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I stared through the ironwork and fantasized about freeing myself into the solitude of the undistinguished house, imprisoning the world behind those gates.

Lucy always insisted that I must have tried it at least once, and she was right.

At primary school, after fifth period, my friend John Rolfe once set off the fire-alarm by flipping a king-size marble called Murad the Cruel at a piece of glass in the gym called Break In Case Of Fire. It was while I was watching Miss Bryant smoke her Embassy Regal in the Top Field. When she heard the bell she said Fuck and threw her cigarette onto the grass and strode off towards Fire Assembly.

I went and picked up the cigarette, which was only half-smoked. I was struck by how evenly it burnt and by its strong adult smell. There was a bracket of Miss Bryant's red lipstick on the filter.

Partly because I wanted to, and partly because I'd heard Miss Bryant say Fuck, I sucked on the cigarette like Uncle Gregory always did. It tasted horrible. I tried to get the smoke to come out of my nose, like with Miss Bryant, thinking this might be the fun of it, but it wouldn't come. I blew all the smoke out, and then kept on blowing until I was sure it was all gone. I said Fuck and threw the cigarette away and ran down to Assembly.

‘Simpson!'

‘Present, Miss.'

The taste of the smoke was still bitter in my mouth. I was very confused. I'd always assumed that adults smoked because it was nice to smoke, but this was clearly not true. It was at this precise moment, perhaps, that I lost my sense of the certainty of life.

‘Look, I'll just keep the cat.'

Bananas was still on my shoulder, but he seemed less keen to draw blood. He'd almost stopped moving.

‘Sorry Gregory, but it was tails. It's the big stick for Bananas.'

‘I'll keep the bloody cat, alright? You've made your point.'

‘Gregory, Gregory. I know you want to push everything away, and I see no earthly reason why you should have an innocent and adorable kitten forced on you against your will, especially after the coin came down tails. Much better to put him out of his misery.'

‘I've had enough of this.'

I lifted Bananas off my shoulder and he suddenly became placid so I held him in my arms again. Theo looked at me very carefully. He tossed the coin and caught it without looking.

‘I know what you're doing,' he said.

‘Sorry?'

He looked at the coin in his hand. ‘Tails again. Up at the Unit. I know what they're asking you to do. How much are they paying?'

‘I don't want to discuss it.'

‘Starts low and then increases according to how long you stick at it? That's how I'd do it.'

‘It's confidential.'

‘You can't push everything away, Gregory. It's always too late to clear that kind of space.'

‘That's not what I want,' I said, but I was lying. I wanted to have more money so I could buy the big detached house on the way to the Bridge. I wanted to shut the gates and wall off the world behind me.

‘Don't worry,' he said. ‘You can keep the cat.'

‘Fine,' I said, ‘thanks. I'll keep the cat.'

He handed over the feeding bottle with the picture of Bugs Bunny on the side. Then, as he took the broom-handle back to the kitchen, he said,

‘It was heads really.'

4

Theo's French Guyanan Celtiques had run out ages ago, and now he tended towards either Camels or Buchanan's Special. He always turned one cigarette in the pack upside down and, I noticed, he always smoked that cigarette last.

Sometimes he didn't leave for work until noon. Sometimes he left in the morning and was back by one, or didn't come back at all. This meant that I could never be sure, leaving my own room, that I wouldn't find him lurking, waiting to give me something.

I discovered that there were only two moments of definite commitment in his week. Thursday evenings at seven-thirty he would sit down, light a cigarette, and watch
Tomorrow's World.
And every Wednesday evening at about six he filled two large shopping bags with cartons of 200 cigarettes, not only Buchanan's, but all the popular brands. I would agree to feed Haemoglobin, who was never grateful, and Theo would call a taxi.

He never told me where he went or what he did when he got there, but he always came back at about eleven and the shopping bags were always empty.

It was none of my business.

‘I don't understand you, Gregory. I have no idea what you want. My friend Kim wants to go to Hollywood to earn a limousine so big she can put a Chesterfield suite in the back. Julian wants to find a cure for cancer. What do you want?'

‘I don't know, what about you?'

‘Right now?'

She lit the cigarette she wanted. ‘You don't even want one of these. Any desires at all?'

I could never separate my idea of Lucy from her cigarettes and the way she smoked them. She could lick smoke from the corner of her lips like sugar. Often, she exhaled from the side of her mouth only, turning her head slightly but keeping her eyes fixed on mine. The way she held the filter of the cigarette between the final joints of her index and middle fingers, flexing her hand backwards slightly as if she was always about to inspect her nails. The repeated movement of thumb to filter-tip to dislodge ash which hardly ever had time to form. The archetypal co-ordination of hand to mouth, the same as a sudden thought or a cautious tasting or the blowing of a kiss.

She made it a skill, both the smoking and the promise of a kiss.

I looked at a brown carpet-tile, then at my shoes, my knees. I looked up at the ceiling. I saw a cobweb. I saw a spider. I said to Lucy I'd like to kiss her.

She tasted her cigarette, she remained beautiful, she smiled.

‘Never kiss a smoker,' she said. ‘All the literature says so.'

As she left she inhaled and blew me a smoky kiss all in the same motion. I was desperate, despairing at my inexperience. I knew nothing. I didn't know if she'd ever come back. I didn't even know how to follow her.

Walter is beginning to believe that I might succeed. Instead of saying ‘Still stopped?' he now asks me if I'm still writing. Well clearly yes.

This morning I asked him why and when he started smoking but he began to tell his Firing Squad story so I stopped him and asked the question I really meant to ask instead.

‘Were you never scared of dying?'

‘Always.'

‘I mean from smoking.'

‘No. You mustn't forget Theo and the Estates.'

Walter is wearing a Kill-Me-Quick hat, designed and distributed by his daughter and her anti-smoking LUNG movement at the height of their campaign against us. The No Smoking symbol above the words Kill-Me-Quick is starting to peel. From a distance, the hat might look like the sailor's hat on the packet design of Player's Navy Cut. That particular hat has HERO written on it.

I ask him about his daughter, Emmy, and her new sports club.

‘It's Outward Bound,' he says. ‘She's thinking of taking up hang-gliding.'

‘Good luck to her.'

‘Feeling any better?'

‘Tip-top,' I say.

‘Liar.'

I asked Julian if he would ever give up smoking for a woman.

‘Why should I?'

He was thinking of blonde girls and their eager entry to his room. I think he found it hard to imagine having to change to please them.

‘I mean if you really loved someone, and they would only sleep with you if you stopped smoking, would you stop?'

‘It's a bit hypothetical.'

‘Would you though?'

‘I suppose it depends how much I wanted to sleep with them.'

‘A lot.'

‘I suppose I could pretend to give up.'

‘No, you love them
and
you want to sleep with them.'

‘How many of them are there?'

‘I mean her. One woman.'

'Sure. It's just that if I had to make such a big sacrifice to please her, I'd have to wonder whether we were compatible in the first place. Maybe I should be looking for someone who didn't mind me smoking.'

‘But if you really loved her?'

‘Then I suppose that would be one way of knowing I really loved her. If I was prepared to do that.'

'So would you do it?'

‘If I really loved her I would.'

Before long Bananas grew out of bottle-feeding and started eating meat from tins. After each meal he used to come into my room and sit in a sphinx position, his head slightly inclined over my double castanet ashtray. His nostrils would twitch and then, after several seconds, he'd begin to purr, very loudly. Curious to find out whether a cat could become a nicotine addict, I sometimes used to hide the ashtray. He'd look at me suspiciously, still licking catfood from his whiskers. Then he'd prowl around every surface in the flat which had a memory of ash. He tried to push open Theo's door. Eventually, when he found nothing, he'd jump up behind the sofa and start shredding it to bits. He stopped as soon as I surrendered and offered him an ashtray, and then sat calmly with his nose over it, sphinx-like, sniffing serenely.

This was before he got into the bad habit of actually licking the ash itself. If I left a box of Carmens lying around, he liked to use it as a pillow Later, he learnt how to nudge his way into Walter's tobacco pouch.

The rest of the time, apart from two symmetrical bald spots on the top of his head between his ears, he was a perfectly normal cat.

I went home for Christmas and my mother said I looked thin. I found I missed the company of smokers and I missed Lucy, but when I imagined introducing her to my mother it led to the problem of whose side I would take the first time Lucy reached for a cigarette. I reminded my father of the King Edward he used to smoke during the Queen's speech, and he said yes, he remembered.

That was the Christmas I kept on finding myself alone with him, wondering why we had nothing to say to each other. I think it was because we were largely in agreement about things. Our particular type of closeness was that we had roughly the same idea of what a father and son should expect of each other. He gave me the same amount of money I would receive on a grant, for example, and I never asked him for more than that. He put me under no obligation to follow him into the family business and I had no intention of doing so.

When Uncle Gregory left home to join the RAF, my father had been persuaded to take sole charge of the business. Because his position wasn't achieved by merit, he worked unnaturally hard to convince others, and himself, of his own worth. There are periods of my childhood when all I remember about him is the smell of Cherry Blossom shoe-polish, but by the time I went to University he'd added seventeen shops to the original three passed on to him by his father. This meant that in our area almost every main street was made familiar by the reassuring orange sign,
Simpson's Tobacconist and Newsagent (est 1903).

I like running. I enjoy the solitude of it, the way the effort of it turns into a series of compromises between different parts of the body, working towards an agreement called rhythm. For once, the body is allowed to express itself on equal terms with the mind, instead of staying quiet year after year, and then suddenly blabbing out a great big secret, like cancer, like Theo's cancer.

On the way to the Unit I always used to stop for a moment at the gates in the high wall. The G and the S were at exactly the right height for me to lean against, arms straight, and flex my calf-muscles as I tried to piece the house together through the trees. Its thoughtless solitude reminded me of running.

I pushed myself away from the gates and jogged off towards the bridge. The slight incline made me breathless and I already craved a cigarette as reward for the effort. Instead, I distracted myself by calculating how long it would take before I could afford the house. According to the system they were using to pay me, I reckoned about six years, provided it cost not much more than a hundred thousand pounds.