Copyright © 1996, 2011 by Richard Beard
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-61145-652-3
To Dr John Lee
It seems likely that investigators will increasingly use primates in future investigations of the relationships of hypertension, cigarette smoking, obesity, glucose intolerance, physical activity and genetic disorders.
Strong J. P. (ed) ‘Arteriosclerosis in Primates‘
in Primates in Medicine, Vol. 9
(S. Karger Press, 1976)
An addiction is held in place by an elaborate system of deceptions.
Gillian Riley, How to Stop Smoking and Stay
Stopped For Good (Vermilion, 1992)
CONTENTS
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16
Day 17
Day 18
Day 19
Day 20
DAY
1
Dr William Barclay, born 7 March 1936, died 3 March 1994, aged 57. Mysterium Magnum. The principle of all generation is separation, he used to say.
Distract your mind. Take up a new hobby. Occupy your hands.
He said that the Mosaic Virus could sweep through a field of sweet tobacco leaves or potatoes or tomatoes in a single day, causing devastation to entire agricultural eco-systems.
Try not to think about it. Spend time in public places. Keep very very busy all day long.
{365 × 20 × 10} + {2 × 20} (leap years). Equals exactly 73,040. Plus 17 irregulars. Not give or take, not approximately, but exactly seventy-three thousand and fifty-seven. All the same, it’s difficult to prove.
Walter once told me that the old steam-trains in the old days, all steamed up and stretching homewards, used to say Cigarettes tch tch, Cigarettes tch tch. The sound of a train then, an old train on an old track, steaming homewards, smoking.
I knew about this, the concentration. That concentration would be part of the problem. That a restless, dissatisfied mind would rip from one dissatisfaction to the next, like a child stuck in a hawthorn tree in a high wind, on a high hill, in winter. At night.
Lucy Hinton, big-bellied and surrounded by children. The back of her head turns into a chimney, the blackened smoke-stack of a steam train, steaming smoke-signals saying, at the very least, good-bye.
Steer clear of friends who smoke. Repress your desire.
Feeding the dog would distract the mind. Scientists experiment with animals to save people like me from unnecessary discomfort.
Julian Carr, Dr Julian Carr, went to work in his sister’s bra.
Breathe deeply. Indulge yourself in every other way.
Always boxes of Carmen No 6, and never soft-packs, although at one time soft-packs were very fashionable, especially in Paris, where I once was.
I hate and despise more things than I can name. My lungs ache. Avoid tense situations. Use public transport.
In the flat where we used to live above Lilly’s Pasty Shop, Theo would hop once and jump once and Lilly would bring up a Jumbo Pasty No Chips. He had a range of jigs for different orders, and I swear the cat could recognize the step which meant cod.
I wonder if Dr Julian Carr would have made my parents happy if he’d been their only child instead of me. The Hamburg episode notwithstanding.
Carmen No 6 in endless white boxes, on the beds and tables and chairs, in all the pockets of my life. The logo of black castanets, in silhouette, looks like a split scallop shell. Nowadays, the sign of the double Castanet is most often seen beside the air-intake of Formula 3 racing-cars, or discreetly positioned in posters for the English National Opera.
He once said you can change the world and I said no you can’t.
There is also hypnosis, aversion therapy, psychoanalysis, acupuncture, electric shock treatment, and possible conversion to the Seventh Day Adventist Church, who maintain that cigarettes are an invention of hell itself.
My name is Gregory Simpson. I am thirty years old. I’m trying to keep my hands occupied.
DAY
2
Some time ago, when I was still a teenager, my parents were proud of the fact that I didn’t smoke. Each time I promised never to start they would congratulate me on my good sense, then stare silently for several seconds at the memory of my Uncle Gregory. My Uncle Gregory died of cancer at the age of 48, in the winter of 1973.
Every Christmas, before my uncle died, my father used to light a King Edward cigar at the beginning of the Queen’s speech. He used to lean back in his chair, four fingers along the top of the cigar, smoking as happily as King Edward. Now, whenever I see the Queen, she smells of Christmas cigar smoke.
Thirteen years ago, in what turned out to be my only year at University, I was allocated a room in the William Cabot Hall of Residence for Men. My next door neighbour was Julian Carr, who smoked Buchanan’s Centuries.
The wall between our two rooms was institutionally thin, and whenever Julian had visitors, which was often, it was easy to follow the steep gradients of his impressive voice. The smoke from his cigarettes and the cigarettes of his friends would gradually seep under the adjoining wall, over it, round the sides of it, right through the plaster which held it together. My mother would have called it attempted murder.
Julian Carr was studying medicine. His degree was being sponsored by the Buchanan Imperial Cigarette Company. All his Buchanan cigarettes were therefore free, and he chose to smoke their Century brand, blended and manufactured exclusively in Hamburg.
Almost exactly ten years ago, recently returned from Paris, I met Dr William Barclay in the grounds of the Long Ashton Tobacco Research Unit, just outside the city.
‘Call me Theo,’ he said. ‘Everyone else does.’
It was February and it was cold and we were both smoking cigarettes: the Research Unit corridors and labs were strict No Smoking zones. My cigarette, obviously, was a Carmen No 6. His was a Celtique from a pack he’d bought in French Guyana. It was cold enough to confuse breathing with smoking.
Theo had a tan which made him look unseasonably healthy, and which made a nice contrast with the starched white of his lab coat. But it was his hair which was always the most striking thing about him. Already greying, it stood up from his head like a school performance of surprise. Different sections gave up growing at different lengths, and some bits just kept on going so that his head looked completely out of control, the hair escaping the skull in every possible direction. I noticed he also had a small vertical scar on his upper lip.
&
nbsp; We walked aimlessly through the landscaped grounds, past the cinder running track and the asphalted tennis court, timing the walk by the burn-speed of a cigarette, an instinct I still admired in others. Eventually, we reached the narrow pond which marked the boundary of the Unit, just inside the security fence. Theo asked me if I was new and I said I was.
‘Got somewhere to live?’
I said I had.
He said he’d won the trip to French Guyana in a Spot the Ball competition.
Seven minutes and forty-five seconds ago, roughly, Walter arrived. Walter is one hundred and four years old, but he doesn’t look much over eighty. He uses a stick and always wears a hat or a cap, inside and out, no matter the weather. What started as vanity, to cover his bald bareheadedness, is now habit, and today it is a green canvas rain-hat. There is an enamel badge pinned to the front showing the ruins at Tintagel with a red TINTAGEL printed in a crescent underneath.
Walter is sitting in his favourite chair beneath the framed publicity poster of Paul Heinreid and Bette Davis in the film Now Voyager. He is smoking a pipe, peaceful as an Indian chief, staring into the middle distance of his memory.
He has already asked me what I’m doing.
‘Writing,’ I said.
‘Writing what?’
‘This, that, anything.’
‘Why?’
‘Distracts the mind. Keeps the hands busy. You know.’
‘Thought I’d just pop in. See how you’re bearing up.’
‘I’m fine.’
My lungs are shrinking and my heart aches: I am about to suffocate from unrequited desire. ‘It’s really a lot easier than I thought it would be.’
But Walter isn’t listening. He’s looking round the room.
‘When was the last time you went out?’
‘The funeral.’
‘Oh. Well, the less said then.’
My parents waved me off to University as though I was embarking on a single-handed sail around the world, when between the two of them they knew full well that the world was flat. It had always been flat: in their own lives they had found it nothing but flat. They stood cardiganed together in the frame of the doorway, in primary colours, waving imaginary handkerchiefs.
Unexpectedly, unwillingly, I found I missed them.
My mother used to write a weekly letter in which she hardly ever used full-stops. Mostly, she wrote exclamation marks! She had therefore discovered how to make the events of her life tremendously exciting, not through exaggeration or alcohol or drugs, but simply through punctuation.
Scared that I might choose cigarettes to perform the same function in my new life at University, she often sent me cautionary items from the papers. Attached to her letters with a coloured plastic paper-clip I would find neatly-trimmed columns from the Daily Express or the Guardian, and sometimes from Cosmopolitan.
Half of all smokers expected to die from smoking-related illnesses.
One hundred and ten thousand premature British deaths caused by smoking.
Smokers’ chance of lung cancer increased by 980%.
I read endless columns of percentages of danger, and learned from them the equal and equivalent measure of parental fear, always fearing the worst. In my occasional written replies, and always on the telephone, I promised my mother I still wasn’t smoking and didn’t plan to start. The repetition of the promise became a kind of ritual, a habit it was hard to break. More importantly, it became my easy and English way of saying I loved her.
Even though I didn’t smoke myself, I soon discovered that I enjoyed the company of smokers. It was a kind of rebellion by proxy, each smoky room a moment of passive rebellion. I was particularly impressed by Julian Carr, who could smoke before breakfast and in the middle of meals, and who could light matches into his cupped palms like Humphrey Bogart in Paris in Casablanca. I lent him sugar and gave him my last rasher of bacon. When he ran out of matches, I let him light his cigarettes from the glowing tube of my electric bar fire.
I learnt how many brothers (one older) and how many sisters (one older) he had. He openly admitted to a happy childhood, which made it sound true. At school, he’d lost his virginity at fourteen and been elected captain of the rugby team. He’d sold marijuana to the fifth-form girls. He was reading James Joyce. I gave him my last egg.
In return, he invited me to the parties he was invited to* which were always the best parties. They had the biggest barrels of beer and the loudest music and the blondest girls, most of whom, at some time, came back to his room and smoked quiet cigarettes far into the morning.
Which is how I met Lucy Hinton. Who had black hair.
Starting in his sleep, jumping and spluttering to attention in the trenches of the First World War, Walter wakes up suddenly, spilling the triangular ashtray perched on the arm of his chair.
I tell him it’s alright. I calm him down. I pick up the ashtray and give it back to him.
‘I was dreaming,’ he says.
‘I should hope so. I’d hate to think you were getting senile.’
‘Did I ever tell you,’ he says, ‘about this monkey-skin pouch I once had, dyed the colour green, which I lost during a boar-hunt in the forest of Compiegne in 1903? I was only thirteen.’
But his heart isn’t really in it, not like it used to be, and he remembers the Compiegne forests without telling them, stepping off alone into the vast protected reservation of his past.
Among other distinctions, Walter has the largest cigarette-card collection in the county. Sometimes I ask to look at a particular set (Kings and Queens of England, for example, or Great Stories of the Opera) as a quick and always reliable source of historical reference.
‘You’re pregnant,’ I said.
‘Well bugger me, so I am.’
Lucy Hinton lay on the floor beneath the curtained window of Julian Carr’s room in the William Cabot Hall of Residence for Men. Her shoulders and her head were cradled in Julian’s beige-coloured bean-bag, and she was wearing a denim maternity dress fastened up the front with big black and white yin-yang buttons. Her hands, fingers splayed, rested on her swollen stomach. She had a single feather stuck into a thin beaded headband.
‘It’s difficult to make an effort,’ she said, ‘considering.’
Her voice was languid, throaty, like a code which when deciphered always read a breathy Hello Baby, a message her pregnant body did its best to confuse. It was as if she was speaking two languages at once, making no sense at all.
I was sitting on the bed, watching her, ignoring Julian who had passed out next to his record collection while searching for the latest Suzanne Vega CD. He was now using the head from his gorilla suit as a pillow, and had unzipped and peeled down the top half of the gorilla to show a T-shirt which said Buchanan’s Silverstone Spectacular on the back. He was breathing deeply, evenly.
I was dressed as a doctor, with a white coat and a head-torch and a stethoscope round my neck.
‘Bung me his cigarettes,’ she said. ‘I’m dying for a fag.’
Julian’s cigarettes were on the floor by my feet.
‘Is it due soon?’ I asked, ‘how long is it before it’s due?’ I didn’t reach for the cigarettes. ‘I mean, how long is there to go?’
‘Well, let’s put it this way,’ she said, ‘I only go to parties with a full complement of medical students. The cigarettes?’
‘You’re not really going to smoke, are you?’
‘Why not?’
‘Smoking by pregnant women can result in foetal injury, premature birth, and low birth weight.’
At the last minute, I managed to erase my mother’s exclamation mark.
Theo finished his Celtique. He looked at the filter, then looked over his shoulder, then flicked the filter into the grass at the side of the pond, disturbing a duck which splashed into clear water. He offered me a cigarette, which of course I had to refuse. I noticed one of the cigarettes in his pack was turned upside down.
He smoked, then swore, then clamped his new cig
arette between his teeth and waded down towards the water, found the previous filter, which he wiped against the grass and then dropped into the pocket of his lab coat. As he clambered back up the bank, he said,
‘The tiresomeness of conscience. They told me at the desk you didn’t have anywhere to live.’
‘I’m in a hotel.’
‘Company paying?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve a room free at my place.’
I retreated instinctively and immediately, making excuses. I explained at some length how I had to have my own room, with its own lock. How I absolutely had to be left alone. How I needed to use the kitchen and the bathroom when no-one else was there. How what I wanted most of all was just a simple uninterrupted life, with no intrusions and no involvements and with the minimum possible peripheral activity.
I wouldn’t even want to talk to anyone very much, to be honest.
Lucy Hinton gasped and slipped down the bean-bag, her fingers splayed wide across her belly. ‘Oh!’
‘What?’
‘I think it’s ..’
‘No!’
‘No,’ she said, breathing heavily but managing to push herself back up the bean-bag. ‘False alarm.’
‘Spontaneous abortion,’ I said, ‘is another well-documented risk.’
‘Medical student.’
‘History.’
‘Give me the pack of cigarettes,’ she said. ‘I won’t smoke one, I’ll just hold it, for old times’ sake.’
‘Promise?’
‘Promise.’
I passed her the cigarettes. Our fingers touched, briefly, and I was even more disturbed by the difference between the Hello Baby and the baby baby. I glanced at the denim straining at the yin-yang buttons. I thought of the tense surface of a snare drum and had the idea that if her skin were tight enough it might achieve translucence in the last days before birth. All the workings of the baby and the belly would then be visible like television.
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