The Smoke

by Simon Ings

  The study door was shut and obstructed from the inside. I pushed it open enough to edge through into the room. A blanket had been pulled from the daybed under the window and used to block the door. The smell in here was extraordinary. Warm milk and fresh-baked bread. Though far too powerful to be pleasant, it shared nothing with the sour, blocked-drain smell downstairs.

  Most everything had been pulled off the shelves and out of the cupboards and spread over the floor: clothing, paper, also the balsa sheets and knives and clothes pegs and tubes of glue I had been using to fashion set designs for DARE. I scuffed through the mess to reach the work table. Bizarre to find my notebook there. The phone and lamp had been pulled off and dangled by their wires over the table edge. But the book sat squared to the edge of the table as though set there for me to read. I picked up the chair and put it back on its feet. I sat and opened the notebook.

  It was as I had left it. What else had I expected? I flicked through the pages, one at a time, past my last, abandoned doodle – a sketch of the aliens’ lunar beachhead – and through to the end of the book. The pages were blank. As they surely had to be. And yet I was disappointed, as though denied some revelation. I stood up and, from force of habit, rolled the chair in under the table.

  The chair legs hit something soft: something which shifted in response to the impact. I pulled the chair out and knelt down. Under the table I found an old coat of navy-blue felt. There had once been hi-vis patches sewn on its back and elbows, and there were still tattered lines of the bright stuff fastened to the felt; the rest had been torn or eaten away. The coat slumped and shifted. I reached under the desk and pulled it out by the collar. Little hands closed over mine. I jerked back. From over the top of the coat a face appeared. The chickie was very young: practically newborn. It was still blind. Dark jellies moved behind its yet-to-open, tissue-blue eyelids. It opened its mouth in a yawn. I stared down its pale, pearly throat. It raised its head, extending its neck, begging for food. I stood up and felt in my trouser pockets for something to give it. My fingers closed around a ball of something. I pulled it out. How long the corn dolly had been languishing in my pocket, I could not remember. Anyway, it had come entirely to pieces: now it was just a handful of grass tangled up with short lengths of red ribbon. The infant chickie reached out for the thing. I dropped the mess in its hands. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. At least, I remember saying something absurd.

  Outside the room, somewhere in the house itself, perhaps, the chickie’s parent would be scavenging for food. I didn’t want to get caught between them so I left the room, closing the door behind me.

  The scent of the room seemed to follow me into the hallway. I felt overloaded and unclean and, in spite of myself, aroused. I looked into the bathroom. The toilet was blocked and in the corner between the toilet bowl and the window was a pile of scat. I went back downstairs and through to the kitchen. I found the key to the back door and let myself out. The porch light snapped on automatically: absurd that this light should still be working when the house as a whole was so evidently broken. Like windscreen wipers clicking back and forth on a wrecked car. I climbed damp, leaf-strewn stone steps to the first lawn. Beyond it lay blackberry and gooseberry bushes; grown out of trim, they suggested the beginnings of a fairy tale: a thicket of thorns.

  Above them, up wooden stairs that were succumbing to rot, there was a shed and a greenhouse and between the two, coiled there among weeds, a hose attached to a standpipe. I looked around. I don’t know who I expected to be there, spying on me. The smell from the study had followed me even here. It didn’t make sense. I sniffed my fingers. The odour had come from the dolly. It was spreading up my wrist, my arm. I undressed. I had an erection. I turned the hose full on and doused myself. I forced my head under the biting cold water. My penis throbbed. I turned the jet on it. It bobbed under the downpour like a salmon trying to leap a fish ladder. The baked-bread smell rose through my head and milk spilled in a strong stream from my erection. The water carried it away into the earth.

  I wrenched the tap shut, gathered my clothes to my chest and ran on tiptoes, shivering, up a bark-lined path, up more stairs, past a table and iron chairs, to Stella’s writing hut. The key was where I had left it, by the door under a large stone ammonite. The hut was as I had left it. I closed the door behind me, dug about in the desk drawer for matches and got the gas heater working. There was a blanket folded up on the rocking chair at the back of the room. I shook it out, scrambled into the chair and wrapped the blanket around me. I fell asleep almost immediately.

  The heater woke me hours later, puttering away on fumes from the empty bottle. The room was so hot, I had to peel the blanket off my sweating skin. The hut had a glass door and I stood in the cool air seeping around its edges, watching a smeared winter sun top the edge of the hills.

  Later that day, in a tea house in Clun, near the old castle, I tried to explain to Fel the decision I had come to as the sun had risen to dissolve the mist filling the valley. ‘London’s bad enough with your dad paying our rent, but this place is no different; we’d still be taking handouts from Stella. What we’d have here isn’t an ordinary life at all.’

  ‘What do you want to do?’

  I thought about it. I thought about Fel in my bed in the shared house in Tooting. How impossibly cramped it was. How uncomfortable. How lacking in privacy. I thought about her bed, how it fell squealing out of its niche in her little studio flat in London Bridge. How house-proud she was. How clean everything was, how antiseptic. The curve of her back as she played the piano. I thought how strange and sad it was, that no stream may be stepped in twice.

  ‘I want an ordinary life with you. I do. Only this isn’t it.’

  ‘I understand,’ she said.

  ‘The house is a wreck.’

  ‘We can’t live here.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No.’

  I didn’t know what else to say.

  ‘We’d better call Stella,’ she said.

  * * *

  Fel returned to London the next day. I stayed on for several weeks to organise the refurbishment of Stella’s house. I got a private contractor in to do the extermination. By then the chickies were long gone. ‘You should have called us the moment you noticed them.’ The white-suited exterminator tutted, shaking his head at the dim-wittedness of his clientele. ‘It doesn’t do to disturb them. Once they’ve formed an attachment to a place, they’ll only keep coming back.’

  I hired a firm of industrial cleaners to drive out from Telford. They arrived in a van with a rose painted in incongruous soft-lit detail on its side.

  As soon as they saw the upstairs bathroom, they tried to renegotiate the price. ‘Who on earth did you have in here? Students?’

  I asked Stella for any photographs she had of the cottage, and to leave me to re-create the place as best I could.

  ‘You don’t have to go to all that bother.’

  ‘I want to,’ I said. ‘It’s become a kind of project.’

  It was obvious I was trying to avoid coming back home. Stella didn’t say anything, and neither did Fel. Somehow the pair of them had intuited that I needed my space.

  ‘Don’t forget to watch tonight,’ Stella reminded me.

  The first season of DARE had begun airing on a pay-per-view channel. When I told Stella her television was broken (it wasn’t), she arranged the delivery of a set twice as large and a box to suck the relevant channel off a distant satellite. I was out of excuses, so I sat down to watch.

  Stella’s style was all gloss and chrome and nylon and the shock of the new – or as close as her minuscule budget could get her. Every shot went on far too long as she squeezed every drop she could from my oh-so-brilliantly detailed mise en scène.

  Episode three was called ‘Time and Tide’. It involved a plan to drain and transport the Earth’s oceans to the aliens’ homeworld using a temporal pump. Time, moving faster inside the pump, meant that water was leaving the Earth at a fantastic rate through a pipe of e
conomical dimensions. This neat conceit not only made the device hard to find, giving the episode its narrative thread, it also kept the climactic shoot-out and destruction of the device within Stella’s modest budget.

  Or that, anyway, had been the logic behind the script I had proofread for her. In execution, though, things slip about in odd directions. Stella must have been offered a deal on cheap location shooting, because the episode, which was supposed to have been a claustrophobic affair set almost entirely within the chipboard confines of DARE’s stealth submarine, had been opened out to include a romantic interlude in somebody’s back garden and moody establishing shots of the beach at Dungeness (standing in here for an exposed seabed). Towards the end of the episode, even the submarine came apart into a series of surprising real-world cutaways, including one extended sequence in which Fel, playing the submarine commander, crawls inside the ship’s weapons system to effect a vital repair. In the script, Fel’s risky adventure was conducted off-camera, via regular, increasingly desperate reports over the ship’s Tannoy system. Stella had somehow found the resources to visualise the whole thing. No wonder she had wanted me to watch the episode.

  It surprised me that she had chosen to shoot in such cramped locations: there seemed very little here that Stella could not have got me to re-create in plasterboard and hot-knifed packing foam. Concrete walls and pipework; a floor with a drain. Signage whose significance escaped me but which, being in an easily legible and serifed font, no doubt belonged to the location itself rather than to Stella’s set-dressing.

  At one point, Fel entered a cell-like, windowless space and took her mark behind a drain set in the floor. Her costume was a silver one-piece, sturdier than the foil-thin suits that were the usual daywear of her crew. She wore no wig: her head was close-cropped, shaved over the ears. (I remember that cut; the feel of it under my hand.) From the drain in the floor, water welled. It rose in a column, fluted and swirled by the pattern of the grating, and spread over the floor. It hit the back wall of the cell and broke, foaming: salt water. The flow strengthened and the cell began to fill. Soon the flow welling from the grate was no more than a dome of disturbance on the surface of the rising water. Inch by inch, the water rose around Fel’s body.

  It was over her chest now, and in a weird breaking of the fourth wall, Fel looked directly into the camera lens. Not into the distance, as the shot seemed to demand. Right at me. The water got to her neck. The camera was mounted to match her eyeline. The water was nearly at the level of the lens. Wavelets plashed against a glass screen protecting the lens. Was the camera in a glass box, or were they shooting through a window?

  The water rose over Fel’s face and the camera at the same moment, losing what was surely the most dramatic moment of the shot, the moment Fel’s face, her nose and mouth, became submerged. The image was a mess of distortions, foam, shadows, gloom. Not until the water level had risen above the lens did the scene stabilise.

  Fel remained in shot, holding on to the pipework. The film lamps, adequate enough to illumine the dry cell, struggled to penetrate the seawater, so that Fel’s impassive expression, her apparent relaxation, her utter indifference to the water, may have simply been an artefact of poor lighting. Was she even in the water? Perhaps there was a glass wall between her and the water, just as there was a glass wall between the water and the camera. But how could that be? Surely the water had pooled around her feet? Surely I had just seen that – seen the water rise, not just in front of her, but around her? Yes. I had seen that. The impossibility of it – that she should be submerged and show nothing, and minutes later still show nothing (why on earth were they holding the shot?), impressed me. I wondered how it was done.

  I was still wondering at Stella’s special effect, still impressed by its realism, as I pawed the bathroom door open and retched all my pent-up horror violently into the toilet bowl.

  I wiped my mouth with toilet paper. I swilled and spat. I went back into the living room and phoned Stella. I wanted to know how she had pulled the trick off. I wanted some reassurance. I didn’t get any reply. I phoned Fel. She picked up straight away.

  ‘Hi,’ I said.

  ‘Hi. What’s wrong?’

  I laughed weakly. ‘It’s that obvious?’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I’ve just been watching DARE.’

  ‘It’s not that bad.’

  ‘I’ve just been watching you—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Drown. I’ve just been watching you drown.’

  When I finally got her to understand what I was talking about, she laughed at me. ‘I held my breath, Stu. What the hell did you think?’

  I couldn’t tell her. With the vividness of nightmare, the airlock sequence had realised my suspicion that Fel was advancing beyond the human. That she was changing from the woman I knew into something else. That she was leaving me.

  ‘I was just going to phone you,’ she said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘There’s some bad news.’

  My heart skipped a beat. ‘Mum.’

  ‘What? No, Betty’s fine, don’t worry. Only Daddy and Stella. Well, they’ve decided to split up.’

  ‘Good God. Why?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Things aren’t getting any easier here,’ Fel said.

  * * *

  There were Christmas lights strung across the main streets of Islington. For some, the party had already got itself started:a balloon was stuck in a tree near Stella’s house, and spent firework casings lay trodden underfoot by the park gate.

  With Georgy gone I had assumed Stella might dress her house for Christmas this time. There was no garland on Stella’s door and no tree in her window, though it was hard to be sure because her windows were barred on the inside by white steel concertina railings. The bell was gone from beside the garden door so I went around to the front. Stella let me in. Though it was after noon, she was still in her dressing gown. ‘I didn’t get much sleep last night,’ she explained. ‘Some boys were throwing firecrackers at my window.’

  Betty was in the dining room in the basement, playing Operation. Her dexterity was almost adult. She nodded me hello but otherwise ignored me. The Process had put us at a remove hardly greater than that established already by her long absence. Would we have grown any closer had it not been for her cancers? I doubted it.

  Reminded, I asked Stella: ‘Have you got any greens? I’m out.’

  Stella fetched a freezer bag from the kitchen, full of unopened tubes: ‘Here. I don’t take them any more.’

  ‘Why on earth not?’

  ‘I’ve been rayed.’ And when I didn’t understand: ‘Georgy rayed me. At the Gurwitsch. I’m resistant now, or so he says. It’s a new treatment he’s been developing.’

  ‘That’s—’ I fumbled a green into my mouth, crunched it, swallowed it down. ‘That’s amazing.’

  Stella shrugged, as if developing an inoculation against radiation poisoning were just another of her ex-boyfriend’s eccentricities. Which, perhaps, from her perspective, was just what it was.

  Remembering to drop the affectionate anglicisation of his name must have taken effort. It was something she wanted me to notice.

  I duly noticed it: ‘What’s happening between you and George?’

  Sighing, Betty hopped down from her chair and left the room. She had been here throughout, a witness to their break-up. I could not begin to imagine how awkward that had been.

  Stella sat down at the dining table and lifted Betty’s Operation game, buzzing angrily, onto the floor. She drew a tissue from her pocket and absently worked at one of the old, indelible stains in the zinc. ‘I suppose you were right, after all,’ she said. ‘I suppose the differences between us and the Bund are becoming unbridgeable.’

  ‘But he took you to the Gurwitsch. He’s been treating you. Why didn’t he just—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know. Why didn’t he make you—’

  ‘“One of them”?
’ She shook her head. ‘He offered. He suggested it many times. But why would I want that?’

  I had nothing I could say to her. For a long while now I had wanted nothing else. Of course I wanted to be ‘one of them’. A Bundist. Bright – genuinely bright, not just over-educated. Odd. Different. A match for Fel, since as I was, I was – what? A companion? A pet?

  I think Stella sensed my turmoil; anyway, she squashed it flat. ‘The Bund hands out the treatments it wants to hand out, to people it wants to hand them out to. It’s a cult. It’s always been a cult.’

  ‘It’s certainly a business,’ I conceded.

  ‘It’s a cult. I honestly think I prefer those nutters causing trouble in Palestine. At least they don’t pretend to be doing everyone else favours. How is the house?’

  ‘The house?’

  ‘My house.’

  She meant the house in Shropshire. ‘Oh. Good. It’s good. I hope. I mean, I hope you like it.’

  ‘I’ll probably just put it on the market.’ Stella sighed. She saw my disappointment: ‘Well, I did tell you not to go to all that effort, didn’t I?’

  ‘Yes. You did. You might still have warned me.’

  ‘I didn’t know I’d need the money then.’

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘Everything is fine. The network wants a third season of DARE, so I need to free up some capital to tide me over next year.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I said, uncertainly.

  ‘Don’t tell Fel. The ink’s not dry and I still have to think about casting.’

  I couldn’t imagine Fel losing sleep over whether or not she would get yet another chance to strut around one of my cardboard sets in a purple fright wig.