The Smoke

by Simon Ings

  I remembered the strange combination of awkward slowness and pell-mell speed exhibited by Chernoy’s Processed infants: old souls in bodies adapted to a more accommodating physics.

  Before I could put any of that into words, however, Georgy once again launched himself into wild territory. ‘A lot of little kids running about on the Red Planet!’ he cried.

  Everybody looked at him.

  He blinked at us. ‘Well, isn’t that what it’ll be like? It’s charming. The thought of James here skipping about Schiaparelli like a toddler.’

  Silence.

  ‘Oh, come on, why go all the way to Mars if you’re not going to have a bit of fun?’

  It occurred to me that it was we who were being thin-skinned now. Grown men playing tag in the red dirt? The vision was charming! Especially so in the eyes of a man who had fused the infantile and the aged into one constantly renewing – and therefore immortal – form.

  ‘Fel,’ said Georgy, serious suddenly. ‘What is that you’re drinking?’

  Fel reflexively wrapped her hand around her bottle. ‘It’s beer,’ she told him. I had never really taken any notice of her interest in alcohol, which anyway never exceeded the odd half of cider down the pub. Hearing the tremor in her voice now made me realise that breaking with the Bund’s teetotal tradition was a big deal.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Well.’ Even Georgy’s control slipped occasionally: he shot a glance at me. A corrupter of women as well as an anti-Semite.

  ‘Has everyone got enough?’ Stella asked. ‘Oh, God. The beans.’ She ran back to the kitchen.

  ‘They’re on the side,’ I called, and when she didn’t respond, went into the kitchen after her. Stella was peeling the foil off the pan. ‘Oh, look, they’re burned!’

  ‘They’re not burned.’

  ‘The garlic’s all brown.’

  ‘Not very brown. It’s supposed to be toasted, it’s fine.’

  ‘You can’t do that with garlic.’

  ‘Yes you can. With this, you can. Stella, look at me. What do you think I cook for Fel? I cook this kind of food all the time. It’s perfect.’

  Stella mouthed a thank you and carried the dish out to the dining room. I fetched a spoon.

  The beans were perfectly fine. Trust Bob, though, to be meticulously cutting off each tip and edging it with his knife to the side of his plate. Had Stella noticed? No: her gaze was glued to Georgy Chernoy who, having got everyone’s attention with his potentially belittling remark about playtime on Mars, was holding forth on his favourite subject: the reconciliation of what, in a more formal setting, he would probably have dubbed ‘the human family’.

  ‘It’s absurd!’ he exclaimed, and Jim chimed in, banging the zinc with his beer bottle. (Stella winced.)

  ‘We’re not afraid of you!’ Jim asserted, slurring slightly.

  ‘Well, of course you aren’t!’ Georgy laughingly agreed. ‘Where could the conflict possibly lie? The moment you’re in space is surely the moment you realise how absurd all this scaremongering is. Do you know, I read an op-ed in one of your papers the other day that raised the spectre of us dropping Moon-rocks on London? That’s the word they used: “dropping”! As if the Moon were above the Earth! It’s positively medieval. Ptolemaic, even.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Jim, overcome with fellow feeling, ‘you live here. You people are half of this city. You’d have a few words to say if anyone dropped rocks on you!’

  Chernoy beamed at him. ‘No one’s dropping anything. No one’s throwing anything.’

  Bob, joining in, raised his bottle. ‘And to hell with the red-tops!’

  ‘The tabloids. The papers,’ Stella explained, seeing Georgy’s confusion.

  At that, Georgy raised his own bottle. The bottle surprised me, the label even more: now he, too, was drinking Pils. ‘Well, yes, to hell with them,’ he exclaimed, and drank.

  Fel was working hard to ignore her father and so had managed to strike up a conversation with mine. Bob had that poleaxed look I had noticed men got when they talked to Fel for the first time – as though he was being truly understood for the first time. ‘Pumps, in the main,’ he was telling her. ‘The pipework for pumps. They made me a checker.’

  ‘It’s a big deal,’ I told her, chipping in.

  Bob shot me an angry glance. ‘It’s shift work, as always.’

  ‘On spaceships.’

  ‘The parts for spaceships.’ Poor Bob: he was trapped. Whatever he said about it, his work carried the smack of glamour.

  Georgy drew the back of his hand across his lips, stood up and crossed to the fridge. He wanted people to notice him. Above all, he wanted Fel to notice him. He pulled out two bottles of Pils from the door, unscrewed them both as he returned to the table and handed one to Bob. Fel was still managing to ignore him, but Stella wasn’t. I sensed that this was new: that she had not seen Georgy drink till now.

  ‘An engineer is an engineer,’ Georgy announced, and raised his bottle to Bob to chink.

  Bob stared at him.

  ‘Whatever the engine,’ Georgy added, and took a deep draught of his fresh beer.

  Bob frowned. It was all very well him putting his own work down, but what was Georgy about? I could practically see the clockwork turning in him: should he be offended or not? How I hated that about him: that old pendulum inside him forever swinging between pride and fear.

  ‘God, Daddy,’ said Fel, ‘don’t tell us you’re an engineer now.’

  Georgy sucked at his bottle. ‘Well, what would you call it?’

  ‘Medicine isn’t an engineering problem.’

  ‘Everything is an engineering problem.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘You’ll discover this in time.’

  ‘Here we go.’

  The pair of them, father and daughter, each nursing their bottles of forbidden alcohol, had been building up to a row ever since Georgy came through the door.

  ‘What?’ Georgy smiled a combative smile. ‘You think all that art and music you’re so fond of aren’t engineering problems? Talk to any painter! Any composer!’

  ‘You don’t know any composers.’

  ‘What, you think you’re the first to step outside the Bund? Stuart, tell her: is there anything you studied at that school of yours that wasn’t an engineering problem?’

  ‘Well.’ I was painfully aware what his likely opinion of me was. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes?’ Georgy laughed, incredulous. ‘In that case, remind me to bring a hard hat and good insurance next time I visit any structure of yours.’

  It was such a clumsy attack, I couldn’t help myself: ‘An open mind will do.’

  Georgy was delighted, or made a good show of seeming so. ‘Oh, bravo!’ He raised his bottle in a toast. While he drank, he kept his eyes on Fel. He was showing her how little her trivial dietary rebellion mattered. It would take more than a bottle or two of beer to count as secession. Measure for measure, Daddy could match his brat of a girl. Only it was apparent that he could not match her: his eyes had already acquired a dangerous glassiness.

  I expected Stella to head the conversation into calmer waters, but she sat there in absolute silence. In the end, it was Jim who poured oil on troubled waters by offering a little homespun philosophy of his own.

  ‘Now hang on, Doctor Chernoy. I mean to say, there wouldn’t be much point in good engineering, would there, in making something well, or doing anything well, if others didn’t stand back once in a while and say it was well done? Would there? And isn’t that what art is?’

  Georgy clapped, rather slowly. ‘There you are! “Lonely on a peak in Darien”!’ He winked grotesquely, at me or at Fel or maybe at both of us, it was hard to tell. ‘Poetry.’

  ‘Silent.’ Fel’s voice was taut with anger. ‘“Silent, upon a peak in Darien.” Though what Keats has to do with anything beats me.’ She reached for the pitcher of Vimto Stella had prepared. It was still full, the ice almost melted.

  ‘
I’ll have a sup of that,’ Jim announced, ever the diplomat, and thrust out his water glass. Fel poured for him. ‘And –’ he drank it off ‘– and I’ll be off home. No, no, I’d better,’ he insisted, gathering himself. Sobriety, or a decent impression of it, had become like a jacket he shrugged on at will. ‘Reveille’s at five a.m.’ He got out of his seat and in one swift, elegant move that made Stella squeal, he gathered her into his arms and brought her out of her chair in a hug tight enough to wind her. ‘Auntie!’

  ‘Give over! Oaf!’

  ‘Thank you so much for tonight.’ He planted kisses on both her cheeks. ‘Such a terrific send-off.’

  ‘Great fool,’ Stella cried, flushing with pleasure.

  It was clear enough, whatever we said, that Jim was determined to leave, so one by one we got out of our chairs and hugged him.

  ‘Till tomorrow.’ Stella sighed, kissing him. ‘Get some good sleep.’

  Jim hugged me, kissed Fel on the cheek and came around the table and into Bob’s arms. Neither man smiled as they held each other, and the party fell silent a moment, solemn suddenly at this parting of father and son.

  ‘Here,’ Jim said, pressing something into Bob’s hand. The moment went by so fleetingly, I didn’t take it in. It was only much later, when I returned to Yorkshire, that Bob showed me what he had been given: a wristwatch from the rocketry school in Peenemünde, the logo from the film Frau im Mond surfing starlight on its engraved underside.

  Georgy had the sense to hold himself back in this moment of leave-taking; or perhaps, rising from his seat, he had suddenly felt the effects of the evening’s alcohol. Jim and Georgy shook hands, more formally than before, their smiling eyes locking. For all Georgy’s earlier nonsense about reconciliation, the evening had, if anything, drawn the lines between our races even more clearly. Georgy said: ‘We’ll see you when you get there.’

  He meant the Moon. Jim’s grin at the challenge was without mirth. ‘Your machines will. Have them prepare our supper for us.’

  ‘Don’t be late,’ said Georgy, still holding his hand.

  Bob and I saw Jim to the door. When we came back in, we found Fel and Georgy staring daggers at each other across the table while Stella gathered up the empty plates. Georgy wheeled around in his seat. ‘Robert!’

  Fel, a desperate expression on her face, looked from her father to me and back again.

  ‘Robert, tell Fel what it is you actually do.’

  Stella passed me bearing plates into the kitchen. For all her doubt and her little-girl-lost routine, the meal had been a success. We had demolished every dish; there was barely anything but sauce in the serving bowls. Only Bob’s plate remained full. He took his seat and began picking at his dinner again, his face drawn. ‘Well—’ he began.

  Chernoy interrupted him. ‘Robert measures the widths of holes, Fel. Day in, day out. Imagine that.’

  I felt Stella come back into the room beside me, felt more than heard the breath she drew.

  ‘Dad,’ I said quickly, before she could say anything, ‘stop messing about. Come and help me clear up.’

  Georgy shot me a look that might have been admiring. I ignored him; I just needed to get Bob out of the room. Let the Chernoys fight among themselves if they wanted to.

  In the kitchen, Bob emptied his plate into the bin and handed it to me. He’d eaten hardly anything.

  ‘Too spicy?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Come and help me wash up.’

  I washed, Bob dried. What did you do all day? I wondered. Traipsed around the city. Supped tea in cafeterias. Rolled up at the pub at last. What? You told Jim but you won’t tell me. ‘You should have gone to see Mum,’ I said.

  Bob glanced at me, and quickly away. ‘I did.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘You calling me a liar, lad?’

  ‘Yep.’

  Stella came bustling in. ‘What are you two still doing in here? Come out! Leave that. There’s dessert.’ The party was coming to pieces in her hands. I felt sorry for her, but really, what else could she have possibly expected? Had she imagined that all the bits of unresolved family business she had hurled together willy-nilly this evening would unlock each other, as neatly as a stage comedy? But of course she had. This, after all, was the world she lived in: the scripted world of the stage, where complications only got tangled up in Act Two in order to unwind in Act Three.

  Only there wasn’t going to be any Act Three. Not tonight: not with Georgy drunk and raiding the fridge for another beer, and Stella, suddenly losing her cool, pulling hard on his arm to stop him. The fridge door flew open and a carton of milk toppled out of the door and landed at my feet. I snatched it up but it had burst and it leaked all over my hands and down the front of my trousers as I juggled it into the kitchen.

  By the time I came back, Georgy was shifting, none too elegantly, into a penitent gear. It was already arranged that Bob would stay over, so Georgy was going to have to mend fences somehow. He said to Bob: ‘I honest-to-goodness didn’t mean anything bad by it.’

  Bob was the taller of the two men, but his baffled, hypnotised expression revealed that Georgy, even as an unaccustomed drunk, knew how to handle men like Bob: simple working men for whom even their own sense of self-worth acted as a brake on their self-assertion.

  Fel ordered an autonomous cab for us. We rode most of the way home in silence, until at last she said: ‘Your mother dies tomorrow.’

  I looked out through the window. It was a dry, clear night. Christmas Eve. I was surprised the streets were so empty. ‘Yes.’

  ‘No one said anything about it.’

  ‘No. Well, Jim and Bob went to see Mum earlier today. In the end, there is nothing to say, is there?’

  ‘Isn’t there?’

  ‘For crying out loud, what do you want me to say?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘That I’m losing her again? You need me to spell this out?’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘That I’ve never particularly liked her?’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘Love and like are different things. Deal with it. God knows I’ve had to.’

  She put her arm around me. I tried to calm down. I did. Only I didn’t want to be put on the spot. I couldn’t bear the way Bob had sloped off again, and I couldn’t convince myself that I was any better. And the way the evening had ended: that still rankled. ‘Your father’s an arsehole,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’ She offered nothing else. She didn’t laugh. She didn’t turn it into a joke. She didn’t want to be angry with me. She waited for me to calm down.

  I took her hand. ‘I’m sorry.’

  She squeezed my fingers. ‘What will you do tomorrow?’

  ‘Do?’

  ‘Are you going to Croydon to see Jim off?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She took my hand and massaged it, as though trying to read something there. ‘And your mum?’

  ‘I’ve been to see her,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing left.’

  ‘There’s the birth.’

  ‘I’m not interested in that.’

  We were approaching Moorgate when she said, ‘I’ll go there tomorrow. I’ll go to Ladywell. Someone should be there.’

  I shrugged. ‘If that’s what you want to do. I guess you understand it better than I do.’

  We got to the flat and undressed and huddled together under the duvet. I’d had enough. I couldn’t bear the thought of talking any more. But as usually happens whenever I try to force sleep upon myself, it didn’t last. In the middle of the night I woke up, brain ticking and buzzing as though it were already morning, only I was convinced there was a stranger in the room.

  I stretched out for Fel but found only bedlinen. I sat up abruptly, sure that by doing so I would shake off what could only be a dream. A glitch of the sleeping mind.

  But the presence persisted. It was real enough, though invisible, and felt tied to Fel’s absence. I stared numbly at the empty half of ou
r bed. Fel was not in the bedroom. I blinked, orientating myself.

  The door was ajar. Light fanned in from the living room. I got up. The laminate flooring was cold and sticky against my feet. The French window was open, letting in distant traffic sounds, the city never quite sleeping. Fel was on the balcony. She glanced at me and smiled and the diamond set in her tooth and all the stones in her ear glittered in the moonlight.

  She turned back and looked up at the sky. I followed her gaze. A half-moon was rising above the blocks of the estate. Where the Moon’s dark half should have blocked out the stars, there were lights. Just a few, very faint. Four or five of them. Six. Maybe seven. My eyes, adjusting, caught the hint of more, though I had to look to one side of the Moon to detect them. They were faint enough that they disappeared when looked at directly.

  They hung in no particular pattern, and shone with the same modest brightness as the surrounding stars so that it appeared, after a few seconds, as though they were indeed stars, and the dark half of the Moon was entirely missing. A few seconds later, the illusion righted itself, and reason took hold again, and I was looking at the unlit half of the Moon. And there were lights. Lights on the Moon.

  The Moon was inhabited. I’d read the papers. I knew the inhabitants were only machines. Diggers, cranes and drills. But still. Fires were burning. I had not seen this before. Not with the naked eye. I must have said something. It was quite a sight.

  Here, however, memory breaks down. It fails me, and I can’t be sure which of us next spoke.

  ‘Fires are burning.’

  Nonsense.

  I took Fel by the hand. ‘Come to bed.’

  8

  Champions of the Process called Georgy Chernoy’s medicalised infants the ‘reborn’. Critics dubbed them the ‘undead’. To me they were just strange children. Their bodies, though growing at an accelerated rate, never quite managed to catch up with their impatient, adultish minds. I was never able to take them entirely seriously, not even when one of them was my own mother. Fel persuaded me to visit my new mum around the time she was three months old, and had started to use sign language. Fel was infatuated. Whenever the weather allowed she had been wheeling Betty around the memory parks of Medicine City, and the therapy was having the desired effect. ‘Betty knows who she is now,’ Fel assured me. ‘She’s been asking after you.’ As though this would encourage me. But Fel’s enthusiasm was winning, and my own curiosity was growing. What finally tipped the scales was Betty leaving the nursery. Stella took her back to her house in Islington to look after her, now that she no longer needed specialist care.