Dan Vyleta - Smoke

“My father killed a man,” he says hoarsely and is appalled at the note of pride. “I was told I’d end up doing the same.”

The priest drains his glass. “Ah. Well. In that case, let me talk to your angel. See whether he wants to be introduced.”

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They find him in the bell tower, cleaning the mildewed brass of the great bell.

“We ring it on holidays,” the priest explains as they labour up the narrow stairwell, “but it’s started to sound off-key. Constipated. It’s all the dirt clogging up the bell.

“He does odd jobs for me,” he carries on as they step onto a miniscule landing. “Grendel’s the name. Tobias Grendel. Gren, here’s a lad to meet you. Violent, he says. But I think he’s got a good enough soul. Anyway, I will leave you to it. Have a chat. Shout if you need refreshments. Cheerio.”

The priest’s steps retreat back down the stairwell. It leaves Thomas alone with the stranger. He finds himself at a loss for words.

The man called Grendel has continued working, rubbing the side of the great bell with a dirty cloth, all the while watching Thomas shyly, from behind lowered lids. The crick in his neck lends something abject to him. It forever condemns him to cower before his peers.

“What is it?” Grendel says after the silence has stretched to several seconds, his voice quiet and gentle, inflected with a slight, pleasant lilt. “Some sort of trouble?”

Thomas shakes his head, steps closer to him.

“You were there at the hanging,” he says at last, unsure where to start. “At the end of November. A woman was killed. The whole square was painted black.”

The man nods, a vague fear showing in his eyes.

“Yet you did not smoke.”

Thomas reaches out with his fingers, grabs hold of the man’s collar, turns it back, aware of his imposition, of the brutal rudeness of the act. The shirt is discoloured, Soot-stained, more black than white. But the inside is grey rather than black. All the shirt’s Soot clings to the fabric’s outside: city sin, absorbed from walls and air.

“Where do you get your sweets from?”

“Sweets,” the man repeats, shaking a little.

“Don’t play stupid now.”

“The priest gives them to me.”

“The priest told me he has two a year, and sells them for wine.”

“I found them,” the man cringes.

“Enough to keep you smokeless while a woman dangles from a rope?”

Thomas shakes his head, feels an emotion fill him that he fails to recognise. Something very close to fear. Awe perhaps: a vise around the heart. It releases some Smoke in him, an iodine plume that he does his best to spit in the stranger’s face. It drifts past his cheeks, flakes as Soot onto his shoulders and neck, and draws no change from his bluff and honest features.

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Livia finds them. The priest must have fetched her off her stoop. She is upset, angered, frightened by Thomas’s failure to return. But even so she does not step too close to him.

“Charlie didn’t come,” she hisses. “A beggar pestered me for money.” And then: “What are you doing to this man?”

As she says it, Thomas realises that his hand is still clutching the man’s collar. The fingers of his other hand are wet. He has just finished shoving them in the man’s mouth, hunting his cheeks for hidden objects.

“He does not smoke,” he says, shaken. He tries to explain it to Livia. A part of him wants to kneel before this man. Another is angry that he seems such a fool.

Livia listens to his account without moving a muscle. At last she says, speaking to the angel not Thomas, “You are afraid.”

Then she does something for which Thomas is unprepared. He did not suspect her capable of such grace; not here, not at this moment, her lips still jet-black with her Soot.

She steps past him and embraces the angel.

The man giggles nervously. And then he starts crying.

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He takes them home. Grendel. “Just like the monster,” he says. He says it happily because Livia is holding his hand.

It’s her doing, this hospitality of his. She has taken to him in a way Thomas cannot quite explain; has stepped into his presence as though into a shelter. One of the first things she has said to the man is: “I wish my father had met you. When he was younger.” And also: “He tried to be like you, just like you.”

But Grendel had only flapped his hands in agitated denial until she desisted and started talking about their journey here and how they are waiting for a friend.

“Charlie,” she explains. “You will like Charlie. Everybody does.”

Her eyes are on Thomas as she says it, showing the only sign of anguish that will pass through them all evening.

Grendel lives a half-hour’s walk away, close by the river. Dark has long fallen and the road is treacherous. They are beset by beggars and prostitutes, by lamplighters with smoking torches, asking for tuppence, offering to see them home.

As they draw closer to the angel’s neighbourhood, the city smells grow worse, offal and mud, the stale, rotten waters of the Thames. The house he leads them to has burnt and adds cold ash to the stink. It looks uninhabitable, but Grendel leads them through the gateway to a crooked, triangular courtyard, then beyond to a sagging building overhanging the riverbank. There are a whole series of low-beamed rooms, but two hold no glass in their windows, and one has a collapsed wall that is growing a thick layer of moss. For all that it is cosy enough, with a gaily painted kitchen table and an ancient stone hearth that Grendel immediately sets to lighting.

Before they have had a chance to throw off their awkwardness and begin a conversation, steps can be heard labouring up the staircase behind them. Grendel jumps to open the door, and in comes a woman in mud-smeared boots, carrying a bucket heavy with water so dirty it resembles mud. Her arms, too, are smeared with greenish-brown filth. She is a tall woman, so thin as to appear haggard, her fine bones framed by thinning grey hair. As she stares at them, unmoved by Grendel’s explanations, the bucket begins to boil, and dark claws break the surface, along with the spasmodic twitch of an armoured tail.

“What do you know,” says Thomas. “The angel has a wife. And she’s been fishing.”

She smiles at that, an unpractised, awkward, bashful smile, rinses a fistful of crayfish in a deep, lead-lined sink, and sets to cooking them for dinner.

That night, Grendel sits up with them and tells them he is sick.

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“It started when I was nine. I had smoked as an infant, though never very much. An easy child they called me, good-humoured and docile, perhaps a little dull. Then the Smoke ceased. I was sick, I remember, German measles, spots up and down my body and a terrible fever. When the sickness went, the Smoke went with it. I’ve never shown since.”

They are still sitting at the dinner table, each on a stool of a different height, their fingers vivid with the smell of crayfish. From time to time, Mrs. Grendel rises and busies herself at the stove, where she is boiling up the empty shells for stock. She is humming something, listening to her husband talk; contentment in the hum, but also worry about these strangers who have burst in upon her life. Grendel, for his part, speaks simply, trustingly, as eager to shed his story as a child is to slip out of its Sunday clothes. Thomas listens to him with the heightened intensity of fever. He sits far from Livia, out of her sight; has picked a fallen crayfish leg from off the floor, black and spindly, spikey at the joints; sits rolling it within his palm, digging its edges into his skin.

“Nobody really noticed it at first. I was placid before and was more placid after. It was my clothes that gave it away, my bed linen. No stains. Not by day and not by night, for weeks on end. But it was more than that. I didn’t fight anymore. Didn’t argue. I would watch my sisters do it, get into a proper scrap, clouds rising out of them like steam from a mangle, and feel left out. It was as though I was watching them walk on their hands, or speak a foreign tongue. As though sin were a knack, and I had lost it.