Саймон Ингс - The Smoke

Stella turned to me and grinned. She had her youthful colour back, as if the air itself must be tonic. ‘What do you think?’

I had no thoughts, just a few futile and incoherent premonitions. I felt as though I had been reduced to the size of a mouse and left to fend for myself inside the toybox of a spoiled and distracted child.

Now came Honor Oak, and the hill from which Boadicea, Queen of the Britons, is said to have led her last and fatal charge against the legions of Gaius Paulinus. A cable car carried us over that, and down through modest residential streets which by pure coincidence had already been named, a good century before Medicine City was ever conceived, for the Crimean War and for the work of Florence Nightingale. We walked the length of Scutari Road and came at last to the Rye.

A breeze had picked up and across the fields children were flying kites. Dogs ran about among them, barking. Families picnicked on squares of blanket. A railed-in section of the park afforded a little shade. The flower beds were planted with red-leaved ground cover, grasses, ornamental thistles and other sculptural plants.

There was a bowling green, a café selling Italian ice creams, a playground.

‘We’ve come a long way,’ Stella said to me as we set down our coffees at a table outside the café, opposite the lake. Children ran back and forth, squealing. I couldn’t tell if they were real children this time or more of Chernoy’s medicalised infants. I nodded agreement, too tired to ask what Stella meant. She might have been referring to our journey today, or even to our involvement in the ostensibly glamorous business of television production. Perhaps she meant the life-journeys we had each taken, out of the West Riding and into the Smoke, into careers no one back home would have foreseen for us, and which among some locals were no doubt, and at this very moment, raising sneers of reverse-snobbery.

Theatre. Architecture school. Should the HMS Victory ever leave the ground, Jim would be following the most remarkable trajectory of us all. It was his adventure, if anyone’s, that would earn our family its footnote in the history books. Were we particularly gifted, particularly blessed? The way we had scattered felt more like an accident than anything else. How had a family with roots in iron and coal and labour haemorrhaged so suddenly, in the space of less than a generation, and scattered its energies on so many grand-sounding but empty projects? Plays that people no longer came to see. Bridges and buildings that machines could make better. A giant spacecraft that had yet to fly.

Fel arrived at the café laden down with laundry bags. I went to get her a drink and when I came back the table, my chair and a great deal of the decking round about were strewn with swatches and squares of material.

Fel was helping Stella design the costumes for DARE .

She cleared my chair, dumping her fabric samples unceremoniously back into the bag. The piece she and Stella were agonising over had an open, interlocking weave; it looked as if it had been made by a spider. ‘I can make this out of wire,’ Fel explained. ‘I can distort it to fit any shape, like armour. It doesn’t have to be fabric at all. It could be a sort of exoskeleton.’

‘Well.’ Stella stretched the fabric over the table. ‘It’s you that has to wear it.’

‘If we choose the colours carefully you won’t be able to tell the difference between the fabric version and the rigid one. We could pretend they were the same suit. A responsive fabric. A kind of safety garment.’

Stella liked that. ‘What else?’

Fel had been running off samples at a nearby medical fabrication lab. With a computerised loom she had created materials that looked half-mechanical, as though there were tubes running just under the weave: compression suits, Stella explained glancingly to me, for use in the vacuum of space. What interested her most, though, were the flimsy, shiny stuffs that would ultimately appear on the show as fashion wear. ‘Can you make these up?’

‘I’ve had a go,’ said Fel, doubtfully, pulling out a tabard and a microskirt made of white vinyl, each piece stamped with a bright red DARE decal. ‘I thought this might work for the crew of the submarine.’

Stella was far too busy with the fabrics to notice the glances Fel and I were exchanging. We had been seeing each other for more than three months, and I still had no clear idea who Fel was, beyond that she came from the Bund and seemed to own her own time.

I did not know what she did, and had yet to realise that among the Bund the question ‘What do you do?’ made little sense. I knew what her mouth tasted like. I knew the jewel in her tooth was a birthday present she had given herself. I knew she lived away from the Bund, pursuing an independent life in a place of her own, a studio flat near London Bridge Station with a bed that pulled out from the wall and an upright piano and a bathroom stacked with funky, off-piste perfumes, all moss and wet rope and cat piss and cigarette ash. I knew she didn’t so much sleep in a bed as in a nest of pillows and duvets and clothes and bathrobes and anything else that lay to hand, and that her blood ran so hot that she barely covered herself at night, but lay snoring on top of the heap she had made, like a young dragon. I knew she had a teddy bear called Boethius and that when she was alone, cuddling Boethius brought her consolation. I knew that she had read Boethius’s Consolations , and it was rare that I met anyone who had read what I had not. It was an effort for me not to talk about books with Fel, but I tried to hold back because I knew that the more we talked, the easier we would be with each other, and the easier we became with each other, the more we ran the risk that we would defuse whatever was driving our mouths together whenever we were alone.

I didn’t want Stella to know about us. I didn’t want it in her head that she had somehow brought us together. That my aunt was sleeping with Fel’s father was more of a family connection than Fel and I knew what to do with, and we already had a tacit understanding to treat Stella simply as a wealthy, eccentric lady of a certain age; someone for whom we did amusing favours.

This was the game we were playing with each other, the fiction we were trying to maintain.

I glanced up and saw Stella looking at me. Stella knew. Any fool would have guessed that I was smitten. Fel was naturally discreet; ‘wily’ might be a better word. But me? I may as well have worn a sign around my neck. I coloured up.

Stella was far too intelligent to say anything, though.

Fel packed up her samples and her notebook. She was staying on at the café – her father was due to meet her there for tea.

‘Give him my love,’ Stella said. ‘Tell him if I’m not home before him, I won’t be far behind.’

I wondered what Fel really thought of her father’s blousy new girlfriend. I wondered if her father had taken many partners. It was strange, thinking of him about to turn up here. He was still lodged in my mind as a celebrity. The man who had defeated death.

‘Now, Stuart, shall we go and make some use of that camera of yours?’

Stella and I said goodbye to Fel and walked north to the restored lido – one of the few structures remaining from the old Peckham. From here we worked our way back to London Bridge by taxi, on foot, and by taxi again: a three-hour zigzag in pursuit of locations, vistas, angles, and in all that time my eye hardly left the viewfinder of my camera. Stella was a tyrant when she wanted to be, and tireless, and – I had to admit it – inspiring. We did good work that day.

In the course of it, we discovered that the whole of Peckham had been transformed, all the way north to its hazy junction (razed by Zeppelin bombardments in the Great War) with Bermondsey, where the old Peek Freans and Hartley’s Jam factories had given way to pharmas, hacker labs and synbio start-ups.