BARRIE PATTISON--for several months I visited him once or twice a week in his little room before I realized that I simply couldn't stand him any more. Those last few weeks I had visions of telling him, "My God, Barrie, you're just so horrible I'll go crazy if I have to hear another of your jokes" or "I don't know, Barrie; your whole outlook is full of hate, and I never want to have to talk to you about anything again."

But Barrie's defense mechanisms were so strong that something like that couldn't hurt him--if I did really want to hurt him. He would just have said, "I see, I see. Thought you could make me change, didn't you? It's not so easy, my girl!" So I just put him off for the final three weeks before I left the country. Of course, I didn't know all this at the beginning. I try to enjoy whomever I'm talking to, and the first sign to me that I disliked him was that he made me feel incredibly bored.

I met him through my roommate Tony, a small time film director. Tony and I and his sister lived in a flat in the center of London, and Tony had a color TV, so we were all very happy. When Barrie called up I probably answered the phone and handed it to Tony--who afterwards explained to me who he was.

"Oh, he's just working in the cutting room somewhere." Tony said. Most of Tony's friends were people like Roman (Polanski), Liza (Minnelli), Michael (Winner), and a lot of other names I only grew familiar with after six months of indoctrination into England's bigtime. But Barrie was a mere cutter, and Tony told me scornfully that he was so absorbed in seeing other people's movies that he would never make any of his own.

Barrie used to call me up whenever he got an "admit-two" trade pass, and we'd go together to see the latest in Hammer horror--The Best in the Cellar, for example--and have a meal afterwards. His favorite place was a little dive just outside Soho (which caters to tourists and has higher prices) where for about a dollar you could get an entire chop-suey meal. Having chosen between chicken or beef chop suey and orange or tomato juice, Barrie would resume the conversation he had begun as we walked out of the movie house.

HE TOLD ME long stories about his adventures here and there. He'd grown up in Australia and emigrated as soon as he could support himself. It once took a whole coffee hour to tell me how he had rescued five hundred production stills from a garbage dump after he had refused to buy them from a company going out of business. "But I fooled them! I still have them in my room. Next time you come over you can see them. How about tomorrow: there's a good flick on the telly and I can make us some lamb stew with my leftovers--very nourishing."

"Well," I said, "I had arranged to go see someone else and..."

"I see, I see. Not good enough for you, eh?"

At first I listened out of interest in Australians, then out of interest in him, and finally out of interest in pathology, I suppose--although again I never thought of him in this way until the very end.

He was about thirty, and he'd left Australia for the first time maybe ten years before. He came from a working-class family, and he couldn't talk to his parents, he said. I think his father had died, anyway, in the past five years, but his mother was still alive. He never told me too much about them, simply that they were confining and constricting and reactionary, and he'd got away as soon as he could. In Australia he'd worked on several film publications--copies of which he had strewn around his room, and in England in books by other authors his name would frequently crop up on the acknowledgements page.

When he borrowed a projector and showed movies in his room he often showed a motorcycle short he had worked on called Wheels of Death as a prelude to the main feature. Some of the people he had invited--most of them never came--would sit around the room talking desultorily and asking what he was planning to show. For Barrie would never tell. He would call up, saying. "I'm having a showing this Friday afternoon, Can you come?"

"Oh", I would ask, and so I suppose would the others, "what are you showing?"

"Ha! Wouldn't you like to know!" Barrie crowed over the phone. "A forgotten masterpiece."

"Well, who's in it?"

"Lana Turner," he might reply. He had a fondness for American B movies and rediscoveries of minor stars in their early and most piddling roles. "George Raft. You'll be really sorry if you miss it!"