by Beth Thomas
Actually, don’t look too closely. I’m not really skulking. I’m in Abby’s room, and I’m rooting around in the bottom of her wardrobe. It doesn’t look good, I know, but there is a genuine, well-intentioned reason for it.
Graham started smoking when he was eight years old, which has always struck me as a little bit odd. I mean, why would someone of that age need the crutch of nicotine to help him get through the day? Was the stress of learning to tie his shoelaces just too much to handle? Did he suffer anxiety over conker matches? Maybe being called Speccy Four-Eyes really got to him, and he relieved the tension by doing the only thing an eight-year-old kid in those difficult circumstances can do: light up at lunch time.
I think he tried to quit when he was ten. He never told us an awful lot about that time, but the idea of a ten-year-old going cold turkey always intrigued me. I imagined him fretfully stirring his Sugar Puffs in the morning; nervously picking at a loose thread on his Action Man jumper; snapping at his friend Jack who wanted to know if he was coming out to climb trees; dropping his head back onto his Transformers pillow in despair when he woke up to another day without cigarettes. OK, maybe this was before the time of Transformers, but I don’t know what else a ten-year-old kid might have on his pillow in 1956. Something about Marlboro country, maybe?
There were no nicotine patches or ashtray-flavoured chewing gum in those days, I think, so I guess it was just too hard and Graham fell back into it. When he was twelve he realised that all his paper-round money was going on cigarettes, not sticker books, so he moved onto roll-ups. He very quickly discovered that a fifty-gram pouch of rolling tobacco was less than half the cost of twenty ciggies, and lasted him virtually all week, instead of one day. In his twenties, on a health kick, he started to roll filters into his fags, telling himself that it wouldn’t kill him with a filter to protect him. And there he stayed until he died of emphysema at the age of sixty-three.
I think he must have tried to quit several more times as Naomi and I were growing up, but of course we weren’t really aware of it. Only that he was often very changeable and moody, favouring one of us over the other, then reversing.
‘Jesus Christ, Daisy, can’t you ever move your sodding shoes from the hallway?’ he shouted regularly, when he came in from work. My shoes were lying in a pile of general debris, male and female, that accumulated over days. I scuttled downstairs and grabbed my shoes, noticing Darren’s trainers and Naomi’s strappy sandals also left there. As well as several items of post on the floor by the letter box, Darren’s leather jacket draped over the chair, a comb, a cardigan, a bunch of keys and a crash helmet. All not mine.
‘Why are you only having a go at me?’ I whined. I was about fourteen, so it’s allowed. ‘There’s everyone’s stuff here …’
‘Just move your crap,’ he’d seethed. ‘I’m sick to the back teeth of seeing it. Christ, Daisy, you’re nearly an adult, don’t you think it’s about time you started acting like one?’
‘Um, no, actually. Not for four more years.’
Of course my smart retort had the desired effect of illuminating for him very clearly just exactly how unfair and unreasonable he was being, and he calmed right down. Ha ha.
A couple of weeks later, he would be on Naomi’s back, moaning about her mess – coffee cups in the living room, clothes in the kitchen, handbags, jackets, crumbs, washing up. And I would be able to get away with anything. I loved it that way round. Left my coats and shoes all over the place, just for fun, as a kind of experiment. Once I deliberately put my school bag with books and folders and pencil shavings spilling out of it in the middle of the dining table, after it had been set for dinner. Graham came in, saw it, and walked straight past it towards a peanut butter jar with the lid off that he knew Naomi had left there that morning. I found her crying in her room once, when she was about eighteen and I was sixteen. She’d just endured a prolonged rant about how she treated the place like a hotel, coming back for meals then going out again, parking her car where she liked without regard for anyone else, leaving her shit lying around in every room. She was well into week three of being on the receiving end by this time, so it was quite likely to switch fairly soon. Of course, later on that year, the unpleasantness switched to me more or less permanently. But this was before that, before everything turned so nightmarish.
‘He’s so horrible,’ she’d sobbed, while I sat with her on her bed. ‘No wonder I don’t ever want to be here.’
‘Oh come on, that’s not true,’ I’d said, rubbing her shin. ‘He’s lovely sometimes.’ That was true. He’d been smuggling me cigarettes for months. I’d sometimes find a pack of twenty in my bed when I got into it.
‘No he isn’t,’ she’d sniffed. ‘He’s just nasty, all the time. You know it Daisy, you must have seen it. You’re only saying that because he’s not getting at you. If he ever treated you like this, you’d feel the same as me.’
‘What?! He does treat me like this! What are you talking about?’
She regarded me coolly. ‘No he doesn’t. He goes easy on you because you’re the baby. They both do.’
‘They do not!’
‘Yeah, well, I knew you’d say that. You don’t know how horrible Graham is to me sometimes. And it’s even worse when I see him being really lovely to you.’
‘Oh my God, Nomes, that’s so not true! Haven’t you noticed that he favours one of us, then switches?’
‘No.’
‘You’re kidding? Are you honestly telling me that you think he’s nice to me all the time?’
‘He is.’
‘No he isn’t. God, I can’t believe this! Just wait a couple of weeks. Actually, it’s more likely to be a couple of days, then you’ll notice. He’ll start doing nice things for you again, and start coming down on me like falling masonry again. Just wait.’
‘I don’t believe you …’
‘OK, so you don’t remember him picking you up from that club at two in the morning last month? And, oh, who gave you the money to get in? And didn’t he make sure he kept a dinner warm for you that night you got held up at work? And he set that programme about army recruitment up to record for you, because you said six months ago that you were thinking about it.’
She was thoughtful, then shook her head. ‘Those were isolated incidents. It’s obvious to everyone that you’re the favourite. All my friends have noticed it, you know. I reckon it’s just you who thinks it’s OK.’ She’d wiped her face at this point and sat up. ‘And why the fuck wouldn’t you? You’ve got it easy.’
She was wrong, and realised it eventually. Graham had been fairly pleasant to both of us for some time – no doubt in smoking phase – but then he must have had another go at quitting and the smokeless dragon was unleashed yet again. That’s when Nomes and I made our pact. We rendezvoused in her room, having both fled there after a particularly brutal and unfair tongue lashing directed for a change at both of us at once. Our miserable faces met in silence and stared at each other for several moments as Graham’s cruel words echoed in our minds. It was Naomi who spoke first.
‘You’re right,’ she said, wide eyed. ‘I’ve been paying attention and you’re right.’
‘About what?’
She jerked her head towards the door. ‘Graham. He’s horrible to you too.’
I nodded slowly.
‘I’ve thought for years that you were the favourite. But …’ She tailed off, shaking her head. ‘You’re right. He varies his favourite, from week to week.’
‘Or day to day.’
‘Yeah. God. So unpredictable.’
‘I know.’
We both stood in silence for a few moments, then, out of the blue, Naomi said, ‘Whichever one of us is out of favour when he dies will probably get disinherited.’
I frowned. ‘Fucksticks, Naomi! Where on earth did that come from?’
‘It’s obvious.’
‘No it isn’t.’
‘It is! Daze, I’m serious. One day, one of us will be cut off. I can se
e it coming.’
‘No. No way. He wouldn’t do that.’
‘Reckon he would. Bearing in mind what he’s like at the moment. What he’s been like these past few weeks. What he’s always been like.’
I thought about it for a minute, but I really couldn’t see it ever happening. Naomi was adamant.
‘We have to prepare for it, Daisy. It’s gonna happen, and we need to make a pact, right now. Let’s agree that if one of us is left out, the other one will split their share exactly fifty-fifty, so that we both get an equal amount. Even though it will mean the one not left out will only end up with half as much as they would have done. But the one who is left out won’t get nothing. What do you think? Fair?’
I felt a huge rush of affection for her then as I looked at her anxious face. And I agreed, in a heartbeat. It was a lovely sisterly thing to agree to, and it meant we were both protected. Plus I was sure it would never come to it anyway. Mum was going to live forever so Graham would obviously die first. Plus he would never ever do something so terrible. We grinned at each other, and hugged tightly, united more completely in that moment than ever before or since. Our sisterhood had never been stronger.
Graham’s emphysema really started to take a hold of him about four or five years before he actually died from it. Shouting about shoes in the hallway or coffee cups left on the floor would cause a desperate coughing fit that left him either leaning against the wall or slumped into an armchair, red in the face, so he stopped doing it. Those final years of his life, while my mum was fighting for hers, he was in and out of hospital experiencing periods of extreme shortness of breath, coughing, wheezing and difficulty exhaling that left him weak and frightened. He stopped smoking then, of course. It would have been madness to continue in those circumstances. Like losing a leg to a crocodile, then hopping back to ask it if it wanted to have another go. The symptoms of emphysema are irreversible, but all his doctors said that he could prolong what time he had left by stopping smoking immediately.
‘I’ll never smoke again,’ he promised my mum as she sat by his hospital bed. He promised the same thing again a year later as he sat by hers. Maybe the stress of trying to cope with a wife dying from breast cancer was too much for him, though, because I knew that, against the wishes of all his doctors, all the nurses that visited him and helped him at home, all his friends, his family, his children, and his stepdaughters, he was smoking again.
I can’t blame him really. I found dealing with my mum dying incredibly stressful too. I dealt with it in a Jaffa Cake frenzy, and by being increasingly unpleasant to everybody around me. We all have our little vices. I found a snippy word to the checkout girl, or a sarcastic comment in the post office queue to be just as satisfying as a quick Benson & Hedges out the bedroom window.
You’d think that spending years of my childhood listening to someone wheezing and rasping every time he went up and down the stairs or got up from the sofa, and coughing until he retched and his eyes watered every morning when he got out of bed, would be the ultimate deterrent to ever taking up smoking. But I found that it held a kind of fascination for me. Graham seemed to suffer so much for his art. What could possibly be so good that someone would go through all that, just to keep doing it?
By the time I was fifteen, I was already caught in the stranglehold of a full-blown nicotine addiction. It had taken me several months to get there, but I persevered. The nausea and sweating, not to mention explosive coughing, dizziness and near-vomiting I experienced on the first try could not possibly be what Graham loved so much. Why would he want to keep doing it if it just made you feel like throwing up? There had to be something more. So I kept trying, and trying, and trying, until eventually, inevitably, I found out.
Naively I thought that no one knew about it, because I sucked Polos immediately after every cigarette; and if I smoked at the bus stop or on the walk home, I went very slowly, and often took a detour, the better to allow the fresh air to wipe out any lingering odours. At home, I only smoked out of my bedroom window, when I was sure I would not be disturbed. I found out years later that when Mum cleared the gutter in the autumn of the year I turned sixteen, thinking it was clogged with leaves, she found instead that it was clogged with fag butts. She didn’t say anything. She wasn’t even surprised. She’d known the entire time, of course, that I had been smoking. The smell isn’t just on your breath; it’s in your hair, your clothes, your fingertips, under your nails, and probably seeps out of your pores the same way that garlic does the morning after a chicken balti. But the only time she ever spoke to me about it was after discovering my cigarettes and a lighter in a Sainsbury’s carrier bag rolled up and tucked away safely – I thought – inside the Tampax box under my bed, a few months after my seventeenth birthday. She’d gone in there to borrow a tampon. It seems ridiculous to me now that I hadn’t predicted that this might happen. Hadn’t even considered it. What, a woman in her forties, needing sanitary protection? As far as I was concerned, she’d had her children, she was old and didn’t need that kind of thing any more. Never had, actually. Never had sex, either.
‘Oh my Daisy Duck,’ she said to me that evening, ‘don’t smoke, sweetheart. Please don’t smoke.’
‘I don’t, Mum,’ I replied, not quite meeting her eye.
She just looked at me without saying anything for a few seconds. ‘All right, well, that’s good,’ she said eventually. ‘But don’t start, my darling girl. Don’t ever start. Don’t be dependent on anything, or anyone, to make you happy. Be strong. Be stronger than that. You can exist in the world with only you to rely on, only you, yourself. Find other ways to be happy.’
‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ I said, meeting her eyes now and finding real anxiety there, ‘I won’t ever smoke. I’ve seen what it’s doing to Graham. I don’t want to go through that. No way.’
She narrowed her eyes at me, just to let me know that she knew the truth. She didn’t need to do more than that. She knew. And I knew that she knew. Then she nodded. ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ she said. ‘You’re better than that.’ She didn’t mention Graham, who even at that moment could be heard coughing fruitily in the next room. But she didn’t need to. He’d effectively brought himself into the conversation as a warning all on his own. ‘You must be a slave to nothing,’ she added darkly. ‘To nothing, and to no one. That will weaken you. Have you got any homework?’
I gave up the next day.
When Graham started again, she was already very seriously ill for the second time. Except this time we knew she wasn’t going to get better. He tried to keep his habit secret from us all but she was probably aware. I certainly was. He was quiet and tolerant so much more of the time for starters. And on top of that dead giveaway were all the tell-tale signs of a secret smoker, which I was very familiar with, of course. After every meal, he’d find some excuse to pop outside for ten minutes. Getting something out of the car; checking the padlock on the shed; calling in on Elsie at number 10. Then when he came back in, he was always eating a Polo or sucking on a mint humbug. He’d lock himself in the bathroom for half an hour at a time, then leave all the windows open afterwards, even in mid-winter. ‘I wouldn’t go in the bathroom for a while,’ he’d say with a grin, coming back downstairs. ‘I lit a match in there, but it’s still a bit poisonous.’
‘I can’t understand why anyone would ever smoke,’ Abby would say to me whenever I talked about it. ‘It’s like committing suicide really really slowly. I mean, you might as well put a stick of dynamite between your teeth and light the end. Or put a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger. I just don’t get it.’ She didn’t mention it after Graham had died, though. The silence of his gravestone spoke loudly enough for anyone.
I’ve found some fairly interesting things in this wardrobe, including a shiny pink wig and a hideous devil mask with bloody teeth that I’m hoping is more to do with Halloween than something she and Tom might have used in this room. Truthfully, I’ve got no memory of either of them ever wearing this mask, but I
have to believe it was worn to a party I didn’t go to. The alternative is making me feel even more uncomfortable than I was already. I handle it and the wig as little as possible, using only my fingertips to put them back where I found them. They’re not what I’m looking for.
I pull my phone out of my back pocket and click open the photos folder. The most recent picture is one I took about five minutes ago and features the inside of Abby’s wardrobe, before I started rummaging through it. Quickly I rearrange all the clothes and boxes in the wardrobe so that they match the photo exactly, then carefully close the door. I’ve learned from experience here.
My next stop is under the bed and thankfully I find what I’m looking for fairly quickly. I was dreading having to look in the bedside drawer. I say thankfully, but actually I’m not at all happy with what I’ve found. It’s an open packet of Silk Cut cigarettes and a box of matches, wrapped up in a carrier bag inside the Tampax box she keeps here. Evidently she remembered me telling her about my childhood hiding place and decided it was as good as any. I sit back on my heels and stare at the booty in my hand. This is not good. Abby has always been so completely against smoking of any kind, I’m pretty surprised to have my suspicions confirmed. The signs were so easy to spot: always eating Polos; rushing up for a shower as soon as she came in from work; constantly washing her hands. I’d seen it, and done it, all before. But what is Abby doing smoking at all? What on earth could have prompted her to start? At twenty-eight? No one starts smoking at twenty-eight; that’s when everyone is giving up. She can’t be bowing to peer pressure at this age, surely? Or wanting to look more grown up? Trying to look cool? Turning eight?
My phone quacks suddenly and I fling the cigarette packet away from me in panic, as if the person on the other end can see me illicitly rooting around under my best friend’s bed. Not that there’s an un-illicit way of doing it. A licit way. No, that’s not right. What is the word? Legal? No, that doesn’t seem right either. What I’m doing isn’t illegal, it’s just grotesquely immoral. Or is it amoral? Hell, this is a minefield.