Ten Stories About Smoking (23 page)

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.

‘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.’