The Smoke

by Simon Ings

  We strode as the elevated walkway pulled us along, the air fresh on our faces. We passed a girl on crutches, and sidled around twins in a pushchair, and were nearly bowled over as three boys barged past us, playing tag. On the travellator running beside us in the opposite direction, I saw one medicalised boy trying to fly a paper kite, though these walkways moved at nothing like the necessary speed.

  Stella turned to me and grinned. She had her youthful colour back, as if the air itself must be tonic. ‘What do you think?’

  I had no thoughts, just a few futile and incoherent premonitions. I felt as though I had been reduced to the size of a mouse and left to fend for myself inside the toybox of a spoiled and distracted child.

  Now came Honor Oak, and the hill from which Boadicea, Queen of the Britons, is said to have led her last and fatal charge against the legions of Gaius Paulinus. A cable car carried us over that, and down through modest residential streets which by pure coincidence had already been named, a good century before Medicine City was ever conceived, for the Crimean War and for the work of Florence Nightingale. We walked the length of Scutari Road and came at last to the Rye.

  A breeze had picked up and across the fields children were flying kites. Dogs ran about among them, barking. Families picnicked on squares of blanket. A railed-in section of the park afforded a little shade. The flower beds were planted with red-leaved ground cover, grasses, ornamental thistles and other sculptural plants.

  There was a bowling green, a café selling Italian ice creams, a playground.

  ‘We’ve come a long way,’ Stella said to me as we set down our coffees at a table outside the café, opposite the lake. Children ran back and forth, squealing. I couldn’t tell if they were real children this time or more of Chernoy’s medicalised infants. I nodded agreement, too tired to ask what Stella meant. She might have been referring to our journey today, or even to our involvement in the ostensibly glamorous business of television production. Perhaps she meant the life-journeys we had each taken, out of the West Riding and into the Smoke, into careers no one back home would have foreseen for us, and which among some locals were no doubt, and at this very moment, raising sneers of reverse-snobbery.

  Theatre. Architecture school. Should the HMS Victory ever leave the ground, Jim would be following the most remarkable trajectory of us all. It was his adventure, if anyone’s, that would earn our family its footnote in the history books. Were we particularly gifted, particularly blessed? The way we had scattered felt more like an accident than anything else. How had a family with roots in iron and coal and labour haemorrhaged so suddenly, in the space of less than a generation, and scattered its energies on so many grand-sounding but empty projects? Plays that people no longer came to see. Bridges and buildings that machines could make better. A giant spacecraft that had yet to fly.

  Fel arrived at the café laden down with laundry bags. I went to get her a drink and when I came back the table, my chair and a great deal of the decking round about were strewn with swatches and squares of material.

  Fel was helping Stella design the costumes for DARE.

  She cleared my chair, dumping her fabric samples unceremoniously back into the bag. The piece she and Stella were agonising over had an open, interlocking weave; it looked as if it had been made by a spider. ‘I can make this out of wire,’ Fel explained. ‘I can distort it to fit any shape, like armour. It doesn’t have to be fabric at all. It could be a sort of exoskeleton.’

  ‘Well.’ Stella stretched the fabric over the table. ‘It’s you that has to wear it.’

  ‘If we choose the colours carefully you won’t be able to tell the difference between the fabric version and the rigid one. We could pretend they were the same suit. A responsive fabric. A kind of safety garment.’

  Stella liked that. ‘What else?’

  Fel had been running off samples at a nearby medical fabrication lab. With a computerised loom she had created materials that looked half-mechanical, as though there were tubes running just under the weave: compression suits, Stella explained glancingly to me, for use in the vacuum of space. What interested her most, though, were the flimsy, shiny stuffs that would ultimately appear on the show as fashion wear. ‘Can you make these up?’

  ‘I’ve had a go,’ said Fel, doubtfully, pulling out a tabard and a microskirt made of white vinyl, each piece stamped with a bright red DARE decal. ‘I thought this might work for the crew of the submarine.’

  Stella was far too busy with the fabrics to notice the glances Fel and I were exchanging. We had been seeing each other for more than three months, and I still had no clear idea who Fel was, beyond that she came from the Bund and seemed to own her own time.

  I did not know what she did, and had yet to realise that among the Bund the question ‘What do you do?’ made little sense. I knew what her mouth tasted like. I knew the jewel in her tooth was a birthday present she had given herself. I knew she lived away from the Bund, pursuing an independent life in a place of her own, a studio flat near London Bridge Station with a bed that pulled out from the wall and an upright piano and a bathroom stacked with funky, off-piste perfumes, all moss and wet rope and cat piss and cigarette ash. I knew she didn’t so much sleep in a bed as in a nest of pillows and duvets and clothes and bathrobes and anything else that lay to hand, and that her blood ran so hot that she barely covered herself at night, but lay snoring on top of the heap she had made, like a young dragon. I knew she had a teddy bear called Boethius and that when she was alone, cuddling Boethius brought her consolation. I knew that she had read Boethius’s Consolations, and it was rare that I met anyone who had read what I had not. It was an effort for me not to talk about books with Fel, but I tried to hold back because I knew that the more we talked, the easier we would be with each other, and the easier we became with each other, the more we ran the risk that we would defuse whatever was driving our mouths together whenever we were alone.

  I didn’t want Stella to know about us. I didn’t want it in her head that she had somehow brought us together. That my aunt was sleeping with Fel’s father was more of a family connection than Fel and I knew what to do with, and we already had a tacit understanding to treat Stella simply as a wealthy, eccentric lady of a certain age; someone for whom we did amusing favours.

  This was the game we were playing with each other, the fiction we were trying to maintain.

  I glanced up and saw Stella looking at me. Stella knew. Any fool would have guessed that I was smitten. Fel was naturally discreet; ‘wily’ might be a better word. But me? I may as well have worn a sign around my neck. I coloured up.

  Stella was far too intelligent to say anything, though.

  Fel packed up her samples and her notebook. She was staying on at the café – her father was due to meet her there for tea.

  ‘Give him my love,’ Stella said. ‘Tell him if I’m not home before him, I won’t be far behind.’

  I wondered what Fel really thought of her father’s blousy new girlfriend. I wondered if her father had taken many partners. It was strange, thinking of him about to turn up here. He was still lodged in my mind as a celebrity. The man who had defeated death.

  ‘Now, Stuart, shall we go and make some use of that camera of yours?’

  Stella and I said goodbye to Fel and walked north to the restored lido – one of the few structures remaining from the old Peckham. From here we worked our way back to London Bridge by taxi, on foot, and by taxi again: a three-hour zigzag in pursuit of locations, vistas, angles, and in all that time my eye hardly left the viewfinder of my camera. Stella was a tyrant when she wanted to be, and tireless, and – I had to admit it – inspiring. We did good work that day.

  In the course of it, we discovered that the whole of Peckham had been transformed, all the way north to its hazy junction (razed by Zeppelin bombardments in the Great War) with Bermondsey, where the old Peek Freans and Hartley’s Jam factories had given way to pharmas, hacker labs and synbio start-ups.

  And while the warm
air gathering in the bowl of New Cross had hardly changed from the fug Stella said she remembered from her boarding house days – still laden with Chindian and Cypriot kebabs, mutton in sticky rice, eels, pies and liquor – the streets west of there and around the Queen’s Road had, we discovered, acquired a quite different olfactory signature, stringent and sickly citrus, reflecting the food habits of Medicine City. Wheatgrass and spirulina. Goji crackers. Smoothied spinach. Crispy kale with chia seeds. Stewed kelp.

  * * *

  Three months had not been time enough for our sex-delirium to dissipate and reveal just what Fel and I had let ourselves in for.

  I was not, she told me, her first unaccommodated boyfriend. I was, however, the very first not to look into her eyes and say something catastrophically ill-judged like, ‘Are you even real?’

  Fel, true to her corvid appearance, proved a first-class mimic. Once, over her first ever (and, for her, highly transgressive) half of pub cider, she performed these lines of reductive male incomprehension to the company with a precision that had my male friends wincing in self-recognition and the girls throwing up a little into their mouths.

  I can’t for the life of me remember the name of the pub but it was a block away from the High Street in Tooting in south London, and I would often be there with my friends, catching a routine or a band.

  Two of my housemates had a stand-up act. They dressed as pirates. We went to see them every month, whenever the comedy circuit brought them back near the house. Their routine was never the same twice, and it never improved.

  When Fel and I met, I was sharing that house in Tooting with seven others. None of us had any money or knew how to cook an egg. There were so many of us, and so much traffic on the stairs, that the ground-floor ceiling plaster was coming down. The door to the downstairs bathroom had no lock, but the bottom edge had swollen so you could jam it shut for privacy. Two smallish strides carried you from the door of my room to the bed, assuming the floor was clear, which it never was. You could open the window and climb out onto the roof of the kitchen extension. Fel and I perched out there some nights drinking cheap white wine from Balham Tesco, chilled almost to freezing to make it palatable. We drank it out of mugs because all the glasses in the flat had been broken. Sometimes the others would join us on the roof, bringing beer.

  The Tooting crowd liked Fel, but they weren’t sure what to make of her. A stray fox. A feral cat. They knew, and sometimes said aloud, that I had bitten off more than I could chew. Stan Lesniak once went so far as to draw me aside and give me a stern talking-to. ‘You know she’s slumming it with you, don’t you?’

  I wasn’t angry. I knew Stan was jealous, and drunk, and unhappy. I was even prepared to accept that he was right. I knew I was overly submissive around Fel.

  But how else was I to behave? She was a Bundist, and I was not. Her mind ran on high-octane fuel. Next to her, I was a wood-burning thing.

  Though she excelled me in the speed of her thought, in her wit, in her knowledge, that is not to say that her mind had no shape. It was particular, as specialised in its way as any piece of technology. It had edges. Even limits. She hated abstraction. I learned quickly not to offer her my hidden depths. She absolutely would not engage with my important agonies about life. She wanted things from me. People. Facts. Objects. She was a collector. This was her purpose in life, and all the purpose she needed.

  She liked me to explain things to her exactly. She wanted details. When I sat at my drawing table, studying the Cripplegate plans, or simply working on something that to her must have appeared quite ordinary – a staircase, perhaps, or a curtain wall – she would pull up a chair and kneel on it, elbows on the table, watching with a seriousness that was utterly, charmingly childlike.

  I told my housemates that Fel designed costumes for television, because it was true, and because whatever else she did remained a mystery to me. Or not a mystery, exactly, but difficult to explain. What did she do all day?

  Fel had money. I didn’t. I remember saying early on that this situation was bound to grow old very quickly: that I would not be able to keep up with her. I did, in the end, manage to convince her that taking me out to dinners I could not possibly afford, though good for my stomach, was bad for my spirit. But still she treated me to concerts, to song cycles at Wigmore Hall, to opera at the English National and the Royal.

  She knew every piece. She knew every performer. Every soloist. She listened to music. Really listened, sometimes with the score in her lap. There didn’t seem to be any part of the cultural life of the city that she didn’t know like the back of her hand, and I couldn’t work out how she had acquired so much knowledge or how she sustained such a lively engagement with everything. She put me in mind of an ambitious foreigner, acquiring the trappings of a culture not her own. Which was, of course, exactly what she was. And like an ambitious foreigner, the culture she had acquired by diligent study was easy to parody. It was undeniably off-beam, and often yawningly over-serious. At the same time, it was richer than anything a native like me would ever gather out of the air.

  She took me to lectures at the Whitechapel and the Barbican and the Tate. She wasn’t a student. She wasn’t an artist. She wasn’t a musician. She wasn’t working on a novel. She didn’t fit any art-school pigeonhole. Still she knew more about art, music, books and architecture than anyone I’d ever met, Stanislaw Lesniak included, and this is why, in time, Stan came to hate her so. She sucked everything in but she was more than a buff, more than an anorak in a pretty wrapper (this was her description of herself, one night among friends).

  All she did was live, and so she lived, intensely and well. Her mind was like a steel trap. She forgot nothing. I had no idea what she saw in me. What I saw in her was someone who was used to considerably more than I could ever give her, and whose talents – even if, in the end, they simply boiled down to smart acquisition – ought to have earned her a sight more than a supporting role in Stella’s DARE.

  ‘What do you reckon?’

  Thigh-high boots and brassiere. Open-weave tabard. Platform heels. A long dress made of translucent plastic, split to the thigh. Playsuit. Plastic camisole.

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ I said.

  ‘This is just for the submarine. You should see my Moon gear.’

  ‘Please.’

  Purple fright wig. Silvered eyeshades. Microskirt and thong. ‘Stella kept me behind an extra hour today for screen tests. I think she might have been hitting on me.’

  ‘Please take that image out of my head.’

  ‘Oh.’ Fel folded her arms. ‘You’re no fun.’

  Stella wanted Fel to play the captain of DARE’s global fleet of stealth hunter-killer submarines. In DARE’s ever-expanding show bible, this was defined as an executive position involving active service, frequent dry-land contact with the upper echelons of the DARE bureau, and regular face-to-face contact with defence crews on the Moon. That way Fel could wear virtually everything Stella designed.

  When DARE won match-funding and received the green light from the broadcaster, life became easier. I told people Fel was an actress.

  My female flatmates were subdued around Fel, the boys puzzled, though sympathetic. Some – Stan Lesniak in particular – were quietly concerned that I might be bad for her. They fed her herbal teas and shot me looks as though sceptical of my motives. As well they might have been: she got drunk very easily and more than once Stan leaned out of his cupboard of a room to find me manhandling Fel up the stairs.

  At night we tore into each other the way a starved cat tears at a bird.

  Fel gave herself a hard time, always. She never took her brilliance for granted. She was conscientious. She never took her body for granted, either, moving with an oiled slickness that suggested the expert operation of a complex mechanical system. When she reached orgasm, she laughed, and while her happiness was evident, at the same time her climaxes were not a release for her, nor any hackneyed falling back into self. She was energetic afterwards,
elated, as though together we had enabled her body to accomplish a new thing.

  It was a part of Fel’s heritage that she was insatiably curious about all kinds of processed food and unfamiliar tastes. Dog treats. Mealworms. Cans of winter melon tea and pressed fish roe. Though she agonised over it, interrogated it, poked it and pilloried it often, she ate virtually everything. Bacon. Black pudding. Growing up on the Bund’s peculiar, delicate and by and large processed diet, she was fascinated by the rawness and bloodiness of my own meals. Once I cooked her some steak, and she grinned and chewed and slobbered and enthused right up to the point where she was violently sick just a couple of feet short of our toilet.

  She thought in ways that were studied and contrarian. She treated other people’s opinions the way a fox treats an unsecured bin. She gave herself no quarter; she said, ‘The way I’ve been taught, I tear everything down to white light.’ Until she said that, it had never occurred to me that, young as she was, she might actually have finished her education, and been given mastery over all the tools she would ever need.

  Towards Christmas in my second year, Fel decided it was ridiculous, me having to commute from Tooting to the Cripplegate site every day. ‘There’s too much going on. You’ve too much to worry about. It’s going to drive you crazy,’ she said. ‘Leave it with me.’

  The next evening she turned up at the Tooting house dangling a set of keys in my face. She said, ‘Daddy says we should move in together.’

  ‘Well.’ I thought about it. At least, I made a good show of thinking about it. ‘Daddy knows best, I suppose.’

  * * *

  ‘Is this Georgy’s?’ I asked, moving as if in a dream from one large, airy, day-bright room of the Barbican flat to the next.

  ‘One of them,’ Fel replied. ‘It’s not a place I know.’

  ‘Why is he doing this for us?’

  She came and stood by me and we gazed out through the patio door at the water and the strong, brutal lines of the buildings. Sunlight against brick and cement render. ‘He’s going to have to accept what I want,’ she said. ‘And I want you.’