The Smoke

by Simon Ings

  With extra episodes to devise, Stella was using me as her sounding board. Our teas were more frequent, which pleased my sweet tooth, but they were closer to script meetings than family catch-ups. As Stella’s ideas for DARE developed, it grew clear, at least to me, that I was not the best reader she could have chosen. It was all too obvious where her latest ideas were coming from. She seemed to me to be working out her feelings about looking after my mother – none too subtly, neither.

  By episode twenty, DARE’s secret Shepperton HQ has developed an effective portable countermeasure involving resonant crystals, and the aliens are flushed from their bridgehead.

  Submarine-launched interceptors land successfully within the perimeter of the now abandoned alien station, and ground crews set out to explore the structure.

  In the final reel of the final episode, they find the moonbase’s ‘dead’ crew.

  They are not dead, but they are not really alive, either. Helpless, strapped to gurneys, dripping blood and worse, many have had their organs harvested and their vital functions are being maintained by sophisticated machines.

  ‘In the second series, brilliant surgeons will pack these life-support systems into the victims’ still-living bodies, and these cybernetically enhanced personnel will form a new, elite line of defence for the DARE organisation,’ Stella explained. ‘They’re not just stronger, not just faster; their ordeal has bestowed on them a deep insight into the minds of the invaders.’ She could see I wanted to interrupt and, to stop me, she turned her attention to the teapot, adding hot water, stirring, pouring, talking all the while: ‘But with this knowledge comes a certain sympathy for the aliens – these last desperate representatives of a dying world. As the second series builds to a crisis, you won’t be entirely sure whose side these familiar characters are actually on.’

  ‘I think,’ I began (I knew I had to tread carefully), ‘I think we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves. You want the first series to end with a shot of the show’s most engaging characters eviscerated on surgical beds?’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be graphic.’

  ‘It doesn’t?’

  I didn’t want to be angry with her, but it was all I could do not to shake her. Betty was only just out of her latest bout of ‘life-saving’ surgery. I assumed this was where Stella had got the idea. By now my mother had hardly any internal organs left.

  * * *

  It is a measure of the love Betty and Stella felt for each other that, almost until the last, it survived the radically different choices they had made in life. As a young woman, Stella had chosen a life in which she could decide things for herself. Betty, marrying young, and marrying Bob, chose to have her life dictated by a husband. She never thought to resent her sister’s success, and I suspect this is partly because she did not recognise it as success. In my memory, Mum, while fond of Stella, always spoke rather disparagingly about what she was ‘getting up to’. The real fullness of life, in Betty’s opinion, was to be obtained through home and family. And given that these, in our case, consisted of a tin bath in the parlour and Bob rolling in drunk every Friday and Saturday night, you could only admire her faith.

  I had just started my second year at the Bartlett, and was watching my first houses rise in Cripplegate, when Betty moved to Islington to stay with Stella. I didn’t visit often, and they did not encourage me. Chemotherapy left Betty weak, prone to viral infections of one sort or another. There was no prohibition on my visiting, but an odd reticence kept me away. If I phoned Stella at home in Islington, it was always to talk to my mother or, if she was resting, to ask after her. But when Stella and I met in person, it was never at the house, and the subject of Betty never arose.

  Had I known my mum was going to spend the rest of her life in London, I would never have let such an unnatural state of affairs persist. But I always assumed that Betty would return to the West Riding after her treatment.

  I wonder, at what point did Betty’s affection for Bob entirely die? He never, to my knowledge, behaved badly towards her, not even in his blackest moods, not even in his deepest drunk. She never had to hide behind lace curtains of a Monday morning, as I recall some bruised and battered neighbours doing.

  Betty never went home. She spent her last years in a room not her own, in a city she didn’t know, being ministered to by a sister she loved dearly but with whom she had nothing in common. I realise now, and far too late, that she was disorientated. That she did not know what she was doing. That she did not know what she was agreeing to.

  How long did Betty hide the symptoms of her cancer? She must have been aware of her illness even before I left for college. I remember when I was still at home, and distracted by the business of moving to London, she was constantly visiting the toilet. But this sort of thing seems significant only in retrospect. Once or twice I found pink piss in the toilet bowl. But even this is no smoking gun. With bladder cancer the bleeding stops and starts. It can disappear for weeks. Even months.

  Whichever way you cut it, Betty’s silence killed her. Once in Islington, the pain in her lower back became so bad that Stella had to manhandle Betty to the surgery. It was the first time in her professional career that Stella had ever missed a matinee. Much later, she told me how startled she was at how light her sister had become: ‘Like a bundle of sticks.’

  Had this medical emergency unfolded in the West Riding, I don’t doubt the doctor would have sent Betty away with painkillers and some nonsense about sleeping on a harder mattress.

  In London it was a different story. Stella’s GP gave Betty an immediate referral.

  The cystoscopy revealed suspicious lesions, too far gone to be removed surgically. Betty returned to Stella’s with a sore arm from a BCG injection and a letter for the GP to continue the course, but it was only ever a holding measure. Within the month she was back in hospital, an inpatient this time, awaiting an operation to remove her bladder.

  It was the autumn of my second year, while I was having to commute daily from Tooting to Cripplegate. I suspect now that Mum’s operation was the main reason Fel and I moved in together when we did. Fel was worried about me.

  ‘There’s too much going on. You’ve too much to worry about. It’s going to drive you crazy.’

  At the time, I was bowled over at the thought that Fel liked me enough to live with me. It never occurred to me, until later, how much she wanted to care for me.

  I went to see Betty before the surgery. Her bed was a pile of forms, handbooks, diagrams. She was trying to understand what life would look like after the operation. She was confused, humiliated.

  Further operations followed to create a new bladder for her, using a loop of intestine. She grew even thinner from that procedure, as was only to be expected. Released from hospital, she stayed with Stella, learning to self-catheterise, learning to live with incontinence.

  She never went home. She never went back to my dad. She reminded me of those women of the Middle Ages who, disappointed in their political manoeuvrings, retire to a religious establishment.

  And though it feels strange to me to be casting Aunt Stella, of all people, as a nurse, her performance was, as always, immaculate.

  * * *

  Why Stella did what she did then is still a mystery to me. And I can’t quite get it out of my head that she waited till I had spent a month in Shrophire, designing her precious TV show, before she dropped her bombshell on me.

  ‘It’s not the end of death,’ she tried to explain.

  It had seemed strange to me at the time, that she had wanted to meet me so soon after our last teatime, when we had shared jokes about that strange meal in Windsor castle. It turned out that both occasions were of a piece: Stella was preparing me for what she had done.

  Our sandwiches lay neglected on the silver tray and the tea grew cold in its pot. Had she really thought to lure me into an easy understanding? Was she so complacent? The hotel’s faux-Louis XV chair frame dug hard across the backs of my legs as I crouched forward, wanting to
run, wanting to fight, wanting this not to be happening. Stella, for her part, must have guessed what my response would be: her shoulders were hunched, her whole manner defensive. ‘What it does,’ she explained, ‘is it obviates one’s personal extinction. Obviates. Is that a word?’

  I had no idea what to say to her. What could you say to this? Georgy Chernoy’s patented Process was unprecedented. It was revolutionary. It was, frankly, bizarre. ‘For God’s sake, Stella. What were you thinking?’

  ‘She will not leave us. That’s what I’m trying to say. That what your mother is – and you have to think of her as a performance, Stuart, that’s the point, we’re not things, we’re performances, you see? We rehearse ourselves. Well, that rehearsal will continue.’

  ‘Does Dad know?’

  Stella would not look at me.

  ‘You know he can stop this. Don’t you? He’s her husband. He has that right.’

  She forced herself to meet my gaze. ‘We cannot let her die, Stuart. Can we? Think of the possibilities!’

  When I got back to the Barbican, I was too upset to go up to the flat. I headed to the Foresters instead and used the payphone by the gents to call Bob’s pub, the Arms. I asked the barman to give my dad a shout and after a few minutes Bob called me from the usual payphone. ‘What is it?’ he said, assuming the worst. He had been preparing for this call for a while.

  ‘It’s Stella.’

  That foxed him. ‘Stella?’

  The pips sounded. ‘I’ll call you,’ I said.

  I rang him back – we had called each other like this often enough that I knew the number – and I explained what Stella had done. I told him what she had planned for Betty. I couldn’t tell if the silence that followed indicated anger or confusion or grief or what. ‘Has Stella talked to you about this?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘She’s not spoken to me.’ This in a tone that would have told me, had I been paying attention, that it was quite pointless putting any responsibility for action onto him. Bob’s fear of confrontation was pathological. ‘I think this is Mum’s choice, don’t you?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I don’t think this is Mum’s choice. I think Stella’s railroading her.’

  ‘Why would she do that?’

  ‘I don’t want a conversation about Stella. I want to talk to you about Mum. Will you come and see her, at least? Speak to her?’

  Robert hummed and bumbled.

  ‘You can take a couple of days. The factory will give you a couple of days.’

  ‘But where will I stay?’

  ‘You can stay with Fel and me,’ I said, out of my mind with frustration.

  Which left me having to explain to Fel why my father was visiting: because Stella had persuaded my mother to sign up for the Chernoy Process. The emotional complications of all this would surely drown us, so I decided to make a last-ditch effort and visit Medicine City myself, to see if I could dissuade Betty from undergoing the Process.

  ‘Why am I meeting Mum outside? I can’t see how that’s going to be comfortable for her.’

  Fel, sprawling across our bed in the Barbican, gestured at her tablet. She twisted and fiddled with the air above the screen: ghosts rose from the glass and spun. But even Fel was bested by Medicine City’s overmediated user portal. ‘I’m not sure “inside” and “outside” mean very much in Medicine City any more.’

  I bit my tongue. The baroque complications the Bund larded over everything had long since ceased to captivate me. ‘I just need to know where I’m going.’

  In reply, Fel dug about under our pillows and pulled out the glass wafer that was her new phone. ‘Take this.’

  ‘You know I don’t have a clue how to operate that.’

  She tapped it. A miniature colour-coded urban landscape appeared. ‘Ladywell. Follow the blue dot.’ She waved the phone at me to take. ‘It won’t do anything else, I’ve locked it to the app.’

  I had no idea what she meant by that. I did know she was trying to be helpful. I knew, too, that without her help I would never have been able to make an appointment in the first place. This, after all, was how the Bund was locking the rest of us out of its accelerated territory: by the sheer weight of its offering. Options, menus, mirrors, proxies – what did these words even mean? What concepts lay behind them? No door was ever barred in the Bund, but no door was ever the right door, either. The Bund was a party at which, unless you knew everyone already, you were never able to strike up a conversation.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, pocketing the phone.

  She got up and kissed me. I ran my hands over her head. It felt as though I were stroking a cat. Filming had begun on DARE and Fel was sporting a haircut appropriate to submarine commanders: close-cropped, and shaved over the ears. She kissed me again. ‘I hope it goes all right.’

  ‘“All right”?’

  I didn’t mean to be awkward with her. She was only trying to be kind.

  She let me go. She was out of patience with me, and trying not to show it. ‘I don’t know what you want. Not really.’

  I took a breath. I had no desire to take my confusion out on her.

  The least I owed her was an effort to be honest.

  ‘Your father’s treatments.’

  ‘Yes.’ She let go of me and climbed back under the sheet.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘What do I think?’ She paused a second, letting me register the inadequacy of my own question. ‘I think they work.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In fact, I know they do.’

  I sat beside her on the bed.

  ‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘you’re asking me the wrong question.’

  I took a breath. ‘I can’t ask you how you feel about it,’ I said. ‘It wouldn’t be fair of me. I don’t know what I feel about it myself.’

  ‘I am the wrong person to ask,’ Fel agreed. ‘I’m too close to it. I grew up with Daddy’s work. It seems normal to me. Inevitable, in a way it doesn’t to anyone else. Not yet. Not even in the Bund. I don’t think it does you and me any favours that your mother’s been invited to go through with this. I know that’s selfish of me.’

  I took her hand. ‘I feel the same. I know I shouldn’t but . . . There’s something else.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘My father’s coming to town to see her. He’s going to need somewhere to stay.’

  It took Fel a moment to realise what I was getting at. ‘I’ll book him a room,’ she said.

  ‘He wouldn’t feel comfortable with that.’

  She lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. ‘Right.’

  ‘It won’t be for long.’

  I lay beside her on the bed. Her hand found mine. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘It’s fine. I didn’t mean to be a bitch.’

  ‘It’s not that.’

  She turned to look at me.

  I said: ‘If Bob asked you about the treatments, what would you tell him?’

  Fel thought about it. ‘I’d tell him the truth. That Daddy’s a genius. That the Process he’s invented is the future. That death has lost its sting. Beyond that, what other people believe is irrelevant. Don’t you think?’

  That Georgy Chernoy’s triumph over death would usher in a new world was evident. But I could not imagine Bob wanting to take up residence in that world. It would surely repulse him. All his life, Bob had lived for the weekend. A long rest by a sunny brook and fish enough to catch. What was Death to him but an everlasting weekend, an eternal release from the labour of living? I could not imagine anyone less likely to consider the Chernoy Process a victory. Seen through Bob’s eyes, in fact, it could only be thought a betrayal.

  ‘Go.’ Fel kicked me under the sheet. ‘You’ll be late.’

  To get there quickly I caught the Tube but it was already four by the time I arrived at London Bridge. This station being a Bundist development, I was not surprised to find the layout changed since my last visit and extra exits added for streets I’d never heard of. The
gloss and finish of the place did surprise me, though they offered but the barest hint of the bizarre transformations I would encounter above ground.

  The conceit of the designers was that London Bridge owed its existence to bones. And I had read enough at college to know that this was, in a strict historical sense, perfectly true: Southwark has risen from the marshes of the ancient Thames on the bones of its settlers and their animals, accreting layer by layer like a coral.

  The same is true of many long-settled places.

  Because the Tube line had been dug deep here, the remade station had been fashioned as a slice through history. The walls were lacquered earth, and in the earth were the leavings of past ages of London. Potshards and wooden clogs. A trove of coins. Chicken bones in the ashes of a fire. As I ascended the escalators to street level, so I moved through time, through timbered frames and broken arches, pools of shattered stained glass, swatches of stained brocade. Then ironworks. Pipes and pumps. The homogenous tilth in which the station’s faux-relics had been ‘buried’ (set in lacquer, polished, cunningly lit) vanished entirely, squeezed out by a tangle of ducts, drains and brickwork vessels – the innards of a world coming to mechanical life.

  The story these corridors were telling was not subtle. It was coarse, triumphalist and irresistibly exhilarating. As I neared concourse level, iron ceded to plastics and glass and ceramic, and the whole fabric of the building seemed in motion, responding as an anemone might to my passing. The entire subterranean structure was a narrative of human progress, writ according to the Bund’s rigorously materialist creation myth, in which the poor, bare forked folk of the Earth had assembled, out of dirt and heat, generation by generation and oh-so-painfully, a living thing out of dead stuff – a city that first had breathed, then gushed, then felt and cried, and now, at last and with the coming of the Bund, had begun to speak.

  I had a moment’s panic while I fished for my ticket, then remembered that Fel’s phone itself would let me through.

  I held it up to the plastic barrier, which slid open, letting me onto Tooley Street and a project that, since my last visit, had taken a strange and baffling new direction.