Smoke

by Dan Vyleta

  “Don’t,” he says.

  Against his will, even Charlie feels uplifted.

  “That’s right, Mr. Spencer. Don’t. Stay together. Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t buy anything. Don’t pass out any money. And don’t give in to the infection. Fight it with every fibre in your body. If you need help, seek it. It is why I and my esteemed colleagues are here with you. To offer support.”

  Charlie looks about the compartment, seeks out the faces of the other teachers. All but Trout and Swinburne have joined the Trip; as they roll into the station, back in school the lower-class boys are locked in the refectory, spending the day in silent study. Foybles, the maths teacher, sits on a bench to Charlie’s left. He is fingering a tin of sweets, nervously shoving one into his mouth. It is typical of him that he does not offer any to the student sitting next to him. Charlie, for one, could have used something to take the dry out of his throat.

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  The doors do not open at once. At another time, in another place, this would have caused complaints and unrest, threescore students wriggling on their bottoms. But the compartment remains as quiet as a grave. Everyone is staring out the window. The platform outside is full of people. There are porters in dirty frock coats holding baggage wagons. Old men, so Soot-covered, their sweat leaves tracks on their temples and cheeks; labourers with tools slung over one shoulder. There is a woman so little dressed it makes Charlie’s blood shoot to his face. He looks away and still sees the curve of her white leg disappearing into the long slit of her dress; tastes Smoke on his tongue. Don’t, he exhorts himself.

  He finds it’s easier when he speaks.

  “If London is full of criminals,” he whispers to Thomas, who remains glued to the window, “and Smoke begets Smoke, would it not be better if people left the city?”

  Thomas does not turn when he speaks.

  “Perhaps they don’t want to leave,” he says.

  “We could make them.”

  “We?”

  “All I mean is—if they lived in the country, in the fresh air…They can’t all be criminals. Sinners, maybe, but not criminals. Some of them are good at heart.”

  Thomas turns to him at last. It is a shock to discover how angry he looks.

  “And who would work in the factories then? And operate the shipyards? That’s what London is, you know. A collection of work yards, around which there’s some housing.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Me ma,” Thomas says, a burr of accent surfacing in his voice. He shakes himself like a dog, spits a mouthful of Smoke. “She used to write political pamphlets, in protest. But look—they’re opening the doors. Let’s go.”

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  There can be no hope of walking in formation. If the platform was full, London’s streets are packed. The din is almost as bad as the Smoke: a whole city shouting, or so it seems. Costermongers roam the streets with their handcarts, parting the stream of people like rocks in a river. They sell coconuts, ropes, and petticoats, Soot-smeared and drooping; nails, sewing needles, and hard-boiled sweets; medicine, gunpowder, and coal. Drunks and beggars line the house fronts, slumped against the plaster; they display mangled limbs and open sores, or simply sleep away their stupor. Children dart through the press of the crowd, some in play, some loaded with goods for delivery or sale. The street is made of black muck five inches deep, soggy with meltwater. It takes Charlie a while to realise that it consists of Soot, deposited over decades and centuries. It clings to his shoes as though it were glue. The house fronts are smeared with it to a height of three or four yards: above this, dark brick shines through or else the dappled yellow of sandstone.

  Every few minutes the boys are jostled by some person, man or woman, elbowing their way past. Twice Charlie feels hands in his coat and trouser pockets, looking for pickings. He does not try to catch the thief. His pockets are empty anyway. Ahead Renfrew has raised a walking stick high into the air. The boys—isolated, walking in groups of two, or three, or four; drops in the wash of hostile people—keep their eyes trained on this stick. To lose it would mean to risk losing the group. The way back. As Smoke sinks into Charlie’s lungs this fear transforms into something darker. When another passerby brushes him with his elbow, Charlie pushes him away. All his weight is in the push; the man, old and walking on a withered leg, slips and collides with others. The feeling of triumph that washes over Charlie only erodes when he notices the threads of Smoke that curl out of his coat and shadow him down the road.

  Nor can there be any pretence that Renfrew is choosing their route. Tall, self-possessed, formidable though he is, the Master of Smoke and Ethics is, like all of them, subject to the tidal swell that governs the crowd. For there is a definite movement to this stream of people, a movement that can be briefly resisted but not reversed. It leads them across the river, which lies beneath the bridge like a smear of tar. Foybles passes Charlie, his handkerchief pressed to his face.

  “Raw sewage,” the maths teacher mutters in horror to himself. “They are pumping their cesspools straight into the river.”

  Indeed the water smells like the distillation of a hundred latrines. Even so, boats and ferries part the muck, and a group of women stand on the riverbank, sifting its mud with bare hands for baubles, lost pennies, cockles, and crabs.

  They arrive. It is a square of irregular proportions, large enough to hold several thousand people and filled with their heat. The haze is so thick here, it feels like night is falling, though the afternoon is young. The sun stands high above, dirty pink behind this veil of sin. But it isn’t the tinted sun that’s making people crane their necks. A platform has been erected at the centre, a good two yards off the ground. From it springs a gallows. Its noose frames an oval of dirty sky. The crowd stares at it with a reverence otherwise reserved for the cross. Even the noise is hushed here in the square.

  “An execution?” Charlie whispers, not wishing to believe his eyes.

  “Yes.” Thomas’s eyes look wild. His throat and face show streaks of Soot. There is no telling if it is his own. “And there’s the executioner.”

  It takes Charlie some moments to identify whom he means. The crowd shares his confusion. The man who clambers up the platform is not tall nor powerfully built; wears no hood of either black or scarlet; he has not bared his chest over a thick leather belt, and no gristle frames his manly chin. In fact, he is rather slight and knock-kneed, with light, bushy whiskers that stick to his pale cheeks as though they are glued on. He is wearing a frock coat, quite clean given the circumstances, and raises his top hat shyly to the crowd.

  “A gentleman?” Charlie asks, surprised and dismayed.

  “His Majesty’s servant,” Thomas whispers. On his face horror mingles with expectation. Charlie feels it, too. They will watch someone die. His eagerness sickens him.

  It’s the Smoke, he tells himself.

  If so, it is a perversity shared by all.

  The victim arrives. For the longest time nobody can see anything other than the tall hats of the guards. The crowd parts reluctantly, letting them through, along with the prisoner hidden in their midst: a jostling that is passed on, from shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, through the length and the width of the square. At long last the guards reach the ladder leading up to the platform. Smoke rises from their knot of bodies, dark and oily, like they are burning bits of rubber. Shouts are heard, the cry of pain. Then someone is lifted up, bloody and smoking, her body a sheet of paper blotched with black.

  “A woman,” Charlie gasps. He staggers under the surge of people starting forward.

  She is no longer young, and dressed in a white, ankle-length shift. Across the distance it is difficult to get a precise sense of her features. Big, round cheeks; a heart-shaped face; a mass of greying hair pulled back sharply from the forehead: this is all Charlie makes out. Her Smoke has stained her, face and clothes, but it is as nothing compared to what happens next. The guards position her under the noose; the executioner slips it around her head. He is ta
lking to her, quietly and intently. They are the same age, give or take; they could be man and wife. Just then the crowd starts a chant, “Murderer, murderer”: not for him, who is about to send her to her death, but for her and the crimes she has committed. She turns to the crowd, raises her arms. And all of a sudden she seems to be burning, her skin an oil slick set ablaze on water. Black, sticky Smoke seeps from her every pore. In a moment the plain white shift is black and sodden, clinging to her chest, her hips, her legs. The Smoke slithers up the executioner’s body like a living thing. The transformation is immediate: a wolfish snarl grows over his face; his fingers, still on the noose, grab her hair and tug at it, and he starts screaming something at the crowd, triumphant and cruel.

  The cloud of Smoke, heavier than air and hungry for converts, descends into the crowd. You can watch it spread by the yard. In less than a minute it has reached Charlie. It’s like breathing in a drug: his heart begins to pound in his chest, his senses open themselves to the crowd. He ceases to think in terms of good and evil, he wants to see the woman die, wants the noose to break her neck, for the sheer thrill of it. And at the same time he admires her, hopes she will drag the executioner down with her, through the trapdoor under her feet; is ready to riot, tastes his own Smoke, grey and feeble on his tongue, and for the first time in his life enjoys its flavour.

  All around him the chant continues—“Murderer, murderer”—but a new note has emerged in it, as accusation transforms into salute. Charlie tries it, quietly at first, then louder and louder: “Murderer, murderer.” He feels the joy of being one with the crowd, wants to share it with Thomas, wants to link arms with him and run riot, mingle Smokes, and partake of his friend’s sin.

  But when he looks, Thomas is no longer there.

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  Afterwards, back at school, lying awake on his bed, Charlie will be pleased to realise that his concern for his friend was stronger even than the woman’s Smoke. A breeze helps him, too, blowing in from behind. It shifts the centre of madness to the other side of the square. The executioner, his features twisted into a mask of hate, is kicking the woman, then throws his weight against the lever that triggers the trapdoor. Charlie turns and breaks his connection with the gasping crowd. He hopes Thomas is behind, away from all this, in safety. But it is hard to make out any one person in this ocean of faces, all trained in the same direction, all blackened and mean. He spins, catches a sickening glimpse of her body, dancing, twisting at the end of the rope, looks in all directions and sees nothing but the heaving, shouting mass, all individuality dissolved, each face reflecting the emotion of its neighbours and retaining little feature of its own.

  Then his mind snags on someone, the way a fingernail may catch on fabric. It isn’t Thomas, and he does not know him, but all the same his separateness commandeers Charlie’s attention. It isn’t immediately obvious why. The man is in his forties or thereabouts; stout but not fat; the head sloping sideways, like he’s twisted his neck. A face like a dozen others; his clothes shabby and stained. And yet he stands apart. It’s his movement, for one thing. Like Charlie’s, his eyes are not on the execution. He is slinking through the crowd, trying to exit the square unobtrusively, pushing past those who will move aside and rounding those who won’t. Something else, too. It takes Charlie the longest time to see it. He is not smoking. Smoke surrounds him, Soot clings to him in streaks and blotches. But he: he is not smoking. When he passes not two feet from Charlie, the boy, taller by some inches, sees the man’s neck, where its sideway crick exposes the inside of his collar. It is clean, though the outside is quite black. As though feeling a stranger’s gaze on him, the man pulls at his loosened handkerchief, ties it tightly around his throat. In another moment he has reached the edge of the crowd and is walking more boldly, away.

  Charlie hesitates. He wants to chase the man (not chase, says the Smoke that’s coursing through his blood: hunt), but he is worried about Thomas; glances around for him with no success. Then he is gone, the man who did not smoke; swallowed up by the city.

  Charlie spins and looks and pushes, all to no avail. As the press around him eases, it’s becoming less difficult to move and at the same time harder to see, bodies shifting across his field of vision. Within minutes there is a general movement outward: the crowd disperses, a strange kind of exhaustion in their faces. Charlie realises that it is over. The woman is dead, cut down from the gallows. The spectacle has run its course. Thick flakes of Soot are floating in the air like snow; living evil has turned into mere dirt. As the townspeople leave—to work? to tea?—the only figures remaining on the square are some sixty schoolboys in blackened uniforms and the small huddle of their teachers. As for Thomas, Charlie finds him on his hands and knees, not far from the scaffold, retching. He walks over to him, crouches, waits for Thomas to look up.

  “Quite a Trip this,” he says at last, as lightly as he can.

  Thomas nods, spits, smiles. “Yeah. Not bad.”

  But his eyes are full of fear.

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  They walk the city for several more hours, visit a bottle blackening factory, and admire the grand husk of Buckingham Palace, now locked up and abandoned. A factory bell marks the end of a shift, and Julius, against Renfrew’s instruction, stops a flower girl and buys a bouquet, then presents it back to her with a gallant bow. Not even his cronies grant him applause: the boys have withdrawn into themselves, walk in a state of nervous exhaustion. Smoke continues to waft through the air, but it is lighter now, or else Charlie has gotten used to the feel of his own meanness. There is no lunch or dinner, but neither students nor teachers complain. They have but one need: to go home.

  On the way back to the train a group of men passes them, in good if Soot-stained clothing, holding rolls of charts under their arms and protected from the crowd by the ministrations of two burly servants who clear the way with the liberal use of their elbows and arms. Renfrew tips his hat to the well-dressed men, and they tip theirs, look after the boys for a moment, before moving on.

  They ride the train in silence. Inside the compartment it is very dark. The gas lamps have not been lit, whether by oversight or on purpose it is hard to say. Some whispers travel, boys with their heads thrown together, in conspiracy and shame. A few boys are crying, quietly, their faces to the window. Charlie can tell because of how still they hold themselves. Thomas, too, keeps his face averted. Charlie would like to ask his friend how he is feeling; how it was that they got separated at the market square and what it was that made him sick. He would like to tell him about the miracle he, Charlie, witnessed. A man without sin; crooked about the neck. Just thinking about it makes his heart pound with hope.

  But Charlie does not trust himself to speak. A trace of Smoke remains in his blood, feeds a feeling of irritation and impatience. He’s afraid it will show in his voice. There is more to it yet. Charlie’s whole sense of who he is lies disturbed and the calm that returns to him feels strange, like a mask grown stiff from want of use. When he finally does speak, his voice surprises him, is gentle, unchanged.

  “We look like miners, coming back from a shift” is what he says. He has been looking at his hands. The skin beneath his fingernails seems unnaturally pale next to his blackened fingers.

  Thomas turns, cheeks shiny with Soot. There are no tear tracks linking eye and jaw.

  “There was someone there,” he says. “Underneath the scaffold.”

  “Under the scaffold? Who?”

  “Don’t know. A man. He was stripping the dead woman’s body.”

  “Stripping her.” Charlie’s mind recoils from the image. “For valuables?”

  Thomas shakes his head, glowers at the memory.

  “For her Soot.”

  He turns his face back to the window before Charlie can ask him to explain.

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  At Oxford station the lights are burning. The boys take stock of one another. They are, each of them, splattered with sin. Renfrew and the other teachers do a head count, the third since the execution squa
re. It is a miracle they have not lost anyone. A porter leads them to a room at the far end of the platform. Behind the double doors yawns a bathroom twice the size of the one in school. Four rows of shower-baths stand in military formation. Some gas lamps are lit but turned down very low. On a counter there sit a hundred little towels, neatly folded and piled chest high. Renfrew crosses the room, opens a metal hatch on a large stove in the corner. A fire roars beyond. The heat is so intense he retreats two steps before speaking.

  “First,” he says, “you will retrieve a towel. Then: strip. Pile your clothes here.” He points to the floor. “They will be incinerated. We deposited a change of clothes for each of you there.” He points to a door marked CHANGING ROOM. “Make sure to wash thoroughly.”

  A murmur goes through the room. The clothes will be burned! No inspection; no investigation. Whatever happened that day, it will not be added to any ledger of transgression. As relief floods the students, they grow chatty, almost giddy. Clothes are ripped off bodies; cotton tears, buttons pop; boys can be seen running half dressed through the room, flicking at one another with towels. As they push into the shower-baths and scrub at their skin, their noise begins to fill the entire hall. They are sharing the wonders they beheld in London, cleansing them of fear in the process; their day recast as adventure. Charlie listens to them distractedly, his own face raised into the tepid stream of the shower.

  “Did you see the Negro street sweeper? He had but one hand. He was so black you could hardly see the Soot.”

  “I swear she was selling heads, that one, only they were shrunk somehow. Size of a cricket ball, each of them, tied to a stick by the hair.”

  “And as I was looking at her, she opens her coat all of a sudden, and underneath she’s starkers, I swear. Only she was so dirty you couldn’t see a thing.”

  It takes but half an hour until everyone is clean, kempt, dressed in fresh clothing. The teachers, too, have cleaned up in an adjoining bathroom; some have found time to shave. A servant has come and is shovelling their dirties into the incinerator with a pitchfork, much as though he were moving manure. The fire’s heat has spread throughout the room and is bringing a rosy hue to Charlie’s cheeks. Nothing is left of the delirium of London other than the vaguest of yearnings: for irresponsibility, perhaps, for some hours spent in the thrall of base instinct. He wonders briefly whether all delirium leaves you with this trace. Then Renfrew calls them together, teachers and pupils, assembles them by the door.