Smoke

by Dan Vyleta

  It was an accident, unsought, irreversible. Livia has watched him struggling against it ever since, cheeks bunched, fingers picking at the scab that runs past his temple, resting his eyes on her only in moments of distraction, dark, unflinching eyes, taking her in. When his Smoke rises, as in London it must, she is there amongst its flavours, dissolved in fear and want and spite. He cannot spit, it seems, without her presence being written in the bile.

  She frowns, lingers over the thought, shies at the threshold of another. For there is more to it yet. Thomas has noticed her.

  She has noticed him too.

  It is odd that this truth should come with so much anger.

  “I am in love with Charlie,” she whispers, defiantly, and watches a skein of Smoke crawl out of Thomas’s sleeping form and hover above him like a second blanket. A boy with a dirty soul. He will spoil your dress if you step too close.

  But Livia is no longer wearing dresses.

  She slips off the stool, slides onto her knees, the miner’s trousers so dirty that they cushion the knees like felt patches. Thomas is a foot away, is hateful to her, a trial to which she must submit. She leans forward, stretches her neck, seeking to understand him and, in understanding, dismiss him; purge him from her thoughts. She slurps his Smoke like soup. Inhales him, tastes him, and learns nothing she did not already know. This is he: anger and strength. It’s her own Smoke that shocks her. It leaps unbidden, a little pink plume that forms a whirlpool in front of her breath, then spirals up, towards the ceiling. It’s like picking up your diary and finding you wrote a name in it over and over while you were not looking. Thomas’s name; thick and ragged, like she was punishing the quill. She recoils, jumps to her feet, disperses her Smoke with dismayed hands.

  “Dinner, my dear,” Grendel’s voice calls from the kitchen. “Try to wake your friend. It’ll do him good.”

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  They eat in anger. When Thomas learns that Charlie did not come at the appointed hour—and that Livia neglected to wake him—his mood sours and soon colours the mash he is shovelling into his mouth. Livia, too, tastes Smoke with each spoonful, though she does not visibly show. Between them, Grendel sits, unperturbed, imperturbable, a crooked-necked Jesus at supper, sharing out their meagre loaf of bread.

  “You woke with an appetite!” he keeps praising Thomas. “Tomorrow you will be strong enough to meet your friend yourself.”

  Despite these words, Thomas is visibly worn out by the time the last spoonful has passed his mouth and has soon retreated back to the blanket in his room. Mrs. Grendel too is soon to retire. It leaves Livia alone with Grendel. She is glad for it. She is in need of distraction, of hope. Grendel, she knows, will offer her both.

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  They talk without strain, sitting at the kitchen table, tea in the pot. It’s Livia who picks the topic; something safe, simple, far from her fears.

  “How about that name?” she asks. “It must have been a burden.”

  Grendel answers plainly, directly, the way he told his story; unworried by truth.

  “Not at all,” he says. “Growing up, you see, I simply never realised. Not until much later, here in London, when I heard someone sing the song. Have you heard it? Apparently it is very old. There are many versions. But in each of them there is a monster. Grendel. ‘It filled the great hall with its Smoke / And tore the men / Gristle from bone.’ ” He snarls playfully; smiles. “I doubt my father ever gave it a second thought; nor Granddad. Perhaps though, ten generations back, there was a monster in the family. Or perhaps”—his smile fades, and a frown grows into his forehead, more of wonder than of grief—“the name is like a seed, planted in my bloodline a thousand years ago, waiting to sprout in the one for whom it was intended.”

  Livia reaches over and lays her hand in his. How simple, how natural it is to touch him.

  “What sort of villain are you? Do you steal away at night to feast on swordsmen in their sleep?”

  “What is an angel,” he answers, “if not a monster of some kind?” But he giggles as he says it and seems almost happy. “What about ‘Livia’ though? It’s a beautiful name but I’ve never heard it before.”

  “A family name. It was my grandmother’s.”

  Grendel nods and smiles and holds Livia’s hand.

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  That same evening she tells Grendel how her father went mad. She shouldn’t, of course, it is a family secret, all their servants are sworn to it and only two of them are trusted to tend to his needs. But she wants Grendel to know about him. Perhaps they can visit him some day, stand by his bedside and hold his hands. Grendel is the miracle Father prayed for all his life.

  “He wanted to be like you,” she says. “Sinless. Pure. But he wasn’t. When I was a child, I remember, he had a quick temper. I found him once, shouting at a stable boy, Smoke coming out his ears. Two mighty plumes, thick as candy floss.”

  She cannot help laughing. It is a happy memory, despite the sin.

  “And then he conquered his Smoke. Conquered it completely, for more than two years. We were all in awe of him: the servants, Mother, and I above all. He was like a holy man. Only he grew very thin. And then he started talking to himself. Little things, not always in English. When I returned home after the next school term, he was chained to his bed.

  “I’ll tell you another secret: for the past year and more, I’ve wanted to be like him. Like he was, before he went mad. Holy.” She surprises herself by being able to laugh. “But Charlie thinks I have no talent for it.”

  “Tell me about Charlie.”

  “Charlie is the one we are waiting for. Thomas’s friend.” She feels herself blushing. “My friend, too.”

  Soon thereafter, they each retire to bed.

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  Thomas is up early the next day. His sickness has left him at last. Now he stands, itching for action. He is that hateful word found in cheap novels. Virility. It’s in his every stride and glower. No other word will do.

  And yet he cannot meet her eye.

  “I’m off,” he announces after breakfast and does not wait to see whether she will follow. His impatience only increases once—five steps apart, him rushing, her chasing—they reach the foot of the church. Dawn is breaking; a smear of colours in the fog.

  There is no Charlie.

  “Something has happened to him.”

  “You don’t know that,” Livia replies, though she, too, is bowed by the same thought. Charlie is alone: detained in Oxford, or lost on the road to London; in a train compartment, on the back of a wagon, lying wounded in a ditch. They were shot upon before. When Livia closes her eyes she can hear the screaming of the horses dragging her mother’s coach over the precipice.

  Charlie does not arrive at noon. She does not need to wait for Thomas to tell her what he is thinking. He wants to go find Charlie; trace him all the way to Oxford if need be. She can feel it in her pores, on the hairs of her arms. And yet, Thomas is not smoking. There must exist, then, another type of Smoke: invisible, clinging to them as surely as their shadows. The breath of their needs and worries; the truths each must assert and impose upon all others. The potentiality of sin. If so, they are all in each other’s mouths every time they speak. How dangerous then proximity, those hours and days spent shoulder to shoulder until the other’s being begins to grow into one’s own and sows its hunger in one’s furrows. How blissful, conversely, solitude, and how miraculous Grendel’s isolation. Of all the men and women in London, he alone is an island, unadulterated, himself.

  “You go,” she says as much to release Thomas as to be rid of him. “See whether you can find him. I will wait.”

  “It isn’t safe for you here,” he barks back, protective, resentful.

  “There’s Grendel. And the priest. I will be all right.”

  He thinks, nods, hesitates over how to say good-bye, then simply turns and strides off.

  “I shan’t be long.”

  Thomas walks as though he is leaning into wind.

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  It’s well past dinner by the time Thomas returns. When Grendel dons his coat and goes to look for him out on the street, Mrs. Grendel turns from where she stands scrubbing dishes.

  “Boys, eh? Hard to keep track of them. Always running off on some adventure.”

  Livia cannot tell whether she is taunting her or trying to soothe her worries. Mrs. Grendel’s face does not take easily to emotion, and her interactions with Livia have been guarded and stiff.

  “Here he is now.” Grendel returns, a grim-looking Thomas in tow. “Let’s find you some food, my lad. You must be starving.”

  Thomas accounts for his day over a bowl of cold fish stew, eating with a crudeness, Livia notes, which speaks of a childhood running wild.

  “I took the main road west. Asking whoever I could for news. A red-headed youth in dirty clothes. Well-spoken; good boots. I thought maybe somebody had met him up the road.” He grimaces, slurps stew, picks fish bones from pursed lips.

  “I walked for miles out of town and talked to dozens of people. But nothing: no sign of Charlie, no word. Then I met a tinker hailing from Oxford and he told me about rumours concerning the school. He said that one of the schoolmasters had been attacked by a gang of robbers. ‘They fed him to their dogs,’ he said. ‘Can you believe it? They literally ate him up, crown to sole.’ ” Thomas shakes his head as though wishing to rid himself of the image. “The tinker also told me that someone came and rescued the schoolmaster’s daughter. ‘A ginger knight dressed as a beggar,’ he said. ‘Whisked the girl to safety right under the robbers’ noses. But listen to this: what the lad didn’t realise, not until he’d got her to safety, was that the schoolmaster had done surgery on her. On his own daughter! Turned her into half machine. I swear by all the popish saints.’ ”

  Thomas pauses, pulls a face.

  “But that’s nonsense. Gibberish.”

  “Gibberish, Livia? I suppose so. I also met a man who told me there was a devil on the loose on the London road. A devil with a necklace made of human fingers.” Thomas stabs his spoon at the last morsel of fish. “That ‘ginger knight’ of the tinker’s story, though, that must be Charlie. And if so, something happened at Renfrew’s, something bad. And now he is lost, in between Oxford and here.”

  “So what do we do? Charlie could be anywhere. And Mother’s delivery is tomorrow night.”

  “We should never have split up.” Thomas curses, rises, his face flushing dark with more than blood. “What can we do? We wait.

  “If Charlie’s hurt,” he adds, storming out, “I will make them pay. Your mother. The school. Everyone.”

  But even here there is to the train of Smoke he leaves behind something other than his anger, something guilty, whispering her name.

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  Livia sits up late, talking to Grendel. It’s that or going to bed. Worrying about Charlie. Listening to Thomas shift on the blankets in his room. It is the first night since leaving her father’s house that she wishes she had never met the two boys.

  So she sits and asks questions. About Grendel’s youth. About London. About his work at the church. Then she asks Grendel about his neck. It is the only thing that’s twisted about him. One side of his throat appears shorter than the other. It bears the puckered line of a scar.

  “How did this happen?”

  “I did it myself. I was sitting shaving one morning. The razor in my hand. You know that sound it makes when it scrapes off the bristle. I heard it and felt lonely. Not just lonely. Alone in the world. A creature all to itself. So I thought to myself, why not end it? Or rather my hands thought it. It’s like they had reasoned it out.” He shrugs, lopsided. “I cut the muscle, largely. Missed the artery. The surgeon patched me up, only he was drunk and botched it, or so another surgeon told me when he had a look at his work. All the same, he saved my life. My wife, you see, she was the surgeon’s daughter. She looked after me while I was lying sick.” His eyes grow warm. “She figured out what I was, and she cared for me all the same.”

  Livia sits still, trying to square this account with the woman whose house she has been sharing. Her life is not an easy one. She trawls the river mud each day, picks shellfish, mussels, rags, and bone, then trades her findings against meat and money at the market; a cudgel dangling from her belt to ward off rivals. Mrs. Grendel stood washing kidneys that evening, preparing them for the morrow, complaining about their price. “Two extra mouths,” she kept saying, “it is a strain on the purse.” All the while looking at Livia; the tang of urine rising from the sink.

  What Livia says to Grendel is: “You must love her very much.”

  He heaves a sigh. “I do. But I love her with my head. There are moments in married life when it is important that one love with other parts. That one forgets oneself and smokes.”

  He stops abruptly, in doubt whether Livia is too young for such truths, and too nobly born.

  “Passion,” she whispers, not looking at his face. “You are talking about passion.”

  He hesitates before he nods. “I have seen it in others. It’s a kind of greed.”

  “You are saying you can’t—in married life, I mean. And of course you have no children.”

  He smiles shyly, looks about himself, furtive with the weight of his insight. “Oh, I can, I can. But not with that greed. It makes a difference to one’s wife.”

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  It is a small step from there, in conversational terms, and yet Livia is flustered by it, feels primness return to her bearing, bland modesty to her face. All Grendel does is point into the depths of the flat.

  “Is that one your sweetheart then?”

  “No.”

  He seems surprised by her denial.

  “You like him though.”

  “He’s a bully and a brute.”

  He weighs her words, his gentle face grown gentler yet, speaking to her as though to a child.

  “Then there is someone else. This Charlie, perhaps?”

  Livia chews on this, not looking at him, struggling to turn away the lies that rise to her tongue.

  “You can’t like two people,” she says at last and flinches at the fear in her voice. “Not like that.”

  “Can’t you, Livia? I wouldn’t know.”

  He gets up, his knees creaking, finds a bottle of port, almost empty, and pours them each a finger’s depth of wine.

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  They sit and drink. Her mind has become stuck on the earlier word. “Passion.” Lust, really, if one looks it in the eye. There is something so illicit to the word, Livia finds it hard to let it go. Grendel’s questions have unsettled her. There is, on her lips, that strange tingling that presages Smoke. She is literally a breath away from sinning.

  It makes her look at Grendel in renewed awe.

  “So you really never feel it?” she asks him. “Not even a hint? That moment just before the Smoke takes hold of you? Like a drug injected into your blood?”

  He starts shaking his head, stops.

  “Well, perhaps. There are times, you know, quite ordinary moments, when I stumble on the stairs in the belfry, say, and I bump my head, or the neighbourhood children pelt me with garbage for sport, when I think there’s something. Just a hint, see, a buzzing in the skin.” He smiles and blushes, with pleasure. Then his smile wilts. “But of course, I cannot be sure.”

  “And you would like to smoke so very much? Even though it’s evil?”

  He nods, thoughtfully. “It isn’t evil. It’s human. I’d give everything. For just an hour in the Smoke.”

  “Then I have something for you.”

  On impulse, before her better judgement can intervene, Livia reaches into her pocket. Collier’s trousers, too large for her, her hand disappearing past its wrist. Three twigs, bent and brittle. She picks one at random and straightens it between her palms.

  “Here, Grendel. Smell it.”

  “What is it?”

  “Sin. Packaged sin. You only have to light it. Who knows, it might just work.”

  He
nods, dumbfounded, then gets up to search the kitchen for matches. His fingers fail him when he tries to strike a match. Livia can see that he is shaking. She takes the box from his hand and lights the cigarette for him. His inhalation brings a blood-red glow to its tip. He holds the smoke down for as long as he can. The exhalation is a stream of grey, unspent; it curls around Livia’s face and calls to her skin. Her own Smoke is there before she knows it, white like steam. It fills her with something, light and seductive, the feeling a gambler might have the moment he turns over the cards.

  “Do you feel it, Grendel?”

  A shy smile creeps over his face.

  “I do feel a little wicked. Do I look it?”

  “Oh, very much.” Emboldened, her skin steaming, Livia proffers the curve of her cheek. “Do you want to kiss me? Go on. Your wife will never know.”

  He does, quickly, shyly like a child.

  “Oh, you rake!”

  Through the open doorway they can hear Thomas groan in his sleep.

  “It’ll be our secret,” Livia says, pulling her legs up onto the stool while Grendel continues sucking on the cigarette, staring out the crooked little kitchen window, and not a wisp of Smoke jumps from the pallor of his skin.

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  Later that night, Livia goes and stands over Thomas’s sleeping body. He is agitated in his sleep, has kicked off the blanket, his rib cage rising and falling underneath his linen shirt.

  “I picked up your cigarettes,” she confesses to him, a rustle in the silence of the room, “because I thought there might come a moment when I’d like to sin. I was thinking of Charlie. I was not sure I would know how to touch him, out in the light.”

  She lights a second cigarette, crouches down next to him, studies the stain of coal that mars his skin, the stump of ear sticking out of his shorn patch of hair like a mouldy potato.

  “Lizzy said it, down in the mine,” she whispers. “You will always be ugly.”

  And then, just to try it, the cigarette curling in the corner of her mouth, she lies down next to Thomas and presses her cheek into his shoulder, and thinks of the doorway where he held her and warmed her with his shivering chest.

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