The Smoke

by Simon Ings

  Bob and I shared one more Christmas together, then I got my own room, and it was as well for him that I did. The locals saw my father as a man bereaved, but they very quickly developed a different opinion about me.

  The room I rented was in a house by the railway: a garret space not very different from my old bedroom, but larger, with an impressive oak double bed with a frame too high for the room. On waking, I would look out through the window at the railway and feel caught in a dream of flying.

  I was paying for my room out of piecework and favours, but in March a job came up that I could take a genuine interest in, working for the council in Bradford.

  On the morning of my final interview, a rock flew in through my bedroom window. Straight through the gap between the top pane and the frame – it couldn’t have been more than five inches wide – it landed on my bed.

  I picked it up. A bit of clinker from the railway.

  I went to the window and looked out. I couldn’t see anyone.

  It was a miracle the window wasn’t broken. That had surely been the idea. If there was any trouble, the landlady was bound to ask me to leave. I didn’t know where else I could go around here that was affordable and still near my father.

  An hour later, stepping cautiously over the rails to the platform for an early train to Halifax, I turned up the collar of my only good suit, afraid of who might be taking aim at me. My feet wobbled on the stones: no shortage of ammunition around here.

  What, I wondered, was my offence? That I had dated a Bundist? No one here knew about Fel. Was I being punished for Betty’s choices? Even assuming word of her undertaking the Chernoy Process had got around, I’m still not convinced people here would have fully understood its transgressive implications. Which left the Smoke itself. Was my offence simply that I’d had the temerity to leave town in the first place, head for the capital, scholarship under my arm, to better myself?

  That sounded more likely: the old tribal resentments given a fillip by recent headlines.

  This was not a conclusion I found particularly reassuring. Petty fights are still fights. An old friend of mine lost an eye, the day before he matriculated from school, in a punch-up over a controversial goal in a friendly match between Todmorden and Littleborough. Littleborough! Pass by any factory gate in Hebden of a Monday morning and you would see them: the walking wounded of many a Saturday-night soccer battle. Shoe a town of stoppered men with steel-capped boots, add beer, and what else could you expect?

  I sat counting the minutes while the train sat idle at the station and wondered what had happened to my old self – that rough-and-tumble kid who wanted to follow his brother into the army. The boy who set off stolen percussion caps to divert the course of streams. I felt as if, a long time ago, something had broken in me. I stood and pulled down the window and looked back up the wooded hillside to where, so long ago, I had watched a column of black smoke turn to white.

  The flash seemed to take the whole left side of my head away. Something thorn-sharp entered my left eye. I fell back with a cry. I heard footsteps running along the platform. I cursed and turned over onto my hands and knees and tried to throw up. I stared at the grey-flecked linoleum of the carriage floor and was rewarded by the sight of two, three, four drops of blood.

  Nothing was at scale. I couldn’t even tell how close my head was to the floor. I was seeing out of my right eye, my left eye was glued shut, and when I looked up, I couldn’t tell if the figure crouched in concern over me was very big or simply very near. For sure, it wasn’t human.

  ‘Ssh, sweet boy,’ it crooned, through needle teeth. Its smile was sincere but its eyes were all black, no iris visible, and I read my terror in them. It put its hand against my wounded cheek. Instantly, I steadied. I took a breath. Another. I raised my hand to touch its hand and it was strange, bony, with wide, spatulate fingers. Gently, it withdrew, and I saw that it was hurt, or that it had been hurt sometime in the past: its nails had been pulled. And then I remembered.

  ‘You,’ I said.

  ‘Of course, me. Shush . . .’

  More feet. More running. The guard had seen a boy throwing a stone. He tried to persuade me to leave the train and get someone to look at my eye. I made some feeble gestures at the figure opposite me but it had disappeared. The guard thought I was talking about my attacker. ‘He’s gone, sir. It’s all right. You’re safe.’ I stayed where I was, made belligerent by pain, a handkerchief pressed to my face, and insisted I may as well go on to Halifax, since Halifax had a hospital with an A&E department ‘who know what the hell they are doing’. Peremptory. Dissatisfied. Caustic. I had never sounded more like a Londoner, and after that people left me alone.

  The chickie was gone. I couldn’t work out how, and I was in too much shock to care. My handkerchief was all bloody and I still couldn’t open my left eye, but in truth, given how hard I’d been hit, the pain was ridiculously little, as though the chickie, touching me, had salved the cut already.

  Despite my appearance, I got the job. With a gauze patch over one eye, blood on the collar of my good suit and my voice pushed by shock into a strangled falsetto, I was, they said, exactly the man they were looking for: the very chap to draw up plans for retaining walls around their new coke plant. They even took the trouble to show me where I would be working. Above the council chamber were bright, glass-roofed offices, clean white work tables, and the air was bleachy with ink and paper and solvent. I felt immediately at home: looking around me, I recognised the appurtenances of my near-abandoned trade. Wet clay and scalpels and sacks full of balsa. Rolls of gridded blue paper. Stencils and slide-rules. The size of the room was bizarre, though perhaps I was seeing awry, still: getting the scale wrong.

  The council’s chief architect, a man with an improbably styled shock of white hair and a moustache clipped in the military style, shook some greens into the palm of his hand and offered me one. ‘We’ll show them, yes?’

  ‘We surely will,’ I said, and I hoped I sounded sincere. The War Ministry had already visited. Funds were even now being allocated. Emergency tax regulations were coming into force by Easter. The West Riding was building its own spaceship. Across the country, fully twenty ships had been ordered to avenge the death of the Victory.

  I had expected to be kept waiting in a room full of other candidates, interrogated for at most twenty minutes, then sent home to await the bad news. But there hadn’t appeared to be any other candidates, my interviewers kept me talking till noon, and they would have given me lunch if by then my face had not swelled up like a balloon. The chief architect insisted a chauffeur take me to a private clinic on the outskirts of the city, where they unbandaged me, tutted at the shoddy workmanship of the public service, and sewed up the corner of my eye with thread so thick and tough, it felt as though you could have mended a sail with it.

  Feeling equal parts elated and nauseous, I swam more than walked out to the street, and a small figure barrelled towards me, like a boy but not, wearing a tasselled skirt, high heels and a feathered bolero shirt. As it flew past, it thrust into my hands a brown paper package the size and weight of a shoebox.

  Fortune had been making such a plaything of me that day, I hardly dared open the package. I don’t know what I expected. Sheep droppings. A severed rabbit’s head. Used banknotes. Doubloons. I looked about me. The street was empty. If the box blew up in my hands, at least there were no passers-by to be injured. I opened it up.

  Inside the box were six sheets of vacuum-moulded plastic parts, a paint chart and numbered assembly instructions.

  I took the package home, laid out its contents on my bed, went around to Bob’s that evening and, under the guise of telling him the good news about my job – ‘an immediate start, and a month’s pay in advance!’ – fetched from my bedroom an unopened tube of modelling cement, a craft knife and my green vinyl cutting mat.

  I hurried back to my rented room. It hardly registered with me that my window was still intact, that my landlady had not turned up at my door wi
th a horror story of thugs lingering outside the building, or taken one look at my bandaged face and sent me packing, or, indeed, seen me at all. All the other events of the day were a grey blur to me as I tweezered and cut the grey plastic pieces from their frames and spread them on the mat. The instructions were clear, the pieces were few, but my hands were shaking so much I got glue all down the front of the figure’s uniform. I had to wait for it to harden, then shaved it off with a scalpel. I didn’t have any fine sandpaper and I was afraid that when the model was complete, the nubs that had attached each piece to its sheet would stop its joints from articulating properly. It never occurred to me that, once the model was done, it would be able to make its own repairs.

  The jaw needed no glue. It just snapped into place. And then it was complete: a grey plastic miniature rendition of Jim, my dead brother.

  Jim’s jaw clicked up and down. The figure tried to stand. I scooped him up and laid him on my pillow, shushing him. ‘You’re still wet.’

  I was so afraid of crushing him, I slept on the floor, the rug wrapped around me. Jim, in a voice squeaky from miniaturisation, insisted I at least take the pillow. Even so, by morning, I woke with the whole left side of my face aching as though it had been assaulted with hammers.

  I don’t think I even glanced at the bed as I stumbled out of the room. I had it in my head that I must have got drunk. That if I couldn’t remember the pub, then I must have drunk enough to black out. That drinking enough to black out would at least explain the absurdity of my dreams.

  I went downstairs to the bathroom and studied my face. The doctors had assured me that my scratched cornea would soon heal. My left eye looked like a raw egg in a dish of blood. My cheek was a perfect round purple lump, as though someone had stuck a piece of liver on my face. My landlady walked in, saw me and screamed.

  I had forgotten to shut the bathroom door.

  * * *

  My Halifax job didn’t impress my landlady much. She resented the insistent way I locked the door of my room each morning and pocketed the key. She resented my never letting her in to clean. Every so often, I’d find a reason to show her the room. That way I could demonstrate that nothing untoward was going on and that I was more than capable, thank you, of stripping and making my own bed. ‘I have papers here,’ I told her. ‘Confidential papers. You understand.’

  In truth, I did have such papers in the room, plans released to me on the strict condition that I hide them from casual view. But it was Jim I was most concerned about. Where he came from, I could not begin to guess. Jim himself did not know but, in that silly, squeaky voice of his, he speculated: ‘I must be a Bundist thing, don’t you think?’

  I sat on the floor cross-legged before him. ‘I suppose.’

  ‘An earnest of their good faith.’

  ‘Their good faith. The people who destroyed the Victory.’

  ‘If they destroyed it. It could have been an accident. Maybe they saved us. Isn’t that what they’re saying?’

  ‘It’s what some of them are saying. The whole business is unclear.’

  ‘And if they’ve done this –’ he rapped on his hollow chest ‘– then I must still be alive. Yes? In any number of ways. In several editions!’

  I had no answer for him. The destruction of the Victory had brought the unaccommodated world into a belligerent unity. Across Europe, our spaceships were proceeding ahead of schedule. But with the Bund it was a very different story. At the very moment when clarity might have been considered essential, for everyone’s peace and security, the Bund had proved incapable of explaining itself.

  The Victory had been attacked!

  The Victory had suffered a fatal malfunction and been, so far as possible, saved.

  The crew were dead.

  The crew were alive!

  The crew had been killed to serve as an example to others.

  The crew had been restored using the latest medicine and would be returned home shortly.

  The Bund welcomed guests to its new bases on the Moon’s far side!

  Any attempted incursion of lunar facilities would be met with overwhelming force.

  There were no Bundist bases on the far side.

  On and on like this. Was it possible the Bund itself was splitting – even speciating? Might that explain those two TV news anchors we had seen, swinging back and forth, clipboards pressed to their groins, on the night of the Victory’s destruction? Their glass skulls? Their finned and spiny brains? I’d not seen the likes of them before, and no one had reported seeing them since.

  ‘Fuck it,’ said Jim, ‘I’m going out.’

  ‘Wait. Jim. I still don’t understand.’

  ‘Stu.’ He sighed and ran plastic hands down his glue-spoiled front. ‘You expect me to have answers? How do you think I feel? I don’t even know what I am, let alone what I’m for.’ He hefted up a sixpence and used it to turn the screw holding the wall vent in place.

  Jim had been coming and going through the vent ever since I had managed to loosen it from the plaster partition at the back of my room. There was no way I could keep him sealed up in my bedroom all day. Jim, for his part, promised to conduct all his adventures well away from my landlady’s house. How far afield he went, I am not sure. His stories were so highly coloured, it was obvious he was trying to get a rise out of me. Whatever the force animating him, modelling plastic has a tensile strength no magic can alter or improve. Were Jim ever to engage in hand-to-hand combat with one of the local mousers, as he claimed he did, I knew where I would put my money.

  ‘Right through the eye, Stu!’

  ‘Settle down.’

  ‘It sneezed and some of its brains shot out through its nose. I took cover behind a cocktail umbrella.’

  ‘Jim. Shut up.’

  * * *

  In retrospect, and with matters having reached such a head, it is easy to see all the things I should have done; easy to identify all my moments of funk and denial. But though I seem to have a talent for second-guessing myself, I cannot honestly say that I blame myself for the way I hid Jim in my bedroom.

  What else could I have done? What authority was qualified to consider this grey plastic miracle that had been pressed into my hands? Jim wasn’t some emissary. He wasn’t asking to speak to my leader. He wasn’t the scout of some alien army, poised to invade the Earth. He was my brother. Within the limitations set by his size and his simplicity, he was my family, returned to me. Of course I kept him safe with me.

  Nor did I show him to my father. Bob had demons enough to contend with. His wife had been restored to him in a form he could not countenance; what would he have made of a son turned into a toy? I had it in mind to spare him, and even now, I think this was the right decision.

  One thing I might have done differently: I might have taken Jim to London, to Stella’s house in Islington, and showed him to Betty. Jim and I had even talked about it, or tried to, the pair of us hunting for vocabulary with which to discuss this bizarre eventuality: a resurrected child mother presented with a resurrected doll son. I have no doubt we would have visited eventually. But then, one day in early June, Betty was knocked down and killed by a hit-and-run driver on the road outside Stella’s house.

  The circumstances of the accident are still not clear. What was Betty doing, playing in the street? If she was playing. Perhaps she had seen something, heard something. Perhaps she had gone out to confront whoever was spraying threatening graffiti on Stella’s garden wall. A strange sight that would have been: an old Yorkshirewoman’s tirade spilling from the mouth of a child done up in this season’s florals.

  Perhaps they had been expecting her. Perhaps they had been baiting her. Whoever ‘they’ were. Perhaps they had been lying in wait. But what is the point of speculations like these? They don’t do anyone any good. No one even saw the car. It was evening, and half-light, the time for stupid accidents. The doctors said Betty’s injuries were total, that she wouldn’t have felt anything, but I don’t believe that. She died in hospital
three hours after she was found, flung all haywire over the iron railings into Myddelton Square Gardens.

  Because it was a police case, there was a delay releasing the body. This gave my father and Stella an opportunity to fall out over the funeral arrangements. Stella wanted her sister buried near her. Betty had been living with her for years. Stella had seen her through her first biopsy and every round of chemotherapy. It was Stella who had persuaded Betty to undergo the Process, and persuaded Georgy to offer her the Process in the first place. She’d brought her older sister up from birth, as though she were her own child. Whatever difficulties she and Georgy had experienced in their relationship, chances were they’d been started by Stella’s preoccupation with little Betty. (Not every man wants a second family hot on the heels of the last, and for sure Georgy wasn’t the type.)

  None of which made a blind bit of difference to Bob. He was adamant. The plot in Hebden was paid for, and there the pair of them would be buried, husband and wife, with a view of chimneys and rain sweeping down the valley from Blackshaw Head. On the stone: ‘Elizabeth Lanyon. Bob Lanyon.’ Dates. A simple stone over a grave dug extra deep: when his time came, he’d be laid on top of her. ‘It’s all arranged.’

  ‘You never even saw her!’ The stage had given Stella lungs. I could hear her through the earpiece of the public telephone. She was so loud, Bob had to hold the receiver away from his ear, which made following the conversation even easier, though it was the last thing I wanted. ‘You never even acknowledged that child was her!’

  I could understand Stella being annoyed at Bob assuming responsibility for Betty’s funeral arrangements. The sheer level of her rage was something else. I think it was a battle she needed, so that her grief had some way to express itself. Bob was tongue-tied but for once he did not cave in. He asked me to arrange transport for the coffin.