Dan Vyleta - Smoke

“Go ahead, then. Ask.”

“Well, well.”

Julius makes to speak, stops, interrupts himself; turns the lamp around for a brief moment and lets its beam dance over the faces of the boys. Thomas sees Charlie for half a second; not long enough to read his expression. Then the beam is back in his eyes.

“You see,” Julius resumes, “the question I want to ask is not mine. It belongs to everyone. The whole school is asking it. Every boy who is in this room. Even the teachers have been asking it. Even your friend over there, though he mightn’t admit it. It is this: What is it that is so filthy about you, so unspeakably foul, that it made your parents ignore all custom and common sense and hide you away until your sixteenth year?

“Or,” he adds, more slowly yet, articulating every syllable, “is it that there is something vile, disgusting about them that they were afraid you’d disclose and spread?”

The question hits its mark: as an insult (to him, his family, the things he holds sacred) but more so as a truth, a spectre that has haunted half his life. It punctures his defences and goes to his core; wakes fear and anger and shame. The Smoke is there long before he can account for it. It is as though he is burning, burning alive without reason. Then he knows what it marks: he has hatred, murder in his heart.

Another boy would crumple with shame. Thomas leaps. Hits Julius, headfirst, sends the lamp crashing to the floor. Its flame, unextinguished, lights their struggle from one side. To the boys who are watching they are a single shadow projected ceiling-high against the wall, two-headed and monstrous. But to them, close to the lamp, everything is crystal clear. Thomas is smoking like a wet ember. His hands are fists, raining down on Julius. Insults stream from his mouth.

“You are nothing,” he keeps on saying, “nothing. A dog, a filthy dog, nothing.”

His fist hits Julius in the chin and something comes loose from his mouth, a tooth, apparently, a black, rotten molar that jumps from his lips like a coughed-up sweet. There is blood, too, and more Smoke, Smoke that pours from Julius’s skin, so black and pure it stoppers Thomas’s anger.

Immediately, Julius gains the upper hand. More than two years older, stronger, he flips the shorter boy. But rather than hitting him, he bears down with his whole body, embraces him, clings to him, rolls him into the lamp until it tips and smothers its own light. All at once Thomas realises what Julius is doing. He is rubbing his Smoke into Thomas, and Thomas’s into himself. Later, he will claim he was sullied by his attacker; that he himself remained pristine all through their fight. Now, in the darkness, he takes Thomas’s throat and squeezes it until Thomas thinks that surely he must die.

Julius lets go, judiciously, the moment the other boys have stepped close enough to get a better picture. He gets up, wipes at his shirt, and makes a show of his composure. Thomas, crumpled, remains on the floor. Only Charlie bends down to him, soothes him, and helps him back to the dorm.

There is just one thing you can do against Soot if you don’t have any lye and that’s to soak it in urine. It’s disgusting, I know, but there’s something in piss that makes it fade. And so Thomas and I sneak back into the bathroom later that night when everybody is gone, put Thomas’s shirt into one of the bathtubs (the one used by Julius when he deigns to bathe), drink pints upon pints of water from the tap, and take turns peeing on it. Destroying the shirt is out of the question. They’d know at once: all items of clothing are carefully catalogued. It’d get Thomas expelled without appeal.

I wish I could describe Thomas, capture him. He is neither tall nor short, neither stocky nor slight; his hair is neither curly nor entirely straight. But I am making him sound like a nonperson, when he is everything but. Thomas is someone you notice when he comes through the door. It’s a kind of intensity. Like he is walking around with a keg of gunpowder strapped to his chest. It’s in his face, partially. He looks at things, really looks. At people, too. Evaluates them. Not judging them exactly but rather taking them in for what they are; trying to see the truth of them. It is not something most people like. I think I may be his only friend here, and there are close to two hundred boys all told, though some live in a separate building across the yard and a handful are day students who come in from the village; rich burghers’ sons who are here for the schooling and not for the other stuff. The “moral education.” Burghers may smoke, once in a while. One does not expect better of them.

You’d think I’d hold it against Thomas. That his soul is bad. That, unless he reforms, he is bound for hell. It is true, after all. The Smoke does not lie. There is evil in him the way there are maggots in a cut of rotten meat. But you see, all that exists on one level somewhere, the level of adult reason and truths, where science lives, and theology, and the laws of the courts. But there is another level, one I have no name for, and on this other level, I am his friend. It’s as simple as that.

As for myself, when I look in a mirror I see someone tall and sort of angular; bony, my sister calls it. Red hair. Not ginger but a deep shade of copper, cropped very short. My skin is quite dark too. Some say I must have foreign blood, that hair and skin like that come from east of the Black Sea, where there are still tribes riding the endless steppe. It’s nonsense though, because my family is as English as they come. We’re an old family, actually, and rather grand. I mean very grand. There are pictures of Father going hunting with the Queen’s sons. But enough of this. Whether girls find me handsome or ugly you will have to ask them. I know I don’t like my nose very much — too big — and cannot get fat even if I eat nothing but pudding. I am hopeless at rugby but can run cross-country all day. Thomas says I am more than half deer. If so, he must be a badger. When the dogs come for him, he turns and shows his teeth. Unlike me, he does not know when to take to his heels.

We became friends very simply. He arrived in the last week of October. That’s unusual, of course. He was five weeks late for term. And then his age. Sixteen. There are transfers sometime, boys sent up from lesser schools who come here for “finishing” and to rub shoulders with the future leaders of the realm. But Thomas had not been to any other school. He was “home taught.” Nobody knew what to make of it. There was even some talk that it was illegal. Rumour had it, his parents fought his going off to school; resisted ever since he’d turned eleven. They’re poor folk, I think, though noble enough, and live in the far north of the dominion; an unruly land. The Crown’s arm reaches that far, but it does not have the same weight. And now he is here, this wild boy. Like something that’s been raised by foxes.

But he does not like to talk about himself. Even to me.

He arrived by himself: no parent to see him off, no sibling, not even a servant to help him carry his things. Climbed off the mail coach that had picked him up at the train station, in Oxford. A knapsack on his shoulders and a valise in each hand. That’s how I ran across him, in my free hour after lunch: him standing at the inner gate, chin raised, tired, listening to the porter who was talking at him in his coarse country tongue, shouting practically, asking him who he was.

“It’s the new boy,” I said. “They brought up a cot for him just yesterday. To the dormitory. I’ll take him, if you like.”

Thomas did not speak, not until we arrived and I had pointed out his bed to him. It was near the window, the least popular spot, for it meant sleeping in its draught. He put down his luggage, straightened, looked me over, and asked,