Саймон Ингс - The Smoke

I lived in two worlds, and until that point I had always imagined I would be able to hold them apart: my unaccommodated life, and that part of my life that nudged up against the Bund. I had managed until now. I had remembered not to rub my father’s nose in my higher education. I had always toned things down when he was around.

I wanted him to be proud of me, but I knew not to make too much noise about all of the important things I had learned, nor opine too vigorously about political matters of which Bob, living where he did, and doing what he did, could not possibly know anything.

But the stretch between life in the West Riding and life in London was as nothing to the chasm the Chernoy Process was opening up between the unaccommodated and the Bund, and for the first time, I felt myself tear. I loved Fel, and I loved my father, but as time went on and the world continued to change, playing out with a cold logic the speciations triggered by Gurwitsch’s ray, I could see that I might be forced to choose between them.

We none of us visited Betty very often during her pregnancy. And this was no tragedy, since day by day there was less of her to visit. By the autumn, when we were carrying umbrellas to Ladywell and splashing along gravel paths from tent to tent, it was impossible, when we got to her gazebo, for us to glimpse the oh-so-precious core one likes to imagine lies at the root of a human self. Betty’s body alone remained. That and a wrapper of words and associations unbound by anything you could call consciousness.

Betty’s tent was sagging by then, its crimson canvas faded in streaks to a fleshy pink. Mildew grew in the corners and its seams bled in the rain. There was mud trodden into the rugs around the couch, and things living under the weave, and the tin lamps scattered round about, which had lit Betty’s confinement from beneath like a Victorian nativity scene, had tarnished and dented, and many had ceased to function. By then, Betty was spared the sight of this dilapidation. The stand of blade-like grasses had receded back into the earth, but now her head was smothered by hordes of silver bees. It was a sight familiar enough by then to make my last visit, at the end of November, easier than perhaps it ought to have been. Not very charged with emotion at all, in fact – it was as though I had already lost her. When I squeezed her hand for the last time, her fingers found mine and yet I knew, deep in my heart, that this was merely an autonomic response, and that she was consumed. I stared at her swollen belly. Its late fecundity was still disturbing to me: a youngish belly parasitising on an old woman. An unnecessarily bitter way of looking at the Chernoy Process, but given Betty’s medical history, how could I think of it differently?

Oblivious to my grim metaphor-making, Betty hurtled towards her triumphant rebirth. At Stella’s request, the clinic sent us regular video reports. Through them we sensed her belly swelling day by day, and heard the bees swarming in and out of her mouth and nose in pursuit of strange honey, reading her mind even as they burned away her brain.

The clinic controlled every nuance of this process, including the moment of death. For Betty’s demise, they picked Christmas Day: the very day the family were meant to cheer Jim off to Woomera.

Stella’s house in Islington stood on the corner of Inglebert Street and Myddelton Square. It had an impressive front door, but the easiest way in was by the garden. I pressed the bell and after a long shivery moment the side door – set in a high, lilac-topped brick wall – unlatched itself without buzzing. I let Fel through first. Though much of the planting had died back, the garden still felt overgrown. I gathered Fel to me and kissed her in the shadow of the long-neglected apple tree. Laughing softly, she pushed me away and I nearly toppled over a planter moulded in the shape of a classically proportioned human head. I took her hand and led her, more by feel than by sight, along a narrow brick path to the top of a spiral of slippery iron stairs.

Light from the basement dining room lit our way. The kitchen door was ajar. From it spilled a current of warm air, heavy with asafoetida and cumin. Stella, who had never cooked for Fel before and who claimed never to have done more than spiralise a few vegetables for Georgy (‘We always eat out’) was attempting a feast compatible with the Bund’s strictures on diet. There was no trace of Christmas in her cooking, no decorations in the windows, no sign of cake anywhere. I put a brave face on things but it had somehow slipped my mind that Christmas was not universal. I was as disappointed as a child, though grimly determined not to let it show.

‘Come in, come in,’ Stella harried. ‘Don’t let the warmth out. No, don’t shut the door, leave a gap, we won’t be able to breathe.’

‘How are you doing, Stella?’

‘Have you come straight from Cripplegate?’

‘Pretty much,’ Fel said.

‘Drinks. Would you like a drink?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘I’ve got juices, Rose’s Lime, Vimto.’

Fel laughed.

Stella’s smile was uncertain. ‘You all drink Vimto, don’t you? At least, Georgy does.’ She shot a look at me.

‘It’s fine, Stella. They do all drink Vimto. It’s practically a religion.’

‘Do you have a beer?’

Stella blinked at Fel. ‘Of course.’

‘Fel drinks alcohol.’

‘Oh.’

‘And Vimto,’ said Fel. ‘But a beer would be lovely.’

‘Stuart, can you go and get Fel a beer from the fridge next door?’

I slipped off my shoes and stowed them under the bench just inside the back door. I crossed the dining room to the heavy, lime-green fridge-freezer. The room was nothing like I remembered. Stella had it fitted out with subfloor heating under marble, and a set of wilfully eccentric pieces from Portobello Road Market had taken the place of the old cupboards. This evening, in preparation for the gathering, the room was all lit up with tea-lights and candles. It looked like Stella was trying too hard. I returned to the tiny galley kitchen with Fel’s bottle of Pils. ‘Is there an opener?’

Fel, recognising the brand, took the bottle, screwed off the cap and stuck her tongue out at me.

‘Now, Felicine, do go and sit down. Stuart, give me a hand.’ Stella thrust a handful of coriander at me. Some of it dropped on the floor. ‘Here,’ she said, pulling a chopping board down and over the sink: the fit was precarious but there was no other surface to use. She had already taken the dining table out of action with place settings and glasses for Vimto and wine. ‘Can you manage there?’ She fished about in an open drawer and fetched out a mezzaluna. ‘As fine as you can.’

‘A knife would be better. I need one hand to steady the board.’

She found me a knife too small for the job; I sawed away at the stuff in my fist, pressing down to keep the board in place.

‘Oh dear,’ said Stella, gazing at the mess her cooking had made of the kitchen. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’

‘It all smells fantastic.’

‘Everything smells fantastic when it starts to burn.’

‘There. Is that fine enough? Good. Now, what else is there to do?’ Having got through that labour with my fingers still intact, I was game for anything.

Because the Bund only ever ate meat of its own devising – vegetal meat, efficient, sterile and relatively homogenous – Stella had elected to stick to vegetarian food. She was not a bad cook, but she was out of practice and the recipes she had chosen – I read them over her shoulder out of books with titles like The Incredible Spice Wunderkammer and Adventures on the Cardamom Route – had far too many stages to them.