Саймон Ингс - The Smoke

‘No,’ Stella said. ‘Not since you left London.’

‘She’s not been in touch?’

‘No.’

‘I thought maybe she’d been to see Betty.’

There was an awkward pause.

‘It’s all right, Stella,’ I said. ‘Has she been round?’

‘A couple of times. But it was strange without you. I think Betty gave her a hard time.’ She laughed.

‘It was me that left,’ I said.

‘You don’t say? Idiot.’

‘Thanks, Stella.’

‘Well.’

I asked Stella to call round at the flat in the Barbican, but there was never anyone in. ‘You could always phone Georgy,’ she said. She gave me his number.

So I called him, and what a weird conversation that was. No ‘I’m sorry to hear about your mother.’ No ‘My commiserations for your loss.’ I got the strongest impression that he was afraid of me. At any rate, afraid.

‘So you can’t help me.’

‘I’m sorry, Stuart.’

By now, I was furious with him. ‘You’re telling me you don’t know where your own daughter is.’

‘I know exactly where she is. My problem is I cannot begin to tell you.’

‘What? You think I would hurt her? Is that who you think I am?’

‘I mean what I say, Stuart. Literally, I cannot begin to tell you. You would not understand.’

‘Fuck you,’ I said, and slammed down the receiver.

It was clear enough that Georgy was not going tell Fel about Betty’s death. More: that Fel was in a place where she’d not hear the news from anyone else. What the hell was happening with her? This on top of everything else I was handling – the mourners, a sandwich supper in the Arms, my dad. All I wanted to do was think about my mum. But which mum? Even that had been made impossible for me. Was it the formidable and distant woman who had borne me I was supposed to mourn, or the charming and obstreperous child? The pattern of my feelings had been bent so out of true by Georgy’s therapy, I could only keep returning to the one solid, material fact any of us had left to cling to – the horror of her unexpected and violent death. I had terrible, disgusting nightmares, perhaps because it was only in sleep that I was finding freedom enough to try and untangle my feelings. Spending time with Bob helped, I think. He showed me old photographs. My heart ached, but as it aches for someone very dear lost long ago. I began to understand that I had been mourning my mother for a very long time. Before her transformation. Even before her cancer. I began at last to accept the sorry fact that she had always been leaving me.

The coroner’s office released Betty’s body for burial in mid-July. The ceremony took place on a Wednesday afternoon. There were neighbours, and men from Bob’s factory, and some of Betty’s family had driven across from Wakefield. Stella had already said she would not come and there was no one turning up from the nursery in London. Not that anyone from Medicine City would have been made to feel at all welcome. Bob had even insisted that Betty be buried in an adult-size coffin. He was after an ordinary and present sadness, on this day of all days. Nothing remarkable. Nothing out of true. He had spent too many years trying and failing to accommodate the future.

The hearse crawled past us as we climbed the hill to the cemetery. Bob was ahead of me, walking arm in arm with Billy Marsden. I was making conversation with a Wakefield cousin whose name I had already forgotten. The road was muddy, slippery from recent rains, but the weather could not have been brighter. White shreds of cloud lay over Snay Booth while here, in the lee-side of the valley, the air was all mown grass and woodsmoke. The lane rose between high hedges and came to a plateau overlooking the southeast corner of the town. The hedges fell away and a low dry-stone wall marked the cemetery boundary. There was nothing special about the place, no planting, no effort at funerary architecture. The headstones, all of an equal height, suggested a bizarre crop left ignored in a field gone fallow. But smoke from the chimneys below the hill was filling and swilling the valley with washes of desaturated blues and pinks, and with such a view before me it was possible to feel attachment to this land. Even love.

The coffin was absurdly light, of course. How little Betty was secured in that great big black box I could not imagine. I took the head end, Bob beside me, some cousin of Stella’s at the rear and Billy Marsden beside him, and it was no effort at all for the four of us to process across the damp, uneven ground to where the earth had been heaved up. I was afraid she’d shift, slumping to the foot of the box, or its head. But the weight, though absurdly little, stayed steady on my shoulder. What, I wonder, did the other bearers think? Down the coffin went, into its hole, and far too slowly. The weight of the box had the workmen confused.

And Betty’s burial was only the beginning. There was tea to get through at the Arms, and seeing the Wakefield mob off at the station, and back to the Arms for a drink with the fellows at the factory.

By the time I’d tucked Bob in and set off for my own room, I was much too tired to deal with Jim. And Jim, of course, having spent the whole day stuck inside (I wasn’t risking him being discovered on this day of all days) was just about ready to climb the walls. Failing them, the curtains.

‘Come down. Now.’

Jim stuck his plastic tongue out at me.

‘You’ll get me into trouble.’

‘Nah.’ Jim swung from fold to fold, idly, experimenting. His whole environment was one giant climbing frame. He was only five inches high and can’t have weighed much above a pound. This gave him a power-to-weight ratio even more monstrous than the one he’d expected to enjoy on Mars, gambolling about like a toddler in less than half Earth’s gravity.

‘We’ll go to the cemetery together in a couple of days,’ I promised him. ‘You can say your proper goodbyes to Mum.’

Jim swung, missed and dropped onto the dressing table, knocking my wallet onto the floor.

‘For heaven’s sake.’

Jim sat on the edge of the table, swinging his legs as he watched me retrieve it. ‘Sorry, Stu.’

‘How are you feeling?’ I asked him.

Jim’s restitution was not total, and Jim himself was aware of the gaps. He frowned, struggling to assess this great imponderable: how did he feel?

‘Sad,’ he said. ‘Angry, mostly. That she went through all that, only to die like… that.’

Jim’s sincerity shortfall was partly real (he was only a toy, after all), partly a problem of perception. However profoundly he might feel things in his plastic state, he could only ever express those feelings through a plastic mouth, and at a comically high pitch. How deeply can you rate the grief of someone who sounds like a cartoon mouse?

Jim sensed our conversation was going nowhere and, ignoring me, climbed up onto the shelf under the window. He traversed along my books, looking for something to read. I think he was after some inspiration for his storytelling because the volume he lit on was Betty’s pocket hardback edition of the Aeneid . He grabbed the top of the spine and leaned back, angling it out from the shelf.

I stepped forward and rescued the book before its binding tore any further in Jim’s tiny, crudely articulated hands. Jim, dangling one-handed off the spine, let go. He fell, picked himself up and ambled over to the fireplace, where he had his cushion. ‘I could have got it.’

‘You were breaking it.’

‘I’m careful.’

‘You’re an idiot.’

‘I’ll be full-size again one day, so just you watch it.’

‘And back in your right mind, I hope.’ I laid the book out for him, not too near the fire, for fear his joints might soften, and while Jim read, scooping back the onion-skin pages as delicately as he could with mitten-fused fingers, I laid out the paints I had bought that day in Halifax. Humbrol’s enamel range offered good approximations of the regulation colours of Jim’s uniform. Jim’s appearance seemed to have been based on his last moments aboard the Victory . His overall was of a piece with his flesh, his boots sealed seamlessly around his calves. His face, though rendered impassive, still carried – unless this was just my imagination – a faint ghost of my brother’s death-terror.