Ten Stories About Smoking (12 page)

When his confession was at an end, she had, of course, told him not to be so stupid. In that rented cottage she’d taken him in her arms, her ring box still tight in her hand.

‘Sshh,’ she’d said. ‘It’s okay. I’ve got you. I’ve got you, Pete.’ And she’d explained about how it could have been any number of people and
that it was an accident just waiting to happen and that there was no possible way he could know it was him who had caused such a catastrophe. She felt starchy and nanny-like. She stroked his hair
and could almost feel the relief flooding from him. They stayed like that for a long time, Jean telling him it wasn’t his fault, that he wasn’t to blame, that he was not
responsible.

She watched next door’s cat pad along the fence. For a moment she was tempted to flick her cigarette at it. She could see how easy it would be to hit its black and grey
flank. The cat jumped down and still she had the cigarette poised, though now her shot was compromised. If she missed now, the cigarette would be lost in the tangle of weeds and nettles by the
fence. It could start a fire. A real one, not the one that just burned up her nights. She had plenty of matches, she could set the whole lot alight and watch it go up, watch it rage from the
upstairs bedroom, taking every garden with it.

She wished that he had never said anything. That the man she fell in love with was back; the shy, lonely person with a constant look of surprised happiness on his face. The killer of some
people. Of thirty-one people. Absolved from that blame, he had become divorced from himself, and from her. Despite everything, she had preferred the remorse.

She put out her cigarette and looked back inside the still, dark house. Each night she watched for his bare ankles on the stairs, the look of horror on his face, his T-shirt and shorts damp with
sweat. ‘I had the dream again,’ she’d hear him say, and she’d hold him and tell him that she’d got him and that he was safe. She wanted him to have the dreams again;
she wanted him to take them back from her. But he never came down the stairs and never saw her smoking cigarettes sitting out on the canvas chair.

The cat stretched, sleek in the night, then washed itself for a time. When it stopped it nudged its nose against a stray piece of timber. Jean looked again at the matches and then back at the
house. When she turned around again the cat was looking at her, holding her gaze with reflective, filmy eyes. It was still for a second, then darted off through the garden and out into safety.

It was all O’Neil’s fault that I started running. Since I’d moved to New York, we’d quickly become close and were soon living together in a small
Brooklyn apartment. Everything was fine until O’Neil decided to give up smoking. It was a snap decision, taken after he’d watched a television programme about an old man who’d had
to have his leg amputated because of the cigarettes. O’Neil had explained his reasons and given me some unpleasant facts about what smoking does to the arteries. He asked me if I’d quit
at the same time as a gesture of solidarity. I refused. I told him that I’d try to be as considerate as I could when I was at home, though.

He’d gone cold turkey: no patches, no gum, just willpower. He’d done well, but his moods were even more erratic than normal. That morning he’d been smoke-free for two months.
It was a Sunday and we were watching
The Rockford Files
and drinking coffee. He was unusually quiet and when I asked him if anything was wrong, he just grunted and pointed towards the
television. I didn’t say anything. Our friendship understood the importance of keeping quiet.

It was hot in the apartment; hot and dusky. We had a blackout screen covering the window to stop the sun shining directly into the room. Our place wasn’t too big, just about large enough
for the brown corduroy sofa we’d bought second-hand, a television set, stereo, coffee table and two bookshelves. We kept it clean and tidy – O’Neil had a crippling fear of rodent
infestation – and illuminated it with low-wattage lamps. There were dun-coloured rugs covering the floorboards and above the television was a poster of Warhol’s
Gold Marilyn
.
O’Neil had taken an instant dislike to the picture when I’d put it up and asked me to take it down. We played paper-scissor-stone for it. Paper wraps stone, so Marilyn stayed where she
was.

The Rockford Files
finished and as I flipped through the channels O’Neil tapped me on the arm.

‘Rob,’ he said. ‘Can I ask you something?’

I nodded and kept my eye on the television.

‘Do you think I need to lose weight?’

I paused and put down the remote control. I looked at his apple cheeks, his chest and gut, his ham-hock legs.

‘Of course not,’ I said and threw a cushion at him. He screwed up his face, almost as though I’d caught him unawares. But he looked downcast. My smile, so quickly reached for,
slackened. I felt something shift in the room, like the blocked-out sun had passed behind a cloud.

‘Jesus, are you serious?’ I said. ‘I mean—’

‘Of course I’m serious,’ he cut in. ‘I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t serious, would I?’

I finished my coffee and stubbed out my cigarette. It joined the others: an orange question mark in an I
NY ashtray. There was sweat gathering at O’Neil’s brow.

‘Come on, Rob. It’s a simple question. Do I need to shed some pounds or what?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Of course you don’t.’

Realistically he could have dropped three stone and still have been overweight. But since we’d been friends I’d never known him to have a problem with how he looked. Other big people
were conscious of their weight, the rolls that would appear when seated. Not O’Neil. He constantly drew attention to his body, rubbing his belly as though petting a kitten, pulling at his
jowls, and massaging his wattle. His body language, his movements, his very essence was defined by this hulking, jellied frame.

‘Seriously?’ he said. It was difficult to tell whether he was relieved. I could hear his breath over the television.

‘Seriously,’ I said and leant back into the couch.

He shook his head: ‘You fucking liar.’

With a bit of effort, O’Neil got up from the sofa. He shucked off his Batman T-shirt to reveal a pair of scantily haired breasts, two bloated nipples, and a perfectly round, pendulous
belly.

‘You think I don’t know?’ he said. ‘You think I can’t see?’ He held the T-shirt in his hand like a burning flag. I turned away.

‘Rob, look at me,’ he said and slapped his stomach, the fat rippling, his pectorals giggling in its wake.

I looked up at my half-naked best friend. Slowly a smile took shape across his mouth. His lips were fleshy and wide for his face; the dimples in his cheeks making him seem childlike. He started
to laugh, and I laughed too. His eyes were bloodshot; he’d not been sleeping well.

O’Neil put his T-shirt back on and collapsed into the sofa. We went back to watching the television.
Murder, She Wrote.
When it was over, I touched him lightly on the arm.

‘If you really do want to lose some weight, I don’t mind helping,’ I said.

O’Neil cracked a long, contagious smile, as warm as the room and just as comforting.

‘That’s why you’ll always be my bitch, Robert Wilkinson,’ he said. ‘You always know exactly the right thing to say.’

Two days later, dressed in sweatpants and sweatshirts, the two of us wandered the streets of Brooklyn on the way to the gym O’Neil’s uncle owned. It was a
twenty-minute walk through shit-smeared sidewalks and gutters bearded with spent crack vials. The concrete walls and reinforced grilles of the shops were heavy with graffiti. Spindly men and women
hung around doorways and the spaces by dumpsters. Two cop cars drove past, both with their lights and sirens turned off. When the third passed by, I began to regret that I’d offered to help.
Sportswear has never become me and I couldn’t imagine dying dressed like that: an eternity decked out in Nike, Adidas and Fila.

‘I haven’t been round here in years,’ O’Neil said, his face shrouded by his hooded sweatshirt. I kept my head down, uncomfortably snug in the soft cotton. In the middle
distance, the sign for Charlie’s Gym swung back and forth. O’Neil pointed it out with enthusiasm.

‘This is going to be great, Rob,’ he said, then paused. His hood still up, he leant down to me. ‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘I appreciate this, I really do.’

Charlie’s Gym was above a second-hand electrical goods shop. O’Neil and I went up the back stairs, the smell of piss and disinfectant violent at the bottom, changing
to a more general body smell the closer we got to the gym itself.

O’Neil pushed open the door into a pigeon-grey space illuminated by harsh strip lighting. In the centre was a ring where Charlie was training a young black kid. Charlie held a pair of
focus gloves up and away from his face and the kid was smashing his fists into them. We watched him punch as we wandered past a knot of ripped, tattooed men, working dumb-bells like lifers. No one
spoke to us, but the light rain of skipping, the grunting abuse of the focus gloves and the shuffle of feet was ample distraction from their silence.

Charlie called break and O’Neil held up his arm.