Dan Vyleta - Smoke

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I have been at it for six days now. Each morning, I get up before dawn and saddle the horse. Each evening, a supper with Mother, pale and fretting, in her eyes a question she’s afraid to ask. We have a simple relationship, Mother and I. We have replaced emotion with economics. Recently we have added crime to the ties of debt and blood.

“Are you assisting the magistrate’s search?” Mother asks the second morning I set off.

“No. I have my own ideas.”

“You have found a trace then?”

“Perhaps.”

“Please. Be careful,” she says and for a moment I think she means for myself. I look at her, my breakfast in my throat, hoping, dreading that she will force a talk.

But she says nothing further.

As I ride off her hand brushes the saddlebag bulging by my thigh.

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I never thought they might be hiding down the mine. But that’s where Nótt leads me, once she puts her nose to the narrow bridleway where the strangers have been sighted. The colliers stop in their tracks when I enter the work yard. The smell of snow is in the air, but nothing has fallen yet. The sky sits low against the hills. It would make a wonderful painting, Nótt crouching, long tail cocked, her ears pressed high against her head. I ride over to the pit shaft, watch it spit up a cage. A union, forming down the bottom of this hole. Talking revolution through mouthfuls of bread and dripping. All you’d need to do is cut the cable. Trap them like rats. Grandfather is right. This is a world of idiots. I wait until Nótt has emptied her bladder and then we turn, back to the bridleway. They must have left before dawn. Six hours head start. But I have a horse.

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They split up once they reached the train depot. It takes me a while to establish this. The men here are close-mouthed, suspicious. But no pauper can resist gold.

They remember a boy with a bandage, of course. He travelled with a girl. Heading south I am told. London-way. Cooped up with a wagonload of chickens, and some fellow cutthroats, heading home.

It’s the other boy no one can tell me about. Not until I find a man who spoke to him, the boss of a racket selling passenger tickets to freight trains. He has a band of degenerates on staff who will break your legs if you think you can catch a ride for free.

We talk at length. An enterprising man. He reminds me of my grandfather. Affable, given to whimsy. Happiest when making a profit without breaking a sweat.

“What’s he to you?” he asks once we have established he knows the boy I am looking for.

“I’m his elder brother.”

“You don’t look alike.”

“Ah, well. You’d have to talk to Mother about that.”

The man laughs. I slip him money.

“He ran away, did he? This brother of yours.”

“He is guilty of that particular folly.”

The man jingles coins within a meaty fist.

“Awful dirty for gentry,” he muses.

I smile and add one more coin to his stack. Then I call Nótt to my side. The man studies her weight, her teeth.

“Big dog.”

“Enough of this.”

He shrugs, counts up the money. “He was heading for Oxford. Got family there perhaps?”

“A kindly uncle.”

“Those are the best sort.”

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I am left with a choice then. London or Oxford. My inclination lies with the city. Thomas is there. He tasks me, Thomas, tender like an abscess in my throat. How deftly has he slipped into Mother’s regard, where I could only wheedle with my money. How artfully has he contrived to set a mark against my name at school, so that I have to endure Renfrew’s insolent probing. And how similar is our Smoke once woken; how seductive in its kinship; how intolerable in its rivalry. But it’ll be hard, I imagine, tracking someone in London. Too many people, too many scents, even for Nótt. Oxford will be easier. Charlie Cooper must be heading back to school. To do what, I wonder; talk to whom? How much has he seen? It is this simple question that decides me. I want Thomas. But there must not be any talk.

There are no trains to Oxford until the following day, not from this depot. I resolve to make my way by horse. It won’t be any faster that way, but after a week of waiting it feels good to be on the move.

Darkness falls early. And just like that unease descends upon me, half childish fear, half longing, my hand dipping in the saddlebag. The feeling has grown familiar in the week since Price’s death; resembles the tangle of shame and excitement that attends the first discovery of self-abuse.

In confusion then, fretting, unsure whether it is to indulge or to distract myself, I look for company and shelter; make out a farmhouse by its chimney in the distance then see the glow of a fire in a field much closer by. When I approach, I find two men sitting around a pot of boiling potatoes. Two rabbits, crudely skinned, hang skewered over the fire. The men rise, alarmed: crooked figures, thin as rails, the clothes mere rags. Underneath the dirt and Soot their complexions are fair and ruddy. Tinkers, not Gypsies. All the same, unwelcome on these shores.

“A pastoral scene,” I greet them, resolving relief into swagger. “Two Irishmen poaching rabbits in another man’s field.” I dismount. “Not my field though, so please don’t fret. I am just another traveller. Weary. Now my friends, might I share some of your rabbit, seeing that you stole it and are eating for free?”

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They are drinking men. I don’t usually partake in alcohol, but as I lie there, listening to their talk and laughter, I accept the bottle and take a swig, and later another, then another. It heats the stomach, and gives an odd sharpness to the night. At length I slip a sweet under my tongue and taste the liquor through its herbal tang.

As for the Paddies, they are quite at ease with me now. I am prey to them: a rich fool waiting to be robbed. I for my part am too preoccupied to disabuse them of the notion. When one of them sidles over to the pile I made of saddle and bags, it is Nótt that jumps up and pushes her maw into the soft of his tummy. I trained her to do it and hence know the feeling, of her hot wet breath soaking through one’s shirt. It feels as though one’s skin grows paper-thin. The man starts smoking, very faintly, and my bitch, she wags her tail.

“Sure meant nothing by it,” he says almost sulkily though he holds his body very still. “Just admiring the rifle. An unusual piece. Foreign design, is it?”

“And what do you know about guns?”

“Father was a gunsmith. Never learned the trade myself, mind.”

An artisan’s son, fallen on hard times. And for a moment it rises in me, the urge to tell him about this rifle and its telescopic sight, accurate at four hundred yards. A German design. Illegal. Cursed.

I am aware that it is not the desire to show off that tempts me but the lure of confession, boyish and weak; am aware, too, that within this weakness, buried like a thorn, sits some other longing yet, darker in temperament and stronger by far, which has long sketched its own outcome to the night.

“Best leave it alone, my friend.”

But the man has sensed my hesitation. As has Nótt, who has stepped back and eyes me in confusion while the vagrant, slowly but brazenly enough, kneels down next to my saddlebag and studies its bulge. Again the urge takes hold of me to self-betray.

“Go on,” I say, suck weakly at my sweet. “Pull it out if you must.”

What emerges looks (even to me, after days of familiarity) like nothing so much as a man’s face, denuded of bone and cured by a tanner. The eyes are brass-rimmed disks of glass. Where nose and mouth are to be expected, the face grows a proboscis, long and limp like a wet sock. At the far end, this snout is weighted down with something very much like the head of a watering can. For a moment a gust of wind catches the mask and fills its features with volume; then the rubber inverts and the thing hangs dead from the man’s fingers.