Ten Stories About Smoking (22 page)

The fifth time I bought cigarettes from Coco was a bitter day and she was wearing a beanie hat; her nose red-tipped from the cold. As I walked away, I thought about her chilled
to the bone and bought her a large coffee from Subway. She thanked me in a cautious way, then gave me that smile. She took the paper cup and as she did our hands briefly brushed against each other.
I made my way home in a daze, delighting in the crackle between our fingers.

Over the weeks my mood changed and I became more spritely at home, more conversational. I didn’t talk about Coco, though; not to Mark, not to anyone. Mark wouldn’t have understood
anyway. He had already given me a considerable lecture on the moral ambiguities of buying illegal cigarettes. I’d just told him there was nothing ambiguous about the price. Mark shook his
head at this and hadn’t mentioned it again – save for an occasional whispered comment.

Coco and I began to linger over our transactions, to exchange little nuggets of personal information. She lived about a mile and a half away in a shared house with nine other women. I found that
out on week six. That she had two sisters back in the Ukraine, that was week seven. Week nine she told me that she didn’t like much Western music, but she didn’t mind Cold-play. Week
eleven, I gave her a CD of the music I liked and said that not all Western music was Coldplay.

Week twelve she told me she liked some of the songs, but that some were too loud. She told me on week fifteen that she had trouble sleeping because her room-mate – Lenka, the woman who
stood by her side as we talked – snored like a rattling train. She also told me that she had recently started smoking again and wished that she hadn’t.

I told her about Andrea on week nineteen, and she said that she felt sorry for me. She told me that her husband had gone missing a long time ago and that she’d almost forgotten what he
looked like. Week twenty-one, I told her that I secretly called my home The House of Abandoned Men and she laughed at that and said she couldn’t imagine such a place. She had a cold on week
twenty-four and so I bought her some soup and told her to go home. She said I was kind.

On week twenty-five I told her that I’d found this great new cafe bar. It had recently opened and they did the best pasta sauce I’d ever tasted – she’d revealed her
favourite foods, along with her dislikes (cucumbers, cauliflower) on week seventeen. She said the cafe sounded nice, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to ask her to join me. Week twenty-seven
I almost invited her but instead told her that we had a mouse in our kitchen. Coco said that if they had a mouse at her house, it would probably fall into Lenka’s open, snoring mouth.

On week thirty I said goodbye to Eamon and wished him a good day, but I didn’t mean it quite as much as usual. The thing between Coco and me had become somewhat tortuous.
I wanted there to be no transactions, no moral ambiguity. I wanted it to be just the two of us, lost and lonely, sharing a coffee or a meal of some kind. But every time I came close to asking, I
thought of Andrea, her face cold and impassive like the rocks you get at springs.

‘Oh holy living Christ, Joe,’ she’d said, ‘I can’t do this any more. Not one more day. I’m leaving, and I’m leaving now before I end up killing
you.’

Two more weeks went by, and the flick-flack image of Andrea wouldn’t leave me. I thought I’d changed, but how can you really tell? Then I saw the new Coldplay record in the
supermarket and knew just what to do. I bought it from Eamon along with my other shopping and felt confident that this would be the week. I walked past a man selling knock-off cosmetics and an old
homeless guy jangling change in his cupped hands. It felt like they were urging me on from the touchlines.

Between Currys and Sports Direct, Lenka was there as usual but instead of Coco, a dark-haired woman with sad oval eyes was standing beside her. Lenka looked away; the other woman looked at
me.

‘Cigarette?’

‘Where’s Coco?’ I said.

‘Cigarette?’

I turned to Lenka.

‘Lenka, where’s Coco?’

Lenka looked down.

‘Who is Coco? You want cigarette? Good price here.’

‘No, no cigarettes!’ I turned again to Lenka. ‘Where is she? I have something for her.’

Lenka leaned in close to me; she smelled of clove oil.

‘Go away, there is no Coco here. No Coco, okay?’

‘I have this CD for her,’ I said. ‘She likes them. It’s Coldplay, look.’

Lenka looked at the CD in my hand and made to say something but then a man loomed up behind her. He was bear-like and broad and said something to Lenka in Ukrainian. She reached into her bag and
passed him two packets of Camels. As he walked past he gave me a shove, my shopping spilling all over the pavement.

A bottle of orange juice landed near Lenka’s feet. She picked it up and put it in my hand.

‘She liked you,’ she said, quickly in a whisper. Then she turned her back on me and spoke in her native tongue with the new woman, the woman who wasn’t Coco. I glanced up at
the Asda sign; it looked like it was about to float away again.

I stood there without a single idea what to do next. In the distance there was the distinctive wail of sirens. Lenka looked at the other woman, then stooped to pick up her rucksack. Wordlessly
they made their way towards the exit.

He sits on the balcony of the Raised Star Hotel in Reno, newly married, soon to die, about to smoke his last cigarette. He knows it is his last cigarette, and he hopes the
coughing won’t spoil it. The sun is rising over the casinos and hotels and he is wearing his dark sunglasses; the aviator shades he wears when he goes fishing. He could have a drink if he
wanted, but he doesn’t. He could easily steal out of the room and down to a bar, but that would hurt the woman he loves and that’s not what he does these days. It’s become a kind
of joke now, this Good Raymond stuff, but it’s true. When people say they can die happy, he almost understands that. He smiles and taps his last cigarette against the packet. No one wants to
die with a hangover.

There is a cup of coffee steaming on the table in front of him and he wonders for a moment how many cigarettes and how many cups of coffee he has married in his life. The marriage of cigarettes
and coffee. I should have written a story called that, he thinks, and realizes that this is the first time he has thought about work since landing in Reno. He is not looking at others, or observing
himself, or his new bride. He is no longer transforming one thing into another. It’s a bit like being drunk, he thinks: it lends a sort of pitched clarity to your perspective.

He and Tess were married two days ago at the Heart of Reno Wedding Chapel and he’d felt even more nervous than the first time, back when he was twenty. He’d almost joked with Tess
that it’d just be his luck to drop down dead while walking down the aisle. But thankfully he’d kept his mouth shut. They’ve not talked about the cancer since they got here –
they are in Reno, after all, and no one talks about cancer in Reno – and he likes to imagine that he’s left it back at home, like a difficult, truculent teenager.

He puts the cigarette to his lips. It feels good in his mouth, firm and right. It is a Chesterfield. When he was in the store, buying his last packet of cigarettes, he needed to decide which
brand his last cigarette would be: it was a decision too important to be left to chance or simply to habit.

The first kind he smoked were Wings. They were the cheap cigarettes his father had smoked. He remembers the first one he sneaked. He was nine years old and the party his parents were giving had
just come to an end. He took one from the pack, lit it and liked the way the smoke tasted on his tongue. You know instantly if you’re a smoker. A proper smoker. His best friend Harvey always
seemed uncomfortable with a cigarette: like it wouldn’t quite sit right. But Ray’s always looked good smoking. He knows that.

Lucky Strikes were his brand when he was old enough to buy his own. He liked the package and the
It’s Toasted!
line on the box. They were filterless and harsh but they were smoother
than the Wings and they made him feel older. Like anyone in Yakima needed anything to make themselves feel older. He blew his first smoke ring with a Lucky. He smoked a Lucky after the first time
he got laid. Luckies were in his breast pocket when he discovered he was going to be a father a year shy of making it out of his teens.

When he moved to Paradise, California, he smoked Kools for a while. But they made his mouth taste too much like mornings. He went on to Kents, then settled on Marlboros. But this last packet,
and this last one from this last packet, is a Chesterfield. It’s a Chesterfield because Chesterfields remind him of the first day he really knew he’d kicked the booze. He was talking to
Tess, smoking a Chesterfield, and he knew that things were just about getting better: that things finally
were
better.

He coughs a little and feels something chunky in his mouth. He worries that when he spits it out it’ll be part of his lungs. The blood he’s been expelling for months still frightens
him, even though there’s nothing now left to fear. He stands and puts the cigarette on the small card table and leans over the balcony. There is no one around, no one on the street. He
dribbles the spit slowly from his mouth, just like he used to off the Barrelhead Bridge, and watches it cast like a fishing line. A little of it catches on the stubble of his chin. He wipes it away
with the back of his hand and smiles a big goofy smile that makes him feel like he’s that fat little kid hanging out on the Barrelhead Bridge again.

Ray sits back down in the motel chair and picks up the cigarette. He sniffs at it and takes the lighter from the breast pocket of his shirt. It is a cheap plastic Bic. He has lost a lot of
lighters over the course of his life: countless plastic ones, copper Zippos, an engraved Ronson once. But somehow it seems fitting that he’ll use a blue Bic lighter he doesn’t even
remember buying to light that last smoke. He flicks the wheel and nothing happens. He tries again and still nothing. He laughs and tries once more for luck. The thing is busted, unable to do the
one thing that is expected of it. He sets down the cigarette again. There is a book of matches in the bedroom, sitting inside an ashtray. He stands up and goes to get them.

The room is cool, almost pitch-dark through the lenses of his sunglasses. Tess is sound asleep. He palms the matches and looks at her sleeping. He hopes her dreams are pleasant; that she’s
thinking of baccarat tables and reels of slots aligning. On the dresser is $627 in various denominations of bill. Tess can’t stop winning in Reno. She’s on a hot streak that just
won’t go cold, but Ray can’t hit a card, can’t even buy one. He looks at the money and wonders whether he’s ever seen so much just lying around without a purpose. He thinks
how much he could have used that money years ago. How much he could have used that luck.

Back outside he stands and looks out over Reno. He thinks again of that old Johnny Cash record. The first time he heard it was in the late sixties. A long-haired girl in a bikini had a
transistor radio playing in the next yard. It was California hot and he was drinking a beer. When he heard that famous line about shooting a man in Reno, it made him down his drink and go back
inside the house to write. He was urged on by the sound of the prisoners cheering as Johnny sang ‘Just to watch him die’; but it was mid afternoon and he’d had too much to drink.
The poem he’d written was worthless so he’d thrown it away.

Ray puts the cigarette to his lips. The last cigarette. He sparks the match and holds it in his cupped hands until it catches. He sucks in the smoke and fills his lungs.