Smoke

by Dan Vyleta

  “Yes,” says Collingwood, having refound his tongue. He almost shouts it, in fact, his voice an octave higher than it was but a minute ago.

  “And,” asks Julius, matching the shout with a whisper, “do you love your father as the Holy Book instructs us to?”

  Collingwood need not answer. The Smoke does it for him. One notices it at the shoulders first, and where the sweat has plastered the nightshirt to his skin: a black, viscous blot, no bigger than a penny. It’s like he’s bleeding ink. Then the first wisps of Smoke appear, stream from these dark little spots, leaving gritty Soot behind.

  Collingwood hangs his head, and trembles.

  “You must learn to master yourself,” says Julius, says it very gently, angling away the light. “You may go now. It is well.”

  ф

  There is no punishment, or rather none that Julius need administer. The stains on Collingwood’s shirt can be washed out only by soaking them for hours in concentrated lye. The only lye in the whole school is held by the school laundry and is tightly guarded. When he hands over his linen the next morning, as he must, the shirt will be identified by his monogram; his name taken down. The Master of Smoke and Ethics will have a conversation with Collingwood, not entirely dissimilar in nature to the proceedings of this late-night court. A report will be written and sent to his parents, and sanctions imposed upon him. Perhaps he will lose his badge and the privileges of a prefect; perhaps he will be sent to scrub the teachers’ lavatory, or spend his free time in the library cataloguing books. Perhaps he won’t be allowed to join the other schoolboys on the Trip. He shows no anger as he stands up trembling from the chair, and his look at Julius is like a dog’s that has been beaten. It wants to know if it’s still loved.

  Thomas gazes after him longer than most as Collingwood slinks from the room. If he was free to go he would go after him; would sit with him, though not speak. He wouldn’t find the words. Charlie might: he’s good with words, and more than that. He has a special talent, a gentleness of the heart. It allows him to feel what others feel and speak to them frankly, as an equal. Thomas turns to his friend, but Charlie’s eyes are on Julius. More boys are to be examined tonight. A second piece of paper is about to be picked from the sack; a second name about to be read.

  ф

  They call him Hum-Slow, though his real name is Hounslow, the ninth Viscount of. He can’t be twelve yet if he’s a day. One of the youngest boarders, thin but chubby-faced, the way the young ones sometimes are. As he arrives at the chair and turns to sit down on it, his fear wrests wind from his bowels, long and protracted, like it will never stop. Imagine it: the endless growl of a fart, in a room full of schoolboys. There are some giggles yet hardly a jeer. One does not need Charlie’s talent to feel sorry for Hounslow. His body shakes so, he can barely manage his opening line.

  “Please, sir. Examine me.”

  His voice, not yet broken, tends towards a squeal. When he tries to “thank the Smoke,” he mangles it so badly that tears of frustration roll down his plump cheeks. Thomas starts forward, but Charlie stops him, gently, unobtrusively, takes hold of him by the arm. They exchange looks. Charlie has a peculiar way of looking: so simple, so honest, you forget to hide behind your own little lies. For what would Thomas do, if Charlie let him go? To interfere with the examination would be tantamount to rebelling against the Smoke itself. But Smoke is real: you can see and smell it every day, if you like. How do you rebel against a fact? And so Thomas must stay and watch Hounslow be thrown to the wolves. Though this wolf wears white and angles a lamp into which the child blinks blindly.

  “Tell me,” Julius begins, “have you been a good boy?”

  Hounslow shakes his head in terror, and a sound runs through the room very close to a moan.

  But, strange to say, the little boy survives the procedure without a single wisp. He answers all questions, answers them slowly, though his tongue seems to have gone thick with fear, and sticks out of his mouth in between answers.

  Does he love his teachers?

  Yes, he does.

  Love his peers, his books, his dormitory bed?

  Oh yes, he does, he does, and school most of all.

  What sins, then, weigh on his conscience?

  Sins too great and numerous to name.

  But name them he does, taking upon himself all the weight of guilt he can conceive of, until he is quite flattened. If he has failed his Latin test this Monday past, it is because he is “indolent” and “stupid.” If he has fought in the school yard with a classmate called Watson, it is because he, Hounslow, is “vicious” and a “little brute.” If he has wet his bed, it is because he is “vile” and has been so from birth, his mother says so herself. He is a criminal, a retrograde, a beast. “I am dirt,” Hounslow shouts, near-hysterical, “dirt,” and all the while his nightshirt stays clean, its little lace ruffles free of all Soot.

  It’s done in under ten minutes. Julius lowers the lamp and kisses the boy’s head, right on the crown, like they have seen the bishop do with the school chaplain. And when he gets up, there is something more that shows in Hounslow’s face other than relief. A note of triumph. Today, this night, he has become one of the elect. He has abased himself, admitted to all he’s ever hidden in his conscience (and some more besides), and the Smoke has judged him pure. If he gives Watson a bloody nose on the morrow, it will be with the sense of administering justice. Julius looks after him with proud amusement. Then he digs within the sack. And reads a third name, the last one. It won’t be Cooper, Charlie’s last name. Charlie is a future earl, one of the highest in the land. The powerful, Thomas has been given to understand, are rarely chosen for examination.

  “Argyle,” Julius reads, slowly and diligently, not without pleasure.

  Argyle.

  Thomas’s name.

  It would be false to say he did not expect it.

  As though split by an oar, the sea of boys now parts for him. Charlie’s hand squeezes his arm, then he’s walking. He’ll wonder at it later, this undue haste, the absence of any real will to resist, and will berate himself for cowardice. But it isn’t cowardice that shows on his face but the opposite: he’s itching to do battle. From the way he raises his chin into the light, you would have thought he was climbing into a boxing ring. Julius notices it too.

  And smiles.

  ф

  The light is blinding. Behind it, the room ceases to exist. He cannot look to Charlie for guidance or assurance, for Charlie is lost in the darkness while he, Thomas, is bathed in yellow light. Even Julius, who stands not two steps away, is but a shadow from the world beyond.

  There is something else Thomas realises. The light makes him feel naked. Not exposed, or vulnerable, but quite literally parted with his clothing, every stitch so flimsy it has turned into thin air. In itself it might not have meant that much to him. At home, he stripped many times to swim the river with his friends, and when he changes every night into his nightshirt, he does so with little thought to modesty. This is different though. The light singles him out. He is naked in a room full of people who are not. He is not prepared for how angry it makes him.

  “Start,” he growls, because Julius doesn’t, he just stands there, waiting, steadying the lamp. “Go on. I submit to the exam. And thank the Smoke. Now: ask me a question.” The chair, Thomas realises, slopes under his bottom. His feet have to push into the ground to keep himself stable.

  Julius greets his outburst calmly.

  “Impatient, are we? Though you were tardy enough about coming to school. And are slow enough about learning your lessons.”

  He unhooks the lamp and carries it closer, stands over him, bathing him in the beam.

  “You know,” Julius mouths, so quietly only Thomas can hear, “I think I can see your Smoke even now. Steaming out of every little pore. It’s disgusting.

  “But if you are so very impatient,” he goes on, louder again, his orator’s voice self-possessed and supple, “very well. I will make it easy for you. Your
examination will be a single question. Does that suit you?”

  Thomas nods, bracing himself, like you do when you expect to be punched. It is Charlie who later explains to him that it is better to unclench, absorb the hit like water.

  “Go ahead, then. Ask.”

  “Well, well.”

  Julius makes to speak, stops, interrupts himself; turns the lamp around for a brief moment and lets its beam dance over the faces of the boys. Thomas sees Charlie for half a second; not long enough to read his expression. Then the beam is back in his eyes.

  “You see,” Julius resumes, “the question I want to ask is not mine. It belongs to everyone. The whole school is asking it. Every boy who is in this room. Even the teachers have been asking it. Even your friend over there, though he mightn’t admit it. It is this: What is it that is so filthy about you, so unspeakably foul, that it made your parents ignore all custom and common sense and hide you away until your sixteenth year?

  “Or,” he adds, more slowly yet, articulating every syllable, “is it that there is something vile, disgusting about them that they were afraid you’d disclose and spread?”

  The question hits its mark: as an insult (to him, his family, the things he holds sacred) but more so as a truth, a spectre that has haunted half his life. It punctures his defences and goes to his core; wakes fear and anger and shame. The Smoke is there long before he can account for it. It is as though he is burning, burning alive without reason. Then he knows what it marks: he has hatred, murder in his heart.

  Another boy would crumple with shame. Thomas leaps. Hits Julius, headfirst, sends the lamp crashing to the floor. Its flame, unextinguished, lights their struggle from one side. To the boys who are watching they are a single shadow projected ceiling-high against the wall, two-headed and monstrous. But to them, close to the lamp, everything is crystal clear. Thomas is smoking like a wet ember. His hands are fists, raining down on Julius. Insults stream from his mouth.

  “You are nothing,” he keeps on saying, “nothing. A dog, a filthy dog, nothing.”

  His fist hits Julius in the chin and something comes loose from his mouth, a tooth, apparently, a black, rotten molar that jumps from his lips like a coughed-up sweet. There is blood, too, and more Smoke, Smoke that pours from Julius’s skin, so black and pure it stoppers Thomas’s anger.

  Immediately, Julius gains the upper hand. More than two years older, stronger, he flips the shorter boy. But rather than hitting him, he bears down with his whole body, embraces him, clings to him, rolls him into the lamp until it tips and smothers its own light. All at once Thomas realises what Julius is doing. He is rubbing his Smoke into Thomas, and Thomas’s into himself. Later, he will claim he was sullied by his attacker; that he himself remained pristine all through their fight. Now, in the darkness, he takes Thomas’s throat and squeezes it until Thomas thinks that surely he must die.

  Julius lets go, judiciously, the moment the other boys have stepped close enough to get a better picture. He gets up, wipes at his shirt, and makes a show of his composure. Thomas, crumpled, remains on the floor. Only Charlie bends down to him, soothes him, and helps him back to the dorm.

  CHARLIE

  There is just one thing you can do against Soot if you don’t have any lye and that’s to soak it in urine. It’s disgusting, I know, but there’s something in piss that makes it fade. And so Thomas and I sneak back into the bathroom later that night when everybody is gone, put Thomas’s shirt into one of the bathtubs (the one used by Julius when he deigns to bathe), drink pints upon pints of water from the tap, and take turns peeing on it. Destroying the shirt is out of the question. They’d know at once: all items of clothing are carefully catalogued. It’d get Thomas expelled without appeal.

  I wish I could describe Thomas, capture him. He is neither tall nor short, neither stocky nor slight; his hair is neither curly nor entirely straight. But I am making him sound like a nonperson, when he is everything but. Thomas is someone you notice when he comes through the door. It’s a kind of intensity. Like he is walking around with a keg of gunpowder strapped to his chest. It’s in his face, partially. He looks at things, really looks. At people, too. Evaluates them. Not judging them exactly but rather taking them in for what they are; trying to see the truth of them. It is not something most people like. I think I may be his only friend here, and there are close to two hundred boys all told, though some live in a separate building across the yard and a handful are day students who come in from the village; rich burghers’ sons who are here for the schooling and not for the other stuff. The “moral education.” Burghers may smoke, once in a while. One does not expect better of them.

  You’d think I’d hold it against Thomas. That his soul is bad. That, unless he reforms, he is bound for hell. It is true, after all. The Smoke does not lie. There is evil in him the way there are maggots in a cut of rotten meat. But you see, all that exists on one level somewhere, the level of adult reason and truths, where science lives, and theology, and the laws of the courts. But there is another level, one I have no name for, and on this other level, I am his friend. It’s as simple as that.

  As for myself, when I look in a mirror I see someone tall and sort of angular; bony, my sister calls it. Red hair. Not ginger but a deep shade of copper, cropped very short. My skin is quite dark too. Some say I must have foreign blood, that hair and skin like that come from east of the Black Sea, where there are still tribes riding the endless steppe. It’s nonsense though, because my family is as English as they come. We’re an old family, actually, and rather grand. I mean very grand. There are pictures of Father going hunting with the Queen’s sons. But enough of this. Whether girls find me handsome or ugly you will have to ask them. I know I don’t like my nose very much—too big—and cannot get fat even if I eat nothing but pudding. I am hopeless at rugby but can run cross-country all day. Thomas says I am more than half deer. If so, he must be a badger. When the dogs come for him, he turns and shows his teeth. Unlike me, he does not know when to take to his heels.

  We became friends very simply. He arrived in the last week of October. That’s unusual, of course. He was five weeks late for term. And then his age. Sixteen. There are transfers sometimes, boys sent up from lesser schools who come here for “finishing” and to rub shoulders with the future leaders of the realm. But Thomas had not been to any other school. He was “home taught.” Nobody knew what to make of it. There was even some talk that it was illegal. Rumour had it, his parents fought his going off to school; resisted ever since he’d turned eleven. They’re poor folk, I think, though noble enough, and live in the far north of the dominion; an unruly land. The Crown’s arm reaches that far, but it does not have the same weight. And now he is here, this wild boy. Like something that’s been raised by foxes.

  But he does not like to talk about himself. Even to me.

  He arrived by himself: no parent to see him off, no sibling, not even a servant to help him carry his things. Climbed off the mail coach that had picked him up at the train station, in Oxford. A knapsack on his shoulders and a valise in each hand. That’s how I ran across him, in my free hour after lunch: him standing at the inner gate, chin raised, tired, listening to the porter who was talking at him in his coarse country tongue, shouting practically, asking him who he was.

  “It’s the new boy,” I said. “They brought up a cot for him just yesterday. To the dormitory. I’ll take him, if you like.”

  Thomas did not speak, not until we arrived and I had pointed out his bed to him. It was near the window, the least popular spot, for it meant sleeping in its draught. He put down his luggage, straightened, looked me over, and asked,

  “What is it like here?”

  I was about to give him some meaningless answer, something to the effect that he would feel right at home, never he worry. Then I noticed his expression. There was something in his face that said, Don’t mollycoddle me, don’t lie, don’t feed me any bull.

  Or I’ll despise you forever.

  So I gave h
im the truth.

  “It’s like a prison,” I said. “Like a prison our parents pay for.”

  He smiled at that and told me he was “Thomas.”

  We have been friends ever since.

  THE TRIP

  They make him wait for his punishment.

  It’s laundry day the next morning and, having no choice, Thomas throws the sodden, smelly shirt into the basket, along with the week’s underwear and bedclothes. The Soot stain has faded but not disappeared.

  It is no consolation to Thomas that many a schoolboy adds his own stained clothes to the growing pile. Each transgression leaves behind its own type of Soot, and those versed in such matters can determine the severity of your crime just by studying the stain’s density and grit. This is why no classes in Smoke and Ethics are scheduled for laundry day: the master, Dr. Renfrew, spends his morning locked in his office, rooting through boys’ underclothes. The list of those found guilty of “Unclean Thoughts and Actions” is displayed in a glass cabinet before lunch, so that each schoolboy may learn what punishment has been levied on him. Two days of dining-hall service; three pages that have to be copied from the Second Book of Smoke; a public apology at school assembly. These, for minor transgressions. More serious offences require individual investigation. The boy in question will be called to the master’s study, to answer for his sins. There is a chair there, upholstered in leather, that is equipped with leather straps. The boys call it the dentist’s chair. No teeth are pulled, but the truth, Dr. Renfrew has been known to say, has to be dug up by the roots. For the most serious violations of Good Order even this procedure is seen to be insufficient. They require the calling of something referred to as a “tribunal.” So Thomas has heard. There has been no such case in the weeks since he’s been at school.

  In class, Thomas sits distracted and is reprimanded when he cannot recite the four principles of Aristotle’s theory of causation. Another boy recites them with glib relish. He is not asked what the four principles mean, how they are used, or what good they may do; nor who this Aristotle was whose marble bust stands in the school hallway, near the portrait of Lord Shrewsbury, the school’s esteemed founder. And in general Thomas has found that the school is more interested in the outward form of things rather than their meaning; that learning is a matter of reciting names or dates or numbers: smartly, loudly, and with great conviction. He has proven, thus far, a very bad student.