Ten Stories About Smoking (11 page)

They ate outside a Spanish place, picking at fish and meats in tiny terracotta bowls. Jean did most of the talking, and he listened intently, his head leant on his fist, his maroon tie loosened
and splayed. Around them it got dark; couples left and arrived. They drank a lot of wine and told their own little stories. He spoke with a slight drawl to his accent that might have been Irish or
Scottish. She liked it whichever country it was. When the bill arrived, they split it and he did not suggest a nightcap, nor did she invite him to her flat for a coffee. Instead they kissed as it
started to rain, two cabs arriving within minutes of each other. They had each other’s numbers and that itching feeling that something had imperceptibly changed.

Over the weeks, she bought Peter medicated shampoo and took him shopping. He went along without argument, enjoying the attention. She took him to her favourite salon where her
stylist gave him a haircut he initially eyed with suspicion, but later came to like. It wasn’t quite a transformation, more a remodelling. Every day he thanked her, even though sometimes she
was unsure what she was supposed to have done.

Jean read up about night terrors, but didn’t discuss her research with Peter. Whenever sleep was mentioned, she felt him stiffen and so she let it go. At his flat, a high-ceilinged place
in Edgbaston, she would select CDs at random from his collection and listen to them while he cooked. She had heard of almost none of the artists and she was surprised at how fragile and brittle the
singers and recordings sounded – like people trapped on another planet. She liked that he had passions and enthusiasms she did not share, the faded, slightly bohemian feel to the place, the
framed prints that hung on every wall.

It didn’t matter whether they stayed at her place or his, the night terrors kept him awake most nights – despite her early attempts to wear him out with vigorous lovemaking. After an
attack he would remove himself from the bed and go to the bathroom. There he would wash his face, brush his teeth, shave, then head into the lounge and watch television. He’d pour himself a
drink or two and return later to the cooling bed, his body fresh with the smell of cosmetics and the alcohol.

They went on several holidays together, and were introduced to each other’s parents. The meetings were stiff and formal, though Jean’s father and Peter bonded over a shared love of
the Suffolk coastline. The two of them would sit in high, winged chairs and discuss with animation the towns of Aldeburgh and Southwold; they spoke of family holidays in cottages and caravans, the
bitter taste of Adnams ale. It was on one such occasion, after a simple lunch and before their planned walk, that Jean realized she was going to marry him. Her first marriage had been agonized
over, pinched and prodded until she was sure she was doing the right thing; but her second she decided upon without hesitation, while drinking a glass of red wine by the fire, her flushed cheeks
reflected in its brass surround.

Two weeks later, Peter arrived home to find a suitcase packed in the hallway. She was sitting on the bottom step of the stairs already wearing her coat. ‘We’re going away,’ she
said. ‘We’re going on a magical mystery tour. Come on, get showered and changed. Quick, okay?’

She drove them both to a ramshackle cottage on the seafront at Aldeburgh. He loved its odd shape, its worn-down furnishings. They arrived late and he managed to sleep through till five or so.
She woke with him and suggested they walked together down by the seafront.

‘This is the perfect start to a day,’ he said. ‘If I could, I’d live by the sea. I’d walk by it every day.’

‘We’ll do that,’ she said. ‘One day we will do that.’

That evening she cooked his favourite meal of potted shrimp followed by steak and mashed potato. They could hear the waves as they ate, and both had appetites emboldened by the
sea. In the lull before cheese and biscuits, she proposed to him just as she’d planned. In her right hand she held a velveteen box containing a simple engagement ring she’d bought from
a flea market. She asked him to marry her, and he fell silent and wiped his mouth on a linen napkin. He sipped his wine and looked at the debris of the meal in front of him. His face, crumpled and
with a small dab of sauce at the edge of his mouth, looked papery. He rapped his knuckles on the table. She felt her stomach plummet, as though she’d taken a jump from a diving board into a
recently drained pool.

‘Say something,’ she said. ‘Oh please, honey, say something at least.’

He wiped at his mouth again and put his head in his hands. He shook his head.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I can’t. I can’t do that to you.’

‘Do what?’ she said.

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I promised myself I wouldn’t do this.’

He looked away from her as he spoke. He told her he loved her very much. He told her that she had made him happier than he could ever have imagined. He told her that he never meant to let it get
this far. He told her that she gave him hope and that there was nothing he would like to do more than marry her.

‘So what is it? What?’ she said. He looked up at her.

‘I think I killed some people.’

It was the Thursday before the wedding, a little after three in the morning. Beside Jean, Peter slept peacefully. Since their engagement, decided upon after that long night in
Aldeburgh, he had slept through every night. The night terrors – a product not of genetics, but of genuine horror – had disappeared, replaced by long dreamless periods of sleep. He
could not remember such restfulness; she could not think of anything but the dreams that now plagued her.

In the recurring nightmare, she saw bodies blistered by heat, felt the air thick with the stench of flesh and hair afire. The screams and the pleas and the stretching arms, the metal melting on
belt buckles, shoes dissolving into the floor. And him, her lover, watching, somehow flame retardant and dressed in his suit, smoking a cigarette lit from the inferno around him.

That Thursday she had been woken by it again, the fifth time in the last three weeks, and had been unable to rouse Peter or go back to sleep herself. Jean looked at her fiancé, his
breathing easy and his body foetal. She put down the book she had been looking at rather than reading, then inched out of the bed. Pulling on a T-shirt with N
O
P
ROBLEM
written on the front –
a present from Jamaica – she moved into the hallway and then down the stairs. They creaked as she descended, but she no longer cared about waking him. Let him wake, she thought, let him
suffer too.

It was late summer and the air was close and muggy. She went into the kitchen and put on the kettle and opened the fridge. From a plastic container she took a block of cheese and cut a chunk off
at an angle. The kettle boiled and she made tea, which she took through to the living room. Most nights she ended up there, sitting on the sofa, blue-lit by the television. She watched talk shows
and documentaries and programmes signed for the deaf, whatever night-time fare she could find. These days, she knew so much about all manner of trivial things.

Jean turned on the television and lowered the volume. It was a nature documentary about the wildlife of Siberia. She blew on her tea and watched the programme until the commercial break. Her mug
empty, she put it on the coffee table and got up from the deep red couch and started to rustle around inside the cushions of the armchair. Somewhere, in a hollow she’d fashioned inside the
padding, there was a packet of cigarettes.

She’d taken to hiding her cigarettes in ever more elaborate, deceitful places; even though Peter didn’t even know she had started smoking again. ‘We have no secrets,’
Peter was fond of saying, which she thought a stupid, idiotic thing to say: what he really meant was that the big secret was out and that the little ones didn’t count. But for Jean the little
secrets were the ones worth keeping. Which is why she hid the cigarettes with such ingenuity.

As she scrabbled around inside the chair, she began to hope that the packet wouldn’t be there after all; that Peter had discovered them, torn them up, and thrown them away. When she found
them she counted them out, even though she already knew precisely how many there were.

Jean walked through the lounge, opened the patio doors, and sat down on the folding canvas chair. She lit a cigarette and inhaled as much of the smoke as her lungs could take. She did this every
night and often wondered whether she could die that way: asphyxiated by too much smoke taken too quickly into her lungs.

The night was still and calm. She flicked the ash from her cigarette into a small barbecue. Peter had bought it months before as a challenge to himself; but they’d only used it once. It
had not been cleaned since and stubborn pieces of charred meat remained stuck to its grill. Every time she saw it, she thought she should clean it, but she never did. Some nights she was even
tempted to pull some of the flesh off the metal and eat it. But she never did that either.

As she smoked, she tried not to think about the fire, nor think about Peter. She’d spent most of the nights since he’d told her thinking about it in one way or another. Sometimes
simply recalling exactly what he’d said. Not the main part, not what he thought he’d done, but that first sentence that cracked and splintered her life.
I think I killed some
people
.

She could hear the words crisply in her mind, recall the dampness of the rented cottage’s rooms, see him sitting at the table, his hair well styled and his sweater well pressed and that
dab of sauce still at the corner of his mouth. The softness of his voice, its soothing timbre saying something so brutal, so stark.
I think I killed some people
.

The more she thought of it, the more angry those six words made her. The non-specificity of
some people
, the prefacing of such unspeakable violence with
I think
. It made her want
to shout and scream, to beat at his chest with her balled-up fists. You think you killed some people? You think?

Inevitably then she’d imagine the dead bodies, the ash of the living cremated, the fireball whoosh of the explosion. In those first months, she did a lot of research on the fire, research
which, like the smoking, was another closely guarded secret. She read transcripts of firemen’s testimonies, newspaper reports, the official governmental inquest. Nowhere was there blame
attached; at no point did anyone say that there was someone culpable for the deaths of thirty-one people in a fire at King’s Cross Underground station. But someone’s fingers had dropped
the match that had ignited the matter below the escalator steps. Someone was responsible.

She stood up and looked over the fence into next door’s garden. It was neat and pretty, regimented flowers in beds and a well-maintained rockery. She wondered if they’d notice if she
crept onto their lawn, lay down on the lush turf and slept. It was a strange idea and one that hung heavy in her head. She wanted to sleep; she wanted all the sleep he was denying her, but instead
she took in another huge lungful of smoke.

On that evening, Peter had been drinking in a pub in Soho with his then girlfriend, Simone. They were drunk and had argued over something and nothing. On the Underground their disagreements had
become more personal. In front of an alarmed carriage, they had argued in her native French and later in English, his Galway accent increasingly loud. At Euston she ended their relationship and at
King’s Cross she danced past the crowds with Peter in pursuit. He lost her in the tunnels somewhere near the Piccadilly Line. He took the escalator and on the way up to the ticket hall struck
a match, lit an Embassy and let the match fall.
I think I killed some people
. Thirty-one people to be precise. Jean even knew some of their names.