The Smoke

by Simon Ings

  ‘It’s just a matter of patience,’ Fel explained to me. ‘Your mum’s memories are all there. It’s just a question of encouraging her to work through her old life. She needs to call everything to mind. You should go and see her. You should talk to her. You should make the connection.’

  I didn’t know about that. But I had lost too much of my mother already – to cancer, and to Stella – to ignore altogether this strange new chapter in her life. Though I was sceptical about who or what I would find rattling the gaily painted bars of Stella’s newly installed stairgate, I felt I had better stake an early interest.

  I arrived to find Betty in Stella’s basement dining room, strapped in a high chair, splashing sickly, sweet-smelling rusk porridge all over the zinc dining table. Now Betty was out of Ladywell’s care, Stella had to rely on local shops for her supplies. Betty’s stiff plastic bib had a locomotive on it. Her sippy cup was embossed with cartoon giraffes.

  ‘Here she is,’ Stella said, tone cheery, eyes wide as she faced me and nervous as hell. I wondered if her mood was triggered by my arrival. It was just as likely that Betty herself was keeping her on a constant knife’s edge.

  Her feeding, for a start, was painful to watch. An ordinary baby, knowing no better and anyway lacking coordination, will throw porridge around as a kind of wild experiment. The infant before me, however, already knew perfectly well what a spoon was, what a table was, what up and down were and what porridge was for. She just lacked the coordination to handle them. There was no joy in her movements at all – just incapacity. She looked to me to be exactly what she was: a shrunken adult struggling with a motor dysfunction. She glared up at me, her chin thrust belligerently forward and dripping with milky, greyish stuff. She dropped her wide-grip plastic spoon. It fell half into her bowl and toppled out onto the table. She weaved her stubby little arms in front of her face.

  Stella translated: ‘She wants to know what took you so long.’

  Fel was in the kitchen, wringing out a rag. She returned to wipe up the worst of the spills and detach Betty’s bib. Betty sat still throughout the clean-up. No actual baby would ever have done that. I tried hard not to show my discomfort, but I found it very difficult to watch. I felt I was confronted with something pretending to be a baby. Which, I suppose, was not far from the truth. The imposture was more than unsettling. It was disgusting. My whole body sang with tension. It occurred to me that it would be the most natural thing in the world for me to stove this thing’s head in with a pan. The shock was so intense, I mumbled an excuse, rushed into the kitchen and leaned over the sink. There was a glass on the drainer and I fumbled it under the tap and filled it. The drink helped. Thank God that’s over, I thought. My heart steadied. I came back in to find Fel wiping Betty’s face with a damp tissue, and it was all I could do not to rush in and save her, pulling her out of range of that dangerous, gummy mouth and those tiny, stubby, grasping hands.

  They weaved about.

  Stella, translating again, said: ‘She wants to know about your work.’

  So I sat there sipping milky coffee, trying to control the trembling of my hands, trying to explain to my newborn mother how the kinds of technology that (among other things) made her possible were eating my career before my eyes. ‘They print buildings now, Mum. Draw and print. The machines do everything.’

  Whatever sign-system Betty was using, it had to be tiring, and she was constantly trying to form words in the back of her throat, her immature tongue weaving around inside her gaping mouth like something trapped. I tried to ask her about herself, about what she was going through and how she felt. She waved these questions away impatiently. Replying to them with arm gestures would have been both difficult and exhausting – even assuming that Stella was up to translating them.

  Fel steered away from us as we talked; over Betty’s head I could see her busying herself in the kitchen, sorting out piles of baby clothes. Georgy Chernoy was not at home. I wondered what he made of these novel domestic arrangements: about being confronted, at the end of every busy day, with a living, breathing, defecating example of his creation.

  In the taxi back to the Barbican, Fel said, ‘What do you think about kids?’

  ‘She’s not a kid,’ I replied. ‘I don’t know what she is. Well, I do. I get it. She’s something new. Still, I don’t know how you do it. They grow up fast, don’t they? Faster than normal. That’s what I’ve read. I can’t imagine Dad coping with this. Not until she’s older, anyway. Not until she can speak, at very least. How long will we have to wait? A couple of months? She’s developing so fast.’

  I looked across at Fel. She was looking out of the window, away from me. Her arms were folded.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  She took a sudden interest in something outside, though there was nothing to see.

  Eventually, she said: ‘You didn’t answer my question.’

  * * *

  In the game of Set there are no turns. The dealer shuffles a special deck and lays twelve cards face up in a rectangle. Players identify and remove sets of three cards from anywhere in the array. Each card contains one, two or three symbols, which are lozenges, squiggles or diamonds, and these are either red, green or purple, and solid, open or striped. There are 81 cards in the box, and there is a 1:33 chance of there being no set present in an array of twelve cards.

  ‘Set!’ Stan Lesniak exclaimed.

  ‘No.’ Fel pointed to two of his cards. ‘These two are diamonds. That one is a lozenge.’

  He still didn’t understand.

  ‘You can’t have two characteristics the same,’ Fel explained, ‘unless all three are the same.’

  Stan blew a raspberry. ‘This is boring,’ he complained. ‘Have you at least got some better wine?’

  Stan, star of my academic year, editor of Responses, was following my brother to Woomera, albeit in the employ of the Commonwealth Office. For years the army had been detonating atom bombs in tarmac-lined hemispherical basins dug all over the desert. It was the quickest way they knew of producing the valuable, short-lived nuclear fuel called tritium. Now local campaigners were blaming the production cycle for an increase in stillbirths, birth defects and childhood leukaemias. Stan had been hired to establish whether these claims had any scientific credibility.

  ‘You would have thought, when they heard the loud bangs, people would simply have had the sense to move away,’ he complained. He sipped at what I’d just poured him and winced.

  ‘Stan’s a sensitive soul,’ I said for Fel’s benefit, trying to keep the evening light.

  But Stan was caught in an embarrassing position and, being Stan, wanted to take his embarrassment out on us. Somehow he had heard about Betty – I don’t know how – and he must have assumed Fel and I were looking after her. He was irritated to find that Betty was not with us when he visited; worse, that neither Fel nor I wanted to share parenting stories with him. He insisted on staying in the flat though, even though we had a restaurant table booked, and then he acted all put out that our home life was boring. Well, whose isn’t? ‘What do you do all day here, anyway?’

  It was a good question, though not one I had any intention of discussing with him.

  * * *

  What did we do all day here?

  Listlessly, and without much conviction, I revised for my finals, which were now only a month away. I had been a conscientious student. I knew I would pass. I knew, with equal conviction, that I would not excel. For all my brave words in Art’s defence around Stella’s dining table, I was not very creative. I had learned how to use rulers and protractors. I had learned how to project a three-dimensional structure onto a piece of graph paper. I had learned how to turn sketches into lists of materials and plans of work. I had, over three years, acquired competence in the very skills that were even now being automated by the Bund.

  Whenever the futility lay too heavily upon me, I got out my designs for the second series of DARE. The sad fact was, Stella, my first client, was likely to be my o
nly client for some while, and if I wanted to stay in London, then the only way forward for me was to do the kind of work she had offered to find for me: concept artwork in television and film. DARE’s balsa-wood moonbase and extruded polyethylene submarine were amusing enough, and I had undeniably enjoyed designing and assembling them. Series two was already well into development, and I was having a lot of difficulty trying to dream up suitably otherworldly shapes for the aliens’ lunar beachhead, an important recurring locale. Stella had so far deemed everything I had sketched ‘too tellurian’.

  ‘Too what?’

  ‘Too Earthlike, dear.’ She poured out more tea. ‘Too grounded, somehow. I don’t know. I mean, what do we really know about these aliens?’ She gazed off into the Barbican Centre café’s bright orange middle distance.

  Now that my work for DARE involved maquette-making as well as sketching, Stella was renting space for me in the Barbican itself, in workshops that were meant to serve the theatre in the art centre’s basement.

  Being handed the keys to these well-appointed workshops sped my work along. It meant I could walk to work in minutes. It also meant Stella had an excuse to call in at our flat with Betty. Fel, hearing the bell, rushed to the door. It was a novelty for her, to have friends surprise her in the day. Such casual arrangements must, I suppose, have been absent from her own carefully invigilated childhood. And she adored Betty. She scoured charity shops for cast-off toys and games. They were the only second-hand items Fel ever let through our door, and she filled the flat with them. Wooden train sets. Dollies. Toy xylophones. There was always something new at our flat for Betty to play with.

  It was strange watching Betty and Fel playing together on the living-room rug, and impossible to say who was humouring whom. Fel talked a good game, always couching her charity-store purchases of toys and games in terms of Betty’s locomotor development, her hand-eye coordination and so on. When they got together, Fel played with Betty the way I imagine she would have played with any toddler. My mother’s uncanniness did not seem to disturb her at all. It made me wonder if Fel had ever played with young children before. Could she simply not see that there was a difference here? A weirdness?

  Betty did not so much play with Fel as play along. The Process had her growing so fast you could practically hear her creak, and her mental development was more advanced every time I saw her. By the time my finals were over she had begun speaking: a curious, very unchildlike honking from the back of her throat, all hard ‘g’s and aspirants, as though she were suffering from a bad cold. But she never spoke to Fel except through the sign language that had served her in her first month. It was as if she didn’t want to break the illusion of babyhood. As if, around Fel, she wanted to stay a child.

  Betty liked having Fel make a fuss of her. Day after day of Stella correctly and assiduously treating her like an adult undoubtedly made Fel’s attentions, by contrast, into a sort of holiday.

  More than that, though: I think Betty genuinely liked Fel. Among the many exasperated glances Betty shot her when she thought Fel wasn’t looking, there were other, much softer, much more melancholy expressions. Once, I came in from a morning at the workshop and found Fel and Betty sitting on the floor, some sort of bead game spread out between them, with their foreheads pressed together. Neither spoke or let my appearance disturb them.

  Then Fel was up on her feet asking me how the lunar beachhead was coming along, and Betty, in a striped jumper with buttons at the neck and red rompers and one shoe, was looking up at Fel with an expression, on that unformed toddler’s face of hers, of what I can only call love.

  * * *

  As that summer ended, so the distinction between the two parts of London – the East and West, the Bundist and the unaccommodated – grew ever more visible.

  The Bund’s soft annexation of South East London was an injury to the whole so huge and so sudden – the quick hacking-off of a limb – that the unaccommodated city, still dizzy, incredulous and drunk on the endorphin high of injected capital, was only now waking to the pain of its mutilation.

  At the end of a working day, I would stretch out by walking east, into the Bund. With a new phone to help me (‘Here,’ Fel said, handing it to me, ‘it’s simple. There’s only one button,’ – as if that wasn’t half the problem), I decided I would conquer my dislike of exercise and wove a route – never the same twice – to the river, and watched commuters piling home, ever more exhausted, ever more pale and wraithlike, onto ferry boats at Canary Wharf and Millwall Outer Dock. I would ride back with them as far as the Tower. It struck me that my fellow commuters – guest workers, visiting the Bund by day from the unaccommodated half of the city – were beginning to resemble ever more closely the dead-eyed drones drawn by the more hostile newspaper cartoonists. Half-men. Robots. Indentured labour. Working conditions in the Bund remained excellent; in fact, if anything they were improving, with more allowances made for unaccommodated ‘guests’. But something had changed. Watching them stumble off the jetty at the Tower and Charing Cross, you would be forgiven for thinking they had just been hauled, blinking, from the airless depths of a mine. It was hard not to read buyer’s remorse into the blank looks they gave the Thames’s southern banks. Not that there was anything for them to see there. Those zones of the city were by now entirely transmuted, all fairy glitter and constructivist gesture. Structures – you could not call them buildings; for a start, they had no doors – rose and fell there in real-time. There was no solid building anywhere. The very substance of the place had been turned from architecture into something very like metabolism.

  In the newspapers, columnists all of a sudden found themselves reminded of the South London of their youth. School nature walks on One Tree Hill. A favourite aunt in Peckham. A visit to the Horniman Museum. The taste of jam fresh from the factory in Deptford. The smell of leather clinging to the maze of little streets in Rotherhithe. Where, the opinion-writers asked rhetorically, had all this past got to? Was it possible that it was gone for ever, transmuted into a dramatic yet finite flow of capital investment? Had the city’s appetite for new construction become so overpowering that it had induced us all to gobble up our past?

  It became the fashion, even among those snobs who had never set foot south of the river, to claim some connection with those lost lands. Gift shops sold old postcards of the area, antique advertisements from businesses long dead, road maps that no longer squared, in any particular, with the area they once covered. Between cushions printed with photographic renderings of wide, empty, untarmacked high roads in Brockley and Sydenham sat scale models of the Crystal Palace, the TV transmitter, the full-size plaster dinosaurs grazing in the nearby park. A flyer arriving in our postbox invited us to subscribe to a heritage project: the accurate, brick-by-brick reconstruction, in a derelict corner of Hackney, of Brockley’s demolished Rivoli Ballroom.

  Such cheap nostalgia would most likely have faded and been forgotten, were we not constantly reminded of our territorial loss by changes within the Bund itself. Compared to the baffling erasures to the south, the changes wrought in the city’s old financial centre were, on paper, relatively modest. And something had needed doing. Over the few short years of its habitation, the Bund had grubbed up London’s old, war-damaged financial district and amalgamated the pieces into towers like the building-block constructions of a hyperactive child: here a brick-clad wall; there a glass curtain; over there a virtually windowless obelisk. The district’s ancient street plan had not been obliterated so much as upended. Vertical thoroughfares wove through its towering and peculiar constructions, along suspended glass tunnels, over footbridges and platforms, up escalators and moving walkways, so that navigation – already notoriously difficult for the unaccommodated visitor – had begun to tax even the people of the Bund. Some general solution was needed: a way to tie together all these pavements and public spaces.

  The solution was light. Lots of light. Moonlight in particular: that cool, blue suffusion. So the Bund built artificial m
oons: huge fizzing lights mounted on scaffolds that reached so high they topped its tallest buildings. The Bund’s whole bizarre mass lay like an accident beneath these six unblinking eyes. Residents basked in this rational light, navigating with ease, at last, the night-time maze of their city, and celebrating, through a contented silence, their conquest of the night.

  The rest of us hated these six ghastly eyes gushing electric ice, freezing the Bund in a silence that – compared to the bustle in our unaccommodated half of the city – could only suggest the silence that hangs between the detonation of a bomb and the screams of its first victim.

  The Bund erected ingenious baffles so that light from the Bund would not spoil the night-time of our half of the city. Still, come nightfall, the Bund’s high towers shone in their reflected light: a bug-zapping effulgence that, according to those old enough to remember the War, brought to mind the terrible first seconds of an atomic explosion. It felt to us as if the Bund was bathing nightly in some terrible, malign radiation. Though, after all, they were only glorified street lights, and only there to help people find their way in the dark.

  The uncanny and pitiless glare shed by the Bund’s urban ‘moons’ was a source of exasperated humour for a while – the stuff of acid editorials and pithy stand-up routines. The truth is, though, it unnerved us – and by ‘us’ I mean the unaccommodated majority to the west. Compared to the unbending horror of those rays, the West End’s own piecemeal illuminations – the mass effect of a thousand thousand street lamps and headlights and shop signs and God knows what – felt positively homespun.