“Flicks, movies… fleapits, multiplexes…”

This is Dad talking.

“You might think there are hundreds of words for it — the silver screen — but there aren’t. You had talkies once but no catchy word when colour arrived. No one said ‘Let’s go to the coloureds.'”

“‘Silver screen’” sounds facetious,” I say. “What’s the word? — Jocular.”

We’re drinking one of his best single malts.

“It refers to the whole industry, son. Or it did.”

He sips his drink. We’re sitting in his flat in Bath Square overlooking the harbour. He grew up in this city, moved away, then eventually returned. He likes this quarter especially: Old Portsmouth. It’s a gentrified area on the southwestern knuckle of the harbour. There are new wharf apartments and a few older buildings, all cramped round the cathedral and the Camber Dock. Dad is fond of the town beyond too, mostly for what it once was. He reads up on its past, the defunct canal, the railway, the dockyard and workhouse, the long-vanished farms. The Portsea part is an island by virtue of a northern creek only fifty yards wide.

I get down to see Dad a few times a year. He’s in his sixties, a retired lieutenant-commander. He studied Russian in Manchester before training for the navy in Dartmouth. He’s short, florid and plump. In his cups he still gets dewy-eyed over my mother, who walked out on us when I was fourteen, then got herself killed in an accident two years later. He’s never had a live-in partner since, though he’s been through plenty of casual companions. That’s something I envy, his success with women. He’s not a great looker, but he’s got the talk and the air.

We’re pretty boozed up by now and we’ve done half the usual topics. Now we’ve got on to the cinema. He’s fond of films but seldom goes out to see them now — can’t stand the popcorn and cellphones, he says. His library of discs and tapes is the replacement. Name any halfway decent film, old or new, and he’s recorded it from TV or bought the disc. He makes me drink more than I’m used to, and I’m about two glasses from pie-eyed. He says, “Listen!”

I go mute, though my lips are silently babbling, or do I mean bubbling?

There’s a pause, then I venture, “Wha’?”

“Scratching,” he says. A finger raised, like in a da Vinci painting. I shake my head.

“There, again!”

This time I hear a rustling. He says, “Bloody rats.”

“Really? Are you certain?” I have to speak slowly, with deliberation. I find it hard to believe he has rats in the loft. It’s very pricey in these parts. The rats of Point, as this ancient area is called, deserted the quays when the wharves got their makeover.

“It’s got to be. I’ve got the rat-man coming.”

A slur has set in on both sides. He’s drunk a half-bottle more than I have.

“When?” I say.

“When what, Luke?”

“When’s the rat-man coming?”

“Any moment now, I’d say. He needn’t bother us.”

If a rat-man’s coming, he’s probably right, he does have rats. Let’s accept it for now. Then I wonder, incoherently, what’s so wrong with rats. And why, in order to converse, do we drink so much?

That rat-man is a rat-woman. I feel glowingly, stupidly, privileged to watch her at work. She’s about thirty, skinny, unapologetically rough-dressed, her boyish ginger hair all over the place. I’ve never seen such a savage mite of a woman, a matey tank girl in filthy overalls. I imagine that these days most pest control operators are attired more neatly, like plumbers and TV installers. But this one — “call me Becky” — looks like she puts in hard days on a building site.

When I say “watch her at work,” I exaggerate — it’s the drink speaking — she pulls herself into the loft just from standing on a chair, and that’s the last we actually see of her methods of deinfestation. Such muscles on skinny arms is impressive, scary, amusing. I shake my head, trying to clear it, and take another sip of whiskey. After her vanishing act, we hear only muffled rat-woman noises. She’s speaking to herself up there. Dad and I are both mouthing whispers at each other, for no reason at all. She has taken her kit with her. The work doesn’t take long.

Once down again, she tells us there are no sign of nests, but cracks in the eaves “could of let in the little buggers” from a loft next door. Portsmouth working class speech has an aggressive cut, like vinegar, thin and acidic.

I’ve never seen such a savage mite of a woman, a matey tank girl in filthy overalls. I imagine that these days most pest control operators are attired more neatly, like plumbers and TV installers. But this one — ‘call me Becky’ — looks like she puts in hard days on a building site.

“Did you put down poison?” Dad asks.

I won’t try and represent her speech. It’s the raw diction passed on by jolly Jack tars, rough dockers, street hawkers, fishwives, bricklayers. One of my best friends, perhaps my only best friend — Alison of course, another man’s girl — recently convinced me that the Liverpool dialect is melodic. It’ll be some time before Pompey-speak breaks through into that class. The reply of Becky the rat-woman is, in essence:

“Yes like, I’ll be coming by again in a week and pick up any of the little buggers we’ve caught. I’ll also stuff some rags in those cracks you’ve got, but you should get them looked at properly.”

Dad offers her a drink, and she accepts a mug of tea with four sugars. Then something interesting starts going on between her, Dad and me. We’re talking films again. The rat-catcher is on the ball. She’s got a nonstop mouth on her, but it talks sense, and she gets us into a film that she’s evidently studied, Scorcese’s Shutter Island. Briefly, if you’ve not seen it, here’s a summary (which contains a spoiler).

A US police marshal (Teddy Daniels) visits Shutter Island, a prison for the criminally insane, to investigate the disappearance of a child murderer, Rachel Solando. After a while we begin to doubt Teddy’s own sanity, and we’re made to wonder what is really going on. In an episode which is clearly part of his delusional insanity, Teddy “encounters” the missing woman in a cave. She tells him he is being drugged and will never leave the island. Later he enters a lighthouse and again meets the overseer, Doctor Cawley, who tells him he is really a patient who killed his wife Dolores, herself having drowned their three children. Doctor Cawley has set up an elaborate role play to enable Teddy (real name is Andrew Laeddis, from which “Edward Daniels” is an anagram) to face reality. The alternative would be a lobotomy. Teddy/Laeddis breaks down and admits who he really is. However, in the conclusion, he seems to have lapsed back into believing he is Marshal Teddy again. Yet we can see this is a ruse, enabling him to be willingly led away to be lobotomised. As he says, it’s better to die as a good man rather than live as a monster. A lobotomy will kill the monster in him.

This summary comes mainly from Becky, because Dad and I have only dim memories of the movie. I don’t see many, and it’s by a lucky chance that a work colleague dragged me along to see this one only a few weeks back. Even after Becky’s exegesis, there’s still much for me to puzzle over. It’s that sort of film, a nightmarish mystery. I’m not convinced there’s a single fully adequate explanation, but I’ve little to offer as an alternative. Becky has seen the DVD three times. She succeeds in making me remember things, like the black flakes of paper falling across quite ordinary scenes (“bats in the belfry,” says Becky), and Teddy’s migraines, and the shooting of the Dachau guards — “Teddy” had been in a military detachment which liberated the Nazi death camp in 1945.

Such clarity, descending upon Dad and me thanks to our strange visitor, has almost sobered us. The woman leaves with the same lack of ceremony with which she entered our drugged lives. I look at Dad, a bit stunned. He can see what I mean, and comes up with what sounds like a logical way to gather up the day’s threads.

“Let’s go for a pint at the Still and West.”

Sea air clears the sinuses, and the next day a walk from Dad’s along the sea front does it for me: from Point along the Tower Walls and Battery Row to Clarence Pier and Nelson’s Anchor, thence along the Esplanade eastwards. The pavement is wide, and three young hoodies pass me on bicycles. There’s shingle and a grey-green swell to my right, and some good hours ahead for clearer thinking. From the whelks and winkles end (as Dad calls it, he remembers the pre-war days), to the midpoint, Southsea Pier — hardly grand (is any seaside resort grand?) — to the south-eastern end of the isle, Eastney Barracks. I’ll probably not get that far before turning back. Over the sea, slitting the crisp air, are the wings of gulls. Out in the Solent is a ferry from France and a number of small sails.

I don’t get movies the way he does. I go to the pictures only a few times a year, and I rarely watch films on television. I’d rather read.

My problem is something Dad was saying. I don’t get movies the way he does. I go to the pictures only a few times a year, and I rarely watch films on television. I’d rather read. I read a lot: fiction, nonfiction, and of course poetry. Copywriting and poetry go together. I’ve even published a slim volume, though it’s not a feat to brag about. For me, the interest in films, as far as my interest goes at all, is in the storytelling, the illumination, the “mirror up to nature” thing. Though no fan, I have theories. To Dad, for all his collector’s mania, film is a kind of escape — he admits this himself — and he’s not hunting for theories. He doesn’t want to know the “tricks,” he’d rather stay innocent.

One possible reason I don’t watch films much, I’ve tentatively reckoned, is that I’m too emotional — it’s too real. Real life hurts enough; making it so visual rubs salt in the wound. I guess I like reality (I’m not yet fully committed), but as the man says, I cannot take much.

By the time I reach the Rock Gardens I’ve begun to wonder what I’m really trying to wonder about today.

Perhaps it’s memory. Most people, I guess, quickly forget what they’ve read, what they’ve seen. Dad and Becky both said something like: even your average film buff forgets how most movies end. That’s a comfort. Or is it? I’ve heard somewhere about how fallible are the memories of witnesses to a crime scene. Why is memory, which is so good, so necessary and useful, also so bad?

I’m returning on a train to London, and I’m being lulled into a half-slumber, a mixture of memory and dream. I can feel the chill glass against my head. I can hear the clamour of the train, a muffled, repetitive sound, industrial, grimy. I’m aware of this and of someone’s elbows beside me. Yet I’m also dreaming, out of control, in a way that’s beyond daydream, more phantasmagoric. Kids brush past me on bicycles and it’s raining wet soot. My father tells me I’m in a lunatic asylum and Becky the rat-catcher is in a doctor’s white coat telling me that if I don’t remember who I am I’ll stay on Portsea Island. I think about the proximate Isle of Wight, which I’ve never been to, but I know there’s a prison there. Then I’m in a college library…

I’ve heard somewhere about how fallible are the memories of witnesses to a crime scene. Why is memory, which is so good, so necessary and useful, also so bad?

I snap out of the reverie, shaken. I cannot remember having had such an experience. Becky insisted that Shutter Island is not just about madness — the more you revisit it, she said, the more it becomes a true horror, drawing you into madness. Can a film be that good, that awful?

On the tube from Waterloo to St. John’s Wood I’ve returned more or less to normal, though now I’ve switched from memory to thinking about madness. I know that’s a loose word, which refers to terrible mental conditions. Mad people are sociopaths, dangerous, antisocial, but even this is vague and inadequate.

I know next to nothing, and most (horror!) people know next to nothing. Yet we must make up our minds. It’s a credo of mine that to be a person at all, and not mere animated fluff, one must make up one’s mind. The question therefore is not “What is madness?”, but “What is madness as I see it?”

I get out into the air at St. John’s Wood and walk to my flat, still not knowing what I think madness is, and beginning to be afraid to know, feeling like I’m in a rat’s maze, one where the reward is poison. To console myself, I half-decide it may be lack of restraint (plus frenzy or delusion).

Which will have to do.