Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  They make way for Charlie, though, who is either greeted with a nonchalant nod or quickly, shyly hugged around waist or leg; is “hullo-ed” by a dozen different voices and, responding to the calls, must stop halfway to clear his lungs of cough. Recovered, he leads them through a final clot of children to a figure in an armchair. No, not a chair. A throne. Upholstered in a garish floral pattern, faded and mildewed, and decorated around the back and armrests with all manner of junk: mirrors and empty picture frames; wigs and belts; a fox stole and the bleached jaws of a fish. A cloud of birds surrounds it; squats on it; fouls it with its shit.

  On this barbaric seat of office, his legs tucked up under him, and offering a blade of grass to a bird that has landed in his lap, there sits a boy. It is hard to guess his age: he might be thirteen and short for his age, or ten and chunky-limbed. Part of the difficulty comes from his face. There is something oddly puffy about the features, something far away about his narrow, slightly slanting eyes. The teeth sit very small in his wet smile.

  “An idiot!” it escapes Balthazar. Etta May scalds him with a look and knows in her heart that she has thought the same word. Charlie appears unfazed; points to each of them in turn and utters their names, then, laughing, bends down to the child and greets him with a hug.

  “His name is Timmy,” he says happily, “Timmy Angel. That’s how the whole nonsense got started.”

  “But all the talk about a new religion! A movement, a crusade: marching against Renfrew. He isn’t leading anything—he’s a simpleton!” Again it is Balthazar who speaks, in the full brutality of his disappointment. He stares at Charlie, Smoke in his voice. “You’ve been lying to us. It’s you yourself who—”

  He does not get further. The child—Timmy—leans forward, sniffs at Balthazar, and smiles, his big cheeks swallowing up his almond eyes. The next moment he starts smoking. It comes out of his mouth like laughter, spontaneous and willed all at once; is subtle in hue, almost colourless. The effect is immediate. It summons their Smoke like it is summoning their souls: does not impose a flavour but simply strips them naked in their passions and bids them mingle.

  It happens very fast: passes through their group into the camp and travels up the valley, so quick and nimble as to make normal Smoke seem a crude, dark, turgid thing. Etta May feels Charlie’s pride and hope and raging anger that he’s soon to die of broken lungs; and, beneath all this, the boundless good nature that has made him something like a household saint. She feels Balthazar’s confusion and vanity, his terror of ridicule and exposure, his angry marvel at this podgy child; feels Timmy himself, mischievous, happy, and painfully shy, a child who would rather watch than play. Then Mary is there, right there in her skin, full of rich delight that she has returned to this weightlessness of self, like a hooked minnow thrown back into the water where its school is painting shapes beneath the surface and accepts her back within its throng.

  A Gale, it courses through Etta May. He’s laughed up a Gale. Pure as glass.

  The thought is so conscious that she knows it is already over. The Gale has passed. It has returned her to the sanctuary of her flesh. There’s relief in the thought as well as regret.

  The Gale leaves her with something else, too: a feeling of connection to every child and adult within the valley, as though she’s been at a village dance and touched each villager’s hand. The ugly and the fair. All around her the birds are singing their odd song. When she turns she sees they have left their play above throne and lake; have drawn close and formed a cloud upon him, the dead point of the Gale, the spare, aging body of the man who does not smoke; threaten to roost upon his brow.

  When Timmy sees it, he claps his hands with raw delight.

  [ 3 ]

  “You don’t like it.”

  Etta May had to go looking for Balthazar. Her friend and employer has withdrawn, up onto the flank of a hill, a half mile from the encampment. He sits in the wind-shadow of a boulder. A sheep stands nearby, chewing, huddled into its dirty fleece. They make a good pairing, director and sheep: the ceaseless motion of the jaw, working over the regurgitated cud, and the motionless man, withdrawn into himself.

  “It’s a good surprise, you must admit, Balthazar. We thought the Angel was following Gales. Catching them, maybe. But he actually makes them. Or, as Charlie has it, ‘the Gales make a home in him.’ He calls him a ‘vector,’ Charlie does. He says there used to be others, back in the early days. Some of those Pilgrims who carried the Second Smoke over the Atlantic…But they did not last; lost the knack. Not so our Angel: a little boy called Timmy. That part at least should make you laugh, hon.”

  She sits down next to him, uninvited; snuggles close with her hip and pushes him aside a little, so she, too, can lean against the boulder and enjoy its shelter from the breeze.

  “But I can see it’s making you dyspeptic—the camp, the Angel, everything. Idle Smoke. Nobody for you to boss around.”

  He grimaces at this, is drawn out of his silence at last.

  “It’s irresponsible,” he rages. “They’re only children—they can’t live like this. What if they grow sick? Or starve?”

  She sighs in her maternal way, and for the thousandth time since landing in Britain searches her pockets for a cigarette. There is none. She lost hers to the Storm. Minetowns had long run out of tobacco.

  “The farmers bring food, Charlie says, and have done so all along their journey. Donations. I suppose they take in the sick ones, too. Most of these little ones are orphans. They have nowhere to go.” She pauses, studies her old friend. “But it’s not this that bothers you, is it: the poor bereaved parents and how will they live come winter? You’re not that sentimental. Nor that practical.”

  He chews on this, prunes his face. How familiar she is with all his facial tics: the downturned lips, the way his nose wrinkles around his thoughts, the thick dark lids that come down to hide his eyes.

  “It’s changing them,” Balthazar says at last. “This constant living in a Gale. It’s like they are losing bits of themselves. Like they are growing together. Into a herd.”

  “I always thought you believed in the Smoke. In communion.”

  “In the theatre, yes, or in a church! But after the show is finished and the psalms are sung, we go home.” Balthazar is earnest now, agitated. “We are built for solitude, Em. For hard borders between you and me.”

  “Says who, hon? It strikes me we are built for both.”

  “Then you like it? All this?”

  The question coincides with a break in the clouds. All of a sudden rain falls, a hard, quick shower, ten steps to their left while sunlight fills the hillside on their right. It is so dramatic, so theatrical, that she cannot help but giggle. Balthazar fights it but succumbs. It is only when they have laughed themselves out that she returns to his question.

  “It’s Eden, I suppose. Have you noticed that there are no real fights? Some scuffles, but nothing very serious, and the other children soon prise them apart. They have lived in each other’s skins—in their needs and wants. I suppose it makes a difference.” Etta May sighs, wishes once more she had a cigarette there to help her think. “Only it’s not for us, Balthazar. We are too old, see. Have you noticed that even Charlie keeps a little apart? He makes his camp on the other side of that hill. We are just not bred for this. But most of these children are right around ten, eleven years old. They are Smoke-born. It’s the first thing they knew.”

  “You are telling me this camp is the future?”

  “Who knows, Balthazar? Don’t fret. The future, hon, it always looks ugly to us old farts.”

  [ 4 ]

  They fall silent after that but remain on the hillside, enjoying each other’s company and the warmth of the sun. But when the clouds begin to bunch once more and Balthazar starts getting up, she reaches out and stays him, her plump hand on his wrist. There is something else she wants
to talk to Balthazar about. Something she wants him to do.

  “What?” he asks.

  “That man. The Smokeless One. Livingstone. The birds all flock to him, like he has birdseed in his blood. Little Timmy’s taken a shine to him and now he sits there all day whispering into the child’s ear. He’s up to no good.”

  Balthazar’s answer comes out quiet; cautious. “You can’t know what he’s up to, Em—he doesn’t smoke. Perhaps he simply has an ugly mug.”

  Etta May waves away the objection. Her gut is her gut. “Talk to him, will you, Balthazar? Sound him out. Let him know we are keeping an eye on him.”

  Again Balthazar is careful in his answer. “Why me?” he asks.

  “You are the one in britches.”

  Balthazar snorts, thinks. “I will talk to Charlie.”

  It is only then she understands his hesitation. Balthazar is afraid.

  [ 5 ]

  She has to do it herself then. It should not take much courage: it is not quite dark yet and Livingstone has made his camp within shouting distance of the Angel and his court. She will be well watched.

  All the same, a dread overcomes Etta May as she approaches the man who is arranging his blankets and stirring his own private fire, then puts a pot of water on to boil. Birds perch all around him, move only when his feet or hands push them away. As she draws close, she is struck by the smoothness of his movements. It is as though his body belongs to a younger man. The face is lined and grey and inexpressive. He does not pause or greet her though she’d swear he’s seen her from afar.

  “Mr. Livingstone,” she says at last.

  He looks up but does not reply.

  “A word if I may.” She gathers herself, forces herself to step closer. “I would like to know what you are talking to the child about. To Timmy.”

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  Livingstone’s voice is flat, the rudeness of the answer purely in the words themselves. Etta May, by contrast, cannot hide her irritation.

  “You know yourself he does not talk, Mr. Livingstone. He is a mute.”

  This seems to interest the man. He looks at her more fully, considers her.

  “I think he can talk just fine. He just thinks that the Smoke is enough.” He smiles, a bland event, though not entirely free of humour. “You might say we are well matched. A mute who talks in Smoke, and a man who’s deaf to it.”

  “You are up to something. Something bad.”

  He returns to his work. It is almost like she has not spoken at all.

  “I will tell Timmy. I will warn him about you.”

  “Do,” he says, bent over and not looking. “He won’t listen to you. You do not matter to him. Nor to me.”

  For a moment she is lost for words. She feels her face flush at the directness of his dismissal; feels diminished, six years old and without rights.

  “That may be true, Mr. Livingstone, but we both know there’s one person Timmy will listen to. And I will make sure they speak. Good night!”

  She all but shakes her fist at the man, then marches off in rotund indignation. Charlie is camped on the other side of the hill and it is too dark now to go find him. Never mind, she will warn him in the morning. Etta May returns to where Balthazar has built their tent, in a little clearing amongst the trees; beds herself down along his narrow shape, and hums a little song to herself that has ushered her to sleep for as long as she remembers.

  She does not see, therefore, how the man who does not smoke sits hunkered before his fire, chewing on her parting words; does not see him come to a decision. Nor does she see him rise in the darkest hour of the night and navigate the hill ridge by thin moonlight. Nor yet does she witness a great portion of the birds flocking ’round the man like an extension of his shadow abandon him and lake and campsite, and go flying out to sea, as though they have heard or seen or smelled something irresistible to their natures.

  Livingstone ignores their flight and checks his pockets for a knife.

   IRISH SEA

  [ 1 ]

  They have been warned not to sail too close to land. Should wind and weather give them no choice, they are to head for the shelter of the Irish coast rather than the Welsh or Cornish. The sailor need not be privy to the captain’s orders to understand why. They are carrying a disease. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that they have become a disease. The ship’s infected. Its very steel is riddled with the rot. Not that you could tell from afar, other than perhaps by the sheer density of barnacles threading the hull, right at the waterline, painting an outline of the hold. That and by their speed. Something’s wrong with the engine. It started playing up mid-voyage and has been steadily growing worse. The machinists complain they cannot build pressure. The ship is limping to their destination.

  Then, too, there is the anger. The crew has been issued sweets—an unheard-of luxury!—distributed afresh every morning to everyone on board, from cook to mate to cabin boy. It’s like Captain’s handing out gold. During the day it dulls their anger, culls the Smoke. At night, it finds them in their dreams: down in the crew quarters, where they sleep hammock to hammock. Those hammocks were white when they started out, freshly bleached and stiff with starch. Now they droop limp and black from their ropes, the fabric grown heavy from its patina of Soot. There is a rhythm to those dreams, a strange kind of drumming, like the ship’s own heartbeat. Sailors wake, shrouded in Smoke, and shove the last of their sweets into their mouths. If they have them. If not, they get up to mischief. There have been suicides and knifings; two serious fires set by sailors belowdecks. Some say the engine is failing because a machinist took a hammer to its valves. They are a sickroom—a madhouse—sailing across half the world to deliver their sickness.

  The sailor has often wondered what those who’ll receive it have done to deserve such a gift.

  [ 2 ]

  Their self-imposed quarantine also extends to other ships. Whatever it is they meet, whether fishing boat or cargo steamer, they are under strict orders not to approach and warn them away with a complex series of signals painted onto the wind by their signalman’s flags. This includes other Company vessels. Not long ago two Company ships came up on them from behind. They passed at a league’s distance, going full steam. Only the captain and first mate command binoculars, but despite this the rumour spread amongst the crew that the ships’ decks were packed with sepoy soldiers, “prow to stern.” At the time, they were already nearing England; were too close to it, in fact, to make a riddle of the ships’ destination. The sailor, a native of Surat, has pondered this fact. Soldiers, he knows, mean war, mean occupation. Someone’s heel is being planted on the land. He surprises himself with a pang of pride at the thought that it should be the sahibs’ soil and his brothers’ heel. They used to whisper of such a thing when he was a child.

  Now that they have limped past the narrows of Saint George’s Channel, it is fishing vessels they meet and warn away, not Company steamers. The ship is listing a little, as though they are taking water; there are some who say that the thing in their hold has the power to change weight and unbalances them when it chooses to be heavy. The sailor does not believe this. He has gone to a city school and knows that physics are physics; that everything on earth is bound by rules. But he also has eyes in his head and has seen what he has seen.

  He has gone down into the hold only once, on a dare. Most of the sailors have, at some point on the voyage, drawn by the same strange fascination that a sore holds for the sick. Few have made a habit of such visits. The old servant who looked after the prisoner has long been relieved of his duties. His immediate successor disappeared and is thought to have thrown himself into the sea. Now the cabin boy has taken over; it is said he has devised an ingenious way of feeding the prisoner without going near him, a matter of boathooks, ropes, and baskets.

  For all that, the things he saw do
wn in the hold did not fill the sailor with any immediate horror. There was the fungus he had heard of, black and thick like the carpets in rich men’s houses; the tiny mushrooms growing out of floor and walls; islands of barnacles that wrinkled the inner hull, giving way in places to patches of oddly patterned clams, finger-long and feeding on God knew what.

  There was the box-machine, too, its metal sides split and bulging, the top squeezed open from the inside, giving a glimpse of the black rock: distended, growing, absorbing the very steel into its substance and twisting the machine’s pipes around until they pointed outwards like spikes.

  And then, of course, there was their fabled ghost, haunting the hold with his foot tethered to the floor by a chain so overgrown it looked braided from seaweed; rail-thin, feverish, and heinously filthy, his face so Soot-plastered that he was as black as any southern Tamil come to Bombay to beg for work.

  Thomas Argyle.

  When the sailor first heard it was he, he felt the same thrill as all the other native sailors; the same thrill that led some to plot mutiny and saw them shot and ditched into the sea.

  But seeing the prisoner’s sorry state and watching him pace at the limits of his living tether; damp, dark Smoke rising out of his skin at every step; his closed lips humming a melody that captured the strange rhythms of the sailors’ angry dreams—the thrill died away and was replaced by disgust and pity for this creature more beast than man.

  The pacing stopped when, after a whole minute of the sailor’s watching, the chained one suddenly became aware of the intrusion. He looked up then; looked at the sailor with eyes whose whites were threaded by a web of fine black veins; and tore aside the blanket into which he was wrapped. There, in his naked flank, on the same side as his tethered ankle, something wet glistened like a wound. The prisoner’s hand went to it—perhaps, thought the sailor, he wished to beg for medical aid. The Soot-stained fingers searched the skin; reached into it, down below the bend of the lowest of the ribs. He plucked at himself and produced between thumb and forefinger a delicate stem, crested by the thin black hood of a forest mushroom, and tiny, dangling roots wet with the prisoner’s blood. And as he stood, proffering it like a gift, a new expression came into the prisoner’s face, and for the first time he looked human, full of horror at himself, the mouth a black-lipped oval shaping a silent plea for help.