X20

by Richard Beard

  ‘No allergies? No drink problem. Solid and dependable. You’d be perfect. Look, if you ever find yourself short of cash, just think of the animals you’d be saving.’

  I could always tell which of my mother’s letters were more important to her by the number of exclamation marks, each one a wide-eyed whoop!! on the page. There was one particular letter where I counted thirty-seven, along with four separate articles about smoking, which was also a record.

  The bad news was that 15–20% of all British deaths turned out to be smoking-related.

  Limb amputation due to vascular disease was a newly discovered risk.

  Reference was made to Buerger’s disease, to Chronic Mucus Hypersecretion and Obstructive Lung Disease. There was Benzo-a-pyrene. There were one hundred thousand dead every year in the hidden holocaust. And it could at last be confirmed that children who regularly attended religious services were less likely to smoke. It said so in one of the articles.

  There was no good news. Only vitamin A, which is found in carrots, made a tiny recordable difference in efforts to combat lung cancer.

  Of course I immediately recognized the letter and the cuttings as a special barrage of love. My mother was letting me know how much she loved me. It wasn’t until the end of the third and last page that she let slip the supposedly confidential information that my father (Mr Simpson the Tobacconist! Of all people!!) had been provisionally nominated for an OBE, for services to the community.

  This morning, on my fifth day without cigarettes, Dr Julian Carr telephoned for the first time since Theo’s funeral. He knew full well I knew it was him. I could hear him in the silence, inhaling.

  He let me listen to him smoke. I had nothing to say to him but I didn’t put the phone down. Eventually, he whispered, very softly:

  ‘Feeling a bit squiffy, are we?’

  Then I put down the phone.

  In a way, the films were right. If I smoked a cigarette and made love to Lucy then I wouldn’t drop down dead before the night was over. But dreamers find it hard to reduce the world to its todays and calendar tomorrows, and I was also worried about collapsing in the middle of an awards ceremony many years in the future.

  For all I knew Lucy could be toying with me. She might be using me as an early experiment in her masterplan to seduce Julian. She may have slept with him already. She might still be sleeping with him. Perhaps when she went next door they never talked at all, just fell into each other’s arms and made mad passionate love and the noises which came through the wall only sounded like conversation. The time she spent with me could be a trick like her pregnancy. And if I committed myself to her by a simple act of breathing that wasn’t a breathing of air, then how could I be sure she wouldn’t turn on me and laugh, perhaps while the smoke was still settling in my lungs?

  The time she’d acted pregnant: it was late and I was drunk but she’d fooled me. She’d made me feel gullible and inexperienced and stupid. I didn’t want the same thing to happen again but I didn’t want to smoke a cigarette either. I asked her if she knew what she was doing to her health.

  ‘I know, I know. I’ll be dead at thirty and so will my babies. I kill passers-by in the street and total strangers in restaurants. I am personally responsible for the murder of children in public parks. It could hardly be worse, could it?’

  It was a flat with two rooms, one behind the other, then a kitchen, and then behind that a bathroom. All the rooms were in a row like train carriages. In the first room there were chairs around the walls and magazines on a low table: a waiting room. The clinic itself took place in the inner room. I made coffee and lit the gas-fire. Then I sat behind Theo and watched.

  They came in one by one, and each stayed for between five and ten minutes. Theo sat on one side of a table in the middle of the room, and with his ‘patient’ sitting opposite him it reminded me of prison-visiting the way I’d seen it on television. Everyone who came in called him Dr Barclay, and in the three hours we were there every visit followed the same pattern. Someone would come in, sit down, tell Theo why they started smoking and why they carried on, and then at the end he would give them cigarettes. It was all formally done, and there was no show of gratitude.

  At the end of the clinic we were left with a single carton of 200 Kensitas. I called for a taxi which would only come as far as the pub, and as we walked back across the open space, Theo said,

  ‘Best keep it quiet.’

  ‘Yes Theo.’

  ‘Doesn’t look too good. Tobacco men handing out cigarettes.’

  ‘No, I can see that.’

  ‘Freud’s early work was on fish. He specialized in the noses of fish.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Nobody likes Freud anymore.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But he was right about one thing. Everybody has a story.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I can see that too.’

  Outside Lilly’s Pasties, the beggar was still begging. Theo gave him the carton of Kensitas.

  DAY

  6

  Time, memory; the usual problems.

  I remember her bones. When I dreamed her she had no bones at all, and I hadn’t expected her pelvis and her hips to be so hard. I hadn’t expected her to move so much.

  But that was later. First I had to surrender, which was inevitable once I reached the stage where every morning I woke up with a nagging sense of dissatisfaction. It was as if all the dreams I never remembered had secretly ended unhappily, and only Lucy could change the endings. But then Lucy was also the smoking of a cigarette.

  Once too often, she stood up and shook out her hair and threatened to go next door.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Julian watches me smoke without frowning.’

  ‘Wait.’

  ‘What now?’

  ‘Come to dinner.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here. On Monday, no, Tuesday.’

  ‘I’m getting very impatient, Gregory. Pretty soon I’m just going to give up.’

  ‘Great news.’

  ‘You know what I mean. Give up on you. I’ve tried everything and I don’t believe you even like me.’

  ‘You know I like you.’

  ‘Then prove it.’

  ‘If you say yes to dinner, I will.’

  ‘You’ll what?’

  ‘You know what. I promise. We can make it a special occasion.’

  She lit a cigarette and smiled.

  ‘Please, Lucy.’

  ‘I’ll dress up shall I? If we both know what it means.’

  The more often I went to the Estates, the more radically I had to revise my opinion of Theo. His approach was disciplined, rigorous, the exact opposite of his hair. I concluded he wasn’t entirely confident he was doing the right thing.

  His prescriptions for cigarettes were never automatic. There was once a lank young man, in a surplus East German combat jacket and blondish dreadlocks. In a bad teeth contest he would have run Theo a close second. He didn’t sit down, and his head bobbed in a reflex memory of years viced in a walkman. Or maybe it was just because he was completely stoned.

  ‘It’s like they told me you hand out cigarettes.’

  Theo said he was a doctor.

  ‘Like to the oppressed, man.’

  ‘I conduct counselling clinics.’

  ‘That last woman had 200 Raffles. I saw her.’

  ‘Tell me how you started smoking.’

  ‘I’m a traveller. I could really handle a few fags, you know?’

  ‘Do you like travelling?’

  ‘Yeah, well. Like it’s the only honest response?’

  ’Sorry.’

  ‘A couple of hundred would be fine.’

  ‘I’m mostly just an endurance man. I’m sorry.’

  Another time a young boy said his mum had sent him to pick up a packet of Embassy Legals. The boy had the face of an apple-eater and a milk-drinker. He had freckles and a hard, cheeky look that in adults becomes a kind of endearing blunt-ness. Theo
told him to sit down and unrolled the photo of the diseased lung. When the boy understood what it was his eyes opened wide and he stood up and backed towards the door. He couldn’t keep his eyes off the photo. He said:

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Believe me.’

  ‘It’s just a piece of bubble-gum.’

  Then he ran through the waiting-room and away, leaving the door wide open so that we could all hear his trainers slapping along the walk-way.

  ‘The youth of today,’ Theo said, shaking his head.

  She took off her clothes. When she was naked she shaped herself into the bean-bag. I remember her bones.

  Tuesday arrived. I pulled my desk into the middle of the room and covered it with my spare blue duvet cover. I bought two red candles and stuck them in lumps of Blu-Tack. I went next door to borrow Julian’s desk-chair. I was very nervous.

  ‘You need hot food for a seduction,’ Julian said.

  He thought he always knew best. I planned to give Lucy three courses, all of them cold so I wouldn’t have to leave the room once while she was with me. Julian pointed out that I’d also chosen the wrong colour wine.

  ‘You could take her out for an Indian,’ he said.

  Lucy had once told me that I shouldn’t upset myself about Julian because he didn’t fancy her. But anyone can change their mind, and I thought he might be jealous and getting worse at hiding it, which was one more worry to add to the already considerable anxiety which was gathering in my chest, making me linger too long in Julian’s doorway, still holding his desk-chair. I asked him if he thought Lucy liked me. I mean really.

  ‘Of course she likes you.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ’She told me.’

  ‘Did she?’

  ’She said she liked you because you were straight.’

  ’Straight?’

  ’Square.’

  ‘I’m not square.’

  ‘You hardly drink. You don’t smoke.’

  ‘Did she really say that?’

  ‘Why should I lie about it?’

  ‘You told me that all smokers lie.’

  ‘I was lying.’

  The Marlboro cowboy never had conversations like these. He was totally unhurried, unworried, unmodern. He was exactly how I imagined myself, tomorrow.

  Some months before he died Theo gave a plant to Emmy Gaston, Walter’s daughter, as a present. Today Walter has brought the plant back and it doesn’t look very healthy. It is about a metre high, but the broad leaves look sorry for themselves, slack in the mouth, in full contemplation of death. There are no flowers on the plant. Theo told Emmy there would be white flowers.

  ’She wants you to save it,’ Walter says. ‘She imagines Theo passed on the secret. And she gave me a message but I’ve forgotten what it was. I think she wanted you to meet somebody.’

  I tell him not to worry, and he doesn’t. He settles in his chair and starts puffing at his pipe, flicking through a National Geographic feature about cash crops in the Pacific basin. He is wearing a tweed flat cap, with a crimson-feathered fishing fly attached to the cloth stretched over the peak.

  I move the plant slightly to the left so that I can see him better. He looks up and asks me what I want. I’m embarrassed that he catches me looking so I say nothing and bend my head over the desk and write this sentence and will carry on writing it until he goes back to his magazine as if none of this ever happened and now he is reading the magazine again and I think I can stop.

  She was very generous and she refused to let me fumble. Her limbs curled out of the bean-bag, wrapping me in.

  Faced with the possible intimacy of the evening, I felt friendless. I wasn’t sufficiently close to anyone else to take the risk of explaining how much Lucy meant to me. I couldn’t ring home, obviously, and either I was feeling guilty in advance or my mother already suspected something. The last time I’d phoned I’d asked her about Uncle Gregory’s cancer.

  ‘Are you sure he got it from smoking?’

  ‘Of course I am.’

  ‘I mean, are you absolutely positive that this is factually accurate?’

  ‘Gregory. Your Uncle Gregory smoked sixty high-tar cigarettes every day of his adult life. What else did you want him to die of? You’re not thinking of smoking are you?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Promise?’

  Julian didn’t understand either. He became arch and suggestive when I wanted him to be sympathetic, as though Lucy was just another blonde girl. He said the important thing was to stay calm and not to worry. I asked him if he was going out for the evening and he said he didn’t know. I was terrified, abject before my desire.

  I lit the candles with my Swan Vestas. I turned off the electric light. Wanting something to do with my hands, I opened the bottle of wine. Julian had said it needed to breathe. I was wearing a tie. I was a boy dressed up and pretending to be a man in one of the smallest rooms in the William Cabot Hall of Residence for Men, and I suddenly realized that nothing here could possibly match the incomparable success I’d imagined for the evening. I felt out of place, absurd, worthless.

  And anyway, it was too late. She wasn’t coming. She would have found something more interesting to do than dinner on this evening with me, like watch television. I licked my fingers to snuff out the candles, and then decided it would be less dangerous to blow them out instead when there was a gentle knock, three times, tap tap tap, on the door.

  A club for smokers is not a new idea. At the end of the nineteenth century there were a number of smoking clubs thriving in London. They were called Divans and among the most famous were Whites in Devonshire Street and The Slipper Club in the Strand. Divan as a word derives from the Persian. It has vacillated its way through the English language swerving in meaning from a collection of poems to a courthouse to a room entirely open on one side towards a garden to a type of long seat but at one stage stopping at a club for smokers. The word divan then, is a good example of how a single point of departure, in this case a word, can come to mean many different things and travel far beyond itself.

  The Divans of the late nineteenth century allowed gentlemen to smoke in peace (see Disraeli, Endymion XX 1880). They were also places of refuge from women, who were strictly excluded from membership. It’s different now of course, at the end of another century. Smoke has been democratized, and it features in everyone’s photographed past. It has become a sign of the commonness of our humanity, the link between a Maori and a Mau-mau. It has been the century’s open addiction, the world-wide admission that breathing by itself is simply not enough.

  But it’s different now, like I said. It turns out that pleasure kills, as the strictest of history’s theologians always promised. A hundred years ago it must have all seemed so splendid, such an innocent pleasure so cleverly packaged and so obviously harmless that with hindsight it almost convinces, as feared by the Seventh Day Adventists, as the most perfect invention of hell itself.

  ‘When I first wake up and feel depressed. When I’m tired and worn out or when the children get a bit stroppy. When I’m violently mad and about to throttle them. You know.’

  ‘Here. Take these whenever you like. Do not exceed the recommended dose.’

  It was mostly women who came to Theo’s clinics, often with young children. They had a lifetime’s habit of sacrificing their own desires to please other people, and smoking was the solitary repeatable indulgence that could be called exclusively their own. Small comfort through it was, it was still a comfort.

  ‘I was sort of on my own, and you can’t really sit and read a book so you think what the heck can I do and instead of twiddling your thumbs. I don’t know what made me do it. I just went round the corner, bought a packet of cigarette? and smoked a cigarette.’

  ‘Here. Take these whenever you like. Do not exceed the recommended dose.’

  Most of them were unfamiliar with the blind optimism needed to give up anything as consoling as cigarettes. One woman said that at
least finding a match was a reason to get up in the morning.

  ’Sometimes I put the baby outside the flat, shut the door and put the radio on full blast and I’ve sat down and had a cigarette, calmed down and fetched him in again. Then I give him his tea. I think it’s all in the mind really, you know like it calms you down, just in your mind.’

  ‘Here, take these.’

  Her hair, released, fanned into the black of the bean-bag. The allelujah of eyes closed and open, open and closed. Her shoulders.

  ‘The carrots aren’t glazed. They’re more alert than that.’

  It was going brilliantly. Lucy was dressed as a gypsy, with Creole hoops in her ears and her black hair tied back. She was wearing make-up which brought her features into focus like a portrait photograph, and she had a wraparound top thing and a long red skirt, threaded through with gold. The candle-light flecked deeply in her eyes and I realized this was the point and I hoped it was doing the same for me. She was laughing a lot, which made me think she was happy. Her teeth gleamed. She touched my arm when she wanted me to really visualize her sister in a wet-suit, trying to water-ski. She was happy about everything that ever was. She was absolutely bloody fantastic.

  After the starter (grated carrot salad), she lit two cigarettes at once. I drank some wine and watched her hands. She offered me one of the cigarettes.

  ‘This is a magic cigarette,’ she said.

  She leaned towards me. ‘It’s enchanted. Whoever smokes this cigarette will fall in love with the next person they see.’

  I took the cigarette from her hand.

  ‘Will they live happily ever after?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I offered it back to her.

  ‘Why don’t you smoke it yourself then?’

  ‘I will, once someone falls in love with me first.’

  I looked at the magic cigarette and watched it burn. Then I placed it carefully in the Courage ashtray so that the filter rested in the indentation designed for just this kind of emergency. I dropped a twenty-pence coin over the glowing ash and watched the smoke dwindle and die. Just like Lucy had taught me.