Source A: The screen behind the workbench

On the morning the builders arrived, I unlocked the cinema with the brass key I had carried for thirty-one years. The door stuck at the same point. I pushed harder, as I used to when the queue was waiting, and the auditorium opened around me: rows of seats, a ceiling scattered with painted stars, and the screen hanging white and blank.

The plan on the clipboard called the room a repair workshop. Workbenches would stand where the front rows had been; the screen would come down; the stars would stay. I read that last line twice. Someone had measured the ceiling carefully enough to save it, but the words made the rest of the room sound like an obstacle to be cleared.

I showed the builders the little booth at the back. The projector was still there, its metal casing warm-coloured with dust. For years I had sent a beam across the room, and faces had turned towards it as if the light had chosen each one in turn. Now a strip of masking tape marked the wall where the new electrical sockets would go. The beam had never left a mark; the tape did.

By lunchtime, the seats were stacked in the foyer. Their red fabric made a bright, untidy hill beneath the old film posters. I had expected the room to look smaller without them. Instead, the bare floor seemed to stretch towards the screen, which the builders had not yet touched. I caught myself listening for the familiar rattle of the projector, then remembered that it had not run for years.

A month later, I returned for the workshop’s first evening. A bicycle stood beneath the painted stars, one wheel turning slowly while its owner tightened a bolt. The screen was gone. In its place, the pale rectangle on the wall held a row of tools. I took the brass key from my pocket, but the new door opened before I could use it.