The Smoke

by Simon Ings

  It was in the Collège de France, working down the corridor from Pierre and Marie Curie, that Gurwitsch achieved the breakthrough that would, for better and for worse, immortalise his name: the Gurwitsch ray.

  A colour all his own!

  What he had in fact found was a weak ultraviolet pulse, passing from cell to cell. Living tissues emit light. This was a significant finding, but not unexpected. What was unexpected – indeed, revolutionary – was Gurwitsch’s leap of faith: that it was this self-generated light, this ‘biophotonic ray’, that was orchestrating development. Why do birds give birth to birds, and dogs to dogs, and cats to cats? Because, said Gurwitsch, every species emits its own special ray.

  Easy to say; harder to prove. Anyway, Gurwitsch’s discovery had to join the queue. There were altogether too many newfangled rays abroad. Every ambitious physicist in middle Europe was touting a ray of some kind. X-rays, N-rays. It took time to sort the wheat from all this hopeful chaff.

  But in the end—!

  At an international conference held at the Ukrainian animal breeding station at Askania-Nova, on the eve of the war that would consume a generation and irradiate a continent, Alexander Gurwitsch was ready to declare, not only that the biophotonic ray was real, but that he had already taken the first steps to control it. Biophotonics, he declared, would give the next generation the ability ‘to sculpt organic forms at will’ – no small promise to make to men and women scarred, as Gurwitsch was scarred, by memories of the ten-year Yellowstone Winter.

  ‘In the near future, man will expose foetal material to a finely tuned and targeted ultraviolet ray, synthesising such forms as are entirely unknown in nature,’ he declared. ‘Biological synthesis is becoming as much a reality as chemical.’

  This was Gurwitsch’s promise – nothing less than ‘the planned and rational utilisation of the living resources of the terrestrial globe’.

  No one standing and applauding him that day had the slightest idea how badly this was going to go. The speciation of mankind. The Great War and its battlefields. The all-too-many undead.

  * * *

  So the whole sorry history of the twentieth century unpacks itself, leaving the appointment slip, wilted, crumpled in your hand.

  When you think about it (and you do think about it, all the way down the wooded valley and in under the filthy milk-waves, past factories of cold smoke and the shop-floor smell of suds and hot metal, through the town’s smutted streets to your father’s front door), who’s to say, with medical science being what it is these days, that cancer will not turn out to be the product of some virulent biophotonic ray?

  Of course, there’s no earthly way you can talk to your father about this.

  You enter the house without knocking. Bob is having his weekly wash in a tin bath by the fire. Bob: a man made of sticks, reduced by age to the gawkiness of a teenager. Strong, but somehow . . . whittled. You go through to the kitchen, giving him his privacy. You fill a kettle and boil it on the hob, and while the tea mashes you fish around in the bread tin, fetch out a stale nub and try to turn it to good account; damned thing near snaps a tooth. Through the half-closed door you ask your father how his day has gone. He replies, ‘A thousand turned.’ His voice, full of pieceworker’s pride, now admits a new and discordant note: the defensive vocal tremor of an ageing man pitted against the young.

  And they are so young! Many of them cannot remember a time before the spaceships. When Bob started there, his factory was making frames for ladies’ bicycles.

  ‘We need bread, Dad.’

  ‘Chippie’ll have some.’

  You hear him clamber from the bath. The quick thwacking of a thin towel over tight, hard limbs. His footsteps on the stairs, surprisingly fleet as the weekend approaches. This has been Bob’s life: cares tumble off him on a Friday night only to pile redoubled upon his thick and aching head come Sunday morning. A few hours’ fishing in the beck above the old wheels will put his mood right by Sunday afternoon and ready for the week ahead: a week of numbing, repetitive labour in the factory. Fishing, though, is a summer occupation. The rest of the time, or kept indoors by the weather, he can only mope.

  You bring out his tea and your own and set the mugs on the mantelpiece. Two tall cones of condensation form on the mirror behind, apparitions rising to occupy the room that lies beyond the glass. When your dad comes down he’s wearing his suit, a grey shirt with a collar and shoes bought in Leeds less than a year ago. Around his wrist is the watch Jim left him for safe-keeping two Christmases past: the one from the flight school in Peenemünde, with the logo from Frau im Mond surfing starlight on its engraved underside.

  ‘Christ, Dad.’

  His face falls a little. You have embarrassed him, and well may you want to kick yourself. Now you are going to have to talk him, stage by painful stage, back into whatever holiday mood overtook him, that he has put on his best clothes for an evening of fish and chips by the canal. He dressed hardly finer the day he and your mum first waved you off to London, a scholarship under your arm and a promise of digs at your aunt’s house in Islington. What is there for Bob to celebrate now?

  It is not impossible that he’s simply glad to see the back of you for a few days. These have been trying months, the pair of you without companions. Abandoned Lanyon and his singleton son have been hanging out their washing in the yard on a Wednesday night when any housewife, sensitive to the changing currents of the town, could have told them the Wednesday air runs foul from the shipyards.

  * * *

  Fish is brought on ice from Whitby twice a week to Hebden Bridge, and from there it is carried across the valleys of the Calder, from Mankinholes to Hipperholme, by cart and lorry and bike, even to the very ends of Jerusalem (or at any rate to Jerusalem Avenue, where it intersects with Dry Cart Lane). Were you able to map this distribution of wet fish on a screen such as the wizards of the Bund employ, you might say, in something approaching wonderment, that this is a great transmigration of sorts: how the corpses of fish move through the upper air, and up, and up, even to the giddy heights of Mount Tabor, three miles north-west of Halifax. There, on that busy, deceiving (and for you, incomprehensible) handheld device, would be evidence of the land’s invasion by the sea.

  ‘With chips.’

  ‘Right you are, Mr Lanyon.’

  ‘Twice.’

  Bob’s futile noblesse oblige has him ordering, in nice detail, the only dish the shop can possibly serve, since fresh pies won’t be delivered before the morning and they’re out of pickled eggs. Bob has a weak man’s habit of standing on his dignity. ‘We’ll sit here by the window.’

  ‘Right you are.’

  Bob wants you to tell him what things you plan to bring back from London: how much in hand luggage and how much by the van. Hard to imagine that you’ll need a van at all, unless you were to ship your drawing table home. ‘Which,’ you explain, ‘what with petrol and the hire, would make it the most expensive drawing table in the whole of Yorkshire.’

  ‘But if you need it, lad—’

  Now here’s a question. Do you need your drawing table? Do you need any of the appurtenances of your vocation? Life in London, with all its little disappointments and petty humiliations, came damned close to convincing you otherwise. There you were, pitting your poor, bare, unforked drawings, your set squares and putty rubber, against the generative gambollings of the Bund’s machine-brains. How could you fail to fail?

  To Yorkshire, however, no Gurwitsched superbrain will ever come. No Bund-made architectural projection will ever flicker in hologram over the waxed tabletops of local council rooms in Halifax, because even if they did – the speciation of the human race being what it is – no one in Halifax, however handsomely educated, would be able to understand it. Your skills, however crude, however outdated, are still valid here. Here the pencil and the slide rule, rule.

  How long, once you set your mind to it, will it take you to turn your skills to account here? How long to learn to wall a furnace, or calcula
te canteen space for a factory? Not long. Never mind for a moment the accelerated lives of others: in this part of the world, your talents still count. And you have to do something. Anything. You can’t always be freeloading off your dad. Puffing your way up the valley to the pub and back. Poring through your mum’s old Everyman Pocket editions. It won’t be long before your savings run out.

  ‘Wherever I find work will have a drawing table for me.’

  Your father is disappointed. ‘But your books. Your clothes. That chest of drawers—’

  You try not to show a smile. Bob once visited the flat you and Fel shared near Cripplegate. He might have been visiting a fairy’s castle. The place astounded him: its size, its light. It was only a flat on the Barbican Estate. A self-igniting hob. An electric piano. Tablets. A phone without a cord. Nobody he knew owned such things as he saw there. Furniture from Fel’s family. A chest of drawers, meticulously painted in the Moldovan folk style.

  ‘That was Fel’s, Dad. Not mine. Anyway, it’ll be long gone. She’ll have cleared out her things by now. I’ll get to the flat and probably find just a couple of suitcases’ worth of textbooks.’

  Bob wants there to be more for you to ferry back. He wants you to fill his house. He wants to come downstairs of a morning and find his living room cluttered with someone else’s clothes, someone else’s furniture, the tools of someone else’s trade. He wants his home filled with the signs of life.

  You sense your father’s hunger so suddenly, and with such lurching clarity, that you’re finding it hard to swallow down your fish, and there is a moment, not long, but real enough, in which, unable to breathe, you reach for your teacup only to discover that there may be not enough tea there to clear the batter clagging your throat.

  Now that you know how lonely your father is, you also know that you absolutely must not carry on living with him.

  ‘You want another tea?’

  ‘No. Ta.’

  The way your feet dangle absurdly over the edge of your little truckle bed is surely evidence that moving back in with your dad was only ever a stopgap: a chance to breathe free air again, out of the Smoke. It is time you found your own place. Earning enough to afford it is another reason to pick up your trade. No more paper bridges, no more fancy permeable-walled pavilions on the Bartlett forecourt. It is time for some serious application. Workers’ housing for the spaceship yards and bomb manufactories of Huddersfield (an upwind location would be best, in light of recent reports from the Ministry of Health). Planning meetings to be scheduled with the users of Greenhead Park. Written objections anticipated from the parents of children attending the adjacent grammar school. You read the papers, you talk to people, you even know which firms to approach. You know what the work will be like. You believe it will be worthwhile. The prospect might even excite you, were it not that London has poisoned your love of building things.

  Hasn’t it?

  Since January you have been breathing Yorkshire air, air you grew up in, air that made you. All year you have been walking these valleys, eating this fish, drinking this beer, rubbing blood and feeling back into your night-frozen feet of a morning. This has been your solid, ordinary life.

  Now, again: the Bund. It floods back. It fills you like a tide.

  London, and all you have seen there, as street by street, investment by investment, handshake by soft handshake, the Bund’s enclave in London has spread. Not that anyone talks about ‘enclaves’ any longer, far less ‘ghettos’. The Bund has grown synonymous with its constructions – its great shining towers of plastic stuff, all glass curtain walls and weather-responsive bricks – and ‘Bund’ has come to stand for both. Today the Bund stretches from Fenchurch Street to Spitalfields, while on the other side of the river it has turned South London, in the space of a few years, into Medicine City: an incomprehensible medical theme park, a macabre sort of Blackpool for Georgy Chernoy’s undead. (Or pick your term, as the papers do. The nigh-on-dead – the Telegraph. The better-off-dead – The Times. The might-as-well-be-dead – the Sunday Express.) All this building done at a cost so high that most nation-states would break before they had accomplished nearly so much – and done with hardly more effort than it took to push a button on one of those confounded, impossible, incomprehensible keyboards of theirs.

  ‘Come on, lad,’ says Bob, clapping you on the shoulder, ‘let’s get a jar.’ He’s already up and shrugging on his coat.

  * * *

  Flowing yourself into bed, five pints the worse, you pull back the curtains in your room. This is the plan: that even through a fug of Friday ale, the morning light will wake you in time to catch the milk train to London.

  Five hours later and light wakes you all right: not sunlight, but light from the furnaces. Even at this early hour, the town’s chimneys are belching sparks.

  The air in your room is so cold that for a while you lie in bed, pinned under the blankets, watching your breath rising like smoke from a stubble-field. It pinks in the light of a distant steelworks.

  Now you stand, hunching in the cold, before the window. The street lamps are out and the road surface, hidden from the furnace-pink predawn, is a river running silently and forcefully under your window, down the hill, towards the beck, and the mill wheels, and the weirs. This is the current taking you away today, back to confront those things that lost you your love and ruined your nerve. This is the river you have no name for, bearing you back into the Smoke.

  On the surface the matter could not be simpler, and setting it out, in terms both clear and pleasant, took no more than four lines of standard type on a sheet of legal-sized paper headed ‘Hotblack Desiato’. The letter arrived through the door a couple of weeks ago from the estate agent that manages the flat in the Barbican you’d shared with Fel.

  The flat has been lying idle and the lease is finally up. Any remaining personal property must be removed. You had six weeks from the date of the letter so there is still a month to go. There is a number to call in case of problems, and the letter ends, for no especial reason, ‘Warmest regards’.

  A gloomy metaphysical river you cannot name is dragging you helplessly off into the difficult past, but here’s a comfort: at least your papers are in order.

  You put on travelling clothes. Your best shirt is crisp, and in the minimal, industrial light of belching chimneys, the cotton does not show the stains you know are there: indelible smuts the fabric acquired within days of your coming back home. (Do you remember the look Bob gave you when you asked him if there was a dry cleaner’s nearby? The strangled mess he made of the word ‘Halifax’?)

  It pleases you to be fastening the cuffs on a shirt so new-looking, so apparently white. But are you not saddened, too, to find time rewinding so easily? You must look very much the same as when you stepped down off the train in the New Year: a returning, not-so-very-prodigal son. You thread your tie. Close your throat against the room’s cold. Think of your father’s face as you glimpsed it from the train that day in January: a face framed in the spray-can snow still adorning the station café window. On it was a loneliness you could not then begin to measure, but instantly reckoned with your own.

  Bob is downstairs in the parlour now, raking out the fire. The almost-musical scrape of that tiny shovel in the grate. Robert Lanyon, third-generation lathe-man. He has proved too firmly rooted to ever leave this valley, as the rest of you have left, one after another.

  Stella – your mother’s sister, ten years younger and a looker – was the first to leave Yorkshire, leading the family’s diaspora. No one was surprised to see her go, least of all the teachers at that miserable school you went to, slumping along in her footsteps. Your headmistress had been a probationary English teacher when Stella was at school, and imagined people admired the way she and her staff held to their original, dismal view of Sue (as she was back then), stiffly ignoring her subsequent successes on stage, in film and, most recently, in the Bund. It is an attitude that has only made the institution appear more petty.

  The n
ext emigrant? Uncle Michael, Bob’s older and reputedly much smarter brother. Michael upped sticks to Canada. Fleeing the bombs, he said. The rocketship yards and reactors. The radiological toll. The ‘greens’: government-issued radiogardase pills. ‘The whole country is committing slow suicide,’ he wrote, in the only letter he ever sent home: you found it years ago in the back of your dad’s clothes drawer. Whatever the reasons for his emigration (along with the stick of plutonium, there came the carrot of a sizeable tax break), the upshot is a whole slew of barely-heard-of relations are earning quick fortunes and hard knocks in the shale fields of Alberta.

  Jim was next, your brother: straight from school into the army. You have no idea where his fascination with the Space Force began. At home, the nearest he ever got to rockets was the percussion caps he persuaded you to steal from a nearby quarry. The pair of you spent a whole summer blasting them, trying to reroute the course of the brook below Heptonstall. You were never caught; the police were baffled. Since joining the Force Jim has written to the family with decreasing frequency, his stories becoming ever more bland, their details more and more thoroughly redacted. Last month he recommended your dad buy government bonds. That had to have been dictated by somebody else.

  Finally Betty, your mother. Three years go she moved in with Aunt Stella to attend outpatient chemotherapy appointments and, in so doing, took her first, fatal sips of Georgy Chernoy’s magic medicine.

  Sue/Stella. Michael. Jim. Betty. All of them have been blown down the valley, one way or another, onto the rails and away. Bob alone remains.

  Your jacket pockets are full of unnecessary things. You sort them out in the half-light. A penknife and a tube of mints. A scrip for ‘greens’ and a packet of them, half-gone but still more than enough to see you back to the city.