Rick White
2007: The Summer the Smoking Ban Came into Place
And suddenly the pubs all smelled disgustingly of human bodies—rank breath and stale conversation. Without that old grey shroud to cover us, the succour and the fug of it, everything seemed at once too real, too solid to ignore.
We found refuge in the smoking area (formerly the beer garden, although it was never a garden at all but a brick courtyard strung with flickering fairy lights and rickety benches—pretty enough, in its own way).
“Have one for me, will you?” you asked. You were trying to quit but still liked the smell, and a freshly-lit cigarette mingled with the trapped heat of summer pavements is a fine thing indeed. So I had one for you. Haloed in the silvery smoke and the waning light we talked; talked of our favourite cigarettes, taken from us so cruelly now by the locum doctors in the for-your-own-good wards.
“In a café. Early morning with coffee and the papers, when it’s raining outside,” I’d offered, typically dour. “In the club!” you countered. “When you’ve just come off the dancefloor and you’ve got that nice sheen of sweat on your skin, like after sex.”
The way you said it bumped my heart into my lungs. I’d invited you out to the smoking area on the premise we were just two fellow smokers who needed to get out. Now you were flirting. Or were you? Maybe you were merely asserting your dominance and higher social ranking? Underscoring the obvious fact that of the two of us, you were the sexy one.
I couldn’t work it out. My brain was starting to whir and fry. But I hadn’t time to pause, for at that moment the sun slipped below the kerb and the moon popped up above the fence—full and fancy and closer than it should’ve been, really, when I think about it now.
A dapper-looking black cat perched atop the wobbly old fence, appearing from nowhere as cats have a habit of doing, silhouetted against the moon’s pale light, a perfect tableau—spectral in framing.[1] He gave his tail a laconic swish, and then another, as the smoke swirled upwards past the moon.
“I think he wants us to follow him,” you said.
“He wants you to follow him,” I corrected.
“You can come if you want,” said the cat.
You leaned in and took my arm; you smelled of perfume and sandalwood and charity shops. Your hair touched the bare skin on my arm. There was no way I wasn’t going with you.
We travelled over late-August parks, summer bandstands and barbecues. Pumpkin fields, smouldering bonfire-leaves and drowsing Sunday scarecrows. We floated up, up, up, on the thermals, looking down on Christmas chimney-tops and January frost.
And we came to a house, somewhere in a space that was not where we had come from, and not quite where we were going. And we walked through a door.
And inside there was love, and brightness. There was music playing in the background—The Cure’s Greatest Hits (in my opinion). There were candles burning and the scent of fresh cotton. There were cut-glass tumblers and peaty scotch.
And
we are both
still here.
Two children sit at the table, decorating pumpkins. I don’t recognise either of them, though they seem innocuous enough, their features undefined and unmapped to me. I feel no pull towards them, until the older one—the boy—starts hacking with a knife at the orange flesh, gouging two uneven holes for eyes. I feel a strange compulsion to take the blade from him, or at least to place my hand on his wrist and guide him towards a better impression of a face.
The boy is called Lennox, the little red-headed girl is Annie. She has chosen to paint her pumpkin black, working diligently to cover every bit of the surface before sprinkling purple glitter on top. Her gothic pumpkin is quite strikingly beautiful and I decide in this moment that I would die for this tiny new artist if she asked me to.
Days pass, weeks maybe, no, not weeks. The glitter still blankets the kitchen like the last of a winter snowfall and one of the pumpkins begins to sag and rot. Eventually it collapses in on itself and leaks foul smelling liquid across the kitchen table which seeps into some outdated correspondence left there by you.
“Why did you let this happen?” Is that your voice I’m hearing? I’m not sure anymore, it doesn’t sound familiar but I answer anyway—
“I didn’t. It just happened.”
“Well it was inconsiderate.”
“How am I supposed to consider every eventuality that might occur? I can’t control the pumpkins, it isn’t my fault.”
“Nothing ever is,” says the cat, from somewhere down the hall, just loud enough for me to hear.
Fuck this, I think. I want to smoke. But I can’t smoke inside and it’s so cold out there. It’s cold in here too. So I take a hatchet into the draughty living room and chop my limbs into firewood, arranging myself neatly in the log-burning stove. I shave strips of skin from my back and scrunch up today’s newspaper to use as kindling. You find me holding a match uselessly between my teeth, trying in vain to strike it.
“Why do you always do this?” you ask, not unreasonably.
“Do what?” I sputter back.
“Act like I am the one who has somehow diminished you?”
“Balls,” I say. “I could have been a tree.”
“I didn’t make you come here, get out of the stove.”
“No. Let me burn. Spark a match for me and control my oxygen with that little grate thingy in the stove. I’ll warm us and then I’ll go.”
At once we’re both aware of how ridiculous we sound. How this isn’t where either of us thought we were going, yet here we are. This version of us, here in this place, is not the version we would have chosen to show our children; they deserve—we assume—something better.
Or perhaps not.
Perhaps there is no version of love in which one person does not end up chopped into bits in a log burner, or as a rotten pumpkin-head slumped on a kitchen table, brains leaking everywhere. Perhaps that is the best thing we can know.
“I’m going for a smoke,” I say. Beyond the glitter-frosted kitchen, the warm mechanised glow of the oven, the whistle of the kettle.
I step through the patio doors onto the cold and uneven decking which feels as though it’s about to give way as it begrudgingly accepts my weight. I know, in some part of my brain—the dimly lit closet at the back of my memory where I keep everything now— that it was me who built it, because it looks OK but it’s not. The angles are all just a fraction out. These rickety old joists were meant to kiss each other but somehow just missed.
I take my last cigarette from the pack, the one I’ve been saving. My old Zippo appears in my hand, catching the spark first time as I light up—the pull and the crackle and the glow. The first puffs disappearing into the blackness of the space outside our little home. The feeling of the smoke in my lungs which never really left. Our old black cat winds itself around my leg, as soft and as light as breath[2], and you step out beside me and say, “Go on then, have one for me.”
~
[1] A cat may appear to you, but you will never see one arrive. This is because cats are always where they’re supposed to be, whereas you, are not. [2] If you should meet a cat on Halloween night, they’ll be on a journey. Whether it’s your journey or not isn’t something you can know. You should always follow, but don’t tarry, for they will not wait for you. Rick White is an ex-smoker who now lives and writes in Manchester, UK. Read more of Rick's work at www.ricketywhite.com.
