The Smoke

by Simon Ings

  And because you want to feel something, anything, you allow yourself, for a split-second, to think of the life you could have had – and, Christ, you pull back immediately, of course you do, there’s the cut, there’s the wound, not going there, not going there again.

  Fel must still be staying here. This is still her flat. She could come through the door at any moment – only your gut tells you she won’t. If this were her usual home, there would be a liner in the kitchen bin and the refrigerator would be stocked and there would be open packets in the cupboards.

  No: she has held on to this place for occasional visits. Her pad in the city. This is where she stays when she wants to be alone.

  3

  The Kaiser Wilhelm Society meant well. The idea was to save lives. To treat wounded soldiers from the air. In the winter of 1916–1917, during an extraordinary and extended hiatus in the conflict, Zeppelin-mounted floodlights raked the dead and dying of the Somme with healing Gurwitsch rays.

  A bubbling in the winter mud. ‘A fantastical mulch,’ Punch burbled; The Strand was likewise mightily intrigued. On both sides of this ever more evidently insane conflict, a great hope arose: that the freshly killed might be squeezed and pummelled back into order by Gurwitsch rays. If it worked, then (argued some) war itself would become meaningless. On the contrary (argued others), war would become infinitely more heartless and mechanical. It didn’t matter whether your heart was filled with dread or with longing; everyone, in those few quiet weeks, believed they had glimpsed the world of the future.

  But the future was of a sort no one could have imagined, and the spring of 1917 brought forth strange fruit. Where the name ‘chickie’ came from, no one now remembers, and it’s a strangely innocuous name to have stuck given the bloody nature of their arrival, rising, diminutive and needle-toothed, from the mudblood of the Somme.

  They feasted upon the dead, dragged gangrenous limbs into their hives, prospered and, after their fashion, bred, while all around them, the heavily armed constituencies of Europe succumbed to existential horror. Nothing budged the chickies. Not flamethrowers. Not gas. Attempts at pogrom further complicated an already impossibly complicated conflict, and attacks against this bizarre new threat very quickly deteriorated into campaigns against the usual: Gypsies, students, Czechs perished by the hundreds of thousands. Jews came in for special persecution, as it got into people’s heads that Gurwitsch’s biophotonic technology was the weapon of choice of a cosmopolitan Jewish conspiracy.

  Young leftist Jews had for many years been torn between two competing political camps: the Zionists, who sought a political homeland in Palestine; and the Bundists who, rejecting the old ‘obscurantism’ and embracing Marx, sought integration in a new, humanist future. The pogroms of 1917 polarised that struggle. The Bundists, seizing Gurwitsch as their secular saint (who would be strung from a lamp post in Prague in 1920), fled to Moscow and Saint Petersburg.

  It should have been the end of them. Reduced to a pitiful few hundred radicals, they were flying right into the jaws of yet another Russian famine, even as every other intellectual was trying to get the hell out. Lenin, grateful and canny, offered them Birobidzhan in Siberia as their homeland and, singing hymns to the New Soviet Man, they leapt aboard the carriages of the Trans-Siberian. No one expected to hear from them again.

  Within a year, Birobidzhan had become the engine of Bolshevik atheism: industrious, innovative, positively American in its embrace of new technology. Still no one foresaw its rise: how the Bund should, in the course of thirty bloody years, overtake and surpass its Bolshevik paymasters. But how could it have turned out otherwise? The Bund had the Gurwitsch ray, and with the ray they transformed everything, just as Gurwitsch had predicted. Gurwitsched wheat averted the ’21 famine, saving Saint Petersburg. Gurwitsched horses twenty-five hands high pulled rocks out of the path of the White Sea Canal, connecting the Arctic to the Baltic. All Europe fed on Gurwitsched pigs, Gurwitsched apples, Gurwitsched lemons. Until at last their mastery was such, the Bundists dared to try again, and in a much more careful, targeted fashion, what had been tried in 1917. They turned the rays upon themselves.

  * * *

  The Barbican: two towers, and seven storeys of maisonettes upon a rectangular podium, grouped around lakes and green squares. Its architects were your teachers: German war refugees with strong ideas about simplicity and utility. Men who, with their past ripped from them, embraced the future. They were men whose self-idea was constructed entirely of new materials. They were old when you met them, stood in lecture halls and applauded them, and they are long gone now. They surfed the wave of the future, and it swallowed them up. The flat you shared with Fel looks inwards, over the lakes, the greens, the lines of trees, and it is easy, standing at the living-room window, to imagine that nothing has changed. Ironic, that a building conceived with an eye focused so fiercely on the future should already be feeding your nostalgia.

  Meanwhile the Bund races ahead, overtopping everything, swamping everything. This wave your teachers surfed has grown so big, all you can do now is run from it. Head for the hills, the mills, the moors! There is not much dry land left above the Bundists’ liquid way of building. Walls that shift to accommodate the occupant. Roads that move. Aircraft that unfurl from the sky.

  The Bund’s in every country now, with enclaves in all big cities. The obvious metaphor for this process – a tumour, metastasising – fails because of its unkindness. The Bund’s enclaves offer the Old World much, and almost all were welcomed. Good regulation helps, as London proves. Founded in the city’s financial heart, London’s Bund may overtop the Barbican all it likes, but it is here, on this line, that its deluge ceases and its wave is frozen. It has been agreed and signed into statute that the Bund’s glass and LED glitter will come no further west. And after all, the Bundists are men and women, not without feeling, not without judgement. Even if it were in their jurisdiction, the Barbican Estate would probably survive as, within the purlieus of the Bund, traces of London’s Roman wall survive, and local wells and rivers under stone, Bazalgette’s pump house, and the foot-tunnel under the Thames at Greenwich. The Bundists are kinder to the past than your precious émigrés ever were. Remember those pictures: how thoroughly they erased the ruins of Cripplegate to bring the Barbican into being?

  In your first year (such was the city’s desire to keep up with the Bund) the Bartlett assigned you some ruined land of your own. It lay within a stone’s throw of this estate. It was yours to survey, yours to refashion on paper and in balsa, and in your second year, assuming your vision was not hopelessly inept, you got to see it built. You read and reread your commission, unable to believe your luck. The Corporation of the City of London was giving you a whole block of the city to play in: a huge, weedy lot, bombed out in the Great War and neglected since, running south from Roscoe Street as far as Fortune Street, and bounded east and west by Whitecross Street and Golden Lane. You imagined yourself another Geoffry Powell, another Christoph Bon. You imagined great Brutalist towers rising. You didn’t have nearly the amount of money needed for such grandiloquence (nor, indeed, the freedom; your tutor was constantly breathing down your neck). Undeterred, you traced the borders of your playpen on maps both old and new, in council offices and in libraries, struggling to encompass your fortune. Fortune, Whitecross, Roscoe, Golden Lane . . .

  You picked through the stones so gingerly. What were you expecting to find in that choked and rubble-strewn quarter? Another corn dolly? Superstition kept you hesitating at the outskirts of the bomb field for a long time. Street by overgrown street, garden by garden, cellar by flooded cellar you crept forth, timidly occupying your very own zone of council-approved redevelopment. Theodolite over your shoulder. Cheap camera. Notebook. Sandwiches in a tin box.

  Over the course of spring term, you came to know every ruin, broken arch and orphaned doorway. Every exposed interior. The papered walls of everted reception rooms. The absurdity of sanitaryware under a blue sky. You found a fox nesting insid
e a toppled wardrobe, a spindle of buddleia taking root inside a shoe.

  You worked hard, long into the night, and gradually that square of streets – Fortune, Whitecross, Roscoe, Golden Lane – became your private kingdom. And why not? This was the zone assigned to you. This was yours to transform. Yours to improve. The clearance operation was scheduled for the summer break. Before then, you had to bring your friends here. You wanted them to appreciate the scale of the work ahead, and see the shabby Before to your carefully drafted After.

  You brought Jill here, with whom you acted once or twice in college plays. She was very stiff, her fingers always playing at her throat, and you imagined she was a bomb just waiting to go off. Which, as it turned out, she was, though not in the way you had hoped. You spent an entire spring day trying to seduce her. Mind this drop, that spar, an unprotected hole! She wasn’t dressed for it. A yellow frock. Strappy sandals. You took these as good omens. Listen, you said, hear the water, running just beneath our feet! Here, there’s shade and a seat, someone’s abandoned sofa, not too damp, behind this abandoned car. Here – shush – look at the pretty little foxes!

  Until, in the ruins of a bomb-hollowed church where you led her by the hand (you had got that far) down an aisle filled with coloured light filtering from a great west window still unaccountably intact and there, butterflied in green and red and blue, she let go of your hand and knelt, fingers clawing at her neck for the little gold cross you had imagined was no more than an ornament. Then tears, and the hysteria that (you learned) invariably accompanies a religious visitation. ‘The light! Such light!’

  So that tore it.

  Who else did you bring here? More college friends. Stan and Robyn. In their third year of music studies they had decided to get married and had moved into rooms absurdly far from the campus.

  Towards the end of your first year your scholarship monies had all run dry, and you were making ends meet playing lounge piano in a dive north of Soho. One Saturday night, Stan and Robyn turned up there. They paid you hardly any mind, they were too busy screaming at each other, throwing wine at each other, throwing plates. It was the sort of place that appreciated character. You were more likely to get hustled out than they were: your plodding arpeggiations were the definition of dismal.

  They showed up the following Saturday, and the Saturday after that, and the one after that. They told you they were co-writing a musical review. It was all about the art of the English murder and the impossible airlessness of the garden suburbs. You didn’t take them at all seriously, until their faces were in the papers. Your Aunt Stella bankrolled the show’s move to the West End, where it won instant acclaim.

  As a favour to Stella, you led Stan and Robyn through your soon-to-be-flattened wilderness – Fortune, Whitecross, Roscoe, Golden Lane. The earthmovers were already trundling into position as you sat the pair on piles of broken masonry and took moody publicity shots of them with a very complicated large-format camera. Stan was wearing a lounge suit and Robyn was in a cocktail dress and they were constantly brushing the plaster off each other, picking off burrs and thorns and seeds and stray grasses. ‘We’ve got to return these clothes.’ They couldn’t take their hands off each other.

  Six months later and with the baby beginning to show, they parked up on a bridle path in the Lee Valley and piped exhaust fumes into the cabin of their car. The papers, in a frenzy, rang you up for more photographs. ‘Anything unpublished will do.’ You dug out the portfolio. You gazed at them. They looked so very happy. So very unworldly. You burned everything, even the negatives.

  Stanislaw Lesniak – another ‘Stan’ – was no celebrity, but of all your visitors, he was the one who most publicly identified with the place. Early one summer vacation, so as to fill a gap in his little magazine Responses (‘Poetry, Politics, Gardening’), he took a tour of Cripplegate (‘The foxes here are riddled with rabies: what has the council to say?’), casting you as that region’s native guide (‘Surly, incommunicative, venal, but a match for the wildlife’). Stanislaw was in love with you, and you must have felt you owed him something because you spent four whole days leading him up and over banks of broken masonry, through thickets of bramble and self-seeded foxglove. It was a stop-start affair as he was constantly having to peer at, pick and identify the surrounding plant life, cross-referencing diligently between three heavy field guides. ‘It must be fat hen after all. I’ve never seen a specimen so tall.’ Buddleiae were just buddleiae to you until he taught you to distinguish between Lochinch and summer lilac. ‘I have also come across wall lettuce and hedge mustard here, among the usual smooth sow thistle, nipplewort and coltsfoot, all with yellow flowers.’ You appear in his exhaustive account of his Cripplegate explorations often, and always through the lens of incredulity. ‘The rubble banks to the west of the site are “a sea of bluebells” in March, Lanyon tells me: a convenient claim to make in July.’

  Responses withered but Stanislaw Lesniak’s account of unrepaired Cripplegate has never been out of print. The Penguin edition has woodcuts for each chapter head. You still hear him on the BBC sometimes, explicating difficult ideas to do with soil radiobiology.

  Felicine Chernoy.

  Last and not least.

  When you led Fel through Cripplegate, she drank in everything you showed her so passively, it was impossible to know whether she was having a good time or not. She was not equipped, mentally, for an unaccommodated world. She had no idea what to do with it. If you led her to a vantage point, she would follow. If you sat her down in the shade behind a wrecked car, she would sit. She said almost nothing. She more or less ignored the picnic you had brought. You had no idea, back then, how little she ate. She was a vacuum into which you had been pouring all your hopes for weeks. She was, at that time, still a simple object of desire, absurdly too beautiful for you.

  In the night that followed your explorations of Cripplegate, you took her back to the house in Tooting where you rented a room. She let you make love to her again.

  In the middle of the night, the faulty central heating clanged you awake and you found her sitting up beside you in the bed, sketching with a biro on lined paper. She had tweaked the curtain aside to illuminate her page by street light. You sat up and turned the light on. She had your likeness down in all its gawky preposterousness. Her portraits never tipped into caricature; they were crueller than that. The plants at your feet were identifiable. Mercury, lamb’s ear, black bryony. You told her the names of the plants she had drawn. She blinked at you, half-smiling, and you began to understand what the vacuum inside her signified. She was built to absorb everything. Nothing escaped her notice. Nothing was beneath her regard. Not even you.

  Somewhere there must still be the drawings Fel made of the construction site when, in the autumn term of your second year, your paper buildings were given planning permission and began to rise upon the plane of levelled rubbish separating Fortune Street and Roscoe Street. She caught details with her pen onsite, and when you were alone together you explained the things she had drawn. That the sill-plate bolted to the crawl-space wall is made of pressure-treated lumber. That the lintel carries the load from the roof to the trimmer studs, so the door does not burst open under the weight of the roof. Your careful explanations were completely pointless. You surely realised this. A tribesman patiently explaining to an anthropologist how to work a flint into a scraper.

  Bringing Fel to the building site strained your relations with the foreman, who already had little interest in anything you had to say. He knew what houses were. Again and again you had to drag him back to the plans. Answering the builders’ objections became an exhausting and nightmarish version of the fairground game in which hammering the head of a mole into its hole causes three other moles to pop out. You had to fight for every off-width stair, every pricey curtain wall, every non-standard sheet of glass. What you did not know at the time was that construction of this sort was already redundant. In fact, your houses were the last the foreman would ever oversee, or his worker
s build. The Bund’s constructions stop east of City Road, but its construction crews are available for hire by any cash-strapped city council. The homes you and your construction crew so painfully conjured into being, turning pencil strokes to timber and nights of careful calculations into so many tons of mixed cement: for the Bund, these are merely printing jobs.

  Your work survives, though much of it has suffered after being passed rapidly from owner to owner and from use to use. On Banner Street someone has tacked faux-Elizabethan timbering over your brick frontages. Flats that impend over the pavement on cantilevered beams have been propped up with massive and unnecessary concrete pillars. Carpet shops and convenience stores fill the small, uniform retail units you had meant for artists’ studios, rehearsal spaces and left-wing bookshops. Where Banner Street meets Golden Lane, the Foresters pub remains true to your vision: a rectilinear shell of yellow brick, hardly different in its proportions from the houses surrounding it. The architectural suggestion here – that the pub might have been made later, by knocking through two ordinary residences – was, if you recall, deliberate: one of many knowing nods to the idea of a manufactured past. It is an embarrassingly bad building but this is where you find yourself: a criminal returning to the scene of his crime.

  The inside of the pub is carpeted throughout with worn red industrial stuff. The balustrades around the little raised dining areas are made of wood, as are the chairs, though they are slathered over with such a layer of thick and shiny varnish that they may as well be made of plastic. Plastic drip-trays line the long bar. Tall electric pumps offer a narrow selection of beers. A Heineken will do. You carry it over to a round table set out for eating. Not that you plan to eat, but there’s a television blaring away in the taproom.