Ten Stories About Smoking (7 page)

We arrived and in the midst of a stream of impatient commuters, I made my way out of the station. The line for the taxis was long and I waited behind a couple recently reunited by the 17.04 from
Cardiff. The woman had her hand in the man’s back pocket, and he was kissing her. Even in Swindon, I thought, train station kisses are the most romantic of all.

Eventually I got a cab, and the driver tried to engage me in conversation – something about bus lanes – but I ignored him and looked out the window, hugging my overnight bag to my
chest. Swindon looked like a business park that had got out of hand. There was an eerie, almost American sadness to it; the entertainment parks, the shopping malls, the parades of smoked glass
office blocks, their windows reflecting the dying sun. The hotel was at the intersection of several arterial roads, a squat building cowering against the flow of traffic.

The hotel lobby was shockingly bright, decorated with plasticky blonde wood. The receptionist – a young man with ginger stubble – was sullen and gittish. I told him
there was a reservation in the name of Fulton and he puffed out his cheeks.

‘Yes, that’s correct, sir. However, the reservation appears to be for a
Ms
Fulton, sir. And we require the person named on the reservation to be present before any party can
take possession of their room or rooms,’ he said.

‘Did Angela not put my name down as well?’

‘Evidently not,’ the receptionist said and waving his hand answered the ringing telephone.

I stood there not knowing exactly what to do. ‘I’m so sorry,’ the receptionist said into the receiver, ‘would you mind holding for one moment, madam?’ He turned to
me.

‘Sir, why don’t you wait for your friend in the bar?’ he said, pointing to some double doors. I picked up my holdall and followed his outstretched arm.

The bar was just as plasticky and woody, and just as garishly lit. There was a drunken party of young women sitting around a huge round table and three Japanese businessmen
silently drinking Stella Artois. I ordered a gin and tonic. It felt like the right kind of drink to be seen with by an ex-lover – from a distance it could easily be sparkling water. The
barman was sullen and gittish. He tried to get me to order some olives. I ordered some olives.

Angela arrived soon after. She looked older, but in a good way. Her hair was kinky and her eyes fizzed like Coca-Cola. She stood at the bar and drank the remainder of my gin and tonic.

‘Say nothing,’ she said and took me by the hand.

The bedroom was brown and cream and functional. She sparkled in her silver dress and pushed me against the wall. For a moment we were twenty again. She guided us both back to a
time when we didn’t need to worry about interest rates and love handles, pensions and cancer, stunted ambitions and broken dreams. I made sure that she came first; I could have done it with
my eyes closed.

After we were finished, she looked at me expectantly and rolled over. I held her tightly and she leaned herself back into me. She smelled of sex and shampoo; her breasts heavier
in my hands.

‘Hello,’ she said, ‘I’ve missed you.’

‘Me too—’

She interrupted me with a long, sloppy kiss, which she then abruptly curtailed. She put her hands on my chest and then on my face, like she was piecing me together from scrap.

‘But . . . no, this is all wrong,’ she said. ‘Something’s not right. I feel . . . ’ she shivered. ‘I can’t explain it.’ Angela bent down and
kissed me again, experimentally.

‘You smell . . . I don’t know, wrong,’ she said, sniffing my skin.

‘What, like bad?’

‘No. Just not like you.’ She looked puzzled for a moment then glanced at the bedside table.

‘Did you quit smoking?’ she said, like it was an accusation. I laughed.

‘About five years ago now.’

‘Quit? I never thought you’d quit. Not ever.’

I didn’t like the maddened look in her eyes: she was naked, but not in a good way.

‘Well I did.’

I put my hand to her hip and she looked at me as though I had deceived her.

‘Do you still drive that Vauxhall Viva?’ she said.

‘It was a Hillman. And that’s long gone. You don’t need a car in London.’

She pulled up the bedsheets and put her head in her hands.

‘I never should have done this,’ she said, ‘it was a terrible, terrible idea.’ She turned her back on me then and made her way to the en suite bathroom. She had cellulite
on her thighs. It was sexy in a way that women just don’t understand.

‘I don’t get it,’ I said to the closed door. ‘You spent the whole time we were together bitching about how much I smoked and how bad it was for me and how much it stank,
and now . . .’ She opened the door wearing a white towel. The shower was running.

‘Look, Marty,’ she said, picking up her abandoned clothes. ‘I wasn’t going to say anything, but the truth is that I’m getting married.’ She smiled, tiredly.
‘Or at least I was thinking about getting married. But then out of nowhere, I started thinking about you. About those years we had. And what I have with Declan, well it’s not like that.
Nothing could be like that. So I had to see. I couldn’t let it just go. Couldn’t let it just disappear into nothing. I hoped that, you know, that it would all just slot back into place,
but . . .’

‘But what?’

‘Look at us,’ she said. ‘We’re not children any more. In my head, you’re this romantic, childish, impossible boy with all these impossible dreams. But that’s
not you. Not any more. And I can’t bring him back. And even if I could, could you really live like that again?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes I could. And if that’s all it is, I could start again. I could start right now!’

‘You know there’s more to it than that.’

She laughed and closed the bathroom door. As the water fell I imagined her getting married, the flowers in her hair and the string ensemble playing as she walked down the aisle. Her husband a
lunk of a man; his head shaved and looking like a security guard in his hired suit and tails.

When she came back into the room, Angela was fully dressed, her hair wet at the ends. She picked up her overnight bag.

‘I’m sorry, Marty, I just needed to know,’ she said and kissed me lightly on the cheek.

She shut the door behind her and I went to the window to see her drive away. Across the bypass, a twenty-four-hour supermarket glowed red and blue. I pulled on my jeans and headed out to get
supplies.

David Falmer couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment he lost control of John’s stag party; but he knew it was long before the topic of conversation had turned to
hookers. By then it was late, and instead of eating dinner at the Sunbird – a restaurant highly recommended by one of David’s guidebooks – they were sitting around a smoked-glass
table in a neon-lit cocktail bar. Nearby, too close for David’s liking, clusters of young Americans stood in short dresses and sportswear, their teeth glowing a ghoulish blue-white. They made
David feel old; tired, niggardly and old.

‘Little Angels,’ John’s future brother-in-law, Richard, said. ‘You can’t come to Vegas and not go to Little Angels. There’s like a law against it. It’s
like the law of the stag.’

Brightly coloured spotlights bounced off the table. David’s itinerary was being used as a coaster; Richard had said they didn’t need it anyway: he’d been to Vegas loads of
times. Whatever you wanted, whether it was the perfect steak and eggs, the finest champagne cocktail, the lowest buy-in Texas hold ’em game or the most enthusiastic whore, Richard always
seemed to know the best place in town.

In his broad Yorkshire accent, Richard was describing a Chicana prostitute called Rosalita: her mouth, her legs, her breasts, her behind. David looked to John, hoping to exchange a raised
eyebrow; but John was listening intently. Richard was enjoying himself, recreating in lavish detail Rosalita’s floor show; the four other men lapping it up. To David it sounded both painful
and intensely unerotic. For a moment he wondered whether this was all an act, another of Richard’s tall tales, but the details seemed all too plausible.

John leant forward and asked Richard something that was muffled by the sound of a party cheering another stag to down his drink.

‘Five hundred in all,’ Richard replied. ‘And believe me, I’d have paid double that just to see those tits.’

David picked up a spare packet of cigarettes and lit one. He’d not smoked in thirteen years.