Саймон Ингс - The Smoke

‘Just grind all that into a paste and fry it,’ I told her, pointing to a particularly knotted passage in Under the Tamarind Tree . ‘Make life simpler for yourself.’

‘But it’ll burn!’

‘It won’t burn, it’ll be full of liquid from the onion. Just toss it about in some oil until the water evaporates.’

She looked up at me with wide eyes. ‘You think so?’

‘Go and talk to Fel,’ I said. ‘She’s on her own in there. I can fix this.’

She kissed me on the cheek.

It was easy enough to handle. Stella had forgotten the rice. It was still soaking in far too much cold water. I drained half of it off, added cardamom and butter and salt, and was just sealing the pan with a sheet of foil when the back door opened and Bob and Jim came in.

‘I found him,’ Jim bellowed, putting his arms around me. ‘I found Dad, bet you can’t guess where.’

‘How’d you get in?’

‘Some pillock left the garden door open.’

I wanted Jim to be still and let me look at him: I had seen him twice in the past two years, both vanishingly brief encounters on his way through London, and none of us had received so much as a letter from him since he’d been selected for the army’s Space Force. He had just finished a month in purdah at a submarine base in the Firth of Forth, doing whatever passed for basic training in that bizarre and brand-new organisation. Tomorrow was Christmas Day and he was off by air for Woomera and the rocket construction effort there. After that, there was no telling when we would see him again. If all went well, the next time we saw him he would be on television: first Yorkshireman in space.

If Jim’s ebullience hadn’t already given him away, his breath certainly would have. ‘Good drink?’ I asked him.

‘Should have come with us, bro.’

I wrestled Jim off, one hand still steadying the rice pan. ‘Christ, you’ll have me tipping this over.’

Jim laughed and ruffled my hair.

‘How’re you doing, Stu?’ Bob’s face was flushed, maybe from the sudden heat of the kitchen, more likely from however many hours he had spent drinking with Jim.

‘Go through. Take your shoes off. There’s beers in the fridge.’

Stella appeared at the living-room door and hugged the new arrivals. Once the rice pan was sealed, I set it on a low heat, checked my watch and followed the others into the dining room.

Stella’s new dining table was very small: a find from her scavenging expeditions in search of props for DARE . She told us it hailed from the mortuary of a defunct hospital. The zinc wrapping was tarnished here and there, and you could not help but try to guess which had been the table’s head end and which the other.

Fel sat at the end of the table, Jim near her and Stella next to him. ‘Food in fifteen minutes,’ I announced, taking a seat opposite Jim. Dad sat beside me. This left the chair at the head of the table vacant for Georgy.

‘I don’t know where he can have got to,’ said Stella, finding things to fret about. ‘He said he’d be here to help.’

Fel must have asked Jim something about his work because the next thing I knew he was moving all the glasses about the table in an effort to explain the hydrodynamics of small nuclear devices.

Bob was aghast. ‘Should you be telling us any of this, lad?’

Jim laughed. ‘It’s no secret, Dad. The ship’s half-built.

You half-built it!’

Bob smiled a guarded little smile. ‘Only shift work, son.’

‘Anyway,’ said Jim, ‘I dare say if you lot had wanted, you’d have blasted off years ago and this Earth’d be riddled with holes like a Swiss cheese.’

I looked from Jim to Fel, unsure what was going on.

Jim saw me and shrugged. ‘The Bund, I mean.’

Fel smiled him a cold smile. ‘Blowing things up is not our style.’

Jim laughed and raised his beer. ‘Trusting us to do the heavy lifting, eh?’

‘ We don’t trust you to do anything,’ Fel said, holding my brother’s gaze.

No one knew how to react – no one, that is, but Jim, who met my eye and whistled his appreciation. ‘Got a live one here.’

‘Bob?’ Stella placed her fingertips on the table: a subtle call-to-order. ‘How was Betty?’

Bob met Stella’s smile with a rare smile of his own but he said nothing.

Jim filled the silence so quickly, there might not have been any silence at all. ‘I thought she looked jolly fine. Stuart?’

‘I saw her last month,’ I said. ‘She seemed – well, she seemed healthy, didn’t she, Fel?

‘God, she must have been glad you were there, Felicine!’ Jim exclaimed, thumping the table. He pronounced her name to rhyme with ‘twine’. ‘The daughter she never had.’

What that was supposed to mean, I had no idea, but Fel took it in good part: ‘How much have you drunk?’ she asked him, laughing.

‘We sank a couple, didn’t we, Dad? Christmas cheer and all that. You two should have come along.’

It occurred to me then why Jim was coming at everything from such an odd angle, exhilarated and aggressive. He was nervous. And realising this, I realised why. He was covering for Bob. Bob had once again failed to visit Betty. It must have been obvious to Fel as well: she felt for my hand under the table and gave it a squeeze.

‘When I come back,’ Jim said, ‘I expect Mum’ll be… well, I hope—’ He hesitated, finding himself suddenly on dangerous ground, and something else occurred to me: how strange all this must seem to him! He had spent most of the last year, prior to basic training with the Space Force, on a peacekeeping tour of Sri Lanka. Of all of us, he had the least understanding of what Betty was going through, and the least notion why anyone could have thought it was a good idea.

‘Well, of course,’ Stella exclaimed. She laughed. ‘Everything’ll be different in a year.’

As though her assurances were a cue, Georgy Chernoy entered the living room.

‘George! Where have you been?’ (Only Stella ever anglicised Georgy Chernoy’s name. I suppose it was a sort of endearment. I wondered what he thought of it.)

Georgy strode up to Stella’s chair and kissed the top of her head. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I could not get away.’ He took in the table, his daughter, me. ‘You must be Robert,’ he said to my father. ‘And James.’

Jim stood up, none too steadily, to shake his hand.

‘Congratulations.’ Georgy pumped his hand. ‘When do you fly out?’

‘But I only just got here,’ Jim shot back, and over laughter, ‘Tomorrow morning.’

‘And the big launch?’

Jim grinned. ‘I’d be the last to know that.’

‘Jim’s been telling us how their ship’s drive works,’ Fel said.

‘Oh yes?’

‘Did you know that the bomb-delivery mechanism is based on a Vimto dispensing machine?’

‘Yes. I did.’ This flatly, and without humour. I wondered why Georgy was trying to shut his daughter down. To Jim: ‘Well, I wish you luck with it.’

Try as he might – and I was not convinced that he was trying especially hard – Georgy Chernoy could not let go the noblesse oblige of his people, for whom such pyrotechnic adventures were, according to their conceit, quite superfluous.

‘There’s something splendidly muscular about this effort, isn’t there? Yes?’ He fished around the table for signs of assent and, ignoring their absence: ‘Here we are – in the Bund, I mean – setting off firecrackers from high-altitude balloons, spreading sails to catch the sunlight, spitting ions out the back of flameless rockets, sending up fist-sized microsatellites on pencil-thin laser beams. And here you are, shipping ruddy great pipes halfway around the Earth and threatening to nuke an entire desert so as to get a frigate into orbit.’