X20 (6 page)

In the New Year it became common knowledge that the Vice-Chancellor had finally discovered who was responsible for leaving a human heart and lung on her lawn, cut and shaped into the word
Hi!
The Vice-Chancellor had also been visited by the police about the incident at the testing centre with the monkeys.

However, Julian couldn't see the Vice-Chancellor because he was ill. Several University doctors came to see him, as well as Lucy Hinton. I hadn't seen her since the time I'd asked for a kiss, but as soon as I heard the slopes of her voice through the wall I could remember why I'd asked. Her voice disappeared for a while, then re-appeared in a different register I didn't recognize. I tidied my room while I was listening, but she never came.

I went to see Julian once myself. He was sleeping. There was a nurse sitting with him who said he was worse and I couldn't stay. When I asked her why he wasn't in hospital she said it wasn't that kind of illness and anyway, he wasn't in any danger. I went back to my room thinking my mother was right. If you smoked as much as Julian, then something just had to give.

The Tobacco Mosaic Virus is a highly infectious plant disease which renders tobacco leaves useless by mottling them a mosaic of different shades of green.

Theo said that if he could find a way of eliminating the virus then the world would change beyond recognition.

‘You can't change the world,' I said.

‘You can if you're a scientist.'

Because of the Mosaic Virus, tobacco has to be grown in areas with the highest standards of agricultural hygiene. This despite the fact that otherwise it's a highly resilient plant. Without TMV, tobacco could be grown in window-boxes.

If they learnt how to eliminate the virus, the big tobacco companies could grow tobacco wherever the workers were cheapest. Regions currently dependent on the plant would have to adapt or collapse, while farms in areas with low labour costs would flourish. The economic balance of the tobacco industry would alter beyond recognition.

‘Change the tobacco industry and you change the world,' Theo said, ‘because we all share in the one weed.'

Theo presented this in a very matter of fact way. It was something he calmly considered at work every day of the week, and he had long accepted the truth of it, and the responsibility. For me it was only science, and because I didn't fully understand, it scared me.

I immediately assumed she'd come to see Julian.

‘He's in,' I said. ‘He's just not answering the door.'

‘I didn't come to see
Julian.
'

She thought about this for a moment. ‘Then how do you know he's in there?'

‘I hear his lighter.'

Lucy nodded, satisfied. ‘So you know I've been to see him before?'

I didn't reply. She wanted to know if I could hear conversations through the wall, actual words.

‘I wasn't listening.'

I still hadn't looked at her properly. She was wearing suede rockers' shoes with a red and black Paisley design.

‘You know you
ought
to smoke. It would do you good.'

‘I'm not the smoking type.'

‘Yes you are. You're so damn
anxious
all the time. You just need the right motivation, and the right situation.'

I asked her if she wanted some coffee.

‘Yes, coffee's good,' she said. She walked past me and settled herself in the bean-bag. ‘After meals is also good, especially breakfast. After sport is okay. Waiting in a cinema queue is hard to resist. Before and after an interview, or a performance of any kind.'

I asked her how strong she liked it.

‘The best time though, is always after sex.'

I missed the cup with the water, drenching a carpet-tile.

‘Or is that something else you've never tried?'

My lung-ache has lessened. I'm sure of it. I breathe in, I breathe out. I feel fine.

My heart, however, is worse. The outside of my left shoulder flinches when I edge back my arm. It could be a strained muscle, but it could also be the arteries in the limb closest to my heart hardening irrevocably, sclerotically, damming my blood.

The room ticks with the stick-stacking of Walter's dominoes. It is one of those moments ushered into an annexe to the side of normal time. I can hear a bird singing outside. I can hear trees. I can hear the silence of the gorge. We are as we were and as we always have been, and then I remember that as we were includes a Carmen No 6, twenty times a day, and I swallow. I bite my tongue. I envy Walter his pipe. His one hundred and four years of life. I envy him his luck.

The least I could do, when Theo asked, was to tell him how I spent my days.

I was reading history books again. After Paris I'd intended to do absolutely nothing, but there was only so much time in a day. Weeks and then months passed by, and doing nothing except smoke cigarettes was not, strictly speaking, a full-time job.

I justified the history books by thinking of them as something unfinished retrieved from the past. It wasn't a new departure of the kind I'd promised myself never to make again. It didn't involve meeting any new people or even leaving the house, and I was always careful to monitor my reading for any sensation resembling enthusiasm.

With this in mind, I worked my way through the
Oxford History of England,
smiling from time to time at its gloriously comic central idea that there are always connections to be made and causalities to be found. The comic perfection of rationalized coincidence (what timing!) and the final slapstick desperation of the historian with eight fingers in eight separate dikes and his thumbs up his bum, smiling nicely as he demonstrates to passers-by how the past is under review, under control, wholly understood.

We went dancing and she danced like a mad woman, on drugs. I watched my feet forget themselves in the presence of her feet, surprising the rest of me. We cycled into the city-centre together. We sat together in the refectory, and at the end of each meal she would light a cigarette and I wouldn't know what to do with my hands.

‘In English we study love,' she once said. ‘We think about it all day long, disguised as poems. Then in class we always come to the same conclusion. Love is action, not words. I don't suppose you think about love much, in the History department.'

Our best conversations always happened in my room, her in the bean-bag, me on the bed. I think it was because of Julian. Knowing that she could easily slip next door made me more eager to please her. It made me remember my luck.

‘Do you like thin women, Gregory?'

She was stretched out in the bean-bag. She'd pulled up her T-shirt and was looking down at her waist.

‘Yes.'

‘Do you like me then?'

‘You know I do.'

‘And do you like me more because I smoke?'

‘No.'

She pulled down the T-shirt.

‘I don't believe you. If I didn't smoke I wouldn't be thin.'

I asked her if she wasn't afraid of dying and she said she was only eighteen years old for God's sake.

Most of all, I liked to watch her being sad, staring at the flame of her lighter until it became too hot to hold. It was then that I wanted to squeeze her into the bean-bag and make love to her, but instead I just looked. I dreamt about her. I never told her that there were also love stories in the History department. I mean ones which actually happened.

The asbestos factory where Uncle Gregory worked was in Adelaide, South Australia, and he used to save his salary to pay for an annual pilgrimage to the Isle of Man Motorcycle Time Trials. In the early years he worked as a mechanic for a team of his old RAF pals. Then, between 1958 and 1963, and again in 1965, he rode the TT himself.

He had many friends among the racers. In 1960, he was up in eighth place in the Senior 500 when he dropped his Triumph at the Gooseneck. Later, in hospital, he was presented with a trophy made of old kick-starts welded together. Both his legs were broken. Two years later, he knew the names of the wives of all three riders who died at the Devil's Lunge.

When TT week was over, he put his bike on a trailer and came to stay. He used to tease Mum about riding me to school on the Triumph, and when she gave him the car-key he'd put on a big show as if he didn't know how to drive, as if driving a car was so boring he was bound to fall asleep at the wheel. Once, he lit two cigarettes at the same time, as a way of promising mum he'd stay awake. When she didn't laugh, he put the cigarettes in his nostrils.

At this time the Isle of Man TT was sponsored by Wills Woodbines. Uncle Gregory had CAPSTAN across his green petrol-tank. Even today, as far as I know, he remains the only partially-sighted rider ever to compete on the senior circuit.

Julian Carr was in trouble. Some Marxist ecologists had circulated a flyer condemning him for taking money from a tobacco company. They implicated him in the destruction of the rain-forests, the murder of unborn babies, and the economic weakness of the Third World. They therefore proposed his expulsion from the Students' Union.

Added to that the Vice-Chancellor still wanted to see him, and although the nurse had gone, Julian hung on to his doctor's note and rarely left his room. I went to show him the flyer and he looked awful, his eyes dark and somehow unfocused. He said he was fine. He rolled up the flyer, touched it against the bar fire and used it as a spill for his cigarette. He threw the paper into the bin, where it singed a milk carton before I stamped on it. He said,

‘Did I ever tell you about those monkeys?'

He stumbled against the wall. He put his cigarette down on the desk and steadied himself. I thought he might be drunk, but the only smell on his breath was tobacco.

'Should have burned the bloody place down,' he said.

He concentrated hard and focused on me, then remembered his cigarette and picked it off the desk and stuck it in his mouth.

‘How's Lucy?' he said. His voice was slurred. ‘Any luck?'

‘Are you sure you're alright?'

‘I'm fine.'

I briefly wondered if he was jealous. He screwed up his eyes and tried unsuccessfully to get another cigarette out of his pack. He gave up and just waved the pack generally in my direction. One of the cigarettes was upside down, tobacco showing.

‘Cigarette? Or not yet?'

I doubt he even noticed that I took one. I put it in my pocket.

Stay cool, stay calm, think of the tarspots in the lung on the photo by the door. Don't think of the double CASTANET or the air intake of Formula 3 racing cars or posters for the ENO. Remember that when Theo put up the poster of Popeye, smoking himself into strength, it was a joke. (Remember the spinach.) He didn't frame the Yalta photo of the century's three greatest men because they achieved peace by smoking. If Winston had surrendered his cigars there would still have been peace, surely (Roosevelt was a fag man and Stalin loved his pipe — Hitler never touched the stuff). Look instead at the enlarged acupuncture diagram of a human ear (next to
Now Voyager),
locating the exact point E which relates to smoking.

I tug at my ear, at the exact point E: it doesn't help. Think of Julian Carr, and remember the real reason for disdaining your pain. Remember Hamburg.

More immediately, try very hard indeed to ignore the straight-forward implication of the words painted above the door in thick black italics, Theo's old and useless mantra:

There are no poisonous substances, only incorrect doses

PARACELSUS,
Paragranum,
Basel 1536

I placed the cigarette I'd stolen from Julian on my desk next to a box of Swan Vestas, the smoker's match. I switched on the Anglepoise. I sat down at the desk and squared my shoulders. I didn't want to be slouching at the moment my life changed for ever.

I had resolved, due to the vehemence of my love, to perish with her.

I studied the cigarette carefully. Fine-cut leaves of tobacco packed into a thin roll of paper, fixed to a synthetic filtering device. An object contrived to spring a small pleasure in the brain. It was such a simple idea, so clear in ambition and so neat in execution. I rolled it along the desk. The paper had Buchanan's printed on it, just above the filter. That was good thinking. I rolled it back again. A cigarette rolls nicely.

It was a kind of cowardice to prepare for Lucy by smoking the cigarette now, alone. But I was scared I might cough, or feel sick, or even vomit, any one of which would be unfortunate if Lucy were there, otherwise impressed by my proof, at last, that I was prepared to die for her.

I put the cigarette in my mouth. I was surprised by how dry it was and I took it out of my mouth and it stuck to my lower lip, tearing the skin. I put the cigarette down, tried to light a match into my cupped palms like Humphrey Bogart in Paris in
Casablanca,
but I couldn't. So I lit the match by striking it towards me and a spark flew off and burnt a hole in my shirt.

I took a last deep breath. I wet my lips and put the cigarette back in my mouth. And for some reason remembered an article from
Cosmopolitan
which said that cigarettes were a substitute for the mother's breast, so I thought of Lucy when she was pregnant, and then I thought of my own mother and the countless promises made and impossible to unmake.

I took the cigarette out of my mouth. I watched the Swan Vesta burn itself out.

I was scared of dying.