Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  Still he proceeds.

  He draws her arm closer, lifts the syringe. Just in this moment, Eleanor surprises him with a movement. She steps closer and kisses his cheek.

  Renfrew flinches. How long has it been since these cheeks have felt the imprint of another’s lips? Most likely, he has not been kissed since childhood and then only by his nursemaid. His mother would not have been willing to put up with his infant Smoke. The kiss is like sticking a finger in the hole beside his navel.

  It hurts.

  All the same Renfrew plays along. The gesture suits the moment and there is a beautiful, formal chasteness to the kiss, a supplication that he can’t resist. It is a good hurt, this, a fitting hurt, purifying, clean.

  Until Eleanor smokes.

  There is a trick to it. Her right arm has long dropped from its extended position back down to her side. A sewing needle lay hidden between her fingers. Now she pricks herself, a deep stitch, right into the flesh beneath her hip. The pain is immediate; Smoke in her mouth. She breathes it right onto her uncle’s cheek.

  Renfrew’s self-control is absolute. His body knows what is happening long before he has understood it. It fights the intrusion with all the craft of discipline acquired through a lifetime. Eleanor twists the needle, digs it deeper. She is looking for something, buried deep. She pictures it: that sealed container (smooth-walled, metal-hard; a silo, a cage, a train engine boiler) where she has learned to trap her pain and rage since early childhood. She finds it at last; digs the needle into its steel wall. A single puncture; the pressure inside is such that it’s enough. In a moment she is gushing black. Along with a cruelty grown fat feeding upon itself, a phrase wells up. She last heard it as a child, heard it rising through the floorboards, chanted over and over by the educated voice of Julius Spencer, while Spencer’s dog was slipping teeth into the schoolmaster’s gut. Smoke for me, Master Renfrew.

  Smoke for me.

  Her uncle makes one last attempt to escape. But by now her left arm has shed his grip and taken hold of his head, pressing his cheek firmly to her lips. And still Smoke pours from her half-open mouth. Into his skin she breathes it; her hand clinging to his beard, his jaw; his bony chest pressed into the hard front of her harness.

  Then Renfrew breaks.

  It happens first at the far side of his face, there between her fingers clamped into his skin. A sudden jet of black, thin and dense. It is as though she has shot him and the bullet has carried through. Then bullet turns whip, leaps away only to snap back onto itself, snakes around his neck and shoves its tip into his open mouth, right down his throat, all the way to his broken bowels.

  Renfrew erupts. His own silo of pain has been breached. Together they burn, uncle and niece, set alight from groin to scalp, hurling their hate at the world.

  It finds the parliamentarians. Some try to protect themselves: they shove sweets into their mouths, or pull their embroidered Smoke masks hastily over their faces. But there is not one who does not catch the Renfrews’ stench. It creeps into their bodies, soils them inside out; exposes each to all and strips their Lord Protector naked, shames him in his frailty and doubt.

  [ 4 ]

  She won’t allow it to go on for long. There is no need. Her uncle is finished. He will never again command these men. But now the Smoke is in the room it starts to feed on everybody’s fear. A riot looms, a lynching. Renfrew’s death is on the air.

  To prevent it, Eleanor does the impossible. She stoppers herself. She seals the rend within the depths of her; pulls the needle from her flesh and drops it on the floor. Her Smoke continues unabated, but she has begun to shape it, refining her uncle’s darkness into something subtler, spinning a finer yarn from his black wool. Her body filters the rage out of it; binds it in her flesh. One can see it in the colours. Renfrew’s charcoal plume passes through her and emerges brightened, dyed. Soon the room’s aggression becomes infused with purpose, its despair with defiance, even hope.

  One by one the parliamentarians turn to her. All of them have long risen and invaded the valley between the twin rows of benches. Those who have donned masks remove them now; blackened lumps of sweets are spat carelessly upon the floor. They drink her in, this girl to whom the Smoke itself has bent both knees. She, too, turns to face them: blood on her hip, a bright red ring, encircled by Soot.

  I am turning into a flag, she thinks giddily. Now I must nail myself to a high pole.

  She begins to walk, a ritual measure to her step, the crowd of men parting on her approach. Here comes the bride. Behind her, a crack sounds. She turns to see that her uncle has hurled his temple at the edge of the lectern, splitting his scalp. Unconsciousness releases him from his Smoke. A black mist hovers, then rains down on him as Soot.

  “Please,” she says to one of the parliamentarians, a young dandy with long, sculpted hair. “Carry him to his chamber then go fetch Lady Naylor. She will look after him. Tell her I said so. Quick now, he is bleeding.” And in that same quiet voice underwritten by the weight of her Smoke, she adds to two others, “Will you carry the crate for me? The one my uncle had brought in? I thank you.”

  Then she walks out of the chamber, trailing her Smoke, feeling like a fraud who tricks people by the sheer depth of her need. A bridal train of men follows her five steps behind.

  They are heading to the pier.

   FATHERS

  [ 1 ]

  “Home sweet home! God, I’m all out of puff—and all I did was drive! It’s nerves, that’s what it is. All the way back I kept asking myself: what if he’s gone? Stuffed his pockets full of beetles and absconded. It drove me half insane. But here you are, sitting around and eating tinned meat. All is well? Good! Wait, I have brought you mail.”

  Smith is indeed “out of puff,” or at any rate flushed and in a high state of excitement. He has found Nil at lunch; hovers around him, then squeezes him into an awkward embrace when he rises. They are in the upstairs part of the warehouse; one has to shout against the subterranean buzz. As Smith digs through his satchel, he continues talking, too excited to be mum.

  “All’s well at court, or so I am told. My clerks will have delivered the jars of spore by now. Apparently, our Lord Protector has called an extraordinary parliamentary meeting for this very morning.”

  He finds what he is looking for at last and pulls a sealed envelope from the satchel.

  “There,” Smith beams. “From your girlfriend. Please note that I have not opened it! I was sorely tempted. But then I thought it’s bound to be love stuff. And besides, we are partners.”

  Nil receives the letter and opens it. He reads the single piece of paper enclosed therein, trying not to move his lips as he does so, then folds it back into its envelope and quickly shoves it in his pocket.

  “Well, boy, what is it?”

  Nil is thinking fast. “Nothing,” he says. “Love stuff.”

  “I knew it! I wish you could see your face, boy. And they always say you darkies cannot blush.”

  [ 2 ]

  Smith is hungry. He casts a cursory glance at the breeding room (“It’s like a swimming pool full of bugs, isn’t it?”), washes his hands in the rain barrel they have set up outside, then settles down onto a box next to Nil (“I see you have been collecting crates. Good thinking, boy, we will need to pack up more bug snot soon”). His table manners remain rustic. He picks the half-eaten tin of corned beef from off the floor and starts spooning it out with his fingers.

  “God, but this is good!”

  Other than his relish, Smith has also brought fresh provisions, including a basket of strawberries. It takes their explosion of flavour to jolt Nil out of his silence. His mind is racing; a half-formed plan disrupted by a page-long note.

  “Did you hear anything else?” he asks abruptly. “From your clerks.”

  Smith shrugs. “Not much. I received a letter from
Miss Cooper. She is leasing out Company sepoys to Renfrew—I’d been wondering where he was going to conjure an army from! God, that will have cost a pretty penny. As for herself, she is leaving the island just as soon as she has overseen their arrival. Running away. A cautious girl!”

  Nil won’t share Smith’s smile. “She told you all this? Then you are…partners?”

  Smith shakes his head. “No, not quite. There is mutual interest, see, but no trust. When I spoke to her in the Keep we kept dancing around one another, dropping hints. She told me she was selling Renfrew a weapon; and I hinted I had a new kind of sweet, only better. I even offered her a taste! You know what she said? ‘I will try it once it is past the experimental stage.’ Oh, she’s pert, that girl!” He laughs, sees Nil’s look, misinterprets it. “Now don’t get ideas, boy. I’m a family man! I don’t play around with girls. Still, there is something there: old money and new. A tacit alliance. A competition, too, of course.”

  Smith continues eating, first finishing the strawberries, then opening a tin of beans and wolfing it down, too.

  “Travel,” he beams. “Makes you hungry.”

  Nil, meanwhile, has stood up and started pacing. Eleanor’s letter is working away in him. He speaks abruptly, incoherently. “You know he will start a Storm. Renfrew. Up north.”

  Smith nods. “And then invade it with inoculated sepoys. They’ll be marching through a graveyard. Old Hegel’s Slaughterhouse of History, eh? I never thought of it so literally.”

  “But the Storm won’t stay north. It will spread. South. Perhaps across the sea.”

  “No doubt it will. And we—you and I—have a total monopoly on the one thing that provides shelter from it. It’s a perfect economy.”

  A pause falls, filled by the strumming of beetles. There are moments, fleeting, eerie, when all of them seem to fall into rhythm, so it is as though there were only one beetle, moving its pincers, clapping its giant wings.

  “We should go north, Smith. We should load up the beetles and go north.” Nil feels his heart pound with the words. He hastens on before the Company man can reply. “It’s good business, see. We can sell the inoculant to Minetowns. Renfrew won’t like it, but what can he do, he needs it, too! We can make twice the money. It’s a risk, sure, but a profitable one.”

  There is urgency in the words, in the look he flashes to Smith. This is what it feels like to have hope. It’s not just that they can save people—that part of the idea is newly formed; is too young yet to have acquired any weight. It’s the thought that they can do this together, Smith and he; that Nil will be spared a choice, an act.

  Smith, for his part, has stopped eating. It’s the idea that he’s chewing now: quite literally so, his jaws moving, tongue busy amongst teeth.

  “It’s bold,” he says at last. “Unprecedented. You and I, selling snake oil out of the back of our motorcar! Only our snake oil works and costs a fortune…” He laughs at the thought, delighted, then rises and starts pacing, rubbing the back of his neck with his palm. “Alas, it is too risky. The Workers’ Council—they are slippery customers. They may decide to rob us and call it a ‘redistribution of assets’—no really, they are pompous like that. And then Renfrew is not a man to trifle with. We are vulnerable. What are we, after all? A boy and a fat man, guarding a basement full of bugs. All we have to protect us is a contract. We better keep to it.”

  For a moment longer, businessman wrestles with adventurer. Then the latter surrenders.

  “Good capital is conservative. It’s how life is, Nil. At the very moment of success, one starts longing for the early weeks of struggle. You aren’t mad at me, no? Good. Then let’s shake on it, or better yet, embrace. There! Look, you’ve made me tear up with your idea! I better find my hanky.”

  And Nil hugs him back, resting his chin on the big man’s shoulder, unprepared for the knot within his chest, trying in vain to unpick the strands of sorrow and guilt.

  [ 3 ]

  Later—though not very much later—Nil resumes their conversation.

  “What next then? What will we do now?”

  “Go back to milking beetles. Two of the clerks are coming soon, to help us, and I have written to friends in the Netherlands to send us five more, men personally loyal to me. One of them is a trained engineer, a Swiss chap, very clever. Perhaps he can build some kind of machine to help us with the work; mechanise the process. This was fun, but we are barons of industry, after all.”

  “When will they come?”

  “The clerks? In a few days. It will take the others a week or two, I imagine. Once they are here, we—” Smith interrupts himself, whips around and scans the walls of the factory. “There, that sound. What was that?”

  Nil does not look up. “Ghost.”

  Smith furrows his brow at that, then laughs. “Why yes! I had almost forgotten about him. You know, we really need to flush him out. We can’t build a factory that’s haunted. It’s just not done.”

  [ 4 ]

  Later yet—Smith sitting on the naked floor, leaning his back against a crate while reading a month-old international newspaper his clerks have given him, while Nil stands tall, hovering behind him, as though trying to read over his shoulder—Nil says softly,

  “It’s time you told me. Where I am from. You promised me.”

  Smith stops reading. From behind and above, all Nil sees of him is the bald red pate of his head and its frame of whiskers.

  “You are right,” Smith says at last. “But I don’t think I brought a map of South America. It’s not much use without a good map.”

  “Tell me what you remember,” urges Nil. “You said you went there. Describe it to me.”

  And Smith, reluctantly, not turning around but speaking to the dark of the warehouse, starts telling his story. He describes the river first of all, “tea brown and as though rotting, like a flowing swamp”; the rusty steam tug that carried him and a native guide upriver, following the outlines of a hand-drawn seventeenth-century map. After weeks of travel, on ever narrower branches of the river, the tug deposited them on a shore and promised to wait for them there. He and his servant—“a boy just like you, a few years older perhaps, a line of fuzz above his lip”—worked their way inland, along a corridor of jungle just a little less densely overgrown than the rest, suggesting a path.

  “It was machete work. People say the jungle there is ‘fecund.’ I tell you what it is—it is obscene. Anything will grow on anything. You wake up and have maggots burrowing under your skin, like you’re already dead. Little flowers shooting out of your boot leather! You spit and it takes seed; grows fronds, or tentacles. And the creepy crawlies there! Simply disgusting.

  “After a few days we met our first native tribe. We had gifts on us. Some cash, some glass beads and other junk. They were butt-naked—or very nearly so. Savages. But even they had already been touched by the white man. They asked for whiskey, will you believe it, whiskey and brandy. There was a caoutchouc farm just twenty miles from where we were hacking out path. Cao-ochu—‘tree tears,’ that’s what my guide says it means. Mind, twenty miles in that jungle is like a different continent.”

  The tribe had heard about the people who do not smoke. They could make no sense of the lines and squiggles of the map Smith showed to them but described the way in terms of foliage and day walks.

  On they travelled, ever deeper into the jungle. For the first few weeks, they saw some evidence of other tribes—shadows watching them from trees, too suspicious to approach—then no one. No-man’s-land, the end of all paths. The jungle so dense that midday felt like dusk. The native guide cut himself on a thorn and developed a fever. He raved as he walked.

  And still they carried on. A swampy creek, a little waterfall, served as points of orientation: they were marked on the map. Another day, Vasconcelos’s map implied. Two at the most.

  “I looked ou
t for the flower, of course, the original Smoke Poppy. It’s what I came for. But there were so many bloody flowers: growing from the soil, the tree bark; whole root systems floating in thin air. I collected some and threw them away again. I suppose I had pictured something different: a nice bouquet I could harvest, supplied with a nice Latin tag. By then we had almost run out of food and were starving ourselves, trying to make it last.”

  At last they found the village, or what remained of it. There might have been many huts once but the jungle had eaten them. There remained a clearing, now reduced to a crescent of beach by a stagnant pool of river water.

  “We only noticed it had been a place of habitation because someone had drawn a picture on a man-high slab of stone. A stone! Nothing but soft soil around us for scores of miles. The picture itself was meaningless: abstract lines; triangles; waves. And something that looked like a bug.

  “The village was not quite abandoned. They came out of the tree line that evening, attracted by the smell of our last tin of sardines. Three women, all past child-bearing age, tiny-framed like girls. They looked at us with stupid eyes, would not react to our gestures. I offered them a chunk of sardine but they simply stood there, vacant. I thought the jungle had rotted their brains until, all at once, one of the women stepped past the edge of light of our little campfire and squatted down in the darkness. She said a word, and the other women joined her. There was something to the way they moved. Haste but also something…careful. Reverent even. Like three nuns rushing into a church.

  “We shone a light over to them. They were squatting very low, their faces pushed down low between their pointy knees. And there, in the midst of their little circle: a beetle. I realised at once I had seen it before. Those pictures in Vasconcelos’s notebooks. I pushed them aside and scooped it up, ignored the women’s yelling.