I put the cigarette in my mouth. I was surprised by how dry it was and I took it out of my mouth and it stuck to my lower lip, tearing the skin. I put the cigarette down, tried to light a match into my cupped palms like Humphrey Bogart in Paris in Casablanca, but I couldn’t. So I lit the match by striking it towards me and a spark flew off and burnt a hole in my shirt.
I took a last deep breath. I wet my lips and put the cigarette back in my mouth. And for some reason remembered an article from Cosmopolitan which said that cigarettes were a substitute for the mother’s breast, so I thought of Lucy when she was pregnant, and then I thought of my own mother and the countless promises made and impossible to unmake.
I took the cigarette out of my mouth. I watched the Swan Vesta burn itself out.
I was scared of dying.
DAY
5
Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (1493-1541), also known as Paracelsus. Personal doctor to Erasmus and Theo’s hero. John Donne is known to have considered him an innovator of greater importance than Copernicus.
Paracelsus believed that in the beginning there was primal matter, the Mysterium Magnum, which could generate life by transforming itself. The principle of all generation was therefore separation, and every object separated from the MM was impressed with an identifying signature. It is from this idea that the concepts of micro- and macrocosm were later developed. The particular discovery Paracelsus made then, was that everything around us, however small and seemingly commonplace, is a microcosmic expression of the macrocosm, or everything.
He considered that the aim of natural research should be to identify the signature which explained the connection of any particular object to the primal source. For Paracelsus this was synonymous with the search for God, and by applying these ideas to medicine and the human body he became the first European doctor to suggest that diseases were located in specific organs. He also discovered that poison could act as an effective remedy, and was rumoured to have accelerated his research by experimenting frequently on himself.
She introduced me to the Olympians of smoke. She taught me its mythology through black and white cinema, showed me its gods and rituals and villains. I marvelled at Greta Garbo and Sam Spade and the way the smoke of cigarettes made sophisticate the silver of the silver screen.
She took me to see the Gitanes series of pre-war film-noirs at the Arts Cinema, where a sign in the toilet said No Smoking Rauchen Verboten Ne Pas Fumer Non Fumare while the screen filled with unrepentant images of the twentieth century’s most proficient smokers. Their lives and our lives were enhanced by tobacco, confirming beyond doubt that in times of stress like love and European war the only fully human action was always a smoke. Smoking was as decent a response to hysteria as it was to boredom. It was as reassuring in victory as it was in defeat. And most comforting of all, it was absolutely one hundred per cent safe. I saw nobody die of lung cancer, not on screen. Nobody even coughed or had a sore throat, except perhaps Marlene Dietrich.
Lucy told me that all this could be mine. That smoking and not smoking was the difference between entry and no entry into a cinematic world where post-coital cigarettes were shared in king-size beds in all the premier hotels of the world. By people like us. She held out cigarettes to me like an apple. It was love and desire. It was knowledge and everything.
Walter, on top form, is wearing his light and dark blue Jack Straws cricket cap, paled by countless seasons of April rain. It is his sporting cap and he is expecting Jonesy Paul and old Ben Bradley for a session of dominoes. Amounts of money will change hands. There will be cursing.
So Walter is feeling chirpy, braving up his luck by filling each of his pipes with a little extra tobacco. I ask him if he ever tried to give it up.
‘Never willingly.’
He rocks back in his chair, pipe in mouth, pulls down the dark peak of his cap. He takes the pipe from his mouth and looks into the bowl-end. He exercises his jaw as he joins up the dots of a past experience so varied it can connect into any number of stories.
‘I once had a friend who tried to give up. He lost his wife and children.’
‘Irritability?’
‘No, nothing like that. It was the MCC
‘Oh come on, Walter. I’m prepared to bet the MCC has nothing to do with it.’
‘What we used to call the Marital Consummation Cigarette, the best smoke of the week.’
Walter rambles a little but he gets there in the end. It was the wife’s fault. Wanting to make giving-up easier for her husband, she decided they should forego the marital bed until he learnt not to crave an MCC the moment it finished. The husband became increasingly desperate. He held out for two months before deciding to spend an evening at Walter’s house, hoping for some moral support. Walter invited him in, opened several bottles of beer, and later, purely out of compassion, he offered his old friend a Woodbine.
The next day, his friend’s wife left for her mother’s and took the children with her.
’She smelt the tobacco on his breath,’ Walter says. ‘And for the wife it could only mean one thing: her husband must have slept with another woman.’
Walter was starting to chortle.
‘Mind the ashtray!’
Every Wednesday, without fail, he filled the two shopping bags with cartons of cigarettes and called for a taxi. Every Wednesday night he came home with the bags empty. It was still none of my business.
He seemed to have run out of things to give me and I hardly ever saw him. I started worrying that he didn’t like me and I wanted to smoke extra cigarettes to console myself but of course I couldn’t. I asked if I could join him for Tomorrow’s World, and very politely he offered me the better end of the sofa, the one with fewer dog-hairs. Haemoglobin curled up between us and Bananas went to sleep on Haemoglobin.
Tomorrow’s World featured a new computer programme being developed to colourize old black and white films. . Fashion experts and film critics had already been consulted on the correct colour of Lauren Bacall’s eyes in To Have and Have Not. There were other ways the old films could be altered. Brand names on consumer items could be changed or added, which was one way that colourization might finance itself. More interestingly, cigarettes could now be air-brushed into inexistence. By way of example, the team from Tomorrow’s World had eliminated the cigarettes from a scene in Casablanca.
It is evening. Rick’s Bar. A piano plays and roulette tables rattle in the background. Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman sit at a table drinking champagne. Occasionally they smell their fingers, very discreetly, as if wanting to give the impression they are actually doing something else. Neither of them is openly going to admit that there is a funny smell coming from somewhere close, which probably explains why, from time to time, they sigh so deeply at the social delicacy of the situation.
Julian Carr came to my room to practise the speech of defence he was going to make at the Students’ Union. He’d made a full recovery from his illness and only referred to it obliquely, by apologizing for acting strangely.
His main point was that the money from Buchanan’s was intended to start him on a career-path which would eventually help him research a cure for cancer. It was therefore at least as legitimate as money given to Cancer Research, and probably more so. He argued that cancer charities needed cancer to exist, and therefore they might be interested in a certain delay, as it were. Tobacco companies, on the other hand, had more urgent incentives to find a cure as soon as possible. Millions of pounds were at stake, whole regions of farmers, nations of producers, teams of distributors, communities of executives. The salesmen and the tobacconists were entirely dependent. Buchanan’s sponsored medical students like Julian in the best of faith and he was determined to justify their confidence in him.
‘Evil exists,’ he concluded, ‘there is no need to create it. Should I keep this bit about the animal testing?’
I went to listen to him at the meeting itself and he was magnificent. He was visibly m
oved when he described how unequivocally he objected to the use of animals in experiments. After the speech, he stood on a chair and gave out free packs of Buchanan’s cigarettes. He was not voted out of the Union.
Some weeks later, using a similar strategy, he was elected President. After a minor stumble, his mission of ambition was back on track. Cigarettes tch tch. Cigarettes tch tch. There goes Julian, steaming all the way to the top.
While we waited for the taxi a beggar came up and asked if we could spare some change or a cigarette. Theo said no and then the taxi nearly ran the beggar over.
It was a London-style cab, with lots of leg-room and plenty of space on the floor for the two shopping bags full of cigarettes. The bags were made of plastic-coated nylon, in red and white stripes. I tried to summon back the unprecedented wave of curiosity which had led me into this taxi with Theo, but I couldn’t. I had no idea why I’d asked to go with him.
On the dividing window in front of us there was a copyright sticker made in Hong Kong which said Please Don’t Offend The Driver By Asking To Smoke. Next to this was a cartoon of two busty women sitting at a restaurant table. One of the busty women says Do You Mind If I Smoke? and the other one says I Don’t Mind If You Burn.
‘Not many fares this direction,’ the cabbie said.
He glanced in the rear-view mirror and caught my eye but I had no idea of how to start a conversation with him. I was wondering how I could have forgotten my basic principle, since Paris, that inactivity was an honest response to life. Only curiosity was absurd. I hoped Bananas was alright: I’d made sure to leave him out a full ashtray.
We were now skirting the edge of the Estates, and this was the furthest I’d ever been from the bridge. All of the five-storey blocks, without exception, were beige and grey, each one merging into the background ugliness of the next as if their natural state was camouflage, always prepared for ambush and modern war. One or two older, detached houses cowered back from the street, curtains closed, unsellable.
Theo told the driver to stop at a pub where the sign was smashed in, leaving it nameless. The Strangers’ End seemed a decent guess. I looked at Theo. He said,
‘They’ve got pin-ball.’
In the car-park a security light acted nervously and blinked on the steam of our breath. I was frightened, very keen to get back in the cab and go home, and Theo looked at me as though he knew what I was thinking.
‘Not any old rubbish. They always have the latest machines.’
Uncle Gregory settled in Australia after he was discharged from the RAF. Partly it was for the sunshine, but it was also because of the excellent treatment he’d received at the Royal Adelaide Hospital. His full disability pension meant that there was no real need for him to work in the asbestos factory, but he liked to keep himself occupied. The job also helped cover the costs of his trips to England.
In his final tour of duty for the RAF, Uncle Gregory had flown as navigator in a five-man Canberra bomber. His pilot was Group Captain Ralph Lane, who in 1957 became only the third pilot in the history of the RAF to win a DSO in peacetime. Lane died in 1964 when he fell down the stairs of a house he’d designed for himself in the hills behind Shepheard’s Hotel, a small town near Montreal. Despite the fact that he’d been blind for nearly seven years, Lane’s fall was rumoured to have been a suicide.
Uncle Gregory went to the funeral in Shepheard’s Hotel. It was very well attended. That was the year he missed the TT.
In February the Vice-Chancellor finally summoned Julian to her office. She was keen to discuss the vandalization and theft of property properly belonging to the School of Medicine. She meant the Indian corpse. There was also the small matter of the animal testing centre housed in the Long Ashton Tobacco Research Unit, where sixteen cynomolgus monkeys had caused eighty-five thousand pounds worth of damage in a single night. Julian was reminded, in no uncertain terms, of the air-conditioned audio-room which the Buchanan Imperial Cigarette Company had recently sponsored in the basement of the University Library.
The Vice-Chancellor was aware of Carr’s distinguished academic record and his recent election as President of the Union, but she couldn’t possibly overstate her personal disapproval of this kind of meaningless and juvenile behaviour. She was therefore left with no alternative but to attribute blame to chemical imbalances in Carr’s brain, caused by the clinical tests he’d volunteered to follow on behalf of his Faculty.
Carr’s successful completion of the course of drugs, despite certain unwelcome side-effects, had been taken into account. As had his respect for the University’s need for confidentiality in such matters. He was therefore excused with a stern reprimand, and a warning that any future indiscipline would be punished with the utmost severity.
Walter is so happy today that he sometimes lets his pipe go out. I watch him playing and winning at dominoes with Jonesy Paul and old Ben Bradley. It’s like the beginning of the club all over again, except that I can’t share the absolutely incalculable joy which is a cigarette at each and every moment I want one.
Jonesy Paul looks old enough to be a contemporary of Walter’s, but he did something in a war with submarines so he must be younger. On doctor’s orders he smokes the lowest tar L and B, but he makes a point of ripping off the filter. He is telling old Ben Bradley that if any one of the many ships carrying radioactive waste into British ports were to sink, then cancer would devastate coastal communities for generations to come.
‘And they warn you against a little cigarette.’
‘Dominoes,’ Walter says, and deals.
Old Ben Bradley is only fifty-three. He is called old Ben because fourteen years ago his first son Ben turned professional and went to play Rugby League for Hull Kingston Rovers. Last year, the whole Bradley family had a box at Wembley to watch the Silk Cut Challenge Cup final. The Rovers were the underdogs and they lost.
At this moment I envy Walter his pipe. I envy Jonesy Paul his filterless L & B and I envy old Ben Bradley his JPS. At this moment I envy everybody everywhere everything, which I know is stupid but that’s how I feel.
Lucy was gradually wearing me down, wearing out my resistance. Sometimes, she deliberately provoked me by going next door to smoke a cigarette with Julian. I could hear their voices through the wall, interrupted by silences the length of an inhaled breath or a snatched kiss. I asked Lucy what they talked about.
‘Cigarettes.’
‘But what do you do?’
‘We smoke.’
When I insisted she tell me what they really talked about, she just threatened to go next door again. She made me nervous. With her slim fingers she made a point of pulling each Marlboro from her pack like a Lucky Dip where the prize was always the same, and always satisfactory. She coolly lit each cigarette and left me to fidget between different weapons of defence: a folder of statistics sent by my mother; the foul taste of Miss Bryant’s Embassy Regal; Uncle Gregory dead at 48; the ransom of my mother’s love.
But there was little comfort in being well-armed now that Lucy spoke only the one smoky language, the Hello Baby, easy to understand. She had cast herself in the role of a medieval princess who could be wooed and won, where smoke-a-cigarette was her modern version of swim-a-lake, climb-a-mountain, kill-a-dragon. She worked on making me believe that cigarettes could be the one moment to change everything, as if all I had to do was smoke like Humphrey Bogart to end up with the girl and my own piano-player.
I began to wonder whether cigarettes had changed since Miss Bryant. Otherwise, how could Lucy Hinton and Julian Carr and 33% of the population (!) who I’d never really thought about before ever have learnt to smoke with such an impression of pleasure?
We walked from the pub across a failed area of open space towards a five-storey block at the hub of the Estates. Theo handed me one of the shopping bags and I was surprised by how light it was. I looked around for muggers and thieves but it must have been too cold. I kept looking, just in case.
Surprisingly, the pub had almost been fun. The
o had the invisible but convincing invulnerability of the slightly strange, the uncommon man. He made me feel safe and I stayed close to him. We played pinball, and the ends of the longest strands of his grey hair trembled as he tried to tilt his ball into favourable alleys and nearly always succeeded. He beat me by two hundred and nineteen million points.
Inside the block we took a wasted shudder-proof lift to the fourth floor. There was an outside walkway with numbered doors spaced by frosted windows. In front of the door furthest from the lift-shaft there was a queue of three or four women, and I followed Theo towards them. Under his breath, Theo said: ‘Call me Dr Barclay.’
He said hello to all the women, and introduced me as his new assistant. Nobody took much notice. Then he took a Chubb key from the pocket of his coat and opened door number forty-seven. He invited us all inside.
I never really understood why Julian did it. It wasn’t as though he needed the money.
He looked at me seriously, his square jaw jutting slightly.
‘It was a matter of principle. They would have tested the drugs on animals otherwise, which would have been totally pointless.’
‘Because of the restraint again?’
‘No. Because rabbits are not in the market for a male contraceptive pill. You know, if you wanted to do some tests I could set you up.’
‘Well thanks, Julian, but all the same. Considering.’
‘You can earn up to fifteen hundred pounds for a ten week course.’
‘No really, Julian.’
‘I know you’re short of money. You could take Lucy on holiday with fifteen hundred pounds. You could take her to the Caribbean.’
‘We’re not going on holiday together. And anyway, we’re just good friends.’
‘Any family history of madness? Any cancer in the family?’
‘I’m not going to do it, Julian. Look what happened to you.’
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