Smoke

by Dan Vyleta

  At lunch, he hardly eats. He is sitting in the school refectory, which has the shape and general dimensions of a chapel and is dreadfully cold. December winds have pushed the snow into the windows. On the outside they are shrouded in dull white that saps the warmth from every ray of sun. On the inside, they bleed cold water from the edges of their metal frames. On the floor, the puddles refreeze and eat away at the unvarnished wood.

  Lunch is a cut of hard gammon half hidden under a ladleful of lukewarm peas. Each bite tastes like mud to Thomas, and twice he bites down on the fork by accident, digging the prongs into his tongue. Halfway through the meal Charlie spots him and joins him at the table. One of the teachers held him up after class. Charlie waits until the skinny little boy on service duty has condemned him to his own piece of leathery gammon with its attendant pile of yellowing peas.

  “Anything?” he asks.

  Thomas shakes his head. “Nothing. Look at them, though. They are all waiting for it. The pupils, and the teachers, too. All of them, impatient. Yearning for the bloody shoe to drop.”

  He speaks resentfully and even as the last word leaves his lips, a wisp of Smoke curls from his nostril, too light and thin to leave behind Soot. Charlie disperses it with a quick wave. He is not worried. Hardly anyone gets through the day without a minor transgression, and there have been days when a teacher could be seen flapping at a thread of Smoke pouring from his tongue. The students tend to like these teachers better. In their imperfection they are closer to their own states of grace.

  “They can’t send you home.” Charlie sounds like he believes it. “You’ve only just got here.”

  “Maybe.”

  “He’ll call you into his office, Renfrew will.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “You’ll have to tell him how it was. No holding back.”

  And then Charlie says what’s been on Thomas’s mind all morning. What he hasn’t dared spell out.

  “Otherwise he mightn’t let you join the Trip.”

  Thomas nods and finds his mouth too dry to speak.

  The Trip is what everyone has been talking about from the minute he arrived at school. It’s a unique event: there has been nothing like it in the school’s history for close to three decades. Rumour has it that it was Renfrew who had insisted on the Trip’s revival, and that he has faced fierce opposition, from the teachers, the parents, and from the Board of Governors itself. It’s hardly surprising. Most decent folk have never been to London. To take a group of schoolboys there is considered extraordinary, almost outlandish. There have been voices suggesting that it will put the whole school in danger. That the boys who go might never return.

  Thomas still has trouble finding spit for words. “I want to go” is all he manages before breaking into a dry cough. It does not quite capture what he feels. He needs to see it. The prospect of the Trip is the only thing that’s kept him going these past few weeks. The moment he heard about it was the moment he decided there might be a meaning to his coming to school, a higher purpose. He’d be hard-pressed to say exactly what he expects from their visit to London. A revelation, perhaps. Something that will explain the world to him.

  The cough runs its course, exhausts itself in a curse.

  “That bastard Julius. I could kill the bloody turd.”

  Charlie’s face is so honest it hurts.

  “If you can’t go, Thomas, I won’t—”

  Thomas cuts him short because a group of teachers are passing them. They are speaking animatedly, but drop their voices to a whisper the moment they draw level with the boys. Resentment flickers through Thomas’s features, and is followed by another exhalation of pale, thin Smoke. His tongue shows black for a second, but he swallows the Soot. You do that too often, your windpipe roughens and your tonsils start to darken, along with what’s behind. There is a glass jar in the science classroom with a lung so black it looks dipped in tar.

  “Look at them whispering. They are enjoying this! Making me stew in my own fat. Why don’t they just get on with it? Put me in the bloody dock!”

  But Charlie shakes his head, watches the teachers huddle near the door.

  “I don’t think they’re talking about you, Thomas. There is something else going on. I noticed it earlier, when I went to the Porter’s Lodge, to see if I had any mail. Master Foybles was there, talking to Cruikshank, the porter. Making inquiries. They are waiting for something, some sort of delivery. And it’s important. Foybles sounded pretty desperate. He kept on saying, ‘You’ll let me know, won’t you? The minute it arrives.’ As though he were suspecting Cruikshank of hiding it away somewhere. Whatever it is.”

  Thomas considers this. “Something they need for the Trip?”

  “I don’t know,” says Charlie, thoughtful. “If it is, it better come today. If they have to postpone the Trip, they might end up cancelling it altogether.”

  He cuts a piece of gammon like it’s wronged him somehow, spilling peas on all sides. Thomas curses and turns to his own lunch. Leaving food on your plate is against the rules and carries its own punishment, as though it is proof of some invisible type of Smoke.

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  They send for him after vespers.

  It’s Julius who comes for him, smirking, Thomas can see him all the way down the corridor, an extra flourish to his step. Julius does not say anything. Indeed he does not need to, a gesture is enough, a sort of wave of the hand that starts at the chest and ends up pointing outward, down the length of the hall. Ironic, like he’s a waiter, inviting Thomas to the table. And then Julius leads the way, walking very slowly now, his hands in his pockets, calling to some boys to open the door up ahead.

  Making sure everyone knows.

  Keeping pace with Julius, trapped behind that slow, slouching, no-haste-no-worry-in-the-world walk: it’s enough to make Thomas’s blood boil. He can taste Smoke on his breath and wonders if he’s showing. A dark gown covers his shirt but he will soon be asked to remove it, no doubt, and expose his linens. He attempts to calm himself, picks Soot out of his teeth with the tip of his tongue. Its bitterness makes him gag.

  Julius slows down even further as they approach Dr. Renfrew’s door. The Master of Smoke and Ethics. It’s a new post, that, no older than a year. It used to be the Master of Religion was in charge of all the moral education, or so Charlie’s told him. When they arrive at the door, Julius pauses, smirks, and shakes his head. Then he walks on, faster now, gesturing for Thomas to keep pace.

  It takes Thomas a minute to understand what’s just happened. He is not going to see Dr. Renfrew. There will be no dentist’s chair for him. It’s worse than that. They are heading to the headmaster’s quarters.

  There’s to be a tribunal.

  The word alone makes him feel sick.

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  Julius does not knock when they reach the headmaster’s door. This confuses Thomas, until they’ve stepped through. It leads not to a room but to a sort of antechamber, like a waiting room at the doctor’s, two long benches on each side, and an icy draft from the row of windows on the right. They are high up here, in one of the school’s towers. Beneath them, the fields of Oxfordshire: a silver sea of frozen moonlight. Down by the brook, a tree rises from the snow-choked grounds, stripped of its leaves by winter. A willow, its drooping branches dipped into the river, their tips trapped in ice. Thomas turns away, shivering, and notices that the door back to the hallway is padded from the inside, to proof it against sound. To protect the headmaster from the school’s noise, no doubt. And so nobody can hear you scream.

  Julius stands at the other door, knocks on it gently, with his head boy’s confidence and tact. It opens after only a moment: Renfrew’s face, framed by blond hair and beard.

  “You are here, Argyle. Good. Sit.”

  Then adds, as Julius turns to leave: “You too.”

  Renfrew closes the door before Julius can ask why.

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  They sit on opposite sides, Thomas with his back to the windows, Julius facing them, a
nd the moon. It affords Thomas the opportunity to study him. Something has gone out of the lad, at this “You too.” Some of the swagger, the I-own-the-world certainty. He is chewing his cheek, it appears. A good-looking boy, Thomas is forced to admit, fair-skinned and dark-haired, his long thin whiskers more down than beard. Thomas waits until Julius’s eyes fall on him, then leans forward.

  “Does it hurt? The tooth, I mean.”

  Julius does not react at once, hides his emotions as he does so well.

  “You are in trouble,” he says at last. “I am here only as a witness.”

  Which is true in all likelihood, but nonetheless he looks a tad ruffled, Julius does, and Thomas cannot help gloating a little over his victory. They looked for the tooth late last night when Charlie and he were trying to clean his shirt, but it was gone. Julius must have picked it up himself. It would have made a nice souvenir. But that was then and now he is here, his hands all sweaty, casting around for bravado. Waiting. How much easier it would be to fight, even to lose: a fist in your face, a nosebleed, an ice bag on your aches. Thomas leans back, tries to unknot his shoulders. The moon is their only light source. When a cloud travels across it, the little waiting room is thrown into darkness. All he can see of Julius now is a shadow, black as Soot.

  It must be a quarter of an hour before Renfrew calls them in. Rich, golden gaslight welcomes them; thick carpets that suck all sound from their steps. They are all there, all the masters. There are seven of them—Renfrew-Foybles-Harmon-Swinburne-Barlow-Winslow-Trout—but only three that count. Renfrew is tall and well-built, and still rather young. He wears his hair short, as well as his beard, and favours a dark, belted suit that seems to encase him from neck to ankle. A white silken scarf, worn tight at the throat, vouches for his virtue.

  Trout is the headmaster. He is very fat and wears his trousers very high, so that the quantity of flesh between the top of his thighs and the waistband dwarfs the short sunken chest, adorned though it is with fine lace and ruffles. What he lacks in hair, Trout makes up for in whiskers. His button nose seems lost between the swell of his red cheeks.

  Swinburne, finally: the Master of Religion. Where Renfrew is tall, Swinburne is towering, if twisted by age. He wears the cap and smock of his office. The little one sees of his face is mottled with broken veins, the shape and colour of thistles. A beard covers the rest, long and stringy.

  Renfrew, Swinburne, Trout: each of them, it is said, entangled in affairs that reach from school to Parliament and Crown. Thomas has often thought of painting them. He is good with a brush. A triptych. He has not decided yet who belongs at the centre.

  It’s Renfrew who bids them sit. He points to two chairs that have been pulled up into the middle of the room, making no distinction between them. Compared to the theatricality of Julius’s examination last night, the gesture is almost casual. The masters are standing in clusters, wearing worsted winter suits. Some are holding teacups; Foybles is munching a biscuit. Thomas sits. After a moment’s hesitation Julius follows suit.

  “You know why you are here.”

  It is a statement, not a question, and Renfrew turns even as he makes it, reaches into a basket, retrieves something. It affords Thomas another moment to look around the room. He sees a leather settee and a brass chandelier; stained-glass windows with scenes from the Scriptures, Saint George with his lance through the dragon’s throat; sees a painting of a fox hunt under a dappled sky; sees cabinets, and doors, and a sideboard with fine china; sees all this, but takes in little, his mind skittish, his skin tingling, nervous, afraid. When Renfrew turns back to them he is holding two shirts. He places one over the back of an unoccupied chair, spreads the other between his hands, displaying the Soot stain; runs his fingertips through it, tests its grit.

  And launches into lecture.

  “Smoke,” he says, “can have many colours. Often it is light and grey, almost white, with no more odour than a struck match. Then there is yellow Smoke, dense and wet like fog. Blue Smoke that smells acrid, like spoiled milk, and seems to disperse almost as soon as it has formed. Once in a while we witness black Smoke, oily and viscous; it will cling to anything it touches. The variations of texture, density, and shade have all been carefully described in the Four Books of Smoke: a taxonomy of forty-three varieties. It is more difficult to establish the precise cause for each type of Smoke. It is a question not only of the offence but of the offender. The thoroughly corrupt breed darker, denser Smoke. Once a person’s moral sickness is sufficiently advanced, all actions are coloured by its stain. Even the most innocent act will—”

  “Sin, Master Renfrew.” It’s Swinburne who interrupts him. His voice, familiar from the thrice-weekly sermon, has a shrill intensity all its own. He sounds like the man who ate the boy who ran his fingernails down the blackboard. “It is sin that blackens the soul. Not sickness.”

  Renfrew looks up, annoyed, but a glance from the headmaster bids him swallow his reply.

  “Sin, then. A difference of nomenclature.” He pauses, collects his thought, digs his fingers into the shirt’s linen. “Smoke, in any case, is easy to read. It is the living, material manifestation of degeneracy. Of sin. Soot, on the other hand, well, that is a different matter. Soot is dead, inert. A spent symptom, and as such inscrutable. Oh, any fool can see how much there is and whether it is fine like sea sand or coarse as a crushed brick. But these are crude measures. It requires a more scientific approach”—here Renfrew smooths down his jacket—“to produce a more sophisticated analysis. I spent my morning bent over a microscope, studying samples from both shirts. There are certain solvents that can cancel the inertness of the substance and, so to speak, temporarily bring it back to life. A concentrated solution of Papaver fuliginosa richteria, heated to eighty-six degrees and infused with—”

  Renfrew interrupts himself, his calm self-possession momentarily strained by excitement. He resumes at a different point and in a different voice, gentler, more intimate, drawing a step closer to the boys and speaking as though only to them.

  “I say I spent the morning analysing these two shirts and I found something unusual. Something disconcerting. A type of Soot I have seen only once before. In a prison.”

  He draws closer yet, wets his lips. His voice is not without compassion. “There is a cancer growing in one of you. A moral cancer. Sin”—a flicker of a glance here, over to Swinburne, hostile and ironic—“as black as Adam’s. It requires drastic measures. If it takes hold—if it takes over the organism down to the last cell…well, there will be nothing anybody can do.” He pauses, fixes both boys in his sight. “You will be lost.”

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  For a minute and more after this announcement, Thomas goes deaf. It’s a funny sort of deaf: his ears work just fine but the words he hears do not reach his brain, not in the normal manner where they are sifted for significance and given a place in the hierarchy of meaning. Now they just accumulate.

  It’s Julius who is speaking. His tone is measured, if injured.

  “Won’t you even ask what happened, Master Renfrew?” he asks. “I thought I had earned some measure of trust at this school, but I see now that I was mistaken. Argyle attacked me. Like a rabid dog. I had no choice but to restrain him. He rubbed his filth into me. The Soot is his. I never smoke.”

  Renfrew lets him finish, watches not Julius but the other teachers, some of whom are muttering in support. Thomas, uncomprehending, follows his gaze and finds an accusation written in the masters’ faces. He, Thomas, has done this to one of theirs, they seem to be saying. Has covered him in dirt. Their golden boy. Thomas would like to refute the accusation, but his thoughts just won’t latch on. All he can think is: what does it mean to be “lost”?

  “I have had occasion,” Renfrew replies at last, “to collect three separate statements concerning the incident you are referring to, Mr. Spencer. I believe I have a very accurate impression of how events unfolded. The facts of the matter are these. Both shirts are soiled—from the inside and out. The Soot is of var
iable quality. But I took samples of this”—he picks from his pocket a glass slide at the centre of which a few grains of Soot hang suspended in a drop of reddish liquid—“from both shirts. I could not determine the origin.

  “Both shirts,” he continues, now turning to the teachers, “also bear marks of being tampered with: one very crudely”—a nod to Thomas—“the other rather more sophisticatedly. Almost inexplicably, Mr. Spencer.”

  Julius swallows, jerks his head. A crack of panic now mars his voice.

  “I wholly reject…You will have to answer to my family! It was this boy, this beast…”

  He trails off, his voice raw with anger. Swinburne rescues him: rushes up, with a rustle of his dark gown, taps Julius on the shoulder, ordering him to shut up. Up close Swinburne smells unaired and musty, like a cellar. The smell helps Thomas recover his wits. It is the most real thing in the entire room. That and a knocking, like a hard fist on wood. Nobody reacts to it. It must be his heart.

  “Mr. Spencer is innocent.” Swinburne’s voice brooks no dissent. He speaks as though delivering a verdict. “I too made inquiries about the incident last night. The situation is quite clear. It’s that boy’s fault. His Smoke is potent. It infected Spencer.”

  “Infected?” Renfrew smiles while the knocking grows louder. “A medical term, Master Swinburne. So unlike you. But you are quite right. Smoke infects. A point only imperfectly understood, I fear. Which is why I insist that both these boys join the Trip tomorrow.”

  Perhaps the most disconcerting thing about the roar of shouts and voices that answers this announcement is that Thomas’s heart appears to stop: it gives a loud final rap and then falls silent. “It mustn’t be,” one of the teachers—Harmon? Winslow?—keeps repeating, high-pitched, squealing, as though giving voice to Thomas’s dismay. A moment later the door is thrown open and the small, dishevelled figure of Cruikshank, the porter, stands on its threshold. He pokes his head into the sudden silence of the room.