Ten Stories About Smoking (8 page)

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.

‘You go Delphinium? Everyone come here, they all going. I can tell, you going Delphinium.’

David didn’t know how to respond, but smiled a big dumb smile and hoped that would do. But the man from the shop then sidled up to David and tugged at his jacket sleeves. He had his
cigarette wedged into the corner of his mouth.

‘Look – Delphinium,’ he said, pointing to a cluster of lights in the distance. ‘Good casino, best in town.’

The man looked around, his face confused and wrinkled. ‘Where’s car?’

‘I’m sorry?’ David said.

‘You no come in car?’

‘Oh, I see. No. I walked.’

The man tugged on his sleeve once more and pointed to a thin fenced-in track. ‘Ten minutes. Fifteen most. I use for motorbike.’

At the end of the pathway were the lights, and they were enticing. He squinted his eyes and the colours went to pixels. The man urged him forward and David started to walk rather slowly along
it. He wondered then whether this was entering into a trap. Whether he would be later bludgeoned or murdered, or robbed then raped. But he couldn’t go back, couldn’t now ask for the
taxi number or a ride back to the strip. It was the Delphinium or nothing. The man was waving him on, and David was smiling, feeling trapped even out in the open expanse of the desert.

‘Tell them Li sent you,’ the man said almost as an afterthought. David waved back, determined he would do no such thing. When he got to the Delphinium he would have a drink, a
cocktail of some kind, and then get the concierge to call him a taxi. He thought about that as he walked, the cocktail – a whiskey sour he was thinking, or maybe a Martini – and the
taxi, or perhaps a limo. Yes, he thought, a limousine; imagine the looks from the stag party as he tooted the horn, their blank faces as they wondered whether he’d won a million on the slots.
Yes, he thought, cocktails and limousines, home and bed.

It took twenty minutes to arrive at the fifties-style facade of the Delphinium Casino and Hotel. It was brightly lit by two large searchlights and was swarming with people.
Uniformed valets whisked away broad-finned cars as doormen greeted their owners at the revolving doors. The people entering the casino were different from the kind he’d seen at the tables and
slots on the strip. They were smart, these people; couples mainly: the men in sharply fitted suits, the women in elegant, flowing gowns. At the door, the bouncers said hello to every well-dressed
patron.

David straightened his tie and ran his hands through his thinning hair. One drink, he told himself, and then he’d call a taxi. He could hear the chatter, could feel the excitement of the
patrons flooding through the door.

‘Good evening, sir,’ the doorman said. ‘Welcome to the Delphinium.’