Dan Vyleta - Smoke

Then the light changed, down in this coffin that formed the base of London’s gallows, grew darker. It was the face and upper body of the executioner bending over the trapdoor and thus blocking much of its light. He did not say anything, but I saw the figure nod to him and pocket its jar. Immediately, the executioner rose again, barked an order at the guards, to fetch the cadaver.

I had but one thought now, and that was to crawl back out. I moved, rolled back towards the canvas flap I had pried loose. I turned once before pushing through. The figure was at the opposite side, crouching in front of a little door that served as its exit. He, too, turned. It was dark, and it was smoky, and yet I swear we would recognise one another again. An odd face, lined and old but also boyish, the chin closely shaved under a bloom of whiskers, with a fine, bony nose and graceful eyebrows; large, heavy-hooded eyes. A gentleman’s face, I remember thinking; or a gentle-born boy’s who’s been aged in his sleep. Like an evil Snow White. Then the man stepped out, closing the door, and I rolled through into the street, where the vomit jumped out of me like a living thing that wanted to get out, out, out, as though association with my body was shameful even for my half-digested dregs of breakfast.

Charlie found me there, a quarter hour later. Time to watch the guards drag the body out from underneath the scaffold by its feet, wrap it in sacking, strap it to a plank, and carry it off. That, and to wipe my mouth. My sleeves were so Soot-stained, it was like dragging charcoal across your mug.

The taste of it, though, stayed with me all the way back to school. It’s still there in the morning, when the school bell pulls me out of a dream the only part of which I remember is a snowman, its button eyes slowly sliding down the blank of its face one by one. I make it to the toilet before I am sick.

And later — later I go to see Renfrew, for the first of many such sessions. “An intensive programme of reform.” Those were his words to Trout. It’s Cruikshank who fetches me, at five o’clock sharp. Renfrew does not say anything when I enter his office. That’s all right; I don’t need instructions to know what to do. The dentist’s chair is awkward to climb into but turns out to be surprisingly comfortable: upholstered red leather, turned dark and smooth where other boys have sat and squirmed and sweated, leaving behind the hazy outline of a ghostly boy into which I fit myself quite naturally.

“Do I put the straps on?” I ask, doing my best to sound calm.

Renfrew smiles.

“That’s what all the boys ask. I think secretly you really want to.”

And I relax a little. After all: Renfrew already thinks the worst of me. That I am growing murder inside myself, the way a woman grows a child.

Nothing I can say or do will ever disappoint him.

School is different after London. The change is everywhere and, as such, hard to pin down. Charlie tries to make an inventory, but the more he writes down the more he feels is slipping through the cracks, the gaps between words and lines, until he throws away the piece of paper in disgust.

For one thing, the upper-school boys are having dreams. Nightmares. Not all of them, naturally, and not the same ones night after night. Actually, nobody is sure they are nightmares, because nobody remembers a thing. But they wake up, these boys, with rings under the eyes, bruises almost, their pillowcases stiff with Soot. Renfrew does not punish them. This in itself causes a stir. A gentleman never smokes. He dreams, it is said, as he lives. In the lower school, by contrast, the pale grey smears found in the bedding in the mornings continue to exact their price: the boys are disciplined, if mildly.

Then, just four days after their return — Christmas is approaching, and the boys have taken to counting days — an upper-school boy breaks through the ice while playing on the school pond. They are in the midst of a cycle of rapid melts and sudden freezes, and the boys have been warned to be careful. Charlie happens to be present: it is the afternoon break and he is returning books to the school library. The water in the pond is less than a yard deep, but the bottom is littered with rocks and discarded old junk. In summer, when the water is low and the sky clear, one can see the shape of an old bedstead rusting at its bottom, like the wreck of a steamer lost near the shore.

It’s this very shallowness that causes the injury. The boy’s skate hits something at an awkward angle, and his ankle and knee buckle. He is screaming so much, they have a hard time dragging him out of the hole and onto the thicker ice. There is blood on his trouser leg, hard to see at first, then dyeing the ice a vivid crimson. Low down on the shin, a thick, jagged spike pokes a bulge into the wet wool that nobody dares touch or even name. Worst of all is the pungent yellow Smoke that comes out of him, out of his mouth chiefly, along with his screams. It does not rise like a plume but rather crawls along at ankle-height then falls to the snow as a fine yellow powder, impossibly bright, like the jar of sulphur on the shelf in chemistry class.

It’s Charlie who beds the boy’s head on his knees until the school nurse arrives. His name is Westwood. Peter. They share a bench in Greek.

“Help me,” Peter keeps shouting up at Charlie’s face, not five inches away, and Charlie strokes his hair and promises he will be fine. By the time the nurse gets there, Westwood has passed out, his blood steaming in the cold air.

The boy is saved, but for several days the school lives in suspense over whether his leg will come off. It doesn’t. When Charlie’s trousers return from the laundry, he can trace the outline of the boy’s Soot as a faint yellow line that runs from knee to mid-thigh. Disquieted by this, Charlie requests special permission to deposit the trousers in the school’s charity box, destined for an orphanage in London. He’d rather burn the pair but this, he is reminded, is against the rules. Charlie recalls the incinerator at Oxford station. They broke the rules easily enough on their return from London.

ф

Then there is Thomas. He is being sick. Every morning, like clockwork, a full hour before the bell is rung. The sound travels, the toilet bowl amplifying his retching like a trumpet, sending it down the corridor to where Charlie crouches, waiting for him, a handkerchief at the ready.

“Are you all right?” Charlie asks him in what has fast become a ritual.

“Right as rain,” Thomas always responds. “Something I ate.”

They laugh, as the ritual demands. Gallows humour, one calls it. Only now that they have seen a gallows, the phrase is not one they use.

And every day, at four o’clock sharp, when the others sit down for study hall in the upper assembly room, Thomas goes to visit Renfrew. It’s part of his punishment for fighting Julius. Thomas does not seem to mind these sessions. No, that’s not quite true. He dreads them and seems eager to go, all at the same time.

Charlie asks him about what happens at these meetings. There is too much between them — too much respect, for one thing; too much trust; too many hours spent exchanging confidences — for Thomas to button up entirely. But Charlie sees him guard his words.

“What does he do to you?” Charlie asks. “Renfrew.”

Thomas shrugs. “He asks questions. I answer.”

“Do you show?”

“Very little.” Thomas seems surprised by this himself.

“What does he ask about?”

“This and that. Family, a lot of the time. My mother and father.” His face darkens, grows pensive.

“It’s the way Renfrew asks,” he continues. “In earnest . Like he really wants to know. Sometimes I almost trust him. Sitting there on his inquisitor’s chair.”