Ten Stories About Smoking, page 4
I answered the emails, returned the phone messages and was about to make my afternoon cup of tea when the phone rang again. It was a number I didn’t recognize. I hesitated, then picked up the receiver. There was a pause and then a woman’s voice asked for Marty. She was the only one who’d ever called me Marty.
Angela sounded exactly as she had before, and I recalled for a moment the way she used to breathe heavily in my ear. She asked me how I was and I stuttered, then stood up for no good reason. There was a pause, a long one. Eventually, I asked her how she’d got my number.
‘You’re on the Internet,’ she said.
‘I’m on the Internet?’ I said.
‘Everyone’s on the Internet,’ she said.
I asked her what she wanted. She asked if I was with someone. I said no, not really. She told me she’d booked us a hotel. I asked where. She said Swindon.
‘What’s in Swindon?’ I said.
‘I will be.’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘I mean—’
‘Oh come on,’ Angela said, ‘we both know you’re going to say yes, so why waste the time?’
I had never been to Swindon before, and all things considered, it is unlikely I will ever go to Swindon again. On the train, there was something about the look on the passengers’ faces, a certain kind of blankness. I burrowed into my seat and took out a newspaper, but realized I’d read it all at breakfast. Instead I went to the buffet car and came back with some Chinese nuts and a can of Bass. In the silent carriage, I apologetically opened the can and crunched the snacks. I tried the crossword, but couldn’t concentrate on even the simplest clue.
We arrived and in the midst of a stream of impatient commuters, I made my way out of the station. The line for the taxis was long and I waited behind a couple recently reunited by the 17.04 from Cardiff. The woman had her hand in the man’s back pocket, and he was kissing her. Even in Swindon, I thought, train station kisses are the most romantic of all.
Eventually I got a cab, and the driver tried to engage me in conversation – something about bus lanes – but I ignored him and looked out the window, hugging my overnight bag to my chest. Swindon looked like a business park that had got out of hand. There was an eerie, almost American sadness to it; the entertainment parks, the shopping malls, the parades of smoked glass office blocks, their windows reflecting the dying sun. The hotel was at the intersection of several arterial roads, a squat building cowering against the flow of traffic.
The hotel lobby was shockingly bright, decorated with plasticky blonde wood. The receptionist – a young man with ginger stubble – was sullen and gittish. I told him there was a reservation in the name of Fulton and he puffed out his cheeks.
‘Yes, that’s correct, sir. However, the reservation appears to be for a Ms Fulton, sir. And we require the person named on the reservation to be present before any party can take possession of their room or rooms,’ he said.
‘Did Angela not put my name down as well?’
‘Evidently not,’ the receptionist said and waving his hand answered the ringing telephone.
I stood there not knowing exactly what to do. ‘I’m so sorry,’ the receptionist said into the receiver, ‘would you mind holding for one moment, madam?’ He turned to me.
‘Sir, why don’t you wait for your friend in the bar?’ he said, pointing to some double doors. I picked up my holdall and followed his outstretched arm.
The bar was just as plasticky and woody, and just as garishly lit. There was a drunken party of young women sitting around a huge round table and three Japanese businessmen silently drinking Stella Artois. I ordered a gin and tonic. It felt like the right kind of drink to be seen with by an ex-lover – from a distance it could easily be sparkling water. The barman was sullen and gittish. He tried to get me to order some olives. I ordered some olives.
Angela arrived soon after. She looked older, but in a good way. Her hair was kinky and her eyes fizzed like Coca-Cola. She stood at the bar and drank the remainder of my gin and tonic.
‘Say nothing,’ she said and took me by the hand.
The bedroom was brown and cream and functional. She sparkled in her silver dress and pushed me against the wall. For a moment we were twenty again. She guided us both back to a time when we didn’t need to worry about interest rates and love handles, pensions and cancer, stunted ambitions and broken dreams. I made sure that she came first; I could have done it with my eyes closed.
After we were finished, she looked at me expectantly and rolled over. I held her tightly and she leaned herself back into me. She smelled of sex and shampoo; her breasts heavier in my hands.
‘Hello,’ she said, ‘I’ve missed you.’
‘Me too—’
She interrupted me with a long, sloppy kiss, which she then abruptly curtailed. She put her hands on my chest and then on my face, like she was piecing me together from scrap.
‘But . . . no, this is all wrong,’ she said. ‘Something’s not right. I feel . . . ’ she shivered. ‘I can’t explain it.’ Angela bent down and kissed me again, experimentally.
‘You smell . . . I don’t know, wrong,’ she said, sniffing my skin.
‘What, like bad?’
‘No. Just not like you.’ She looked puzzled for a moment then glanced at the bedside table.
‘Did you quit smoking?’ she said, like it was an accusation. I laughed.
‘About five years ago now.’
‘Quit? I never thought you’d quit. Not ever.’
I didn’t like the maddened look in her eyes: she was naked, but not in a good way.
‘Well I did.’
I put my hand to her hip and she looked at me as though I had deceived her.
‘Do you still drive that Vauxhall Viva?’ she said.
‘It was a Hillman. And that’s long gone. You don’t need a car in London.’
She pulled up the bedsheets and put her head in her hands.
‘I never should have done this,’ she said, ‘it was a terrible, terrible idea.’ She turned her back on me then and made her way to the en suite bathroom. She had cellulite on her thighs. It was sexy in a way that women just don’t understand.
‘I don’t get it,’ I said to the closed door. ‘You spent the whole time we were together bitching about how much I smoked and how bad it was for me and how much it stank, and now . . .’ She opened the door wearing a white towel. The shower was running.
‘Look, Marty,’ she said, picking up her abandoned clothes. ‘I wasn’t going to say anything, but the truth is that I’m getting married.’ She smiled, tiredly. ‘Or at least I was thinking about getting married. But then out of nowhere, I started thinking about you. About those years we had. And what I have with Declan, well it’s not like that. Nothing could be like that. So I had to see. I couldn’t let it just go. Couldn’t let it just disappear into nothing. I hoped that, you know, that it would all just slot back into place, but . . .’
‘But what?’
‘Look at us,’ she said. ‘We’re not children any more. In my head, you’re this romantic, childish, impossible boy with all these impossible dreams. But that’s not you. Not any more. And I can’t bring him back. And even if I could, could you really live like that again?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes I could. And if that’s all it is, I could start again. I could start right now!’
‘You know there’s more to it than that.’
She laughed and closed the bathroom door. As the water fell I imagined her getting married, the flowers in her hair and the string ensemble playing as she walked down the aisle. Her husband a lunk of a man; his head shaved and looking like a security guard in his hired suit and tails.
When she came back into the room, Angela was fully dressed, her hair wet at the ends. She picked up her overnight bag.
‘I’m sorry, Marty, I just needed to know,’ she said and kissed me lightly on the cheek.
She shut the door behind her and I went to the window to see her drive away. Across the bypass, a twenty-four-hour supermarket glowed red and blue. I pulled on my jeans and headed out to get supplies.
The Best Place in Town
David Falmer couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment he lost control of John’s stag party; but he knew it was long before the topic of conversation had turned to hookers. By then it was late, and instead of eating dinner at the Sunbird – a restaurant highly recommended by one of David’s guidebooks – they were sitting around a smoked-glass table in a neon-lit cocktail bar. Nearby, too close for David’s liking, clusters of young Americans stood in short dresses and sportswear, their teeth glowing a ghoulish blue-white. They made David feel old; tired, niggardly and old.
‘Little Angels,’ John’s future brother-in-law, Richard, said. ‘You can’t come to Vegas and not go to Little Angels. There’s like a law against it. It’s like the law of the stag.’
Brightly coloured spotlights bounced off the table. David’s itinerary was being used as a coaster; Richard had said they didn’t need it anyway: he’d been to Vegas loads of times. Whatever you wanted, whether it was the perfect steak and eggs, the finest champagne cocktail, the lowest buy-in Texas hold ’em game or the most enthusiastic whore, Richard always seemed to know the best place in town.
In his broad Yorkshire accent, Richard was describing a Chicana prostitute called Rosalita: her mouth, her legs, her breasts, her behind. David looked to John, hoping to exchange a raised eyebrow; but John was listening intently. Richard was enjoying himself, recreating in lavish detail Rosalita’s floor show; the four other men lapping it up. To David it sounded both painful and intensely unerotic. For a moment he wondered whether this was all an act, another of Richard’s tall tales, but the details seemed all too plausible.
John leant forward and asked Richard something that was muffled by the sound of a party cheering another stag to down his drink.
‘Five hundred in all,’ Richard replied. ‘And believe me, I’d have paid double that just to see those tits.’
David picked up a spare packet of cigarettes and lit one. He’d not smoked in thirteen years.
More drinks arrived and they drank them down, then ordered another round, then another. David watched John laugh, watched the others laugh, and felt like he was watching himself laugh along. He smoked his cigarette down to the filter, the taste uncommon and salty in his mouth. He plucked another from a pack and lit it from the butt of the one he was smoking. He wished he could be sitting outside somewhere smoking that cigarette, anywhere but there, there with Richard and the others. These are my friends, he thought. Phil, Ben, Simon, Dan, John. And I know nothing of them now: nothing. It was as though they’d abandoned their personalities at the airport.
Richard was telling a story about the guy he went to the Little Angels with. He did all the accents and his timing was clockwork; despite himself David laughed along with the others. He shook his head and tried to hide it, but he was laughing. Richard was a salesman by trade and he’d sold himself to Phil and Ben and Simon and Dan; though David knew something wasn’t quite right with John.
On the surface, John seemed to be having a good time, but David could see the clench in his jaw, the same sense of disappointment that had been there the first time he’d got married. This time was supposed to be different: the 3,000 mile journey, the identical suits, the celebration of a man passing from one stage of life to another. But it was not enough. It was not extraordinary; not in the way that John had imagined it. And though John was being loud and boorish, David was sure that part of him was imagining himself there fifteen years before, how it would have felt back then, after Helen, but before Alice, and before everything else.
David missed the punchline of Richard’s story and looked out over the room while the men laughed again and reached for their drinks. He saw himself reflected in the glass of the bar and put the cigarette to his lips. His face ghosted behind the smoke, his mouth almost obscured.
‘You’re smoking?’ John said, clapping David on the leg. ‘Christ, I haven’t seen you smoke in years.’
David shrugged.
‘You okay?’ John said.
‘I’m fine. Just a bit tired. Must be the jet lag,’ David said.
‘This is my stag, remember,’ John said, ‘so fuck jet lag, okay? I missed out last time and I’m shagged if I’m missing out this time, so just get a drink down your neck and join the party. I know Richard is . . . I know okay, but he knows all the best places. I mean this is pretty cool, isn’t it?’
David nodded, wondering what the Sunbird would have been like, and whether there was any chance of them making the helicopter tour to the Grand Canyon the following day.
‘Look,’ John said, ‘I really appreciate all the organization and stuff, but you’ve got to be a bit, you know, flexible. What do you think, best man?’
David smiled and crushed out his cigarette.
‘I think it’s time for a drink,’ he said.
The drinks arrived, a pink concoction this time, garnished with a hunk of pineapple. David was about to propose a toast when Richard held his drink aloft.
‘To the little angels,’ Chris said. ‘And the old devils!’
David downed his drink and without a word headed for the toilets.
Two hours later, David was quite lost. After leaving the bar, he’d bought some cigarettes and wandered off the strip, turning onto streets without any clear destination in mind. The heat and the cigarettes reminded him of a long sultry summer when he and John had been seeing a pair of Canadian women. Marie, the one David had fallen for, was a tall, tousled-haired girl who liked gin and tonics, painting her toenails and talking dirty. In his single bed they’d lain awake for hours, smoking and watching the sunlight’s slow dance on the walls. He could have listened to her talk for ever, and as he walked and smoked, David wondered how and why he hadn’t.
John was wild then. His first marriage scared him: one morning of waking and realizing that this was it, there was to be nothing else, had left him petrified. He and Helen were living in an unfamiliar part of town in a rented flat decorated with cast-off furniture from Helen’s parents. It was oppressive, all the pieces too grand for a one-bedroom attic flat with a damp kitchen and leaky plumbing. David liked Helen, liked her seriousness and her neat style and clipped intelligence. Her rational, logical nature was balanced by a wicked streak and a breezy sense of humour. She was, as John would later say, far too good for the likes of them.
He walked out on her after six months. He’d been out at some party and had taken the opportunity to get acquainted with one of the waitresses. At two in the morning he hammered on David’s door carrying a small rucksack and bag of records. He didn’t leave for six years; years that coursed through David as he walked. He smoked and walked and wished that he was with John; younger, leaner, having seen less of the world and of themselves.
He threw down his cigarette and looked around him. For the last few minutes he’d been walking down deserted alleys, those alleys leading on to dusty two-way tracks blown with raggedy bits of paper, flattened cigarette packets and crushed tin cans. He looked around and was faintly relieved to see a shop – Li’s 24-hour Liquor store – some way in the distance.
A series of bells pealed as he opened the door. It was cool inside and he walked the aisles with a kind of dreamy lightheadedness. The store was brightly lit and the rows of products, comfortingly recognizable but different, Americanized, looked almost fake under the fluorescent lamps. He touched the handle on the refrigerator door, held it, then opened it. He took out a bottle of root beer and then made his way over to a display case that held three donuts: his body clock was confused enough to believe that this was breakfast and those items the closest he could find to such a meal.
The man behind the counter looked up from a black and white portable television. He rang up the items and said something which sounded like five dollar twenty. David fumbled with his wallet and handed Li – if that’s who he was – a ten. The change was placed on the counter and the man went back to his television programme. David stood there for a moment, unsure what to do. He had planned to ask for a taxi number, eat his makeshift breakfast and then get back to the hotel, change out of his suit, go down to the pool and swim, then shower and go to sleep in the huge bed with the silky pillows. But for a moment that all seemed a preposterous idea. He picked up his coins, his bag of donuts and the root beer and left the shop, the door jingling like loose change as he exited.
Outside it was fully dark, the sky pricked with stars and spilled light from far-off casinos. David sat down at a concrete picnic table and tucked in to his donuts. They were slightly stale, the glaze dry and powdery, and he ate them quickly without any real enjoyment. He cracked the seal on the root beer and took a long pull on it, the medicinal smell reminding him of the times he and John used to hang around in the Newbury branch of McDonald’s, drinking root beer through plastic straws and talking about Susan Tucker, the sixth former who worked the Saturday shift.
He lit a cigarette and looked up and down the road. There were no cars or people, no lights even. He kicked a stone with his boot and spat for no other reason than there was no one to see him do it. Just as he did, the man from the shop came out, took a pack of Camels from his pocket and lit one.
‘Delphinium?’ he said.
‘I’m sorry?’
The man gestured with his cigarette behind him.
