‘No.’
‘She’s allergic to cats.’
‘No.’
‘Also, I’m out every Wednesday night and I can’t take him with me.’
‘You found him so you should keep him. Tossing a coin is stupid.’
‘I’ve given him a name.’
‘I’m not having your cat.’
‘Bananas.’
‘You can’t make decisions by tossing a coin.’
‘His name is Bananas.’
I looked at the kitten curled and purring in Theo’s arms. Its brown markings still reminded me of a duck. It rubbed its cheek against the wool of Theo’s tank-top and a pink tongue stuck out a fraction from the middle of its mouth. I know that cats don’t smile, but when he closed his eyes like that Bananas made me think I might be wrong.
‘OK,’ I said, ‘I’ll look after him and feed him on Wednesday nights. The rest of the time he’s yours.’
‘No, no compromises. Here.’
He passed me Bananas, who lay on his back in my arms like a baby and made me feel ridiculous. Theo went off to the kitchen and I followed him, wanting to protest, but in the kitchen he’d already lit a cigarette and was flexing a broom handle across his knee, testing its strength.
I asked him what he was doing.
‘Big stick,’ he said.
Whenever anyone asked Do You Mind If I Smoke? I always felt like saying No But My Mother Does and seeing whether my mother’s views made any difference. Lucy Hinton would have said My Mother Does Too, before sucking a full centimetre and a half of tobacco and Marlboro-brand cigarette paper down her long throat.
Lucy was a student of English literature. She liked writing and acting. She liked singing and dancing. She liked performing. She was going to be in a stage adaptation of The Magic Mountain for two women, where she was cast as the entire Half-Lung club. She was editing a poetry magazine called Filter. She was going to front a swing band called Lucy Lung and the Carcinomatones. She wasn’t really: she was just teasing me, plucking tunes on the anxiety I stifled each time she lit up.
I was easy to tease, because after the mistake of our first meeting I was never entirely sure when she was being herself. She was always changing the way she looked and sometimes I used to scare myself with the thought that in fact she was never out of fancy-dress, disguising a permanent pregnancy which was the truest expression of her character. At one stage she liked to pile her black hair in a chignon which she tied in place with transistor wire. She said she was going to get it cut when the play was finished.
‘What play?’
‘The Magic Mountain.’
‘I thought that was a joke.’
‘The director wants to set it on the Shenandoah.’
‘Sounds mad,’ I said. ‘Who’s the director?’
‘Julian.’
What’s the point of telling anything to a man who is one hundred and four years old? He isn’t going to learn anything. I told Walter not to put the ashtray on the arm of the chair. Silly Bugger. Now he’s knocked it off I shall have to go to the cupboard. I shall have to take out the hoover, fix on the special ash attachment, plug in the hoover, unwind the flex, bring the hoover over to Walter’s chair, vacuum, then repeat each inconvenience in reverse order.
Added to that Walter offered me a cigarette can you believe that?
He said he found it inside the band of the grey trilby he’s wearing today.
‘Must have put it there to hide it from Emmy, then forgot about it. Did I ever tell you,’ he added, ‘about the pipe-smoking Jesuit on a mission to Greenland?’
He pushed the trilby back a little on his head, took a puff on his pipe.
There was this missionary. Jesuit. Greenland. Igloo. Barest essentials of life, pipe included. Annually, a papal message. All missionaries to sacrifice one more luxury to the holy virgin. Fine.
Several years pass. The missionary is naked and without fuel but he still has his pipe. Raw fish. Ice. Again the message arrives from Rome and again the Pope begs one final sacrifice.
Walter settles the grey trilby back on his head. His darkly stained and dexterous fingers fumble confidentially in his leather tobacco pouch.
‘Alright, Walter. I give in. What happens next?’
‘He gives up Christianity of course.’
‘That’s not a true story, is it, Walter? How could he buy tobacco from an igloo in Greenland? It’s not TRUE, is it? It’s totally meaningless.’
‘Oh well pardon me,’ he said, filling his pipe. But he must have been chortling quietly to himself, he must have thought it was funny, because it was only because he was laughing that he knocked the ashtray off the arm of the chair.
‘For God’s sake, Walter!’
‘Well pardon me for living.’
Julian scrapped his Shenandoah production of The Magic Mountain, claiming that nobody understood the geographical irony. Ever since his visit to the animal-testing centre he seemed subdued, disappointed. It was as if just for once his life had failed to live up to expectations and he would sit in his room for hours, refusing to answer the door, listening to Suzanne Vega on Repeat. He turned away several blonde girls who came to visit. He took long walks without a coat. When I asked him if anything was wrong he said,
‘Even if I told you you wouldn’t believe me.’
At the beginning of December, sixteen cynomolgus monkeys broke free from their cages at the animal-testing centre in the Long Ashton Tobacco Research Unit. Instead of escaping through a fire-door that was mysteriously left open, they smashed every breakable piece of equipment they could find. The next morning the sixteen monkeys were found huddled in a corner of the wrecked lab, shivering and sick after ripping open eleven cartons of 200 cigarettes and eating the tobacco inside.
My parents are good and decent people, which mostly accounts for the faults I find in them. However, theirs were the ideas which reached me first, so I’ve always been constrained by a sense of original decency which leaves me feeling ill-equipped for life. They believe in gratitude and kindness, and have burdened me with a stubborn residue of both, a sense of good faith which required me to trust that all Theo’s gifts were generously offered. Mostly because, as my mother likes to say, if you begin by assuming the worst then where does that lead you?
At University, I sometimes made a real effort and wrote a letter home. I passed on the news that my degree was going fine, even if I was frequently intimidated by the facts of history and all the people and places I was supposed to remember. On a more practical level, I said I sometimes struggled to afford the textbooks I needed, just to keep up with the others.
By return of post my mother sent me a ten-pound book token. After checking that I couldn’t exchange it for cash, I spent it on paperback novels.
‘So tails is the big stick, agreed? Or a bag, what d’you think? Or an electric shock? A bread-knife? No, bag or big stick. Big stick would be more humane. Harder to do though. But the bags I have are plastic, and they might float. For a while, anyway. Or Bananas would suffocate and that’s a bad way to go, all breathless and scrabbling against non-porous polythene. While sinking.’
‘Theo, this isn’t fair. It’s stupid.’
‘Well if you refuse to have him we can’t let him run around the kitchen until he starves, can we? It wouldn’t be hygienic’
‘We could just let him loose, let him go wild.’
‘Things don’t go wild, Gregory. They get eaten by dogs. Would you like to check the coin? Okay, here’s praying for heads. Take this.’
He passed me the broom-handle so he could toss the coin, and it must have disturbed Bananas because he raced up my jumper and tried to claw his way through my neck. Seeing as I was trying to escape with my life, I didn’t see the coin land.
‘Oh dear,’ Theo said, picking it up from the carpet. ‘I’m sorry, Gregory, but it’s tails.’
I asked Lucy Hinton why she smoked and she said it was because she came from a family of non-smoking fat people.
&
nbsp; Her mother had been a teenage beauty queen in Weymouth in the early fifties, with an hourglass figure pinched in the middle by rationing. She met her husband when she was nineteen, and they married in February 1953, three months before sugar was released from the ration.
‘Then she inflated,’ Lucy said. ‘She spread, she bloated, she loaded down, she bulked up. She thought she couldn’t have children, but eventually I came along. She was seven months pregnant before anyone noticed.’
For Lucy’s mother, eating was both a proof of having grown up and a reward for the rationed years.
‘She learned to cook,’ Lucy said. ‘She tried to feed us into submission.’
‘She’s a good cook then?’
‘You can be very dim, Gregory.’
She lit herself a cigarette, filling the light in my small room with angular grey smoke. She always sat in the black bean-bag. I used the bed, leaning back against the wall, my knees pulled up to my chin.
‘Fat is the contract,’ she said, waving her cigarette around. ‘She wants everyone around her to be fat so they feel at ease with her. My sister’s already gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘Fifteen years old. Five foot four. Fourteen stone. She squelches when she walks.’
Lucy was slimness itself. She used to smoke her breakfast and most of her lunch. She smoked all her snacks. Every cigarette was a weapon in her ongoing rebellion against her mother, and already, even though she was only eighteen, she had a special talent for types of combat like these.
A restraint-based inhalation system. The face-mask is rigid and oral breathing is ensured by inserting a metal bit between the jaws and blocking both nostrils. Cigarette smoke is drawn into the face-mask at regular intervals, and a technician fits a new cigarette each time the test cigarette burns down to a length of twenty-two millimetres. Electrodes connected to ECG monitors are clipped to chests and temples because everything has to be measured. Tubes are stuck in penises and collection boxes under bums because everything has to be measured. Everything has to be measured so you can be sure of the results.
‘It’s all so pointless,’ Julian said.
He was drunk.
‘It’s not even as if the results have any value, because the stress of restraining the things can never be measured. Unless they enter the test voluntarily it’s worse than useless because you can’t measure the effects of the tying down. You do see, don’t you? Maybe getting tied-up causes lung cancer.’
I asked him why they didn’t just find volunteers and ask them politely how much they smoked. They could then take nice peaceful measurements of heartbeats and be done with it.
‘Because smokers lie,’ Julian said sourly. ‘Smokers are always lying about how much they smoke, so you can never be sure of the results.’
Every Tuesday and Thursday I was scheduled to jog from the flat above Lilly’s Pasties to the Unit. It was about five miles in all, up the hill and over the suspension bridge, and then straight on all the way to Long Ashton.
Just on the city side of the bridge, set back slightly from the road, there was a brace of iron gates hinged in a high brick wall. At that time, nine years ago, the green paint was flaking and the rust was pushing through from beneath. I only noticed the gates because they had the letters GS woven into the ironwork.
They were padlocked, shutting off a gravel drive and chestnut trees spaced randomly in long grass. Through the leaves I had momentary jigsaw glimpses of a house. It appeared to be entirely ordinary, in plain brick with no intricacies at all, and as far as I could see it was completely detached, walled off from the road on one side and looking over the drop of the gorge on the other. The small windows were boarded.
I stared through the ironwork and fantasized about freeing myself into the solitude of the undistinguished house, imprisoning the world behind those gates.
Lucy always insisted that I must have tried it at least once, and she was right.
At primary school, after fifth period, my friend John Rolfe once set off the fire-alarm by flipping a king-size marble called Murad the Cruel at a piece of glass in the gym called Break In Case Of Fire. It was while I was watching Miss Bryant smoke her Embassy Regal in the Top Field. When she heard the bell she said Fuck and threw her cigarette onto the grass and strode off towards Fire Assembly.
I went and picked up the cigarette, which was only half-smoked. I was struck by how evenly it burnt and by its strong adult smell. There was a bracket of Miss Bryant’s red lipstick on the filter.
Partly because I wanted to, and partly because I’d heard Miss Bryant say Fuck, I sucked on the cigarette like Uncle Gregory always did. It tasted horrible. I tried to get the smoke to come out of my nose, like with Miss Bryant, thinking this might be the fun of it, but it wouldn’t come. I blew all the smoke out, and then kept on blowing until I was sure it was all gone. I said Fuck and threw the cigarette away and ran down to Assembly.
‘Simpson!’
‘Present, Miss.’
The taste of the smoke was still bitter in my mouth. I was very confused. I’d always assumed that adults smoked because it was nice to smoke, but this was clearly not true. It was at this precise moment, perhaps, that I lost my sense of the certainty of life.
‘Look, I’ll just keep the cat.’
Bananas was still on my shoulder, but he seemed less keen to draw blood. He’d almost stopped moving.
‘Sorry Gregory, but it was tails. It’s the big stick for Bananas.’
‘I’ll keep the bloody cat, alright? You’ve made your point.’
‘Gregory, Gregory. I know you want to push everything away, and I see no earthly reason why you should have an innocent and adorable kitten forced on you against your will, especially after the coin came down tails. Much better to put him out of his misery.’
‘I’ve had enough of this.’
I lifted Bananas off my shoulder and he suddenly became placid so I held him in my arms again. Theo looked at me very carefully. He tossed the coin and caught it without looking.
‘I know what you’re doing,’ he said.
‘Sorry?’
He looked at the coin in his hand. ‘Tails again. Up at the Unit. I know what they’re asking you to do. How much are they paying?’
‘I don’t want to discuss it.’
‘Starts low and then increases according to how long you stick at it? That’s how I’d do it.’
‘It’s confidential.’
‘You can’t push everything away, Gregory. It’s always too late to clear that kind of space.’
‘That’s not what I want,’ I said, but I was lying. I wanted to have more money so I could buy the big detached house on the way to the Bridge. I wanted to shut the gates and wall off the world behind me.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘You can keep the cat.’
‘Fine,’ I said, ‘thanks. I’ll keep the cat.’
He handed over the feeding bottle with the picture of Bugs Bunny on the side. Then, as he took the broom-handle back to the kitchen, he said,
‘It was heads really.’
DAY
4
Theo’s French Guyanan Celtiques had run out ages ago, and now he tended towards either Camels or Buchanan’s Special. He always turned one cigarette in the pack upside down and, I noticed, he always smoked that cigarette last.
Sometimes he didn’t leave for work until noon. Sometimes he left in the morning and was back by one, or didn’t come back at all. This meant that I could never be sure, leaving my own room, that I wouldn’t find him lurking, waiting to give me something.
I discovered that there were only two moments of definite commitment in his week. Thursday evenings at seven-thirty he would sit down, light a cigarette, and watch Tomorrow’s World. And every Wednesday evening at about six he filled two large shopping bags with cartons of 200 cigarettes, not only Buchanan’s, but all the popular brands. I would agree to feed Haemoglobin, who was never grateful, and Theo would call a taxi.
He never told m
e where he went or what he did when he got there, but he always came back at about eleven and the shopping bags were always empty.
It was none of my business.
‘I don’t understand you, Gregory. I have no idea what you want. My friend Kim wants to go to Hollywood to earn a limousine so big she can put a Chesterfield suite in the back. Julian wants to find a cure for cancer. What do you want?’
‘I don’t know, what about you?’
‘Right now?’
She lit the cigarette she wanted. ‘You don’t even want one of these. Any desires at all?’
I could never separate my idea of Lucy from her cigarettes and the way she smoked them. She could lick smoke from the corner of her lips like sugar. Often, she exhaled from the side of her mouth only, turning her head slightly but keeping her eyes fixed on mine. The way she held the filter of the cigarette between the final joints of her index and middle fingers, flexing her hand backwards slightly as if she was always about to inspect her nails. The repeated movement of thumb to filter-tip to dislodge ash which hardly ever had time to form. The archetypal co-ordination of hand to mouth, the same as a sudden thought or a cautious tasting or the blowing of a kiss.
She made it a skill, both the smoking and the promise of a kiss.
I looked at a brown carpet-tile, then at my shoes, my knees. I looked up at the ceiling. I saw a cobweb. I saw a spider. I said to Lucy I’d like to kiss her.
She tasted her cigarette, she remained beautiful, she smiled.
‘Never kiss a smoker,’ she said. ‘All the literature says so.’
As she left she inhaled and blew me a smoky kiss all in the same motion. I was desperate, despairing at my inexperience. I knew nothing. I didn’t know if she’d ever come back. I didn’t even know how to follow her.
Walter is beginning to believe that I might succeed. Instead of saying ‘Still stopped?’ he now asks me if I’m still writing. Well clearly yes.
This morning I asked him why and when he started smoking but he began to tell his Firing Squad story so I stopped him and asked the question I really meant to ask instead.
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