Blockbuster Nights

The shop was on the parade between the chippy and the launderette and on Friday nights it was, for three hours, the busiest place in Swindon. Families in tracksuits. Couples arguing in the New Releases aisle. Lads coming in at ten to nine wanting something with a car chase. And every Friday at about half seven, without fail, a man called Mr Pruett. Mr Pruett was seventy-ish, small, with a mac and a flat cap and a face like he'd been left out in the rain. He'd come in, nod at me, walk to Classics, take down the same film, and bring it to the counter. Same film. Every week. A black and white one, an old romance, a man and a woman in a railway station. He'd been renting it since before I started. Dawn, who did days, said he'd been renting it since before she started, and she'd started in ninety-four. "Doesn't he own it?" I said, the first month. "We asked. Said he doesn't want to own it. Wants to rent it." "Why?" Dawn shrugged. "Ask him." I didn't ask him. You didn't, in that job. You scanned the case and said "back by Sunday" and took the two pound fifty and that was it. He'd say "thank you" and go, and Sunday afternoon the tape would be in the return box, rewound, always rewound, which in 1998 marked a man out as either a saint or a serial killer. I was nineteen. I had ideas about what I was going to do that were not "work in a video shop", and I was there because the money was cash and the manager didn't mind if I read on the till. I read a lot that year. I also watched a lot, because you could take things home, and about six months in, on a slow night, I took home Mr Pruett's film. It was good. That's not the point. The point is that at the end, the man and the woman in the railway station, when it's obvious what's going to happen and neither of them can say it, I understood a bit. Not everything. A bit.

The next Friday he came in at half seven and put the case on the counter. "I watched this," I said. I don't know what made me. "Last week." He looked at me. It was the first time, I think, that he'd properly looked at me. "Did you." "Yeah." "And?" "I thought the ending was sad." He thought about it. He put the two pound fifty on the counter. "It's not sad," he said. "It's just true. Sad's different." Then he took his tape and went. That's the only conversation we ever had. I left in the spring for a job in Reading and then the shop closed in 2003, like they all did, and became a phone shop and then a nail place. I don't know what happened to Mr Pruett. I think about it sometimes, that he rented it rather than owned it, and I've decided it's because owning it would have meant he could watch it any time, and he didn't want any time. He wanted Friday, half seven, and the walk home with it under his arm, and Sunday to bring it back. I own it now. A disc, then a file, now it's on one of the streaming things. I hardly ever watch it. It doesn't feel right, having it just sitting there.