X20

by Richard Beard

  As for my lung-ache, I hardly notice it now, and I shouldn’t wonder if before long several of the Suicide Club take me discreetly to one side and ask me for the secret of my success. I shall tell them it may well have helped to throw away all the ashtrays, and to dispose of the disposable Bic lighters. And even though the solitude was probably useful, in the end it was nearly all a question of personality and a certain rigour of intellect needed to reconcile the body to the mind without the familiar arbitration of nicotine.

  It’s true anyway that I don’t crave a cigarette half as often as I used to. A week ago I was writing away the cravings at least once an hour, but my attention span is now appreciably longer. There are tight green buds developing on the inside branches of the plant on the desk, for example. They look like tiny green pine kernels.

  Oh, and Mum phoned up. She asked me how I was and I asked her how she was and she said everything was fine at home and I said good, I’m glad that everything’s fine at home. Then she asked me if I was alright.

  ‘You sound ... different. You’re sighing less.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I’m absolutely fine.’

  I could have told her how I’d given up smoking. I nearly told her, but then I decided not to, not yet.

  The room measured 2m92 by lm63, a little over five square metres, so it wasn’t big enough for my bean-bag even if I had it with me. It was in a quiet area close to the river and if I stood on the chair, put one knee on the edge of the wash-basin, and stuck my head out of the window I could just about see the radar-swollen bulb at the top of the Eiffel Tower. On account of this view the room was expensive as well as cramped, but I didn’t mind because I had ten thousand pounds and no possessions apart from a few books and clothes and the twenty-one cigarettes I’d imported from England. And anyway, I planned to be out a lot.

  I discovered that in Paris you could never really lose yourself. Wherever you went, no matter how wide the circle, sooner or later you were sure to come across people taking photographs of something already better photographed on postcards. The number of recognizable landmarks was reassuring; it made me feel involved in something already recorded as important. Paris immediately seemed familiar, so that I was rarely frightened by the fact that in a city this big anything could happen. It hardly worried me at all, for example, that I once saw Lucy Hinton, her white mini-skirt circumflexing between her thighs as she leant over a push-chair and fussed with a baby. She straightened to light a cigarette and turned back into someone else.

  Back in my room, listening to the big city sound of sirens, I sat on the bed and handled the pack of Gauloises. They reminded me of the shop. The orange tie came to mind and I unwrapped the cellophane. A drawer opened and closed in the room next to mine and a man cleared his throat. I thought of Julian Carr and the single cigarette he used to turn upside down for luck, so I broke the duty-paid seal with my thumb-nail and prized up the edges of the silver paper.

  And was surprised to see that someone had beaten me to it. I couldn’t turn a single cigarette upside down, just for luck, because someone had already done it, and they’d done it all wrong. Every single cigarette was already turned upside down.

  Then I remembered that the Gauloises were filterless. There was therefore no right way up and no upside down. I laughed, and took my mistake for an omen predicting the most incredible spell of good luck, times twenty.

  In the beginning it was just Tomorrow's World. Then I watched Top of the Pops before Tomorrow’s World, then Nationwide before Top of the Pops and then the local news before that. Eventually I fell into the habit of switching on the television each evening at six o’clock for the proper news, where there were often items about how many people were dying every day and all over the world from smoking cigarettes. It was a statistical epic of disaster which consistently revealed the terror to be found in numbers. Men in suits quibbled about advertising and filter-systems and amounts of money which stretched into millions. The word epidemic became fashionable. There was the first National No-Smoking day, but I missed it.

  Now that I had less far to run to the Unit, they insisted I make up the distance by lapping the cinder track once I arrived. I hardly ever saw Theo, so there was little opportunity to gauge exactly how lonely and depressed he’d become since living without me. Back home, fed up, I would talk to Bananas. I read, I twiddled my thumbs. I thought of taking up motorcycling, just to liven up the days.

  Jamie used to visit about once a week and he told me all about Walter and Theo and Emmy and the Estates. He was a fairly unreliable narrator because he was so easily distracted, but it seemed that Theo was still giving out cigarettes and that there were more demonstrators all the time (although probably not the thousands which Jamie claimed). A gang of anti-vivisectionists had tried to force their way into the flat above Lilly’s Pasties but Haemoglobin had chased them away.

  ‘Bananas would have eaten them,’ Jamie said.

  He’d become a great Bananas fan ever since Bananas had lifted a dazed mouse through from the back of the house, then patted it around the rugs for a while before biting its head off.

  ‘I’m sure there was something else,’ Jamie would say, ‘but I can’t quite remember.’

  I gave him another cigarette. He said that Theo had gone for a check-up at the hospital. As for the result ... Jamie snibbed the next Carmen behind his ear.

  ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘But there’s a really cool X-ray. We stuck it on the wall in the waiting-room. It’s ace.’

  The X-ray was in black and white, Jamie said. Even for another cigarette he couldn’t remember whether any of the black bits were on the lungs.

  In English Madame Boyard said can you speak English and in English I said yes, yes I could, and the incisiveness of this answer secured me a job as part-time assistant sub-librarian in the music department of the National Library of France. I was therefore right about the Gauloises bringing me luck.

  Madame Boyard, the librarian, was a stocky woman with thin lips and flat breasts and a pale complexion. She wore a beige suit and when she spoke she burred her vowels as if she was expecting a cold. She told me I was to work no more than twenty hours a week and sometimes it would be less, and I said that was fine. There was also another part-time assistant sub-librarian, with whom I would sometimes be expected to co-operate.

  The work itself was straight-forward: I had to continue the task of transferring the library’s Astrat Archive onto computer. The archive contained press reviews and performance programmes collected by Henri Astrat from opera houses in England and America between 1910 and 1975. Astrat had also bequested an income to finance the continuation of the archive, but the Opera Gamier had spent the money sending a team of administrators to China to explore the feasibility of in-house fireworks.

  The department of music was in the basement at the back of the library, and consisted of two large adjoining rooms. Half of the connecting wall had been removed to allow an easier passage for trolleys of over-size documents. On a broad table in the centre of the larger room there were two computers back to back.

  Madame Boyard went to a desk in the smaller room and glared at me until I chose the computer facing away from her. I opened a box-file marked 1940 and started to type in, very slowly but also conscientiously, the details of Mario del Monaco’s debut performance as Rodolfo in La Boheme for the Neapolitan Opera at Covent Garden.

  I occasionally glanced at the white hunch-back of the other monitor.

  ’She’s American,’ Madame Boyard had said. ‘She talks too much.’

  Boredom is the enemy and cigarettes can help. Fact.

  I take an envelope out of the top drawer of the desk. I open it and empty the contents onto a fresh sheet of white paper. The pieces of leaf are dry now, brittling as they turn brown at the edges. I crumble some between my fingers, like a Yecuana Indian might have done, in Venezuela, a long time ago, looking for cures to boredom.

  There is, say, a small village-worth of tee-pees occupying a clearin
g in the centre of a jungle of broad-leaved plants. In a wigwam not far away a dozen strips of dried llama and as many plump carp are being smoked in preparation for winter. All the Yecuana except one are away somewhere, down by the river probably, and the solitary Indian discovers that it is only moderately entertaining to turn one thumb over the other until the two blur together.

  For something to do then, she examines the encircling bushes, wondering why such broad and inviting leaves are so bitter and useless as food. She uproots a plant and smells it, licks it, tastes it, wears it, burns it and it burns with a nice enough smell. She strips the leaves and tries cooking them in various different ways. She experiments, and in doing so she re-inforces the essential difference between herself and the other animals which stalk the plains and surrounding mountains.

  Gradually, over a long period in which she learns to recognize that curiosity relieves boredom, she observes the change m the leaf as it dries. She discovers patience. She learns the skills of selection, care, and attention to detail required to cultivate tobacco for smoking. How or why it occurred to her actually to inhale the smoke remains a mystery.

  Meanwhile, down at the river, the men have overcome boredom by discovering the principles of bridge-building. In the process they have become adept at modelling clay, and someone makes a pipe. The Yecuana try out smoking and several of them become ill, but this sickness is infinitely preferable to boredom and anyway, next time the leaves will be left to hang a little longer beside the llama and the carp.

  And because boredom is still the enemy I find my Helix tin and tip out the pencils and dividers and protractors and replace them with the pieces of dried leaf. Then I pull the Calor Gas heater in from the kitchen and turn it onto low, placing the tin on top of the heater. I look at the leaves in the tin for a while, thinking how this act has re-inforced the difference between me and the animals, and then other things like oh what a noble work of art is man. I mean I include myself these days.

  ’Smoke-break,’ she hissed.

  ’Sorry?’

  ’Smoke-break.’

  Because she was the more experienced part-time assistant sub-librarian I’d had to move over to the computer facing Madame Boyard. The O on the keyboard kept sticking. For the past hour I’d been typing in the names of unsung contributors to forgotten operas, while occasionally glancing across at Ginny Mitchell, the American who was supposed to talk too much. So far she hadn’t said a word. She had short hair, not quite blonde, and an interesting fine-boned face. She wore glasses with round lenses and dark frames. Not that I’d been looking, particularly, but the neck of her white T-shirt was pulled into a V-shape and she was wearing jeans cut off just above the knee. I quite liked her delicate neck and the slide of her shoulders and her white American teeth.

  ’Smoke-break,’ she said again, pushing back her chair. There was something very familiar about her.

  ‘I don’t smoke,’ I whispered back.

  Madame Boyard was peering in our direction so I looked down and hit the O key by mistake and it stuck, reproducing at least twenty Os on the screen before I could prize it up with my thumb-nail. Then, in perfectly projected and very polite French, I heard Ginny tell Madame Boyard that we were both going to take a break to smoke a cigarette. Madame Boyard nodded.

  ‘Make sure it’s only one,’ she said.

  I grabbed my jacket and followed Ginny up the stairs.

  At the back of the library there was a dusty courtyard with a few trees and some stone benches around a dry fountain. Half the staff of the library were milling around, smoking. We sat down on a low wall next to a green life-size statue of a shortish stoutish man wearing a long overcoat. It flapped out behind him as he strode into the wind, his hands clasped firmly behind his back like a skater.

  Ginny leant forward, put her hands on her bare knees, and looked closely at the sandy gravel. Then she reached down and picked up a cigarette-end. She gave it to me.

  ‘Really,’ I said, ‘I don’t smoke.’

  She ignored me and leant forward again until she found a second cigarette-end for herself. She held it between the very tips of her long fingers and grimaced slightly.

  I offered her one of my Gauloises, which I carried about with me at all times, for luck.

  ‘I thought you didn’t smoke,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t’

  ‘You’re weird.’

  ‘Have one.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t smoke either. What have you done with your butt?’

  ‘I dropped it.’

  ‘Don’t you know anything? Just hold on to it, in case Boyard comes out. And keep an eye on the door.’

  After about exactly the time I imagined it took to smoke a cigarette, Madame Boyard did come out into the sunlight of the courtyard. Ginny immediately stood up, dropped her filter, and stood on it. She then lifted her heel slightly and turned her naked ankle in both directions, crushing the filter under the sole of her loafer.

  We passed Madame Boyard on our way back to the basement. She already had a Camel lit and was heading for one of the benches by the fountain, a great collar of smoke planing out behind her.

  Just after six o’clock I turned on the television. A Durham man who once played inside-right for Stoke City was suing British American Tobacco because there was no health warning on his cigarette brand when he first started smoking in the early sixties. The man was fifty-seven years old and suffering from chronic lung cancer. He’d smoked fifteen cigarettes a day for thirty years and was expecting a third, possibly fatal heart attack. He was one of life’s seriously low-rollers.

  And then on the local news the lead story was the Research Unit and Theo. He was filmed through the wire fence walking from the Unit down towards the pond. He didn’t seem to know about the cameras, because all he did was smoke and look at his feet. Then the film cut to a reporter who was interviewing Emmy Gaston outside the main gates. Demonstrators could be heard chanting Barclay Barclay Barclay, Out Out Out, and several lab-coated scientists stood at a corner of the Research Unit peeking round each other at the protesters. I recognized Theo’s hair. He had a cigarette in his mouth. They cut back to Emmy, who explained very clearly that Buchanan’s were paying certain employees to distribute free cigarettes in order to addict new customers. It was a disgrace and something should be done.

  Finally there was a studio interview with a representative of the Buchanan’s company. He was young and smartly turned out in a double-breasted blue suit. He wore sincere wire-framed glasses. He said he’d been specifically sent to Long Ashton by Buchanan’s senior management as a sign of how seriously the company was treating the allegations being made. He said that an internal enquiry had already begun and any necessary disciplinary action would be taken swiftly and without delay. No, it wasn’t company policy to give away cigarettes to addict new users. The Buchanan’s company would never, under any circumstances, approve such an initiative.

  Looking admirably composed, entirely trustworthy, and all grown up, Dr Julian Carr thanked the interviewer warmly for her time.

  DAY

  12

  Ginny Mitchell was training to be a singer in the National Academy of Music, which was based at the opera house. She worked in the library to help pay the fees.

  ‘Know anything about opera?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘It’s simple. Everyone sings and then someone dies.’

  Every hour, on the hour, Ginny told Madame Boyard we were going outside for our smoke break. As she often pointed out, it could only happen in France, and once in the courtyard we used to talk and wave around our unlit fag-ends, one eye on the door leading to the basement. Ginny told me that her first impression of Europe had been small people with bad teeth which she attributed respectively to an ignorance of dental floss and the under-development of basketball.

  ‘I think you’ll find that’s a joke,’ she said.

  She came from Maryland and apart from buying contact lenses her most immediate ambi
tion was to be chosen as an understudy for a forthcoming production of Cosi Fan Tutti. She had beautiful and slender hands, and held cigarette-ends right at the tips of her fingers, between her polished fingernails. When she talked she moved her hands expertly, flowingly, like a Mediterranean.

  ‘I try to keep my throat and my vocal cords and my lungs in optimum condition at all times.’

  Her hands lingered in front of each essential part of her singer’s anatomy. ‘It’s like a sport. I have to train. I have to work out. I have to jog. Do you like jogging?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I have to keep the tiniest bronchioli as clear as glass. You know about bronchioli?’

  ‘Little bits of lung.’

  ‘Then I can hold the high notes. They must never be allowed to fade, not in the Paris method. I don’t suppose you have any idea how large a lung is?’

  ‘No, no I don’t.’

  ‘I mean to look after. It’s quite a job.’

  ‘Honestly, I have no idea.’

  ‘Flattened out, a single adult lung covers about forty square metres. Imagine that.’

  There was something disquieting about her. I thought it might have been her mouth, but then I really liked her mouth. It might have been the way she looked at me over the top of her glasses, or the crispness of her voice. Whatever it was, I was fairly sure she wasn’t a transvestite.

  ‘Did you always want to be an opera-singer?’

  ‘Only when I found out I was good at it,’ she said. ‘It agrees with me. Here she comes.’

  Ginny stood up and dropped her cigarette-end and trapped it beneath her shoe. Intent on crushing it beyond redemption she turned her heel and then her shapely leg and then her slim hips first one way and then the other. She kept on killing the cigarette long after it was dead.