X20

by Richard Beard

  ‘I once had respect for you, Julian. Can you believe that?’

  ‘We kill them, Gregory. At the end of the tests we kill them all, and then we have a very close look at what the cigarettes have done from the inside out.’

  ‘Are you threatening me?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘You’ve changed, Julian.’

  ‘I’m a fully qualified doctor.’

  ‘You’re like a low-tar version of your former self.’

  ‘I have a first-class degree. I get results.’

  ‘You’re filter-tipped.’

  ‘Everything you have is because of me.’

  ‘And aerated.’

  Julian stood up and leant over the desk, his weight spread across his splayed fingers. ‘So sign the damn contract’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  He lunged at me across the table. I swayed out of his reach, stood up, opened the door to the waiting-room. I was nearly at the outside door when he said:

  ‘Lucy Hinton.’ I stopped where I was. I turned round. Julian hadn’t moved. ‘She only slept with you for a bet’

  I opened the outside door and went out onto the walkway. I started walking towards the lift.

  ‘Lucy Hinton!’ he shouted out, his voice carrying clearly from behind the table, through the waiting-room, following me along the walkway. ‘I fucked her. I fucked her all the time!’

  I made it to the lift. The door opened on a woman holding a sleeping baby wrapped in an anorak. The woman had a fag in her mouth. She stepped out of the lift.

  ‘Three weeks!’ Julian screamed. ‘I give you 3 weeks, maximum!’

  The lift doors shuddered closed, shutting off Julian’s voice. Sooner or later, inevitably, he would have to notice the queue which had formed outside the flat. He would know what to do. He was a doctor.

  DAY

  20

  I’ve made a big mistake.

  Inside the house, on the desk in front of me. A Helix tin, originally designed to hold scientific instruments, now containing tobacco leaf. Stripped, cured, shredded and flavoured by my own hand.

  A packet of cigarette papers.

  I must have misunderstood. It’s highly unlikely that Miss Bryant would have said the narrator can never die. More reasonably, she probably taught us that the narrator can’t describe his own death. Not all of it, not to the very last moment, for obvious reasons. According to Miss Bryant then, the narrator either lives to see another day, or dies silently.

  Outside the house, the early morning blue of a bright spring day, this day and no other. Outside my window right now. High white clouds. Hang-gliding weather.