Dan Vyleta - Smoke

“You are like me. Flawed and angry. Only you hide it better. Some day you will let him down.”

“I won’t.”

He startles himself with the sadness that rises up in him. “Who can say for sure, Livia?”

Then he adds, turning now, looking boldly in her eye. “You are pretty. I did not notice it before.”

In answer, she wraps her arms tight around her slender frame.

They resume walking. As they set off, Livia quickly, furtively crouches down to the cigarettes he has discarded and picks them off the ground one by one. She does not offer an explanation.

Thomas does not ask for one.

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She tells him later. They are walking single file, Thomas in front, Livia behind, straining to adjust her pace to his slow stumble. Her explanation has no face, therefore: just a voice, measured and even, reciting the facts.

“The name is Roman,” she says. “Livia Orestilla. An empress: Caligula’s wife. She was to marry someone else, but Caligula stole her on her wedding night. Then he divorced her after only a few days.”

“A funny thing to put into your cradle. In lieu of frankincense and myrrh.”

“That’s just what Julius said. Not the words but the sentiment. It was he who told me. About Caligula.”

Stung, Thomas turns around to her, careful to place his eyes on her face, her jacket closed now, swallowing her body.

“It is good that you hate me. I’m dangerous. I have tainted blood.”

He is surprised to see she holds his gaze. Thus far, she has always avoided it. It must be something she brought up with her, from the depth of the mine.

“So you are,” she replies, serious and not. “‘Tainted.’ ‘Dangerous.’ Why is it you think I’m walking three paces at your back?”

It shouldn’t, but it makes Thomas laugh. When they start walking, her steps fall into rhythm with his.

One pace , he thinks. Two paces at the most.

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They reach the border at dusk. The transition is gradual but also distinct. On their side, the dipping sun finds the earth rich and brown; trees tall and proud even in hibernation; hollies growing in green vigour. On the other side all growth is stunted, the soil barren, mixed with Soot, the puddles greasy with sin’s residue, the air pregnant with its stink.

The other side. The city. London.

The day has grown colder and snow is in the air. Thomas wonders whether it will fall black, over there . They stop under the shadow of a tree. It is a species Thomas does not recognise, a conifer nearly as broad as it is high, its branches growing sideways and forming a series of platforms, filtering the last of the sun. On the London side, the tree stands black, smeared in Soot, and threadbare in its canopy. He walks up to the trunk and touches the bark. Livia watches him, puzzled.

“What is it?”

“Nothing. It’s just — I like this tree.” He talks with his back to her, so she won’t see his face. There is a catch to his voice, a hint of a younger Thomas, gentler in pitch. “What kind is it? I have never seen it before.”

“A cedar of Lebanon,” she answers without hesitation. “There is a grove of them on the grounds of my school, along with a plaque. It says an explorer brought back a handful of seeds, in the early 1600s. All British cedars descend from that handful. There was a debate in Parliament not long ago over whether they should all be cut down.”

“Why? No, I know. Because they are foreign. An outside thing.”

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” she says reasonably. “They do not belong here.”

“It’s beautiful.”

He touches the bark, both hands flat on the tree, lets it take his weight. There is a high, light humming in his chest. Bone music. Singing of home. Home? A tree transplanted from its native soil, planted at the edge of purgatory. The early 1600s. It came with the Smoke. Its bark warm and rough under his spread-out palms.

“Come,” Livia urges, not unkindly. “We cannot stay here. We’ll freeze to death.”

Indeed a deep chill has started to rise out of the land and pinpricks of snowflakes stand in the air, catching the sunset. Only the breeze blowing in from the south is a little warmer. It carries London to them, sewage and sin, and the dank stink of boiling cabbage.

They walk towards it side by side.

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Darkness falls just as the muddy little path they follow feeds into a cobbled road. All of a sudden there are people, dwellings, mangy dogs hunting for offal in the ditch. They are still far from the centre, in a no-man’s-land of pig farms and factories, vegetable plots, lean-tos made from wood and sackcloth. The closer they draw the less certain they become of the way, encounter sinkholes, dead ends, intersections that split the street in confusing ways. Then also, with every step Thomas’s fatigue is mounting, the ache of fever returning to his joints. It isn’t long before Livia stops him.

“We have walked all day. You need rest. There, we can find shelter in that doorway.”

Thomas is too tired to argue. The doorway is ripe with smells but deep enough to allow them to disappear into its shadow, even to lie down, using their arms for pillows. For a moment the muck that seeps through his coat and shirt makes Thomas gag. Then exhaustion wipes the feeling from his mind. What remains is the cold. Even out of the wind, heated though it is by the furnace of London’s sin, the night is near-freezing. Against their will, they are forced to huddle close, back pressed against back, each keeping the other awake with their shiver. The floor of the doorway is uneven from use. It dips at the centre. Late at night, not explaining himself, Thomas turns around to take Livia in his arms and mould his chest, knees and legs against her frame. It is warmer this way. Her hair smells of coal, sweat, and peaches. It is the peaches that trouble him as he drifts off to sleep. Dawn brings noise and the acrid smell of fresh Smoke. They roll apart like disgruntled puppies and stiffly resume the road. Behind them, their doorway remains empty, the door locked, the house unmarked and ordinary but for the lopsided contour of a cross that declares it a chapel.

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They walk in comfort with each other, two steps apart. Some truce appears to have been struck between them in the course of the night, almost a friendship, dispelling the tension of the previous day. It fills Thomas with hope. In a few hours — the next morning at the latest — Charlie will re-join them and all danger will have passed, this strange, dimly sensed trap laid for them by the road. In the meantime Thomas gives himself to London. In the thin light of morning it seems different to him than it was when he first came here. Or rather, he is different, has shed both school and uniform, become one of the crowd. Already the streets are choked with wagons and people: farmers bringing sheep to market, costermongers, morning drunks, factory workers marching to their shift. The Smoke is light yet, dissolved in yellow fog, tugs at Thomas in ways not entirely unpleasant, gives rise to unruly feelings he does little to suppress. Next to him, Livia walks more guardedly, suspicious of this haze, yet gawking, too, at this sea of people whose steady current carries them along.

They find the square by midmorning. There is no scaffold there today, no soldiers, no hangman, no rabid mob. Even so the square is crowded enough that all movement becomes a matter of negotiation, of space claimed and yielded, shoulders brushed, weights gently shifted. London is a place where people touch. It strikes Thomas as a succinct definition of its sin.

Despite the press of people, however, the square feels different today. During the execution, there had been but one crowd, focussed on a single spectacle. Today there are many centres of attention. A group of farmers have set up stalls and are selling produce to a jostling throng, their boys armed with cudgels to discourage thieves. Behind these stalls, a ring has formed around two fighting dogs; a crone with a chalkboard is accepting bets. Right next to her a man has mounted a crate and is screaming at the score of people who form his congregation. Beyond, a small tent has been set up, and a gaudily dressed youth is selling tickets to a show that, judging by the sign dangling from his neck, appears to involve a woman undressing to reveal her scorpion’s tail. Each of these groups is knit together by a mist of Smoke, light and volatile in the air, if thickening in places into dark swirls. At the borders these mists mingle or rain down in flakes of Soot soon absorbed by the ground’s black grit.