X20

by Richard Beard

  I wanted to kiss her.

  Her lips, pursed closed over the smoke, made her look determined and a little frightened. They slipped open, closed again, and an orphan wisp of smoke floated up past her cheek. She took an inward breath, short and sharp like someone bee-stung, pin-pricked. She swallowed a cough at the back of her throat. And then, her eyes crossing at the wonder of it all, she watched the smoke she breathed out through her nose.

  I put my right hand on her left breast. She looked at my hand and then into my eyes and then she inhaled again on the cigarette. A tear tracked down from her left eye.

  ‘Contact lens,’ I said.

  ’Smoke,’ she said.

  The tear shrugged over the ledge of her eye-lid and slid towards the ridge of her cheek-bone. It fell onto my hand and dripped through my fingers.

  She smoked the cigarette all the way to the filter, and the only movement in the room was the regular travel of lit cigarette from hand to mouth and the upward waver of smoke. When the cigarette was finished, she leant over and stubbed it out on the metal lid of the Helix tin. She blew the last of the smoke out of the side of her mouth, and kept on blowing long after it was all gone. Then she took a deep breath of clean air, and her breast rose in my hand. I leant towards her and we kissed, and this was exactly how it used to be, in the good old days, tasting Lucy Hinton. Everything was alright, and nothing had ever gone wrong. I opened my eyes and saw the yawing cheek-bone of Ginny Mitchell, kissing me. I closed my eyes again.

  Some time later, out of breath, we pulled apart.

  Ginny smiled. She bit her lower lip.

  We started again. Her fingers were on my face, on my back, pitching into my ears. Then they were under my shirt, but I wasn’t much interested in any of that.

  I wanted to steal the taste of the cigarette from her tongue. I wanted to lift every last trace of nicotine from her gums and the smooth enamel behind her perfect American teeth.

  I have no idea how much time passed before I noticed the taste of the cigarette was fading. I pulled away and was surprised by the hold Ginny had on one my wrists, my hand threaded beneath the skirt of her dress. She bit my neck. I leant away from her. The bed brought us together again.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she said. She kissed the side of my mouth. I freed my hand and then held onto her shoulders to keep her still.

  She tilted her head, aiming her next embrace.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  She flapped her head onto my shoulder.

  ‘I feel a bit light-headed,’ she said. ‘I’m not normally like this.’

  ‘That’s the nicotine.’

  ‘I like it.’

  She aimed a kiss at my chin, but pulled up short.

  ‘There’s something wrong, isn’t there?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s to do with the cigarette.’

  ‘I thought I was pretty good at it,’ she said. ‘For a first timer.’

  ‘You were brilliant,’ I said. ‘Have you got any more?’

  She put her hand under my shirt and rolled a finger on a rib.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I haven’t.’

  I looked over at the Helix tin, but that was different. ‘Let’s manage without,’ she said, pulling her finger across to my navel. I caught her hand and held it. ‘I can’t,’ I said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I just can’t. It excites me.’

  ‘More than this?’ She bit my earlobe.

  ‘More than that,’ I said.

  ‘I suppose I could go and get some more.’ She sounded doubtful. ‘If you really wanted me to.’

  I kissed her lips, and the taste of cigarette had definitely faded. ‘Just one more,’ I said. ‘I’d like that very much.’

  She swivelled off the bed and rolled the dress back up over her stomach and then her breasts. She threaded her arms through the straps and said:

  ‘You’re still weird, but I love you.’

  She settled the straps on her shoulders and reached for her jacket. She kissed me on the nose and said she wouldn’t be long, and then closed the door behind her without nearly enough force to mean good-bye.

  I had no idea what I was doing. Ginny was a singer and she had lungs as clean as glass. I reached out for the Helix tin and picked it up, exploding the ash from her cigarette. It settled on the bed and on me and on the floor. The ash from a whole packet would probably cover everything ! owned.

  I tried to work out what was happening. I was asking Ginny to smoke cigarettes. Lungs ruined, her singing career would collapse. Her whole life would change. Presumably, at some stage, I would also encourage her to have sex with a man with no qualifications and no future who lived in a room the size of a shrunken lung. I should never have acted as if the cigarette Ginny smoked was magic. It wasn’t. It had once belonged to Madame Boyard who had bought it in a shop, and it wasn’t right to let Ginny believe that magic cigarettes were available in shops in exchange for money.

  The fact was: cigarettes made no difference. This was just another dog-eared day which had been lived before, and I was suddenly aware of the disappointing truth, as sad and ridiculous as a dunce’s cap, that I had no desire to carry on. I had no desire to change or defend anything. I wanted to forget hope, enterprise, success, perseverance. I was letting myself go, and it came easily.

  I stood up and locked the door. I sat down again. I opened the Helix tin. I took out Julian’s cigarette, and the writing above the filter which used to say Buchanan’s, and which I once thought such a clever idea, had almost worn away.

  I could crush this ragged cigarette between my fingers like Superman crashed the cigarettes offered to children by the evil Nick O’Teen.

  It was a novel idea, which had never really occurred to me before. The cigarette was such a fragile object, so easy to break, and I wanted all it stood for to disappear. I wanted to begin my adult life again from the beginning, avoiding pointless obsessions and this persistent habit of disappointing women.

  But I wasn’t Superman. I put Julian’s cigarette between my lips and it tasted like the unlit cigarettes in a cigarette shop. The filter was firmer than I expected but otherwise it was all so familiar, as if I recognized it from another life. Now, not that it made any difference now, it seemed an obvious and absolute truth that I should have smoked when Lucy asked me to. I grabbed a book of stray matches from the floor and curled up on the bed, Julian’s unlit and battered cigarette hanging from my mouth.

  Ginny was hammering at the door.

  ‘It’s a packet of twenty!’ she said, excited, but I didn’t move from the bed. I told her I was sorry. She called out my name. I told her I was sorry. She demanded to know what was going on and I said I was sorry. With my face turned to the wall and the cigarette in my mouth she might not have heard me. She kept calling out to me. I covered my ears with my hands. Sometime later, or perhaps it was earlier, she slumped down with her back against the door.

  ‘I won’t give up,’ she said, over and over again, but in the end she did.

  ‘I want to go home.’

  ‘Have another pipe,’ I say. ‘I’ll wipe your ashtray for you.’

  ‘Alright,’ Walter says. ‘But this is the last one, and then I’m going.’

  He picks fresh tobacco from his pouch and tamps it down into the bowl. I watch his practised hands because his face is hidden by the broad brim of a huge sombrero. Haemoglobin turns in his basket, snores, settles. The ghost imitates the wind, scratching against the corners of the house.

  I ask Walter if he believes in ghosts.

  ‘You mean seriously?’

  ’Seriously.’

  ‘Of course I don’t. Do you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Probably not.’

  Walter puts a match to his pipe, and a cloud of smoke billows up from beneath the brim of the sombrero. I ask him where he got the hat.

  ‘It’s a long story,’ he says, but for once he shows no inclination
to tell it. ‘Involving Fidel Castro, the CIA, and an exploding cigar.’

  Actually, Walter is sulking. I should have remembered his competitive streak from the way he plays dominoes.

  ‘In Cuba,’ Walter says, glancing out from beneath the sombrero so that I see he hasn’t quite given up, even now. ‘Where the girls who like their fellas,’ and here he quite deliberately tips the ashtray off the arm of the chair, just to annoy me, ‘always light their panatellas.’

  None of his ploys are going to work. I shall clear up the ashtray later, calmly and without fuss. It’s not a problem, and to be perfectly frank, without wishing to blow my own trumpet, Walter never had a chance in a million of beating me at Tempting Gregory, a game I invented some hours ago to pass the time. Walter had wanted to stay a little longer, mostly because Emmy is still away on a course, devoting the surplus energy she once invested in LUNG into learning about the dangers involved in nuclear fuel. ‘Still fighting the good fight,’ I said, and she said, ‘Still fighting, anyway.’ Before coming back she intends to make her first parachute jump.

  Anyway, Tempting Gregory is a very simple game. To win, Walter has to make me admit that I want to smoke. The only rule is that he isn’t allowed to stop me from writing, but apart from that, anything goes. So far he has recounted all the times when smoking saved his life. He frequently refers to his venerable old age. He has reminded me of irrational wars, random buses, escaped radiation, over-powered motor-cycles, undetected asbestos, lethal sand particles, passive smoking and, imaginatively, the possibility of being eaten by lung-fish. He has placed his lit pipe in my hand and blown smoke in my face. He has described Tahitian maidens rolling cigars along the insides of their honey-brown thighs. He has evoked jazz basements and cowboy camp-fires and Rick’s Casablancan bar. Varying his attack, he then tried to irritate me towards the delirium of a cigarette-craving, only coming close once when he read a page from yesterday and snorted with derision while threatening to set fire to it with his lighter. Close, Walter, but no cigar.

  As a last resort he’s been trying to bore me into submission. I’m not allowed to look at a book or the television, or to move from my chair, while he sits in front of me handling moist tobacco from his pouch. Now, at last, I think he accepts defeat, though not at all gracefully.

  ‘You know,’ Walter says, pointing at me with the stem of his pipe, ‘you’re lucky to live in this house.’

  ‘Thankyou, Walter,’ I say, even though it has nothing to do with luck. This house is the positive evidence of my ten years working for Buchanan’s, always hoping there’s no other evidence lurking inside my body, no internal tattoo, no patient message.

  ‘I’ve thought of something else,’ Walter says.

  ‘Last chance.’

  ‘If you’ve really given up,’ he says, pausing, timing the strike, ‘then why haven’t you told your mother?’

  Walter was always good at games. I pretend I have something very important to write down.

  ‘I could tell her if I wanted to.’

  ‘But you haven’t, have you?’

  ‘Maybe I don’t want to.’

  Maybe I don’t know how. My mother thinks cigarettes are dangerous, and important. She can’t be expected, as a lifelong non-smoker, to grasp that the reasons for both starting and stopping are equally absurd and entirely reasonable. The world remains the world, and I remain me, in the same relation to everything else as I ever was, except with a tube of burning leaves between my teeth, or not, as the case may be.

  ‘It proves you’re not going to make it,’ Walter says.

  ‘I could tell her anytime.’

  Walter goes through the familiar ritual of refilling his pipe.

  ‘I thought you wanted to go home.’

  ‘The other thing,’ Walter says, enjoying himself now, ‘is what happens when you stop writing? Does that mean you’ve started smoking again?’

  ‘It could mean anything. I could have joined Emmy’s Outward Bound club and taken up hang-gliding, or mountain-climbing. I might have fallen in love at first sight.’

  ‘With Stella?’

  ‘I don’t know who. It’s first sight.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Walter says, ‘because Stella won’t look at you more than once.’

  ’She might.’

  ’She won’t. Mostly because you can’t make up your mind about anything. You haven’t even decided to go to the show yet. For all we know, the moment you stop writing you’ll run up to the Unit and plead with Julian to take you back. You know Julian offered money to Jamie?’

  No, I didn’t, and it was almost a shock to think of Julian still out there, in his suit, smoking, offering money to strangers. For the last few weeks I’ve only ever imagined him sitting in the dark in his front room, fuming. He crushes out half-smoked cigarettes on the glass frames of photos of his wedding.

  ‘I bet Jamie said no.’

  ’Surprisingly, he did.’

  The last time I’d seen Jamie, at Theo’s funeral, I’d explained to him as simply as I could that Theo had died because he smoked too many cigarettes. I could see how determined Jamie was to understand this, even though he’d always known about the connection between cigarettes and cancer. It was like switches and electric light, or taps and water, but before Theo’s death he’d never needed to think it through.

  ‘But why would they sell anything which killed people?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘But why do they kill people?’

  ‘They’re made that way.’

  I recognized Jamie’s confusion. It reminded me of the foul taste of Miss Bryant’s cigarette, and the end of my sense of the certainty of things.

  I pick up the phone and dial a number.

  ‘There’s no need, Gregory,’ Walter says. ‘I believe you. You win.’

  I motion him to be quiet. The phone is answered and I say hello and out of habit, though sleepily, Mum asks me if I’m alright.

  ‘I know it’s late,’ I say, ‘but I’ve something to tell you.’

  And then, even though Walter is watching me and I know it would make Mum very happy, I find I can’t say it. It’s as hard as telling her I love her.

  ‘Tell me,’ she says, ‘now you’ve started. Have you found a girlfriend?’

  ‘Maybe I’ll come over,’ I say.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Maybe at the weekend. I’ll come over.’

  Both of us are happy with this idea, so we say goodbye before I can ruin it. I’ll just turn up and not smoke until someone notices. After lunch, most probably, when I don’t head for the garden as soon as Dad offers to show me the photos from his OBE day.

  ‘Never mind,’ Walter says. ‘I still think you’ve cracked it.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Yes. I believe you’re going to stop.’

  ‘For good?’

  ‘You’ve proved you can do it. You’ve made it, and frankly I’m impressed.’

  ‘Well thanks, Walter.’

  ‘I suppose it can’t have been easy.’

  ‘Thanks very much.’

  ‘But you are now officially an ex-smoker, and I take my hat off to you.’

  ‘You really mean it?’

  ‘I really do. I take off my hat.’

  And quite amazingly, he does just that.

  DAY

  19

  Second class. Smoking. It had been building up to this since the Gare St Lazare, presumably to continue all the way to Hamburg. The train had found its voice and all it ever said was cigarettes tch tch, cigarettes tch tch.

  Diagonally across from me sat a girl in a black dress and tortoise-shell sun-glasses. She placed a yellow soft-pack of Ernte 33 on the table-top, next to a book in Flemish which might have been a novel. When reading, she sometimes tapped her teeth with a slim metal lighter, but I tried to ignore her because all that mattered was that time should pass and nothing should get through to me. I gazed out of the window, then down at the quick silver of a par
allel track, liquid in the sunlight.

  She lit a cigarette. Tobacco. Smoke. I thought I might have met her somewhere before. Inhaling, exhaling, reflected in my window, her transparent lips and her fingertips. Since smoking a cigarette she wouldn’t notice, were we to kiss, that I tasted like an ashtray.

  Cigarettes tch tch, Cigarettes tch tch, and telegraph poles wiping past the window.

  That morning I’d packed my possessions into a single suitcase and set no itinerary besides buying a train ticket that would take me to Hamburg. On the way to the station, in the bright morning sunshine of the city, Lucy Hinton was everywhere, lighting smoking extinguishing her cigarettes, sitting standing kneeling by the river, littering the pavements with crushed butts, killing passers-by. Could I have known that this one girl would become the template for every girl I’d ever meet? I should have paid more attention. I should, obviously, have smoked a cigarette.

  Reflected in the window, against a background of rapid greenery, repositioning her sun-glasses, tapping her teeth, smoking her cigarette, turning her page, coughing occasionally.

  Of course it was possible, given the small choices I was still free to make, that I could leave the train at any of the stations before Hamburg. I could recover my senses in a remote guest house (No Smoking Please), before returning to Paris refreshed, lungs intact, and from there perhaps to England. I could find Lucy Hinton and assess the probability of living happily ever after.

  Touching the middle of her top lip with the tip of her tongue. I could ask her for a cigarette.

  I realized I must have forgiven Julian. I imagined him in his lab, pacing up and down between burning Bunsen-burners and frothing test-tubes, beside himself with the seemingly impossible task of finding his Mr X. I assumed he’d still recognize me. I trusted his letters, and the trouble he’d taken, and I wanted to believe this made him my friend. He’d written so often that I couldn’t believe in a bet between him and Lucy. In fact, Lucy had really loved me, that was the truth. She left me because I broke my promise to smoke a cigarette. It was all my fault and I ought to be dead.

  Shifting in her seat, re-positioning her bones. I was an idiot even to think it. Her bones were nothing compared to Lucy’s bones. And Ginny’s bones. Ginny’s back-bone curled against my door, Ginny in tears. I was an idiot and I ought to be dead. Which was why, the night before, I’d smoked a stale Buchanan’s Century which had once belonged to Julian Carr, a very good friend of mine.