Ten Stories About Smoking, page 12
‘Friends?’ I said.
He nodded and ushered me out of the room. I heard him change the music, the soft voice of a hushed man. I went into my room and smoked a couple of cigarettes and decided what to do with the following day.
I woke early and had a shower, put on some washing then surveyed what was in my cupboards. I made a list of items I needed and then checked online for the nearest supermarket. It seemed there was one in a shopping complex some half mile away. I walked there, the huge Asda sign a green beacon in the distance. As I approached, it looked like it was floating, unattached. I stopped at the edge of the car park and wished I had a camera with me; it was the kind of photo I’d like to look at. I put my fingers into a square and framed the shot. It was beautiful.
There was a small parade of boarded-up shops and in front of them a man had set up a cup-and-ball game on a fold-out picnic table. He was conning a crowd of muscled Poles out of money to send home, and they seemed happy to be handing over the cash. Further along there were more hawkers selling pirated DVDs, Spanish razor blades, counterfeit underwear and blister packs of Duracell batteries. By the time I got to the door of the Asda I had ignored seventeen separate opportunities to purchase dodgy goods of all kinds.
In the cavernous Asda I fumbled over the crème caramels in the dairy section: they were Andrea’s favourites and we always kept some in the fridge, just in case. I held them in my hand for a little while, the cold air from the refrigerator numbing my arm, until eventually I put them down. I didn’t even like crème caramels.
My trolley was half full when I pranged it on someone else’s. The man looked at me with sympathetic eyes and apologized.
‘Oh no,’ I said, ‘it was my fault, I wasn’t looking where the hell I was going.’
He had a beard and sidelocks and gentle features. He was the first Hasid I’d ever seen and it made me happy to be out of the house and meeting new people. I nodded and made my way to the checkouts.
None of the queues were too long, but I was a little unsure as to which one to join. In the end I decided upon aisle five, which was staffed by a blond-haired man. He had psoriasis on his left hand and he scratched at it in between scanning items. When it was my turn, he looked up from his cash register. ‘Would you like help packing?’ he asked in a voice that suggested he would immediately walk out of the shop if I said yes.
His nametag said Eamon and I couldn’t fathom how he had become stuck bagging shopping and scanning goods when he clearly had something more to offer the world. At that moment, I would have done anything to help him. Anything at all. I imagined him eating his evening meals in one of those builders’ cafes, a paper open as he chewed shepherd’s pie with three vegetables, and the sadness almost overtook me. This man – what, my age? younger? – hearing the bleeps, the constant bleeps of the products, hearing them like an echocardiogram counting out his remaining heartbeats.
Eamon smiled as he handed me my till receipt. He wished me a good day, and I wished him the same. I meant it, too.
I walked the other way around the mall and passed more street vendors. I wasn’t tempted by anything until I saw two women standing between Currys and Sports Direct. They were holding out packets of rolling tobacco, Marlboro Lights, Benson & Hedges and Silk Cut.
‘How much for Marlboros?’ I said. The blonde woman named her price in a deep Eastern European accent; it was well under half what I paid at the supermarket. Her eyes were grey and her cheekbones made her look like one of those vacant, ice-queen models who never appears to enjoy life. But when she smiled, this woman looked like she had invented the very idea of happiness.
‘How many you like?’
‘A carton,’ I said and her big grey eyes got bigger. She unshouldered her rucksack and took out the cigarettes. The health warning on them was in Cyrillic. I thanked her and asked if she was often here. She looked at me slightly funny.
‘You police?’
‘Do I look like police?’
‘No. You look like . . . you know, skateboarder.’
‘So are you here all the time?’ I said. She nodded.
‘Good,’ I said, ‘I’ll make sure I only buy cigarettes from you. My name is Joe, by the way.’
‘Coco,’ she said. ‘Everyone calls me Coco.’
‘Like the clown?’ I said.
‘No, like Chanel,’ she said.
It was the beginning of a routine. Every Thursday I would walk past the hawkers and the DVD vendors to do my weekly shop. I’d get in line and Eamon would offer a faint smile of recognition and I would wish him a good day and mean it. I’d then wander round to Coco and exchange a brief few words with her and her silent accomplice. She’d pass me my carton of Marlboros and say, ‘See you soon.’ The best part of the week was always the smile she gave me as I left. That would keep my cheeks burning all the way home.
After the initial tension, living with Mark became much easier. The two of us fell into a familiar and comforting kind of life. I would cook on weeknights and Mark on the weekends. We shared washing duties and he paid for all the channels on the television. We sometimes played chess, sometimes went to the pub or met up with other friends in town. It was the right, correct thing to do and I felt something had altered, that a ship had been steadied. I still thought of Andrea, but the hurt wasn’t quite as livid as before.
The fifth time I bought cigarettes from Coco was a bitter day and she was wearing a beanie hat; her nose red-tipped from the cold. As I walked away, I thought about her chilled to the bone and bought her a large coffee from Subway. She thanked me in a cautious way, then gave me that smile. She took the paper cup and as she did our hands briefly brushed against each other. I made my way home in a daze, delighting in the crackle between our fingers.
Over the weeks my mood changed and I became more spritely at home, more conversational. I didn’t talk about Coco, though; not to Mark, not to anyone. Mark wouldn’t have understood anyway. He had already given me a considerable lecture on the moral ambiguities of buying illegal cigarettes. I’d just told him there was nothing ambiguous about the price. Mark shook his head at this and hadn’t mentioned it again – save for an occasional whispered comment.
Coco and I began to linger over our transactions, to exchange little nuggets of personal information. She lived about a mile and a half away in a shared house with nine other women. I found that out on week six. That she had two sisters back in the Ukraine, that was week seven. Week nine she told me that she didn’t like much Western music, but she didn’t mind Cold-play. Week eleven, I gave her a CD of the music I liked and said that not all Western music was Coldplay.
Week twelve she told me she liked some of the songs, but that some were too loud. She told me on week fifteen that she had trouble sleeping because her room-mate – Lenka, the woman who stood by her side as we talked – snored like a rattling train. She also told me that she had recently started smoking again and wished that she hadn’t.
I told her about Andrea on week nineteen, and she said that she felt sorry for me. She told me that her husband had gone missing a long time ago and that she’d almost forgotten what he looked like. Week twenty-one, I told her that I secretly called my home The House of Abandoned Men and she laughed at that and said she couldn’t imagine such a place. She had a cold on week twenty-four and so I bought her some soup and told her to go home. She said I was kind.
On week twenty-five I told her that I’d found this great new cafe bar. It had recently opened and they did the best pasta sauce I’d ever tasted – she’d revealed her favourite foods, along with her dislikes (cucumbers, cauliflower) on week seventeen. She said the cafe sounded nice, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to ask her to join me. Week twenty-seven I almost invited her but instead told her that we had a mouse in our kitchen. Coco said that if they had a mouse at her house, it would probably fall into Lenka’s open, snoring mouth.
On week thirty I said goodbye to Eamon and wished him a good day, but I didn’t mean it quite as much as usual. The thing between Coco and me had become somewhat tortuous. I wanted there to be no transactions, no moral ambiguity. I wanted it to be just the two of us, lost and lonely, sharing a coffee or a meal of some kind. But every time I came close to asking, I thought of Andrea, her face cold and impassive like the rocks you get at springs.
‘Oh holy living Christ, Joe,’ she’d said, ‘I can’t do this any more. Not one more day. I’m leaving, and I’m leaving now before I end up killing you.’
Two more weeks went by, and the flick-flack image of Andrea wouldn’t leave me. I thought I’d changed, but how can you really tell? Then I saw the new Coldplay record in the supermarket and knew just what to do. I bought it from Eamon along with my other shopping and felt confident that this would be the week. I walked past a man selling knock-off cosmetics and an old homeless guy jangling change in his cupped hands. It felt like they were urging me on from the touchlines.
Between Currys and Sports Direct, Lenka was there as usual but instead of Coco, a dark-haired woman with sad oval eyes was standing beside her. Lenka looked away; the other woman looked at me.
‘Cigarette?’
‘Where’s Coco?’ I said.
‘Cigarette?’
I turned to Lenka.
‘Lenka, where’s Coco?’
Lenka looked down.
‘Who is Coco? You want cigarette? Good price here.’
‘No, no cigarettes!’ I turned again to Lenka. ‘Where is she? I have something for her.’
Lenka leaned in close to me; she smelled of clove oil.
‘Go away, there is no Coco here. No Coco, okay?’
‘I have this CD for her,’ I said. ‘She likes them. It’s Coldplay, look.’
Lenka looked at the CD in my hand and made to say something but then a man loomed up behind her. He was bear-like and broad and said something to Lenka in Ukrainian. She reached into her bag and passed him two packets of Camels. As he walked past he gave me a shove, my shopping spilling all over the pavement.
A bottle of orange juice landed near Lenka’s feet. She picked it up and put it in my hand.
‘She liked you,’ she said, quickly in a whisper. Then she turned her back on me and spoke in her native tongue with the new woman, the woman who wasn’t Coco. I glanced up at the Asda sign; it looked like it was about to float away again.
I stood there without a single idea what to do next. In the distance there was the distinctive wail of sirens. Lenka looked at the other woman, then stooped to pick up her rucksack. Wordlessly they made their way towards the exit.
The Final Cigarette
He sits on the balcony of the Raised Star Hotel in Reno, newly married, soon to die, about to smoke his last cigarette. He knows it is his last cigarette, and he hopes the coughing won’t spoil it. The sun is rising over the casinos and hotels and he is wearing his dark sunglasses; the aviator shades he wears when he goes fishing. He could have a drink if he wanted, but he doesn’t. He could easily steal out of the room and down to a bar, but that would hurt the woman he loves and that’s not what he does these days. It’s become a kind of joke now, this Good Raymond stuff, but it’s true. When people say they can die happy, he almost understands that. He smiles and taps his last cigarette against the packet. No one wants to die with a hangover.
There is a cup of coffee steaming on the table in front of him and he wonders for a moment how many cigarettes and how many cups of coffee he has married in his life. The marriage of cigarettes and coffee. I should have written a story called that, he thinks, and realizes that this is the first time he has thought about work since landing in Reno. He is not looking at others, or observing himself, or his new bride. He is no longer transforming one thing into another. It’s a bit like being drunk, he thinks: it lends a sort of pitched clarity to your perspective.
He and Tess were married two days ago at the Heart of Reno Wedding Chapel and he’d felt even more nervous than the first time, back when he was twenty. He’d almost joked with Tess that it’d just be his luck to drop down dead while walking down the aisle. But thankfully he’d kept his mouth shut. They’ve not talked about the cancer since they got here – they are in Reno, after all, and no one talks about cancer in Reno – and he likes to imagine that he’s left it back at home, like a difficult, truculent teenager.
He puts the cigarette to his lips. It feels good in his mouth, firm and right. It is a Chesterfield. When he was in the store, buying his last packet of cigarettes, he needed to decide which brand his last cigarette would be: it was a decision too important to be left to chance or simply to habit.
The first kind he smoked were Wings. They were the cheap cigarettes his father had smoked. He remembers the first one he sneaked. He was nine years old and the party his parents were giving had just come to an end. He took one from the pack, lit it and liked the way the smoke tasted on his tongue. You know instantly if you’re a smoker. A proper smoker. His best friend Harvey always seemed uncomfortable with a cigarette: like it wouldn’t quite sit right. But Ray’s always looked good smoking. He knows that.
Lucky Strikes were his brand when he was old enough to buy his own. He liked the package and the It’s Toasted! line on the box. They were filterless and harsh but they were smoother than the Wings and they made him feel older. Like anyone in Yakima needed anything to make themselves feel older. He blew his first smoke ring with a Lucky. He smoked a Lucky after the first time he got laid. Luckies were in his breast pocket when he discovered he was going to be a father a year shy of making it out of his teens.
When he moved to Paradise, California, he smoked Kools for a while. But they made his mouth taste too much like mornings. He went on to Kents, then settled on Marlboros. But this last packet, and this last one from this last packet, is a Chesterfield. It’s a Chesterfield because Chesterfields remind him of the first day he really knew he’d kicked the booze. He was talking to Tess, smoking a Chesterfield, and he knew that things were just about getting better: that things finally were better.
He coughs a little and feels something chunky in his mouth. He worries that when he spits it out it’ll be part of his lungs. The blood he’s been expelling for months still frightens him, even though there’s nothing now left to fear. He stands and puts the cigarette on the small card table and leans over the balcony. There is no one around, no one on the street. He dribbles the spit slowly from his mouth, just like he used to off the Barrelhead Bridge, and watches it cast like a fishing line. A little of it catches on the stubble of his chin. He wipes it away with the back of his hand and smiles a big goofy smile that makes him feel like he’s that fat little kid hanging out on the Barrelhead Bridge again.
Ray sits back down in the motel chair and picks up the cigarette. He sniffs at it and takes the lighter from the breast pocket of his shirt. It is a cheap plastic Bic. He has lost a lot of lighters over the course of his life: countless plastic ones, copper Zippos, an engraved Ronson once. But somehow it seems fitting that he’ll use a blue Bic lighter he doesn’t even remember buying to light that last smoke. He flicks the wheel and nothing happens. He tries again and still nothing. He laughs and tries once more for luck. The thing is busted, unable to do the one thing that is expected of it. He sets down the cigarette again. There is a book of matches in the bedroom, sitting inside an ashtray. He stands up and goes to get them.
The room is cool, almost pitch-dark through the lenses of his sunglasses. Tess is sound asleep. He palms the matches and looks at her sleeping. He hopes her dreams are pleasant; that she’s thinking of baccarat tables and reels of slots aligning. On the dresser is $627 in various denominations of bill. Tess can’t stop winning in Reno. She’s on a hot streak that just won’t go cold, but Ray can’t hit a card, can’t even buy one. He looks at the money and wonders whether he’s ever seen so much just lying around without a purpose. He thinks how much he could have used that money years ago. How much he could have used that luck.
Back outside he stands and looks out over Reno. He thinks again of that old Johnny Cash record. The first time he heard it was in the late sixties. A long-haired girl in a bikini had a transistor radio playing in the next yard. It was California hot and he was drinking a beer. When he heard that famous line about shooting a man in Reno, it made him down his drink and go back inside the house to write. He was urged on by the sound of the prisoners cheering as Johnny sang ‘Just to watch him die’; but it was mid afternoon and he’d had too much to drink. The poem he’d written was worthless so he’d thrown it away.
Ray puts the cigarette to his lips. The last cigarette. He sparks the match and holds it in his cupped hands until it catches. He sucks in the smoke and fills his lungs.
The fag fell and somehow managed to get itself below Dad’s dressing gown and half inside his pyjama bottoms. He wriggled in the wheelchair, his arms flailing as he tried to get at it. I paused for a moment, wondering whether or not to help him. Eventually I relented and retrieved the cigarette, putting it in his hand. The smell that clung to his clothes and to his skin was strong, like bad breath. I hoped that the powerful odour would overwhelm the tobacco, and none of the nurses or doctors would look at me with disgust as I wheeled him back to the ward.
The staff had been good to my father, all things considered, and he probably pestered them to help him long before he asked me. But, professionally, I don’t think they could be seen to be wheeling a man through the hospital grounds just for the purposes of smoking a fag. Even those who smoked would have seen that it was dubious to grant this dying man his last wish. I’ve always been more of a pushover.
We were standing, illuminated by low yellow street lamps, at the hospital perimeter. To our right were a couple of nurses, smoking in their uniforms and talking in solemn voices about a dance act they’d seen on a television talent show the night before. When eventually they saw us, they hurriedly finished their cigarettes and made their way along the path back to the main part of the hospital. ‘Ladies,’ my father said as they passed, nodding and half rising from his chair as though they had just left the captain’s table of a cruise ship.
