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(I knew all this, bats excluded. The surveyor's report clearly stated that all three houses had made use of the same foundations, making the present brick-built structure inherently more solid. The previous two buildings, by unfortunate coincidence, had both been demolished after fire damage.)

The old man did it,' Walter said.

‘What old man?'

‘The mad arsonist professor. He smoked opium like a Chinaman and it scrambled his brains. Then he burned down his house.'

‘It was electrical.'

‘Then when they built the second house he came back as a ghost and burnt that one down as well. That's why nobody dares buy the place, because who's to say the ghost isn't waiting there still?'

(The surveyor's report made it quite clear that nobody had bought the house because the back half over-looking the gorge was rotten with damp. It was as flammable as a moist sponge.)

‘Thank you Walter,' I said. ‘That was most helpful and encouraging.'

'Sounds nice,' Theo said, absent-mindedly tapping ash from a cigarette onto his trouser leg, listening for Emmy's voice on the walkway, his judgement and sensitivity to his friends and flat-mate utterly destroyed by the selfish obsession of love.

‘Your mother tells me you want to work in the shop.'

‘I don't want to work in the shop.'

‘Why on earth would you want to work in the shop?'

‘I don't want to work in the shop.'

‘Over my dead body.'

He told me he hadn't given me Uncle Gregory's money so that I could waste it by staying at home. And what about my University education?

‘You never went to University,' I said.

‘Precisely. You think I
wanted
to be a tobacconist?'

Or failing that, as a kind of educational second-best, there were foreign countries full of satisfactions far grander than any offered by a chain of provincial British newsagents. He said I didn't want to be dependent all my life and he was right. There was New York City and beautiful women wailing to be rescued from burning buildings.

But then there was also the mole-like suspicion, encouraged by my mother, that mothers were always right and I ought to resolve my life now, while I still could. Perhaps instead of beautiful women my destiny was simply to continue the series of Simpson's, Tobacconists.

I asked Dad if he thought New York was a good idea, really.

‘I don't know,' he said. ‘It's your decision.'

‘But do you think it's the right decision?'

‘How should I know? It's your life, Gregory, and it's up to you. There's no user's manual.'

We are waiting for a taxi, black. Walter wears a black Homburg. He is leaning forward on his chair, his hands crossed on the crook of his stick and his chin resting on his hands. I ask him if he thinks I should wear a hat.

‘Leave me alone.'

‘I was only asking.'

'Stick to your writing.'

I haven't been outside the house since I gave up. This makes me nervous, which makes me want to smoke, so I follow Walter's advice and try to subdue the familiar craving for a Carmen by writing, wishing my blood would hurry up its re-learning of the purely organic life.

‘I really don't want to go.'

‘I told Mrs King.'

Walter looks at nothing in particular, grimly revising all the stories he ever lived and invented with Humphrey King, wondering why all of them had to have the same ending: Humphrey King dies. It makes the stories weak and uninteresting, predictable from the beginning.

Humphrey King will be buried in the ground, not burnt in a furnace like Theo. Most of the Suicide Club will be there. We will sing hymns and shuffle darkly in our funeral suits. During the service one of us will have an uncomfortable throat just itching to become a choking fit, and Jonesy Paul's memorial address will have to compete with sporadic bursts of infectious smoker's cough. Afterwards, in the weak sunshine of the churchyard, someone will recall the ironic spirit of the Club and attempt to brighten the occasion by observing that it wasn't the coughing that carried him off it was the coffin they carried him off in. Blah.

‘I'm coming straight home, mind.'

Walter and the others will go to Mrs King's front room for expert sandwiches and ritual estimates of how much longer they each have to live.

‘What about Haemoglobin?'

‘He'll be fine.'

At Theo's funeral I smoked thirty-seven cigarettes, one after the other, and I made sure that Carr was watching.

On 1 March 1962, an Ash Wednesday, the Royal College of Physicians published their first ever report on smoking and health. The initial print-run of ten thousand copies sold out, as did the twenty thousand sent to America for re-distribution by the United States Cancer Society. The report received widespread publicity and in 1963 cigarette sales in the UK fell by 14.5%.

The College pointed out that in 1960 10,000 people died from lung cancer in comparison to 250 in 1920. In an extensive study of British ex-servicemen a 20-a-day smoker was found to have a 14 times greater risk of dying from lung cancer than a non-smoker. As many as 3 out of 10 smokers would die from a smoking-related illness.

Industry spokesmen were quick to respond. No causal connection had yet been demonstrated between smoking and cancer, so the results given in the report were merely inferences from statistics. They had no more authority than mathematical expectations at a roulette wheel. The increase in lung cancer could be explained by improvements in diagnostic method. And a study of ex-servicemen was inherently unreliable because it wasn't random: ex-servicemen might have a higher rate of lung cancer for entirely different reasons. It was all a question of presentation: even according to the RCP, 70% of smokers remained in robust good health. To suggest otherwise was to deny British tax-payers their citizen's right to enjoy a pleasant and perfectly legal pastime.

The RCP couldn't explain why certain smokers were more susceptible to disease than others. It was entirely possible, even after the findings of the Royal College, that a smoker could go through three packs a day for fifty years without losing a single day to smoking-related ill health. Or he could die horribly of lung cancer before he was forty.

What a gamble that was.

‘And I've never worn your stupid rainbow sweater and I've never done the jigsaw puzzle and I
hate
Lilly's jumbo pasties.'

‘Then why eat them all the time?'

Because I'd never learnt any of the other dances, but I wasn't going to tell him that. Instead, I watched him drop cartons of cigarettes into the nylon shopping bags while at the same time dialling for a taxi and trying to avoid tripping over Haemoglobin. All this fuss was clearly a ploy of his to annoy me, just because I refused to go with him to the Estates. I said,

‘I don't feel well.'

‘Rubbish.'

‘Really. I feel, it's something in my chest I think.'

'See a doctor then.'

‘Theo, please.'

I followed him into the bathroom and this was the part I really hated, when he preened himself in front of the mirror. He never really improved anything, like his hair for example, so I suppose he just did it to check he looked like himself. He inspected his face from lots of different angles with his mouth closed, and sometimes stroked the little vertical scar on his upper lip.

‘Beautiful,' I said, but I wasn't very good at sarcasm.

‘I thought you were ill.'

‘I was lying.'

‘You shouldn't lie.'

‘All smokers lie, you know that. I bet Emmy Gaston never lies.'

‘You're in the way, Gregory.'

I followed him into his bedroom where he picked his brown overcoat off the bed, then back into the living-room. I watched his back struggle into the coat, lit a Carmen, and told him I was going to move out. Now he'd
have
to pay me some attention.

‘Elsewhere,' I said, ‘somewhere else. Another place. Not here.'

The horn of a taxi sounded from outside. He ignored me and went over to the nylon bags and arranged the cigarette-cartons so that none of them poked out of the top. I said:

‘I can't just stay in the same place all the time, can I? A man has to move on, doesn't he?'

‘You won't move out,' he said, picking up a bag in each hand.

‘I will.'

‘You won't.'

‘Let's toss for it,' I said, but he didn't even laugh.

'Sure you won't come to the Estates?'

‘Do you love her?'

‘I don't want to be late,' he said, slipping past me.

I watched the door close. The taxi sounded its horn. Haemoglobin sniffed at my hand. Bananas looked round for an ashtray. We all have to be doing something, when we're lost and alone and under-attended. We all have to occupy ourselves somehow.

At my own funeral, well into the next century, few of the mourners will remember cigarettes as anything but curious artefacts from a past millennium.

The cathedral will be crammed with dignitaries who take turns to pay their respects to my coffin of highly polished ash. We are more than half-way towards the year 2100, and for the last decade or so I have been solemnly revered as an ambassador from the twentieth century. Children rarely fail to ask me interested questions about typewriters and frying pans and petrol engines. They want to know if it hurt to suck down the poison smoke from cigarettes and I tell them no, not really, but none of them quite believe me. Instead, they privately conclude that we were all less civilized and therefore tougher in the old days, and I'm not beyond suggesting that maybe we were.

In a less optimistic version of my own funeral I'm only Uncle Gregory's age, or younger, and the twentieth century is easily remembered. At the graveside there are no personal friends, and in my line of work I have no colleagues. My mother weeps into a black handkerchief. A couple of springtime strollers in fashion raincoats stop and stare and internally sermonize on the stupidity of smokers. They identify the scene as a moral lesson for their children, and then wonder if it's going to rain.

And me, I wonder if Julian Carr will be there, either today or in fifteen years' time or in fifty. I examine my nails, gauging where best to start biting.

He bought twenty Consulates, just to get himself started. Then he applied for a high-flier's job in a Tobacco Research Unit in England, where he was accepted on the strength of his PhD. He rented a flat above Samson's Turkish restaurant, which later became Lilly's Pasties, and quickly settled into the routines of his new home and his new work. Compared to molecular biology, learning to smoke was easy.

Gradually, he began to lay off the bet of his smoking against acts of kindness. This, if anything, was his little guilty hypocrisy. He subscribed to charities, saved abandoned animals, and gave life-saving cigarettes to people who couldn't otherwise afford them. He saw being kind as an extension of his challenge to Providence to strike a good man down, a refinement to his gamble on the existence of his mother's God. It was as if he wanted to make a conquerable opponent of the unknown, tricking it into revealing itself by gradually increasing the value of the prize at stake.

Theo only rarely talked about his past, and if I'd been more busy than I was I might never have succeeded in piecing his story together. The flexibility of his working hours suggested that his research at the Institute was beyond reproach, to the point where he could turn up whenever he liked. I had no idea how much he was paid, but the two-bedroomed flat above Lilly's Pasties was a direct result of his habit of buying more than four thousand cigarettes a week.

He still gambled occasionally, as a kind of unannounced check on the remorse of God. He'd play Spot-the-Ball, or pump money into the fruit machine at The Strangers' Rest until we won enough change for the pinball. He once told me he won Haemoglobin in an impromptu game of 21 in Broseley, Shropshire, but I don't know if that's true.

He would almost certainly have played and won the National Lottery, if his luck hadn't run out.

Monday morning.

I am wearing a brand new and slightly crisp short-sleeved white shirt and an orange tie. The tie has a weave of gold STNs at diagonal intervals. I am wearing grey trousers and the polished black shoes I last wore for my A-levels. I rinse out my coffee-mug (I love Simpson's) and kiss my mother on the cheek.

‘I'm proud of you,' she says. ‘New York was a stupid idea.'

‘Immature beyond belief. Thanks, Mum.'

My father has already left, in a mood so foul he made a point of slamming the door twice. But I can't be worried about that because this is Monday morning and my first day at work as a shop-assistant in Simpson's Tobacconist and Newsagent (est 1903), High Street Branch. My destiny begins today, free of the pain of decisions. My life becomes a set of train-tracks with a timetable and a clear idea of destination and no call for judgements of steering. This morning and every morning until I become area manager I will walk to the shop. Then I shall buy a car. Before succeeding my father to the position of general manager and, generally, Mr Simpson the Tobacconist, I will at some stage engage myself to a slightly plump but always punctual young girl who will delight in bearing me a son called Gregory.

I open the front door and take a deep breath of fresh spring air. A freak ray of sunshine picks me out and I smile at the sun-drenched lawn and a chestnut in bloom. One of the Adventist neighbours, in a charming green dressing-gown, is picking up her milk from the doorstep. I turn towards her and say over the wall:

‘Good morning, fine morning, good morning to
you
.'

I stride purposefully into our quiet road, swinging my arms and slapping lamp-posts with conviviality as I pass them by. I jauntily follow a brown-headed spaniel, out on its own, predatory and curious between interesting shits on the pavement. I beam into front gardens full of great klaxon daffodil gangs. On the High Street I overtake a black man and wonder why people don't have curly hair in cold places. I mean countries, of course. I ask myself what is curly hair all about? I turn my head for a pretty girl with thin ankles and the spaniel passes me on its way back home, followed by a thickset man who could have been bred specifically for meat. He has a cigarette pinched backwards into the palm of his hand, but I feel I can safely ignore that.