D - Come into the light, Assassin
By Jack Cade
- 1173 reads
"Do you want me to stop smoking?" she very hoarsely asks after the
first touch of the cigarette to her lips, which seems to me more of a
sob than a drag.
I ponder, brush my face with a forefinger. When he came up to see me,
my father asked how smokers could afford their habit on the pittance we
have to live on. I said, "I don't know," but what I meant to say was,
"We have to go on living, dad, however much it costs. I eat what I
like, when I like and I drink nearly every other night some weeks, and
I go to clubs and caf?s with friends. And hey, I'm one of the more
reserved ones."
He asked me that question because in spite of all that I had moaned to
him about the creeping descent of my monies in recent months, as I do
to everybody I know when conversation topics are hard to come by.
Moaning about it makes me believe I'm as concerned as I should be,
particularly with regards to the disgusting depths of my
indulgence.
I cough.
"That's a strange thing to ask me," I sound almost surprised. To
accentuate this, I stand up straight and stare right into her darkly
smeared, war paint face in an amused, disbelieving manner. My chin now,
I imagine, is lightly flecked with hair and rain, and tipped inward
towards my neck so that my brow is a heavy overhang that renders my
eyes comically intense - and, I hope, smaller. As I stand up a thin
layer of the concrete wall I was leaning on comes away, some falling to
mingle with the dust and gravel, some clinging to the soft yolk of my
raincoat. The crumbling sound fools me briefly into believing we stand
on a precipice, and that it is about to collapse. I listen for the
crunch, but all that comes is a hacking titter from above. I look up.
It's a gull.
"I'm not saying I would stop if you said yes. I just wanted to know.
Honestly, tell me."
"Well I don't really think I'm in a position to be pious about
it?"
She remains leant against the same wall in spite of my manoeuvre, an
angular branch, rooted to the ground by her black boots, their laces
trailing like stagnant rivers of thin smoke. The mouth of the cigarette
flares gold again as it perches on her lower lip - she waits for me to
finish my sentence.
The gull cackling above seems mechanical in its movement. I look back
at her, probing my teeth in search of a conclusion.
"I mean, I can't take the moral highground. And I wouldn't want to.
Would I?"
It's true enough that I steal her cigarettes from time to time, lift
them from her packet when she's not looking. They're so light, these
cigs; feathers of an angel. Flakes of heaven.
I steal them more for the thrill of the act, the look of incredulity
she allows me, than for the cigarettes themselves. That said, they're
good for posing with - doing a nazi in a war film - and I like the
atmosphere created by the pall. Mysterious, dense, uncertain.
Some times I even enjoy the taste.
"But yes. I would?prefer it if you did. Because I don't want you to
die."
She is in the process of blowing out a near transparent plume, but
interrupts herself with a convulsion of laughter. Her teeth break out
in a small curve - they're not yet gilded by the angel feathers. Not
yet.
I've smoked too many of hers, I think. If I speak before I cough now I
sound croaky and blunt. I have to clear my throat to put the drama back
into my voice, to prepare the melody.
"That's pretty melodramatic, isn't it?" she asks.
"Maybe so. Maybe so. Still, it's true. I don't want you to die, just
as I don't want anyone I know to die, and as far as I know those things
have a pretty high hitrate?
"Trowelfuls of tar in a pack of them, you know."
She opens the packet with an automatic, almost delicate tap of her
finger, and offers up the contents to me and my eyes. They look like
lines of tall, thin choirboys in their chancel, impeccably neat and
organised, with halos around their pretty heads. They aren't
singing.
I wave a hand hurriedly, shoe them away. She withdraws them and
they're gone in a snap. The church is dark and empty.
"So you aren't going to become a smoker then I take it?"
I wonder if the few I have sucked dry in my time are also the boys
behind my curious patterns of hunger of late. I always seem to be
hungry these days. But any fat, filling meal makes me feel bloated and
verging on sickness long before I've finished it, if indeed I manage to
do so. That itself is infrequent. I leave half full plates of warm
mince, spaghetti and mash for those ravenous men who want seconds. Well
done, healthy men.
Maybe I eat too fast. Maybe too slowly. I'm too thin and bony these
days, but according to the bathroom scales I've never been heavier.
Nine stone isn't bad going, after all.
I'm certain the doctor would find nothing amiss. I have an excellent
immune system - I've never had anything worse than a cold, or acne,
whichever of them is worse - not for many years.
"No. I don't think so. If that's alright with you."
"No, because you're going to keep stealing my cigarettes."
"Then give me something else to steal in equal abandon."
The fiery peak of another one coming to life is her answer. She shakes
her head in an amused act of forgiveness. I recline out of respect. The
lichen crackles beneath the impact of my back, and the gravel spits and
flicks as I grind my heel into the skin of the grey city.
Neither of us speak now for some time. We listen to the fragments of
other people's lives that are thrown our way from the city centre, like
scraps to old, toothless dogs.
"You realise," she says, eventually, "that if you did become a smoker
you would immediately owe me around six packs of fags?"
"Six packs, eh?"
I consider this figure in relation to the road markings painted out
diagonally in front of me. Each dash looks like one of the choirboys
minus the halo. The railings look like slanted shelves waiting to be
filled with stack upon stack of the plastic-sealed packets, their logos
shining like precious metals.
I really need to stop thinking about cigarettes. It can't be good for
my mind. My father would disapprove - strongly - then settle down to a
tasty cigar for the evening, and fill the lounge with the soft caress
of a tobacco petticoat. I'd wait on the hearthrug, arms folded, for him
to say something wise and thought-provoking, which he nearly always
would.
Then there's Coal's father, who lights his pipe in his transit van
using both hands whilst steering the vehicle round the corners of A
roads with his knees. And they try to tell me there's nothing admirable
about smoking.
"If an artist was to steal an idea from another artist," I say, very
slowly and very carefully, and as the gull wheels close to my head,
"but builds on the idea and makes it his own, then the act of theft is
called gathering inspiration. Similarly, if I take your cigarettes and
smoke them my own way, surely I don't owe you anything?"
She laughs again, an astonished, staccato laughter that zings like hot
shards off the armour of the surrounding sentry buildings and ricochets
into the evening sky.
"Oh no. You can't bullshit me on this one."
"I'm not bullshitting you. My argument makes perfect sense."
"No, it doesn't."
"Well," I conclude decisively, and with the air of a costumed judge,
"you aren't getting any payment. Nor retribution, you hear?"
"That's all right. I don't mind."
"Good."
The costumed judge feels like smugly dining on choirboys. Or a victory
cigar. Give the lad a cigar. But no rustle of applause drifts through
the faint aural scenery of shrieking cars and the rumble of young
drunks. Of course not. I share a sad smile with the kerbstone, which is
unmoved by my show of sentiment. She shuffles her feet slightly and
leaves the wall with a short, low groan, breathes out heavily - I catch
the scent of ash on the air and sigh involuntarily. She takes a few
paces forward, scraping. I look up at her. Her dark, undershadowed eyes
flitter to the pavement to the wall to the overbearing sky to me, as if
a multitude of strings were pulling them this way and that.
Her blinking makes me think of a violet hummingbird.
"Stop looking at me with your scary face."
"You think my face is scary, eh?"
"It is when you do that."
I relax my facial muscles. Fired off a grimace without even thinking
about it. I do that these days - natural self defence I suppose.
A taxi approaches. It's not the one we ordered. It bellows long into
the distance like an endlessly collapsing hull, then suddenly the
streets are free again. Free for poetic enterprise.
"Where's our taxi? Why doesn't it get a move on? I'm cold."
She hugs her jacketed arms to herself and sways side to side, then
bounces on her toes. Her boots creak. I inspect the index and middle
fingers of my right hand for patches the colour of lemon marmalade,
maybe slightly green at the edges, but there are none there. Her own
faghand is held tight between her bicep and bosom, so I cannot perform
a similar inspection on her.
The gull's gone. Must've gone ages ago. Gone coastwards to light an 8
inch cigarillo and blow ringlets at sailors' wives and sandwich terns,
putting up his webbed feet on a footstall and lounging in one of my
favourite devices - a red velveteen smoking jacket. Just to pass the
time between flying and fishing, or mating and resting. Just to pass
the time between the essentials of living. Gulls don't have television
sets and books and football like us people, so I'm betting they're
raving nicotine addicts when they aren't dealing with such essentials.
He probably knows all the pitfalls of his habit like his favourite
lady's plumage; he might even be a doctor seagull, with diagrams on the
walls of his surgery showing the gradual destruction of his little
brain and lungs.
He's enjoying his own licentiousness now, while her and I stand
trembling under the bloodless fingers of night, indulging in our own
passtimes. I wish I were writing letters. I love writing letters.
She snaps; "What is our taxi driver playing at? I want to get home. Do
you think I should ring them?"
"What for?"
"Maybe they've forgotten us."
"I doubt it."
David Niven once appeared in an advert for cigarettes. Good old David
Niven. I wonder how well that fine, wispy arrowhead moustache would go
down with the ladies these days. Maybe I'll grow one when I get the
chance, and puff the brand Niven recommended. I could wear my hair back
too. I wonder if the advertising team behind the poster are still
around to witness its wide-reaching effects. I might do it just for
them.
"I think I should ring just in case."
She takes a last touch, drops the ember and its halo to the floor. It
falls like a dead parachutist, not such a light feather now its use has
expired. She shatters its last crystal of heat with the toe of her
boot, churning it between rubber and the grindstone earth.
I wonder. I wonder if an angel dies every time a cigarette is dropped.
Or maybe the angel David Niven, wheeling a colossal cart down a road in
hell, gets an extra hunk of lead added to his load. I must routinely
remind myself never to advertise unhealthy substances, or else I may be
made to carry headstones for eternity, and wear a necklace of blackened
flesh tubes that drags along the floor for miles behind me.
Of course there's no use in being presumptuous at this early stage,
but I don't plan to go into advertising anyway. She's taken out her
mobile phone and is keying in the numbers of the taxicab company. The
faint tin ring fills the street like a carnival with her anxious
breathing as a cymbal tumbling til the call is answered.
"Hello, we called for a taxi half an hour ago from?oh, it is, is it.
OK, thanks. Bye."
My teeth chatter, each scrape a dull drum in my head. I feel like a
woodpecker.
"They said it should be here any minute."
"Good. I'm getting very cold."
"Me too."
The packet emerges in the palm of her hand again, but disappears just
as quickly after a very brief rattle.
"I should save them for later, specially if the taxi's nearly
here."
"Yeah."
Well, well. It's almost like a moral, this hesitance of hers, however
much sense she makes of it. And is that a faucet dripping in the
background? No. It's a young lady in high heels walking towards us, and
I can't for the life of me turn her off. Making off with her heels is
very probably a criminal offence, and I'd miss the taxi in my escape
effort. She's walking past me now with an unnatural strut, exercising
her haunches more than is necessary and staring rigidly into the
distance. The streetlight draws a tiny window of white on her thickly
pouting lower lip, another in the eye that I, from my viewpoint, can
see, and a panoply of them across the plastic rivulets and folds of her
evening wear, right down to the bridges of her feet.
I stop staring. Her footsteps fade and become part of the background
fog. The wait resumes.
I think the reason I'm not a smoker is nothing to do with my scruples.
Nothing to do with my parent's frank and ongoing disapproval of such
occupations, or the videos shown like beacons of light to wanderers in
the acidic sting of biology rooms. I concede that my status may have
been affected by my early association between smoking and
puffer-jacketed child thugs, and by the sight of a group of old people
singing Christmas carols through machines and holes in their necks,
brought to me via Channel 4. But I think the most significant reason
that I am not a smoker, I think, is because I need to think too much.
And I'm sure they'd kill me very quickly. One or the other.
Our taxi arrives.
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