Smoke

by Dan Vyleta

  It’s Charlie who beds the boy’s head on his knees until the school nurse arrives. His name is Westwood. Peter. They share a bench in Greek.

  “Help me,” Peter keeps shouting up at Charlie’s face, not five inches away, and Charlie strokes his hair and promises he will be fine. By the time the nurse gets there, Westwood has passed out, his blood steaming in the cold air.

  The boy is saved, but for several days the school lives in suspense over whether his leg will come off. It doesn’t. When Charlie’s trousers return from the laundry, he can trace the outline of the boy’s Soot as a faint yellow line that runs from knee to mid-thigh. Disquieted by this, Charlie requests special permission to deposit the trousers in the school’s charity box, destined for an orphanage in London. He’d rather burn the pair but this, he is reminded, is against the rules. Charlie recalls the incinerator at Oxford station. They broke the rules easily enough on their return from London.

  ф

  Then there is Thomas. He is being sick. Every morning, like clockwork, a full hour before the bell is rung. The sound travels, the toilet bowl amplifying his retching like a trumpet, sending it down the corridor to where Charlie crouches, waiting for him, a handkerchief at the ready.

  “Are you all right?” Charlie asks him in what has fast become a ritual.

  “Right as rain,” Thomas always responds. “Something I ate.”

  They laugh, as the ritual demands. Gallows humour, one calls it. Only now that they have seen a gallows, the phrase is not one they use.

  And every day, at four o’clock sharp, when the others sit down for study hall in the upper assembly room, Thomas goes to visit Renfrew. It’s part of his punishment for fighting Julius. Thomas does not seem to mind these sessions. No, that’s not quite true. He dreads them and seems eager to go, all at the same time.

  Charlie asks him about what happens at these meetings. There is too much between them—too much respect, for one thing; too much trust; too many hours spent exchanging confidences—for Thomas to button up entirely. But Charlie sees him guard his words.

  “What does he do to you?” Charlie asks. “Renfrew.”

  Thomas shrugs. “He asks questions. I answer.”

  “Do you show?”

  “Very little.” Thomas seems surprised by this himself.

  “What does he ask about?”

  “This and that. Family, a lot of the time. My mother and father.” His face darkens, grows pensive.

  “It’s the way Renfrew asks,” he continues. “In earnest. Like he really wants to know. Sometimes I almost trust him. Sitting there on his inquisitor’s chair.”

  Thomas looks up, forces a smile through the tension on his face.

  “He’s an arsehole, of course, a gaping arsehole. But there are worse.”

  ф

  There are other, confusing aspects to life after the Trip. For all the darkness they brought back with them, a new spirit has taken hold of the upper school, a sort of pride. It takes Charlie a while to understand it is the afterlife of Renfrew’s words, his demand that they return to London when they come of age. Students can be found standing in huddles discussing “politics.” It is time, some say, to join the movement for “reform.” Parents are criticised, not individually but as a generation, and slogans are bandied about. These are seductive and evade concrete meaning. “The return to the cities” is one of them. “Scientific theology” is another. “Meritocracy.” “Rationalism.” “Regeneration.” Even (more quietly, with guarded smiles): “Revolution.” On occasion one of these impromptu speeches results in a belch of fine, light Smoke. The boys so chastised by the emission of their bodies observe this Smoke with genuine shame. It is, they say, a judgement on the purity of their motives. They invent punishments that they impose on themselves long before Renfrew has had the opportunity to study their Soot.

  Interestingly, the ringleaders of this talk are boys who have been at the periphery of things before. Not one of them is a member of the highest aristocracy. Charlie, usually popular across factions and cliques, finds himself avoided: his father is a prominent Tory. Julius, too, is sidelined, participates only by listening, an odd little smile on his face. In fact, his whole behaviour appears changed, especially as regards his treatment of Thomas. The first few days after the Trip he was his usual self: jeering, pompous, and hostile, baiting the younger boy at every opportunity. Now he is watching; seems omnipresent in fact, always at the doorway or standing halfway down the hall, his hands in his pockets, his dark eyes everywhere. He, too, is having daily discussions with Renfrew. It may be that it is these that account for the change.

  Whatever the reason, it has caused considerable confusion amongst Julius’s cronies—the whole complex web of guardians, prefects, and informers that upholds the structure of the school more surely than the teachers or the bricks and mortar. They have grown unsure of themselves, less inclined to impose their authority. In the lower school in particular, Charlie hears, it leads to more horseplay, more pushing of the rules, more arguments, more quarrels, more Smoke. But then, it’s almost Christmas. Everyone will be going home soon. Perhaps it is nothing more than this.

  ф

  With Thomas busy and preoccupied, and he himself adrift between the group of “rebels” and those representing the “old order,” Charlie finds himself with time on his hands. For a full week he searches for a sense of purpose, sits around, mopes, turns pages in books he fails to read.

  Then he finds it.

  It starts with a letter to his parents. The letter is overdue—Charlie is to write every Sunday without fail—but he did not feel up to it before. Even now each sentence crawls reluctantly out of his pen. The words sit on the page with a clarity that feels unearned and mock the chaos of his emotions. Part of the problem is that he does not know what to say about London. “I was very saddened to see the preponderance of sin,” he writes then crosses it out immediately. Not only is it inaccurate but it reads as though he is eighty years old and lives between the covers of a book (and a dusty book at that). “I hated it,” he tries again, but again crosses it out, because this, too, is false, inadequate, short of the mark. It takes six drafts in all for him to produce a satisfactory version. In not one of them does he mention the execution.

  Near the end of the letter, in the only paragraph he writes with ease and pleasure, for it conveys well-wishes to his sister and his excitement about coming home, he includes the following passage: “A week or two ago the teachers here received a shipment of tea and sweets from Beasley and Son. Naturally this caused some interest amongst us pupils—especially the sweets! Would it be cheeky for me to ask whether a packet of B&S’s might not also find its way into my Christmas stocking?”

  He finishes with a postscript asking whether it would be agreeable if he invited a schoolmate to join the family for all or part of the holiday. “I do not know what his commitments are,” he adds, punctiliously, “but am anxious for you to meet him. He is my best friend.”

  He sends the letter by the afternoon mail and receives an answer with the customary promptness the day after next. Yes, the family are looking forward to his coming, his mother writes, and are planning a trip to their house in Ireland, weather permitting. Yes, he may bring home whomsoever he wishes, however obscure his family name; and all the more so if the boy in question is dear to his heart.

  As to the sweets, Charlie has to read the letter twice until he finds an answer to his request. It is hidden away in a paragraph describing Christmas preparations and in particular the tree that the servants put up “only yesterday” and whose branches are “so rich and wide that there will hardly be any space for the family to fit beside it”; “nor is there hardly any chance that Father Christmas, who in some picture books appears a rather portly fellow, will be able to squeeze his girth into the room to deliver any presents.” “It may be just as well,” his mother goes on, “that, by the evidence of your letter, you are growing up very fast and have no more need for superstitions. It is all the mo
re important that your maturing desires, regarding Christmas presents and otherwise, be married to your discretion, both in public utterance and private.” There the paragraph ends. The next spends an inordinate number of words reminding Charlie to wear warm socks and underwear, and to dry off properly after taking a bath.

  Charlie wishes that his mother could put matters more simply, but has learned that it is the nature of letter-writing that one must state things in a roundabout and somewhat poetic way; otherwise letters would become frightfully short. All the same he finds himself returning time and again to that curiously worded admonishment concerning his “desires.” It appears his mother is telling him to shut up. This is unusual in itself; as an answer to his lighthearted request it is also rather odd. More than odd.

  A riddle.

  It is fair to say that Charlie is intrigued.

  ф

  The following afternoon finds him setting out to the little market town about half an hour’s walk from the school. Visits there are one of the privileges he enjoys as an upper-school boy in good standing, though they are limited to a single outing a term. The day is grey and cold, the skies threatening snow. Charlie walks briskly, trying to keep warm, but there is no way to keep the frost out of his hands and feet. Town is a butcher’s, a baker’s, a greengrocer’s, and a haberdashery. There is also a public house near the river and a Saturday market, though none of the boys have been to either, their privileges extending neither to weekends, nor to pubs. In a side street, not far from the market square, there is yet one other establishment. By three in the afternoon, when the bakery’s bread is all sold out and no longer dominates the smells of the town centre, one can find it by scent alone. A sticky smell: baked apples, cloves, and cinnamon along with something darker, black treacle burnt solid on the iron of a red-hot hob. HODGSON’S SWEETS, DRIED FRUIT, AND NUTS. The sign of a date tree, stooped low under its load.

  Inside the shop the smell of sugar is near-overpowering. The shop’s heat, too, rushes in on Charlie, puts a tingle in his fingers, toes, and cheeks. A young gentlewoman is there, buying candied fruit and almonds. Her waist, seen from behind, is impossibly slender and accentuated by the bundled opulence of her skirts. Attending her is Mr. Hodgson: a short, balding man with pockmarked cheeks and tidy movements. At his feet, rolled up snout to tum, lies a runty whippet, as skinny as they come. The dog appears to be sleeping, dreaming; sweeps its tail across the floor in jerky crescents and sounds quiet, high-pitched yelps. It is, it occurs to Charlie, a very good thing that animals do not smoke.

  Charlie keeps to the back of the shop until the woman is finished. The schoolboys are warned not to have any contact with the opposite sex other than the school nurse, though greetings, of course, are allowed. He takes off his cap when the lady turns to leave and holds the door for her; sees her smile with pleasure. Outside, she crosses the street holding up her skirts to avoid dragging them through muddy snow: a movement to the hips underneath that wasplike waist that puts a blush on Charlie’s cheek. The shopkeeper, too, looks after her with a certain fixity, a wisp of Smoke curling from somewhere at the back of his neck.

  “Corsets, eh? Like tying a belt around a balloon. You always think it’s goin’ to blow. Above. Or below.” He makes a violent gesture that brings to mind a man with a garrote. Then he recalls he is speaking to a gentleman, albeit a schoolboy, tousle-haired under his cap. “Begging your pardon, of course. I was only speaking in jest.”

  Charlie is unsurprised by his sudden deference, at once strategic and real. No police, no magistrates are needed to enforce it. It is written into their complexions, the man’s Soot-coarsened, Charlie’s soft and smooth. All the same, the grocer’s comments about the lady have put Charlie in a difficult position. As a gentleman, it is his duty to reprimand the man. But Charlie is also a minor, instructed to respect his elders, irrespective of their station. That, and he is here for a purpose.

  A new customer relieves him of his uncertainty. It is the vicar, come in for a tuppence-worth of humbugs. Charlie immediately cedes ground to him, stands by the door with his cap in his hand, listens to their small talk. On his way out, the vicar stops, places his eyes on Charlie, and leaves them there for longer than is comfortable. He is an old man, close-cropped white whiskers meeting underneath his chin.

  “Skiving?” he asks at last.

  “I have a pass. From the school.”

  “Ah. A good boy then.” The vicar digs in his paper bag. “Here, have a humbug.”

  His eyes won’t leave Charlie until he has put the stripy sweet in his mouth. Then the old man sniffs the air.

  “It smells of Smoke in here. Underneath all the sweet. Not yours? His then. Well, his kind are meant to. Go to hell, I mean. God’s natural order. Good day.”

  He says this quite loudly, even cheerfully, then walks out of the door. Again both Charlie and the shopkeeper find themselves looking out the big front window, watching after the flutter of dark skirts.

  “A true man of God,” Mr. Hodgson declares, rattling the vicar’s pennies in his fist. “Righteous. If not as charming as the lady.” His tone remains oddly poised between deference and derision: accepting the truth of the vicar’s words, yet enraged by them all the same. “And what would you like then?”

  Charlie has anticipated the question and has worked out his answer, word for word, on the way over; has gone so far as to try it out on the empty country road where there was no one to hear. But now, faced with this man, his wheedling manner, the coarseness of his pockmarked cheeks, and the heavy atmosphere of the shop, he hesitates.

  “Sir?”

  “Liquorice,” Charlie improvises. “A penny’s worth.”

  “Sweet or salty?”

  “Salty.”

  “I’ve snails and coins.”

  “Snails, please. And a quarter pound of hazelnuts.”

  “Anything else?”

  Again Charlie hesitates, then is grabbed by the sudden fear that the vicar will return, or some other customer, and make his query impossible.

  “A tin of sweets.” He is rushing through the words so fast, he himself can hardly understand them. “Beasley and Son. If it’s no trouble.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Beasley and Son. A tin. Or just some loose sweets, if that’s how they come.”

  The shopkeeper’s reaction is curious. The first thing he does is step away from Charlie, look him up and down. Reassess him. But he is still the same skinny schoolboy in the same tidy uniform, his collar freshly starched. Then the man looks behind Charlie, as though he suspects him of hiding a second person behind his back; then on past him, at the desolate street. His face is a mask of calculation.

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about.” Smoke frames the words like a shroud. “You better pay and get out.”

  And then, as Charlie stands counting out coins: “Who sent you here?”

  “Nobody. I just— The teachers have them. I have seen the little tins. Just ordinary hard-boiled sweets. Like caramels, only clear. There was a delivery not long ago…”

  Charlie trails off, unsure how much information he should part with. The school’s affairs are private. Nobody has ever instructed him to treat them as such, but it is a rule all the same. It’s like any other family. When there are guests at dinner, certain things are not to be discussed.

  “Look here,” the shopkeeper barks with particular emphasis, as though defending his good name, “if there was a delivery it wasn’t from here.”

  More Smoke pours out of him, not thick but oddly smelly. It paints dark blotches on his collar. Again he looks Charlie up and down; again he stares past him, out at the street, searching it for accomplices.

  “How much was there, boy? How many tins?”

  Charlie shakes his head. “I don’t know. A crate, I believe.”

  All at once the man is shouting, sweeping Charlie’s pennies off the counter so they scatter on the floor.

  “You’re a liar, you are. Out. I will make a complaint
, don’t think I won’t. Out, out!”

  The noise wakes the dog. It jumps to its feet, presses its ears flat against the side of its head, arches its back, then spins on its feet, trying to identify the source of danger. But Charlie has already retreated to the door. He lets himself out, the brown paper bag with his sweets in one hand. Outside, released from the atmosphere of boiled sugar and caramelized nuts, the cold air hits him like a slap. Through the window he sees the man shouting, shaking his fist above his head. The high, quivering yelp of his dog falls in with the man and follows Charlie down the street. Then the wind picks up and scatters their noise. All the same, it’s only at the edge of town that Charlie stops running.

  The road to school seems longer on his return.

  ф

  Charlie tells him everything, starting with the letter. Thomas listens distractedly at first, then with ever greater intensity, biting off pieces of liquorice from an uncoiled snail.

  “So what do you think?” Charlie asks when he’s finished his account.

  “These are disgusting. You should have bought sherbets.”

  “Be serious, Thomas.” But he can see from his friend’s face that he is, really; that he is thinking it over.

  “I don’t know,” Thomas decides when the liquorice is gone. “Some sort of drug, maybe. Like opium.”

  “Can’t be. You can buy opium in any pharmacy. Or laudanum, which is the same thing.”

  “Something different then. More powerful than opium. Hence: forbidden.” Thomas shrugs. “We won’t really know until we get our hands on some. Here’s the thing, though. The shopkeeper knows about it. And so does your mother.”