‘You never used to be like this. Come on, Theo.’
‘May be she’s right.’
‘You’re the one who started it. You can’t just stop.’
‘What’s the point? Emmy says we kill people.’
‘We haven’t killed anybody.’
‘Make them dependent.’
‘You think they’re free? They need us.’
‘We created the need.’
‘Cigarettes help. You’ve heard the stories.’
‘A poor substitute for real help.’
‘There is no real help.’
‘We addict them.’
‘We’re all more addicted to water.’
‘What?’
‘It gets us through the days.’
‘We die earlier.’
‘Understanding satisfaction.’
‘Children suffer.’
‘Less than being beaten.’
‘There’s no connection.’
‘In an irrational rage by parents desperate for cigarettes.’
‘Yes, well. But. It’s still a risk.’
‘It’s not drugs, Theo. It doesn’t break up homes.’
‘Increased risk of fire then.’
‘It’s only one mad woman, and friends.’
’She’s not mad.’
‘They’re all the same.’
‘Only married.’
‘They hate one smoker and take it out on everyone else. We just have to keep on going until she gives up and leaves us to our own devices.’
‘Would you say she hates me?’
‘Who knows? She’s not normal.’
‘Have you seen the way she waves a banner? Amazing.’
’Stop tormenting yourself. Look, let’s have a fag, before Bananas rips up the sofa. Theo:
’Sorry. What?’
‘Let’s have a fag, alright?’
‘I’m trying to cut down.’
‘You’re what?
‘They say that cigarettes are sometimes a substitute for affection.’
‘Last request, soldier.’
I blame myself. Feeling sorry for him I actually asked for it.
1916 etc. The officer pulls his silver cigarette-case from the upper left hand pocket of his tunic, and then asks Walter for his last request. Walter says nothing.
’Speak up, soldier. D’you want a cigarette or don’t you?’
‘I don’t smoke,’ Walter says.
‘I don’t smoke, sir’
‘I don’t smoke, sir’
‘Of course you smoke. You’re about to be shot. Take one of these.’
It wasn’t the ideal moment for Walter to point out that he didn’t smoke because it was bad for his health, so he took the cigarette from the officer and put it between his lips. The officer then pulled out a silver wheel-lighter and spun the wheel. It was out of petrol.
‘Damn,’ he said.
He asked the caterers if any of them had any matches, and unfortunately they did. The officer took a box from a pastry chef, who then returned to his place in the line, rifle at the ready.
These matches are damp,’ the officer said. ‘Where have they been?’
‘In a trench, sir.’
The officer struck a match, just to check they still worked. He threw the first match away and walked back to Walter. He struck a second match and held it in front of Walter’s cigarette just as Walter exhaled, practising how to smoke. The match blew out.
’Sorry,’ Walter said.
’Sorry, sir.’
’Sorry, sir.’
The officer struck a third match and was shot dead by a German sniper.
‘Can I sit in your bean-bag?’
‘No, Mum, please.’
‘I’ve never sat in a bean-bag before. It’s a long way down.’ ‘Mum.’
‘It’s very comfy really. Am I meant to lean forward? Or lie back like this?’
‘Don’t sit in my bean-bag.’
‘I’m only seeing. Well help me up then.’
She picked up some clothes and folded them. She came and sat beside me on the edge of the bed. She took a book from the bedside table and looked at the cover-picture of a melting clock. Then slowly, as if reaching out her hand to trap a living thing, she plucked Julian’s cigarette from the open Helix tin. She held it up accusingly.
‘Gregory.’
I said Mum.
‘What is this?
‘You know what it is, Mum. It’s a cigarette.’
‘And why is it here in your room?’
‘It’s mine. And it’s only a cigarette.’
I took it away from her and put it back in the pencil-box. Mum said she didn’t understand me, and I had the feeling she was making a big effort to be understanding.
‘First cigarettes,’ she said, ‘and then New York. It’s a girl, isn’t it?’
I didn’t answer.
‘You know you could work in the shop?’
Her arm, by motherly guile, crept around my shoulders as she patiently explained to me that visiting idealists were shot to death every day on the streets of New York, mostly by realists. She also reminded me that I was completely middle-class and therefore totally unskilled. I should remember who I was: Gregory Simpson, son of Mr and Mrs Simpson, tobacconists.
‘I don’t want to work in the shop,’ I said.
‘I’ll ask your father.’
‘I don’t want to work in the shop.’
‘What do you want then? What is it you really want in life?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Whatever it is you want,’ she said, ‘you can’t have it. Not exactly how you want it. You know that, don’t you?’
She gave my shoulder a little squeeze.
‘There’s always something missing, and feeling dissatisfied is just, well, it’s the same for everybody. You could do a lot worse than work with your father.’
‘What does Dad think?’
‘He thinks he’s a drug-dealer.’
‘It’s a tobacco shop. I’d probably take up smoking.’
‘As if you hadn’t already,’ she said, staring significantly at the Helix tin. ‘Cigarettes won’t help, Gregory.’
‘I don’t smoke, Mum,’ I said. ‘I promised, remember?’
She didn’t look totally convinced.
‘It’s kind of a sentimental cigarette,’ I said.
She gave me a big hug, jamming my throat against her shoulder.
‘I love you, Gregory,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget I love you very much.’
DAY
10
’Surrounded by a wall.’
’Sounds nice,’ Theo said.
‘You must be mad,’ Walter said.
We were in No. 47 at the end of another charitable evening and I’d been describing my dream-house by the bridge. I still ran past it twice a week on my way to the Research Unit, and amazingly it was still empty. It was flat and square, made of brick scuffed orange like cigarette filters. The outside was blank and unornamented, which made it seem like an inside house, discreet, with no outside heart.
I could buy it too, if I wanted. If they gave me an advance on next year’s money I could easily afford it. At the very least I could get a surveyor’s report, even though Theo was bound to beg me to stay on at the flat.
‘Theo?’
‘It’s haunted,’ Walter said. ‘That’s why they can’t sell it.’
‘Theo, what do you think?’
‘It’s a well-known local fact,’ Walter added, ‘that two previous houses have stood on exactly that same spot.’
I wanted Theo to say something, anything, but Walter was already launched into a description of the original house, a grey mansion with tall spires and a slate roof stained dark by rain. At dusk, from the barred windows, screeching vampire bats flew wildly, desperate for blood.
(I knew all this, bats excluded. The surveyor’s report clearly stated that all three houses had made use of the same foundations, making the present brick-built struc
ture inherently more solid. The previous two buildings, by unfortunate coincidence, had both been demolished after fire damage.)
The old man did it,’ Walter said.
‘What old man?’
‘The mad arsonist professor. He smoked opium like a Chinaman and it scrambled his brains. Then he burned down his house.’
‘It was electrical.’
‘Then when they built the second house he came back as a ghost and burnt that one down as well. That’s why nobody dares buy the place, because who’s to say the ghost isn’t waiting there still?’
(The surveyor’s report made it quite clear that nobody had bought the house because the back half over-looking the gorge was rotten with damp. It was as flammable as a moist sponge.)
‘Thank you Walter,’ I said. ‘That was most helpful and encouraging.’
’Sounds nice,’ Theo said, absent-mindedly tapping ash from a cigarette onto his trouser leg, listening for Emmy’s voice on the walkway, his judgement and sensitivity to his friends and flat-mate utterly destroyed by the selfish obsession of love.
‘Your mother tells me you want to work in the shop.’
‘I don’t want to work in the shop.’
‘Why on earth would you want to work in the shop?’
‘I don’t want to work in the shop.’
‘Over my dead body.’
He told me he hadn’t given me Uncle Gregory’s money so that I could waste it by staying at home. And what about my University education?
‘You never went to University,’ I said.
‘Precisely. You think I wanted to be a tobacconist?’
Or failing that, as a kind of educational second-best, there were foreign countries full of satisfactions far grander than any offered by a chain of provincial British newsagents. He said I didn’t want to be dependent all my life and he was right. There was New York City and beautiful women wailing to be rescued from burning buildings.
But then there was also the mole-like suspicion, encouraged by my mother, that mothers were always right and I ought to resolve my life now, while I still could. Perhaps instead of beautiful women my destiny was simply to continue the series of Simpson’s, Tobacconists.
I asked Dad if he thought New York was a good idea, really.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s your decision.’
‘But do you think it’s the right decision?’
‘How should I know? It’s your life, Gregory, and it’s up to you. There’s no user’s manual.’
We are waiting for a taxi, black. Walter wears a black Homburg. He is leaning forward on his chair, his hands crossed on the crook of his stick and his chin resting on his hands. I ask him if he thinks I should wear a hat.
‘Leave me alone.’
‘I was only asking.’
’Stick to your writing.’
I haven’t been outside the house since I gave up. This makes me nervous, which makes me want to smoke, so I follow Walter’s advice and try to subdue the familiar craving for a Carmen by writing, wishing my blood would hurry up its re-learning of the purely organic life.
‘I really don’t want to go.’
‘I told Mrs King.’
Walter looks at nothing in particular, grimly revising all the stories he ever lived and invented with Humphrey King, wondering why all of them had to have the same ending: Humphrey King dies. It makes the stories weak and uninteresting, predictable from the beginning.
Humphrey King will be buried in the ground, not burnt in a furnace like Theo. Most of the Suicide Club will be there. We will sing hymns and shuffle darkly in our funeral suits. During the service one of us will have an uncomfortable throat just itching to become a choking fit, and Jonesy Paul’s memorial address will have to compete with sporadic bursts of infectious smoker’s cough. Afterwards, in the weak sunshine of the churchyard, someone will recall the ironic spirit of the Club and attempt to brighten the occasion by observing that it wasn’t the coughing that carried him off it was the coffin they carried him off in. Blah.
‘I’m coming straight home, mind.’
Walter and the others will go to Mrs King’s front room for expert sandwiches and ritual estimates of how much longer they each have to live.
‘What about Haemoglobin?’
‘He’ll be fine.’
At Theo’s funeral I smoked thirty-seven cigarettes, one after the other, and I made sure that Carr was watching.
On 1 March 1962, an Ash Wednesday, the Royal College of Physicians published their first ever report on smoking and health. The initial print-run of ten thousand copies sold out, as did the twenty thousand sent to America for re-distribution by the United States Cancer Society. The report received widespread publicity and in 1963 cigarette sales in the UK fell by 14.5%.
The College pointed out that in 1960 10,000 people died from lung cancer in comparison to 250 in 1920. In an extensive study of British ex-servicemen a 20-a-day smoker was found to have a 14 times greater risk of dying from lung cancer than a non-smoker. As many as 3 out of 10 smokers would die from a smoking-related illness.
Industry spokesmen were quick to respond. No causal connection had yet been demonstrated between smoking and cancer, so the results given in the report were merely inferences from statistics. They had no more authority than mathematical expectations at a roulette wheel. The increase in lung cancer could be explained by improvements in diagnostic method. And a study of ex-servicemen was inherently unreliable because it wasn’t random: ex-servicemen might have a higher rate of lung cancer for entirely different reasons. It was all a question of presentation: even according to the RCP, 70% of smokers remained in robust good health. To suggest otherwise was to deny British tax-payers their citizen’s right to enjoy a pleasant and perfectly legal pastime.
The RCP couldn’t explain why certain smokers were more susceptible to disease than others. It was entirely possible, even after the findings of the Royal College, that a smoker could go through three packs a day for fifty years without losing a single day to smoking-related ill health. Or he could die horribly of lung cancer before he was forty.
What a gamble that was.
‘And I’ve never worn your stupid rainbow sweater and I’ve never done the jigsaw puzzle and I hate Lilly’s jumbo pasties.’
‘Then why eat them all the time?’
Because I’d never learnt any of the other dances, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. Instead, I watched him drop cartons of cigarettes into the nylon shopping bags while at the same time dialling for a taxi and trying to avoid tripping over Haemoglobin. All this fuss was clearly a ploy of his to annoy me, just because I refused to go with him to the Estates. I said,
‘I don’t feel well.’
‘Rubbish.’
‘Really. I feel, it’s something in my chest I think.’
’See a doctor then.’
‘Theo, please.’
I followed him into the bathroom and this was the part I really hated, when he preened himself in front of the mirror. He never really improved anything, like his hair for example, so I suppose he just did it to check he looked like himself. He inspected his face from lots of different angles with his mouth closed, and sometimes stroked the little vertical scar on his upper lip.
‘Beautiful,’ I said, but I wasn’t very good at sarcasm.
‘I thought you were ill.’
‘I was lying.’
‘You shouldn’t lie.’
‘All smokers lie, you know that. I bet Emmy Gaston never lies.’
‘You’re in the way, Gregory.’
I followed him into his bedroom where he picked his brown overcoat off the bed, then back into the living-room. I watched his back struggle into the coat, lit a Carmen, and told him I was going to move out. Now he’d have to pay me some attention.
‘Elsewhere,’ I said, ‘somewhere else. Another place. Not here.’
The horn of a taxi sounded from outside. He ignored me and went over to the nylon bags and arranged the ci
garette-cartons so that none of them poked out of the top. I said:
‘I can’t just stay in the same place all the time, can I? A man has to move on, doesn’t he?’
‘You won’t move out,’ he said, picking up a bag in each hand.
‘I will.’
‘You won’t.’
‘Let’s toss for it,’ I said, but he didn’t even laugh.
’Sure you won’t come to the Estates?’
‘Do you love her?’
‘I don’t want to be late,’ he said, slipping past me.
I watched the door close. The taxi sounded its horn. Haemoglobin sniffed at my hand. Bananas looked round for an ashtray. We all have to be doing something, when we’re lost and alone and under-attended. We all have to occupy ourselves somehow.
At my own funeral, well into the next century, few of the mourners will remember cigarettes as anything but curious artefacts from a past millennium.
The cathedral will be crammed with dignitaries who take turns to pay their respects to my coffin of highly polished ash. We are more than half-way towards the year 2100, and for the last decade or so I have been solemnly revered as an ambassador from the twentieth century. Children rarely fail to ask me interested questions about typewriters and frying pans and petrol engines. They want to know if it hurt to suck down the poison smoke from cigarettes and I tell them no, not really, but none of them quite believe me. Instead, they privately conclude that we were all less civilized and therefore tougher in the old days, and I’m not beyond suggesting that maybe we were.
In a less optimistic version of my own funeral I’m only Uncle Gregory’s age, or younger, and the twentieth century is easily remembered. At the graveside there are no personal friends, and in my line of work I have no colleagues. My mother weeps into a black handkerchief. A couple of springtime strollers in fashion raincoats stop and stare and internally sermonize on the stupidity of smokers. They identify the scene as a moral lesson for their children, and then wonder if it’s going to rain.
And me, I wonder if Julian Carr will be there, either today or in fifteen years’ time or in fifty. I examine my nails, gauging where best to start biting.
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