The Smoke

by Simon Ings

  By which time most of his listeners, exhausted, had set down their glasses and had to snatch them up again for the toast. We drank, not too sure of what we were drinking to, and some of us numbly suspecting that whatever it was, it was but another small, friendly, well-meant step towards our own dissolution. The Bundists around us, strictly teetotal, drained their Vimtos and grinned their bright-white grins. A second dignitary – tired, stoop-shouldered, obviously not a Bundist – stood to speak.

  I took advantage of the lull to slip out of the room.

  The nearest bathroom was a public toilet. Its steel trough and elbow-operated taps were incongruous fittings among the elderly brickwork and pitch-black wood.

  I dried my hands on a paper towel, left the bathroom, and then, when I came to the gift shop, I continued walking until the corridor turned and deposited me outside on a gravel path. I crossed over to a stone balustrade and studied the garden below – or as much of it as could be seen in light shining from the windows of the castle.

  The garden was arranged to a formal plan: a sheet of paper folded, cut about with nail scissors and spread out flat again. The planting was sparse and precise. I smelled roses.

  I heard her footsteps on the gravel path before I saw her, approaching from out of the darkness. Her shoes were dangling from one hand and she was walking slowly, barefoot, over the stones. The weakness of the light, and the slowness of her walk, suggested some marine space, and it startled me when she looked up, right at me, and stopped: a first contact between separate worlds. I raised my hand in uncertain greeting. She turned to the left, along a narrow path between low bushes of lavender. As she brushed by them, their scent rose into the air. Just at the edge of vision, where the darkness prepared to swallow her again, she glanced back at me.

  Small dog-like stone lions guarded a flight of steps that ran flush to the wall. I followed them down into the garden. Once out of the glare of the castle, my eyes adjusted quickly. The night was not so very dark after all. There was a full moon. The air along the lavender-lined path was heavy and astringent. It was a smell that, much later, I would recall every time I used Fel’s soap: lavender and thyme, with something metallic in the mix.

  She was waiting for me. ‘You’re supposed to be listening to my dad.’

  I took this in. Chernoy was her father? Then she was a Bundist. ‘I thought you were a painter or something.’

  ‘Why can I not be?’

  I thought about this. ‘Not with those nails.’

  She lifted her hand and looked at them: impossible to tell in this light whether her nails were black or red. ‘Perhaps I brush up well.’

  I walked on, hoping she would follow. The path widened and she came to walk beside me. I slowed down, conscious of her bare feet on the stones. ‘Unless you don’t use paint,’ I said. ‘Being what you are.’

  ‘What would I use? Being what I am.’

  ‘Light. Plasma. Solidified air.’

  ‘You’re funny. What else?’

  ‘Dad’s rays, maybe. I reckon you spend your days sculpting living forms for new natures, on this and other worlds.’

  ‘Did he really say that?’

  ‘Yup.’

  In the garden’s centre there was an oval bed of carefully topiaried evergreen shrubs. She said, ‘This is a garden for people who don’t like nature, isn’t it?’

  ‘I think that’s the point.’ With a sweeping gesture, I took in the town below the castle, the railway, the foggy effulgence that was London. ‘Be glad there are such things as gardeners. Out there it’s chaos, haven’t you heard? The wasteland.’

  ‘And there was I thinking you were a romantic.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I meant in the intellectual sense.’ She turned to the castle. Her face, lit by distant windows, was as grey and fragile as paper. ‘So. You’re not a nature lover.’

  I thought about the West Riding, my narrow upbringing there, how my father’s love had straitjacketed me, and how glad I was to get out. And at the same time, how much I missed weekends fishing with him in the fast-flowing brooks above the town, and how bitterly I regretted my brother James’s disappearance into the toils of military security. We used to go walking about the moors until . . .

  I might have touched a dental cavity with my tongue, the shock was so sudden, the pain so sharp. I covered my confusion as best I could. Hands in pockets, surly shrug: ‘Nature has its moments.’

  ‘Dad’ll sort it out.’

  ‘I’m sure he will.’

  ‘There will be order. Fel.’ She extended her hand. Her nails on the back of my hand were cool and sharp, like the edges of teaspoons.

  ‘Stuart.’

  She smiled. There was something on her front tooth. It glittered. ‘And I don’t paint.’

  ‘I don’t paint, either. We have that in common.’

  ‘Let’s leave it at that.’

  ‘We’ll prolong the mystery.’

  ‘Only you buttonholed La Cosgrave and sat with her all evening, so I assume you’re one of her harem.’

  ‘I’m her nephew.’

  She looked at me. ‘Really?’

  ‘This makes you and me practically related. From how she tells it.’

  ‘God, don’t, she’s worse than he is.’

  She appeared easy with the idea that her father was sleeping with an actress. I wondered what had happened to her mother. ‘How do you get on with Stella?’

  ‘Not very well at first. Now she’s roped me into this television project of hers.’

  ‘DARE? She told me about that.’

  ‘Every week I arrive at a small film studio in Shepperton, West London, in a gold car with batwing doors.’

  ‘Star treatment, then.’

  ‘That’s the title sequence, silly. Personal assistants with big hair saunter past me in hotpants.’

  ‘Several flash you a leer.’

  ‘Careful.’

  ‘Trust me to know my aunt. What’s the film studio about?’

  ‘It’s a cover: behind the glitz and tinsel of Shepperton lie the central headquarters of a surreptitious supra-governmental organisation dedicated to the defence of the planet.’

  ‘The Desk of Abominable Rectal Examination.’

  ‘Or something. Don’t interrupt.’

  Beyond the formal garden was a grove of trees, and a narrow path between ferns and steps down to a pool, and a waterfall splashing, and an artificial cave behind the waterfall, and in the darkness I kissed her, and her hands moved across my back, and she opened her mouth to me, and she tasted of berries and all the concentrated juices of the summer. (Only later did I remember: Vimto.) The thing on her tooth was meant to be there. It was a jewel, set in the enamel, reflecting light that, given where we were, hidden from the castle and its windows, could only have come from the Moon.

  5

  Since any Bundist, staring at a screen (and when did they ever do anything else?) could follow any number of live video feeds transmitted by machines already anchored on the Moon, already digging, mixing and building, it was and remains a puzzle why any of them found Stella’s television show worth their investment. DARE: the glacially paced saga of men and women on a fictional moonbase plagued by a perpetual clothing shortage.

  And this, Punch tittered, came as no surprise since the rockets necessary to supply the moonbase were themselves fictional.

  DARE’s world was one powered by gigantic chemical rockets of the sort that had, one after another throughout my childhood (eager ear pressed to the radio), come to spectacular grief in the deserts of Woomera. No doubt the art of sending payloads into orbit by rocket would be mastered eventually. But in the Bund – that peculiar ethnic combine in frozen, far-distant Birobidzhan, Lenin’s Siberian homeland for the Jews – a new technology had been born.

  The Bund used balloons to lift small payloads into the stratosphere, then gently accelerated them into orbit using the same proprietary mechanism that allowed the Bund’s aircraft to land vertically on any s
quare of level ground.

  The payloads their technology could handle were light indeed – just a few pounds, far lighter than any living human being. Steadily, however, their technology had amassed in orbit, constructing itself out of parts, so that Bundist machines were even now scuttling over the surface of the Moon.

  Woomera hoped to leapfrog the Bund’s lunar ambitions with their planet-hopping HMS Victory. And if, God willing, the Victory flew, then the present would diverge even more sharply from Stella’s imagined future of aeroplane-sized space shuttles and orbital docking platforms.

  At least Stella had the sense not to put a date to this redundant future of hers. She gave me a draft of her pilot script to read over the summer holidays. When I handed it back to her with proofreader’s scribbles, I teased her about her concept. She countered, ‘Who says there can’t be more than one future?’ This with the touching melancholy of a girl who has asked for a puppy and a kitten.

  Though I knew my aunt and her reputation well enough to distrust her performed naivety, I did think at first that DARE was most likely a mere vanity project. I couldn’t imagine the show ever getting made. I couldn’t imagine who would want to watch it. But if it gave Stella, in the autumn of her career, the sense that she was breaking new ground, learning a new skill, exploring a new medium, or however you want to put it, then where was the harm?

  Georgy Chernoy, I had assumed, was bankrolling his lover’s project, though his name never appeared on the project’s paperwork, not even as one of the show’s more-than-a-dozen executive producers. I do know he arranged the permits necessary for Stella to film south of the Thames, in the purlieus of Medicine City. One bright August morning, when I should have been working through my second-year reading list, I went, armed with a camera, to help Stella to scout locations for her series.

  It was my first visit to Medicine City, and for all the press that had greeted the project, both gushing and hostile, I was quite unprepared for what I found there. It felt as though the tram trundling us from London Bridge Station to Peckham Rye were slipping us through theatre flats into an entirely different reality. A weak enough commentary, since this was more or less exactly the impression the City’s designers had been aiming at.

  I had been living and studying in London for slightly less than a year; in that time Medicine City had spread at visible speed across the compulsorily purchased streets of its south-east quarter, turning schools into clinics, cinemas into surgeries, whole avenues into ‘memory lanes’, re-creating Londons past and gone – and this with technology the Bartlett staff themselves could hardly fathom, let alone teach to us.

  Who were the unknown architects of that extraordinary and controversial transformation of the south-east, from the Thames at Deptford, through Peckham, to the very mouth of Forest Hill and the valley William Blake had dubbed his ‘Vale of Vision’? How many of them were there? Where did they live and work? Had Medicine City’s construction relied upon ordinary, unaccommodated talents, thousands of them would have been needed to realise the project.

  But it was no secret that the entire look and feel of Medicine City – ‘An Oasis of Reminiscence and Regrowth’ – had been envisioned by machine, down to the smallest details: the tasteful lighting embedded at the edge of every pramway; the walnut detailing of Medicine City’s step-free streetcars.

  My sense of rushing disorientation began the moment our tram, starting from outside London Bridge Station, turned the sharp and squealing corner onto Tooley Street and a view of the first and most well-reported of Medicine City’s architectural novelties. Around the cool white walls and dappled niches of a second Saint Paul’s Cathedral – smaller than Wren’s original and opened out, a kind of exploded maquette – strolled the medicalised infants generated by the Chernoy Process.

  Some infants wandered unaccompanied, but most held the hands of nursie. For those not yet able to walk, an elevated pramway swooped around the structure.

  The point of the cathedral was simple: it existed to jog, in these ersatz infant minds, memories of the actual cathedral, which lay hardly a mile away on the opposite bank of the Thames. Much of Medicine City was directed to this purpose: it was a theme park dedicated to the awakening of memory. And if it seemed gimcrack, absurd, even insane – well, no one involved in the project, not even Georgy Chernoy himself, was likely to disagree with you there. It wasn’t as though they had planned it this way.

  No one had guessed, at the start of the project, how difficult it would be for Chernoy’s Processed infants to remember their past.

  And once the problem was recognised, no one had any idea just how baroque the solutions to this problem would become.

  Memory, after all, was the most labile of mental gifts, the one most susceptible to suggestion – no? It would be enough, surely, to show these forgetful infants certain pictures; or play them certain pieces of music; or feed them, in extremis, mouthfuls of madeleine dipped in tea – no?

  No, no, and no. The medicalised infants generated by the Chernoy Process turned out to be maddeningly resistant to reminiscence. Nothing short of full immersion in the past seemed capable of waking them to it.

  So then the problem had become: how to immerse an infant in a vanished world? Various lacklustre systems of ‘virtual reality’ were developed: ugly concatenations of pressure suit, visor, gloves. Nothing worked. It proved cheaper, in the end, to re-create entire environments, at least in little. To resort, that is, to the artisanship of theatre makers, fairground engineers and theme-park designers.

  Saint Paul’s was not only Medicine City’s most famous ‘attraction’; it was also, from Chernoy’s point of view, its most successful prompt to memory. It turns out that all of us hold Saint Paul’s in mind in much the same way. Most everyone, whatever their background and personal circumstances, remembers the same cathedral.

  London’s less celebrated landmarks, however, were more of a struggle, requiring redundancy and repetition to be effective. Our route led through endlessly reiterated miniature versions of the same places. I lost count of the number of Oxford Streets we rattled by: tatty barrow and hawker Oxford Streets, shuttered and hostile Oxford Streets, Oxford Streets lit here by flames (a memory of the Great War), there (a happier, more recent memory) with Christmas fairy lights; all small, none built above waist height, a vast, cluttered multiversal Oxford Street containing all imaginable prompts to memory.

  Vernacular memories were the hardest to bring to mind through this bizarre architecture. And this was an abiding worry for Medicine City: vernacular memories are, after all, what define a personality. Yes, everyone remembers visiting Saint Paul’s Cathedral, but few personalities are profoundly shaped by the experience. What shapes a person is the colour of the bedroom curtains; the pattern of the linoleum in the kitchen; the sound of muffled arguments in the hall. What shapes a person is the daily grind.

  Bedrooms, bathrooms, office cubicles: these did not require endless versioning so much as an extensive, dull, generic running-through of elements. There was only one office building in Medicine City, but it stretched all the way from New Cross Gate, up and over Telegraph Hill to the leafy crescents of Brockley. It had been built outsize to most effectively prompt, in the infantile minds of Chernoy’s patients, memories of the times they had spent in such places. The cramped conditions. The irritation, the boredom, the drudgery. Here furniture substituted for buildings: desks five, six yards high, and office chairs as tall as street lights. Anglepoise lamps loomed over the street like great white eyes, while calendars as big as billboards scrawled over in marker-black (‘provisional deadline’, ‘sales strategy’, ‘accelerator hub’) provided curtain walls, dividing the district up into discrete memory-packets: post room, sales, marketing, human resources, even a trading floor.

  This last was the most abstract area of all, a series of giant blocky, geometrically simple maquettes sporting the bright striped blazers (rendered in wire-reinforced tarpaulin) of the most venerable London firms. A bell tolled as we ra
ttled by; more likely, the recording of a bell.

  Hauled through a cutting at Telegraph Hill, at last Stella and I found ourselves amid a sanely proportioned architecture: a practical, habitable architecture built for use. We boarded an elevated travellator at Brockley which promised to take us to One Tree Hill and the southern edge of Peckham, but which for the longest time led us a circuitous dance through the thickly arboured avenues of Ladywell.

  ‘All the gentlemen from the City set their mistresses up around here,’ said Stella, pointing out handsome red-brick villas through gaps in the rhododendron. I glimpsed gabled frontages and doors and upper windowpanes heavy with stained glass.

  These houses had since swapped their knick-knacks, closets and cocktail cabinets, their Everyman Libraries and Schirmer’s Classics, for padded pneumatic chairs and lockable cabinets, for wall calendars and anatomical charts, for drills and mirrors, and had opened their doors to dentists, chiropodists, opticians, reflexologists and all the other ancillary crafts and services that hung off Medicine City’s great enterprise. We saw infants in perambulators and buggies. We saw newborn infants bundled up in the arms of young nurses. We saw infants staggering out of driveways clutching their freshly drilled jaws, and peering out of the windows of private cars, owl-like in new spectacles.