“That’s the film that made me retch. Retch”

8pm. My husband and I are jogging towards the Eye cinema from Galway city centre, in a last-minute bid to catch a movie. “Something nice and benign,” I gasp, as I’m whisked along.

8.15pm. We sprint into the gloom of Screen 2, clutching tickets for Django Unchained.

“So it’s basically a Western?” I whisper, panting.

“Yes,” my husband pants back, “it’s about slavery but I think it has some humour in it, too.”

I cast my eye about in the darkness. “What kind of humour? I ask.

“I suspect dark,” he says. I am not a fan of dark.

“Is there suspense in it?” I ask, for I am not a fan of suspense.

“Some, I imagine.”

“Violence?”

My husband mumbles something in the shadows.

“Did you just say Tarantino?” I gape at him. He wrestles ostentatiously with his coat and scarf, before taking off up the central aisle.

“But that’s the one who made Pulp Fiction,” I hiss at his legs as they gallop up the stairs.

“Yes, but…”

“But what?” I pant, as we arrive at the top of the stairs, “that’s the film that made me retch. Retch.”

“We’ve been through this,” my husband whispers, “you were pregnant and feeling sick anyway. This isn’t as violent. I have it on good authority; all your brothers and sisters have seen it.” He flourishes their five names triumphantly, like the Ace, King, Queen, Jack and Ten of Clubs. “They said it was fantastic.”

I refresh his memory — for it’s a long time since we’ve braved the cinema together. “You seem to have forgotten that when it comes to the cinema, I do not share the same sensory threshold as my siblings. I share my mother’s, which is immutably fixed at Mary Poppins-grade violence.” This, I remind him in an urgent whisper, is to do with DNA. “Genetics,” I say.

We’re both standing at the back of the cinema. “You’ll be fine,” he says, wiggling along the aisle, “here, take my coat and you can stick it over your head if...”

I wiggle along the aisle after him. “You have snared me,” I whisper, with a panicked sense of entrapment that’s making me loathe to sit, “like in 1991, when you sold me Silence of the Lambs as “an interesting psychological thriller, whereas in fact, it was about someone eating someone else and that poor woman down the well, who I’ll never forget as long as I live.”

“She was rescued,” he says.

“I didn’t see the rescue,” I whisper, “I was fragmenting in the foyer, alone.”

“Oh come on, it was so unreal it was funny — don’t you remember that boom-mike hanging down the top of the screen in that scene when …”

“Funny? With a woman down a well and face-eating? Never mind the bloody boom-mike, what about that film with the serial killer who wrote “bitch” on the wall above his victims’ bed? In blood?”

“Jagged Edge,” he says, “brilliant film. Django Unchained is more… historical. He flourishes the word more defensively this time, like a Nine. “I think you’ll find it… interesting.”

“Historical?” I hiss, “historical? You described Shawshank Redemption as an ‘an allegory for hope’. I never even got to see the redemption bit, because I was fear-sweating out in the foyer, alone.”

8.20pm. He gets up, gathering coat and scarf.

“Where are you going?” I whisper, all of a jitter; the woman down the well is now very much on my mind and the dark is all around me.

“Compromise,” he says.

“What do you mean, compromise?” I say, scuttling after him down the aisle.

He sits down on the far right of the cinema.

“Why are we sitting here?” I quaver.

“It’s near the exit,” he says.

8.50pm. I’m trembling alone in the empty foyer, trying to expunge the image of a black slave being eviscerated by dogs, from where it has lodged on the inside of my eyeballs. Under the table , I take my own pulse, wondering, in a sudden fit of hypochondriacal alarm, whether it’s possible, medically speaking, for cinematic violence to induce a heart attack.