‘Were you never scared of dying?’
‘Always.’
‘I mean from smoking.’
‘No. You mustn’t forget Theo and the Estates.’
Walter is wearing a Kill-Me-Quick hat, designed and distributed by his daughter and her anti-smoking LUNG movement at the height of their campaign against us. The No Smoking symbol above the words Kill-Me-Quick is starting to peel. From a distance, the hat might look like the sailor’s hat on the packet design of Player’s Navy Cut. That particular hat has HERO written on it.
I ask him about his daughter, Emmy, and her new sports club.
‘It’s Outward Bound,’ he says. ‘She’s thinking of taking up hang-gliding.’
‘Good luck to her.’
‘Feeling any better?’
‘Tip-top,’ I say.
‘Liar.’
I asked Julian if he would ever give up smoking for a woman.
‘Why should I?’
He was thinking of blonde girls and their eager entry to his room. I think he found it hard to imagine having to change to please them.
‘I mean if you really loved someone, and they would only sleep with you if you stopped smoking, would you stop?’
‘It’s a bit hypothetical.’
‘Would you though?’
‘I suppose it depends how much I wanted to sleep with them.’
‘A lot.’
‘I suppose I could pretend to give up.’
‘No, you love them and you want to sleep with them.’
‘How many of them are there?’
‘I mean her. One woman.’
’Sure. It’s just that if I had to make such a big sacrifice to please her, I’d have to wonder whether we were compatible in the first place. Maybe I should be looking for someone who didn’t mind me smoking.’
‘But if you really loved her?’
‘Then I suppose that would be one way of knowing I really loved her. If I was prepared to do that.’
’So would you do it?’
‘If I really loved her I would.’
Before long Bananas grew out of bottle-feeding and started eating meat from tins. After each meal he used to come into my room and sit in a sphinx position, his head slightly inclined over my double castanet ashtray. His nostrils would twitch and then, after several seconds, he’d begin to purr, very loudly. Curious to find out whether a cat could become a nicotine addict, I sometimes used to hide the ashtray. He’d look at me suspiciously, still licking catfood from his whiskers. Then he’d prowl around every surface in the flat which had a memory of ash. He tried to push open Theo’s door. Eventually, when he found nothing, he’d jump up behind the sofa and start shredding it to bits. He stopped as soon as I surrendered and offered him an ashtray, and then sat calmly with his nose over it, sphinx-like, sniffing serenely.
This was before he got into the bad habit of actually licking the ash itself. If I left a box of Carmens lying around, he liked to use it as a pillow Later, he learnt how to nudge his way into Walter’s tobacco pouch.
The rest of the time, apart from two symmetrical bald spots on the top of his head between his ears, he was a perfectly normal cat.
I went home for Christmas and my mother said I looked thin. I found I missed the company of smokers and I missed Lucy, but when I imagined introducing her to my mother it led to the problem of whose side I would take the first time Lucy reached for a cigarette. I reminded my father of the King Edward he used to smoke during the Queen’s speech, and he said yes, he remembered.
That was the Christmas I kept on finding myself alone with him, wondering why we had nothing to say to each other. I think it was because we were largely in agreement about things. Our particular type of closeness was that we had roughly the same idea of what a father and son should expect of each other. He gave me the same amount of money I would receive on a grant, for example, and I never asked him for more than that. He put me under no obligation to follow him into the family business and I had no intention of doing so.
When Uncle Gregory left home to join the RAF, my father had been persuaded to take sole charge of the business. Because his position wasn’t achieved by merit, he worked unnaturally hard to convince others, and himself, of his own worth. There are periods of my childhood when all I remember about him is the smell of Cherry Blossom shoe-polish, but by the time I went to University he’d added seventeen shops to the original three passed on to him by his father. This meant that in our area almost every main street was made familiar by the reassuring orange sign, Simpson’s Tobacconist and Newsagent (est 1903).
I like running. I enjoy the solitude of it, the way the effort of it turns into a series of compromises between different parts of the body, working towards an agreement called rhythm. For once, the body is allowed to express itself on equal terms with the mind, instead of staying quiet year after year, and then suddenly blabbing out a great big secret, like cancer, like Theo’s cancer.
On the way to the Unit I always used to stop for a moment at the gates in the high wall. The G and the S were at exactly the right height for me to lean against, arms straight, and flex my calf-muscles as I tried to piece the house together through the trees. Its thoughtless solitude reminded me of running.
I pushed myself away from the gates and jogged off towards the bridge. The slight incline made me breathless and I already craved a cigarette as reward for the effort. Instead, I distracted myself by calculating how long it would take before I could afford the house. According to the system they were using to pay me, I reckoned about six years, provided it cost not much more than a hundred thousand pounds.
In the New Year it became common knowledge that the Vice-Chancellor had finally discovered who was responsible for leaving a human heart and lung on her lawn, cut and shaped into the word Hi! The Vice-Chancellor had also been visited by the police about the incident at the testing centre with the monkeys.
However, Julian couldn’t see the Vice-Chancellor because he was ill. Several University doctors came to see him, as well as Lucy Hinton. I hadn’t seen her since the time I’d asked for a kiss, but as soon as I heard the slopes of her voice through the wall I could remember why I’d asked. Her voice disappeared for a while, then re-appeared in a different register I didn’t recognize. I tidied my room while I was listening, but she never came.
I went to see Julian once myself. He was sleeping. There was a nurse sitting with him who said he was worse and I couldn’t stay. When I asked her why he wasn’t in hospital she said it wasn’t that kind of illness and anyway, he wasn’t in any danger. I went back to my room thinking my mother was right. If you smoked as much as Julian, then something just had to give.
The Tobacco Mosaic Virus is a highly infectious plant disease which renders tobacco leaves useless by mottling them a mosaic of different shades of green.
Theo said that if he could find a way of eliminating the virus then the world would change beyond recognition.
‘You can’t change the world,’ I said.
‘You can if you’re a scientist.’
Because of the Mosaic Virus, tobacco has to be grown in areas with the highest standards of agricultural hygiene. This despite the fact that otherwise it’s a highly resilient plant. Without TMV, tobacco could be grown in window-boxes.
If they learnt how to eliminate the virus, the big tobacco companies could grow tobacco wherever the workers were cheapest. Regions currently dependent on the plant would have to adapt or collapse, while farms in areas with low labour costs would flourish. The economic balance of the tobacco industry would alter beyond recognition.
‘Change the tobacco industry and you change the world,’ Theo said, ‘because we all share in the one weed.’
Theo presented this in a very matter of fact way. It was something he calmly considered at work every day of the week, and he had long accepted the truth of it, and the responsibility. For me it was only science, and because I didn’t fully understand, it scared me.
I immediately assumed she’d come to see Julian.
‘He’s in,’ I said. ‘He’s just not answering the door.’
‘I didn’t come to see Julian.’
She thought about this for a moment. ‘Then how do you know he’s in there?’
‘I hear his lighter.’
Lucy nodded, satisfied. ‘So you know I’ve been to see him before?’
I didn’t reply. She wanted to know if I could hear conversations through the wall, actual words.
‘I wasn’t listening.’
I still hadn’t looked at her properly. She was wearing suede rockers’ shoes with a red and black Paisley design.
‘You know you ought to smoke. It would do you good.’
‘I’m not the smoking type.’
‘Yes you are. You’re so damn anxious all the time. You just need the right motivation, and the right situation.’
I asked her if she wanted some coffee.
‘Yes, coffee’s good,’ she said. She walked past me and settled herself in the bean-bag. ‘After meals is also good, especially breakfast. After sport is okay. Waiting in a cinema queue is hard to resist. Before and after an interview, or a performance of any kind.’
I asked her how strong she liked it.
‘The best time though, is always after sex.’
I missed the cup with the water, drenching a carpet-tile.
‘Or is that something else you’ve never tried?’
My lung-ache has lessened. I’m sure of it. I breathe in, I breathe out. I feel fine.
My heart, however, is worse. The outside of my left shoulder flinches when I edge back my arm. It could be a strained muscle, but it could also be the arteries in the limb closest to my heart hardening irrevocably, sclerotically, damming my blood.
The room ticks with the stick-stacking of Walter’s dominoes. It is one of those moments ushered into an annexe to the side of normal time. I can hear a bird singing outside. I can hear trees. I can hear the silence of the gorge. We are as we were and as we always have been, and then I remember that as we were includes a Carmen No 6, twenty times a day, and I swallow. I bite my tongue. I envy Walter his pipe. His one hundred and four years of life. I envy him his luck.
The least I could do, when Theo asked, was to tell him how I spent my days.
I was reading history books again. After Paris I’d intended to do absolutely nothing, but there was only so much time in a day. Weeks and then months passed by, and doing nothing except smoke cigarettes was not, strictly speaking, a full-time job.
I justified the history books by thinking of them as something unfinished retrieved from the past. It wasn’t a new departure of the kind I’d promised myself never to make again. It didn’t involve meeting any new people or even leaving the house, and I was always careful to monitor my reading for any sensation resembling enthusiasm.
With this in mind, I worked my way through the Oxford History of England, smiling from time to time at its gloriously comic central idea that there are always connections to be made and causalities to be found. The comic perfection of rationalized coincidence (what timing!) and the final slapstick desperation of the historian with eight fingers in eight separate dikes and his thumbs up his bum, smiling nicely as he demonstrates to passers-by how the past is under review, under control, wholly understood.
We went dancing and she danced like a mad woman, on drugs. I watched my feet forget themselves in the presence of her feet, surprising the rest of me. We cycled into the city-centre together. We sat together in the refectory, and at the end of each meal she would light a cigarette and I wouldn’t know what to do with my hands.
‘In English we study love,’ she once said. ‘We think about it all day long, disguised as poems. Then in class we always come to the same conclusion. Love is action, not words. I don’t suppose you think about love much, in the History department.’
Our best conversations always happened in my room, her in the bean-bag, me on the bed. I think it was because of Julian. Knowing that she could easily slip next door made me more eager to please her. It made me remember my luck.
‘Do you like thin women, Gregory?’
She was stretched out in the bean-bag. She’d pulled up her T-shirt and was looking down at her waist.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you like me then?’
‘You know I do.’
‘And do you like me more because I smoke?’
‘No.’
She pulled down the T-shirt.
‘I don’t believe you. If I didn’t smoke I wouldn’t be thin.’
I asked her if she wasn’t afraid of dying and she said she was only eighteen years old for God’s sake.
Most of all, I liked to watch her being sad, staring at the flame of her lighter until it became too hot to hold. It was then that I wanted to squeeze her into the bean-bag and make love to her, but instead I just looked. I dreamt about her. I never told her that there were also love stories in the History department. I mean ones which actually happened.
The asbestos factory where Uncle Gregory worked was in Adelaide, South Australia, and he used to save his salary to pay for an annual pilgrimage to the Isle of Man Motorcycle Time Trials. In the early years he worked as a mechanic for a team of his old RAF pals. Then, between 1958 and 1963, and again in 1965, he rode the TT himself.
He had many friends among the racers. In 1960, he was up in eighth place in the Senior 500 when he dropped his Triumph at the Gooseneck. Later, in hospital, he was presented with a trophy made of old kick-starts welded together. Both his legs were broken. Two years later, he knew the names of the wives of all three riders who died at the Devil’s Lunge.
When TT week was over, he put his bike on a trailer and came to stay. He used to tease Mum about riding me to school on the Triumph, and when she gave him the car-key he’d put on a big show as if he didn’t know how to drive, as if driving a car was so boring he was bound to fall asleep at the wheel. Once, he lit two cigarettes at the same time, as a way of promising mum he’d stay awake. When she didn’t laugh, he put the cigarettes in his nostrils.
At this time the Isle of Man TT was sponsored by Wills Woodbines. Uncle Gregory had CAPSTAN across his green petrol-tank. Even today, as far as I know, he remains the only partially-sighted rider ever to compete on the senior circuit.
Julian Carr was in trouble. Some Marxist ecologists had circulated a flyer condemning him for taking money from a tobacco company. They implicated him in the destruction of the rain-forests, the murder of unborn babies, and the economic weakness of the Third World. They therefore proposed his expulsion from the Students’ Union.
Added to that the Vice-Chancellor still wanted to see him, and although the nurse had gone, Julian hung on to his doctor’s note and rarely left his room. I went to show him the flyer and he looked awful, his eyes dark and somehow unfocused. He said he was fine. He rolled up the flyer, touched it against the bar fire and used it as a spill for his cigarette. He threw the paper into the bin, where it singed a milk carton before I stamped on it. He said,
‘Did I ever tell you about those monkeys?’
He stumbled against the wall. He put his cigarette down on the desk and steadied himself. I thought he might be drunk, but the only smell on his breath was tobacco.
’Should have burned the bloody place down,’ he said.
He concentrated hard and focused on me, then remembered his cigarette and picked it off the desk and stuck it in his mouth.
‘How’s Lucy?’ he said. His voice was slurred. ‘Any luck?’
‘Are you sure you’re alright?’
‘I’m fine.’
I briefly wondered if he was jealous. He screwed up his eyes and tried unsuccessfully to get another cigarette out of his pack. He gave up and just waved the pack generally in my direction. One of the cigarettes was upside down, tobacco showing.
‘Cigarette? Or not yet?’
I doubt he even noticed that I took one. I put it in my pocket.
; Stay cool, stay calm, think of the tarspots in the lung on the photo by the door. Don’t think of the double CASTANET or the air intake of Formula 3 racing cars or posters for the ENO. Remember that when Theo put up the poster of Popeye, smoking himself into strength, it was a joke. (Remember the spinach.) He didn’t frame the Yalta photo of the century’s three greatest men because they achieved peace by smoking. If Winston had surrendered his cigars there would still have been peace, surely (Roosevelt was a fag man and Stalin loved his pipe — Hitler never touched the stuff). Look instead at the enlarged acupuncture diagram of a human ear (next to Now Voyager), locating the exact point E which relates to smoking.
I tug at my ear, at the exact point E: it doesn’t help. Think of Julian Carr, and remember the real reason for disdaining your pain. Remember Hamburg.
More immediately, try very hard indeed to ignore the straight-forward implication of the words painted above the door in thick black italics, Theo’s old and useless mantra:
There are no poisonous substances, only incorrect doses
PARACELSUS, Paragranum, Basel 1536
I placed the cigarette I’d stolen from Julian on my desk next to a box of Swan Vestas, the smoker’s match. I switched on the Anglepoise. I sat down at the desk and squared my shoulders. I didn’t want to be slouching at the moment my life changed for ever.
I had resolved, due to the vehemence of my love, to perish with her.
I studied the cigarette carefully. Fine-cut leaves of tobacco packed into a thin roll of paper, fixed to a synthetic filtering device. An object contrived to spring a small pleasure in the brain. It was such a simple idea, so clear in ambition and so neat in execution. I rolled it along the desk. The paper had Buchanan’s printed on it, just above the filter. That was good thinking. I rolled it back again. A cigarette rolls nicely.
It was a kind of cowardice to prepare for Lucy by smoking the cigarette now, alone. But I was scared I might cough, or feel sick, or even vomit, any one of which would be unfortunate if Lucy were there, otherwise impressed by my proof, at last, that I was prepared to die for her.
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