Саймон Ингс - The Smoke

Fel remained in shot, holding on to the pipework. The film lamps, adequate enough to illumine the dry cell, struggled to penetrate the seawater, so that Fel’s impassive expression, her apparent relaxation, her utter indifference to the water, may have simply been an artefact of poor lighting. Was she even in the water? Perhaps there was a glass wall between her and the water, just as there was a glass wall between the water and the camera. But how could that be? Surely the water had pooled around her feet? Surely I had just seen that – seen the water rise, not just in front of her, but around her? Yes. I had seen that. The impossibility of it – that she should be submerged and show nothing, and minutes later still show nothing (why on earth were they holding the shot?), impressed me. I wondered how it was done.

I was still wondering at Stella’s special effect, still impressed by its realism, as I pawed the bathroom door open and retched all my pent-up horror violently into the toilet bowl.

I wiped my mouth with toilet paper. I swilled and spat. I went back into the living room and phoned Stella. I wanted to know how she had pulled the trick off. I wanted some reassurance. I didn’t get any reply. I phoned Fel. She picked up straight away.

‘Hi,’ I said.

‘Hi. What’s wrong?’

I laughed weakly. ‘It’s that obvious?’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I’ve just been watching DARE .’

‘It’s not that bad.’

‘I’ve just been watching you—’

‘What?’

‘Drown. I’ve just been watching you drown.’

When I finally got her to understand what I was talking about, she laughed at me. ‘I held my breath, Stu. What the hell did you think?’

I couldn’t tell her. With the vividness of nightmare, the airlock sequence had realised my suspicion that Fel was advancing beyond the human. That she was changing from the woman I knew into something else. That she was leaving me.

‘I was just going to phone you,’ she said.

‘Yes?’

‘There’s some bad news.’

My heart skipped a beat. ‘Mum.’

‘What? No, Betty’s fine, don’t worry. Only Daddy and Stella. Well, they’ve decided to split up.’

‘Good God. Why?’

There was a pause.

‘Things aren’t getting any easier here,’ Fel said.

There were Christmas lights strung across the main streets of Islington. For some, the party had already got itself started:a balloon was stuck in a tree near Stella’s house, and spent firework casings lay trodden underfoot by the park gate.

With Georgy gone I had assumed Stella might dress her house for Christmas this time. There was no garland on Stella’s door and no tree in her window, though it was hard to be sure because her windows were barred on the inside by white steel concertina railings. The bell was gone from beside the garden door so I went around to the front. Stella let me in. Though it was after noon, she was still in her dressing gown. ‘I didn’t get much sleep last night,’ she explained. ‘Some boys were throwing firecrackers at my window.’

Betty was in the dining room in the basement, playing Operation . Her dexterity was almost adult. She nodded me hello but otherwise ignored me. The Process had put us at a remove hardly greater than that established already by her long absence. Would we have grown any closer had it not been for her cancers? I doubted it.

Reminded, I asked Stella: ‘Have you got any greens? I’m out.’

Stella fetched a freezer bag from the kitchen, full of unopened tubes: ‘Here. I don’t take them any more.’

‘Why on earth not?’

‘I’ve been rayed.’ And when I didn’t understand: ‘Georgy rayed me. At the Gurwitsch. I’m resistant now, or so he says. It’s a new treatment he’s been developing.’

‘That’s—’ I fumbled a green into my mouth, crunched it, swallowed it down. ‘That’s amazing.’

Stella shrugged, as if developing an inoculation against radiation poisoning were just another of her ex-boyfriend’s eccentricities. Which, perhaps, from her perspective, was just what it was.

Remembering to drop the affectionate anglicisation of his name must have taken effort. It was something she wanted me to notice.

I duly noticed it: ‘What’s happening between you and George?’

Sighing, Betty hopped down from her chair and left the room. She had been here throughout, a witness to their break-up. I could not begin to imagine how awkward that had been.

Stella sat down at the dining table and lifted Betty’s Operation game, buzzing angrily, onto the floor. She drew a tissue from her pocket and absently worked at one of the old, indelible stains in the zinc. ‘I suppose you were right, after all,’ she said. ‘I suppose the differences between us and the Bund are becoming unbridgeable.’

‘But he took you to the Gurwitsch. He’s been treating you. Why didn’t he just—’

‘What?’

‘You know. Why didn’t he make you—’

‘“One of them”?’ She shook her head. ‘He offered. He suggested it many times. But why would I want that?’

I had nothing I could say to her. For a long while now I had wanted nothing else. Of course I wanted to be ‘one of them’. A Bundist. Bright – genuinely bright, not just over-educated. Odd. Different. A match for Fel, since as I was, I was – what? A companion? A pet?

I think Stella sensed my turmoil; anyway, she squashed it flat. ‘The Bund hands out the treatments it wants to hand out, to people it wants to hand them out to. It’s a cult. It’s always been a cult.’

‘It’s certainly a business,’ I conceded.

‘It’s a cult. I honestly think I prefer those nutters causing trouble in Palestine. At least they don’t pretend to be doing everyone else favours. How is the house?’

‘The house?’

‘My house.’

She meant the house in Shropshire. ‘Oh. Good. It’s good. I hope. I mean, I hope you like it.’

‘I’ll probably just put it on the market.’ Stella sighed. She saw my disappointment: ‘Well, I did tell you not to go to all that effort, didn’t I?’

‘Yes. You did. You might still have warned me.’

‘I didn’t know I’d need the money then.’

‘Is everything all right?’

‘Everything is fine. The network wants a third season of DARE , so I need to free up some capital to tide me over next year.’

‘That’s good,’ I said, uncertainly.

‘Don’t tell Fel. The ink’s not dry and I still have to think about casting.’

I couldn’t imagine Fel losing sleep over whether or not she would get yet another chance to strut around one of my cardboard sets in a purple fright wig.

‘Does Georgy know?’

Stella woke up to what she was doing with the tissue, the pointlessness of her scrubbing, balled the tissue up in her fist and tucked it into the pocket of her dressing gown. She frowned at the stain in the zinc. ‘I’m going to have to get rid of this table. These marks don’t bear thinking about.’

I looked at it. It was a dreadful thing. ‘Where did it come from? Could you take it back?’

‘From the Gurwitsch,’ Stella said. ‘They don’t want it, they threw it out. I found it in a skip.’

It was some ungodly hour of the morning on Boxing Day. Fel was sitting up in bed with her bedside light on. She was unclothed, a sheet over her knees and a book balanced open in the shallow nook of her thighs. I had just woken out of a deep sleep. I sat up, drinking in her spare and pale body, and she held up the book to shield herself. Playing along, I bent forward and read the faded spine. She laughed at my surprise: Virgil’s Aeneid . And, closing the book, she said: ‘The old stories are the best.’