The Smoke

by Simon Ings

  I caught the train from Waterloo to Windsor at dusk, read a while, then glanced up and stared in mild disbelief as the floodlit castle came into view, perfectly symmetrical, perched above the lamp-lit town on its conical and lonely hill. This imposing yet straightforward structure conformed so exactly to my picture-book idea of what a castle should be, I wondered if every childhood castle might not be traced, through influences both trained and untrained, conscious and unconscious, back to this one foundation.

  The climb to the castle, past shuttered shops and cheery pubs, was taxing. I am not fond of physical exercise. A soldier examined my invitation and let me through the wicket gate.

  Electric lights bedded in the lawn marked a discreet but clear path across the inner court of the castle. I doglegged around a cloister, passed through a gift shop (which took some of the shine off the adventure) and came to the back of a short queue. A man older than my father offered to take my coat. Entering a timbered, book-lined room, I was handed a glass of British méthode champenoise and an earnest woman in flat shoes eagerly introduced me to representatives of Dance, Literature and the Plastic Arts. We had absolutely nothing in common, and – aside from money, or rather the lack of it – absolutely nothing to talk about.

  The Bund as a culture is not famous for its cultivation of dialogue. In place of a nuanced give-and-take, its members tend to substitute power or, in a softer setting, volume. Georgy Chernoy’s voice, neither deep nor shrill, nonetheless cut through lesser conversations as though tuned to a wavelength unused by anyone else. ‘It is,’ he announced, ‘simply a matter of limits.’

  An opinion, expressed with patrician self-confidence, has a seductiveness of its own, unconnected with its content.

  ‘These limits are real. They are not imaginary, and they are not theoretical.’

  Wrapping my fingers inexpertly around my glass, warming it, I worked my way through the growing knot of listeners while, away from the throng, men and women in kitchen whites entered through disguised doors in the bookcases to gather abandoned glassware and arrange the supper tables.

  ‘At what point – this is what we have to ask ourselves – at what point do we assign a painful pejorative like “pollution” to a living thing? Oh no—’

  (Impossible, at this distance, to tell whether Georgy Chernoy was responding to a genuine interjection or to a rhetorical one of his own devising.)

  ‘—I do not dispute for a second that chickies are living things, with as much “right” (as you might say) to life as any other ordinarily evolved thing: a horse or a house plant or a human being. Though the Bundist interpretation of some terms here have wider philosophical implications than the definitions we find operating elsewhere. Terms like “rights”. And “life”.’

  ‘He talks as if he just stepped off the boat.’

  Surprised, I turned to my right. The young woman standing next to me came barely up to my shoulder. She had expensively cropped blue-black hair and so many bright studs in her ear, it had at a glance the appearance of a single jewel. I had assumed her words were meant for me, but she was not looking at me. She did not seem aware of my presence at all. Words burst from her, softly but with an extraordinary intensity, as though she were drawing little knives and hurling them in Chernoy’s direction. ‘He was born in Beckton, for crying out loud.’

  ‘Yet when it comes to the beings you call “chickies”—’

  ‘Oh, for crying out loud.’

  ‘—we find ourselves struggling for an appropriate vocabulary. Their human provenance – the way they bubbled up from the blasted earth of the War’s greatest and most terrible battlefield – inflicted upon all parties in that wasteful conflict a trauma that has yet to be fully appreciated, let alone understood, and not at all healed. I would go so far as to say that historians of the future will dub our present age as the Great Shock. If one considers – as we almost never do – that these creatures emerged from the death-throes of doomed soldiers, what does one feel, what can one feel, but a great numb pressure, such was the enormity of the German mistake? Meaning to bring the dead back to life, they brought something new into the world. And in an attempt to contain that mistake, they then tried to put the new thing to use. The industrial utility of the chickie is beyond dispute: our economy thrives and our culture is fed and watered on an infrastructure built by these easily regulated sub-men. But this easy regimentation veiled from us the other half of their nature, what I might call the Dionysian half of their nature, which ultimately brought an end to the German industrial project and led to our current, uneasy stand-off.’

  This was Chernoy’s circumlocutory way of referencing the way the Ruhr Valley’s entire industrial workforce, who by 1937 had been labouring alongside chickies day in, day out for years, were finally overcome by an insatiable lust, downed tools and spent the entire summer and most of the autumn of that year frolicking with these so-called ‘sub-men’ in an orgy that all but broke the nation’s economy. Similar, sometimes grotesquely violent ‘outbreaks’ across Europe brought an end to all grand experiments at the industrial regulation of the chickie population. Left alone at last, the chickies simply melted away. And as Chernoy charmingly put it, ‘Who can say how many of these oh-so-easily-organised work animals conduct affairs of which we know nothing, in places hidden from us: the crannies of our derelict spaces, our edgelands, our abandoned outhouses?

  ‘Their numbers matter, you see. And on this very island, in this great nation, a great unplanned experiment is under way. Let me say it. Someone has to say it: as a species, regarded as a species, chickies impute a so-far-unmeasured pressure upon this island’s ecosystems. It is not a matter of what they might intend. Such concepts are wholly irrelevant. It is, simply, a question of what the chickies are.’

  I leaned towards the girl beside me and said, under my breath: ‘He doesn’t know what “impute” means.’

  She shot me a flat glance and looked away. Her rejection was total, as though I had poked my head around a door into a room in which I was not welcome.

  On the other side of me, a hand shot out and gripped my own. I turned, and was confronted by magnificent breasts and a freckled décolletage adorned with a single silver medallion on which an aeroplane rose above a stand of palms.

  I raised my eyes. ‘Stella.’

  ‘Naughty boy. Why haven’t you said hello?’ This in a much louder, gayer voice than the girl had employed; it put even Chernoy off his tracks.

  ‘So that, erm, we might consider them – the chickies, I mean. I mean, how should we regard them? As we attempt, for instance, to control the spread in our southern waterways of American signal crayfish—?’

  ‘Good God,’ a man in a dinner jacket exclaimed, sliding his hand around Georgy Chernoy’s shoulders, ‘in my local restaurant we eat them.’

  Georgy Chernoy blinked at the interruption, before smoothly joining in the general laughter. ‘Well, that isn’t quite—’

  ‘Happily,’ the man in the dinner jacket went on, assuming control of the party – I think he was a junior minister, something to do with the Arts, or Sport – ‘we have no culinary plans for the chickie race this evening. I have just been informed that our somewhat more conventional menu is ready for serving. Friends, would you take your seats?’

  Aunt Stella, her hand tight around my own, led me along the room to where about a dozen round tables had been laid for dinner. ‘Come with me.’

  Bootless to point out that there was already a seating plan. Stella placed me firmly in the seat to her left and brushed off the small confusions this generated with a charm she had learned years before on the stage, steering repertory performances in which she alone had properly learned her lines.

  ‘So come along,’ she cried, settling herself beside me. ‘How on earth are you?’

  ‘Well.’ I was in love with her; so were most people, irrespective of gender. As is often the case with actors whose power resides in declaiming their lines as though they were poetry (a dying and undervalued art
), she was magnificently sexual. Putting everything into every line tends to leave everything on show afterwards. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I think I’m here to represent Architecture. I feel a complete fraud.’

  ‘I think it’s rather sweet,’ Stella said, picking up and examining the tableware with a critical eye. ‘The government hasn’t a clue about what any of us do and thinks we all subsist on air and sunlight. Come a crisis, though, they gather us up and rally us over the top like the good little foot soldiers we secretly long to be. Oh, to belong to society! Imagine! The vanguard of soft power. Good God.’ She peered more closely at her fork. ‘“John Lewis”. Really?’

  Her clipped delivery was hard to parse. Painfully, I ascended the ladder of her logic. ‘Crisis?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said there was a crisis. That we were here because of a crisis.’

  ‘Oh. That. The spaceships, I mean. The whole Woomera effort.’

  ‘That is a crisis?’

  ‘Not for us, dear. For us it’s a red-letter day. But for the Bund . . .’ Her eyes widened. ‘For the Bund, well . . .’

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘If the Victory reaches the Moon and the Bund are already there . . .’

  I shook my head. ‘The Victory is not even built yet,’ I told her. ‘And even the Bund aren’t on the Moon yet.’

  ‘Their machines are.’

  ‘Exactly. Their machines.’

  Stella pulled one of her little-girl-lost faces. ‘Well, I don’t pretend to understand the details,’ she said.

  ‘And you?’ I asked her, backtracking. I wasn’t equipped for a political conversation, and not in the mood to be bested in it.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘What are you doing here? You’re hardly “a young person of promise”.’

  ‘Well, thank you for that.’

  ‘More a woman of glamour and accomplishment.’

  ‘You stepped around that hole very neatly, dear.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘But if I hear you utter the word “mature” I will stick this fork in your eye.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, what?’

  ‘So what brings you here? Presumably there’s a production on the way I should have heard about?’

  Stella laughed and patted my hand. ‘Dear Stuart, don’t you ever read the papers?’

  ‘Not really, no,’ I said. I didn’t want to say that I had taught myself to read a better sort of newspaper these days than the ones in which she regularly featured.

  ‘Well, if you had, you silly boy, you would know I am your hostess this evening.’

  I frowned.

  ‘In a manner of speaking.’ She gave me a big false grin. ‘In that I’m Georgy’s fuck.’

  Over the years, Stella’s promiscuity had likely earned her more column inches than her acting. How plain Sue Cosgrave had escaped the confining expectations of Yorkshire’s West Riding in the first place was the stuff of a dozen gushing articles in a dozen different magazines, to the point where she had reduced the entire saga (Pye Nest Methodist Church, the Halifax Victoria, Leeds Rep, Birmingham Rep, Liverpool, Bristol, the Manchester Tivoli) to one of her pithier one-liners: ‘I owe my career to three things: a gift for mimicry, a vice-like memory and an inability to conceive.’

  She saw nothing salacious in the way she had arranged and rearranged her domestic circumstances over the years, and as for the men she had supposedly exploited, well, she never approached the role of muse with anything other than perfect seriousness. This had made her one of theatre’s more notorious femmes and, until the recent decline of the West End, one of its more powerful players. Only the youngest commentators ever took her to task: earnest, unattractive young people from provincial stage schools, sharpening their wits on Stella in between, say, a casual catering job and a devised theatre production in the basement of an Islington pub. Newcomers imagine theatre runs on talent. Stella learned early on that it runs on morale.

  ‘I can’t imagine there are many theatres in the Bund.’

  ‘Stuart, don’t be an anti-Semite.’

  ‘Are there?’

  ‘There’s television, you silly boy.’ She let me mull over that as the waiters brought the soup course. Then: ‘Georgy’s very interested in a concept I have for a show about unidentified flying objects. They get a lot of them in Wales.’

  ‘You’ve lost me.’

  ‘They come from a dying planet. They are genetically spent. Their germline is exhausted.’

  ‘The Welsh?’

  ‘The aliens. I’m calling it “DARE”. They have come for our organs.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘In the first episode, DARE’s flight commander downs an alien craft over Theydon Bois, only to discover that its occupant’s heart belonged to his abducted sister.’

  ‘Dare—’

  ‘D. A. R. E. Only I don’t know yet what it stands for. What do you think?’

  ‘How old is Chernoy?’ (When Stella was in this garrulous a mood, one’s only line of defence was attack.)

  Stella affected weariness: ‘How would I know? How old are any of them? Good Christ, pea and ham.’ She picked up a spoon and stirred it experimentally through her soup. She gave a squeal as bullet-headed tadpoles of pancetta flocked and nibbled at her spoon.

  This playful demonstration of Chernoy’s mastery of biophotonics elicited some scattered laughter but no one knew whether to eat the soup or not. The effect wore off soon enough, the cubes losing their motility as they cooked in the hot broth. The stuff, once I got up the nerve to try it, was far too salty.

  ‘If we can find match-funding from Germany then DARE goes into production early next year.’

  ‘So this is real.’

  Stella pursed her lips at me. ‘Of course it’s real.’

  ‘I’m sorry, as a pitch it just sounded a bit . . . unformed.’

  ‘We’re talking about the Bund, Stuart. Things happen quickly there.’

  Stella had always maintained that once she reached the age of fifty-five she would retire, fit out some attic rooms and gather together a small salon (‘It’s how all the real business in this town is done’). But, as I learned later when I caught up with the gossip columns, Georgy Chernoy’s antics outside Wyndham’s Theatre – nightly deliveries of flowers and chocolates; light but swingeingly expensive suppers; incomprehensibly pretentious cocktails in the bars of so-exclusive-as-to-be-invisible hotels; taxis to friends’ country houses – all this had turned her from her purpose. She was still acting, too – in television.

  She had found a man at last. Not a boy, uncertain of sex and in need of a guide and a mother, God knows there’d been plenty of them in the last few years, but a man of accomplishment, ready to fuck her, riotously (she wanted the yellow press to know that, for some reason) and well. I wondered what Chernoy thought of that.

  It amused her to cast herself as Chernoy’s plaything. She had always enjoyed pulling the puritan tiger by the tail, but ‘Georgy’s fuck’ – was there not an element of the abject here? ‘A fuck and nothing more’?

  The waiting staff entered once again through hidden doors to gather up empty plates. The rest of the meal was conventional, even stolid. The Bundists were served slabs of pinkish stuff on a bed of spiralised radish. The rest of us got slices of overdone venison on under-seasoned mash and crunchy vegetables.

  Once the tables were cleared, Georgy Chernoy stood up to speak at a lectern in the corner of the room. The Bund’s rather childish sense of humour and habitual bids for attention (the soup was a classic example) had this effect: that its spokespersons were earnest to a fault, dry as bones and solemn as owls.

  ‘We take this truth to be self-evident,’ Chernoy began, ‘that death is a mistake.’

  It was ground he had covered many times, in the press and on the radio, and it was not a subject with which I felt comfortable. To take my mind off his words, I looked about the room. The girl with the jewelled ear wove past our table on her way to the toilets.
This was my first chance to see her properly and her spareness surprised me. Her slim black skirt shifted tight over her thighs as she moved. High heels explained her mesmerising walk but meant that she was even shorter than I had imagined. She had a hungry look: a female Cassius, Stella would have said. Hungry and determined. I thought of foxes. I thought of crows. I watched her leave the room: her hair was shaved short at the back, a chaotic dyed-black shag everywhere else; it must have cost a fortune. Shiny things sparkled under her hair as she pulled open the door. I assumed her to be one of the angrier ‘creatives’ brought to decorate a gathering whose average age must have topped sixty.

  When she was gone, I studied the room, out of sorts without really understanding why.

  It was easy to tell the Bundists from the rest of us. They tended to be either very short or very tall. They did not share any particular facial characteristic. They put the lie to the notion that beauty lies in conformity. The strangest-looking of them, be they elves or ogres, displayed a health, happiness and animation that contrasted painfully with our sallow, sagging, relatively immobile faces. I wondered what they did, that they thought it worth being here, and how involved they were in government. I wondered how many backroom conversations our civil servants might conduct with them this evening, over sherry, perhaps, or spirits, or at any rate over wine markedly better than any served during our meal, in private rooms away from the dining hall. But these were idle thoughts and for all I knew the entire evening might be adding up to no more than a series of empty, well-meant platitudes.

  ‘To Alexander Gavrilovitch Gurwitsch, then,’ Chernoy declaimed, raising a big glass of purplish stuff. (I expect it was Vimto, though neither I nor anyone I had ever asked knew what accident of history had caused the Bund to fall so madly in love with that stuff.) ‘Brother of a concert pianist, he mastered Beethoven; pupil of Kupffer and Boehm, he conceptualised the developing shark brain; and with Vladimir Vernadsky, in that little hut in Kazan, why, it is not too big a claim to make that he dreamt up the Bomb! This modern Aristotle, for whom “the whole” was never a static entity, but rather an invariant dynamic law pertaining to the entire process of development! And as Gurwitsch moved step-by-step in that direction, trying never to lose contact with real biological data, may we uncouple his Kraftfeld from the body itself, never losing our wonder or our rigour, so we might realise the potential plasticity of all living matter, and weave for ourselves new natures, for the men and women who are to come in his name, on this and other worlds!’