The Smoke

by Simon Ings

  Betty’s tent was sagging by then, its crimson canvas faded in streaks to a fleshy pink. Mildew grew in the corners and its seams bled in the rain. There was mud trodden into the rugs around the couch, and things living under the weave, and the tin lamps scattered round about, which had lit Betty’s confinement from beneath like a Victorian nativity scene, had tarnished and dented, and many had ceased to function. By then, Betty was spared the sight of this dilapidation. The stand of blade-like grasses had receded back into the earth, but now her head was smothered by hordes of silver bees. It was a sight familiar enough by then to make my last visit, at the end of November, easier than perhaps it ought to have been. Not very charged with emotion at all, in fact – it was as though I had already lost her. When I squeezed her hand for the last time, her fingers found mine and yet I knew, deep in my heart, that this was merely an autonomic response, and that she was consumed. I stared at her swollen belly. Its late fecundity was still disturbing to me: a youngish belly parasitising on an old woman. An unnecessarily bitter way of looking at the Chernoy Process, but given Betty’s medical history, how could I think of it differently?

  Oblivious to my grim metaphor-making, Betty hurtled towards her triumphant rebirth. At Stella’s request, the clinic sent us regular video reports. Through them we sensed her belly swelling day by day, and heard the bees swarming in and out of her mouth and nose in pursuit of strange honey, reading her mind even as they burned away her brain.

  The clinic controlled every nuance of this process, including the moment of death. For Betty’s demise, they picked Christmas Day: the very day the family were meant to cheer Jim off to Woomera.

  * * *

  Stella’s house in Islington stood on the corner of Inglebert Street and Myddelton Square. It had an impressive front door, but the easiest way in was by the garden. I pressed the bell and after a long shivery moment the side door – set in a high, lilac-topped brick wall – unlatched itself without buzzing. I let Fel through first. Though much of the planting had died back, the garden still felt overgrown. I gathered Fel to me and kissed her in the shadow of the long-neglected apple tree. Laughing softly, she pushed me away and I nearly toppled over a planter moulded in the shape of a classically proportioned human head. I took her hand and led her, more by feel than by sight, along a narrow brick path to the top of a spiral of slippery iron stairs.

  Light from the basement dining room lit our way. The kitchen door was ajar. From it spilled a current of warm air, heavy with asafoetida and cumin. Stella, who had never cooked for Fel before and who claimed never to have done more than spiralise a few vegetables for Georgy (‘We always eat out’) was attempting a feast compatible with the Bund’s strictures on diet. There was no trace of Christmas in her cooking, no decorations in the windows, no sign of cake anywhere. I put a brave face on things but it had somehow slipped my mind that Christmas was not universal. I was as disappointed as a child, though grimly determined not to let it show.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ Stella harried. ‘Don’t let the warmth out. No, don’t shut the door, leave a gap, we won’t be able to breathe.’

  ‘How are you doing, Stella?’

  ‘Have you come straight from Cripplegate?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ Fel said.

  ‘Drinks. Would you like a drink?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘I’ve got juices, Rose’s Lime, Vimto.’

  Fel laughed.

  Stella’s smile was uncertain. ‘You all drink Vimto, don’t you? At least, Georgy does.’ She shot a look at me.

  ‘It’s fine, Stella. They do all drink Vimto. It’s practically a religion.’

  ‘Do you have a beer?’

  Stella blinked at Fel. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Fel drinks alcohol.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And Vimto,’ said Fel. ‘But a beer would be lovely.’

  ‘Stuart, can you go and get Fel a beer from the fridge next door?’

  I slipped off my shoes and stowed them under the bench just inside the back door. I crossed the dining room to the heavy, lime-green fridge-freezer. The room was nothing like I remembered. Stella had it fitted out with subfloor heating under marble, and a set of wilfully eccentric pieces from Portobello Road Market had taken the place of the old cupboards. This evening, in preparation for the gathering, the room was all lit up with tea-lights and candles. It looked like Stella was trying too hard. I returned to the tiny galley kitchen with Fel’s bottle of Pils. ‘Is there an opener?’

  Fel, recognising the brand, took the bottle, screwed off the cap and stuck her tongue out at me.

  ‘Now, Felicine, do go and sit down. Stuart, give me a hand.’ Stella thrust a handful of coriander at me. Some of it dropped on the floor. ‘Here,’ she said, pulling a chopping board down and over the sink: the fit was precarious but there was no other surface to use. She had already taken the dining table out of action with place settings and glasses for Vimto and wine. ‘Can you manage there?’ She fished about in an open drawer and fetched out a mezzaluna. ‘As fine as you can.’

  ‘A knife would be better. I need one hand to steady the board.’

  She found me a knife too small for the job; I sawed away at the stuff in my fist, pressing down to keep the board in place.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Stella, gazing at the mess her cooking had made of the kitchen. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’

  ‘It all smells fantastic.’

  ‘Everything smells fantastic when it starts to burn.’

  ‘There. Is that fine enough? Good. Now, what else is there to do?’ Having got through that labour with my fingers still intact, I was game for anything.

  Because the Bund only ever ate meat of its own devising – vegetal meat, efficient, sterile and relatively homogenous – Stella had elected to stick to vegetarian food. She was not a bad cook, but she was out of practice and the recipes she had chosen – I read them over her shoulder out of books with titles like The Incredible Spice Wunderkammer and Adventures on the Cardamom Route – had far too many stages to them.

  ‘Just grind all that into a paste and fry it,’ I told her, pointing to a particularly knotted passage in Under the Tamarind Tree. ‘Make life simpler for yourself.’

  ‘But it’ll burn!’

  ‘It won’t burn, it’ll be full of liquid from the onion. Just toss it about in some oil until the water evaporates.’

  She looked up at me with wide eyes. ‘You think so?’

  ‘Go and talk to Fel,’ I said. ‘She’s on her own in there. I can fix this.’

  She kissed me on the cheek.

  It was easy enough to handle. Stella had forgotten the rice. It was still soaking in far too much cold water. I drained half of it off, added cardamom and butter and salt, and was just sealing the pan with a sheet of foil when the back door opened and Bob and Jim came in.

  ‘I found him,’ Jim bellowed, putting his arms around me. ‘I found Dad, bet you can’t guess where.’

  ‘How’d you get in?’

  ‘Some pillock left the garden door open.’

  I wanted Jim to be still and let me look at him: I had seen him twice in the past two years, both vanishingly brief encounters on his way through London, and none of us had received so much as a letter from him since he’d been selected for the army’s Space Force. He had just finished a month in purdah at a submarine base in the Firth of Forth, doing whatever passed for basic training in that bizarre and brand-new organisation. Tomorrow was Christmas Day and he was off by air for Woomera and the rocket construction effort there. After that, there was no telling when we would see him again. If all went well, the next time we saw him he would be on television: first Yorkshireman in space.

  If Jim’s ebullience hadn’t already given him away, his breath certainly would have. ‘Good drink?’ I asked him.

  ‘Should have come with us, bro.’

  I wrestled Jim off, one hand still steadying the rice pan. ‘Christ, you’ll have me tipping this over.’

&n
bsp; Jim laughed and ruffled my hair.

  ‘How’re you doing, Stu?’ Bob’s face was flushed, maybe from the sudden heat of the kitchen, more likely from however many hours he had spent drinking with Jim.

  ‘Go through. Take your shoes off. There’s beers in the fridge.’

  Stella appeared at the living-room door and hugged the new arrivals. Once the rice pan was sealed, I set it on a low heat, checked my watch and followed the others into the dining room.

  Stella’s new dining table was very small: a find from her scavenging expeditions in search of props for DARE. She told us it hailed from the mortuary of a defunct hospital. The zinc wrapping was tarnished here and there, and you could not help but try to guess which had been the table’s head end and which the other.

  Fel sat at the end of the table, Jim near her and Stella next to him. ‘Food in fifteen minutes,’ I announced, taking a seat opposite Jim. Dad sat beside me. This left the chair at the head of the table vacant for Georgy.

  ‘I don’t know where he can have got to,’ said Stella, finding things to fret about. ‘He said he’d be here to help.’

  Fel must have asked Jim something about his work because the next thing I knew he was moving all the glasses about the table in an effort to explain the hydrodynamics of small nuclear devices.

  Bob was aghast. ‘Should you be telling us any of this, lad?’

  Jim laughed. ‘It’s no secret, Dad. The ship’s half-built.

  You half-built it!’

  Bob smiled a guarded little smile. ‘Only shift work, son.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Jim, ‘I dare say if you lot had wanted, you’d have blasted off years ago and this Earth’d be riddled with holes like a Swiss cheese.’

  I looked from Jim to Fel, unsure what was going on.

  Jim saw me and shrugged. ‘The Bund, I mean.’

  Fel smiled him a cold smile. ‘Blowing things up is not our style.’

  Jim laughed and raised his beer. ‘Trusting us to do the heavy lifting, eh?’

  ‘We don’t trust you to do anything,’ Fel said, holding my brother’s gaze.

  No one knew how to react – no one, that is, but Jim, who met my eye and whistled his appreciation. ‘Got a live one here.’

  ‘Bob?’ Stella placed her fingertips on the table: a subtle call-to-order. ‘How was Betty?’

  Bob met Stella’s smile with a rare smile of his own but he said nothing.

  Jim filled the silence so quickly, there might not have been any silence at all. ‘I thought she looked jolly fine. Stuart?’

  ‘I saw her last month,’ I said. ‘She seemed – well, she seemed healthy, didn’t she, Fel?

  ‘God, she must have been glad you were there, Felicine!’ Jim exclaimed, thumping the table. He pronounced her name to rhyme with ‘twine’. ‘The daughter she never had.’

  What that was supposed to mean, I had no idea, but Fel took it in good part: ‘How much have you drunk?’ she asked him, laughing.

  ‘We sank a couple, didn’t we, Dad? Christmas cheer and all that. You two should have come along.’

  It occurred to me then why Jim was coming at everything from such an odd angle, exhilarated and aggressive. He was nervous. And realising this, I realised why. He was covering for Bob. Bob had once again failed to visit Betty. It must have been obvious to Fel as well: she felt for my hand under the table and gave it a squeeze.

  ‘When I come back,’ Jim said, ‘I expect Mum’ll be . . . well, I hope—’ He hesitated, finding himself suddenly on dangerous ground, and something else occurred to me: how strange all this must seem to him! He had spent most of the last year, prior to basic training with the Space Force, on a peacekeeping tour of Sri Lanka. Of all of us, he had the least understanding of what Betty was going through, and the least notion why anyone could have thought it was a good idea.

  ‘Well, of course,’ Stella exclaimed. She laughed. ‘Everything’ll be different in a year.’

  As though her assurances were a cue, Georgy Chernoy entered the living room.

  ‘George! Where have you been?’ (Only Stella ever anglicised Georgy Chernoy’s name. I suppose it was a sort of endearment. I wondered what he thought of it.)

  Georgy strode up to Stella’s chair and kissed the top of her head. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I could not get away.’ He took in the table, his daughter, me. ‘You must be Robert,’ he said to my father. ‘And James.’

  Jim stood up, none too steadily, to shake his hand.

  ‘Congratulations.’ Georgy pumped his hand. ‘When do you fly out?’

  ‘But I only just got here,’ Jim shot back, and over laughter, ‘Tomorrow morning.’

  ‘And the big launch?’

  Jim grinned. ‘I’d be the last to know that.’

  ‘Jim’s been telling us how their ship’s drive works,’ Fel said.

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Did you know that the bomb-delivery mechanism is based on a Vimto dispensing machine?’

  ‘Yes. I did.’ This flatly, and without humour. I wondered why Georgy was trying to shut his daughter down. To Jim: ‘Well, I wish you luck with it.’

  Try as he might – and I was not convinced that he was trying especially hard – Georgy Chernoy could not let go the noblesse oblige of his people, for whom such pyrotechnic adventures were, according to their conceit, quite superfluous.

  ‘There’s something splendidly muscular about this effort, isn’t there? Yes?’ He fished around the table for signs of assent and, ignoring their absence: ‘Here we are – in the Bund, I mean – setting off firecrackers from high-altitude balloons, spreading sails to catch the sunlight, spitting ions out the back of flameless rockets, sending up fist-sized microsatellites on pencil-thin laser beams. And here you are, shipping ruddy great pipes halfway around the Earth and threatening to nuke an entire desert so as to get a frigate into orbit.’

  ‘The point of space,’ said Jim, ‘is being there. Don’t you agree? No, you don’t,’ he continued, not letting Georgy respond. ‘You’d rather send up machines. Each to his own, but I want to see the Earth spread below me with my own eyes.’

  Georgy cocked his head: a predator sizing up prey. ‘What a pity you only have one pair.’

  Stella shot me a look. She didn’t like the combative turn the conversation was taking. But what was I supposed to do? Get the two sides of this dinner to meekly agree on their mutual incomprehension? I said: ‘I suppose, having given birth to the dead in Catford, it’s a relatively small step to give birth to them on the Moon.’

  Georgy’s smile tightened.

  ‘That is the idea, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s certainly a possibility,’ he conceded.

  ‘Already you’re populating other planets!’

  He did not look at me. ‘Quite why everyone is so fascinated by the population curves of the Jewish race, I’ll never know. It has always been like this. As if we’re a sort of human isotope. Don’t let them reach critical mass!’

  His angry defensiveness astounded me. Why now, here, among friends, was Georgy referring to his community by the old, unhappy name? The whole point of the Bund had been to repudiate its tribal past. Of all the bizarre figures forged in the inferno of the Great War, the Bundist – thoroughly modern, rigidly materialist, crushing the rabbi under his proletarian heel – had surely been the most compelling, the most exhilarating.

  ‘If it was critical mass we were afraid of,’ I said, ‘I think we’d look at London and declare that battle lost for good and all.’

  By Georgy’s expression, I could see that he still thought I was attacking him. Fel had let go of my hand. Perhaps she thought so, too. I did not care. My blood was up. I knew what he thought I was. All I could do was answer fire with fire. ‘When you’ve finished snatching racial failure from the jaws of political victory,’ I said, ‘you might just possibly see that I was paying you a compliment. Whatever the Space Force accomplishes – men in space, men on the Moon, men on Mars – it’s obvious to me that you will still b
e first to settle these places. That is, I assume, what your machines are for? To build for your arrival?’

  ‘First to settle?’ This from Bob, for whom none of my oh-so-important opinions had made any sense at all. ‘Well, I don’t know about that. I think Jim and his mates might surprise you there, Mr Chernoy.’

  Chernoy did not miss a beat. ‘How very proud you must be of your son,’ he said, reaching across the table.

  Bob, blinking, rose as if hypnotised to shake Georgy’s hand.

  I glanced at my watch. ‘Stella?’

  Stella and I served the food while Jim, in the lull occasioned by my absence – what on earth had I been thinking? – held forth about his training. Bob, at least a little tight and with a second bottle of beer on the go, listened intently. Georgy had relaxed at last, though as usual his open, warm smile gave absolutely nothing away. I couldn’t catch Fel’s eye to see what she thought of my altercation with her father. It hadn’t been my finest hour, but of one thing I was sure: he had started it.

  ‘I don’t know how we’re going to fill the days of our voyage, exactly,’ Jim admitted. ‘There won’t be much to master about the ship itself: it’s the size of a frigate, as you say, and a damn-sight easier to sail.’

  ‘And where will you go?’ Georgy asked. ‘All being well.’

  More rearrangements of the glassware: ‘So you see, even Jupiter is not outside our range.’

  Georgy looked impressed. ‘And do you have special suits prepared for Mars?’

  Jim blinked, blindsided by a question so specific and so very much off the point. ‘I’d be the last to know about details like that,’ he said again.

  ‘Only I’ve heard it said that it’s going to be easier to run on the Martian surface than it is to walk,’ Georgy said. ‘So I suppose the designers are going to have to think about that.’

  You could see Jim taking confidence from the question. You could see him thinking: Here we are, two men together, thrashing out the technical detail. ‘True enough,’ he said. ‘Your power-to-weight ratio is different in lower gravity – more like a child’s. The smaller you are, the stronger you are relative to your size. And that’s why little kids are always running about from place to place. It’s easier for them to run than walk.’