By George Oliver

We met at the movies. At the pictures, as my grandpa says. At the cinema. At a cinema. Specifically: the BFI. The British Film Institute. Belvedere Road, South Bank, London, SE1 8XT.

          We were at the stage in acclimatising to the UK’s capital city where personalities become more transparent. Less performative. Adjustment pains… not as dominating.

          We had both started to leave those difficulties at our new homes. We lifted tensions outside of ourselves and locked them in overpriced rented accommodation. The stay-at-home struggles spent time with nervous strangers met on flat share Facebook groups.

          We allowed our mutual film enthusiasm to dictate our first months in London. Tastes aligned; paths diverging. Our anti-romcom was punishing. There was a string of near misses.

          One of us went to a 25^th anniversary showing of La Haine at the BFI on an unusually chilly September evening; the other opted for Rocks, playing simultaneously at the BFI.

          One of us entered the Prince Charles Cinema through one door, for a 16.30 screening of Tenet; the other exited through a different door, after a 13.15 screening of Tenet.

          One of us sat at one side of Screen One at the Ciné Lumière for a London Film Festival screening of Nomadland; the other sat on the opposite side of Screen One, for the same screening. 

It was remarkable that our struggles had become stay-at-home ones. It was a mere four months after moving to the most overwhelming and exhilarating part of the country, amplified by one of us having Level 1 ASD, the other Combined-Type ADHD.

          By chance, we moved to separate SW postcodes, eight days apart. The UK was between Covid-19 lockdowns. Cinemas were on their knees. Even commercial chains were barely hanging on.

          London seemed like an impossible premise for people like us, at a time like that. But one of us was offered a place on a master’s programme at a dream university. The other received an unrefusable job offer.

          In the first days, sights blinded us. Sounds deafened.

          Initially, we were both wading through quicksand, our bodies progressively submerging with forward motion. We were each the only person close enough to unzip a jacket and throw a sleeve into the mixture of granular material and water. We each would have done this, if we weren’t also drowning.

          We could see each other from our divided sections of sand. We coached each other pointlessly, knowing safety required a third party. There was a raised footpath between us, but no-one on it. But days became weeks became months. Then we actually met. An icy carafe of water was on the right side of the sticky bar top. One of us was filling, the other waiting. Neither of us knew where to direct our eyes. The one filling became increasingly aware of the one waiting, blushed, mumbled an apology. The one waiting smiled a blanket of warmth, said there was no rush at all, as their film didn’t start for another twenty minutes. The one filling asked if that meant they were here to see the same film.

          The conversation simmered. It fizzed. It relaxed. Our selected words were a shared construction project, with no blueprint, because neither of us had experience in this type of scenario.

          The conversation had to pause after realising we were on different rows. But: the same film, in the same screen, at the same time, after being made aware of each other’s existence. Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor: a freakout, batshit, body-swap sci-fi horror, starring Andrea Riseborough, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Christopher Abbott. The UK’s snap one-month lockdown had just ended. The film felt appropriate.

          The conversation resumed after Possessor’s 103 minutes. Then for several months and years after that. The first thing one of us said after Possessor? “I want to be Christopher Abbott.” The second? “Well, Christopher Abbott: do you want to go for a drink?”

          During that long resumption, we were almost always together. Often, we spoke. Sometimes, we didn’t. But we could hear each other’s silence. We were no longer deaf.

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George is a writer and researcher based in London, UK. He has a PhD in contemporary transatlantic literature and is the author of ‘Hybrid Novels: Post-postmodernism, Sincerity, and Race at the Turn of the 21st Century’ (Routledge). His short stories have recently appeared or are forthcoming in ‘Freshwater Literary Journal,’ ‘grist,’ ‘Litro,’ and ‘Peruse Lit,’ and he was shortlisted for the MTP 2025 Short Story Competition.