Walter isn’t dead. He hasn’t been run over by a bus. I’m so relieved I could almost listen to his Firing Squad story. I’m so relieved I could tell it myself.
This wouldn’t be the first time I’d asked for Uncle Gregory’s money. I once stole some Lucky Boy chocolate cigarettes from the sweet display at one of my father’s shops. A new assistant whose name I didn’t know took me into the stock-room for a telling-off, and then I had another one from my parents when I got back home. I nearly cried and I wanted to be tougher than I was, so I imagined being Uncle Gregory in the cockpit of a Canberra or at the start of a motor-bike race.
After the telling off, I stood up straight and said I was sorry and asked if I could have the money to pay for a ticket to Adelaide, where I was going to start a new life as a cricketing airline pilot. My mother said no, I had to learn to be honest if I was going to run a chain of tobacconist shops. Then my father said no. So I started crying after all, and mum hugged me and said I could have the money when I was older if I promised never to steal again. I promised.
‘And never to start smoking,’ she added.
After that I rarely thought about it, except vaguely when I suspected that only a top skateboard or a motorized go-kart or a decent stereo stood between me and widespread popularity at school.
But this time, as soon as my father came home, I was going to go downstairs and ask him straight out for Uncle Gregory’s envelope. He would object, and we’d probably fight, but I was prepared for fighting if it meant I could have the money and therefore be in New York by the end of the week. I’d probably find a new lover within a month. That would show Julian Carr, and Lucy. That would teach them.
And then everything would be alright.
About twice a year he used to get the most terrible flu which he would cough out of his system over a period of weeks. He always refused to see a doctor.
‘I’m not ill,’ he said. ‘Never been ill in my life.’
Then I would go to the Estates on my own. Otherwise, we went together and often Walter would come and join us, though not always in his Rastafari hat.
Jamie was vigilant in pacing the walkway, travelling up and down in the lift, and patrolling the block for any sign of a lady with grey eyes wearing too much make-up. And even though Theo gave him film-posters and Bounty bars, he never stopped asking for cigarettes. At the end of the evening we’d smoke and Walter would tell stories while Jamie flipped through the pages of the waiting-room magazines looking at the adverts. Then he’d gabble on about what he was going to do when he was rich. Jamie and Walter would always set off for home together, both of them convinced they were protecting the other.
And Emmy came to see us most weeks. The Bluebell Drama Club also met on Wednesdays, so sometimes Emmy looked older, and sometimes younger. Her eyes, however, were always the same. Because of the carriage layout of the flat and Jamie’s warnings we could always hide Walter by pushing him through into the bathroom, and then into the toilet for good measure.
‘I promise you,’ Theo would truthfully tell her, ‘I have never given cigarettes to an old man.’
However, Theo always acted strangely for at least an hour after any visit from Emmy. He would ask a different type of question to the people who came for cigarettes, like had they really thought properly about the danger of an earlier death. The replies were predictable:
‘You have plans for those extra years? Like holidays, or something?’
Or he’d ask someone if they minded losing their sense of taste, or smell, which always raised a smile.
I sometimes slipped into the waiting-room for a quick Carmen and while I was there I watched the way the others used to smoke. There was an intensity to it which said that each cigarette had to stand for everything — for bread and meat and beer, for shoes and blankets and the tinsel on the Christmas tree and the Christmas tree itself, and for tins on the shelves and something decent on the telly. Something, anything, to look forward to. Something to depend on.
A panacea is a miraculous plant which cures all known diseases. It is a universal remedy, a catholicon, and Pliny ambitiously identified it as lovage. Later, panacean qualities were variously claimed for other plants, among them ligusti-cum and opopanax, wound-wort and witch-hazel.
The first connection between the elusive panacean plant and tobacco was made in England by Edmund Spenser, author of The Faerie Queene, and by the time of Queen Elizabeth’s death it was well known that tobacco could cure colds, eye inflammations, involuntary tears, headaches, migraines, dropsy, paralysis, slowness of the blood, apoplexy, death trances, childbirth pangs, hysterical passions, dizziness, memory loss, restlessness, black melancholy, mental derangement, plaque, bad air, and all infectious illnesses known to mankind.
Later, the universal remedy was sought not in a single plant, but instead in a single action, or in a single chance happening, or in a single idea. All our daily dissatisfaction could be turned round in one easy moment of panacean discovery, a hope well served by casinos and product advertisements and the promise of emigration to paradises like Australia. The panacea skipped from plants to chemicals to grand ideas to thoroughbred horses to fortunate combinations of numbers by way of the changeable moods of moody men and women.
But always, even since Pliny, the panacean hope has had a regular home in the miraculous love of the one good man or the one good woman. This is the most common of catholicons, and guaranteed to cure everything.
A group of four or five people with Emmy Gaston, Walter’s daughter, at the centre. She wasn’t wearing make-up. Her brown hair was pulled back into a no-nonsense pony-tail fastened by a rubber-band. She was probably a few years younger than Theo, and she was waiting in the dark, with her friends, outside the double-doors which led to the lift. There were two placards, hand-written in black marker pen: SLOW MOTION SUICIDE and STOP THIS NOW!!, which looked like it had been used before.
The five protesters, including Emmy, followed us into the lift and we travelled up to the fourth floor jammed together and trying to avoid each other’s eyes. The lift stopped and we stepped out one by one onto the walkway. It was so cold and there was so much steam from all our breathing that it looked like we’d each inhaled a pack of cigarettes in the lift and then left the packets behind. In front of No. 47 there were a few people already waiting, and while Theo unlocked the door Emmy was asking, not to anyone in particular, but just generally,
‘Did you know this man gives cigarettes to children? Would you want your children to smoke? Do you know the probability of catching cancer if you start smoking before fourteen?’
‘Emmy,’ Theo said. ‘Come inside. Let’s talk about this inside.’
She stood absolutely still and stared at him. She flared her nostrils and breathed out a long straight plume of breath.
‘Who on earth said you could call me Emmy?’
Her back seemed to straighten. Theo developed a small apologetic crouch.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, but mostly he seemed surprised by his mistake, as if the word Emmy had been through his mind so many times it had become familiar without him really noticing.
‘Please, come inside,’ Theo said, recovering some of his composure. ‘Everyone, come inside.’
One of the Estates women said,
‘I knew this would happen.’
1916.
The morning of the battle of the Somme. Twenty thousand men die in six hours and not one of them by accident or bad luck. Compared to smoking, Walter decides, this is genuine stupidity and dicing with death.
Walter, a private in the Black Watch, was arrested by an officer’s adjutant while walking for no apparent reason in a direction two cardinal points astray of the forward trenches. Within two days, as an example to all other soldiers with a poor sense of orientation, he was court-martialled and sentenced to death by Firing Squad. On the third day, stood against the battered wall of a rained outhouse, he was faced by a platoon of caterers from the King’s Own Scottish Borderers and a second lieutenant from
the Blues and Royals. The soldiers were cold and wet and miserable, but according to Walter the officer was oblivious to this because soldiers didn’t count as human beings.
Walter is not blindfolded but his hands are tied behind his back. His back is against the wall, from which a greenish type of moisture has begun to seep through his tunic onto the tensed muscles of his shoulders, which are wet anyway with sweat. The caterers load, check and make ready their rifles. The officer, who clearly has previous experience, orders rifles raised, rifles levelled, rifles aimed, one and all at Walter’s heart. The officer nonchalantly lifts his arm.
At this point, any number of things can happen.
About a month after Theo submitted the corrections to his PhD thesis (Deception Patterns in the Tobacco Mosaic Virus), his mother heard that her ex-husband and Theo’s father had been sighted working in the kitchens of the RAF jet-fighter base near Achnasheen.
Above all else, Theo’s mother loved travelling on the West Coast Red Band bus service. Perched just high enough above the hedges to see everything, at just the right speed, the buses were big enough to allow cigarette smoke to circulate, unlike the confined compartments of the West Highland Railway.
On this occasion there were only six other passengers heading north from Glasgow. Well before the Erskine Bridge, they were already coughing in a meaningful way and looking darkly towards the back of the bus, where Theo’s mother sat contentedly on the very back seat, daring anyone else to join her by smoking one cigarette after another.
By Ardlui, all the other passengers had crowded into the seats behind the driver, and Theo’s mother settled down to enjoy the moving pictures of Scotland in the big BSI stamped windows.
Twenty minutes short of Achnasheen, the bus swung round a corner and narrowly missed a head-on collision with an RAF transporter towing the tail section of a Vulcan fighter-bomber. In braking, both vehicles skidded across the road. The articulated trailer of the transporter skewed into the back of the coach, sheering off the right hand rear-wheel panels and crushing the seats inside.
Theo’s mother was killed instantly. There were no other casualties.
Earlier than I expected I heard him come in, and then I thought I heard them arguing but that couldn’t be right because they never argued.
I went downstairs for tea and nobody was saying very much so I just came out with it and said I was leaving University and wanted to have Uncle Gregory’s money. It was the direct approach.
‘It’s not a good time,’ my mother said.
‘Let the boy speak!’
I looked up from my plate, wondering how much I could have missed in less than a year. Lucy had once asked me what my father did and I said he went driving on Sundays between his roast lunch and the Antiques Roadshow. Then I showed her the exclamation marks in one of my mother’s letters, and we both spluttered with amazement, even though neither of us could have said exactly what was wrong with exclamation marks. Lucy had asked me what my mother was like really and I’d said you know. You know, as if there was nothing to be said beyond the expected. It had taken such a short time to forget them. I didn’t deserve the money.
Mum had pursed her lips and narrowed her eyebrows. She looked a lot like me and she was very worried and I was the one making her worry. Dad needed a haircut. He looked tired and somehow disappointed, as if he could see right through me to the absurd life I projected for myself* where episodes of gratification were punctuated by glamorous catastrophes with my only responsibility the inevitable rescue of the beautiful women involved. It was the idea of life a film-maker might have, but at least a film-maker would make a film of it.
‘Fine,’ Dad said. ‘I’ll organize it tomorrow.’
Mum asked him if he’d gone mad. Misunderstanding her, and a little flushed with my success, I assured her that I hadn’t smoked once while at University.
‘Greg wanted some of the money used for foreign travel,’ Dad said. ‘He was clear about that.’
‘No problem,’ I said, ‘great.’
‘What’s the big hurry?’ Mum said. ‘You can stay as long as you like. Here, I mean.’
‘It’s ten thousand pounds, a bit more.’
‘New York,’ I said. ‘I was thinking of going to New York.’
‘You could maybe work in one of the shops,’ Mum said. ‘Gregory?’
Dad said: ‘Not Hollywood then?’
‘I know what I’m doing, Dad.’
Emmy, still made-up as Hedda Gabler, had been on her way to No. 47 to check for Walter when she found Jamie sitting alone in the lift smoking a cigarette. She’d asked Jamie if Theo had given him the cigarette and Jamie thought very hard about the question. After due consideration he said no.
Instead, he said that Theo had sold it to him.
‘But I paid with my own money.’
The next week Emmy turned up as herself, with her placards and her friends.
We went through to the inner room. I lit the gas fire while Theo asked Emmy if they couldn’t just talk this through to a compromise, like adults.
‘You sell cigarettes to children,’ she said.
‘Look at me,’ Theo said. ‘Do I look like that kind of person?’
‘I have no idea what you look like. I warned you what would happen. And I know Walter comes here.’
‘I can explain.’
‘You seem to think all this is some kind of joke,’ she said, slapping her hand down on the table. ‘But people die horribly from smoking cigarettes, and quickly too. It can happen in less than a year. I doubt you’ve ever seen a cancer of the tongue? Well the tongue swells up until it fills the whole mouth, by which time the mouth is also cancerous, and it could be your mouth, or Walter’s, or Jamie’s. Then your soft-palate starts swelling, followed by the glands in your lower jaw and finally your neck. You can’t speak, or eat. You can’t even vomit, which is something you desperately want to do, most of the time. You certainly can’t smoke anymore. Can’t get the smoke down there, although by this stage the pain doesn’t leave much room for nicotine nostalgia. And it’s not just the smokers. There’s no statistic which records the spectator’s pain of the nearest and dearest. Now you may be perfectly happy about all this but I am not.’
‘Oh come on,’ I said, and Emmy said ‘shut up you,’ without even looking at me. She said to Theo,
‘This is only the beginning.’
Theo winced as she closed the door firmly behind her. He said to me,
‘How can she think I’d do it if I didn’t think it was the right thing to do?’
New York City is disdainful nicorette-chewing blondes on dwarfed side-walks hailing yellow taxicabs to luxury penthouses in awesome skyscrapers negotiating kick-back deals with nicotine-patched lawyers sporting diamond tie-pins from stogie-sucking jewellers mourning runaway daughters starring in pornographic movies directed by cheroot-smoking pimps in sharkskin suits with a taste for disdainful New York blondes, chewing nicorette. And the streets are paved with gold.
Smokers in America, it’s said, at least in the upper strata of society, are treated as pariahs.
It seemed a pretty clear choice, an uneven contest between the land of opportunity and a University I didn’t like, exams I didn’t want to do, and a next door neighbour I never wanted to see again in my whole life. However, I also had the strong feeling that if I went to New York I’d almost certainly never see Lucy Hinton again, and that’s probably why I spent most of the rest of the week lying on my bed in my room. I read paragraphs from depressing French novels which sent me to sleep in the middle of the afternoon, and gave me dreams which came out simply as language.
My father was regularly coming home much earlier than I remembered. I sensed him about the house, prowling. He asked me why I hadn’t left for New York.
‘I’m getting organized,’ I said.
‘What for?’
‘I want to find myself.’
‘And you think you’re in New York?’
‘I want to know who I am, I
think.’
He looked at me over the top of his glasses.
‘You need to know a lot more than that, son.’
He was joking, of course. I seemed to remember he used to like a joke, sometimes. I said,
‘I heard about the OBE. That’s great news.’
‘Oh well done,’ he said. ‘Very well done. Bloody marvellously tactful.’
Then he stamped off into the bathroom, taking his newspaper with him. This wasn’t home as I remembered it at all
One possibility is native American folklore. Even while the Enfield 303s are aimed unerringly at the New Testament in his top left-hand tunic pocket, Walter reminds us that smoking originated as a solemn spiritual and diplomatic ritual on the buffalo plains of the Americas. At about the same time, historically speaking, there was a war-cry common to many of the Indian tribes, including the Crow, the Comanche, the Panankey and the Picayunes. We are people, they yelled as they rode into tribal skirmish, we are people. Everybody else was enemy only.
The officer in charge of Walter’s Firing Squad, according to Walter, was therefore no better than a Red Indian savage.
Another possibility, as fingers more familiar with regimental meringue tighten around triggers, is that Walter reminds us this incident is taking place well before passive smoking was even invented. Then, after a short ironic aside (if they’d known about passive smoking of course no-one would have smoked in the trenches) he might describe how the officer, still with arm aloft, and using his other arm to slap his swagger-stick against the brown-tan tops of his riding boots, puts his moustache in Walter’s face and says:
‘Last request, soldier.’
And Walter, who up until then has only smoked once or twice in a purely recreational way, asks for a cigarette. He says this is the first of many times in his life when he has a strong conviction that he isn’t going to die from smoking.
He is given a cigarette, a Craven A, and he is about half way through it when the officer from the Blues and Royals, a veteran of too many Firing Squads, drops down dead from passive smoking. Nobody else is authorized to give the order to fire, so the caterers let Walter go. He smokes a second cigarette to celebrate.
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