The Smoke

by Simon Ings

  ‘Does Georgy know?’

  Stella woke up to what she was doing with the tissue, the pointlessness of her scrubbing, balled the tissue up in her fist and tucked it into the pocket of her dressing gown. She frowned at the stain in the zinc. ‘I’m going to have to get rid of this table. These marks don’t bear thinking about.’

  I looked at it. It was a dreadful thing. ‘Where did it come from? Could you take it back?’

  ‘From the Gurwitsch,’ Stella said. ‘They don’t want it, they threw it out. I found it in a skip.’

  * * *

  It was some ungodly hour of the morning on Boxing Day. Fel was sitting up in bed with her bedside light on. She was unclothed, a sheet over her knees and a book balanced open in the shallow nook of her thighs. I had just woken out of a deep sleep. I sat up, drinking in her spare and pale body, and she held up the book to shield herself. Playing along, I bent forward and read the faded spine. She laughed at my surprise: Virgil’s Aeneid. And, closing the book, she said: ‘The old stories are the best.’

  I kissed her. She touched my face. ‘Go back to sleep,’ she said.

  I don’t know how much later it was but when I woke again, I found the bed empty. The sheets were cold. The room was in darkness. I turned on the light. I felt certain that there was someone in the room with me. Someone behind me. Someone hiding out in the corner of my eye. I got out of bed and went to the window. The Moon was rising behind the flats of the Barbican. It was a very different Moon from the one I had seen with Fel just a couple of weeks earlier. It was a new Moon, bright with artificial light. The light was spread unevenly over the Moon’s surface, gathering in streams, knots and pools which, to the informed observer, might well have echoed the geographic features of the Moon itself. At a glance, however, the far stronger impression was one of regularity: off-kilter lines of longitude and latitude gridded the Moon’s sphere.

  I thought of bacteria and bell jars. I thought of clocks and curves. I thought of the exponential function. The HMS Victory would have to hurry if it was to land the first living people on the Moon. Even then, their efforts would only be token. The evidence was shining there above our heads: whole Bundist cities were rising from the regolith, empty and bright and inviting. Some people found it strange that the Bund, for all their activity on the Moon, had built no rockets worth the name, no spaceships, no Space Force. But it was not the way of the Bund to waste time on a journey. To them, the destination was everything. I had been to Ladywell. I could guess well enough the means by which the Bund would one day settle the Moon – if indeed it had not already begun. I wondered which of those lights up there were hospitals.

  I heard Fel in the living room, turning over playing cards. I slipped on a dressing gown and went to join her. She was sitting on the floor, laying down cards, gathering them up. She was playing Set.

  If no set can be found in the twelve-card array laid out at the start of a game of Set, three more cards are added. The odds against there being no set now increases from 33:1 to 2500:1. 1080 distinct sets can be assembled from the deck. Though there is no such thing as a ‘good’ card, or a ‘good’ pair of cards (each of the 81 cards participates in exactly 40 sets, and each pair of cards participates in exactly one set), some players have hypothesised that the ratio of no-sets goes up as sets are removed from the array.

  Fel paid no attention to me. She was focusing on the cards. She played too fast for my eye to follow. In the space of two minutes she had ordered the whole deck, leaving three discards. She gathered them up, shuffled and began again.

  I said, ‘Why did you ever play me at this?’

  She saw me and put down the cards.

  ‘You always won. But you made it look hard.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Yes you did.’ I came and sat opposite her. ‘You made it look as though it was a game worth us playing.’

  She gazed at the cards. ‘I liked playing this with you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It was fun. Playing you.’

  ‘Humouring me.’

  She shook her head. ‘If that’s what you think.’

  ‘What else am I to think?’

  It was a stupid question. A mean question. She was right not to answer it. There were tears in the corners of her eyes.

  I said, ‘What else did we do together that was like this? By which I mean: totally fucking pointless?’

  ‘Not pointless.’

  I wish I hadn’t raised my voice. I wish I’d had at least that much sense. ‘Well, what would you call it?’

  She stared at me, the way you search a wall for a door that isn’t there. ‘Love,’ she said.

  That shut me up.

  She said: ‘That’s what we do together. That’s the point of it. That’s why it’s worth doing.’

  It wasn’t that I disbelieved her. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand. But we had started to talk of ourselves in the past tense and it was too late trying to change. ‘I know you’ve been slumming it with me.’

  ‘Oh, for crying out loud.’

  ‘Well, you have!’

  ‘According your friend Stan bloody Lesniak I have.’

  I hadn’t expected that. ‘What?’

  ‘Your friend Lesniak. He’s shared his important thoughts about our relationship in his fucking student rag. I thought you’d seen.’

  ‘I don’t read Responses – I didn’t even know it was still running.’

  ‘He’s had a fine old go at us. In fiction, but it’s pretty bloody obvious who he’s talking about.’

  That took the wind out of my sails. It made my blood run cold to think that Stan had so easily identified the breaking point in our relationship; worse, that he was actually finding something entertaining in it all. Was our being together so obviously unworkable? Was Stan the only one of our friends to be raising his eyebrows at the thought of us? I doubted it.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ I said. ‘Anyway, what’s it got to do with him?’ I wanted all of a sudden to paper over the cracks, to heal what was broken, to withdraw every complaint.

  She gathered the cards up from the floor, split the deck in two and put it back in its box.

  ‘What does it matter?’ I said. ‘His readership can’t number more than a couple of dozen.’

  ‘All our friends read him. All your friends, that is.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘When was the last time we went out with friends?’

  ‘We can do that.’

  ‘Not now we can’t.’

  I gave her a minute to calm down. ‘What does he say? Exactly?’

  ‘Read it yourself. Only I threw it away.’

  I tried not to smile. ‘Good,’ I said. Then: ‘Do you want to come back to bed?’

  She shook her head.

  I took her hand and led her to the sofa. We sat together, intimate but not touching. We had not sat like that before. It felt very grown up.

  We both knew what this was. Knowing it, we managed to be kind to each other.

  She said: ‘I know people, they get a lot out of having a kid. They get a different kind of relationship out of it. Satisfaction. A lot of fun. Being stuck in their little monster’s perpetual present – it makes them young again, in a way. Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘I know what you mean.’

  ‘But you don’t feel it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You like the life we have. The music, the books. You can work. We go out together in the evenings. It’s good for you. It’s what you want.’

  ‘Yes.’

  It was the worst possible moment I could have chosen to be honest. Sometimes the words have to come before the feelings. You may not mean them, but that doesn’t make them untrue. They are a kind of promise to yourself. A challenge to yourself. And I failed that challenge. Even at the time, sitting there beside her as her tears came, and me there feeling so very sad, so very noble that I had managed to be honest, I knew that I had failed. ‘In time—’r />
  ‘What time?’ She got up off the sofa. She pointed out of the window. She screamed at me: ‘There is no fucking time!’

  I looked where she was pointing, but there was nothing to see. Only the Moon.

  She said: ‘I’d better go.’

  * * *

  Returning in the new year to the West Riding, to the valley, the furnaces and all those narrow streets, I decided to move back in with my dad for a while. Though Betty had left him years before, Bob was feeling especially lonely now that she had passed away. And despite Stella’s best efforts, her unwelcome letters and even less welcome day visits, he refused to let her reconcile him to the idea that there was another Betty waiting to see him, and talk to him, and reminisce with him over past happiness. Death was death to Bob: a boon companion he refused to abandon.

  I told myself that I would not stay long. That moving in with my dad would be an opportunity for me to regroup, while giving Fel some much-needed space before she and I took up – in a more circumspect fashion – the next chapter in what was obviously going to be a lifelong friendship. We had made some brave noises about staying in touch and remaining friends.

  Naturally, we never saw each other again.

  THREE

  The hatch closes on Jim Lanyon’s hand. He whips clear, catching his finger for a split-second between the hatch door and the sill. A dull compression pulses through the nail into the bone.

  The tunnel lurches around him and his arm sweeps on a reflex, seeking something to cling to.

  His hand finds something soft and lumpy and unmistakably alive. A face. His hand digs in, forefinger and bruised middle finger getting purchase around the arch of an eye even as he cries out in terror: he thought he was alone here.

  The face joins in with Jim’s screaming and swivels free of his grasp. His fingers trace thick, dense hair, a woman’s hair, and his autonomous self, that diurnal part of him oblivious to events and circumstances, and which responds only to the routines and the givens of life, pulses out its interest.

  The world lurches, throwing Jim and the face and a tangle of limbs and ducting into a new and radically different arrangement. It is as though they were the jumbled elements inside a kaleidoscope and someone is twisting the eyepiece, setting them to a new configuration.

  The sound as it twists – this grinding, screaming corridor made kaleidoscope – fills Jim’s head with metal, and he presses his hands against his ears and screams along to the buckling tube like a child on a fairground ride, screaming to take control, to rise to the fear, to perform it, anything so as not to be consumed by it, sensation piling up on sensation as the corridor buckles and twists, every failure a jagged edge, a spark, a scream, a puff of vapour.

  He remembers the last time he was afraid like this, and screamed like this. He was a boy, strapped into a fairground ride with his dad. He and his dad had screamed together, surfing together the wave of their imminent destruction, and here, too, there is a second scream accompanying his own and the lights come on again. How long have the lights been out? Jim does not know. He had his eyes tight shut, the better to scream, but his eyes are open now and he sees the face, bare inches from his own, hurtling into him, into his face, filling his vision with shadow, a dark and heavy presence filling his field of view. Then the collision, forehead to forehead in classic silent-comedy symmetry to a soundtrack of mutual screaming, and the corridor thrusts itself straight again, a limb kicking itself back into shape, and the lights go out again.

  They breathe together, suck air together, paired in the darkness, and in the eerie blast of cold that stops both their mouths, they are joined in the terror of decompression. But the chill dissipates and, released for a second, their rhythms come apart, each pants to their own beat. Jim is first to speak, if you can call it speaking, a wet swallowing that approximates his name.

  The face beside him is a wet, hot presence at his left ear, and upside down – what quality of sound tells him the mouth is upside down he cannot say, but in the pitch dark he is certain that the face, just one inch from his ear, is now inverted. It jabbers something, Venison or Tennyson or some other name he does not recognise. Not on his shift, not on his deck, not in his department. A stranger, even here, thinks Jim, and wants to cry. A dark unknown, suspended in a greater dark.

  Hands pat and palpate him, fumbling for purchase, and he feels her breath on his cheek, its hot, wet pulse as intimate and shocking as a tongue, and then it is gone as his hands and her hands find each other in the dark and her hand finds his bruised hand and he gasps with pain and pulls his hand away and the corridor rips along its length as sure and straight as if along a seam and flattens itself, showing them themselves against the stars, as in a vast and cinematic mirror. He loses purchase. She reaches for him, reaches up for him, to hold him fast, but she cannot reach him as he wheels above her, a new star, spreadeagled, Union Jack patch bright and primary against the welling Earthlight. The woman – Tenterden? Verizon? What’s in a name? – turns to face that massive and appalling planet whose light and mass and heat they have so recently escaped. Jim, floating above her, waves desperately, while she clings to a stanchion in the unwound tunnel, her flesh gently swelling as though she were blooming in the light of Earth, and her outgoing breath is a puff of ice crystals that Jim, in his own anoxic, depressurised and surely dying state takes to be seeds or spores spilling from her puffball mouth. He fancies that she is shouting his name. But he knows he is only bootstrapping cold comfort for himself in these, his last seconds, and as the Earth rises over the metal ribbon in which they were wrapped, it comes to him that death is taking its own sweet time, and seems indeed to have forgotten him.

  For the longest time he hangs there, spreadeagled British star, contemplating, as he pulls away, the wreck of all personal and national hopes, and why can he not die?

  Jim sees with a sinking heart that the ship has buckled, failing at the place, the joint, that even a child would have pointed to and said, The weak spot’s here. The giant shock absorbers have shivered and flung their sockets, sending engine and crew tumbling into different, equally unstable orbits.

  This undying man, this British astronaut called James Lanyon, does not understand his life, or why it should continue now that the face he clung to is gone. The face, the hair, her hands on him, her breath upon his cheek. This man turned dying star looks for the woman whose name he cannot figure and sees the corridor in which they were caught, spread wide and flattened like the tube from a roll of toilet paper. He sees her, tethered to a pipe by a yellow harness. She had been safe, he sees. She had been trying to save him. She had not careened into him. He had careened into her. She was the still point in that space: his anchor. And here she is, her breath a thousand spores scattering in barren space, her flesh blue and swollen, oedema puppying her, making a doll of her, a thing of fabric more than flesh, and he remembers her breath on his cheek. He feels tears, and how is it that his tears float liquid in his eyes, turning the wreckage before him into so many threads of light? How can his tears be wet, when her eyeballs are ice?

  And thinking this, he lets his gaze drift away, which has been focused on the painfully fine grain of the stranger’s body. His field of attention widens, threads clearing as he blinks, to take in more, and yet more, as he is led away (by whom? by what?), his field of view expanding with distance as he travels, faster and yet faster, from the scene of the disaster. He sees it whole now: the frigate-sized living quarters on whose behalf the Victory’s great elastic heart once, and so very briefly, beat out a nuclear pulse. Where is that valiant engine now, its pneumatic legs spread and pulsing, appendages of an atomic space-jellyfish?

  * * *

  The ship’s drive was a spinning disc of concrete, and through its centre, once every four seconds, nuclear devices were fed by a machine that, but for its size, would be familiar to any vending-machine engineer. When the ship buckled the living quarters, fighting free, limped off crippled, bent askew and barely space-worthy: certainly no match
for the rigours of reentry. In the tense hour following the accident, the crew held a silent vigil, all ears to the Tannoys on every deck and stair. Now all was being stored away again, as the doomed spacefarers set about softly tidying their tomb. With motive power gone, all was afloat. In silence, the crew moved listlessly, securing all the things they had already unstrapped, so cocksure, once the atomic engines had begun to pulse and the floors had begun, in jerks at first, and then with greater smoothness, to deliver the promised one-gravity.

  With the drive gone, they knew they were doomed. Impossible to convince a crew so highly trained that a stable orbit was achievable now. Having flung itself from its broken but still-pumping drive, the accommodation module stood no chance of survival. They had only to look out of the frigate’s many generously proportioned portholes, where the view was impossible to parse: a whirligig of stars and clouds as the ship tumbled around the Earth in an ever-tightening spiral.

  The accommodation module had thrusters meant to orientate it finely for docking with and undocking from its engine. Half these thrusters had been destroyed in the brutal act of separation, but the ones ranged forward remained and still held a little fuel. By line of sight, by trial and by error, the helmsman brought the ship about and steady on its axis. The awful Earth turned beneath and about them. The stars, doused by Earthlight, went out one by one. The crew waited for nightside, and a chance to hide in their minds from the planetary mass that would in a very little while embrace and consume them. But nightside did not come, and the Earth swung about them like a big, bright, smothering parent as if illuminated by its own light.

  Of the sun, by some eccentricity of their turn and trajectory, there was no sign.

  What further disaster has befallen the frigate, James cannot begin to guess, embroiled as he is in the event of it. He can only witness: a somehow undying eye.

  * * *

  Shocked out of the capacity for further shock, Jim watches with a feeling at once profound and nameless – a great annihilating wave of sensation – as the ship unfolds itself, an aluminium origami reversing itself into sheets of base metal. The flattened and unwoven plates of the ship turn on a mutual axis, plates striking plates without a sound, so that all are sent spinning on syncopated rhythms, turning to the light and knifing into the dark. A complex visual score, lacking all edge of violence, unfolds before his somehow still-working eyes. James grows drowsy. He closes his eyes.