Ten Stories About Smoking, page 13
‘I may be dying, but I’ve still got it,’ he said. ‘You see the arse on that?’ – he pointed to the woman’s shuddering rear – ‘I should have asked you for that. What a last request that would have been!’
He said he was dying in the same way he would have once have said he was drunk or ugly; not quite believing that he was anything of the kind. There was foam at the corner of his lip which he caught with his hand. That was something my grandfather used to do: let spit dribble from the corner of his mouth and mop it up with a handkerchief. I used to look at my sister and gag at the sight of it; the false teeth that had so amused us as children now foul things that sat crooked in his mouth, leaking liquid down his chin. Dad would mock him, his manners and his appearance. I wondered if he remembered that, and whether he felt bad about it.
Dad looked nothing like Grandad though; not then and not ever. Dad was always thin and reedy: a real boneshaker of a man, but he had become more cadaverous since the illness had taken hold. Under the yellow lights he looked even more unwell, even closer to death, but his rakish smile intimated that he knew something even the doctors didn’t. I held the blue Bic lighter I’d purchased from the newsagents in my pocket – he would not use matches, he said they gave him headaches – and thought that when people say they laugh in the face of death they don’t mean it literally; my Dad, however, certainly did.
‘It’s not going to light itself, soft lad,’ he said. ‘Come on, step to it. Chop, chop.’
I handed him the lighter and he tried to flip the wheel. His hands were shaking, his flesh loose over his bones. These were old man’s hands. Had someone said he was seventy, no one would have disagreed: the deterioration was faster even than his diagnosis. I convinced my mother to visit him early in his treatment but when she saw him from a distance she grabbed me by the arm, apologized and turned on her heels. When I called round later, to her and Jim’s place, she was sitting on the big leatherette sofa looking at old photographs of him and her, pictures of us as children.
‘It doesn’t make me hate him any less,’ she said as she offered tea but poured gin. ‘Don’t think that. I’ve been many things in this life, love, but I’ve never been a hypocrite and I won’t start now. Not for you, and especially not for him.’
We got slowly drunk. I cried and she cried, though she made it clear her tears were for me. ‘Do you remember,’ she said as we ate a defrosted chilli and drank red wine, ‘when you were about seven and you decided that you and Elsie needed a new daddy? You said to me that your other friends had new daddies and you wanted one too. You remember that?’
‘I suggested Mr Stevens,’ I said. ‘He had a snooker table and a sports car.’
‘He ended up marrying that Skellern woman. Josie from Jim’s work knows her a bit and she got chatting to him. Bald like Yul Brynner he is now, apparently.’
‘Does he still have the snooker table?’ I said.
She smiled. ‘I’ll make sure she asks next time.’
Dad never mentioned Mum, and I never told him how close she came to seeing him. He hadn’t expected much in the way of visitors, which was fortunate. Elsie hadn’t been in contact for over a decade and, like Mum, refused to be a hypocrite. I went to gather his drinking buddies at the North Star. They all promised to come later, on another day, soon though, really soon. Even when I went back to tell them that it wasn’t going to be long, that now was the time, they just looked at Lank Tony behind the bar.
‘He was a right pain in the arse, your Ray,’ Lank Tony said. ‘I mean he’d give you his last fag and fivepence, sure, but still a right pain in the arse. Drink for Ray, though, eh? A drink for Ray.’ I watched the five of them toast him with whisky and exchange the same glances: I hope it’s you next, I hope it’s not me.
My father knew nothing of this. He’d look through the papers, laughing at celebrities and politicians. That Amy Winehouse? She looks like one of those blokes I was in Pentonville with once, just with more tattoos and smaller tits. I’d let him make the jokes and wonder why it was only me here. Just the two of us. Two men with nothing in common, not even sport, not even the fucking football. It was the only time in my life that I was glad of his jokes. At least it kept the conversation flowing.
I watched him flip the wheel on the lighter, again and again. He adjusted the flame setting then tried again. At the fourth time of asking still nothing happened. He took the cigarette from his mouth and held it up, the filter wet with his saliva. ‘Would you, son? I think this has got the old man lock on.’
I took the clammy cigarette, lit it and passed it back. He held it between his thumb and forefinger – like a spiv, Mum had always said. He put the cigarette to his lips. The last cigarette. This last, final cigarette. He sucked in the smoke and filled his lungs.
Ray sips his coffee and takes a second pull on his cigarette. He is trying not to smoke too quickly, which has been his habit all his life and is probably what’s killed him. It seems a very slow kind of suicide, and one that in a race with the bottle always looked on the outside track. He blows out the smoke and a Cadillac drives past, ice-cream coloured and with the top down. In the back is Yul Brynner, at least it looks like Yul Brynner from up there. The guy is bald as an egg and three girls are with him in the back of the Cadillac. But it can’t be Yul Brynner because he died four years ago, sixty-five and change, fifteen more than Ray will ever see. Ray watches the car pull away and hears the giggling of the girls. He will never know what it feels like to go bald, to have to shave the hairs at the back of his head to match his crown. He’s ambivalent about that part.
Yul Brynner made a commercial to be broadcast after he died, saying that if he’d stopped the smoking then he wouldn’t be talking about the cancer. Ray doesn’t see it that way. He lets out a long beam of Chesterfield smoke in satisfaction. He couldn’t have written without the cigarettes, he’s certain of that. The drinking stopped him from writing, but the cigarettes? They sharpened his mind. He knows that the routine of smoking helped him so many times to get out of a rut, out of another story-shaped hole.
With the cigarette smouldering, he coughs again but it isn’t a bad one, not this time. He is enjoying the cigarette, it feels light underneath the thumbnail of his right hand. He flicks it just to make sure it is still there. Ash falls on the floor and is kicked up a little on a breeze that passes across the balcony.
The problem is that Ray’s enjoying this cigarette so much he’s already looking forward to the next one. If he were rich, he imagines that he would like to smoke only a third of each cigarette then immediately light another. If he’d met Tess earlier, if her hot streak had started years before, then maybe he could have done just that. Maybe that would have saved him from this.
You shouldn’t get hung up on things, but when you’re doing something for the final time it’s hard not to. He thinks of Maryann. Sixteen when she gave birth the first time, seventeen the second. He has students now whom he teaches and he can’t see any kind of correlation between their fresh eighteen-year-old selves and Maryann and Ray, two babies on their knees, the sawmill dust in his hair, the smell of disinfectant on his skin. And as he thinks about it, he realizes that even when they had no money, even when they were on the verge of bankruptcy there were always cigarettes. They were always there. They were a reliance and they were reliable. No matter how bad the day, you could come home and smoke one and it might just feel that the world wasn’t such a terrible place after all.
Ray shakes his head at this. The last book is complete; it is poetry and he is glad to have finished it. He has left everything in order: neat. His last story, ‘Errand’, is about the death of a writer and though proud of it, he is also worried about how it looks. That it is too poignant. He does not want to be remembered that way. He does not know how he wishes to be remembered. It’s not something that anyone should have the chance to consider, he thinks. You should be doing what it is you’ll be remembered for, rather than working out what that thing is. Even if it’s being a total ass.
The smoke my father blew from his mouth was thin, as though it was just the steam coming from his lungs. His hands shook as he held the cigarette and we both watched the Saturday night traffic go by: the buses, the motorbikes, the sports cars with their spoilers. I sat down on a wooden bench and pulled my jumper’s sleeves over my hands. It was getting cold.
‘I do appreciate it, you know,’ he said. ‘You doing this.’
‘I just wheeled you out here, that’s all,’ I said.
‘And I appreciate it. Giving a dying man his dying wish. Did you . . .’ He paused for a moment and shifted himself in the chair. His face was expectant and I would have loved nothing more than to say no. That in the rush of leaving I had forgotten; that it was unfortunate but he would have to go without. Instead I passed him the hipflask.
‘Good lad,’ he said. He put the cigarette in the crook of his mouth and squinted as he unscrewed the cap. The coal of the cigarette glowed as he puffed on it; then he took a long pull from the flask.
‘Forgot to tell you. Heard a good one this morning.’
It was a long joke about beekeepers and I’d heard it before. In fact I thought it was him who’d told me, one afternoon in the North Star perhaps. I sat back down on the bench and tried to fix him in my mind: the last cigarette, probably the last time I would ever be alone with him. He took a gummy pull on the fag and then raised his arm at the punchline. I laughed and it sounded hollow in the night air. He drank some more Scotch and nodded his head.
‘You remember when we went fishing that time?’ I said. ‘You remember that?’
He paused and hitched up his robe a little.
‘Aye, right. It were just the two of us. It pissed it down and you cried because it was cold. And to cheer you up I ate some of the bait’ – he slapped his thighs and laughed – ‘I can see you now, your little rod barely in the water and you screaming to go back home.’
‘It wasn’t just the two of us, though, was it?’ I said. ‘Lank Tony was there. And Stan. You only let me go because Mum had to go to work and she couldn’t get someone to watch me.’
He looked confused. ‘If you say so,’ he said. ‘I thought it was just us two. Don’t remember Tony or Stan there at all.’ He shook his head and took a long drag. He looked away from me, over to the road and the silent terraced houses opposite. ‘Fact is I don’t remember much about all that time, you know? Seems so long ago now. Another life.’
‘I remember once you bought me an ice cream,’ I said. ‘As a surprise.’
‘Ah yes, I do remember that,’ he said, as though it was important. ‘Beautiful day. Sweating like a wog on a rape charge, I was. Bought you all an ice cream. Your mum was right surprised, I can tell you. I’d remembered that she liked those ice creams with the bubble gum in the bottom, you see. She thought it was romantic.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, another time. When we were on Alton Way.’
It must have been a year or so before he left. Mum had taken Elsie into town to buy something she needed. Dad and I were alone and watching the television. Outside an ice-cream van sounded its three-blind-mice tune and I went to the window and watched it slowly make its way down the road. It wasn’t too hot a day, but it was hot enough. Dad picked up the paper and said he was going for a dump. I turned away from the window and watched the television. When I heard the door open, I looked round thinking it might be Mum and Elsie, but it was him clutching a 99 Flake with strawberry sauce in each hand. ‘He asked if I wanted a ninety-nine,’ he said. ‘And I said I wanted a bloody hundred.’
I retold the story and he looked on with growing confusion.
‘If you say so, son. Can’t say I remember though.’ He sucked in some more smoke. ‘And, anyway, I don’t even like strawberry sauce.’
He laughed and beckoned me to pass the flask. I hoped he wasn’t going to get pissed. How would that look, my dying father drunk, stinking of fags and booze, trying to goose the nurses during the early morning rounds? He took a long pull and passed back the flask. I looked at the floor and at the wheels of the chair. There was mud in the tread and the red paint was chipped.
‘I miss fishing,’ he said eventually.
Ray looks at the chunky wedding ring and thinks of the kids. He has variably been a good father, a bad father, an absent father, and a recovering father. Being a father is a lot of people to be; and he’s glad that at the final reckoning both his daughter and his son realize that he is more the good father, the recovering father than anything else. Like being a smoker, being a father becomes him, and he feels that truly as he takes another drag on the Chesterfield. Like the smoking, there would be no writing without the kids; their scratched knees, their bathing routines and their bedtimes. They are adults now, but that means nothing when your father dies. Everyone’s a child then.
He places the cigarette on the edge of the table and moves inside again, twisting the cord of the telephone under the doors. He has never made a phone call from a hotel room before, the cost so prohibitive he’s never even considered it. Usually he would use one of the booths in the lobby, but there is money on the dresser and this is a call he doesn’t mind paying for.
Ray punches in the digits, pausing on the middle one and remembering with sudden clarity that it is a number 8. There is a brief pause before the call is connected. It rings twice and a female voice answers.
‘Hi, Diane, it’s Ray,’ he says.
‘Oh, hi, Ray,’ Diane says, smiling. ‘How was it all? You both have yourselves a good time?’
‘It was great, Diane. We got hitched at one of those little chapels and then we had steaks and went gambling. Tess is up about six hundred bucks.’
‘And you’re feeling okay?’ Diane ties the telephone cord around her little finger.
‘Never better, Diane.’ He picks up the cigarette and takes another hit.
‘Still smoking though. I can hear it.’
‘It’s my last one ever. Promise. It’s a Chesterfield.’
‘And how is it?’ she says. She quit two years before and often feels like starting again when she’s around Ray.
‘Like heaven,’ he says and laughs. ‘Is he in? Can you put him on? I want to speak with him.’
‘Sure, Ray, I’ll go get him.’ She puts her hands over the receiver. ‘Honey!’ she shouts. ‘Quickly, it’s your dad on the phone.’
A woman was approaching, striding stiff-legged and purposefully up the asphalt pathway. She had a duffel coat on over her uniform and her displeasure was obvious from the way she pumped her arms. It was Diane.
‘Looks like we’ve been rumbled,’ I said. ‘Diane’s here. Throw the cigarette away.’
‘I will do no such thing,’ Dad said. ‘Fuck her, I’m smoking a fag.’
He smiled revealing his teeth and the gap by his left molar. They say beards grow when you die, toenails too. Dad was always doing things of his own accord.
‘Please,’ I said, but it was too late.
‘Mr Peters. Are you smoking a cigarette?’ Diane said.
‘No, it’s a hamster,’ he said.
She rolled her eyes at me and looked down at Dad.
‘And you’ve been drinking, haven’t you?’
‘Only deep from the well of life, my glorious Florence Nightingale.’
‘It is against hospital policy for patients—’
‘Oh do shut up, woman. Let me finish this wee fag and then I’ll be in. Scout’s honour.’
She looked at me in exasperation and I shrugged. She motioned towards me and I followed her a little way off.
‘You let him smoke any more and it could kill him right now,’ Diane said. ‘I’m serious. He’s got a chance. It’s slim, but there’s a chance, okay?’
‘He asked me to. And I—’
‘I know, Lindsay,’ she said. ‘I know. Just make sure it’s his last one, okay?’
We looked over at him in the chair, his low voice humming ‘Smoke On the Water’. Diane squeezed my arm.
‘And you’re okay? Coping?’
‘Coping. Yes.’
‘Good.’
She nodded and headed back to the ward. I sat back down on the bench.
‘If I were you, son,’ he said. ‘I’d try and get in her knickers. Everyone knows nurses are filthy as fuck.’
‘Hey, Dad,’ Lindsay says. He is dressed in pyjamas. It is late morning and the smell of pancakes has made it to the top of the stairs. He sits on the side of the bed and rubs his eyes. Since they found out he has hardly slept, hardly done anything but think of his father, his father who’s not going to be around for ever. Not even for a few more years. Diane tells him to be positive, but he can’t find the positives in any of this.
‘Hey, son. How you doing?’
‘Not good, Dad. How about you?’
‘Better, son. Tess has won maybe six hundred bucks gambling. Looks like I’m going to die rich after all.’
Ray takes a drag on his almost finished cigarette.
‘It’s early morning in Reno. It’s beautiful here.’
‘Reno’s a shit hole, Dad.’
‘I know, Lin. I know’ – he blows out smoke – ‘but for the moment it’s the best place on earth. I was thinking that the only thing that’d make it better was if you were all waiting downstairs in the buffet room. All of you waiting and then me and Tess could come down and have breakfast with you all. Wouldn’t that be something?’
‘I’d like that, Dad. I’d like that a lot,’ Lindsay says.
‘You’re going to come and see me, right?’ There is a long pause. Lindsay’s crying but he won’t let his father know. Ray is crying too.
