Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  Already, the auditorium is smoking. A curious flavour, of longing and wonder; twists of anger, of disappointed expectation. Onstage, the action is limited, deliberately contained. One boy showing the other around. Charlie explains the workings of the school to the new arrival, who continues to hold the suitcase in one meaty fist. The words are almost incidental but set in blank verse all the same, to lift them from the realm of the banal to that of ritual. Charlie is asking why Thomas has arrived so late in the semester; is inviting him to choose his bed. It’s a trivial moment, chosen precisely for its lack of drama, until, out of nowhere, Thomas steps close to Charlie, across five or six feet of space, and juts his chin into his face. Oh, how well Geoffrey has learned that step. “Walk like you are getting ready to beat him,” Balthazar had instructed him. “Like you are stepping up to someone, willing to take his life.” Geoffrey, it turns out, knows a thing or two about the intimacy of violence.

  “What is it that awaits me here?” he asks of Charlie, flat and belligerent, blank verse be damned.

  “Pain,” answers Charlie. “Pain and friendship. But mostly pain.” He reaches out and calmly, gently touches Thomas’s cheek and ear. To the audience it is as though he marks the very spot where, much later, Thomas will be shot and scarred.

  Then: a handshake as intense as a kiss. One clean thread of Smoke rising from their joint exhalation, seemingly too fine to have much sway over the crowd. But there is a final twist to the scene, a recent innovation that Balthazar has reserved for special nights. He sees Ada’s eyes on him, sees the fist she has slipped into her pocket.

  Do it, nods Balthazar. They have been a good audience and the mood is right. It is the final night in the Canadas and the tour will be done after New York. There is no need to husband their resources as stringently as before.

  Ada reacts without seeming to react. Balthazar watches her pocket, sees her fist harden over the vial he knows is hidden there; fancies hearing it break, a sound like a fingernail tapping a glass.

  The results are spectacular. It starts with the actors. They have entered well into the moment; have summoned emotions deep and pure. The vial’s contents take care of the rest. They find their Smoke and, without visibly altering it, electrify it, giving it currency and charge. Soon the entire audience is weeping, hugging, shouting.

  “Hear, hear,” they shout (though there have been no speeches). “Revolution!” (though it has happened already, long ago, and a good half of them are unsure they like what it has brought). “Huzzah!” and “Hurray!” Some people are kissing, all sexes, young and old; a native trapper, black-eyed, weather-burned, and the old doctor’s wife stand cheek to cheek. Balthazar signals for the fans to be turned on. Even so it takes half an hour for the crowd to calm down.

  As the audience disperses, shy now, each unto themselves, avoiding further contact, Balthazar once again catches sight of the stiff-backed girl with auburn hair and full, round cheeks.

  [ 6 ]

  The girl with the auburn hair does not go home when the play finishes. She waits outside, in the shadow of the market hall, and watches the players spill out in a noisy gaggle. The tall man, the Negro, is amongst them, sour-faced and oddly regal. It is to him she wishes to speak. But she needs to find him on his own.

  The actors head for their hotel. She has already learned that they are staying there and follows at a good distance. Inside, the waiting area of the lobby is split into half a dozen booths, each bordered by a parting wall: Smoke screens, guarding against indiscrete emotion. She sits in one of these booths and endures the concierge’s gaze. Always now, there is the sense of being hunted. When he reaches for the telephone, she thinks it is to call the police.

  The players have already gone to their rooms. She can hear them, shouting and laughing, somewhere deep in the hotel. Other guests come to complain about the noise. Once they quiet down she will get up and ask the concierge for the number of the Negro’s room. The words arrange themselves within her with the staid formality that is her lot. She has no spontaneity, not when it comes to speaking. It is one of the things that make her stand apart. She rises and sees the concierge reach for his phone; sits down again and waits for the police.

  The police do not come. Instead it is the Negro—the director—who descends the lobby stairs. He is wearing a flat cap and a herringbone coat; his steps are so long it is almost as though he’s running. Everyone in the lobby stops to stare as he rushes out. It makes the girl feel a pang of sympathy for him. Here is another one who has been marked out.

  Outside, the air carries snow. April the nineteenth, the Canadian seaboard. Her long johns itchy from six months’ wear. She follows at a distance and watches the director retrace his earlier steps and let himself back into the market hall. An old man, thin as a rail. The dark face pruned under his cap.

  Inside, he lights a lamp and steps onto the stage. She slips through the gates and, in the ring of light created by his lamp, watches him take stock of the props that stand still arranged for the final scene. It occurs to her that he is here to pack things up, but he sits down on one of the dormitory beds instead and sniffs the cold air. Instinctively, she mirrors him and flares her nostrils, takes in the stink of the market hall, sea fish and offal, the sweat of workingmen. It isn’t so difficult to imagine into this smell something of school. Soiled laundry and digestive gases; clods of dirt clinging to rugby studs. If one cocks the head a little, one can almost hear it: the noise of boys charging down the corridor and down the steps. They never walked. As a child, their constant hurry was a puzzle to her, like the height of the moon. The bed the man sits on is the one that his play designated for Thomas. She quietly walks closer until she too reaches the stage. He has yet to notice her. His eyes are closed now, his bitter face un-pruned. An old man caught in reverie; stroking crumpled linen. Believing his own lies.

  It makes her like him better than before.

  “That’s not what they looked like,” she says into the silence. “The beds.”

  The words startle him. He leaps upright, the scowl returning to his features.

  “You!” he exclaims. “The girl with the poker up her arse. Sneaking in here to steal!”

  She does not respond at once but walks closer, pointing at the beds. “They weren’t this narrow. And the backs were higher, you could prop up a pillow and read.”

  The man seems incredulous, as much at her words as at her manner of speaking. “How would you know?” he mutters, growing angry. Then: “How old are you, girl?”

  She thinks about it, blinks, attempts humour. “Eighteen. But I have an old soul.”

  The director does not laugh.

  The next moment she has thrown herself on her knees and bent forward, slipped her palm under the edge of the bed. “Here,” she says. “That’s where they carved in their initials. Come, you can feel for yourself.”

  She is unsurprised when he tells her to piss off.

  [ 7 ]

  She gets him to do it in the end, through obstinacy rather than any more words, waiting out his sourness until he slides onto one knee and bends down next to her, and allows his fingers to be guided by hers. She runs them across the unvarnished undercarriage of the bed, filling in with words that which is not there to be felt by their skin.

  “The T first,” she says, “big and bold, with a slant to the crossbar. The A much smaller, as if it didn’t matter quite as much to him, or he was ashamed of it. And next to it, almost touching, two Cs. The first jagged, two sides of a triangle; the second smoother, almost a curve. TA, CC, side by side. Like sweethearts.”

  As she speaks she pictures them, Charlie and Thomas, lying flat on their backs, passing a pocket knife back and forth, leaving their mark; pictures herself on the day of her discovery at a time when the school stood closed, abandoned. The old man next to her seems caught in his own yearnings; his fingers still laced with hers. T
hen he catches himself and shakes loose her touch so violently that his knuckles rattle on the wood.

  “Nonsense,” he barks at her. “Made-up crap. It’s a boys’ school. On the other side of the world. You weren’t there!”

  His Smoke blends anger, suspicion, hope. She takes it in and returns it to him, realigned in its components. His own hope, given back to him, appears to frighten him; or perhaps it is the strangeness he can sense within her. He rises up, looks down at her, still crouching at his feet.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  She looks up at the prune of his dark face and decides she does not trust him yet. There is some secret in his Smoke that she finds difficult to fathom.

  So she says, “I was frightened tonight. At the performance. So many people in one room, shoving, talking, jostling for space up front. I haven’t been in a room with more than a handful of people, not since the Second Smoke came. And even before, only in church. It’s strange, isn’t it? Most people like to Smoke now, at least some of the time. But we are afraid of crowds.”

  She pauses for breath and finally rises, dusting off her skirts.

  “Tell me,” she continues. “You must see lots of places. Is it like that everywhere?”

  “You don’t get around much, do you?”

  “No,” she says, and finds her voice free of resentment. “Since coming here, I haven’t gone anywhere at all.”

  [ 8 ]

  She sees him waver between his habit of sourness and the itch of his curiosity; the urge to know this awkward, pesky girl. She waits unmoving, long seconds that they share in silence, then prompts him gently with a question. It’s a familiar question, one that has been asked a hundred thousand times across the world, whenever strangers meet.

  “Ten years ago—when the Second Smoke came. Where were you?”

  “There. England. You?”

  “The same.”

  “Then you know all there is to know.”

  The old man stills himself and closes his eyes. His eyelids are lighter than the rest of his skin. When he speaks again, it has the precision of a recital. He must be recalling lines long committed to memory, something from one of his plays. He speaks them quickly, dryly, without pathos.

  “It came like an infection,” he says, “passed from body to body like the flu. The land itself had caught it; sweated, shivered, stank. Here and there it bled. England was first; then the Continent, raging north to south. The Atlantic proved no barrier. Ships brought it to the New World in random little bursts. Halifax. Montreal. Savannah. The Virginias, the Carolinas, then the cities by the lakes. The far west never caught. Then the Smoke ebbed and grew sluggish once more: everywhere but at the source. Within three months the Second Smoke was dead.”

  He opens his eyes and she nods her acknowledgment. It was how he said it was. She’d arrived here just when the Second Smoke had deadened. Normality soon returned. Officially, nothing had changed. Smoke was said to be what it had always been: a marker of sin. In territories like the Canadas, the same governor stayed in place, the same laws remained active. There was little news from Britain, not at first, but the Empire continued, like a chicken still running when its head has been chopped off.

  It is running still.

  And yet, nothing is the same. It’s the people who have changed. They have tasted one another, known one another, high and low. Tinker, tailor, soldier. Beggar man, churchman, lord and lady: revealed in their needs. The Second Smoke coloured everything, down to the way people thought, how they prayed and raised their children. How they loved. There were new ways of speaking now: people said less, let their Smoke do the talking; or spoke one thing with their mouths and another with their skins. Smoke irony; Smoke humour. It is not a gift the girl has found within herself. Her Smoke is not that flighty.

  “I was surprised by your play,” she tells the old director now. “You made the audience create it as much as the actors. And there were so many shades of Smoke…Back when I was little, all Smoke seemed to be made of anger. Or of greed.” She pauses, then carries on in her awkward way. “Tell me: what has changed?”

  “What now?” he sneers. “You want to talk philosophy? Smoke epistemology, eh? Who knows, girl! Some say it’s the Smoke itself that’s changed; others that it changed us, in our heads and down in our livers. What do I care? It feeds me well, the Smoke. It pairs well with stage lighting and mirrors.”

  But the girl does not believe him. The old man’s relationship to Smoke runs deeper than that.

  “You have a secret,” she says abruptly. “What you did at the end, the scene with Charlie and Thomas. You released something. The Smoke was different then. Quicker, suppler. Alive.”

  He recoils at the comment; a puff of anger jumping from his skin. She sniffs it, takes it in her blood; tastes again that strangeness she found hard to fathom.

  All at once she knows what it is.

  “There’s another secret,” she continues, not without wonder. “You are different from others.”

  He hides behind his anger. “How very perceptive of you! I’m the grandson of a slave. People say it does not matter anymore. That everyone’s black now, much of the time. But at night they still scrub themselves white.” He spreads out his hands in front of her, flips them from the pallor of his palms to the blue-black of their backs.

  The girl simply shakes her head. “No, not that. Something else. It’s there in your Smoke. A kind of anger.” And adds softly, wishing to be kind to him: “You’re not a man.”

  “What, I’m the devil now?”

  But she won’t be put off. “Why do it?” she asks, genuinely at a loss. “Why be angry with your body? And live your life in britches?”

  “I’ll live my life any goddam way I please.”

  The girl can accept this. “Do your actors know?”

  “You think you can travel with people for months and years and they don’t know how you piss?”

  His Smoke is coming thick now. It rages at the girl. She stands calmly in its fury, takes it in, then returns it as something both gentler and more complex. It is like she is holding up a mirror and showing him a better version of himself. Herself.

  Whatever it is the director wishes to be.

  When it is over, and Soot falls around them in the lamplight, the girl reaches across the space that separates them and touches one wrinkled black hand.

  I trust you, the gesture says.

  But she does not say it.

  [ 9 ]

  They are interrupted. It is a middle-aged man who announces himself with a cough, born of an actual cold by the sounds of it but now used strategically. He is dressed rather formally in a tailed topcoat and dark trousers. A fur hat frames a clean-shaven face so stiff with cold there is little life to his features.

  “Hullo! Master Balthazar? I hope I am not intruding. I made inquiries at the hotel. One of the—ah—actors said I was likely to find you here.”

  He pauses, stares up at them upon the stage, and at the haze of Soot still riding on the air. His eyes first on the director, then on her.

  “I’m Walton. The—ah—mayor, if you please. Though don’t be alarmed. This visit is entirely informal.”

  Again he looks over at the girl. She shies under his gaze; does not know where to look. The director notices her discomfort.

  “Mayor Walton! What an unexpected pleasure. I read your attack on the theatre in the local rag this morning. I note there was no attempt to stop our performances, though, not after the local burghers went out of their way to offer me this market hall as a suitable venue. I suppose your governor wanted one thing, and your townsmen another. Well, let us step into my office.”

  The girl watches the old director—Balthazar!—climb down from the stage and lead the man over to the screen. He has a stool there, offers it to the mayor, then stand
s towering over him in a twisted stoop. There they talk for some few minutes, too low for the girl to hear. Throughout the talk, the man keeps craning his neck around the screen to peer at her. There is a question in his eyes.

  She turns her back and pretends she does not know the answer.

  Before long their business is concluded. The director walks the mayor to the end of the market hall, then shuts the gate behind him.

  “What did he want?” she asks.

  “Somebody told him we had been to England recently. Recently? It’s been almost a year! He asked me for my ‘assessment’ of the situation ‘over there.’ That man is a cretin. But even he is smart enough not to trust the official news.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  He smiles, pleased with himself. “That the rumours are false, but also true. That the government is back in charge and also failing. That the Second Smoke has died, and yet haunts the land in Gales. That the country is at war, but nobody’s fighting. It’ll keep him up all night.”

  “He kept looking at me.”

  “Of course he did. An old stick like me and a young thing like you, holding hands in a cloud of Soot. It’s more excitement than he’s had in years.”

  “No, it’s not that. He recognised me. There’s a description. Maybe even a picture, it gets sent everywhere. He will go home now and think on it. And tomorrow he will start asking questions and learn that he’s not the only one who’s noticed me. The day after, he’ll make a phone call. And then he’ll arrest me and ship me home.”