Ten Stories About Smoking (3 page)

I spent the last day in my holiday apartment listening to the shrieks of children and the admonishments of parents. I sat under the air-conditioning unit, listening intently to
every conversation, every sigh, every amplified disagreement. I heard the families leave at night, fathers and mothers sun drunk and their kids running races over the road, car horns blaring at
their stupidity. I packed at the last moment, stuffing T-shirts and shorts into my suitcase.

In the cool night air, I thought over and again about what the barmaid – Jimmy’s wife – had said when she’d collared me after leaving the bar.

‘I’m not one for blame,’ she said, ‘you make your own rotten luck in this life, I think, but Jimmy? He blames his old man for everything. He says that he only joined up
because your bloody father wouldn’t go and see him. And as far as he’s concerned if he’d not joined up then those boys would still be alive and well. He blames himself, does
Jimmy, but he blames your bloody father even more. He replays what happened every day, then has nightmares about it at night. And if that isn’t enough, if that isn’t hard enough for him
to deal with – and me for that matter – you lot keep coming back to remind him all about it.’

‘How do you mean, “you lot”?’ I said. ‘Who’s “you lot”?’

She looked at me like I was fooling with her.

‘Well you’re not the first, are you? I mean, how many more of you are there, anyway?’ She turned her back on me and didn’t wait for a response.

I flew home. A week went by and my sunburn quickly faded. I took some time off work – they said they understood – and spent my days ducking in and out of libraries
and record offices. Within a matter of a week I had identified six probable siblings – four brothers and two sisters – and there were several other potential lines of interest.

I gathered all their names, their mothers’ names and their family names, and wrote them down in notebooks, then typed up the results on the computer. It was vast, this family tree, there
were branches everywhere, twining with other branches and other trees, branches snaking off the page. It was a task bigger and more absorbing than I could ever have imagined.

Linda liked the way her brother’s driveway felt beneath her feet. Shingled and stoned, it gave a solid, satisfying crunch at every step, a sound both aristocratic and
forbidden; as though she’d stolen over a wrought-iron fence into the gardens of a stately home. She dropped her cigarette, crushed it under the heel of her boot, and looked at her watch. She
was far later than expected, but she didn’t think it mattered.

The driveway dog-legged to the right, revealing the white stucco front of The Gables. It was an impressive building. In front of the porch, three snub-nosed cars gleamed as though freshly
minted. As she passed them, she wrestled with the urge to kick stones at their fancy paintwork, or smash the wing mirrors with her small rucksack.

There was a flash in one of the windows and then Linda saw the heavy front door open. Suddenly, there was Poppy – Daniel and Christina’s six-year-old – barrelling towards her,
dressed from throat to foot in pale pink fabric. Linda put down her small bag, held open her arms and took the child’s running jump full in the midriff.

‘Auntie Linda, you’re late,’ Poppy said.

‘And you’re ugly,’ Linda replied, pulling at her pigtails.

Poppy laughed, and with great effort proceeded to drag a mock-reticent Linda towards the house. Immediately, she started to talk about her ponies and the games they’d play together, and
the dress that Daddy had bought her, and the dollies she’d named Patch, Ginger and Princess Lily. As Poppy jabbered, Linda thought it a shame she could not engender such devotion in people
her own age.

‘Hi there,’ Daniel said, leaning against the door jamb. Linda accepted his kiss lightly as Poppy chattered away, pulling on her arm like she was ringing a church bell.

‘Leave Auntie Linda alone, Poppy,’ Daniel said, rolling his eyes towards his sister. ‘Is that all your stuff in there?’ He pointed to her rucksack.

‘You know me,’ she said. ‘I always travel light.’

‘Can I show Auntie Linda my room, Daddy? Can I, Daddy? Please?’ Poppy said, and for a moment Linda was touched; the pleading look on Poppy’s face reminiscent of her
father’s when he was a boy.

‘Later, poppet,’ he said. ‘Let Auntie Linda settle in first.’ He flashed a conspiratorial smile towards Linda then bent down to Poppy’s level. ‘I tell you
what, why don’t you practise that play you wanted to show Auntie Linda? You know, the one with all your dollies.’

Poppy weighed up the idea, then ran off at pace into the darkness of the house, shouting something unintelligible to either of them.

‘She’s normally a bit quiet around grown-ups,’ Daniel said, ‘but she just loves you. When I told her you were coming she started counting down the days. When I tucked her
in last night she said: “Just one more sleep and she’ll be here!”’ He squeezed her arm tenderly, ‘You’re a hit, sis.’ When he smiled again, his face looked
jowly and older. Linda bit her bottom lip.

Daniel picked up Linda’s rucksack then rubbed his hands together. It was a familiar motion, something somehow passed along the male line of the family. She could remember Uncle Ron doing
the same thing before charring sausages and burgers on the barbecue; also their father before carving the Christmas turkey.

‘Christina’s just popped out to get some bits for tonight, so why don’t we do the tour later and go have a drink in the garden?’ he said. ‘It’s such a lovely
afternoon, be a shame to waste it, no?’

‘Sounds good to me,’ Linda said.

Linda couldn’t help but feel somehow slighted. Yes she did want a drink, and yes it was a stunning late summer’s afternoon, and no she didn’t much want to
wander around Daniel’s lavish house, but all the same, she did want to be given the same deference as the other people she imagined visiting The Gables: lawyers, landscape gardeners,
jewellery designers, those kinds of people. Christina, she was sure, would not be out buying ‘bits’ when they arrived. She would, no doubt, be dressed casually yet elegantly, handing
out flutes of chilled champagne and encouraging her guests to help themselves to the canapés on silver salvers.

She swallowed her anger and counted out her breaths. The hallway was dark, with tapestries on the walls and bare lacquered floorboards. It was still and cool, like a museum in a provincial
Belgian town, she imagined. This was a house that had a coherent, adult style; there were no posters, no Blu-Tacked concert tickets or Post-it note reminders. Though she was thirty-five – and
two years older than both Daniel and Christina – Linda felt immediately gawky and adolescent.

Her Dr Marten boots squelched on the stone flagging of the kitchen – the room longer and wider than her bedsit in Camberwell – then were quiet when they made it out onto a patio
area. A long lawn, as fiercely coloured and manicured as any bowling green, stretched out to a well-tended hedge and a five-bar gate, two chestnut ponies snuffling grass behind it. To the right was
a swimming pool, inflatable toys bobbing on its surface.

‘Please, sit,’ Daniel said pointing to one of the cushioned wooden recliners. ‘I’ll take your bag up and get you a drink. What do you fancy? Tea, coffee, wine, beer,
vodka—’

‘A beer would be fine, thanks.’

‘Which kind? I got some great stuff from a local microbrewery, or—’

‘Lager’s fine, Daniel,’ she said with a smile.

‘Right you are,’ he said, giving his hands another rub before heading inside.

Linda sat and closed her eyes. She could hear birds and the rustle of the trees, and noticed a slightly sour smell coming from her dress that no amount of Impulse was going to
mask. She felt, for a moment, that she might fall sound asleep but then a sudden snort from one of the ponies startled her. She opened her eyes and watched them buck at each other, then looked
towards the pool. The light breeze blew an inflatable chair across it, a bathing suit draped on one of its arms.

Daniel came back with the drinks and a terracotta bowl with a blue glaze. ‘For you,’ he said. ‘Still smoking, I take it?’

‘Dirty habit,’ she said, taking the cigarettes from the pocket of her jeans.

‘We’d prefer it if you didn’t in front of Poppy, though. You understand.’

‘Sure,’ Linda said, a cigarette already in her mouth. She lit it and took a sip of the beer. It tasted good, much better than she thought it would. Daniel wafted the smoke with his
hand – another tic that had survived from his teenage years. Linda tipped ash into the terracotta pot and relaxed a little. She was thankful for this concession; she had worried that
she’d be forced off the grounds, like at the hospital.

‘So,’ Daniel said, ‘how are you?’

‘I’m fine, Daniel. A bit scorched, a bit weary, but doing okay.’

‘Rolling with the punches?’

‘I don’t know any other way,’ she said. Linda saw the relief in his eyes: the negotiation of that early, difficult conversation thankfully now over. Her brother then talked at
ease about the joys of fatherhood, of the funny things that Poppy said. Linda laughed or smiled at each anecdote, though the humour was predictably lavatorial. Every so often he would remind her of
how much Poppy had looked forward to her stay; and Linda would look to the floor, flattered and still disbelieving.