by Dan Vyleta
“Well then,” he says, gently, triumphantly. “We have survived.”
The mood is such that the phrase is met by applause. Renfrew basks in it then silences the boys with a gesture, a conductor working a willing orchestra.
“There were those who doubted that we would. And more, many more”—his gaze wanders over his fellow teachers—“who doubted we should go in the first place. Why, after all, did we have to climb down into this pit of filth and infamy; breathe the air of crime; rub shoulders with the mob; and see our blood poisoned by their lust and hate and greed?”
He pauses for effect. Charlie is watching Renfrew’s hands. They are small, handsome, freckled hands covered in fine, reddish hair. When he speaks, they dance in front of his body.
“The answer is that we had to go, because we may be called upon to do so again.”
He shuts off the murmur of ill will before it is conscious of itself.
“Two hours ago, as we were leaving the city, all of you saw some gentlemen walking through the city with charts. They were engineers, charged with remodelling the sewage system. Yes, the sewage system. The dirtiest place in a dirty city; the place where all muck and filth collects. They do so not from need, not for profit, nor because they are bound by contract. They do so because it needs doing. Because, like you, they are gentlemen from the country’s finest families. Because they see a cesspool and wish to clean it, improve it, reform it.
“To do so, they must stay, sometimes for days and weeks, in the very centre of London. They must breathe its Smoke and taste its infection. They must endure having their senses clouded, their skin stained, their clothes turned to rags. They must fight temptation, must fight weakness even in their sleep. But they are gentlemen and they are strong. And each time they go, they are stronger, better prepared. More determined, more steeled in their convictions.
“These gentlemen are you. After your studies—as engineers or as doctors, as men of politics or scholars of political science, as scientists and architects—you will be called upon to serve your country and to improve the lives of those miserable wretches we beheld today. When the day comes, do not hide from this responsibility. Do not hide behind fear, or comfort, or the claim of ignorance. When the day comes, stand proud and answer the call of duty. I know you will.”
Renfrew scans his audience’s faces. His certainty is like a force. Like Smoke. It travels through the air and settles in your bones.
“I—we—took you to London today so you would see it for yourself. Infection cannot be explained. It must be felt. Today you are afraid of it. You felt its power and quivered before it. But tomorrow—tomorrow you will face it like an enemy. Tomorrow you will begin thinking about what you can do to change things. To take up the fight. It is your duty as Christian men. As men, I say. For you return from London, no longer boys.”
The roar that follows his last statement surprises even those who stand cheering. Even Thomas falls in with it, stands next to Charlie hollering out a triple “Hurrah!” For once it is Julius who stands apart. Charlie watches him, at the edge of the circle of boys, face drawn, chewing on his tongue.
Renfrew does not bask in his glory but rather shushes them, rushes them out, onto the platform and out of the station, where their row of coaches is waiting for them. The weather is milder than it has been in days, a warm wind blowing from the west, the snow slowly melting and catching the streetlights in puddles.
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Renfrew does not ride back with the teachers. Instead he climbs into Charlie and Thomas’s coach. He takes his seat between them as though he were but another boy; butts in, lifting his suit tails, so they are forced to scoot apart. Immediately all conversation dies. The slush outside makes progress slow as each revolution of the wheels requires extra effort from the horses, and the gentle rocking coupled with the warmth of their recent bath sends them asleep one by one. Charlie feels cut off from Thomas by their teacher’s rigid form and is too self-conscious to lean across Renfrew to see whether his friend, too, has nodded off. He attempts to catch glimpses of Thomas from the corner of his eye, but all he can see are his legs, angled in front of him, the stillness of his feet, the hands that are spread out on Thomas’s thighs. He is so very motionless, in fact, and for so very long, that it comes as a surprise when Thomas speaks.
“Smoke is a disease,” he says.
It takes Charlie several moments to register the words are not for his benefit but for Renfrew’s, and that they form a question, not a statement.
Like Thomas, Renfrew speaks quietly, neither turning nor moving his limbs, his hands resting on the top of the walking stick that juts from between his knees. It occurs to Charlie that he has chosen to ride in their coach just for this, a conversation with Thomas.
“No,” says Renfrew. “Smoke is no more a disease than a fever is the flu. Both are symptoms.”
“Smoke is a symptom,” Thomas reiterates, slowly, carefully. “Either way. Smoke is not from God.”
Now Renfrew turns, bends down to Thomas, his voice warm and earnest. Charlie strains to understand, bending sideways with him, his cheek almost touching Renfrew’s coat.
“Why not?” he asks. “Measles are from God. Swinburne’s religion is outdated. Unenlightened. He does not understand that a scientist can have faith. That science is a form of worship.” Renfrew pauses. “But there is something else you want to ask, isn’t there?”
“If it is a disease. That for which Smoke is a symptom. Does it pass from father to son?”
Before Renfrew can answer the coach hits a pothole and throws them out of their seats. In a second everyone’s awake, jumbled, pushing themselves up, away from awkward contact with their teacher. Charlie waits for the conversation to resume, but it doesn’t. When he looks outside, he sees an owl sitting on a moon-washed hedge, its eyes fixed on his and ringed by fine light feathers that give its stare a look of callous wonder.
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They arrive. As they clear the last hillock, the school lies beneath them, dormitories, schoolhouse, and shed forming a black cross in the wet snow, the dark brick evading the eye’s attempt to impose details. The boys need no prompting to file inside. They head for the dormitory; some fling themselves down without undressing, an eerie silence in the room where whispers, laughter, little squeals mark bedtime on any other day. Charlie waits for half an hour after the last candle has been blown out, then gets up and sneaks into the bathroom. Thomas is already there, sitting on the floor wrapped in a blanket, his back slumped against the wall. Charlie slides down next to him, the tiles very cold under his bottom.
“Me first or you first?” he asks.
“You,” Thomas says. Charlie is unprepared for how weary he sounds. More than just weary. Resentful. Sick of life.
“Unless you’d rather not. It can wait till tomorrow.”
Thomas shifts enough to find his eye. “You want to talk, Charlie, and I am your friend. So let’s talk.”
He does not say: That’s the price we pay. For friendship. But it’s there in his voice.
It sickens Charlie that friendship should have a price.
THOMAS
Charlie tells me. About the miracle he has seen. And I tell him what I was up to, back there on the market square. An accounting, you might call it; honest as two Dutchmen settling up. Then we go to bed. Neither of us reacts in the way the other needs him to. Charlie wants me to be excited; to spin theories with him; devise a plan to return to London, sniff out his man.
But it is difficult to believe what he is saying. A man immune to Smoke, hook-necked and all. It’s impossible: like seeing a ghost. I don’t think he’s lying, of course. Charlie wouldn’t lie. It may be he can’t. But this was the city: a thousand people pushing, pressing, trampling one another’s feet; no air to breathe; and so much Smoke in your blood your senses are screaming. To fight, mostly, smash someone’s face in. That, and the other thing. Find a girl, I mean. Rip her clothes off. It’s like your pulse has slipped into your pants. Chaos, in other
words, not just in the square but in you, rage and lust and laughter, too, a mad sort of laughter, weightless and simple, and your stomach tells you it wants food. To see a man in all that, one that doesn’t smoke, because his collar is clean on the inside, you notice it when he walks past, well—
There’re things you have to see for yourself, I suppose. It’s not a matter of choice, or even friendship. You cannot help but doubt. We are lonely creatures, Mother used to say. We live in our heads.
And when I tell him what I saw—and I do, as honestly as I can, though my stomach heaves with it and I keep spitting up black—all Charlie wants to know is, am I all right. I’m not, but that isn’t the point. Charlie saw an angel walk past. I think I saw the devil. There’s none of us going to be all right ever again.
Here’s what I tell Charlie. When the Smoke spread—her Smoke, the woman’s, the murderess’s—I pushed closer to the scaffold. What drove me there was this: if Renfrew is right, if there is a cancer of sin growing in my guts, my heart, my brain, then she is what I will become. My fate, my patrimony. So I wanted to look her in the eye. For a sign of kinship, or something. That, and there was this flavour to her Smoke, something I have noticed before but never this clearly. It tasted good. Bitter of course, sheer murder on the lungs, but good, too, like spirits I suppose, if you ask a drunk. Seductive. So I pushed ahead. Dealt out a lot of thrusts with my elbows. Earned just as many, my arms black and blue, but kept on pushing.
Right up front there was a yard-wide gap ringing the gallows: only a few people there, and those that were, were pushing back, into the crowd. It makes sense: everyone wanted to be close—see her hang by the neck, her tongue sticking out—but if you got too close, you got pushed up against the scaffold, a big wooden box, really, man-high, square, and covered with a large sheet of nailed-down canvas, somewhere between brown and black. And there, flush against its wall, you couldn’t see a thing. Even the Smoke was thinner here, travelled over your head.
So I tried to fight my way back into the crowd, charged it really, headfirst, half mad. And got kicked in the gut for my trouble, Soot and stomach juice mixing in my mouth. Next thing I knew I was on my knees in the dirt, back in the no-man’s-land near the scaffold, leaning on it as I struggled up. That’s when I noticed that there were gaps beneath the canvas, that the box that held the gallows was more lattice fence than crate. And the evil thought flashed in me that it was there, inside, where the hole would open, the trapdoor, I mean, through which the woman would fall. And—it pains me to say it, it was the Smoke, the Smoke, only perhaps it wasn’t—I wanted to see it, see her, even if it were only her feet kicking as the breath was being choked out of her, and her stiff bloated face when she was dropped through the hole once she was dead.
So while the crowd was chanting, and the Smoke got so black you could hardly see the sky above, I ran my fingers up and down the side of the scaffold, looking for a gap large enough to slip through. I found it right at the bottom, got flat on my stomach (like a worm, I remember thinking, like a nasty little worm), jimmied two nails out of the canvas cover, and scooted through.
Inside the only light came from the open trapdoor above. I was too late, I realised it at once. The body was already on the ground, cut down, the knot of the noose jutting up from her neck like a knife handle. Already her Smoke had ceased; she lay on her stomach, legs splayed, the shift so caked with Smoke it cracked like icing.
It didn’t crack by itself, mind. There was someone there, crouching by her side, his back to me. Holding a razor. He cut the shift away in two quick jerks. The naked body underneath remained as though dressed in Soot. The figure—wearing a suit, a lumpy overcoat, dirty, patched tweed—produced a jar from out one pocket, squat and wide-mouthed, its glass tinted like an apothecary’s bottle. Then he bent over the body again, razor in hand, and with its three-inch blade began to scrape away Soot.
Not everywhere, mind. The figure knew exactly what it wanted. He started at the face, unclenching the woman’s jaws, wedging open her mouth; then, with gloved fingers pulled out the tongue as though to cut it off at its roots, only to run the blade along its underside, taking shavings of the Soot trapped there, more liquid than powder, then transferring it into the jar by sliding the blade along the inside of its rim, the way you’d clean a butter knife of jam. The sound of steel on glass. It seemed louder than the crowd outside.
I watched all this silently, lying on my stomach, afraid not of the knife but of this man with a dead woman’s tongue between his fingers. He harvested Soot from two more places, the depth of both armpits, then (I turned away here: London’s Smoke in my brain and lungs, and still I turned away, could not bear it, was ashamed) from the scissor of her thighs: scraped the knife again and again against the rim of his glass, then screwed it tightly shut. All told it took him no more than a few minutes. He never turned around, worked with precision, never more quickly than the task merited, but with an efficiency that hinted at practice.
Then the light changed, down in this coffin that formed the base of London’s gallows, grew darker. It was the face and upper body of the executioner bending over the trapdoor and thus blocking much of its light. He did not say anything, but I saw the figure nod to him and pocket its jar. Immediately, the executioner rose again, barked an order at the guards, to fetch the cadaver.
I had but one thought now, and that was to crawl back out. I moved, rolled back towards the canvas flap I had pried loose. I turned once before pushing through. The figure was at the opposite side, crouching in front of a little door that served as its exit. He, too, turned. It was dark, and it was smoky, and yet I swear we would recognise one another again. An odd face, lined and old but also boyish, the chin closely shaved under a bloom of whiskers, with a fine, bony nose and graceful eyebrows; large, heavy-hooded eyes. A gentleman’s face, I remember thinking; or a gentle-born boy’s who’s been aged in his sleep. Like an evil Snow White. Then the man stepped out, closing the door, and I rolled through into the street, where the vomit jumped out of me like a living thing that wanted to get out, out, out, as though association with my body was shameful even for my half-digested dregs of breakfast.
Charlie found me there, a quarter hour later. Time to watch the guards drag the body out from underneath the scaffold by its feet, wrap it in sacking, strap it to a plank, and carry it off. That, and to wipe my mouth. My sleeves were so Soot-stained, it was like dragging charcoal across your mug.
The taste of it, though, stayed with me all the way back to school. It’s still there in the morning, when the school bell pulls me out of a dream the only part of which I remember is a snowman, its button eyes slowly sliding down the blank of its face one by one. I make it to the toilet before I am sick.
And later—later I go to see Renfrew, for the first of many such sessions. “An intensive programme of reform.” Those were his words to Trout. It’s Cruikshank who fetches me, at five o’clock sharp. Renfrew does not say anything when I enter his office. That’s all right; I don’t need instructions to know what to do. The dentist’s chair is awkward to climb into but turns out to be surprisingly comfortable: upholstered red leather, turned dark and smooth where other boys have sat and squirmed and sweated, leaving behind the hazy outline of a ghostly boy into which I fit myself quite naturally.
“Do I put the straps on?” I ask, doing my best to sound calm.
Renfrew smiles.
“That’s what all the boys ask. I think secretly you really want to.”
And I relax a little. After all: Renfrew already thinks the worst of me. That I am growing murder inside myself, the way a woman grows a child.
Nothing I can say or do will ever disappoint him.
SWEETS
School is different after London. The change is everywhere and, as such, hard to pin down. Charlie tries to make an inventory, but the more he writes down the more he feels is slipping through the cracks, the gaps between words and lines, until he throws away the piece of paper in disgust.
F
or one thing, the upper-school boys are having dreams. Nightmares. Not all of them, naturally, and not the same ones night after night. Actually, nobody is sure they are nightmares, because nobody remembers a thing. But they wake up, these boys, with rings under the eyes, bruises almost, their pillowcases stiff with Soot. Renfrew does not punish them. This in itself causes a stir. A gentleman never smokes. He dreams, it is said, as he lives. In the lower school, by contrast, the pale grey smears found in the bedding in the mornings continue to exact their price: the boys are disciplined, if mildly.
Then, just four days after their return—Christmas is approaching, and the boys have taken to counting days—an upper-school boy breaks through the ice while playing on the school pond. They are in the midst of a cycle of rapid melts and sudden freezes, and the boys have been warned to be careful. Charlie happens to be present: it is the afternoon break and he is returning books to the school library. The water in the pond is less than a yard deep, but the bottom is littered with rocks and discarded old junk. In summer, when the water is low and the sky clear, one can see the shape of an old bedstead rusting at its bottom, like the wreck of a steamer lost near the shore.
It’s this very shallowness that causes the injury. The boy’s skate hits something at an awkward angle, and his ankle and knee buckle. He is screaming so much, they have a hard time dragging him out of the hole and onto the thicker ice. There is blood on his trouser leg, hard to see at first, then dyeing the ice a vivid crimson. Low down on the shin, a thick, jagged spike pokes a bulge into the wet wool that nobody dares touch or even name. Worst of all is the pungent yellow Smoke that comes out of him, out of his mouth chiefly, along with his screams. It does not rise like a plume but rather crawls along at ankle-height then falls to the snow as a fine yellow powder, impossibly bright, like the jar of sulphur on the shelf in chemistry class.
