Саймон Ингс - The Smoke

‘Is your point,’ Georgy asked, acidly, ‘that these hooligans are trying to be affectionate?’

I felt a tug at my hand.

I looked down to find Betty looking up at me. ‘I want to go pee,’ she said.

I was confused. ‘Can’t you—?’

She tugged at her groin. ‘These bloody poppers are impossible.’

‘Oh,’ I said. I led her out of the room.

She ignored the bathroom and led me to the front door. ‘I can’t open this,’ she said.

‘You want to go outside?’

‘I want to get you outside.’

‘What have I done?’

‘Given vent to your advanced education. Open the bloody door.’

I turned the lock and followed her out. On the top step, she took my hand and turned me around. ‘Look.’

A six-pointed star had been daubed over the door in red paint. Since the door was painted red anyway, this didn’t look nearly as bad as it might have done.

‘They weren’t the brightest,’ said Betty. ‘I think they wanted it to look like blood.’ Her voice was thready and raw. Even the Process couldn’t tune immature vocal cords to adult use.

I had to ask: ‘What do you think brought this on?’

‘You mean, “What did we do wrong?”’

‘You know that’s not what I mean.’

Betty shrugged: another oddly adult gesture. ‘Maybe someone spotted me. Maybe someone realised what I am and didn’t much like what they saw.’

I said nothing. What Betty was suggesting was certainly possible. Were feelings running so high against the world’s still pitifully few undead?

‘How’s James?’

Only Betty ever called Jim by his full name. It was one more proof that my mother really was residing in that crisp, fresh, infantile frame, and the realisation, as usual, dropped the temperature of my blood by a couple of degrees. I recalled how I’d felt when first confronted with her: the recidivist urge I’d had to get rid of this monstrous thing. This impostor. This ‘child’. If her son had felt that way, how could anyone be surprised if strangers, liquored up and fed fright stories by the cheap papers, felt the same way? Naive or not, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the anti-Semitism that agitated Georgy so was no more than a desperate and inept scrabbling for vocabulary, and that these hatreds were a new beast masquerading in old clothes.

‘We don’t hear from Jim much,’ I said.

Betty skipped down the steps, stopped at the gate, and skipped up them again. If this was her way of allaying the suspicions of passers-by – just a little girl playing on some steps, nothing to see here – then it was ill-judged. Physically she looked only about two years old.

‘No letters?’

‘Sometimes. I’m pretty sure they’re being dictated.’

Betty paused on the steps. ‘I wonder if James knows he’s picked a side.’

‘A side.’

‘In the war.’

‘Oh. The war . That.’ I said, with sledgehammer irony.

‘Oh, Stuart.’ Betty sighed and flopped onto the top step, exhausted by her game. ‘Do try and take your head out of your arse.’

I laughed, as who would not, barracked by a child? But Betty’s attention had been caught by three youths who had come to linger at the corner opposite the house. One leaned against park railings, watching us. The other two seemed to be paying us no mind. One was fighting to light his cigarette in the breeze. The other, with his back to us, had a baseball cap pulled low over his face.

I leaned towards Betty: ‘Is that them, do you think?’

Betty stood up, arms folded. ‘Let’s go in.’

We found Stella alone in the kitchen.

‘Where’s Fel?’

‘Upstairs with Georgy. No, don’t go up.’ Stella rattled the dishwasher shut. ‘He’s in one of his moods.’

‘Can I give you a hand?’

‘It’s all done. God!’ Stella picked a dish towel up off the floor and threw it onto the counter. ‘I am so sick of clearing up.’

Given their resources, it had not occurred to me that Stella might be feeling the weight of a domestic burden. But little Betty’s arrival must have ushered in a dramatic change of pace for her. And from the times I had met him, I was confident Georgy was not a man to look after himself. He had that preppy, over-mothered quality. Not one to keep the laundry in check, was my guess. Not adept in the stacking of dishwashers.

Fel came into the room. She had been crying. She held my eye long enough that I knew not to ask any questions. Betty went over and took her hand, and though Fel smiled and gave her hand a returning squeeze, nothing came of it: no talk, no game.

‘Is it time we were going?’ I asked.

Fel nodded.

‘Stella, call us any time. Is Mum going to be all right?’

‘We’ll be fine.’

‘Any time.’

‘Yes. Thanks.’

Fel and I bent down and took turns to kiss the top of Betty’s head. We left through the front door. Evening was drawing in. The boys lingering near the house had wandered off; there was no one on the street.

I said, ‘Let’s walk along the canal a bit. We can get a bus from the Roman Road.’

Fel followed where I led, without enthusiasm. We met the canal at the southern end of the tunnel, where it emerges from its underground passage of Islington. We picked our way down leaf-slimed steps to the towpath. It was a bright night. Most of them were, since the Bund had begun to light the Moon. We glimpsed it through damp, bare branches: a new moon, illumined by the lamps newly lit on its surface. Like this, it hardly seemed a solid thing at all: more a scaffold of lit strings stretched across a small, circular void.

‘Mum thinks there’s going to be a war.’

‘Is that what she says?’

‘She reckons the Victory ’s a warship. I don’t know where she gets this shit.’

‘My dad. Upstairs he was telling me much the same thing.’

‘Really?’ I was disconcerted. I had assumed Betty had been listening to the local phone-in shows. Maybe they both had. ‘Georgy buys into this idea?’

‘Daddy just had death threats daubed over his garden wall.’

I had no reply to that. ‘What did he say to you?’

Fel did not reply.

The roads running parallel to the canal descended slowly till the only thing separating the towpath from the road and its council housing, the bricks curdling under bright orange sodium lamps, was a low chain-link fence. Houses like these, I thought, were likely to be my only mark upon the world, and then not for long. The economies of the Bund were ungainsayable, and the whole city would be a Bund construction in time. Rage towards this future, though ugly and to be deplored, was not an unnatural response. ‘We should get out of here,’ I said.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I mean we should get out of London altogether.’

‘Are you so frightened?’

‘It’s not a question of being frightened,’ I said, ‘it’s a question of being expected to take sides in a conflict that as far as I can see is entirely fatuous.’

We walked in silence. Beyond the estate were retail parks, more housing and, as we neared the Roman Road, the iron fences and towering plane trees of Victoria Park.

Fel said, ‘My mother rejected the Bund. Did I ever tell you this?’

‘You’ve never told me anything about your mother.’

‘She was Moldovan. Her family were boatmen before the War. Farmers before that. Peasants. Not thinkers. The last people you would ever expect to make a stand over an idea. When she left the Bund, she tried to take me with her to Palestine. I was too little to remember. I’m told that when we reached the Mandate, the authorities tore me off her and put me on the first boat home. I do think I remember Daddy waiting at the dock as we sailed into Tilbury. My mother died a year later during a typhus outbreak in Jerusalem. I have no idea why she suddenly decided to cling to the old faith, and it’s hopeless asking Daddy, all he ever does is quote from his own speeches. The debt we owe future generations. The promise of technology. Maybe my mother embraced Jehovah as the only voice strong enough in her head to contend with Daddy’s.’