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Everyone is off to work, just like me, and I am entirely satisfied because I have succeeded in completely repressing every single one of my desires. It is therefore hardly surprising that by lunch-time I will be walking home with my head down and my feet dragging, looking at nothing much but my shoes.

Jonesy Paul and old Ben Bradley. Dr Hacket, Marlowe and Whittingham, Drake and Mrs Drake. The Pole Jan Peto, Russell, Gallagher, and Lundy Foot the mariner addicted to all legal substances except alcohol and tobacco. He passes around his latest variety of Ginseng. All of them, at one time or another, have been regular or part-time members of the Suicide Club, and a general restlessness is therefore inevitable about mid-way through the funeral service. I watch them trying to occupy their hands.

Later, outside, lighters click like insects and there follows a general inhalation of tobacco smoke, like the exact opposite of a sigh. It is a sound expectant of imminent satisfaction, which is realized in every case within seven seconds. Lundy Foot swallows some Sanatogens and I put my hands in my pockets.

‘Nobody told me it was lung cancer,' Drake says, and Jonesy Paul says it wasn't.

‘It was too,' says Lundy Foot, gum-chewing.

‘He hadn't smoked in fifteen years,' says Dr Hacket.

Walter says: ‘Nothing to do with smoking at all.'

Everyone agrees that this must surely be so, especially since Humphrey's lengthy participation in the North Africa campaign exposed his lungs to irritant and probably fatal sand particles. Jonesy Paul and Lundy Foot then support each other at some length on the dreadful modern dangers posed to the lungular health of one and all by radon, volatile organic and inorganic substances (from walls and floor-coverings), concrete sweat, ozone from electrical machines (notably computers and printers), heat radiation, humidity, static electricity, bacteria, fungi, fungal spores, house dust, mites and mite excrement, and the incalculable problem of all other people and their terminally flaking skin.

The air was so dirty, Jonesy Paul said, he was surprised anyone bothered to breathe it. He asked me if this wasn't so.

'Sure,' I say, ‘he could have died from anything.'

Old Ben Bradley says, ‘He could have died from old age.'

There is a moment's silence and then a general shaking of heads.

‘No,' Walter says. ‘It was definitely his lungs.'

And it was then, or perhaps a little later, that I saw Julian Carr. He was some distance away near the entrance to the cemetery, his hands in his pockets, leaning against a solitary tree like a bereaved and secret lover.

At my back, the gorge. I moved into the front half of the house. I had no curtains. I had no chairs and tables. I had no socket for a television aerial but that was alright because I had no television. I found myself living in the largest room of the house, ground-floor-front, surrounded only by the things I owned.

From a call-box I phoned home for my bean-bag. Mum sent the bean-bag and asked me one if I was still smoking, two if I had a girlfriend, and three did I want anything else.

‘No, I'm fine,' I said, and then had nowhere but the floor to stack my history books. I bought a cooker and some rugs to quieten the floor-boards. I bought a Calor Gas heater, and then sat on my rugs in front of the fire listening to noises from outside, reading my history books and sometimes laughing out loud, frightening myself with echoes. I bought a fridge with a freezer compartment and laid up frozen supplies.

I often talked to Bananas. He was an amazing listener, as long as he had his ashtray somewhere near him, and I reassured him that Lilly would keep an eye on Theo, the poor old man, the old mad scientist. He wouldn't waste away, living all on his own, without friends. Then I introduced Bananas to the bean-bag and from then on the bean-bag belonged exclusively to him. Neither of us missed Haemoglobin one tiny bit.

I sat on the floor, watching smoke curl to the ceiling, listening to the house creak and wondering how to distinguish the rattle of a window-frame from the cackle of a ghost I didn't believe in. For the first few weeks I smoked all my cigarettes before night-fall, and spent the evenings re-heating frozen pasties.

Behind the counter I was visible from the waist upwards, a white shirt and an orange tie and a happy face against an unbroken background display of cigarette packs.

Chesterfield, Camel, Kent. Stuyvesant (for sporting events worldwide), Philip Morris, John Player Special (Black to Basics). Lucky Strike It's Toasted. Buchanan's Century, More, Raffles, Richmond Straight Cut, Royals 25 because a change is as good as a rest. State Express and Sullivan No 1 and Salem Lights and Silk Cut purple blue red and green. Lambert and Butler if there was really nothing else. Rothmans (airplane pilots), Winston (USA), and a Benson and Hedges after breakfast. 555 (555
what?).
Carmen No 6 and Embassy No 1, Embassy Regal, Embassy Extra Mild, Embassy Extra Extra Mild (depending on her mood and the time of her life, say). Virginia Slims. Du Maurier in the theatre at St Moritz while Sobranie shares a Cocktail with a Black Russian Viceroy. Maybe. Fortunas (Spanish beaches and the cafes of Madrid). Caporal and deep blue packs of philosophic Gitanes. Kool or Craven in Piccadilly and Mayfair. Down at the Kanif Club with the entire Senior Service. Triple A. And then finally, just to round off the evening with another new lover, a consummate Consulate menthol.

It was like being surrounded by Lucy's plans for the future. It was like a vision of endless but calculable days without her, measured in cigarettes by the twenty and my fear of each and every one of them, because Cigarettes Kill and Smoking When Pregnant Harms Your Baby and Tobacco Seriously Damages Your Health and surely it must be true because on every single packet it says so.

I grabbed a pack, any pack. It was a soft-pack of Gauloises and I tried to stare it down. The door opened and I stuffed the cigarettes deep into my pocket and served a complete stranger with forty Marlboro in exchange for money. A packet for him and one for Lucy (pull yourself together, man). It happened so quickly that he didn't once take the lit cigarette out of his mouth, leaving behind his smoke and the smell of Lucy Hinton.

Someone else came in.
The Independent;
20, 40, 60 Benson and Hedges and 20 pence change and thankyou most kindly madam and don't forget that Smoking Causes Heart Disease. Through the cellophane and the paper I could feel the curve of each cigarette like a cartridge.

Family Circle,
Snickers, single Hamlet.

I tried to remind myself that the job was a breeze: just money and multiples of twenty, day after day. But then why did it feel like being stuck inside Lucy Hinton's mouth?

In my lunch-break I locked the shop and went to the travel agent's. Looking for my cheque-card I took the Gauloises out of my pocket, and because I was still mindful of my anxious mother, and because there was a fifty pound limit on my cheque-card, and because the travel agent was about to close up for lunch, and for several other essential reasons like these (any one of which could have been the patient and determining factor in my destiny), I bought a coach ticket to Paris.

11

Paracelsus was born in the same year that Christopher Columbus returned from America in the listing
Santa Maria,
bringing with him the news that every established European idea about geography was wrong. Many of the more enlightened thinkers of the time then started to question other branches of knowledge, casting doubt on almost everything previously considered a certainty. Paracelsus, as doctor and alchemist, inherited this radicalism.

His unshakeable belief that the principle of all creation was separation led him to improve on contemporary techniques of distillation. However, he was always prepared to embrace a broad constituency of learning in his search for the pharmaceutical equivalent of the philosopher's stone. His expert knowledge of chemistry could therefore exist alongside a fascination for ritual incantations and sacred objects, and this modern acceptance of the notion of profusion meant that he often seemed to contradict himself. This in turn left him vulnerable to criticism. His students were known to have called him Cacophrastus and envious colleagues whispered his enviable pact with the devil.

In many ways this opposition was understandable. Paracelsus was, for example, the first European to suggest that ‘miner's disease' (now known as silicosis) was caused by inhalation of metal vapours and not, as previously thought, by mountain demons who administered the disease as punishment for sin. However, it was also Paracelsus who popularized the word ‘gnome' throughout Europe as a term to describe the dwarfish goblins who guarded hoards of subterranean treasure. He believed in Gob, king of the goblins, whose magic sword influenced the melancholic temperament of man, yet he also devised a radical revision of the Renaissance system of Humours to include the then startling notion of the circulation of the blood.

Like all great innovators he was prepared to examine the consequences of the unbelievable. And to Paracelsus no stories of goblins can have been any stranger than the wilder reports filtering back from America. These included eye-witness accounts of secret cities constructed entirely from gold, and solemn sad-eyed natives swallowing draughts of fire as calmly as cool water.

Uncle Gregory's money changed me. I began to appreciate how clothes and books and the food I ate could be made to speak for me. I bought a black leather jacket and Camel boots and large books about history. I lunched in restaurants on blackboard meals and drank small jugs of wine. I discovered, with something almost resembling exhilaration, that I was more than Gregory Simpson the Tobacconist's son; I was free.

At the beginning, still at the YMCA, I used to visit art galleries at random. I saw photographs by Brassai and Lartigue, and the unpublished manuscripts of Raymond Queneau. At the Orangerie I saw a kinetic installation in blue steel by Jean-Pierre Rives. In front of the Pompidou Centre an Algerian magician made lit cigarettes vanish in his bare hands and a ten-franc piece bought me a printed ticket which said there were still 512,019,580 seconds remaining until the year 2000. I remember a Seita exhibition called Ashtrays of Today where I signed the visitor's book as Gregoire Simpson, and because the book had been printed and bound in Thonon-les-Bains I gave that as my address. I could be whoever I wanted to be, from anywhere.

I wanted to be the kind of person who was always on the way somewhere, or on the way back. I didn't want to repeat the empty afternoons of my months at home, lying on my bed thinking it was good enough just to be breathing. I'd learnt since then that waking up each morning could hardly be described as a triumph, so in Paris I confidently set about finding somewhere of my own to live. After that I was going to look for a part-time job to keep myself occupied, which would then leave me ideally placed to identify the beautiful woman waiting to love me.

It all sounded so simple and easy that I doubt even Lucy and Julian would have bet against it.

I suspected them of changing the recipe without telling me because I could now smoke two or three Carmens in a row and all of them tasted airy, or stale, or like somebody else's idea of extra mild. They somehow weren't as consoling as they used to be, so I'd smoke another, just in case that one or the next was different. I checked the box, but the double castanet was unchanged, black on white, and the tar and nicotine values were the same, and there was still the promise that this particular packet of cigarettes would kill me, just like all the others.

I went outside to smoke, thinking the fresh air might help me appreciate the taste, and that's how I found him, lying on his stomach with his head behind a tree-trunk. It was nearly dusk. I called out to him but he didn't answer.

‘Come on, Jamie, stop messing about.'

He scrambled up from behind the tree. ‘I didn't think you could see me,' he said, looking disappointed, but he brightened up again when I invited him inside. I had to sit him on the floor because the bean-bag was occupied by Bananas, who kept one eye open while Jamie commented on my lack of furniture.