She’s looking in his bodiless direction. Soon, she will find the miniscule light in the room and locate the end of the wooden chute and start the process. She’ll look across and pick out Ritchie’s shape, then maybe his motionless fingers upon the metal plate frozen like a pianist at the keys. A pianist who, despite having known and played a tune most of his life, has simply forgotten it.

‘Lovely soapy smell!’ she balls. ‘I always know when you’re in the darkroom!’

Suddenly, the top of Ritchie’s chute flops open. The hole in the wall is angled at 45 degrees so the films move smoothly without getting stuck. The opening is designed to stop light getting in but on a changeover, a momentary fragment of yellow light breaks in from the corridor where the girls ready the cartridges. They sit chattering at a long row of desks but can only be heard by the splicers when the chute opens. When a splicer presses a button on the darkroom floor, a green light flashes on the wall outside and a girl removes an empty chute, refills it and forces it inside the tunnel where it slides back down, ending abruptly with a loud clap.

Clap! Thirty more cartridges. Thirty more anonymous lives to be spun onto a wheel. But Ritchie still has one in his fingers. It doesn’t want to let go. Film number 10,000. It clings to him and the metal plate, tail end out, an inch from the blade, two feet from a knee-high pile of cuttings on the floor. Maybe it’s trying to tell him something? He can’t press the start button though he’s tried ten times. He thinks he’s going mad.

The deafening noise of firing pistons and chopping knives has a unified rhythm, as if every splicer is keeping to the beat of a drum; slaves in the bowels of a Roman vessel steaming to ramming speed. Ritchie looks to his right, sees the outlines of serried workers leaning back in their chairs, staring dumb at a black wall. He looks down at the film he can’t see. It seems to be moving on his fingers.

‘Not wanting to join the fat wheel of fortune?’ he says to himself. He shakes it. ‘Who’s in there? How many cheesy grins?’ He feels the thickness of  a foot of film resting on his reel. ‘How many faces are already pressed together? Diced and spliced on this cog?’

Figures move about the dark like shadowy ghosts, small red eyes floating in the void like mating fireflies. They are the checkers with the rare gift of sight. Baashi’s new, expensive infrared headsets are clamped tight around their faces. They stand at benches on either side of the room, spinning reels on wheels, looking for faults. Are the films spliced tightly? Has the glue set on the joins? They drift from machine to machine hauling off heavy reels and replacing them with empties. They whiz through the films not thinking of the people who are joined together on them. They only want to see neat lines, clean edges and dry glue. All, except Sick Mick.

 He’s ex-army. Ex-con. Boss of checkers. Everyone’s terrified of him. In a brown leather holster strapped to his leg is a Swiss-Army knife. He says he needs it to cut badly spliced film but everyone knows there are scissors for that. The knife never leaves his side except to play in his hand. It clings to him, or they cling to each other.

Sick Mick takes a keen interest in his work. The photographs. He has a private collection stashed inside his staffroom locker and shows them to every new member of staff the moment they walk through the door, like a rite of passage. People in various positions in various locations. Homes, beaches, woods, barns. Beds of springs, sand, grass and straw. Groups in all combinations. Sick Mick likes the close-ups. The gynaecological. He files them away in a fat album divided into sections: Boy-girl, girl-girl, boy-boy. Ebony and Ivory. Manimal. He makes copies, never numbing to the images, promptly entering them for his weekly Top Ten. He takes pleasure from his treasure and shares it with young Basshi  who sees a lucrative business in amateur glossies should the worst come to the worst and digital kill 35mml. If his father knew, they’d both be out the door but no one speaks about the private collection. It’s a club with one rule. No one tells, or else.

At least once a week in the darkroom, Ritchie feels something soft sweep across his cheek and down his neck like the brush of a feather. He imagines it is precious oxygen pushing through the revolving door and mixing with the heat venting up from his machine. Or it’s a large exotic moth, trapped and frantically seeking light. Or maybe a lover’s butterfly kiss.

One night, Ritchie dropped a film and asked for a headset. He slipped it over his head and saw things for what they were, or what they were not. The starkness of the chalk-white breezeblock walls and the dark chutes sticking out from them, some moving up, some moving down, like the legs of a giant spider. The ashen faces of the splicers, lips grey as stone, eyes like ink wells; deathly ghosts barely moving in the grainy light. He found the film, stood and turned. Muriel was working her chute, picking two cartridges at a time, peeling the lids, feeding them in like a pro, but under her chin and over her mouth were hands.  Sick Mick was rooted behind her like the grim reaper, red-eyed, cold smile on his mouth. His knife glided down her pale cheek and across her throat in one sleek stroke. No blood. Just Mick’s sick joke but Ritchie thought, how different or similar can a feather and a knife be?