Саймон Ингс - The Smoke

I kissed her. She touched my face. ‘Go back to sleep,’ she said.

I don’t know how much later it was but when I woke again, I found the bed empty. The sheets were cold. The room was in darkness. I turned on the light. I felt certain that there was someone in the room with me. Someone behind me. Someone hiding out in the corner of my eye. I got out of bed and went to the window. The Moon was rising behind the flats of the Barbican. It was a very different Moon from the one I had seen with Fel just a couple of weeks earlier. It was a new Moon, bright with artificial light. The light was spread unevenly over the Moon’s surface, gathering in streams, knots and pools which, to the informed observer, might well have echoed the geographic features of the Moon itself. At a glance, however, the far stronger impression was one of regularity: off-kilter lines of longitude and latitude gridded the Moon’s sphere.

I thought of bacteria and bell jars. I thought of clocks and curves. I thought of the exponential function. The HMS Victory would have to hurry if it was to land the first living people on the Moon. Even then, their efforts would only be token. The evidence was shining there above our heads: whole Bundist cities were rising from the regolith, empty and bright and inviting. Some people found it strange that the Bund, for all their activity on the Moon, had built no rockets worth the name, no spaceships, no Space Force. But it was not the way of the Bund to waste time on a journey. To them, the destination was everything. I had been to Ladywell. I could guess well enough the means by which the Bund would one day settle the Moon – if indeed it had not already begun. I wondered which of those lights up there were hospitals.

I heard Fel in the living room, turning over playing cards. I slipped on a dressing gown and went to join her. She was sitting on the floor, laying down cards, gathering them up. She was playing Set.

If no set can be found in the twelve-card array laid out at the start of a game of Set, three more cards are added. The odds against there being no set now increases from 33:1 to 2500:1. 1080 distinct sets can be assembled from the deck. Though there is no such thing as a ‘good’ card, or a ‘good’ pair of cards (each of the 81 cards participates in exactly 40 sets, and each pair of cards participates in exactly one set), some players have hypothesised that the ratio of no-sets goes up as sets are removed from the array.

Fel paid no attention to me. She was focusing on the cards. She played too fast for my eye to follow. In the space of two minutes she had ordered the whole deck, leaving three discards. She gathered them up, shuffled and began again.

I said, ‘Why did you ever play me at this?’

She saw me and put down the cards.

‘You always won. But you made it look hard.’

She shook her head.

‘Yes you did.’ I came and sat opposite her. ‘You made it look as though it was a game worth us playing.’

She gazed at the cards. ‘I liked playing this with you.’

‘Why?’

‘It was fun. Playing you.’

‘Humouring me.’

She shook her head. ‘If that’s what you think.’

‘What else am I to think?’

It was a stupid question. A mean question. She was right not to answer it. There were tears in the corners of her eyes.

I said, ‘What else did we do together that was like this? By which I mean: totally fucking pointless?’

‘Not pointless.’

I wish I hadn’t raised my voice. I wish I’d had at least that much sense. ‘Well, what would you call it?’

She stared at me, the way you search a wall for a door that isn’t there. ‘Love,’ she said.

That shut me up.

She said: ‘That’s what we do together. That’s the point of it. That’s why it’s worth doing.’

It wasn’t that I disbelieved her. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand. But we had started to talk of ourselves in the past tense and it was too late trying to change. ‘I know you’ve been slumming it with me.’

‘Oh, for crying out loud.’

‘Well, you have!’

‘According your friend Stan bloody Lesniak I have.’

I hadn’t expected that. ‘What?’

‘Your friend Lesniak. He’s shared his important thoughts about our relationship in his fucking student rag. I thought you’d seen.’

‘I don’t read Responses – I didn’t even know it was still running.’

‘He’s had a fine old go at us. In fiction, but it’s pretty bloody obvious who he’s talking about.’

That took the wind out of my sails. It made my blood run cold to think that Stan had so easily identified the breaking point in our relationship; worse, that he was actually finding something entertaining in it all. Was our being together so obviously unworkable? Was Stan the only one of our friends to be raising his eyebrows at the thought of us? I doubted it.

‘I didn’t know,’ I said. ‘Anyway, what’s it got to do with him?’ I wanted all of a sudden to paper over the cracks, to heal what was broken, to withdraw every complaint.

She gathered the cards up from the floor, split the deck in two and put it back in its box.

‘What does it matter?’ I said. ‘His readership can’t number more than a couple of dozen.’

‘All our friends read him. All your friends, that is.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘When was the last time we went out with friends?’

‘We can do that.’

‘Not now we can’t.’

I gave her a minute to calm down. ‘What does he say? Exactly?’

‘Read it yourself. Only I threw it away.’

I tried not to smile. ‘Good,’ I said. Then: ‘Do you want to come back to bed?’

She shook her head.

I took her hand and led her to the sofa. We sat together, intimate but not touching. We had not sat like that before. It felt very grown up.

We both knew what this was. Knowing it, we managed to be kind to each other.

She said: ‘I know people, they get a lot out of having a kid. They get a different kind of relationship out of it. Satisfaction. A lot of fun. Being stuck in their little monster’s perpetual present – it makes them young again, in a way. Do you know what I mean?’

‘I know what you mean.’

‘But you don’t feel it.’

‘No.’

‘You like the life we have. The music, the books. You can work. We go out together in the evenings. It’s good for you. It’s what you want.’

‘Yes.’

It was the worst possible moment I could have chosen to be honest. Sometimes the words have to come before the feelings. You may not mean them, but that doesn’t make them untrue. They are a kind of promise to yourself. A challenge to yourself. And I failed that challenge. Even at the time, sitting there beside her as her tears came, and me there feeling so very sad, so very noble that I had managed to be honest, I knew that I had failed. ‘In time—’

‘What time?’ She got up off the sofa. She pointed out of the window. She screamed at me: ‘ There is no fucking time! ’

I looked where she was pointing, but there was nothing to see. Only the Moon.

She said: ‘I’d better go.’

Returning in the new year to the West Riding, to the valley, the furnaces and all those narrow streets, I decided to move back in with my dad for a while. Though Betty had left him years before, Bob was feeling especially lonely now that she had passed away. And despite Stella’s best efforts, her unwelcome letters and even less welcome day visits, he refused to let her reconcile him to the idea that there was another Betty waiting to see him, and talk to him, and reminisce with him over past happiness. Death was death to Bob: a boon companion he refused to abandon.