Саймон Ингс - The Smoke

Betty, when I finally got her on the phone, wailed like a child, which, in an important sense, she still was. The grief of motherhood and the physiology of childhood are a heady mix.

‘She’s had to go and be sick.’

‘Stella?’

‘I’m so sorry, Stu.’

‘I don’t know what to think. I don’t know what to feel. I don’t suppose… There’s no way—? Christ, Stella.’

‘Be kind to Bob.’

‘Of course.’

‘Hang on.’ Stella left the phone. The pips sounded: I pushed in more coins. In a minute Stella was back, the tension high in her throat: ‘Is Bob there?’

‘He’s in the pub. I can go and get him, it’s just around the corner.’

‘Betty says she wants to talk to him.’

I tried desperately to think of something to say.

‘Stu.’

‘I’ll try,’ I said.

I hung up, gathered my refunded pennies and went back to the pub. Bob was sitting in the lounge bar at a tucked-away table with Billy Marsden, his wife and daughter.

‘Dad.’ I beckoned him up. I didn’t want Billy and the others to hear our conversation because I had no idea what Bob would say. For all I knew, it would be something terrible. ‘It’s Betty,’ I said. I couldn’t not tell him. I couldn’t just send him out to the call box thinking he was going to speak to Stella.

Bob simply nodded. He headed for the door. Had he understood? He had never once spoken to his wife since her rebirth. I made to go after him, but stopped myself in time. I sat in his seat and the Marsden girl reached under the table and squeezed my knee.

Twenty minutes later, Bob was still not back, so I made my excuses and went around to the call box. It was empty. I walked home and heard Bob moving around upstairs.

‘Dad?’

‘Here,’ he called, hearty enough. I climbed the stairs and looked in at his room: this room he had shared with Betty for years; the room in which Jim and I, I can only assume, had been conceived.

Bob was packing. ‘I’m borrowing your case.’

‘Dad.’

‘Betty wants me with her. She wants me in Islington.’

I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to be glad for him. I wanted to be glad for them both: Mum and Dad together again at last. But it was too much to process all at once. Had Bob forgotten what Betty was now? Had he forgotten what shape she was in? ‘I’m catching the sleeper,’ he said.

‘The sleeper will have left. Dad, wait till morning.’

‘I can get the last train to Leeds.’

‘And then what?’

‘I’ll be all right.’

He was afraid to wait, I realised: afraid of second thoughts, afraid of his own fear. Inspired to action, he was having to commit to it, like a man on a high diving board. (The incongruity of that image was enough to make me smile.)

‘Can I help, Dad?’

‘Make me a tea.’

He asked me not to see him off. He shook my hand. He did not look like an old man who had just lost his eldest son. He looked like an old man on a date. I wished him luck. Perhaps it was the wrong thing to say.

Anyway, he never got as far as London, or anything like. Once again, his fear of the new bested him. The afternoon of the next day, Stella tracked me down by phone to the solicitor’s office. She asked me when Bob would arrive. I told her I had no idea. Afterwards I was told off about receiving personal calls in the office. The next morning, early, a policeman banged on the front door, waking me. He told me I had to go and pick Bob up from Leeds. He was reasonably sober by then.

In the days that followed, Bob vanished into the knot of his workmates. They were bringing him home, paralytically drunk, each night. I didn’t know whether that was a good thing for him, or whether he wanted it or not, but I knew better than to interfere. The factory was a community that, for better or worse, took pride in looking after its own.

On top of destroying the HMS Victory , the Bund had casually stolen our airwaves, the better to show us the futility of all our hopes of leaving the planet under our own steam. The first of these outrages was unconscionable; the other, infantile. Our response, as a government and a people, was immediate. King William was evacuated to Newfoundland. Bills were passed without debate through Parliament in a frantic attempt to contain Bundist communities in London, Birmingham and Glasgow within their civic bounds. Chernoy’s Process was challenged in the courts and class actions were organised. There were demonstrations. In London and in Bradford, riots. Leeds airport was overrun and a Bundist plane was set on fire.

Bob and I shared one more Christmas together, then I got my own room, and it was as well for him that I did. The locals saw my father as a man bereaved, but they very quickly developed a different opinion about me.

The room I rented was in a house by the railway: a garret space not very different from my old bedroom, but larger, with an impressive oak double bed with a frame too high for the room. On waking, I would look out through the window at the railway and feel caught in a dream of flying.

I was paying for my room out of piecework and favours, but in March a job came up that I could take a genuine interest in, working for the council in Bradford.

On the morning of my final interview, a rock flew in through my bedroom window. Straight through the gap between the top pane and the frame – it couldn’t have been more than five inches wide – it landed on my bed.

I picked it up. A bit of clinker from the railway.

I went to the window and looked out. I couldn’t see anyone.

It was a miracle the window wasn’t broken. That had surely been the idea. If there was any trouble, the landlady was bound to ask me to leave. I didn’t know where else I could go around here that was affordable and still near my father.

An hour later, stepping cautiously over the rails to the platform for an early train to Halifax, I turned up the collar of my only good suit, afraid of who might be taking aim at me. My feet wobbled on the stones: no shortage of ammunition around here.

What, I wondered, was my offence? That I had dated a Bundist? No one here knew about Fel. Was I being punished for Betty’s choices? Even assuming word of her undertaking the Chernoy Process had got around, I’m still not convinced people here would have fully understood its transgressive implications. Which left the Smoke itself. Was my offence simply that I’d had the temerity to leave town in the first place, head for the capital, scholarship under my arm, to better myself?

That sounded more likely: the old tribal resentments given a fillip by recent headlines.

This was not a conclusion I found particularly reassuring. Petty fights are still fights. An old friend of mine lost an eye, the day before he matriculated from school, in a punch-up over a controversial goal in a friendly match between Todmorden and Littleborough. Littleborough! Pass by any factory gate in Hebden of a Monday morning and you would see them: the walking wounded of many a Saturday-night soccer battle. Shoe a town of stoppered men with steel-capped boots, add beer, and what else could you expect?

I sat counting the minutes while the train sat idle at the station and wondered what had happened to my old self – that rough-and-tumble kid who wanted to follow his brother into the army. The boy who set off stolen percussion caps to divert the course of streams. I felt as if, a long time ago, something had broken in me. I stood and pulled down the window and looked back up the wooded hillside to where, so long ago, I had watched a column of black smoke turn to white.

The flash seemed to take the whole left side of my head away. Something thorn-sharp entered my left eye. I fell back with a cry. I heard footsteps running along the platform. I cursed and turned over onto my hands and knees and tried to throw up. I stared at the grey-flecked linoleum of the carriage floor and was rewarded by the sight of two, three, four drops of blood.