‘Did you want to get pregnant?’
‘I wanted to have sex.’
She took a cigarette out of the packet. She held it up to the light, then ran it along under her nose, her eyes closed.
She asked me if I smoked and I said no.
‘It’s only I was thinking,’ she said, ‘you could smoke the cigarette and I could just kind of smell it.’
Uncle Gregory died when I was nine years old.
It is breakfast time. Uncle Gregory has come to stay. I’m about to leave for school and he is going to take me in Mum’s car. Mum is washing up at the sink under the window facing the garden. Uncle Gregory is in the garden, lighting a cigarette. Mum shouts out to him that it’s almost time to leave for school. He can’t hear her so she taps on the window. Still smoking his cigarette he steps round the whirligig washing line, spinning it like in a musical, and says ‘What?’ with his mouth moving very clearly. He cups his hand to his ear. Mum shouts at him that it’s almost time to leave for school. Uncle Gregory mouths, ‘What?’
He eventually understands what she’s saying at the exact moment he finishes his cigarette. I can’t remember if we were late for school or not.
I did nothing about finding a place to live. I could hardly see the point. Then the Company said they’d stopped paying for the Bed and Breakfast.
In those days I still had to go up to the Unit twice a week, and on the Thursday I took my break when I saw Theo kicking the dew off the grass as he sauntered down towards the pond, smoke sometimes enveloping his head like an extension of his hair. I caught up with him and took a light for my Carmen. I asked him if we were the only two smokers in the place.
‘Looks like it,’ he said.
‘Don’t they give them free cigarettes or anything?’
‘Sure. But most of them have seen what it does to the animals.’
‘You’d think they’d need a fag after that.’
‘Yes, you would.’ Theo smiled. ‘I said almost exactly the same thing once. To somebody I have successfully forgotten. They told me it was in bad taste.’
‘Do you? I mean you yourself, are you, experimental? I mean do you personally work with the animals?’
‘It’s not a wildlife park.’
He lit another Celtique and I opened my mouth to say I’d been thinking about the room in his place when
‘Shhhh!’ he said. ‘Did you hear that?’
‘What?’
‘Shhh!’
There was a rustling in the reeds by the pond. It was like the sound a blackbird makes in forest undergrowth, pretending to be a rat or a badger, fooling passers-by, exciting them for no reason.
‘It’s only a bird,’ I said, but Theo was already half-way down the bank.
‘You have smoked at least one cigarette before, haven’t you?’
She had the unlit cigarette between her lips. She pulled off the beaded head-band, and caught the feather as it swooped towards her breasts. She placed it on her belly, where it quivered as she breathed.
She took the cigarette out of her mouth, looked at it.
‘Would you smoke this cigarette, if I asked you nicely?’
‘Really, I don’t smoke.’
‘Have you ever heard what a womb sounds like?’
I looked at her belly, rising and falling, the feather trembling, the denim warping to the yin-yang buttons.
‘Would you like to? You can put your ear against my skin.’
I’d stopped breathing through my nose some time ago and the air in my mouth seemed coarse, clogged with seductive impurities. I slipped off the bed and onto my knees so that I could shuffle towards her, not really trusting language anymore, certain that I was about to experience ... about to HAVE AN EXPERIENCE. This was life. And living. As advertised.
She held the cigarette out to me, filter first. In her other hand she had a disposable lighter which she scratched into life, the flame lighting up her face, religiously.
‘Smoke this cigarette for me,’ she said. ‘I just want to smell it. Then you can listen to my baby.’
For thirteen years my Uncle Gregory worked as foreman in a factory which made industry-standard fire-proof doors. He supervised the delicate process of sandwiching a layer of asbestos between two layers of wood. This type of door is believed to have saved thousands of lives, both in civil and military specification.
My Uncle Gregory smoked filterless Capstan full-strength. When his legs were playing up, he often used to cut down to forty a day. His hobby was motorcycle racing.
Theo’s death makes me angry. Or, I don’t know, I’m angry all the time and I’m thinking about Theo being dead and therefore I think it makes me angry.
Visualizing him is easy. He comes through the door in his white coat stained with the residues of strange experiments. His hair is utterly mad, as usual, and he creeps up behind Walter’s chair, motioning All Quiet with a finger to his lips. He nudges Walter slightly and then whispers in* his ear: ‘Prussians!’
His bad teeth, his terrible teeth and, his teeth excepted, his obvious good health from the toes on up. His body looked like it had miles of life left in it. It was only his head that made him look like a crazed professor, eyes wide and full of old mischief.
Theo’s dog also makes me angry, lying on my feet and whimpering occasionally, purely out of habit. I could never understand why Theo liked the dog. The dog is disgusting. In fact, the dog is like a particularly pure idea of idle disgusting dog, and it has never been anything else but useless and disgusting. It has no feelings, this dog, only appetite: it whines constantly at the length of familiar time between now and dinner, not even knowing what’s familiar about it.
If I fed him now, I could both distract my mind from cigarettes and fool the foolish dog. Unfortunately, this wouldn’t distract my mind from the dog.
Every day since Theo died I have received at least five letters of condolence. Today, there were seven, six of them pushed through the letter-box by hand. One woman carried her baby all the way from the Estates to hook a wreath of braided dandelions on the brass door-knocker, next to the polished sign which says The Suicide Club.
‘I don’t smoke,’ I said.
‘Please, just this one, for me.’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t smoke.’
‘Don’t you want to hear the baby? Don’t you want to touch it?’
She flicked at one of the buttons and it popped open and there was her belly tight against a kind of ribbed undershirt.
‘Don’t you want to?’
‘I don’t smoke.’
‘Oh for God’s sake,’ she said.
She put the cigarette between her lips and lit it and drew in deeply, tossed the lighter aside and stared at me. She drew in again and exhaled smoke through her nose.
Then she started to cough.
Her body bucked forward and now she was coughing and choking and staring at me, her eyes surrounded entirely by white, her tongue curling into a cylinder every time she coughed.
I tried to take the cigarette out of her hand and she screamed.
‘OH MY GOD!’
And I was on my feet and I was fussing over her and I was leaning over her and my hands were alternately grabbing for the cigarette and for her hand to comfort her and for her shoulders to keep her still and pinned back against the bean-bag and to try and get that damn cigarette off of her and out of her hands.
The coughing died down and she grabbed at me, the filter of the cigarette crushing between her fingers. She was breathing very heavily, her body trembling.
‘What?’ I said, ‘what?’
‘SPONTANEOUS ABORTION!’
She ripped open her dress and one of the buttons flew off and whacked hard into the CD player. She clawed at her stomach, tearing at her dress, her undershirt, her guts, at her baby, her very own baby, throwing out towards me an endless ream of red intestines, screaming at me to save her aborted baby.
There was something moving under the long grass on the bank which led
down to the pond. It was trying to free itself, or trying to hide. Theo pulled back a handful of grass: something brown, alive, like the brown feathers of a female duck. It was trying to escape.
Theo cleared away more grass, and the half-blind thing blinked in the daylight. It was a kitten, its fur matted with damp, its small red-rimmed eyes too weak to open properly.
Theo picked it up. It didn’t have the energy to struggle, and instead it hid its small face in the lapels of his white lab coat.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t do animal experiments. I’m strictly a plant and natural history man.’
She was laughing so hard, she wouldn’t have seen me pick the still-lit cigarette from where it was burning a hole in one of Julian Carr’s plastic-backed medical textbooks. I crushed it out on the inside rim of the metal waste-paper bin. She was laughing so hard, and rolling around the floor, that the vest she was wearing under the dress had rucked up slightly, letting me see the top of her knickers through the hole she’d made between the buttons of the dress. She laughed so hard I saw her navel prettily indented on her mildly concaved, unpregnant, newly articulate stomach, reaching in and out with laughter.
One by one, I picked up the red nylon rugby socks which had been stuffed inside a pair of woollen tights. I held them in my hands, stupidly.
Walter says:
‘It’s not the same, is it?’
But I don’t want to talk about Theo. I ask Walter how his daughter is.
‘Same as ever,’ he says. ‘Always busy. She joined a new sports club.’
Then he asks me what I’m doing, and I wonder if he’s forgotten that he asked me the same question earlier, or whether he only says it for something to say. He whacks out the remains of a pipe.
I tell him again I’m just keeping my hands busy, but this isn’t entirely true.
When I was seven years old and in Primary 3, I had Miss Bryant for English Composition. Miss Bryant smoked a single Embassy Regal in the Top Field every day after Period 5. She used to go through the gate and hide behind the high wall where she thought no-one could see. I have a vague but insistent memory of Miss Bryant in English Composition teaching us that the narrator can never die. That if the narrator died at the end of the story, then how could he possibly tell it?
So this is the second reason I’m writing, the reason I don’t share with Walter. I’m hoping that Miss Bryant was right, and the narrator can never die.
DAY
3
Dr William Barclay (call me Theo, everyone else does) lived in a two-bedroomed flat over a Pasty and Chip shop owned by an enormous Cuban lady called Lilly. If I’d had as much money then as I have now (and the money I have now was inevitable even then) I would have moved out within a week.
As the days went by, he kept on giving me things. At night, back from the labs, he would give me records and magazines and an old rainbow jumper he said he didn’t wear anymore. He gave me a jigsaw puzzle minus its box and with a piece of sky missing. He said Haemoglobin had eaten it. He gave me the daily paper at the end of every day.
‘Don’t you want to know what’s going on?’
‘No.’
If he had nothing to give me, he might describe some incredible meal he planned to cook for us both, where all the ingredients were colour-coded or began with the letter T. I said no no no, leave me alone, please.
‘Yes, you’re right, it’s a silly idea. I don’t feel much like cooking anyway.’
And then as I was closing my door he’d hop and jump, smiling his closed-mouth smile which hid his bad teeth, and before long Lilly would bring up Something Large Chips, depending on the dance. Except now the order was always for two and I felt I had to eat it because Theo had gone to the trouble of ordering and paying for it.
This weakness was my parents’ fault.
‘I’m sorry,’ Lucy said. ‘I thought you knew it was fancy-dress.’
I was standing in the doorway with my arms crossed, watching her rub her hands down the front of her T-shirt and then over the pockets of her faded jeans, where there was the clear outline of a cigarette pack.
‘Obviously I wouldn’t smoke if I was pregnant. Can I come in?’
I wanted to say yes because I wanted to fall in love with her. However, I also wanted to say no because I’d heard her knock at Julian Carr’s door before she tried mine. He wasn’t there.
I stood aside and let her in. She carried out a quick inspection of the narrow bed and the brown carpet-tiles and the underused pinboard on the back of the door.
‘You should get a bean-bag,’ she said. ‘I love bean-bags.’
And then she said,
‘Do you mind if I smoke?’
Walter is here again, out of sympathy. I imagine he also intends to smoke several pipes safe from the disapproving glare of his daughter, Emmy. He seems to believe that the house in general and this room in particular are about to be seized by bailiffs, and he acts as though each day will be the last. It eventually occurs to me, for the first time, that he has no idea the house belongs to me. He wants to know what will happen to Theo’s pictures and paintings.
‘Where did he get that lung anyway?’
Walter is referring to a grossly enlarged photograph of a cross-section of dissected lung which hangs to the left of the door. It is mostly pink. It is longer than it is high and Theo had it framed in a black-plastic frame. It looks like a wad of chewed bubble-gum recently spat onto a hot road. Someone has picked up the gum and stretched it flat, then photographed it, tar and all.
The hanging of this photograph was Theo’s idea of a joke. It set the tone for the whole room, a kind of colourful irony, which was later to become a founding principle of the Suicide Club.
It wasn’t my idea.
Julian Carr never doubted that he was going to graduate with a first class degree which would qualify him for a research doctorate at Duke University in Virginia. After publishing his PhD he was going to return to a brilliant career in medical research at a Buchanan’s lab somewhere in Europe. During a brief apprenticeship to a famous man he would discover a cure for cancer.
In the meantime, he set about becoming memorable as an undergraduate. In November of that year, he broke into the cold-store at the School of Medicine and stole the heart and lungs of an Indian corpse imported for the dissection tables of first-year students. He opened up the corpse from the back, below the shoulder-blade, so that the body looked untouched from the front. When one of the students eventually discovered the absence of two major organs, she said,
‘I think it’s disgraceful. All the bodies illustrated in the textbooks are European.’
As my next-door neighbour and friend, Julian Carr was also the first person to tell me the rumour about the gullible history undergraduate, the Hall’s only non-medical student to have witnessed a birth. I took his gentle mockery as a sign of affection, and concentrated all my attention on the idea of wrapping my arms around the idea of falling in love.
The first thing I refused absolutely and categorically and without any hesitation was the kitten, the one we’d found up at the Unit. I stood there blocking the doorway to my own and only private room with my arms crossed.
‘I don’t want it.’
I lit a Carmen for extra emphasis and inhaled deeply.
‘It’s a present,’ he said. ‘I’ve brought it a new feeding bottle and everything.’
‘No.’
‘With a pink cap and a picture of Bugs Bunny on the side. Look.’
‘No.’
‘But I’ve got a dog. I can’t have a cat and a dog.’
Haemoglobin the dog padded heavily into sight, whining at some memory or some anticipation of food, knowing there was something he wanted, not entirely sure what it was. He gave up trying to remember and climbed onto the sofa, turned two circles before settling.
‘I can’t have both, can I?’ Theo said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Absolutely not. Not under any circumstances whatsoever.’
‘I�
�ll tell you what,’ he said. ‘I want to be fair, so we’ll toss for it. Heads you keep him.’
‘I don’t want the cat, Theo.’
‘Tails you hit him on the head with a big stick until he’s dead.’
My mother came to visit.
I opened the window two days before she arrived. Then I hid the Courage ashtray Lucy had stolen from Drake’s Wine Bar and emptied my bin of the remains of Julian’s filter-tips. The night before, I re-considered, and spent twenty minutes scrubbing the inside of the bin with lemon washing-up concentrate.
Luckily, Julian was away for the day on a Buchanan’s placement. The company had invited him to an animal-testing centre where monkeys were taught how to smoke. Lucy was in London demonstrating against Mrs T, so in the end I managed to avoid introducing my mother to any person who had any meaning for me. I surrendered nothing personal and betrayed no place of specific interest.
In fact, my mother was so pleased with her day out that she offered to buy me something special to cheer up my room. We went to the city’s oldest department store and had tea in the non-smoking section of the restaurant. Then she bought me a black corduroy bean-bag, paying a little extra for the triangular BSI label stamped NON-FLAMMABLE.
Walter says he was at dominoes last night in the General Gordon, and Humphrey King was wondering whether it was alright to pop in from time to time, like in the old days.
‘It’s not that long ago, Walter.’
‘When you’re my age, all days are old.’
I tell him of course it’s fine.
He says old Ben Bradley and Jonesy Paul were there as well. And one or two of the others.
I have to laugh.
‘All of them,’ I say, ‘and more, if any more want to join. Bring a whole domino league, Walter, if they’ve got the lungs to take it.’
‘Well I can’t keep him. He still has to be fed from the bottle and I’ve had complaints at work from Mrs Cavendish the receptionist.’
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