Smoke

by Dan Vyleta

  Why?

  “The Smoke,” he explains. “I’m not like Charlie. It makes a home in me.”

  As he says it, he realises he is afraid to fight these men not because he will lose. He is afraid he will disappear, disappear into the Smoke, as he did when he fought Julius. One day, he thinks, he won’t find his way back.

  But there is no need to explain all this to Livia. She has already understood the most important thing. They must get off the train.

  “When?” she asks.

  “Now.”

  He has been listening for it, the moment the train’s engine clears the crest of the hill. The moment it is at its slowest, its rump tethered to a dozen wagons, gravity tugging at its nose. It is a sound the body hears, not the ears, a change in vibrations racing through the chain of wagons like a rumour: steel wheel to axle to coupling to wood.

  Now.

  Thomas pushes Livia with both hands, afraid that she will miss the moment; pushes too hard, perhaps, and sees her stumble awkwardly across the threshold of the door. The wind whips at her hair. Then she is gone from sight.

  Him, the vagrants try to stop before he can follow. It is a clumsy charge. Thomas ducks one man’s arm, sidesteps the other’s leg, and throws himself forward. He feels himself falling through the sharp twigs of a shrub. Then the ground jumps up at him. He hits it shoulder first, feels the air pushed out of his lungs; goes head over heels, then starts rolling down a slope of unkempt grass, the world a carousel, hips, elbows, knees pummelled by the impact of each revolution.

  ф

  They are lucky, in a sense. The hill slopes gently where they leapt, and the hedgerow that parallels the tracks is free of thorns. All the same, the twigs have torn clothes and skin. They each come to rest some six or seven yards down, where a ditch welcomes them with its bed of hard-caked mud. He looks around winded, and sees Livia sitting up not far from him, her face dark with dirt, and blood seeping from a cut lip. She gets to her feet and stands over him, rubbing her upper arms and neck. He thinks she will ask him whether he is all right; whether his wound has reopened or he has broken any limbs.

  “Stupid,” she says. “We should have waited for a steeper hill.”

  He tries to speak but doesn’t have enough air.

  “How far to London?” she asks.

  He gasps, spits.

  “Don’t know,” he manages. “Can’t be far.”

  “Get up then.” She brushes at her clothes, her face. “We need to find water. I want to wash.”

  ф

  She won’t be talked out of it. What does it matter, he tries to explain to her, if they are dirty? In London everyone is dirty. It will help them blend in. She could wet her handkerchief with some spit, rub off the blood if it bothers her. But she won’t be swayed, glowers at his words. Something about him makes her angry. He understands this well enough. Something about her makes him angry too.

  Half an hour later she finds a creek. They are walking south, keeping the tracks in sight, on an unmarked path. Already the sun is sitting low in the sky. The day has cleared, its light bright and pure, carving shades of colour out of every blade of grass. It is hard to believe that they emerged from darkness only that morning. Seven hours of daylight and already Thomas’s wonder at the world has worn thin. His head is hurting, his back, the bruises on his hips and knees. A lone crow sits in empty fields and watches him hobble past.

  The creek is three feet wide and a foot deep. There is no bridge, but a fallen tree has been placed across from bank to bank. Livia climbs down to it, crouches, then looks at him expectantly.

  “What?” he asks, uncomprehending.

  “Some privacy, if you will.”

  “You are going to strip? Just dunk a hankie in and mop your face. Be done with it.”

  It’s like talking at a stone. He curses, turns away from her, shuffles ten steps down the path. The crow is still there in its field, caws hoarsely at him, picks an insect out the dirt. While he waits, impatient, Thomas makes an inventory of his pockets. There is a penknife and a handkerchief so stained with coal dust it is a featureless black. A length of yarn; a spent and broken match. A stone he picked up in some childish moment because it impressed him by its smoothness. Then he finds the cigarettes. There are four of them, each bent like an old man’s fingers. He has a memory of forcing open Julius’s little box and stuffing them in his coat. The smell leaps up to him, sticks to his fingertips even after he scatters the cigarettes on the ground. An invitation to sin. Renfrew would have been pleased to witness his fear.

  When Livia finally emerges, her hair is streaming wet. She has no towel and has put on her shirt over her still-wet frame, is using the miner’s coat like a blanket thrown about her shoulders. Her face is flushed with cold. Beneath it shivers her young body, more naked than dressed. Thomas sees it and quickly turns away.

  A silence descends. Behind him he can hear her wring out her hair then climb into the shoes she has been holding in her hand.

  “There,” she announces at last. “Nearly dry. I needed to…Those men made me feel dirty.”

  Thomas hardly hears her. He wonders whether she saw him look. Whether he showed. He needs to say something; warn her; apologise. Her belly button showed dark through the wet cotton of her shirt; he saw the slender arches of her rib cage. You have to be careful, he wants to say. There is a curve, a hollow where her arm runs into torso, so much softer than a boy’s. I am no different than those who rode the train.

  “Livia,” he says instead, his eyes on dirt and crow. It sounds sulky rather than apologetic. “What sort of name is Livia?”

  Instantly, her voice turns cold.

  “What do you care?”

  But his mind has already moved on, slides from thought to thought without finding traction.

  “I wish Charlie was here,” he mutters. And then: “He’s in love with you.”

  “And you disapprove.”

  He listens into himself and discovers she is right.

  “Charlie is the best,” he tries to explain. “The most honest, the bravest person I have ever met.”

  “While I’m a stuck-up little madam pretending to be a saint.”

  “You are like me. Flawed and angry. Only you hide it better. Some day you will let him down.”

  “I won’t.”

  He startles himself with the sadness that rises up in him. “Who can say for sure, Livia?”

  Then he adds, turning now, looking boldly in her eye. “You are pretty. I did not notice it before.”

  In answer, she wraps her arms tight around her slender frame.

  They resume walking. As they set off, Livia quickly, furtively crouches down to the cigarettes he has discarded and picks them off the ground one by one. She does not offer an explanation.

  Thomas does not ask for one.

  ф

  She tells him later. They are walking single file, Thomas in front, Livia behind, straining to adjust her pace to his slow stumble. Her explanation has no face, therefore: just a voice, measured and even, reciting the facts.

  “The name is Roman,” she says. “Livia Orestilla. An empress: Caligula’s wife. She was to marry someone else, but Caligula stole her on her wedding night. Then he divorced her after only a few days.”

  “A funny thing to put into your cradle. In lieu of frankincense and myrrh.”

  “That’s just what Julius said. Not the words but the sentiment. It was he who told me. About Caligula.”

  Stung, Thomas turns around to her, careful to place his eyes on her face, her jacket closed now, swallowing her body.

  “It is good that you hate me. I’m dangerous. I have tainted blood.”

  He is surprised to see she holds his gaze. Thus far, she has always avoided it. It must be something she brought up with her, from the depth of the mine.

  “So you are,” she replies, serious and not. “ ‘Tainted.’ ‘Dangerous.’ Why is it you think I’m walking three paces at your back?”

  It shouldn’t, but it
makes Thomas laugh. When they start walking, her steps fall into rhythm with his.

  One pace, he thinks. Two paces at the most.

  ф

  They reach the border at dusk. The transition is gradual but also distinct. On their side, the dipping sun finds the earth rich and brown; trees tall and proud even in hibernation; hollies growing in green vigour. On the other side all growth is stunted, the soil barren, mixed with Soot, the puddles greasy with sin’s residue, the air pregnant with its stink.

  The other side. The city. London.

  The day has grown colder and snow is in the air. Thomas wonders whether it will fall black, over there. They stop under the shadow of a tree. It is a species Thomas does not recognise, a conifer nearly as broad as it is high, its branches growing sideways and forming a series of platforms, filtering the last of the sun. On the London side, the tree stands black, smeared in Soot, and threadbare in its canopy. He walks up to the trunk and touches the bark. Livia watches him, puzzled.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing. It’s just—I like this tree.” He talks with his back to her, so she won’t see his face. There is a catch to his voice, a hint of a younger Thomas, gentler in pitch. “What kind is it? I have never seen it before.”

  “A cedar of Lebanon,” she answers without hesitation. “There is a grove of them on the grounds of my school, along with a plaque. It says an explorer brought back a handful of seeds, in the early 1600s. All British cedars descend from that handful. There was a debate in Parliament not long ago whether they should all be cut down.”

  “Why? No, I know. Because they are foreign. An outside thing.”

  “Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” she says reasonably. “They do not belong here.”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  He touches the bark, both hands flat on the tree, lets it take his weight. There is a high, light humming in his chest. Bone music. Singing of home. Home? A tree transplanted from its native soil, planted at the edge of purgatory. The early 1600s. It came with the Smoke. Its bark warm and rough under his spread-out palms.

  “Come,” Livia urges, not unkindly. “We cannot stay here. We’ll freeze to death.”

  Indeed a deep chill has started to rise out of the land and pinpricks of snowflakes stand in the air, catching the sunset. Only the breeze blowing in from the south is a little warmer. It carries London to them, sewage and sin, and the dank stink of boiling cabbage.

  They walk towards it side by side.

  ф

  Darkness falls just as the muddy little path they follow feeds into a cobbled road. All of a sudden there are people, dwellings, mangy dogs hunting for offal in the ditch. They are still far from the centre, in a no-man’s-land of pig farms and factories, vegetable plots, lean-tos made from wood and sackcloth. The closer they draw the less certain they become of the way, encounter sinkholes, dead ends, intersections that split the street in confusing ways. Then also, with every step Thomas’s fatigue is mounting, the ache of fever returning to his joints. It isn’t long before Livia stops him.

  “We have walked all day. You need rest. There, we can find shelter in that doorway.”

  Thomas is too tired to argue. The doorway is ripe with smells but deep enough to allow them to disappear into its shadow, even to lie down, using their arms for pillows. For a moment the muck that seeps through his coat and shirt makes Thomas gag. Then exhaustion wipes the feeling from his mind. What remains is the cold. Even out of the wind, heated though it is by the furnace of London’s sin, the night is near-freezing. Against their will, they are forced to huddle close, back pressed against back, each keeping the other awake with their shiver. The floor of the doorway is uneven from use. It dips at the centre. Late at night, not explaining himself, Thomas turns around to take Livia in his arms and mould his chest, knees and legs against her frame. It is warmer this way. Her hair smells of coal, sweat, and peaches. It is the peaches that trouble him as he drifts off to sleep. Dawn brings noise and the acrid smell of fresh Smoke. They roll apart like disgruntled puppies and stiffly resume the road. Behind them, their doorway remains empty, the door locked, the house unmarked and ordinary but for the lopsided contour of a cross that declares it a chapel.

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  They walk in comfort with each other, two steps apart. Some truce appears to have been struck between them in the course of the night, almost a friendship, dispelling the tension of the previous day. It fills Thomas with hope. In a few hours—the next morning at the latest—Charlie will re-join them and all danger will have passed, this strange, dimly sensed trap laid for them by the road. In the meantime Thomas gives himself to London. In the thin light of morning it seems different to him than it was when he first came here. Or rather, he is different, has shed both school and uniform, become one of the crowd. Already the streets are choked with wagons and people: farmers bringing sheep to market, costermongers, morning drunks, factory workers marching to their shift. The Smoke is light yet, dissolved in yellow fog, tugs at Thomas in ways not entirely unpleasant, gives rise to unruly feelings he does little to suppress. Next to him, Livia walks more guardedly, suspicious of this haze, yet gawking, too, at this sea of people whose steady current carries them along.

  They find the square by midmorning. There is no scaffold there today, no soldiers, no hangman, no rabid mob. Even so the square is crowded enough that all movement becomes a matter of negotiation, of space claimed and yielded, shoulders brushed, weights gently shifted. London is a place where people touch. It strikes Thomas as a succinct definition of its sin.

  Despite the press of people, however, the square feels different today. During the execution, there had been but one crowd, focussed on a single spectacle. Today there are many centres of attention. A group of farmers have set up stalls and are selling produce to a jostling throng, their boys armed with cudgels to discourage thieves. Behind these stalls, a ring has formed around two fighting dogs; a crone with a chalkboard is accepting bets. Right next to her a man has mounted a crate and is screaming at the score of people who form his congregation. Beyond, a small tent has been set up, and a gaudily dressed youth is selling tickets to a show that, judging by the sign dangling from his neck, appears to involve a woman undressing to reveal her scorpion’s tail. Each of these groups is knit together by a mist of Smoke, light and volatile in the air, if thickening in places into dark swirls. At the borders these mists mingle or rain down in flakes of Soot soon absorbed by the ground’s black grit.

  “It’s not like it was down the mine,” Livia says, disappointed. “I had started to hope that Smoke was benign.”

  “And now you are shocked.”

  “Well, look at it,” Livia answers. “It’s a disgrace.”

  “I was just thinking the opposite. That it’s not really that bad.”

  Just as Thomas says it, two women at the far end of the square start fighting, the shorter, stockier woman wrestling the other to the ground then pelting her with insults.

  ф

  They choose a perch atop a set of shallow stairs that lead up to a church. Church does not capture the building’s scale; it is very nearly a cathedral. A row of marble columns rise behind them, holding aloft a portico high above their heads. Beyond it a single tower spikes two hundred feet into the heavens, where the Smoke thins and a cloudy sky spews snowflakes that reach the earth as dirty drizzle. For all its grandeur, the building is dilapidated, its great doors leaning burnt within their frames, held aloft by a crude patchwork of timber. The windows, too, have long lost their glass and are similarly boarded shut. High up, the brickwork that peels itself out of the city’s sooty varnish shines with the pallor of limestone. The long, angular lines of the 1720s: built a hundred years into the time of Smoke. Thomas stares at the church and imagines a time when, despite it all, a decision was taken to build it here, at the heart of vice.

  Morning turns to afternoon and Charlie does not come. Dawn, noon, dusk: these are the meeting times they have agreed. They shall have to leave soon, to
look for food and shelter for the night. There is a water pump on the market square and though the water is grey and tastes of tin they have gone down to it repeatedly, to slacken their thirst and fill up their stomachs with something other than air. To obtain food, they will need to raise money. Or else they will have to steal. It is a problem, Thomas imagines, faced by a great many Londoners.

  A man approaches the stairs. It takes Thomas some time to understand why he notices him. There have been others walking past, some openly staring at them, assessing their wealth, their station. Others yet have sought out the stairs as they have: as a place to rest. One old woman sat to feed the pigeons from a tin of dug-up grubs, cooing sweet nothings and all the while gently smoking from the shafts of her high boots.

  This man is different. He moves briskly without wishing to disclose his haste, as though he is straining at the lead of his own discretion. A man in his fifties, bald, a crick in his neck that tilts chin to shoulder. But it is not this that draws Thomas’s eye. He only makes sense of it after the man has turned and darted down the alley by the side of the church. Everyone else who walked towards them, past the various islands of spectacle that dot the square, veered off somewhere, even if only for a moment. The Smoke made sure of it: it called to them as they passed, pulled them towards its centre, as though they were celestial bodies passing the weight of the sun. In his repressed hurry, walking through the siren song of sin, this man alone—the man with the bent neck—never once veered.

  He is eating sweets.

  There can be no other explanation. But something else tugs at Thomas, a memory older than the discovery of sweets, if not by much.

  “Charlie,” he says abruptly, startling Livia out of her doze. “He once told me he saw an angel. Right here on the market square. An angel with a crooked neck.”

  Livia stares after Thomas when he jumps up and runs to the alley. But the man is long gone.

  “Is he important?”

  “Charlie thought so,” Thomas replies. “In any case, it’s more than just chance. Two sightings on the very same square. He must have business here.”