The Smoke

by Simon Ings

  Jim walked. You hobbled behind. You entered a stand of thin trees, and the ground grew damp and green, the moors falling behind. There were rocks to catch the foot and sheep paths to follow, and Jim glanced back at you more often, as you came off the heights, to see that you were following. The path dropped down a narrow stone staircase and Jim was waiting for you at the bottom and he said, ‘Throw that thing away.’

  You stared at him.

  ‘People will see,’ he said. You could tell from his eyes, and the contempt there, that he didn’t mean the dolly. He meant the other thing: what the dolly brought on. You scowled, hunching forward a little, inexpertly trying to hide the swell tenting your pants. You went ahead of him so he could not see. You held the dolly carefully in one hand, by your side, where you could not smell it, its bread smell, its milk smell; you wondered if it had been left there for you.

  You entered woods, a clear path zigzagging down the side of the valley, and came at last to a road. You had overshot. You turned in the direction of town. By the time you got back to the house, Bob was already home and Betty had the fish he had caught gutted and floured. You ran upstairs, hid the dolly under your pillow, washed, came down again, and ate. Everything was normal. Everything was as it had been.

  You shared a room with Jim. That night you waited and waited, hands cupped around your privates, waiting for him to fall asleep. The smell of the dolly was rising through the pillow. A warm-milk smell. A baking smell. You thought of a girl trailing her fingers through the waters of a lake. A little girl. No taller than a chickie. The thing in your hand gave a kick.

  You did not trust Jim to be asleep. You shifted in bed, turning to face the wall, moving the pillow so the scent flooded you. You stroked yourself. You thought of its mouth. Its sharp teeth. You had only seen pictures. The complex entrances between its legs. Its enormous phallus. You did not know what to imagine, and you did not know what to do with what you imagined. Your own modest cock was hard in your hand and you were seized with fear: what if it wouldn’t go down? You wanted to look at it, to reassure yourself. You wondered if doing this turned you into a chickie. It felt as if it might. You tried to remember the pictures you had seen and the feeling in your groin overtook you and something hot spilled into the palm of your hand. This had never happened before; you wondered what was wrong with you.

  You lay still. Jim was silent. It was not a silence you trusted. Only when he started to snore did you ease yourself from the bed. You didn’t know what was in your hand. You thought it might be blood. You were afraid of getting blood on the sheets so you cupped it in your hand and cupped your groin with the other hand and hobbled to the door. The floorboard squeaked. You closed your eyes. Jim did not stir. You wondered how you were going to get the door open without smearing blood on the doorknob. You wiped your hand dry over your belly, opened the door and tiptoed onto the landing. You went downstairs and fetched your coat and went through the kitchen to the back door and into the yard. In the privy there was a nub of candle and a box of matches. You lit the candle and held it near yourself. There was nothing to see. Whatever it was that had come out of you, it was not blood. The fear went away, leaving you hollow inside. There was water in the jug. You soaped and towelled yourself. You tried to pee but couldn’t. You went back to bed.

  In the morning, you lay under the blankets until Jim had dressed and left the room. You fished out the dolly from under your pillow. It was clean and tightly woven, but in the course of the night its smell had changed. There was a sharp note like cat pee running through it, and something damp-smelling: moss and musty washing.

  You took it into the kitchen and poured cold water into the sink and shook the dolly about in the water to clean it. It came apart immediately. There were things living inside it. Insects. They fled up your hands. They crawled about in the water. You slapped and splashed, balled the mess of straw in your hands and took it through the back door into the yard. You screwed up the dolly and dropped it into the bin.

  * * *

  For twenty minutes the train sits without moving. Then, with a great gush of steam, the mechanism gathers itself and with a painful, squealing slowness, the locomotive tugs at its matchwood burden, nursing you over so many meshing rails, into the narrowing mouth of the valley and out again on a broad embankment, east and bending slowly south, past sodden pastures and the silver smears that recent floods have made of rivers, past so many flocks of indeterminate black birds, and mill towns, and the backs of terraces.

  The dolly in your hands is a new thing. Now: how can that be?

  It must be a replacement.

  From where, though? They none of them last more than a few months.

  Let’s say you bought this one in London from a shop east of Charing Cross Road.

  You have no memory of this.

  And then (I’m good at this) you do.

  2

  You come up out of the Underground into Aldersgate Street, at the junction with Long Lane. There are banks and clothing shops. Office workers on lunchtime errands jostle you towards the road. The traffic on the dual carriageway is heavy and unaccommodating.

  Everything here is motion, business and the constant shuffle of people, information and goods. It is hard to imagine that anyone could live around here. Were you to lift your eyes, you would see, rising above the faceless brick wall impending over the opposite pavement, the accommodation towers of the Barbican Estate. But the pavement is too busy, the road too dangerous, so people do not look up. The street keeps their attention. Up this close, the Barbican becomes a kind of secret, a region made invisible by strategy, known but disregarded. Your private kingdom.

  When the lights change, you cross the road and follow Beech Street to where it becomes an underpass, and up a white-painted concrete spiral stair to raised brick-paved walkways. Though the estate follows a rough grid plan, routes between its multiple levels, its towers and terraces and gardens, are confusing for the visitor, so routes to the main towers and the arts centre have been marked out on the ground with durable coloured tape. You follow a yellow line to a view over the ponds. The flat you shared with Fel is directly above you, hidden by a concrete canopy. You are summoning the energy to turn and enter the tower through a door controlled by a keypad. Inside there are stairs and a single elevator. You lived on the eleventh floor and often took the stairs, a late convert to exercise, working off the weight your unathletic college years had piled on. Today you have been awake too long, you have been sitting on the train too long, you are tired and unhappy and you just want to be done; you call for the lift.

  The elevator is clean and cold. A notice behind clear plastic mounted on a mirrored wall reminds tenants of the rules governing sublets. Beside it are an advertisement for a dance performance and advance warning of the annual residents’ AGM. The elevator is painfully slow.

  On the eleventh floor there are two flats. Outside your neighbour’s door there’s still that thin red welcome mat which was always tripping you up when you passed it on your way to the stairwell. The door sports a non-regulation brass-effect knocker that belongs on a house. Not that you expected changes. You haven’t been away long. Anyway, most of the residents are old; they’re settled here for the duration.

  The door to your flat is secured with an Ingersoll and two mortise locks. You did not bother with the mortises when you lived here, so it takes a second to remember which way around the keys go. Inside there is a burglar alarm, disarmed by typing 1-2-3-4 on a keypad near the door. The hall smells exactly the way it used to smell. You had expected to walk into an empty shell. But no: this still feels like home.

  The lounge is an airy room, though the ceiling is low, with generous windows all down the longest side. Nothing appears to have been removed since you were last here. The shelves are stacked with books, and there is Fel’s piano against the wall beside the kitchen door; you’re surprised she hasn’t taken that. She must have a better instrument now. A real one. A grand. What kind of life does she live now?
Money will not be an issue inside the Bund. What friends does she have? No one you know has heard from her since the pair of you split up, nearly a year ago. This is one of those times when losing a lover has been like losing a world.

  Weary of your ruminations, you go to sprawl on the couch, but first you have to empty your pockets. The dolly. The frame. What on earth made you bring these things along? The dolly goes back in your pocket. It’s a wonder that the glass wafer in Jim’s photo frame hasn’t snapped. You set it up on the table beside the sofa and sit there idly tapping it. You move the photo frame around the table, pointing it to face the hall, the kitchen, the long window. As though you are showing him your home. As though the photo were a screen, and your brother really were looking out of it. Tap tap tap.

  He never did visit the flat. The timing was never right, and then he was gone to Woomera. You wonder how he is. You wonder how long it will be before he can write his own letters again. It occurs to you that this whole block must be roughly the size and weight of the army’s new spaceship.

  You never played the piano much while you were here, though you know enough to pick out chords and follow a melody, accompanying drinkers in the pubs you and your father frequent back home.

  Fel was the pianist. Compared to hers, your efforts sounded ugly and lumpen. She said she liked listening to you, but you would not be encouraged.

  The piano is electric and you are surprised to find it plugged in and the power still on. The stand holds a book of cocktail-bar arrangements. Frederic Curzon, Ronald Binge: if you substitute octaves for chords in the left hand you can just about follow the line.

  The work boots you’re wearing are no use on the pedals and will scratch them, so you take them off. It’s good, shedding these great heavy boots, but at the same time you’re left feeling naked. You are making yourself at home in a place that no longer belongs to you.

  There’s a three-against-two syncopation in this piece you’ve lost the knack of. A run of minor sevenths, tangling under your fingers, is so pretty you try it again and again but you don’t make much progress. Run after run, the music falls away, becomes an athletic thing, a banging about. You wish you had practised more while you were here, but at the time the piano had been of a piece with the card games you and Fel used to play together, and the dinners you used to try and cook together for your friends. Ordinary shared activities, they could not help but remind you how far you lagged behind her in understanding, accomplishment, even the plain brute capacity for living. Fel didn’t just think faster than you. She felt faster. She felt more. Until in the end you acted more like her pet than her lover. Until, in the end, you realised that was exactly what you were.

  Too loud. Enough. You close the lid over the keys.

  Has Fel even moved out? It doesn’t look as though she has. Heavy items like the piano: with money no longer an object, you can understand her leaving such things behind. But her sheet music is still here, and her books. All the countless ordinary little things that add up to a person. Did she even pack a bag?

  You need the toilet. In the bathroom, you find that she has left her perfumes gathering dust. This is doubly strange: it’s not a collection anyone would want to just abandon. Blood, moss, wet rope, tobacco, cat urine, ash. In her whole collection there is not one floral note. The business of scent was one of those many subjects Fel had absorbed and mastered, enthused about, obsessed over, and to stand close to her in her weaponised state was to fall down a rabbit-hole of queer associations.

  Your hands are shaking. Are you afraid to try these scents? They will bring you to the edge of places and times you know you will never be able to revisit. The nostalgia they wield is a threat. Let them go!

  But like an agoraphobic drawn to the edge of a high place, you take down a bottle and open the cap. You spray your wrist, shake the alcohol into the air, and once your skin is dry, lean into the scent.

  It is for all the world like being strangled in a damp cellar.

  According to the estate agent’s letter, there are just a few weeks to go until new tenants move in to this flat. You can clear your stuff in hours, but what about the rest of it? Is she really going to abandon Chopin, Debussy, York Bowen, all these well-thumbed scores scribbled over with her own fingering? You imagine her coming here to pack, scraping through the door with a rucksack full of bags. (This is, remember, how you moved in here, carrying gear on the Underground from the shared house in Tooting.)

  More likely, Fel’s belongings will be packed carefully away into boxes and crates by men hired by her father. They could turn up at any time.

  In the kitchen, you dig out a blister-pack of greens and thumb two tablets onto the granite-effect counter. You run yourself a glass of water. And think about it: the power is on, the water is on . . . Try the hob – yes, the gas is on, too: seriously, did you forget to turn the gas off when you left?

  You open the kitchen cupboards and there are some tins and dried goods but all the perishables and opened packets have been cleared out. The kitchen bin by the pantry door is empty, and there isn’t a liner in it. The fridge door is closed. A mistake: it’s been emptied and turned off and the door should have been left open; there are lines of black mould and a bad smell inside; it’ll need disinfecting.

  So here’s a possibility. (You neck your greens – a silly name for little pills of radiogardase, common name ‘Prussian Blue’.) What if she’s coming back? What if she’s moving back in?

  The painted chest of drawers is still in the bedroom: an heirloom from Moldova, and Fel’s favourite object. ‘It used to stand in my nursery. When my grandmother was a baby, they put her down for the night in the bottom drawer.’ The frame and the edges of the drawers are a yellowish green, the drawer panels off-white decorated with carnations. Fel’s underwear is here. Her tights. Her hairdryer.

  She’s entitled to come back, obviously. To carry on living here, if that’s what she wants. Thanks to her father’s generosity with the rent, this was always more her flat than yours. You work through the drawers, pulling out your things, the few clothes you left here. Are they even worth taking back with you? If you’re not going to take them with you, you ought to throw them away. Imagine leaving them for her. Imagine her coming back in here, sorting through these drawers and finding your belongings, your socks, your T-shirts. Imagine her throwing you away.

  This is no good, you’re going to drive yourself mad, you have to stop thinking, you have to find something that will stop you having to think. The power is on, the gas, the water; you go into the bathroom and run the shower over the bath. You undress, and halfway through you remember the fictional removal men you dreamt up, muscling in with their crates and their boxes. Half-naked, you cross the hall to the door and deadlock the Ingersoll.

  The water is running hot when you get back. You adjust it a little, keeping the heat as high as you can bear, and step in under the flow. For a while you stand there, willing on catatonia. The shower does not numb you, but it does refresh you until, to hell with it, you might as well wash and be done. Maybe there is coffee somewhere in the cupboards; you could make yourself a cup.

  You squeeze soap from a bottle: expensive stuff you remember Fel got from a parfumerie on Wigmore Street. Rosemary leaf, cedar-wood bark, juniper berry. On the side of the bottle there’s this absurd, humourless sales screed, to convince you the purchase was worth it. Why on earth should reading this again bring on tears? Maybe it’s the smell. The associations. Something, at any rate, is drawing out tears you have never been able to shed before.

  Ridiculous. You turn off the shower, pull the curtain aside and step out of the bathtub. You dry off. Finding some toilet paper, you blow your nose. Then, out of habit – because you could as easily have flushed the tissue away – you pedal open the bin which stands under the sink.

  This bin has a liner and it’s full – so full, the tissue you’ve dropped in there has rolled onto the floor. So you bend down and pick it up and poke it into the bin, and lying on top of th
e screwed-up tissues, a used-up toothpaste tube, flossing sticks and cotton wool, there is a pregnancy-testing wand.

  You pick it out of the bin. The little screen is blank, though it’s doubtful whether this means anything one way or another; there’s no telling how long the wand has been lying here. You stare at it, waiting for you know not what to overwhelm you. But loss is not like that. Loss is not some pain you can steal yourself against.

  You sit up against the side of the bath, slowly, numbly rehearsing the way the world is now. It is different from what you thought it was, and at first only the words make sense, so that you have to repeat them, over and over, to bring this new world into being.

  She got her child, or is trying for one.

  She got the life she wanted, which you would not give her.

  She’s with someone else now.

  She’s with someone else now.

  That’s the hardest part to come clear, the part that needs the most rehearsal, not because you resent this newcomer, but because you genuinely do not know how to imagine this. Someone else. Who? You think of your old friends, people you shared a house with in Tooting. You’ve spoken to them, it’s none of them, it’s someone entirely new, probably a Bundist like Fel, someone with whom you have absolutely nothing in common.

  You feel like your heart’s just been ripped out of your chest and you wish that felt as dramatic as it sounds. You wish you could bleed. You wish you could be sick. But no. Without a heart, you feel absolutely fine, the way a doll must feel, absolutely fine, all of the time.