Саймон Ингс - The Smoke

She was waiting for me. ‘You’re supposed to be listening to my dad.’

I took this in. Chernoy was her father? Then she was a Bundist. ‘I thought you were a painter or something.’

‘Why can I not be?’

I thought about this. ‘Not with those nails.’

She lifted her hand and looked at them: impossible to tell in this light whether her nails were black or red. ‘Perhaps I brush up well.’

I walked on, hoping she would follow. The path widened and she came to walk beside me. I slowed down, conscious of her bare feet on the stones. ‘Unless you don’t use paint,’ I said. ‘Being what you are.’

‘What would I use? Being what I am.’

‘Light. Plasma. Solidified air.’

‘You’re funny. What else?’

‘Dad’s rays, maybe. I reckon you spend your days sculpting living forms for new natures, on this and other worlds.’

‘Did he really say that?’

‘Yup.’

In the garden’s centre there was an oval bed of carefully topiaried evergreen shrubs. She said, ‘This is a garden for people who don’t like nature, isn’t it?’

‘I think that’s the point.’ With a sweeping gesture, I took in the town below the castle, the railway, the foggy effulgence that was London. ‘Be glad there are such things as gardeners. Out there it’s chaos, haven’t you heard? The wasteland.’

‘And there was I thinking you were a romantic.’

‘Really?’

‘I meant in the intellectual sense.’ She turned to the castle. Her face, lit by distant windows, was as grey and fragile as paper. ‘So. You’re not a nature lover.’

I thought about the West Riding, my narrow upbringing there, how my father’s love had straitjacketed me, and how glad I was to get out. And at the same time, how much I missed weekends fishing with him in the fast-flowing brooks above the town, and how bitterly I regretted my brother James’s disappearance into the toils of military security. We used to go walking about the moors until…

I might have touched a dental cavity with my tongue, the shock was so sudden, the pain so sharp. I covered my confusion as best I could. Hands in pockets, surly shrug: ‘Nature has its moments.’

‘Dad’ll sort it out.’

‘I’m sure he will.’

‘There will be order. Fel.’ She extended her hand. Her nails on the back of my hand were cool and sharp, like the edges of teaspoons.

‘Stuart.’

She smiled. There was something on her front tooth. It glittered. ‘And I don’t paint.’

‘I don’t paint, either. We have that in common.’

‘Let’s leave it at that.’

‘We’ll prolong the mystery.’

‘Only you buttonholed La Cosgrave and sat with her all evening, so I assume you’re one of her harem.’

‘I’m her nephew.’

She looked at me. ‘Really?’

‘This makes you and me practically related. From how she tells it.’

‘God, don’t, she’s worse than he is.’

She appeared easy with the idea that her father was sleeping with an actress. I wondered what had happened to her mother. ‘How do you get on with Stella?’

‘Not very well at first. Now she’s roped me into this television project of hers.’

‘ DARE ? She told me about that.’

‘Every week I arrive at a small film studio in Shepperton, West London, in a gold car with batwing doors.’

‘Star treatment, then.’

‘That’s the title sequence, silly. Personal assistants with big hair saunter past me in hotpants.’

‘Several flash you a leer.’

‘Careful.’

‘Trust me to know my aunt. What’s the film studio about?’

‘It’s a cover: behind the glitz and tinsel of Shepperton lie the central headquarters of a surreptitious supra-governmental organisation dedicated to the defence of the planet.’

‘The Desk of Abominable Rectal Examination.’

‘Or something. Don’t interrupt.’

Beyond the formal garden was a grove of trees, and a narrow path between ferns and steps down to a pool, and a waterfall splashing, and an artificial cave behind the waterfall, and in the darkness I kissed her, and her hands moved across my back, and she opened her mouth to me, and she tasted of berries and all the concentrated juices of the summer. (Only later did I remember: Vimto.) The thing on her tooth was meant to be there. It was a jewel, set in the enamel, reflecting light that, given where we were, hidden from the castle and its windows, could only have come from the Moon.

Since any Bundist, staring at a screen (and when did they ever do anything else?) could follow any number of live video feeds transmitted by machines already anchored on the Moon, already digging, mixing and building, it was and remains a puzzle why any of them found Stella’s television show worth their investment. DARE : the glacially paced saga of men and women on a fictional moonbase plagued by a perpetual clothing shortage.

And this, Punch tittered, came as no surprise since the rockets necessary to supply the moonbase were themselves fictional.

DARE ’s world was one powered by gigantic chemical rockets of the sort that had, one after another throughout my childhood (eager ear pressed to the radio), come to spectacular grief in the deserts of Woomera. No doubt the art of sending payloads into orbit by rocket would be mastered eventually. But in the Bund – that peculiar ethnic combine in frozen, far-distant Birobidzhan, Lenin’s Siberian homeland for the Jews – a new technology had been born.

The Bund used balloons to lift small payloads into the stratosphere, then gently accelerated them into orbit using the same proprietary mechanism that allowed the Bund’s aircraft to land vertically on any square of level ground.

The payloads their technology could handle were light indeed – just a few pounds, far lighter than any living human being. Steadily, however, their technology had amassed in orbit, constructing itself out of parts, so that Bundist machines were even now scuttling over the surface of the Moon.

Woomera hoped to leapfrog the Bund’s lunar ambitions with their planet-hopping HMS Victory . And if, God willing, the Victory flew, then the present would diverge even more sharply from Stella’s imagined future of aeroplane-sized space shuttles and orbital docking platforms.

At least Stella had the sense not to put a date to this redundant future of hers. She gave me a draft of her pilot script to read over the summer holidays. When I handed it back to her with proofreader’s scribbles, I teased her about her concept. She countered, ‘Who says there can’t be more than one future?’ This with the touching melancholy of a girl who has asked for a puppy and a kitten.

Though I knew my aunt and her reputation well enough to distrust her performed naivety, I did think at first that DARE was most likely a mere vanity project. I couldn’t imagine the show ever getting made. I couldn’t imagine who would want to watch it. But if it gave Stella, in the autumn of her career, the sense that she was breaking new ground, learning a new skill, exploring a new medium, or however you want to put it, then where was the harm?

Georgy Chernoy, I had assumed, was bankrolling his lover’s project, though his name never appeared on the project’s paperwork, not even as one of the show’s more-than-a-dozen executive producers. I do know he arranged the permits necessary for Stella to film south of the Thames, in the purlieus of Medicine City. One bright August morning, when I should have been working through my second-year reading list, I went, armed with a camera, to help Stella to scout locations for her series.

It was my first visit to Medicine City, and for all the press that had greeted the project, both gushing and hostile, I was quite unprepared for what I found there. It felt as though the tram trundling us from London Bridge Station to Peckham Rye were slipping us through theatre flats into an entirely different reality. A weak enough commentary, since this was more or less exactly the impression the City’s designers had been aiming at.