by Dan Vyleta
They leave the dog, too, half lying, half sitting on its cart, its maw tied shut with a strap.
When I am sure they are gone, I slide off my chair and crouch down beside it. It growls, then whimpers, dangles drool from its jowls. We sit there, side by side, the broken-legged dog and me with my swollen eye. When the fear rises up in me again, hot like a fever, I drench us both in Smoke.
FACTORY
Livia cannot stop speaking. It’s an open cab, and she has to yell over the noise of wheels and hooves on cobbles, lean forward and halfway across Charlie’s lap to make herself heard. Up on his box, the coachman is making haste; sends his nag flying into corners and keeps craning his neck, too, listening in, or perhaps just staring at her, this gentlewoman with the stringy hair and her two filthy companions. His bowler is rain-dark; it has played feast to many tribes of moth.
“It was as though he had poured petroleum over the floor!” Livia shouts again. “An explosion: contagious. As though it would never stop.”
She raises her chin into the wind, stabs her hands into the air, cutting off some question Charlie has been trying to voice.
“ ‘A problem of filtration,’ Sebastian said. Separating sin from muck and water. That’s what he has been doing down in the sewers. Creating a giant sieve and collecting London’s Soot! Dredging every cesspool for it, the bottom of the river, two and a half centuries’ worth of crimes. They want to quicken it!”
Throughout her monologue, Thomas sits quietly, only half listening, lost in himself. The urgency of his horror has abated and left behind something duller, slow in its wits. He has been watching his hand, the right one. It has swollen to the size of a club, the fingers so thick they feel fused, all but the pinkie which rides up, crooked, above the others. The blood on the knuckles might be his own or it might be Julius’s. Most likely it is both of theirs, mingled. Blood brothers. As a child he read a book about that, two boys whittling open their palms with a blunt penknife. The coach veers, pushes him into Charlie. His thoughts veer with it. He is conscious that he needs to pee.
Killer. It is a funny word. Not an act: a mode of being. A profession. Some trades, you pass them on from father to son. They say his father killed his man in a rage. One of his tenants. There was slander involved, drink, a tavern. A pewter mug scooped up where it had fallen on the ground. A pewter mug. Smart. His father knew how to protect his hand.
Back home, Thomas used to call those who spoke of it liars. Liars!—turning his eyes on them, Smoke on his lips. They stopped speaking of it in his presence. He wonders now: did he sit there, his father, afterwards, on a stool at the bar, nursing his wrist, his bladder nagging at him like a bad joke? Thomas does not know. The only letter his father sent from prison was a will, stipulating that his son was to inherit his leather hunting breeches and his good lamb’s wool coat. Thomas has never grown sufficiently to fit into either.
So, Thomas now says to himself, I have come into my patrimony. All I needed was a bit of priming. Then I took to it like a boar to his rut.
But the ease of his corruption, it isn’t really the worst of it. He has known he is susceptible all his life. A boy with a temper; rage, like a pet, always faithful by his side.
The worst of it is that it was fun. Being consumed by the Smoke. Letting go of all restraint. Stripping naked as the day you were born and becoming a creature of pure want. For Thomas discovered something. At the heart of the Smoke he found waiting for him the unselfconsciousness of childhood, of those years before speech. How perfect, how natural it felt to live there, in a place that knew no consequence. His fists swollen, the heat of Livia’s body pinned under his weight.
Just as he is thinking this, squirming in his seat with the power of the thought, Livia turns to him, her head thrown forward so she can see him across Charlie. Thomas looks away. The coach veers, his bladder strains. He wants to talk to her, explain himself. He wonders where to pee so she won’t notice.
He is, in short, confused.
Then they arrive: a dank street without lighting.
The coach races off as soon as Livia has paid the driver.
ф
It might be Ratcliff or Southwark: Thomas did not pay attention to the way. All he knows of London are a dozen or so streets and a score of names he has overheard. Lambeth, Hammersmith, Wapping. Limehouse. Shoreditch (always mentioned in a hush). They remain close to the river in any case; he can smell its stink. A great grey slab of a building rises before them, looking more like a fortress than a factory. Initially Thomas thinks that it is here they are headed. But it is the smaller, red-brick building growing out of its flank that wears the name of Ryman’s Fine Tobacco. There is no fence at the front, just a sturdy green door at the top of a short flight of steps. For the third time that night they try a door handle and find it does not move. The knocker rings through the building beyond but fails to summon either a doorman or a guard. They are alone.
This time, though, there is an alley running down the flank of the building, and a side door. In the mud outside, footprints are visible, amongst them, unmistakable, the heel of a woman’s boot. The door is closed but not locked. It is a carelessness that speaks of haste, of having one’s hands full. Beyond, a gaslight has been left burning. A corridor connects a string of offices, shabby-looking despite their once-decent carpets. It is a place of business, not of reception. Before they venture farther, Thomas turns on his heel and returns to the alley to relieve himself against the factory wall. It is a moment’s bliss in the middle of a nightmare.
Inside again, he finds Charlie and Livia have run ahead. The main floor holds the facilities associated with the sale and manufacture of ordinary tobacco. A front desk, an orders department; a workshop floor for packaging; and across the cobbled inner courtyard, a warehouse smelling like a giant pipe.
It is in the basement that the other factory is located. To enter one has to negotiate another, sturdier door, also left unlocked, and descend two revolutions of a carpeted spiral staircase. At its bottom a cavernous storehouse opens, suffused in a smell at once floral and rotting, emanating from a row of giant copper vats that loom like pillars in an old cathedral. Slender copper pipes emerge from these vats and move in coils towards a separate tank, minute by comparison, and holding the results of some long process of distillation. A cloying, wet heat stands in the room. Charlie has climbed the brass rungs riveted into one of the vats to get to its open top, has stuck a hand beyond the rim and is scooping up a palmful of its contents. Not far from him, Livia is examining a glass cabinet that holds a series of pharmaceutical bottles, each carefully labelled with dates.
“Flowers,” Charlie calls surprised, holding aloft a delicate stem crowned by a papery bloom, not unlike a poppy but of veined purple-grey. “The vat is filled to the rim with some kind of flower, submerged in warm liquid. There must be a million flowers here. And the smell…” He sniffs his hand. “Like cigarettes, but faint.”
Livia, five steps from him, has uncorked one of the bottles and sniffed its contents.
“Sebastian mentioned flowers. He said: ‘A field of flowers for a dozen cigarettes.’ It must be how they produce the solvent: that which quickens Soot.” She lets her gaze wander between the giant vats and the small glass bottles with their labels, clearly struck by the misproportion. Almost reverently she accepts the flower Charlie holds out to her.
“Can you picture the size of the plantations, Charlie? Half of the Empire must be kept busy growing these.”
“In the full knowledge of the authorities, no doubt. And all part of the Cooper business empire. Your mother said we hold special import licences. One day I shall be very rich.”
Charlie’s eyes offer Thomas a share of his dark-cheeked indignation, but Thomas will have none of it. He is not interested in the Coopers’ stake in horticulture; stands unmoved, or removed rather, still separated by the fog of his own thoughts.
Killer, he thinks. Blood brother.
The proverb’s right: the apple does not fall
far.
Apples, falling. Isaac Newton: built a bridge without nails. Now they bring Germans over to build our sewers, Sebastian said. Ash-Town. Taylor, Ashton and some made-up Sons.
Father.
That piss was good, Thomas thinks. And you are a coward, a coward, wallowing in pity. He moves back into the staircase doorway, hooks his left arm into its frame, and wrenches his shoulder back into its socket.
ф
There is a room that leads off one end of the distillation chamber. A smaller room, boxlike and mould-walled, where a row of workbenches stand bolted to the floor. It is here that Thomas walks his sense of isolation; stands and studies it with self-absorbed patience.
Three workbenches, each with two work places. Each place marked by an oak stool and a little machine, screwed into the table’s wood, combining the features of a sewing machine and a pencil sharpener. Six stools in total, plus a chair for the supervisor, at three yards’ remove and upholstered in bottle-green leather. On the wall, like so many hats or umbrellas, hang six respirators from numbered metal hooks. Tan, well-worn rubber, each snout ending in a chunky, perforated filter, smeared with Soot. Thomas stares at these then sits down at a work place; turns the little wheel of one machine and works out its purpose. Around him, at the wall, stand small kegs of Soot each labelled with a quality sign, ranging from Alpha++ to Gamma–. At the centre of the workbench stands a box full of little squares of cigarette papers; next to it a similar box, somewhat larger, holds a supply of ordinary tobacco. A pipette completes the sets of tools and materials provided for each worker.
Mechanically, holding at bay both thought and emotion, Thomas threads a piece of paper into the machine, fetches a pinch of Soot from one of the barrels, mixes it with tobacco and begins to roll a cigarette. Halfway through the process he takes up the pipette; looks back through the doorway to the rack of solvents Livia has discovered; pictures spreading the sticky liquid into the mix of tobacco and Soot to make it ready for consumption.
“They are wearing the respirators,” he says out loud though he is speaking to himself, not his friends, “so they don’t imbibe any of the quickened Soot. It protects them, and also keeps them docile; and it ensures that not a precious gram is lost.” He gets up, fetches a respirator, spreads it out before him, goggles at the top. “And so they sit. Six slaves, masked, and strangers to one another. And the foreman, he will have a club.”
He hears Livia walking up behind him, listening to his words; continues with his numb recital of the facts.
“And that door over there with the heavy lock will lead next door. Did you notice it when we drove up? A big house like a fortress. Barred windows: a gaol. Of course, whoever works down here must never be released—otherwise they would go into the world and spread the news about cigarettes far and wide. No, they are stuck here for life. I wonder what crime warrants that? Something temperate, I should think. Forgery, counterfeiting, or some clever kind of theft. You wouldn’t want murderers near such Soot. They might get ideas.” He looks over at the kegs by the side of the wall. “What a paltry harvest! Dark Soot is a rare commodity. Until now. Pools, you say, a filtration system. Sebastian has been dredging the sewers to distil three hundred years of crime. No wonder Julius put up the money! Your mother must have told him it was to expand operations. The profits would have been astronomical. I doubt she told him it was all to go up in Smoke.”
He falls silent as Livia takes the stool next to him; watches her study his face.
“Does all this not make you angry, Thomas?”
He could say: I can’t afford my anger. It is too much fun.
Or: We have seen what my anger leads to.
Or: Back there, pressed hip to hip, my trousers wet with Julius’s blood, I could feel your pulse beat in your upper thigh.
But he merely shrugs his shoulders and watches her nostrils dilate around a stringy slug of Smoke.
ф
Charlie joins them. He has raced from room to room and wall to wall, inspected each shelf, each alcove, and each tool. Now he drops his weight onto a third stool.
“There is no sign of Lady Naylor. And no exit. Just that one”—he points over to the bolted door near them—“and you say it leads to the gaol. Which means we have lost her. We have lost Mowgli.”
When neither Thomas nor Livia responds, he jumps up, races around the rooms once more, frantically searching the walls for a clue. On his return he is too restless to sit; walks up and down in front of them, his face open, flushed, and worried.
“We know that she’s been here. The door was open and her footprint was outside. And Sebastian’s letter spoke of construction works. Down here, in the basement. There must be a doorway, then, a passage; something to connect one of these rooms to the sewers. But I looked at all the walls and can’t see evidence of any construction.” He mutters to himself, walks another thirty yards in four-step paces. “Let’s think it out. Only quick now, quick. What do we know? She has been collecting Soot. Black Soot, the darkest she can find, has scraped it off murderers, spent millions to build this sewer to get more. Well then, for what purpose? To quicken it, you say. No, not just quicken it but make it explosive. Self-perpetuating. Contagious. And not by the usual method, using the solvent produced in this factory, which is weak and does not last, but with Mowgli’s blood, two thousand two hundred cubic centimetres—four pints!—of his blood. Do I have this right? Yes? All right! The sewers will steam with rage. A black cloud like nothing anyone has seen, rising out of the ground and infecting the city. But then what? I don’t understand.”
“He kept talking about the French Revolution,” Livia answers. “Robespierre. Decimal time. The Terror.”
Charlie stops mid-step. It nearly costs him his balance.
“Is that what she’s planning? An uprising! An age of anger. Nobody working, the factories idle, the docks closed. An army of Juliuses, infecting one another, looking for food beyond the city. Marching on the manor houses.” He stands, head cocked, appalled and baffled. “But why would your mother want such a thing?”
“She’s evil.”
Charlie won’t have it. “Even evil needs reasons,” he says. “You don’t destroy the world just so.”
“Mad, then. Mother’s gone mad. Just like Father. She hates Discipline. It broke him. She thinks she’s avenging him.”
“Mad?” says Charlie. “I don’t know. When is the last time you saw your mother smoke?”
ф
They sit perplexed and passive, minutes trickling away. Thomas is aware that both Livia and Charlie are looking at him, waiting for him.
Lead us, these looks appear to say. You always have.
But Thomas is afraid to lead.
It is a weak sort of fear, cowering and smokeless, at a remove from life. His shoulders rounded, his chin tucked in Grendel’s abject stoop. The respirator remains spread out on the table in front of him, built to filter Smoke from the infectious air and wall in its wearer within the safety of his private self. Thomas is conscious of Livia watching him as he turns the mask within his hands; once, twice; disappointment cleaving her face. Then she bends to him, leans into him, lip to lip, and shouts her anger into his face—“Help us, God damn you!”—each word a sulphurous taunt summoning his manhood, in that strange language of Smoke in which love and derision can be as one.
It is enough and not enough; sends him to his feet and away from the table, half in obedience to her call to arms, half in flight from her challenge. Like Charlie before him, he storms around the room housing the fermentation vats. It is not the walls he inspects but the floors; and seeing nothing, no fresh seams nor any irregularities in the dark tiling, his courage already abating, he grabs a wrench from a toolbox in one corner, and systematically, hurting his wrist and damaged hand, hammers away at a copper pipe emerging from one of the hulking vats like a spout, until it gives way and a sickly floral liquid pours in a thousand gallons across the floor. Then he stands, watching the room fill inch-deep with flowers and li
quid, eyes peeled, head cocked, like a man on the hunt.
“Why did you—” Charlie begins but Thomas hushes him, hears then sees the pop of bubbles in one corner, where the liquid is drawn to some flaw within the flooring and is rushing to a pocket of air trapped underneath. As the liquid’s level slowly begins to fall, the flowers floating within it arrange themselves into a rough and soggy square, marking the outline of a well-masked trapdoor underneath their feet.
ф
They have to wait until the weight of the liquid has shifted from the door, then kick aside the pulpy mass of drenched and half-fermented flowers. The trapdoor itself has a tiny keyhole and is locked. This time it is Charlie who acts: he fetches a giant steel ladle from the same box of tools that supplied the wrench, manages to wedge it into the minute gap between trapdoor and floor, and throws his weight against it. Soon Thomas too is pushing at this lever. Together, they break the lock and bend the ladle, open the trapdoor to a rough-hewn wooden staircase leading down.
They descend. The staircase is new, wet and strewn with dead flowers; the air rising out of the stairwell thick with the smells of excrement and offal. At the bottom, a light burns. They walk towards it and come to a landing and an arched gateway, much older than the stairs. Beyond lie the sewers: a dark canal of stagnant water, flanked by slime-spattered walkways on each side. But their eyes are riveted elsewhere. Dangling from the ceiling, suspended by a rubber string, hangs a bulb of murky, unwavering light. No flame flickers within. It is like an ailing, miniature sun, fetched down from the sky and nailed here by a hangman. When Thomas touches it, it burns his fingertip, then quivers and dances like a hooked fish.