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‘All I want is a cigarette,' he said.

I gave in and tossed him a Carmen. We shared a match.

A belly of low cloud flattened the glare of the street-lights and trapped the day's heat into the city. I was on my way to the cinema, wearing my black leather jacket and my Camel boots and my most communicative clothes in between. I had a comforting wad of Uncle Gregory's money in my back pocket, and dreaming of eloquent purchases I could make for Ginny I passed an old lady in a blue duffel coat who asked me a question I didn't understand. I wasn't in a hurry, so with the decency I'd inherited from my parents I stopped and asked her if she could kindly repeat herself.

‘A few francs,' she said.

I flustered through my pockets, avoiding Uncle Gregory's money, and inside my jacket my hand fell on the pack of Gauloises. I held them out to her, meaning she should take just one, but she thanked me and took the whole pack, with no idea at all of how lucky they were. She walked away before I could explain.

When I arrived at the cinema Ginny was already queuing. She was wearing over-size dungarees and the white sleeves of her long-sleeved T-shirt overlapped her knuckles. She was wearing her round-rimmed glasses. In need of solace as I was, I could easily have chosen this moment to fall in love with her, but I was distracted by a non-smoking fat couple standing in the queue behind her. They were sharing a baguette and a Camembert cheese, which they spread on the bread with a pen-knife. Lucy's parents, I thought, on a gastronomic weekend away.

Assuming they had instructions to report back to Lucy, I made a point of kissing Ginny on both cheeks. Her dungarees gaped at the side when she leant forward and I saw her hip-bone naked below the seam of her T-shirt. I think I must have blushed, but I tried to hide it by saying I hadn't seen
Now Voyager,
either, at which point, thankfully, the queue began to move.

I soon found out that anyone trying to forget the loss of a pack of lucky cigarettes should avoid
Now Voyager.
The cigarettes in this film are uniquely expressive, managing to communicate lucidly in the awkward territory between language and action. In the very first scene, for example, Bette Davis smokes secretly in her bedroom, thus signalling her inhibited and even suicidal nature. Davis looks terrible at this stage, and there seems to be something wrong with her upper right incisor. However, the power of tobacco means that as soon as she smokes in public, Davis blossoms. Even her tooth heals up. She then finds love in the figure of Paul Heinreid, who seduces her by putting two cigarettes in his mouth, lighting both, and then handing one of them over. Although by the end of
Now Voyager
both Heinreid and Davis have suffered for love, neither of them noticeably suffers from lung cancer.

Cigarettes aside, it's a simple tale of a European man who falls disastrously in love with an American woman, and I suppose Ginny and I were wondering what to make of this as we later strolled down towards the river. There was no romantic moon, but it was still warm. We stopped half-way across the Alexander Bridge and looked down at the slow-moving water, where the lights from the bridge crazed like fire-flies.

Ginny's elbow touched mine. She pointed upstream to where a perfect circle expanded on the sparkling surface.

‘Fish,' she said. She took my arm. ‘Look, another one.'

She pointed out the ripples where several more fish were breathing, and then the river started to fill with fish, all of them breathing perfect circles. They gradually spread down-river, swimming towards us and as they came closer we leant further over the parapet to keep track of them, and one raindrop fell, and then another, and then many, and we realized it was raining.

Ginny laughed and put her forehead against my arm. We looked at the sky and then we looked at each other. She licked some rain from her lips and took off her rain-dropped glasses. And it was there, standing in the middle of the Alexander Bridge, an instant ocean of fish leaving Paris beneath us, that we kissed for the first time.

Then we stopped kissing. I said I had to go. I blamed it on the rain, but it had nothing to do with the rain.

Of course I could, if I wanted to. But it was important not to be simplistic about such things. It wasn't a straight-forward choice, and there were many and complicated issues involved. There were convincing arguments both for stopping (think of your health), and for carrying on (what to do with your hands).

Stop: I knew all the facts and the figures. I knew the statistics and the death-count.

Smoke: I liked it. And besides, statistics never told the whole story.

Stop: My aching lungs and the way I sometimes had to hold my heart in my hand. Think of the worry.

Smoke: Think of the worry, and the crematorium gardens full of roses dedicated to non-smoking dead people. Keep in mind, at all times, the distinction between life and survival.

Stop: It would upset Julian, but Julian aside, Theo wasn't a statistic and he was dying. Remember Uncle Gregory and Walter's wife and John Wayne. Remember the preference for funeral number 2 in the middle of the next century, and not funeral number 1, sometime soon. Think of all those liberated minutes to spend doing something else. Anything else. And. But.

Smoke: Up at the Unit, week after week, they declared me fiddle-fit, and causality was yet to be scientifically demonstrated. It could be one particular brand which was responsible for the death-count, or a not unusual combination of cigarettes with something else. No-one knew. The cancerous cigarette might be an independent event, so that each smoke was like a separate bet, having nothing to do with the last. The dangerous smoke might be number three on the second Tuesday of each month, or the one you didn't smoke because you were too drunk to pull it from the packet, or the one you saved especially for your best friend at the end of a long day. And anyway, I liked the money Buchanan's paid me. And the Chinese might drop a bomb. And it had to be better than Roman discontent and twenty dormice a day.

Stop: Okay then. Forget everything else. It would really upset Julian if I gave up.

Smoke: Everything else. The importance of showing my solidarity with the Estates and with Theo. The taste of Lucy Hinton in every fresh cigarette, and like Paracelsus said, it's the dosage which counts. The way I could light a match and openly hold the danger in my hand in otherwise banal and wholly tamed places. The fear of fattening up. Bogart, and the little bit of Bogart that rubs off. The chemical satisfaction and the seven seconds. The less certain satisfaction of openly defying mortality. And beyond even that, a deeper fear that without cigarettes I might be left with no desires at all.

Stop: Imagine Julian's reaction, and how wrong one man could be.

I lit another cigarette. Surely there must be other ways I could fuck Julian up.

16

‘You can't love her that much or you wouldn't have kissed me.'

‘It's not as simple as that.'

‘Why not?'

‘It's very complex.'

I decided against a smoke-break. Ginny then decided she was also off cigarettes for the day, even though Madame Boyard had told us twice that we could go out now if we wanted to. By the middle of the morning Madame Boyard was chewing the end of her pencil and flicking angrily through Kobbe's opera guide, wondering how long we could keep it up.

Ginny kept on peering at me over the top of her computer, until I felt like a rat in one of Julian Carr's experiments. In another letter from Hamburg he'd assured me that rats didn't count as animals because they were vermin, and anyway, not all animal-testing was the same. Then he described a test he'd developed involving a single rat and a maze with six different exits, where each route to an exit posed a different problem for the rat to solve. Whenever the rat succeeded in reaching an exit, it was rewarded with a piece of cheese. However, as soon as the rat discovered that the reward was always the same, it lay down in the middle of the maze and refused to move. Eventually it died. Julian therefore replaced the cheese at one of the six exits with a chamber full of tobacco smoke. He then replaced the rat. The second rat learnt the routes to all the exits, and then made regular visits to the five containing cheese. It seemed motivated and happy, even for a rat. Julian's conclusion:
What a wonderful world.

Madame Boyard pushed back her chair and accused us both of being crazy, and then English. She can't have been more than half-way up the stairs, Camels just opened and a filter pinched between her fingers, when Ginny said:

‘One moment you like me, the next you don't. Didn't our kiss mean
anything
to you?'

‘Of course it meant something.'

‘You obviously don't love her.'

‘You used to tell me I did.'

‘That was before you took me to the cinema and kissed me afterwards.'

‘I can't just leave her.'

‘Why not?'

Because since my kiss with Ginny on the bridge I thought about Lucy all the time. At night, lying on the narrow bed in my tiny room only an eighth the size of a human lung, I tried to think about Ginny but I couldn't. Instead, there was now no moment in the day which didn't somehow remind me of Lucy. I would see a young Parisian, of either sex, smoking in the street. I would notice their unmistakable air of defiance and understand immediately that they were defying me personally, the cigarette they were smoking a direct result of their recent seduction by Lucy Hinton. I tried to keep in mind how banal a version of happiness was offered by cigarettes, but I wasn't sure I believed it anymore.

I'd lost touch with my idea of myself as super-hero, and now it felt as if every day I lived had been handed down to me used and slightly soiled. Kissing Ginny had brought back the memory of my failure to climb a mountain, kill a dragon, smoke a cigarette, and if I couldn't do any of these things what could I usefully do? Now, whenever I caught sight of Lucy in the street, she would take a drag on her cigarette and stare me down disdainfully, her face heart-shaped and full of scorn. It was even worse when I didn't see her. Then I would find myself worrying what kind of shoes she was wearing and whether she'd changed her brand of cigarettes, and if she had, what colour exactly was the packet she held in her hands day after day. I mean right now, today, wherever she is.

It was exhausting. It made me nostalgic for the amniosis of home and the easy defeat of lying on my bed all afternoon, happy just to be breathing. I hadn't forgotten the feeling that waking up every morning was no victory in itself, but now I imagined waking up every morning with Lucy, which wasn't the same thing at all.

‘You can come and watch me rehearse, if you like,' Ginny said. ‘It's nearly final selection time.'

'Sorry?'

‘For the understudies for
Cosi Fan Tutti.'

I tried to concentrate, and briefly wondered how opera would sound in an American accent. But then Madame Boyard came back, smelling of tobacco smoke, and I remembered why I wouldn't be going to find out.

I crushed my Carmen to death in the large onyx ashtray on the coffee-table in Julian's office. Then I placed the empty box of Carmens carefully beside it, the double castanets facing upwards and the health warning turned away from me. I took a fresh box of Carmens from my shirt pocket and unwrapped the cellophane, which I placed next to the empty box next to the extinguished cigarette. Holding the bottom of the new box in my left hand I took the top section of the flip-top box between the fingers and thumb of my right hand, and flipped it back. I pulled out the slip of gravelled silver paper which said PULL. I placed it on top of the cellophane in the ashtray. From the new box in my left hand I pinched two new filters from two new cigarettes between my fingernails. I extracted both of the cigarettes from the box. One of them, I put in my mouth. The other, I turned upside down and replaced in the box, tobacco upwards. Finally, using Julian's underused lighter, I lit the cigarette in my mouth and even though it was only mid-afternoon, I began to enjoy my twenty-first cigarette of the day.