Thicker Than Water

He turned and looked up, directly towards me, as though he’d known that I was there all along.

The sun was hanging over my shoulder, directly in his face. From that distance and at that angle I’d probably just be a silhouette.

Probably.

I didn’t stay to find out.

5

Harrison Ford went first, sidling out onto the landing from the barely opened door of his apartment and checking out the lie of the land before he allowed Sean Young to join him. Her immaculate hair and high-gloss lips suggested the unearthly perfection of CGI, but in 1982 that wasn’t even a twinkle in George Lucas’s eye.

‘You’re talking through your arse,’ Nicky informed me curtly, wrenching my attention away from the on-screen action. He flicked a couple of switches on the projector, unnecessarily, just to remind me who was in charge. ‘There’s no way Deckard is a replicant.’

Suppressing a shiver that was purely physiological - the projection booth was as cold as the inside of a refrigerator - I tapped the glass that separated us from the auditorium below.

On the screen, Ford looked down. The heel of Sean Young’s shoe had kicked against some small object on the floor, making it move and catch the light. He bent down and picked it up, but the focus stayed on his face for a moment or two before pulling to the thing in his hand: a tiny unicorn made out of the silvered paper and card from a cigarette packet.

After the briefest of pauses, Ford nodded - one of the most eloquent and compelling gestures in the whole of cinema, in my lowbrow opinion.

"I whistled and examined my fingernails through the final bit of tacked-on action, with its tacked-on voice-over, waiting until Vangelis faded up and the credits rolled. Irritably, Nicky unlocked the spool from the projector mouth and fast-forwarded it into the can. Down below us, the auditorium went from black-shot-with-silver to pure, midnight black.

‘It just means the other detective - Eddie Olmos - has been inside his place,’ Nicky said, shrugging in exasperation. ‘Why do you have to build a whole thing on top of that?’

‘Because it’s the turning point of the movie,’ I explained patiently. ‘It throws everything up into the air - Batty’s death speech, “It’s a pity she won’t live”, the whole works - and then makes it come down again in a new pattern.