Саймон Ингс - The Smoke

The moral to all this did not need spelling out: the sides choose you.

‘We could go to Shropshire,’ I said. ‘Stella doesn’t use her house there. It needs someone to look after it.’

‘What would be the point of that?’

‘We could do what your mum tried to do. We could try to lead a normal life. You keep saying that’s what you want. Would you like a normal life with me?’

The look she shot me revealed how much she hoped for, and how uncertain she was that I would commit.

‘Nothing’s off the table,’ I said, careless and (strange how the feeling had crept up on me) desperate. ‘Absolutely nothing.’

If that had been true, I would have been prepared to utter the word ‘baby’ out loud. But some calculating part of me still clung on.

‘Let’s have a normal life,’ I said.

The smell was overpowering. A yeasty, cheesy, sour stench.

Fel stared into the dark of the hall. ‘What is that?’

I felt for the light.

Stella’s Shropshire cottage was infested with chickies. We could hear them scuttling about behind the furniture. Upstairs they thumped and bumped their way into hiding. They were as big as children but had the timid instincts of mice.

The carpets downstairs were smothered in scraps of paper. Every book in the place had been torn to pieces and chewed up for nest materials. The flock had been pulled out of the living-room sofa through rents in its covers. There was a foul-smelling stain in the corner of the living-room ceiling, so it was easy to guess where in the house the chickies went to relieve themselves.

Fel gazed about her at the ruin: ‘How is this even possible?’

‘The neighbours must be away.’

‘Jesus.’ She fished out her glass slab of a phone. Naturally there was no signal. ‘Where’s the land phone again?’

‘Over there. Who are you going to call?’

‘The firemen, of course.’

The fire brigade would bring exterminators. ‘It’s not that bad,’ I said.

Fel dialled. I came over and, gently, took the receiver out of her hand. ‘It’s not that bad. Let me deal with it.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘Let me assess the damage. If we call the fire service, Stella’s insurance premiums will go up.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘We can go to Ludlow and find a hotel. Give me tonight to assess the damage and if necessary we can call the fire brigade in the morning.’

Fel spotted the stain on the ceiling. ‘Oh, God.’

‘Let’s find you a nice hotel.’

By the time I got back to the house, it was after eleven. The rooms were silent. Perhaps the chickies had already evacuated. I doubted it. I went into the kitchen. The radio on the windowsill was tuned to a music channel. I scanned for a talk show and turned the volume as high as it would go. Human voices were a more reliable deterrent. Use music and you were as likely to get chickies dancing as running away.

The player in the living room had no radio but I found a cassette of Third Kingdom , a popular if rather overwrought radio drama that imagined the state of continental Europe had Germany’s most notorious post-war chancellor not choked on that grape.

I went upstairs, letting the din on the ground floor do its work. Upstairs was far worse. There was a nest in the main bedroom, extending from the end of the bed and covering the window. It was made in the main of plastic waste which they must have dragged from fields above the cottage: fertiliser and feed bags, tarpaulin, bubble wrap. It was held together by stuff that had been chewed up and urinated upon to form a smelly cement. God knows what else had gone into it. Fabric. Paper. Bits of carpet. I fetched a broom out of the upstairs closet. I poked it into the nest. There was no sound. I wiggled the broom handle and heard the delicate interior crumble. The nest appeared to be empty.

I went through the hall, clapping and shouting. Nothing I did felt particularly effective, but I had to try something. Ever since the episode on the moors, I had found the idea of doing violence towards the chickies unconscionable. This sounds like a reasonable attitude, but I am afraid it wasn’t. Saving chickies where I could was not a moral imperative with me, or anything in which I could take pride. It was more on the order of a superstition. A childish taboo. Tomorrow, Fel would insist I saw sense and called the fire brigade, and then it would be too late for them.

The study door was shut and obstructed from the inside. I pushed it open enough to edge through into the room. A blanket had been pulled from the daybed under the window and used to block the door. The smell in here was extraordinary. Warm milk and fresh-baked bread. Though far too powerful to be pleasant, it shared nothing with the sour, blocked-drain smell downstairs.

Most everything had been pulled off the shelves and out of the cupboards and spread over the floor: clothing, paper, also the balsa sheets and knives and clothes pegs and tubes of glue I had been using to fashion set designs for DARE . I scuffed through the mess to reach the work table. Bizarre to find my notebook there. The phone and lamp had been pulled off and dangled by their wires over the table edge. But the book sat squared to the edge of the table as though set there for me to read. I picked up the chair and put it back on its feet. I sat and opened the notebook.

It was as I had left it. What else had I expected? I flicked through the pages, one at a time, past my last, abandoned doodle – a sketch of the aliens’ lunar beachhead – and through to the end of the book. The pages were blank. As they surely had to be. And yet I was disappointed, as though denied some revelation. I stood up and, from force of habit, rolled the chair in under the table.

The chair legs hit something soft: something which shifted in response to the impact. I pulled the chair out and knelt down. Under the table I found an old coat of navy-blue felt. There had once been hi-vis patches sewn on its back and elbows, and there were still tattered lines of the bright stuff fastened to the felt; the rest had been torn or eaten away. The coat slumped and shifted. I reached under the desk and pulled it out by the collar. Little hands closed over mine. I jerked back. From over the top of the coat a face appeared. The chickie was very young: practically newborn. It was still blind. Dark jellies moved behind its yet-to-open, tissue-blue eyelids. It opened its mouth in a yawn. I stared down its pale, pearly throat. It raised its head, extending its neck, begging for food. I stood up and felt in my trouser pockets for something to give it. My fingers closed around a ball of something. I pulled it out. How long the corn dolly had been languishing in my pocket, I could not remember. Anyway, it had come entirely to pieces: now it was just a handful of grass tangled up with short lengths of red ribbon. The infant chickie reached out for the thing. I dropped the mess in its hands. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. At least, I remember saying something absurd.

Outside the room, somewhere in the house itself, perhaps, the chickie’s parent would be scavenging for food. I didn’t want to get caught between them so I left the room, closing the door behind me.

The scent of the room seemed to follow me into the hallway. I felt overloaded and unclean and, in spite of myself, aroused. I looked into the bathroom. The toilet was blocked and in the corner between the toilet bowl and the window was a pile of scat. I went back downstairs and through to the kitchen. I found the key to the back door and let myself out. The porch light snapped on automatically: absurd that this light should still be working when the house as a whole was so evidently broken. Like windscreen wipers clicking back and forth on a wrecked car. I climbed damp, leaf-strewn stone steps to the first lawn. Beyond it lay blackberry and gooseberry bushes; grown out of trim, they suggested the beginnings of a fairy tale: a thicket of thorns.