Ten Stories About Smoking (17 page)

These friends of yours talked like peacocks, their vocabulary and arguments showy and bright. If they discussed television it was in a way I did not recognize, and if they mentioned a book or a
film or an art work, I had invariably never heard of it. As a group they were unsettling company. I never really knew what they thought of me, of my quiet presence on the edge of the group. I found
that the best way to assimilate was to listen to the eddying conversation and give dry, ironic answers when asked direct questions. You were proud when I did that; I could see it behind your
thick-rimmed spectacles.

You liked to test me. You were mischievous that way. One night we met up with Mary and the two of you took me to a fetish club. Your faces glowed as you explained what I would
see. I said it sounded fun, and you looked at me oddly.

‘We don’t have to go, you know,’ you whispered as we walked. ‘I just thought it would be interesting.’

‘It certainly sounds that,’ I said.

The fact was that the rubber, the harnesses, the corsetry, the dead-eyed looks from the costumed patrons no longer seemed frightening. Besides, it was hot and underwhelming at the club. So very
dark we could barely see the leather and chaps. Mary went off almost immediately, kissing us both on the cheek before disappearing. A woman walked past with a man on a leash. He drank from a bowl
of water on the floor. We headed to the bar, not talking. I didn’t want to embarrass myself, or make the wrong impression.

‘Are you into this?’ you said. ‘Does it turn you on?’

‘It’s interesting,’ I said pointing to a man with something resembling a long, tasselled tail inserted into his rectum. ‘But I can’t say it does much for
me.’

‘Spoilsport,’ you said. You smiled but I didn’t know whether you were joking We watched Mary beat the hell out of some guy, then went back to your flat.

You never liked staying at my house. It was my great aunt’s old place, a three-bedroomed semi with bay windows and a postage stamp garden. I had tried to spruce it up, but
I understood your lack of enthusiasm.

‘This place has death in it,’ you said. ‘And not in a good way. I mean, it doesn’t give it character. This place
has
no character, this place has no soul. You
could refit the whole place and you’d still feel an old woman’s last breaths on the back of your shoulders.’

In that first year you spent the night no more than five times. I preferred the brown walls of your high-rise flat anyway, the battered sofas and the old bed that creaked whenever we moved. The
lift always smelled of piss and metal – nostalgic, like the stink of old telephone boxes – and I remained as in love with the view from the lounge as ever: it made me feel like I was
part of a living, breathing organism. It made me feel alive.

After a year or so, I sold the house and together we bought an apartment on the top floor of a former mental institution in Dalston. The agent told us that John Merrick, the Elephant Man, had
been an inmate for a time, and you loved that story almost as much as the exposed brickwork and pitch-pine floors. From the bedroom windows you could see Victoria Park in one direction and all the
way down to Liverpool Street in the other. On the night we moved in, the two of us looked out of the second bedroom and toasted it with a bottle of Cava. You put your hand on the window and leaned
your head against the pane.

‘I can do work here,’ you said. ‘Real work.’

You set up your studio in the spare room and spent all your days in there, the stereo turned up so loud our neighbours complained to the environmental health. When I got back
from work you would come out from the studio and have a shower. I would pour some wine and strip out of my work suit. We were still living out of boxes months after moving in and the teetering
stacks taunted me, but I couldn’t bring myself to unpack everything. I kept telling myself I’d do it on the weekend, or one night the following week, but it never happened; just like
quitting smoking, joining the gym and the nights without drinking.

You might disagree, but I think that was when you were actually at your happiest. Fresh from the water, a towel around your body, a glass of wine in your hand, a cigarette burning. You would sit
on the toilet seat and tell me about your day and I would listen; then, like a watery town crier, I’d tell you what I’d read in the newspapers. When we were ready, we’d take a cab
to wherever we were going next. You never thought of the money: you just liked the feel of a taxi ride through the city streets.

I thought of money, though. I thought about the debts we were accruing, the way we were spending our income. I had always been frugal, but just eighteen months of our being together had begun to
burn through my savings and other investments. You’d had small jobs here and there, part-time things, freelance things, but nothing concrete. It frustrated me, but I knew there was no point
in my saying anything. So when you were offered that job, I was delighted. It was a good position, a creative role, and one that was handsomely paid. You were wearing jogging bottoms and a vest top
when you told me all about it. You did not smile once.

I was confused; then angry. You were proposing to turn it down. You gave me excuses and called them reasons. It would interfere with your real work; it was too far from home; you would be cooped
up on a train for two or more hours a day. When you started talking about a new project, one that you were sure would be a success, I lost my temper.

‘Can’t you just for once in your life think of us and not just of yourself? Of what might be good for us?’

‘You don’t get it, do you?’ you said. ‘What’s good for me
is
good for us. Do you really want me to be a wage slave? A suit and a bouncy haircut? All teeth
and tits? Can you honestly see me like that? This is me, I can’t change it and I make no fucking apology for it either. You want me to take the job? You want me to be a commercial artist? I
mean, do you even know what being a commercial artist means?’ you said. You paused and lit a cigarette.

‘But maybe that’s what you want,’ you went on. ‘What you’ve always wanted. A house, a job, maybe some cute kids, then out to the suburbs and the
Daily Mail
?
Is that what this is all about, Ben? You want me to fuck all my ambitions? You want me to be like you; clinging with whitened knuckles to other people’s talent?’

The wine glass missed you by several inches and I left you to pick up the shards.

There was a game on in the Faltering Fullback, Fulham
v
Bolton. Tom and I sat to the left-hand side of the big screen. I’d said as much as I could and he’d
listened as well as he was able, and now we were watching the second half.

‘You want to stay at mine tonight?’ Tom said.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I should go back really. Don’t want her thinking I’ve just popped out for cigarettes.’

We both smiled. It was an in-joke from our first years in London. Back then, Tom and I shared a one-bedroomed flat above a twenty-four-hour video shop. We both worked nights at a data entry
place in Hornsey and would come home after a shift, rent a couple of videos and watch them while playing elaborate drinking games. We loved dumb action pictures, cop dramas, whodunnits; films that
were formulaic, derivative and wonderfully predictable. And it was the clichés we loved: the black best friend shot in the opening moments, the man who disappears after popping out for
cigarettes, the cop on the edge, the boss taking him off the case, the trustworthy mentor turning out to be the bad guy. We lived like that for almost six months, in a state of boozy camaraderie.
It was the only part of my past that you thought was kind of cool.

You called just as the final whistle was about to blow. Tom made his excuses and went to the bar. I picked up the phone and held it close to my ear without answering it. When I eventually did, I
listened to the sound of your breathing.

‘You don’t understand,’ you said. ‘I don’t mean to be like this. Will you come home, now, please? Will you?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t have lost it like that.’

‘So you’ll come home?’

‘I’ll be home as soon as I can.’

I said goodbye to Tom and got a cab back to the flat.

You turned down the job anyway. Not that you told me straight away. By then it didn’t matter; you’d finally sold one of your pieces. You were showing with a bunch of
other people at a space in Bethnal Green and there was a lot of interest. It was a new thing for you, an installation: hats on wires. A whole room full of them, caps and homburgs and boaters and
bowlers, and everyone loved it. I was late to the opening. By the time I arrived you had already sold it to a collector and were talking to him and a group that he had brought along. You introduced
me to James, Johnny, Jimmy, Davey, Mickey, Jane and Iola as your partner and manager. They all said how much they loved the hats.

You seemed slightly nervous around them, but grew steadily calmer. We moved from the gallery to another bar and then got a cab to another one. My head was spinning from the drink and the effort.
We left the club and under the dulled lights of Brick Lane spent some time looking for a place that Mickey knew. We eventually ended up in the back room of a Turkish snooker hall, drinking warm
bottles of Efes and smoking foreign cigarettes. James, Johnny, Jimmy, Davey, Mickey, Jane and Iola were doing drugs, smoking them off foil. And then I watched as you did the same. In the bathroom
there was a long, coiled turd in the toilet bowl. I vomited over it and flushed the stinking mess away.