Monday afternoons in the cinema were usually quiet, but we were in the middle of the school holidays, and it was the day after 'The Empire Strikes Back' had opened. The Gaumont's vast auditorium was filled to capacity for the first time in months, and the foyer buzzed with excited voices, the chink of coins and the clank of the ticket machine. The smell of warmed popcorn and freshly cooked hot dogs was especially welcoming to those who had waited outside for over an hour in the untypically chilly August weather.

'It's just like the good old days,' Brenda sighed. 'Queues around the block. No time to be bored. And no-one throwing unpopped popcorn at the lights.'

'We'd never do that,' I protested.

She raised her eyebrows above the frames of the glasses perched on the end of her nose. 'Hmm.'

I waited for the lecture on how it used to be; staff inspections before opening, uniformed commissionaires opening the front doors to well dressed patrons and putting out the 'House Full' signs every night. She never had the chance.

The office door opened, and Mr Johnson emerged. Earlier, he'd been taking part in mock lightsaber battles with rolled up posters. Now he looked deadly serious.

'Bad news folks,' he said. Even before he continued, I knew what it had to be. We'd been waiting for this. 'Head office have just been on to inform me that we're closing on the twenty fifth of October.'

'No hope of a reprieve this time?' Brenda asked.

'Not even with the business we've been doing. "Star Wars" and its like don't come along often enough. And this old place needs too much money poured in just to stop it falling down. So they'll be sending out redundancy letters in the next week or so.'

'I doubt it'll be enough to retire to the Caribbean,' Vera said. She'd been the cinema secretary for over twenty years.

'With this company you'd be lucky if it's enough to retire to Clacton,' he answered. 'But there you go.'

Somehow, it didn't put me in the right mood to usher in the next house of happy moviegoers.

I went up to the ice room to get the tray ready and found the freezers packed full of dripping chickens again. Mr Johnson had an arrangement with a local caterer who paid him for the illicit use of the former restaurant kitchens. And he had an unpleasant habit of throwing the unwrapped and partially thawed birds on top of my Raspberry Ripples when his usual storage overflowed.

I wrestled them out of the way, sending a couple spinning across the floor, where they picked up a coating of dust and feathers. The pigeons must have been in again. Pigeons could squeeze their bulky bodies through amazingly tiny holes in the windows. Pity he couldn't cook those buggers, for all the use they were, crapping and cooing, and breeding like... pigeons. In a little over two months, they'd have the building to themselves. I imagined the demolition men unlocking the doors and coming face to face with thousands of birds. The smell of them, like rancid chicken with a salt and vinegar dressing. The scabby bits that had fallen from their wings carpeting the foyer. The overpowering noise of their flight in a confined space, as they headed for the light. Men ducking in confusion and terror. 'It went straight for me throat...' And a black stream of birds pouring out from the cinema's front doors, over the heads of startled shoppers, across the rooftops of the town, like the soul leaving a corpse.

It wasn't fair. I liked my job. I loved this cinema, with its semi-decayed grandeur; threadbare carpets in the upper foyer, seat covers chewed by rats in the unused circle. The restaurant, closed for twelve years, where cobwebs gave a gothic overlay to art deco fittings. Long abandoned backstage dressing rooms filled with curled posters for forgotten films. The projection room, filled with machinery that wouldn't have looked out of place in Dr Frankenstein's laboratory. It wasn't fair, and there was nothing we could do to stop it happening.

The weeks went by too quickly. We weren't allowed to order any more confectionery, and what we had was soon gobbled up. Time after time customers scanned the shelves, searching in vain for their favourite sweets. One man asked incredulously, 'Don't you have anything but coconut mushrooms?'

'I'm afraid not.'

'No liquorice allsorts?'

'Nope.'

'Fruit gums?'

I began to feel like the shopkeeper in Monty Python's cheese shop sketch. 'If it's not there, we don't have it.'

'But why?'

'We're closing down.'

There was always the same look of surprise on their faces. The Gaumont had been around forever, and they expected it to remain open even if they only came once a year, or once a decade. Now there were angry letters in the local paper each week, demanding to know why the cinema was being closed. Some of the customers wrote to Head Office as well, for all the good that would do.

September wore on, and the boilers broke down. With only four weeks left, there was no point in having them fixed - and no money to spare anyway - so the two thousand seat auditorium grew chillier by the day. In the foyer we huddled around a two barred electric fire in the island kiosk, like the survivors of a shipwreck, while waves of cold licked around our legs from the polished terrazzo. Customers, naturally expecting that it would be warmer inside the cinema than out in the street (how silly of them) drew their coats together and asked if they would have time to catch the ten past eight performance up the road at the accursed Odeon triple.

Thursday afternoon, term time. Three old ladies inside, braving the cold for a matinee showing of yet another crummy space opera, made on the cheap to cash in on the success of 'The Empire Strikes Back'. Oh, and one chap down in the front row, slumped in his seat, asleep, or dead. On the circle stairs, Mr Johnson, busy with a hacksaw, removing banisters.

'What are you going to do with them?' I asked.

'Sell 'em for scrap. Look...' He scraped the thin coating of chrome away. 'Solid brass. Don't look so shocked. I've been with this company fourteen years. Reckon they owe it to me.'

'You're not going to another cinema then?'

He shook his head. 'It's a dying trade. And it's not the same business I joined in any case.'

Two weeks before the fatal day, and the cable broke on the screen curtains.

'Ah well, there goes the dramatic moment as the tabs close for the last time,' sighed Peter, the projectionist. 'If the sound packs up then I suppose we'll be back to silent movies.'

That huge blank screen stared out accusingly over rows of unoccupied seats. The auditorium grew colder still, but we were showing 'The Shining' so I kept telling people it was to help them get into the atmosphere of being trapped in a snowbound hotel. As I locked up I almost expected a demented Jack Nicholson to pop out from behind the exit doors and chase me up the aisle brandishing an axe.

On the last night, the three remaining hot dogs simmered in the steamer. There had been very few customers for the final week as a result of the chilly weather and now those tasty re-heated snacks would never be eaten. Certainly not by the staff, anyway, who knew exactly how many times they'd been in and out of the fridge.

From the circle lounge came the sounds of drunken revelry as the traditional closing down party got well under way. Inside the auditorium the local yobs, uninterested in 'The Last Picture Show', were trying to beat the demolition crews at their own game.

'They've ripped the Durex machine off the wall,' said Ray, the part time doorman. 'They're blowing up condoms and letting off fire extinguishers.'

'Maybe we should do something,' I suggested. A particularly loud thump shook the building to its foundations. 'On the other hand, we might as well leave them to it.'

Just then Mr Johnson ran down the stairs, hotly pursued by Vera, Brenda and a couple of other managers. We watched as they caught him by the kiosk, and amid struggles and shouts of abuse, pulled down his trousers and took a picture of him in just his underpants. They disappeared back upstairs amid shrieks of laughter, leaving him to try and regain some semblance of dignity. As he tucked in his shirt and straightened his manager's bow tie a young couple wandered in through the front doors. Hearing the varied sounds of merriment and destruction, they looked around uncertainly.

'Has it started?' The young man asked Mr Johnson.

'You've missed about half an hour, but go on in if you like.' He zipped up his trousers and gestured toward the stalls doors. The girl looked worried. I thought she might be afraid there was an orgy going on inside.

'It's all free tonight,' said Ray. 'Take anything you like. Seats, fire extinguishers...'

We laughed. Now they definitely thought we were mad.

'Er, maybe not,' the young man said cautiously. 'What's on next week?'

'Rubble and redundancy,' Mr Johnson replied, grinning maniacally.

'Is that any good?'

'I doubt it.'

'Come on, Paul.' The girl dragged him by the arm. As they left I heard her saying '...all drunk or something...'

'The last complaining customer,' I commented.

'You might as well all have a drink. Come on upstairs.' Mr Johnson led the way. I think he felt safer surrounded by a group of sober staff.

The circle lounge could never have witnessed such scenes before. Vera, normally staid and dignified, was sprawled across the lap of an overweight and red-faced manager. Apparently it was traditional for all the other managers to attend a closing bash, firstly to celebrate their good fortune in remaining open, secondly to drink as much as they could, as the company had paid for all the booze. And thirdly, to take anything worth having. One manager had brought his chief projectionist along, and he was busy with pliers and screwdriver, liberating some ornate light fittings.

I looked around in dismay. Food had been trampled into the threadbare carpet. There was an overpowering smell of spilled alcohol. The air was cold enough to make me shiver, although after enough drink you probably wouldn't feel it. I noticed the photographer from the local paper slumped against one of the circle doors, propping it half open. His camera lay among a pile of empty cans, and the reflected light from the screen flickered over him like an unsteady flashgun.

Stepping over his legs, I climbed the stairs into the circle. Here, it was colder still. The tinny sound of the old film seemed more distant than the rowdy customers down in the stalls. I breathed in the familiar musty smell of damp, and looked out across what had once been described as 'an acre of seats in a garden of dreams'. It seemed impossible that after tonight this auditorium would be dark forever.

All too soon came the last changeover. In the projection box, enthusiasts from all over the country had gathered. It seemed that our projection equipment was itself something of a rarity in this day and age.

'They don't build them like this any more.' One of the old men had his picture taken alongside the amplifier rack with its banks of glowing valves. Another had tucked a couple of spools into a capacious leather holdall and was holding scraps of film up to the light to see if they were worth having.

On the way back down to the foyer, the press photographer grabbed at my arm, then staggered against the wall, where once there had used to be chromed brass railings. 'Have you seen my camera?' he asked. 'Only I left it somewhere around here...'

I helped him to level ground, and he wandered out through the open front doors, stumbled down the last remaining steps and fell across the wing of a car parked outside.

'Anyone here got a brown Escort?' I called out. 'With a dented front wing... and vomit over the driver's door.'

The customers left, carrying their own souvenirs. I checked the kiosk and turned off the steamer. Mysteriously, the last hot dogs had vanished, although no-one would admit to having eaten them. We locked up for the last time, then collected our belongings from the staff room and waited for Peter to come down from the box.

'So this is it,' Mr Johnson said. 'Not with a bang but a whimper...'

He led the way down the centre aisle by torch light, the way we always left. As we climbed up onto the stage, Brenda pointed to a large lever beside which I had often noticed a sign saying 'Do Not Touch' in big red letters.

'What on earth does that thing do?'

'It's the self destruct lever,' Mr Johnson joked.

'It's only the safety curtain,' Peter said. 'But it's not been dropped in years. If anyone had ever let it down, we'd have never got it up again...'

Now that it had been mentioned, the temptation was planted in everyone's mind.

'Shall we?'

'Is it dangerous?'

'Let's see.'

'Mr Johnson should have the honour.'

'Yeah, go on, Mr J.'

The manic grin was back. 'I don't know how I'm going to explain this when the regional engineer comes in next week... but then I don't really care.' He reached up to grasp the lever, brushing away cobwebs. 'Stand back everyone.'

Peter turned on the stage lights. The feeble illumination from three dirty lamps reached out just a little way into the auditorium, enough to give an impression of the shadowed vastness beyond, and all those empty seats facing the blank screen. Mr Johnson counted down, 'Three, two, one...' and pulled. We heard something stir in the darkness high above us. There was a loud, echoing clatter, followed by the panicked flurry of pigeon's wings as their roost was disturbed. Then the safety curtain began to move, slowly at first, gathering momentum as it slid downward.

'Ooh, er,' said Brenda.

'Awesome,' Ray muttered.

And so it ends, I thought, watching the auditorium being closed off, sealed like an ancient tomb. The stage shook beneath our feet and even the walls shuddered as the safety curtain eventually touched down with a crash of finality.

'Not with a bang?' I said, my ears still ringing from it. 'That was a bang in my book.'

Dust followed, making haloes around the bare bulbs. A few feathers floated down to settle on the grey boards.

When we stepped out through the back door, the October air was warmer than inside the cinema. Peter reached back, turned off the lights, and we left it to the pigeons.