Dan Vyleta - Smoke

Trout heaves himself out of the armchair. The leather’s groan might have been comical under other circumstances. But the headmaster’s eyes are too shrewd to mistake him for a buffoon or a kindly relative troubled by wind. He walks Charlie to the door.

“I enjoyed our talk, Mr. Cooper, really I did. We should do it again. Perhaps after your return. You can tell me then how it went. Yes, I think that’s an excellent idea. A debriefing of sorts. Like in the army.”

Outside, at the top of the stairwell, Charlie nearly runs into Swinburne, lurking in the darkness of the landing and breathing heavily, as though he’s been running. Charlie passes him quickly, telling himself that it is merely a coincidence. No dust dances in the gaslit stairwell beneath: it’s only when the boy passes that it rises and hovers, like inverted snow.

ф

“So are you coming along as my nurse or as Trout’s spy?”

They are sitting on the bathroom floor again, making themselves small amongst the row of tubs. Above them, where copper pipes crisscross underneath the ceiling, a spider is sitting in a wedge of web. It may be dead, trapped in its own design. Then again, it mayn’t.

Charlie ignores the question. If Thomas is angry, so is he. They have both taken off their shirts, in case they Smoke. They mustn’t stain.

“You should’ve told me, Thomas,” he says. “I’m your friend.”

Thomas responds without looking at Charlie.

“Yes, Charlie, you are. But will you still be my friend when I end up killing someone? When I turn into that woman underneath her noose, and you feel your own heart blacken with my filth?” He spits, angry, the spit steaming with white Smoke. “I’m rotting. Inside. Like a cancer, growing in here.” He rubs his chest, his guts, his hand a fist that he forgets to unclench. “Renfrew says there’s a machine, on the Continent somewhere. You step behind a sort of mirror and then they can see inside your rib cage. The bones show snow white. And your Smoke shows like fog. The blacker it is, the lighter it shows.” He spits again, watches it steam. “Another year and I’ll glow like an angel with my darkness.”

Charlie does not know what to say. He has rehearsed his conversation with Trout for Thomas. There is a cure , he wants to say, but the words get stuck in his throat.

There may be a cure.

It isn’t the same thing at all.

“Do you know him?” he asks instead. “This uncle who has invited you?”

“I met him as a child. Him and his wife. I only saw them from across the room: a bald man and a woman in a fancy frock. I was too young to be introduced. You know— the childhood years of sin .”

Charlie watches Thomas spit once again, hears his own voice drop to a whisper.

“Why can’t you go home for Christmas, Thomas?”

A snort, tinged with dark. “Nobody there. Mother’s dead.”

“And your father?”

“Dead.” Smoking now, breath and skin: “Disgraced.”

“What did he do, Thomas? Tell me.”

“What did he do? He beat a man to death.”

The words are hard, curt, devoid of pity. Here I am , Thomas seems to be saying, exposed. But also: Don’t push me, not now. I might break.

Charlie hears it, fights a shiver.

“He beat a man,” he repeats, no weight in his voice. “Very good. Thoughtful of him. This way we can spend Christmas together.”

It takes Thomas a heartbeat to react. A transformation in his Smoke, a lightening, colour entering the grey; a parcel of emotions exhaled by one boy and inhaled by the other; infection: the sharing of a burden.

“Prick!” Thomas says softly, shaping a Smoke ring with his mouth.

“You’re welcome.”

Charlie waits until both their breaths have slowed and Thomas’s Smoke has cleared out of his blood. It’s like stepping inside after racing through a tempest; as such not without a sense of loss. Then he changes the subject.

“Where were you all day? I was looking for you.”

It does something for Thomas, this question, completes his transition from desolation to wry humour.

“Well, first I had to see Renfrew. Kept me for a full three hours. And then I went over to Foybles’s rooms to ask him whether he would help me with my maths.” Amusement flashes in Thomas’s eyes. “Made him rather nervous, I think. The demon boy coming to visit.”

“Maths? But you are doing fine with—”

In answer Thomas opens his right hand which has been curled into a fist from the moment they left the dormitory. Inside sit two little cubes, clear like icicles. For two heartbeats Charlie does not know what they are. Then it dawns on him and his stomach contracts with excitement and fear.

“He will know who took them,” he whispers.

“Maybe. There were five pieces left. He may not know the count.”

“He’s sure to.”

Charlie pictures it, Thomas searching the desk in Foybles’s office, while the latter had his back turned. It seems impossible. Thomas picks the thought off Charlie’s face.

And dares a smile.

“Foybles left me alone in his living room. The question I asked, it turned out to be rather complicated. He needed to consult his books. It appears Foybles has his library under his bed. At least that’s what it sounded like. Like he was moving all his furniture about. Hunting for Newton. He left me alone for a full half hour.” Thomas shakes his head in disbelief.

“Did you smoke?”

“A little. But I opened the window. By the time he came back, it was barely noticeable. And he was very focussed on the problem.”

Charlie tries not to think it. Thief. But there is admiration in the word, too. It has long been a puzzle to him how often sin aligns with pluck.

“Shall we?” Thomas asks. “Together?”

They each pick up a sweet. Held up to the light Charlie discovers a pattern stamped into one side. “B&S” underneath a stylised crown. The Queen’s stamp.

There is no smell to the little cube.

“Let’s do it then. On three.”

Thomas counts them down and they each place it on their tongues, like sugar lumps, gently pressing it against the roof of their mouths waiting for it to melt. It takes a while for the taste to spread. Lemon and the sharp herbal notes of Chlorodyne. The sweet dissolves very slowly, one has to suck on it, chew it, wear it out with one’s tongue. Charlie is waiting for something, a tingling, a giddiness, some sensation of change: a surge of strength, a sudden sleepiness, the elation of alcohol. But nothing happens, nothing at all. A look at Thomas tells him it is the same for his friend. At long last they swallow the final few shards. All that remains of the sweet is a medicinal flavour clinging to their gums, like they have just cleaned their teeth.

They both sit in silence, feeling crushed.

“So what does that mean?” Charlie asks when he can no longer bear it.

“It means,” Thomas says, “that we don’t understand anything. Not a thing.”

The spider above them quivers when they rise, in imitation of life.

The boy asks me after vespers: name of Kreuzer, Martin Herman. First year upper school. A German. Naturalised, I suppose, the whole family, for generations.

But still.

“Sir,” he asks, nervous, perhaps on a dare. “What is theatre?”

He does not smoke when he says it, so he thinks the question must be safe. I make him kneel in the pew. Sore knees. Good for the soul. He’s been reading Mr. William Shakespeare, he admits after some probing. A book of plays. Where does he have it from? This he is not supposed to say.

His crying is unbecoming.

I bring all this to Trout. His brother gave the book to him: Kreuzer, Leopold Michael, five years the elder. I remember him well. Daft little shite. Wouldn’t have thought him capable of something quite so monstrous.