The Smoke

by Simon Ings

  The channel it is tuned to is fixating, not for the first or even the fifth time, on the construction of HMS Victory, a British spaceship, powered by atom bombs, that is your world’s best hope for reaching the Moon, and Mars, and other stars. Ever since the end of the war, politicians have been promising to use atoms for peace, and the Victory is the flagship of that effort.

  Unfortunately, it has also come to stand for all the frustrations, delays and broken promises of the Atoms for Peace movement. It is taking far too long to build.

  The TV is regurgitating information films and animations and interviews that everyone has seen several times over. It is all old material. So far as you can tell, there is no actual news.

  Cynics say this state of affairs is likely to last indefinitely: a ship always about to launch, a new era of discovery always just around the corner. This dark joke rankles with you, since it casts your brother and his fellow crew members into perpetual purdah: always ready, hands on the hatch doors; always, and for ever, just a klaxon’s blast away from boarding.

  Since its inception, the project has hung in a queer no-man’s-land, part military project, part national festivity. Politically, keeping the entire project dangling makes a queer kind of sense. Never mind the real possibility of failure (after all, no one has ever tried this before), success will be expensive, in an instant turning investment into expenditure.

  Even sat with your back to it, the flickering screen is hard to ignore: dramatic current affairs-style music, all bombast and synthesised brass in a 5/4 rhythm, shakes the little set so that the casing buzzes. The only distraction to hand is a crammed tin dish of ketchups and sauces and individual servings of sugar and low-calorie sweetener. Why on earth didn’t you bring a book?

  The door opens, admitting the sound of traffic, a man in a pork pie hat, and a chickie on a lead. The man leads the chickie up to the bar. The chickie may as well be a dog he has led in, for all that anyone here seems bothered by it. It squats at its master’s feet. With small, stubby, nailless fingers, it scratches at its neck where the collar has raised a mild red line. The collar is black leather, about an inch wide, and studded with small, rounded stainless steel studs. The chickie yawns, lips peeling back to reveal purplish gums and long, stained teeth. Its incisors are filed to points.

  The chickie is big for its kind, though it is wearing a puffy powder-blue nylon one-piece that adds much to its apparent bulk. Its feet are laced up in strappy black high-heeled sandals. Its toes are long and delicate and end in thick nails, lacquered a glossy black.

  The man in the hat is someone you recognise, though it takes you a minute to place him. He has on a black leather blazer, dull and greasy with use, baggy jeans and tasselled tan loafers. It is the foreman of the construction crew that built your houses. The man who knew what houses were and, worse, knew that he knew. The man you ignored when he told you that you couldn’t bring your girlfriend onto a building site.

  You can’t remember his name. He has lost weight since you last saw him and much of it from his face, which is lined and cadaverous with an ashy forty-a-day cast. You watch as he deftly crushes the filter of his cigarette prior to popping it in his mouth. This is a man with a taste for tarry goodness. He used to be defined by his drinking, his pot belly neat and protuberant and virtually liver-shaped, a cartoon of cirrhosis. Now he has become a man defined by his smoking. The hat is new. At least, you have only ever seen him before in the fluorescent yellow hard-hat of his profession.

  You wonder (because for some reason this does not seem to be in your power to decide) whether you are going to stand up and go over to the bar and say hello to him, though you know full well he will not remember you, and even if he does he will make a business of not remembering, because architecture students with their fancy ideas, their timber decks and neutral facades, are a dime a dozen to him.

  The TV sparks and gutters out and from the taproom comes the soft, hollow sound of tables being dragged across thin carpet. You turn and watch through the rails of your snug. There are a dozen or so men pulling tables together to make an impromptu stage. The barman – a young man with acne and plastered-down hair – disappears out the back and a moment later the stage is bathed in a blood-red glow from small spotlights mounted on the ceiling’s fake rafters.

  Someone sets a glass down heavily on your table. You turn, take in the glass – it is dry, there is money inside – and the fist and the arm and the pork pie hat and the foreman’s eyes. You remember his eyes very well: how they packed and focused and delivered everything he knew not to say. Wilkes. His name was – is – Wilkes.

  ‘Fiver.’

  Had it been anyone else you would have simply stood up and left. Instead: ‘Thank you, Mr Wilkes.’ And in goes money you can ill afford to waste like this. Wilkes, indifferent to his name, moves off. You wonder where his charge has gone.

  The barman is back. He is walking around the lounge, bar towel in hand, wiping tables now that they have been vacated. It occurs to you that what is happening here cannot be legal, and this realisation, coupled with the charge emitted from Wilkes’s eyes, lifts you to your feet and propels you along a line of least resistance into the taproom.

  There are people following you in, nudging you closer to the makeshift stage, and it’s a puzzle to know where they’ve come from, the pub wasn’t this busy before. The stage, made of slippery, highly varnished tables pushed together, a rickety platform full of gaps and raised edges, blears red under the spotlights. You know what is coming and it amazes you they think they can get away with this. The council is not kind to these kinds of infractions, the pub could lose its licence. To cover your nervousness, you try swallowing the rest of your pint. (No? No. It absolutely refuses to go down. Its gassiness has defeated you.)

  The man in the pork pie hat is no longer around. He doesn’t even introduce his act: a thin cheer greets me as I mince through the crowd. With a muscled grunt, I push myself up on my knuckles and swing into a sitting position on top of the tables. I have been here before. Not in this particular pub, as it happens, but on stages like these, in front of crowds like these. I’m surprised there are so many men here; it’s normally a mixed crowd.

  There’s some applause, a couple of wolf whistles. I reply with an expression I know will get you all going: something midway between a yawn and a threat, exposing my sharpened teeth. You all think this is a natural thing for me: feral. You have no idea of the hours I have spent in front of the mirror. You cannot imagine the tedium of all those facial exercises. But that is where the art is, thankless as this sounds. It takes work, making this look easy. I stretch my bowed and rickety legs and part them a little, scraping the table varnish with the pointed heels of my sandals, then get to my feet (such tiny feet! I am proud of them, I take a lot of care of them, can you tell?) and parade slowly over the tables, testing them, marking my space. I bring my hands to my throat, feeling for the zip, and because my eyes are as black as a bear’s, with no whites visible, everyone here thinks I am looking at them as I pull the zip down.

  Is no one going to put on any music? I have played some dives before but this takes the biscuit. Not that I need music. I am more than capable of setting my own rhythm. I know what I’m doing. Let us be clear who is in charge here, shall we?

  Shucking this bloody blue nylon coverall is a relief. You may cheer to see what’s underneath but your pleasure is nothing compared to my own. What was Wilkes thinking, dressing me up in that sweatsuit? I run my nailless fingers through the spangled glitter of my skirt (yes, it hurt; yes, it was Wilkes’s idea; yes, with pliers; into each life a little rain will sometimes fall) and once I shed my bolero shirt I find that half my carefully applied paint job is coming off on my fingers. I can feel it, it’s just slopping off me, I’m drenched. I run my hands around my belly and my breasts, finger-painting myself. Always, if you can, turn a mishap into a number. I remember I once slipped arse-first between two tables in a place hardly better than this and you should have heard the la
ughter, oh, they thought I was done for. But I came up through that crack like the devil himself and all his little demons. Spitting. Snarling. Dripping. Tonguing. They laughed on the other side of their faces that day. They climaxed with terror. The landlord literally so, the gropy bugger. Which is why Wilkes decided that night to see to my claws.

  I need a moment for my skin to breathe and for the glitter spray to tack and harden: a slow, sashaying process around and around my little ‘stage’ gets the audience clapping in time. I’m gathering up the threaded stuff of my skirt as I go, revealing the junctions between buttock and thigh, between buttock and buttock. And stop. And – bend. These heels are at the absolute outer envelope of what I can manage. Bend. Bend, damn it. The bed last night, if you can call it a bed, the foam pallet Wilkes tossed down for me in the back of his garage, has stiffened me like a board. Bend. Good grief, it’s a long way down . . .

  The money shot. Are you looking? You are looking. Sex means very different things to me, which is why I can make it so powerfully personal for you. This is anything but nature expressing itself, let me assure you: how I reach behind, and spread. What on earth you find of paradise in those complex and inutile folds and swelling, hairy lumps beats me, but I’m not complaining. I like being looked at. Can’t you tell? I like being seen and studied. I like being recognised. For me . . .

  Ah, but what’s the point? You don’t even know I can think, and I’m certainly not going to blow the gaffe now. Not here. Not yet.

  Still bent, I part the threaded stuff covering my breasts and cup and squeeze and pull. Milk drips from my fingers. And I am off again, tripping to my internal rhythm, orbiting the stage. My tongue is swelling, the way it does, and without my meaning it, it rolls out of my mouth. Every slip becomes a gesture, every fault an element: I lick the curve of my clavicle and the smooth knob of my shoulder, writhe my slim, long neck against the restriction of my studded collar and – there.

  What you have come to see. Or, at any rate, are going to get. This big, bifurcated member of mine rises of its own will through the silver grasses of my skirt. Honestly, just look at the bloody great thing; it’s hard sometimes to say which of us is in charge. Clear mucosal oil gathers in its bowl-shaped tip, and from it rises a scent as powerful and penetrating as any incense, a human ambergris to set your blood on fire, so gather round, boys, girls, gather round and breathe it in, now that I have you under my spell.

  It says something about your state of mind that Wilkes’s absence from the scene distracts you from my presence. Frankly, I am somewhat hurt. But I have to hand it to you: you’re quick on the uptake. You’re wondering what it is that lets Wilkes sit there quietly at the bar, supping his gaseous bitter, when the air is turned all golden with my milk-and-fresh-bread smell.

  Wilkes glances at you. He says: ‘You’ll av to zerve yourzelf.’

  There. The secret is revealed.

  ‘Barman’z gone to wodge.’

  You shrug, aping the other man’s indifference.

  ‘What’z de madder wid you, den?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You don’t lige de show?’

  You have no answer to that. You neither like nor dislike my show. You understand that it is a thing beyond liking and not liking. Still, you want to say something.

  Wilkes’s face is as belligerent as his question, and you struggle to right yourself under the power of his pale blue gaze. You fancy that our close association – talent and agent, slave and master – has lent him some of his living property’s power, though none of its charm.

  ‘I know you,’ you tell him. ‘We worked together. On these houses. You had charge of the site.’

  Wilkes looks at you without even trying to recognise you. He shrugs. ‘Worked all over,’ he says.

  ‘But here. These houses—’

  ‘Shid houses.’

  ‘Are they?’

  ‘Bund do better dan dese in an afdernoon.’

  Wilkes breaks off his stare, snaps upright as though heaved on a wire and begins paddling the pockets of his trousers. He tilts his head back, his mouth stretching in a rictus that reveals the browned nubs of never-shed milk teeth. His sneeze, coming after so theatrical a delay, is explosive, escaping his rapidly cupped hands. Spit flecks your cheek; you take a step backwards.

  ‘Shid.’

  You have no handkerchief to offer him.

  ‘Fug.’ Wilkes wipes his nose with a bare hand. ‘Shid.’

  The break in transmission encourages you to try again. Why you should want to attempt communication with this oaf beats me. But try you must.

  ‘How do you—?’

  Then his eyes are upon you again, and you stop.

  ‘Whad?’

  ‘The chickie. How do you—?’

  Absently, Wilkes runs his hand down the front of his shirt. ‘Rezizt?’ The man snorts phlegm and, swallowing a bark of laughter, taps the side of his nose. ‘Oh, I gan rezizt. No broblem. I don av none of dis, mate. None of your zense of zmell.’

  The show is over. Chickies bring you on, goes the old joke, but they cannot bring you off. Now my striptease is done, we have a room here full of men and women with no idea – none – what to do with themselves. All this spangle and glitter is but the delivery system for a state of mind you lot cannot resist and can never find a name for, suckers that you are. And since no one wants to meet each other’s eye, it makes logical sense that the entire audience repair en masse to the bar, clamouring and shouting, waving damp banknotes in the air. It is thirsty work, being worked on the way I work on you.

  Glasses clash and tinkle, in and out of the bottle-washing machine. Beer gushes. Slops puddle the bar. The barman reappears, disappears, reappears. Now there are two of him. Seriously: they are as alike as twins. Someone nearby lights a cigarette. You fish in your pocket for change. There’s only enough for a half. What time is it?

  ‘Bollogs.’ Wilkes leans away from the bar. He wobbles a moment, a boat casting off, and by the pitch of his gaze you can only assume he is looking for me, for while I am many things, I am not what you would call tall, even in these ridiculous heels. ‘Mate,’ he says to you, ‘wodge my pint.’

  One glance at the cloudy muck Wilkes has made of his drink is one glance too many. Anyone making off with that yeasty backwash gets what they deserve.

  Half a pint of IPA in hand, you squeeze through to a narrow space to the right of the bar, and at a small table you sit, only to find yourself tourniqueted by that damned twist in your trousers again. You stand up and turn out your pockets, and what should turn up but that corn dolly of yours? Odd: you could have sworn you left it behind at the flat. It’s somewhat the worse for its escapade. One arm is mushed beyond saving and there are loose stands of straw around its neck: a makeshift ruff.

  You shove the dolly back in your pocket and sit down abruptly. You feel embarrassed, though there’s no very good reason why. Such trinkets are common enough. Dollies. Arrowheads. Little baskets (‘Fairy baskets’, they call them). Felt shoes. Crude clay figurines of animals, no bigger than your thumb.

  Every village in England has a store peddling the leavings of its local chickies. They sit happily enough in the window display, nestled among the other tat those places sell. Stuffed mice dressed up in doll’s clothes. Hand-drawn maps of local walks suitable for the halt and the lame. Pamphlets anatomising the local church. There were a couple of shops of that sort in Hebden Bridge, do you remember? One was a post office, the other a riot of incense, posters, semi-precious stones, pendulums, tarot cards, runes, wands.

  Do you remember the summer Jim came home on furlough and brought along mates of his, rough army lads from Sheffield and Penistone? How excited you were! How much you wanted to be a part of their games! You were just about old enough to drink by then, and Jim let you tag along after them up to Heptonstall for a boozy lunch of curries and crumbles, and then to the pub for more pints. They were friendly lads after their fashion. They teased you for your glasses and your weak frame. You were t
oo excited to let anything they said hurt you.

  Do you remember afterwards, what you got up to together on the moors?

  Do you remember stumbling upon my hive, and what you did with it?

  If you had bothered to clear it out instead of burning it, you could have sold my things to that shop. It sold all manner of rubbish, that place, like Mayan Music Balls which came with a note that read, ‘Because they are handmade, no two balls ring alike.’ Most didn’t ring at all.

  What would you have found to sell, had you bothered to dig me out? A brooch made of hammered tin. Some horn buttons. A few long-stemmed pipes. A clay oil lamp. You could have earned a few bob from that lot.

  But no. Jim and his mates were far too drunk by then. Liquored up, they were, and they even had you lugging a crafty keg after them onto the moors. Big army louts, your brother’s mates. Clumsy and vicious, and you no better, leaping up at them, wagging your tail: Jimmy’s kid brother, eager to be joining in with the older boys.

  Pathetic.

  It was your match, Stu. Remember that.

  Do you remember the dance you did? Of course you do. Ululating and farting, how you hopped and skipped around the blaze. Such brave young braves. Shirts shed and feathers in your hair. (And I got the last laugh there, didn’t I? What did you think I saved feathers for? How could it not occur to you, to any of you, that I might want something soft with which to wipe my arse?)

  You didn’t hear my mewling, and this I guess is just as well, because it saves us having to explore the vexed business of what you would have done, or not done, or egged each other on to do, if you had realised what was choking to death under your feet. A dozen eyes not opened. Half a dozen mouths not weaned. Does anything so young feel pain? Oh, trust me.

  A peculiar ululation, distant but very loud, cuts through the pub and silences its banter. The noise is impossible to place: it sounds hardly human. Something horrible must have happened, but beyond that the cry gives nothing away.