The Smoke

by Simon Ings

  And so it came to us that, unlike those strange, friendly folk to the east, we loved the night, and darkness was our friend. Night-time made up part of who we were. Without the night, why would it ever occur to us to gather together? Were there no night, why would lovers ever turn to each other in the dark? We didn’t want to conquer night. We wanted to make light of our own – ordinary, human-scale light – and gather around it, creating little bubbles of humanity in the dark. What were our street lamps and headlights but lanterns? What were our lamps but candles? The night was for stories, for song, for sleep. Summer was hardly over and the gift shops were filled with candles, oil burners, old-fashioned spirit lamps and huge, dim lightbulbs with ornate filaments, not lights so much as ideas of lights; gestures towards illumination. We did not want the day to last for ever, and we wondered at those who did: the ever-industrious Bund, who appeared not to need the night any more. The sleepless Bund who, we reckoned, must have lost the use of some quintessentially human part of themselves.

  And thinking this, we began to rage, as surely as a chimpanzee in a zoo, confronting some simple, animatronic version of themselves, will panic and scream and tear the toy to pieces.

  Who were the Bund, who did not need the night? Who were they, to buy up half our home and wipe its memory off the face of the Earth?

  Capping the matter nicely came the Bund’s long-promised workings on the Moon itself. Once these became visible, I think we all very slightly lost our minds. Who were the Bund, that they were remodelling our Moon? The red-tops, casting around for some means to express their existential outrage, grew literal. And the pictures splashed across their front pages were real enough. Whatever your politics, it was undeniable: the Man who once resided in our Moon had been entirely erased.

  * * *

  On the Day of Atonement – which was also the day I learned I had earned an upper second from the Bartlett – someone splashed graffiti over Stella’s garden wall. The next day, Fel and I stood across the street, watching two men in blue council overalls scrub away at the mess: a boy with a shaved head and a much older man who paused every few minutes to wind a fringe of thinning hair around his scalp, only so the breeze could unwind it again.

  ‘We’d better go in.’

  Fel took my hand and led me across the street.

  ‘I didn’t expect anything that bad.’ I was quite shaken.

  Fel said nothing, and I wondered if I was being naive.

  Stella and Georgy were in the dining room with little Betty. Sprawled across a rug in the corner, she was painstakingly constructing a tower of brightly coloured wooden blocks. She had outgrown the game already, and she moved the blocks about dextrously in her chubby little hands more in the spirit of exercise than play. I wondered if she knew what had been happening, and if so, whether she had recouped enough of her old self to understand its significance. Her air of exaggerated seriousness aside, she looked to me like any child occupying itself while the grown-ups argue.

  Stella was saying to Georgy, ‘If the BBC wants to interview you, you surely have an obligation to go.’ Stella had a producer’s belief in the moral as well as the material benefits of publicity.

  Their familiarity with and love of the microphone had been one of the few bits of common ground Stella and Georgy shared. Today had wreaked a change: ‘I am sick and tired of explaining things,’ Georgy snapped – then, raising his hand, he revised his opinion. ‘No. I’m sick and tired of explaining new things. I’m sick and tired of being the voice of the fucking future. And the fact is, no one around here is interested in the future. They’re interested in old things. Aren’t they? The same old things. For two thousand years the same old things.’

  So much for a drink of something and ‘congratulations on your degree’.

  ‘George, please—’

  ‘Go and read what’s on the fucking wall, woman!’

  ‘I’ve read what’s on the wall.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It says “Yid”.’ Stella retorted. ‘It says “Yid scum”. I can read. I do know what you’re getting at. I’m not stupid.’

  ‘Actually,’ Fel said, ‘it says “Kill yid scum”. If there are points here for accuracy.’

  Georgy, who up to this point had hardly marked our arrival, flew at his daughter: ‘You think this is a joke? This amuses you?’

  ‘I think,’ Fel replied, deadpan, ‘that you could do with calming down.’

  Stella leapt in: ‘It’s the BBC. It’s a chance to explain—’

  ‘Do you think the oafs who daubed our wall listen to the fucking PM Programme?’

  ‘I just think it’s good for people to know what’s going on.’

  ‘I think,’ I said, ‘we all know what’s going on. Don’t we? Isn’t it obvious?’

  Georgy watched me carefully.

  I met his eye: ‘You’re smarter than us, less sentimental than us, more ambitious – whatever words you want to use. We used to write off our differences as cultural. As upbringing. Everyone’s different, we said. Just as everyone’s the same. What a wonderful, rich, diverse world we live in, and on and on. But you are different. Fel’s different.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Fel.

  ‘Fel, listen. The difference between the Bund and the rest of us is getting bigger by the day. Once we began using the ray, some speciations were obvious from the start. Who thinks chickies are human? Who ever thought they were human? Was there ever a time? A few weeks after the irradiation of the Somme, maybe, but by their second generation? No chance. With you and us it’s different. The divergences haven’t been so great between us, or haven’t shown up so fast. So we cling to the idea that we’re supposed to be the same somehow, “underneath”. That’s why you’re getting called those names. The names are offensive, sure, but that’s not all they are. They’re also – you made the point yourself – they’re also old. They’re a way – clumsy, disgraceful, yes – but a way of clinging on to the idea of there being one humanity.’

  ‘Is your point,’ Georgy asked, acidly, ‘that these hooligans are trying to be affectionate?’

  I felt a tug at my hand.

  I looked down to find Betty looking up at me. ‘I want to go pee,’ she said.

  I was confused. ‘Can’t you—?’

  She tugged at her groin. ‘These bloody poppers are impossible.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. I led her out of the room.

  She ignored the bathroom and led me to the front door. ‘I can’t open this,’ she said.

  ‘You want to go outside?’

  ‘I want to get you outside.’

  ‘What have I done?’

  ‘Given vent to your advanced education. Open the bloody door.’

  I turned the lock and followed her out. On the top step, she took my hand and turned me around. ‘Look.’

  A six-pointed star had been daubed over the door in red paint. Since the door was painted red anyway, this didn’t look nearly as bad as it might have done.

  ‘They weren’t the brightest,’ said Betty. ‘I think they wanted it to look like blood.’ Her voice was thready and raw. Even the Process couldn’t tune immature vocal cords to adult use.

  I had to ask: ‘What do you think brought this on?’

  ‘You mean, “What did we do wrong?”’

  ‘You know that’s not what I mean.’

  Betty shrugged: another oddly adult gesture. ‘Maybe someone spotted me. Maybe someone realised what I am and didn’t much like what they saw.’

  I said nothing. What Betty was suggesting was certainly possible. Were feelings running so high against the world’s still pitifully few undead?

  ‘How’s James?’

  Only Betty ever called Jim by his full name. It was one more proof that my mother really was residing in that crisp, fresh, infantile frame, and the realisation, as usual, dropped the temperature of my blood by a couple of degrees. I recalled how I’d felt when first confronted with her: the recidivist urge I’d had to get rid of this monstrous thing. This
impostor. This ‘child’. If her son had felt that way, how could anyone be surprised if strangers, liquored up and fed fright stories by the cheap papers, felt the same way? Naive or not, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the anti-Semitism that agitated Georgy so was no more than a desperate and inept scrabbling for vocabulary, and that these hatreds were a new beast masquerading in old clothes.

  ‘We don’t hear from Jim much,’ I said.

  Betty skipped down the steps, stopped at the gate, and skipped up them again. If this was her way of allaying the suspicions of passers-by – just a little girl playing on some steps, nothing to see here – then it was ill-judged. Physically she looked only about two years old.

  ‘No letters?’

  ‘Sometimes. I’m pretty sure they’re being dictated.’

  Betty paused on the steps. ‘I wonder if James knows he’s picked a side.’

  ‘A side.’

  ‘In the war.’

  ‘Oh. The war. That.’ I said, with sledgehammer irony.

  ‘Oh, Stuart.’ Betty sighed and flopped onto the top step, exhausted by her game. ‘Do try and take your head out of your arse.’

  I laughed, as who would not, barracked by a child? But Betty’s attention had been caught by three youths who had come to linger at the corner opposite the house. One leaned against park railings, watching us. The other two seemed to be paying us no mind. One was fighting to light his cigarette in the breeze. The other, with his back to us, had a baseball cap pulled low over his face.

  I leaned towards Betty: ‘Is that them, do you think?’

  Betty stood up, arms folded. ‘Let’s go in.’

  We found Stella alone in the kitchen.

  ‘Where’s Fel?’

  ‘Upstairs with Georgy. No, don’t go up.’ Stella rattled the dishwasher shut. ‘He’s in one of his moods.’

  ‘Can I give you a hand?’

  ‘It’s all done. God!’ Stella picked a dish towel up off the floor and threw it onto the counter. ‘I am so sick of clearing up.’

  Given their resources, it had not occurred to me that Stella might be feeling the weight of a domestic burden. But little Betty’s arrival must have ushered in a dramatic change of pace for her. And from the times I had met him, I was confident Georgy was not a man to look after himself. He had that preppy, over-mothered quality. Not one to keep the laundry in check, was my guess. Not adept in the stacking of dishwashers.

  Fel came into the room. She had been crying. She held my eye long enough that I knew not to ask any questions. Betty went over and took her hand, and though Fel smiled and gave her hand a returning squeeze, nothing came of it: no talk, no game.

  ‘Is it time we were going?’ I asked.

  Fel nodded.

  ‘Stella, call us any time. Is Mum going to be all right?’

  ‘We’ll be fine.’

  ‘Any time.’

  ‘Yes. Thanks.’

  Fel and I bent down and took turns to kiss the top of Betty’s head. We left through the front door. Evening was drawing in. The boys lingering near the house had wandered off; there was no one on the street.

  I said, ‘Let’s walk along the canal a bit. We can get a bus from the Roman Road.’

  Fel followed where I led, without enthusiasm. We met the canal at the southern end of the tunnel, where it emerges from its underground passage of Islington. We picked our way down leaf-slimed steps to the towpath. It was a bright night. Most of them were, since the Bund had begun to light the Moon. We glimpsed it through damp, bare branches: a new moon, illumined by the lamps newly lit on its surface. Like this, it hardly seemed a solid thing at all: more a scaffold of lit strings stretched across a small, circular void.

  ‘Mum thinks there’s going to be a war.’

  ‘Is that what she says?’

  ‘She reckons the Victory’s a warship. I don’t know where she gets this shit.’

  ‘My dad. Upstairs he was telling me much the same thing.’

  ‘Really?’ I was disconcerted. I had assumed Betty had been listening to the local phone-in shows. Maybe they both had. ‘Georgy buys into this idea?’

  ‘Daddy just had death threats daubed over his garden wall.’

  I had no reply to that. ‘What did he say to you?’

  Fel did not reply.

  The roads running parallel to the canal descended slowly till the only thing separating the towpath from the road and its council housing, the bricks curdling under bright orange sodium lamps, was a low chain-link fence. Houses like these, I thought, were likely to be my only mark upon the world, and then not for long. The economies of the Bund were ungainsayable, and the whole city would be a Bund construction in time. Rage towards this future, though ugly and to be deplored, was not an unnatural response. ‘We should get out of here,’ I said.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I mean we should get out of London altogether.’

  ‘Are you so frightened?’

  ‘It’s not a question of being frightened,’ I said, ‘it’s a question of being expected to take sides in a conflict that as far as I can see is entirely fatuous.’

  We walked in silence. Beyond the estate were retail parks, more housing and, as we neared the Roman Road, the iron fences and towering plane trees of Victoria Park.

  Fel said, ‘My mother rejected the Bund. Did I ever tell you this?’

  ‘You’ve never told me anything about your mother.’

  ‘She was Moldovan. Her family were boatmen before the War. Farmers before that. Peasants. Not thinkers. The last people you would ever expect to make a stand over an idea. When she left the Bund, she tried to take me with her to Palestine. I was too little to remember. I’m told that when we reached the Mandate, the authorities tore me off her and put me on the first boat home. I do think I remember Daddy waiting at the dock as we sailed into Tilbury. My mother died a year later during a typhus outbreak in Jerusalem. I have no idea why she suddenly decided to cling to the old faith, and it’s hopeless asking Daddy, all he ever does is quote from his own speeches. The debt we owe future generations. The promise of technology. Maybe my mother embraced Jehovah as the only voice strong enough in her head to contend with Daddy’s.’

  The moral to all this did not need spelling out: the sides choose you.

  ‘We could go to Shropshire,’ I said. ‘Stella doesn’t use her house there. It needs someone to look after it.’

  ‘What would be the point of that?’

  ‘We could do what your mum tried to do. We could try to lead a normal life. You keep saying that’s what you want. Would you like a normal life with me?’

  The look she shot me revealed how much she hoped for, and how uncertain she was that I would commit.

  ‘Nothing’s off the table,’ I said, careless and (strange how the feeling had crept up on me) desperate. ‘Absolutely nothing.’

  If that had been true, I would have been prepared to utter the word ‘baby’ out loud. But some calculating part of me still clung on.

  ‘Let’s have a normal life,’ I said.

  * * *

  The smell was overpowering. A yeasty, cheesy, sour stench.

  Fel stared into the dark of the hall. ‘What is that?’

  I felt for the light.

  Stella’s Shropshire cottage was infested with chickies. We could hear them scuttling about behind the furniture. Upstairs they thumped and bumped their way into hiding. They were as big as children but had the timid instincts of mice.

  The carpets downstairs were smothered in scraps of paper. Every book in the place had been torn to pieces and chewed up for nest materials. The flock had been pulled out of the living-room sofa through rents in its covers. There was a foul-smelling stain in the corner of the living-room ceiling, so it was easy to guess where in the house the chickies went to relieve themselves.

  Fel gazed about her at the ruin: ‘How is this even possible?’

  ‘The neighbours must be away.’

  ‘Jesus.’ She fished out her glas
s slab of a phone. Naturally there was no signal. ‘Where’s the land phone again?’

  ‘Over there. Who are you going to call?’

  ‘The firemen, of course.’

  The fire brigade would bring exterminators. ‘It’s not that bad,’ I said.

  Fel dialled. I came over and, gently, took the receiver out of her hand. ‘It’s not that bad. Let me deal with it.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Let me assess the damage. If we call the fire service, Stella’s insurance premiums will go up.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘We can go to Ludlow and find a hotel. Give me tonight to assess the damage and if necessary we can call the fire brigade in the morning.’

  Fel spotted the stain on the ceiling. ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘Let’s find you a nice hotel.’

  By the time I got back to the house, it was after eleven. The rooms were silent. Perhaps the chickies had already evacuated. I doubted it. I went into the kitchen. The radio on the windowsill was tuned to a music channel. I scanned for a talk show and turned the volume as high as it would go. Human voices were a more reliable deterrent. Use music and you were as likely to get chickies dancing as running away.

  The player in the living room had no radio but I found a cassette of Third Kingdom, a popular if rather overwrought radio drama that imagined the state of continental Europe had Germany’s most notorious post-war chancellor not choked on that grape.

  I went upstairs, letting the din on the ground floor do its work. Upstairs was far worse. There was a nest in the main bedroom, extending from the end of the bed and covering the window. It was made in the main of plastic waste which they must have dragged from fields above the cottage: fertiliser and feed bags, tarpaulin, bubble wrap. It was held together by stuff that had been chewed up and urinated upon to form a smelly cement. God knows what else had gone into it. Fabric. Paper. Bits of carpet. I fetched a broom out of the upstairs closet. I poked it into the nest. There was no sound. I wiggled the broom handle and heard the delicate interior crumble. The nest appeared to be empty.

  I went through the hall, clapping and shouting. Nothing I did felt particularly effective, but I had to try something. Ever since the episode on the moors, I had found the idea of doing violence towards the chickies unconscionable. This sounds like a reasonable attitude, but I am afraid it wasn’t. Saving chickies where I could was not a moral imperative with me, or anything in which I could take pride. It was more on the order of a superstition. A childish taboo. Tomorrow, Fel would insist I saw sense and called the fire brigade, and then it would be too late for them.