by Jenny Diski
I have smoked since I was fourteen. When I wasn’t travelling the Circle Line, I sat in front of a mirror in my bedroom illicitly practising my smoking skills, just as I worked at kohling and silvering my eyes and posing naked and enticing to my reflection in preparation for future public performances. Much of the time of the fourteen-year-old is spent in front of the mirror. Life must be rehearsed. At my boarding school, once I had got the social workers to send me back, there was a boiler house by the organic vegetable beds. Two or three people could stand in the space in front of the whooshing boiler, leaning against the brick walls, conversing idly. It was warm in winter and secluded in summer and the perfect venue for smoking breaks between lessons or if the weather precluded a trip to the neighbouring unmown field where sex as well as smoking could occur uninterrupted. I smoked Black Russian, black-papered, gold-tipped, and sometimes Abdullahs, Turkish and oval. A packet cost a week’s pocket money but it was important, if one had to perform one’s most sophisticated activity in the ignominy of a boiler house, to do so with style. At that time, style seemed to me mostly black and gold or oval and exotic-smelling. I toyed with the idea of a cigarette holder, but it was one more thing to hide in my knickers, and I decided that such extended glamour would have to wait. That year, a coffee bar opened in the town. It was, of course, off-limits. They served espresso and cappuccino in glass cups, which back then seemed to be very dangerous to the adult world and in fact announced the end, finally, of the fifties. There was also a juke box. It played Ray Charles’s ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You’; Roy Orbison’s ‘Crying’; the Everly Brothers’ ‘Cathy’s Clown’; Dave Brubeck’s ‘Take Five’. I sat there with my kohl eyes, my jeans and oversized black sweater, smoking (was there for a brief period a small pipe?) and idly stirring the froth on my cappuccino, wrote poems in a notebook, and waited for a kind word from the first love of my life, Tub (who wasn’t, though he had crooked teeth which so moved me they made my heart stop), a junior reporter on the local paper. He called me Nej, reversing me, reasonably enough since I was in turmoil over him. He sort-of-let-me be his girlfriend, though he was careful to remain remote and dismissive. Most of the time I wasn’t there for him, just a hovering shadow, who sat in silence while he discussed important matters of life and death with his friends. I existed for the brief moments of encouragement he allowed me occasionally, when he would smile suddenly directly at me, or turn at the door after he had got up without a word to leave and mutter, ‘You coming?’, not bothering to wait to see if I was or not. I could spend several hours at night lying in bed remembering and reliving the quality of that moment, of the bare acknowledgement that he wanted me, actually me, it had been only me he had been speaking to. Or at any rate, he didn’t not want me. Hours would pass as I savoured his tone of voice, the fleeting warmth of inclusion, the inescapable fact (if I thought very hard about it) that he didn’t want to leave without me that made up for being ignored entirely for the rest of the time we were together. All the disdain, the apparent absence of my existence while I was in his company, the endless periods of waiting in the coffee bar which often ended (after all) with him not showing up before I had to get back to school, the terrible moments when I couldn’t get to the coffee bar at all and he might be there and waiting for me, thinking I had stood him up; all that, the majority of the time, anguish, agony, shrank to fleeting nothing beside the memory of his momentary encouragements. ‘You coming?’ They were real, the rest was reserve, resistance, a game of reticence that boys played for reasons that were not then obvious. And no moment was more treasured, unwrapped in the dark night of the dormitory to gleam hope at me, than the times when, after taking one for himself, he took a second cigarette from my pack of five and lit it before putting it between my lips. And Roy sang, ‘Only The Lonely’.
So … smoking. Later, when I was twenty, I spent five months in St Pancras Hospital, North Wing, the psychiatric unit. Cigarettes were no longer an accessory, they were an addiction and a constant source of concern, since I had only the ten shillings a week that was doled out by the hospital to patients without income as pocket money. Not nearly enough to keep me in smokes in a world where smoking was a way of passing the time.
The Mystery Man had been admitted by the police after they arrested him, wandering and confused, at King’s Cross. He had lost his memory. He didn’t know his name, where he had come from, nothing whatever about his life. He was a blank sheet in his forties. I was twenty and became his first friend. We played poker for cigarettes. His inability to remember caused explosions of rage to erupt from time to time, but mostly he was extraordinarily gentle, a man who listened intently to whatever one had to say, whose interest in other people was as much a learning process for him who had had no life that he could recall. We talked a lot, he wondered who he might be, and we imagined a variety of lives for him. It was a game in which he would accept or reject my suggestions according to whether he fancied the idea or not. In reality he was not at all eager to find out who he was, although having no access to his past made him bang his head against the walls sometimes. We considered the possibility, the likelihood, that he had a wife, certainly a family somewhere who knew him, and the idea was intolerable, like a narrowing of vision from a full panorama to a single ray of light that led only where it led. He preferred the more fantastical versions of himself: he was a spy, a master criminal, a private eye, a lost prince from far away. Probably these stories I told him about himself appealed to him because they were likely to be the furthest from the truth. Eventually the police discovered his name, and that he had been missing for a week or so before he had been picked up. He was a builder from somewhere up north. He had a wife and a daughter of nineteen. He had left his house one morning with the rent money and had disappeared. The police and his doctor thought he might have been mugged and the money stolen, or that he had spent the rent money – he played the horses, apparently – and then lost his memory in an attempt to deal with his guilt. John (we’d been calling him John, but it turned out to be his name) told me all this after he came back from seeing the doctor. None of it meant anything to him. The story was as strange as any that we had invented. His wife and daughter were coming to London in a day or two, and he would be meeting them, as far as he was concerned, for the first time. He was terrified, actually sweating at the prospect. I could quite see why.
‘We’ve been married for twenty years. What if I don’t like her?’
I understood the enormity of it. Much more shocking than being a spy or arch criminal. To be an everyday person, a family man with qualities and failings, a husband, a father, to have an intimate history with others, to be an ordinary person with a past was terrible. To have to find out that past, all in a rush, to come to terms with it, not over forty years, but in a matter of days, was frightening beyond belief. What was more, my friend John was going to turn out to be someone, to have a life of his own, and I, for a while the first and most important person in his life, the co-inventor of him, would become just a moment in his passing life, a part of an episode of forgetting that he would probably want to forget. He was scared and so was I. I felt as unconnected with my life, as unhinged from my past, as he was with his. We were outlaws together. Uncluttered and new. His ‘Jenny’ was just a few weeks old and without a history. The present in the safety of the hospital was far preferable to both of us than any ongoing truth.
At first he refused to meet his wife and daughter without me being present, but, of course, that had been vetoed by his doctor. ‘What if I don’t like them?’ he said, haunted by the invisible past, threatened by the future.
How much I wished he wouldn’t like them. But at the same time I could see the awfulness of that. Of discovering, say, that he had had a life of unhappiness to which he had to return, and of realising that the intensity of our friendship of a few weeks in a hospital with no past and no future was unsustainable. The doctor told him he was living a pipe dream, that not only did he have a past but so did I, and that real life w
ould scupper us. Living in a brand-new present wasn’t an option. I was difficult and needy; he wouldn’t be able to cope. He refused to acknowledge this. We would manage. We had a special relation to each other. Old wounds wouldn’t apply. The point was that we hadn’t hurt each other, and without a past there was no reason why we should. If he didn’t like his family, he told me, he wouldn’t go back, and he and I would find a flat and live together, though in what relation we didn’t specify. And what if he did like his family? That was simple, he would adopt me and I would go and live with them. I found it unbearable that he could even think it possible that he would like them. I knew our time was over. I stayed in my bed in the ward, refusing to see him, leaving him alone, the evening before his wife and daughter were due to arrive. My past, at least, had caught up with me.
When they left, he came to tell me about them. Nothing had come back to him during the meeting, but he liked both of them, an intelligent daughter of my age and a wife he found attractive and good company. He thought he might have had a good marriage. He couldn’t imagine he had walked out. He must have been mugged. He was saying goodbye to me, although several meetings were planned, and he wouldn’t be going home for a while. There was no more talk about adopting me, and though he spent most of his time with me when his new family weren’t around, I could feel him separating. He talked about what they had told him of his life, as if trying to fit himself into it. It was an ordinary life, but clearly full of affection. He liked the idea of it more and more.
‘But why did you run away from it?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘No, I’m sure I must have been mugged.’
I gave him up to his life. But we went on playing poker and smoking together until his wife came with a suitcase to take him home. John introduced me to her. She seemed very nice.
Smoking is a love that has never gone wrong, never seen sense. I trust cigarettes. Thirty-seven years after I first practised smoking in front of my bedroom mirror, I sat on the hotel veranda overlooking a lush garden in Savannah late into the singing, sweaty night, smoking and waiting for Saturday when I would start travelling again. I woke, washed and left my elegant bedroom to take breakfast on the front porch so that I could smoke while I drank my coffee and watch the joggers, alone, isolated behind earphones, alone but connected by mobiles, with dogs, with babies in buggies, with lovers or encouraging companions, young, old, fat, thin, black, white, running, puffing or effortlessly, round and round the outside of Forsthye Park across the road. Walking slowly, each step taking account of the saturating heat, I crossed the elegantly gardened public squares surrounded by gothic mansions, past live oak trees dripping with Spanish Moss to Shriner’s bookshop to buy Faulkner to read while I lunched in Clary’s Diner – ‘Smoking section, please’ – on gazpacho or a salt beef sandwich. Then I’d walk, to the river, or just through the squares. Never very far and always slowly. Watch people, take in place names and proud plaques on the older houses claiming not their inhabitants but their age as their fame, stop at a café (non-smoking) for mint tea, sit in a square on an unoccupied bench so I could have a cigarette and read or look at the squirrels – the city is overrun with them. One bench declares that it is in the place of the bench that Tom Hanks sat on in Forrest Gump. The actual bench has been taken away back to Hollywood by the studio. Still tourists come to stare and click their cameras at the substitute. It’s a fake bench, but it’s a fake bench in the right place. Back at the hotel I’d have a shower and then take my tea from the lounge out to the front porch again to smoke and watch the late afternoon joggers doing their programmed circuits round the sultry park whose one-mile-long periphery seemed to be its main civic purpose. I returned to the back veranda on the first floor to watch the light die and my cigarette begin to glow as I drew on it in the dark. One, two, three days. All stillness, all alone in a strange city, not lonely for a second. Never alone with a cigarette in my hand.
And if I thought about anything at all, I wondered with a heat-inspired lassitude what I was doing in this far-off southern city, waiting, pausing between a sea voyage and a train journey, neither of which I had any reason to do other than the theoretical wish to be moving through grand empty spaces.
* * *
A gangly young man queued behind me to have the conductor collect his ticket and board the train at Savannah station.
‘Are you familiar with Jacksonville?’ he asked me nervously as we sat next to each other in our allocated seats and he noticed from my ticket that I was connecting at Jacksonville to the Sunset Limited. ‘It’s a ten-hour layover. What will you do all that time?’
‘Wait. There must be something to do in Jacksonville.’
He didn’t look convinced. His name was Troy and he was making the two-hour journey to connect with the Sunset Limited at Jacksonville to get him to Sanderson, Texas from where he had a six-hour drive to the small town where he lived and worked as a teacher. He’d spent a long weekend in Savannah having read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, a story of gay love and death in the mannered South. It was his first weekend away from home on his own. It was a real adventure, a breaking-away, an acknowledgement (though he didn’t say so explicitly) of his own sexuality. He had wandered about the old city, and spent hours sitting in Madison Square looking at the house where the drama of the book took place. He had even knocked on the door, but no one had answered. He had cruised the gay bars and perhaps made contact with other gay men, but somehow it seemed unlikely. I got the feeling it was quite enough just for now that he had come to this sinful city alone. He was in his mid-twenties. Troy would come to Savannah again, he said, now that he knew he could. The town where he lived was where he had grown up. His father had been a teacher in the same infants school where Troy now taught, and still lived locally, widowed and retired. Troy had had to travel a long way to come out, and he was filled with surprise at himself. Even so, ten hours in Jacksonville on his own alarmed him.
‘Well, we’ll find something to do,’ I comforted, half promising to stick with him.
‘It’s supposed to be a dangerous city.’
‘Why?’
He shrugged, uneasy and awkward. ‘Oh, you know…’
Jacksonville station was a utilitarian box, a few seats, a Coke machine and not much else, except a stationmaster who rather proudly told us there was nothing nearby. It was miles away from the city. So what did people with ten hours on their hands do? He shrugged. There was the Jacksonville Landing, a riverside shopping development, and a bus left for it every fifteen minutes. The answer to what to do in Jacksonville for ten hours, while the Sunset Limited chugged its way up to us from Orlando, was a mall.
‘Hold on, I’m gonna hang out with you guys,’ a husky woman’s twang behind us said.
Bet stepped on the remains of her cigarette with the toe of her black cowboy boot and joined us at the bus stop. We had been adopted by a small, delicately thin woman in her early sixties, neatly packaged in tight denim jeans, a white poplin shirt with a black string tie at the collar, and a smart black jacket. Her face was scored with lines, well lived in but with a recollected prettiness emphasised by big blue eyes starkly outlined with kohl and fringed with spiky mascara’d lashes. Her thin lips were lipsticked pink and her cheeks rouged. Her curly, reddish, light-brown dyed hair was caught in a small ponytail at the nape of her neck. She had a swagger, a consciously boyish way about her that jostled with her physically frail appearance.
The three of us sat on the bus with three or four other people heading into town. During the twenty-minute trip the bus stopped several times to pick up passengers, passing through obviously black suburbs on the way into the centre of Jacksonville. By the time we were nearing the mall, it was almost full and we were the only white people on the bus. I noticed this vaguely, but it seemed no odder than being on a bus going through Brixton. Troy and Bet, however, had become silent and I could feel their tension. Our travelling companions were the usual range of passengers: old, middle-aged, young, work
ing people, noisy teenagers, the usual urban busload, with us as tourists. When we arrived at the Landing, Bet let out a deep sigh of relief. Troy nodded and said, ‘Yeah.’ There were beads of sweat on his forehead from more than the heat.
‘Jeez,’ Bet said, releasing her pent-up breath. She was sweaty too.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘That was pretty scary.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t care to be outnumbered like that. In a strange city.’
‘Me too,’ said Troy.
‘But what was so scary? Outnumbered?’ I insisted, as we walked towards the entrance of the mall.
‘We were the only whites on that bus. This is a black city. People like us … white and strangers … it’s not safe.’ Bet spoke in an undertone.
No one, as far as I could tell, had given us a second look on the bus. But it wasn’t what people did that represented the threat, it was the idea of being a stranger, of being in a white minority that made Bet and Troy deeply uneasy. Blackness was dangerous. We didn’t look substantially richer than most of the people on the bus. So the danger from a black majority would have had to come from our whiteness and their hatred. It was a historical fear. And hysterical. Neither of them lived in inner cities. Troy came from small-town Texas, and Bet lived on and kept to the suburban outskirts of Albuquerque. In their America a bus full of black people was a rumour, a story they’d heard about an America in which they did not, and were pleased not to, live. Nightmare in Jacksonville was a bad dream come true. We might have been travelling on a bus full of aliens, or retributive ghouls, those creatures from movies that represent the fear of being overwhelmed by otherness, so strangely dangerous, so dangerously strange was the situation for them. It was probably the fact of the city that frightened my companions as much as the racial ratio. Neither had ever been to New York, neither would have contemplated it. America might look vast on the map, but for many people it’s as small as their local town, beyond which is an uncharted wilderness inhabited by monsters. Once we’d left the street and entered the air-conditioned, security-policed mall, Bet and Troy relaxed. The shops, restaurants and ambience were familiar or versions of the familiar, and peopled by a much higher proportion of whites. Even so, the danger lurked outside.
