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‘Dominoes,' Walter says, and deals.

Old Ben Bradley is only fifty-three. He is called old Ben because fourteen years ago his first son Ben turned professional and went to play Rugby League for Hull Kingston Rovers. Last year, the whole Bradley family had a box at Wembley to watch the Silk Cut Challenge Cup final. The Rovers were the underdogs and they lost.

At this moment I envy Walter his pipe. I envy Jonesy Paul his filterless L & B and I envy old Ben Bradley his JPS. At this moment I envy everybody everywhere everything, which I know is stupid but that's how I feel.

Lucy was gradually wearing me down, wearing out my resistance. Sometimes, she deliberately provoked me by going next door to smoke a cigarette with Julian. I could hear their voices through the wall, interrupted by silences the length of an inhaled breath or a snatched kiss. I asked Lucy what they talked about.

‘Cigarettes.'

‘But what do you do?'

‘We smoke.'

When I insisted she tell me what they really talked about, she just threatened to go next door again. She made me nervous. With her slim fingers she made a point of pulling each Marlboro from her pack like a Lucky Dip where the prize was always the same, and always satisfactory. She coolly lit each cigarette and left me to fidget between different weapons of defence: a folder of statistics sent by my mother; the foul taste of Miss Bryant's Embassy Regal; Uncle Gregory dead at 48; the ransom of my mother's love.

But there was little comfort in being well-armed now that Lucy spoke only the one smoky language, the
Hello Baby,
easy to understand. She had cast herself in the role of a medieval princess who could be wooed and won, where smoke-a-cigarette was her modern version of swim-a-lake, climb-a-mountain, kill-a-dragon. She worked on making me believe that cigarettes could be the one moment to change everything, as if all I had to do was smoke like Humphrey Bogart to end up with the girl and my own piano-player.

I began to wonder whether cigarettes had changed since Miss Bryant. Otherwise, how could Lucy Hinton and Julian Carr and 33% of the population (!) who I'd never really thought about before ever have learnt to smoke with such an impression of pleasure?

We walked from the pub across a failed area of open space towards a five-storey block at the hub of the Estates. Theo handed me one of the shopping bags and I was surprised by how light it was. I looked around for muggers and thieves but it must have been too cold. I kept looking, just in case.

Surprisingly, the pub had almost been fun. Theo had the invisible but convincing invulnerability of the slightly strange, the uncommon man. He made me feel safe and I stayed close to him. We played pinball, and the ends of the longest strands of his grey hair trembled as he tried to tilt his ball into favourable alleys and nearly always succeeded. He beat me by two hundred and nineteen million points.

Inside the block we took a wasted shudder-proof lift to the fourth floor. There was an outside walkway with numbered doors spaced by frosted windows. In front of the door furthest from the lift-shaft there was a queue of three or four women, and I followed Theo towards them. Under his breath, Theo said: ‘Call me Dr Barclay.'

He said hello to all the women, and introduced me as his new assistant. Nobody took much notice. Then he took a Chubb key from the pocket of his coat and opened door number forty-seven. He invited us all inside.

I never really understood why Julian did it. It wasn't as though he needed the money.

He looked at me seriously, his square jaw jutting slightly.

‘It was a matter of principle. They would have tested the drugs on animals otherwise, which would have been totally pointless.'

‘Because of the restraint again?'

‘No. Because rabbits are not in the market for a male contraceptive pill. You know, if you wanted to do some tests I could set you up.'

‘Well thanks, Julian, but all the same. Considering.'

‘You can earn up to fifteen hundred pounds for a ten week course.'

‘No really, Julian.'

‘I know you're short of money. You could take Lucy on holiday with fifteen hundred pounds. You could take her to the Caribbean.'

‘We're not going on holiday together. And anyway, we're just good friends.'

‘Any family history of madness? Any cancer in the family?'

‘I'm not going to do it, Julian. Look what happened to you.'

‘No allergies? No drink problem. Solid and dependable. You'd be perfect. Look, if you ever find yourself short of cash, just think of the animals you'd be saving.'

I could always tell which of my mother's letters were more important to her by the number of exclamation marks, each one a wide-eyed whoop!! on the page. There was one particular letter where I counted thirty-seven, along with four separate articles about smoking, which was also a record.

The bad news was that 15–20% of all British deaths turned out to be smoking-related.

Limb amputation due to vascular disease was a newly discovered risk.

Reference was made to Buerger's disease, to Chronic Mucus Hypersecretion and Obstructive Lung Disease. There was Benzo-a-pyrene. There were one hundred thousand dead every year in the hidden holocaust. And it could at last be confirmed that children who regularly attended religious services were less likely to smoke. It said so in one of the articles.

There was no good news. Only vitamin A, which is found in carrots, made a tiny recordable difference in efforts to combat lung cancer.

Of course I immediately recognized the letter and the cuttings as a special barrage of love. My mother was letting me know how much she loved me. It wasn't until the end of the third and last page that she let slip the supposedly confidential information that my father (Mr Simpson the Tobacconist! Of all people!!) had been provisionally nominated for an OBE, for services to the community.

This morning, on my fifth day without cigarettes, Dr Julian Carr telephoned for the first time since Theo's funeral. He knew full well I knew it was him. I could hear him in the silence, inhaling.

He let me listen to him smoke. I had nothing to say to him but I didn't put the phone down. Eventually, he whispered, very softly:

‘Feeling a bit squiffy, are we?'

Then I put down the phone.

In a way, the films were right. If I smoked a cigarette and made love to Lucy then I wouldn't drop down dead before the night was over. But dreamers find it hard to reduce the world to its todays and calendar tomorrows, and I was also worried about collapsing in the middle of an awards ceremony many years in the future.

For all I knew Lucy could be toying with me. She might be using me as an early experiment in her masterplan to seduce Julian. She may have slept with him already. She might still be sleeping with him. Perhaps when she went next door they never talked at all, just fell into each other's arms and made mad passionate love and the noises which came through the wall only
sounded
like conversation. The time she spent with me could be a trick like her pregnancy. And if I committed myself to her by a simple act of breathing that wasn't a breathing of air, then how could I be sure she wouldn't turn on me and laugh, perhaps while the smoke was still settling in my lungs?

The time she'd acted pregnant: it was late and I was drunk but she'd fooled me. She'd made me feel gullible and inexperienced and stupid. I didn't want the same thing to happen again but I didn't want to smoke a cigarette either. I asked her if she knew what she was doing to her health.

‘I know, I know. I'll be dead at thirty and so will my babies. I kill passers-by in the street and total strangers in restaurants. I am personally responsible for the murder of children in public parks. It could hardly be worse, could it?'

It was a flat with two rooms, one behind the other, then a kitchen, and then behind that a bathroom. All the rooms were in a row like train carriages. In the first room there were chairs around the walls and magazines on a low table: a waiting room. The clinic itself took place in the inner room. I made coffee and lit the gas-fire. Then I sat behind Theo and watched.

They came in one by one, and each stayed for between five and ten minutes. Theo sat on one side of a table in the middle of the room, and with his ‘patient' sitting opposite him it reminded me of prison-visiting the way I'd seen it on television. Everyone who came in called him Dr Barclay, and in the three hours we were there every visit followed the same pattern. Someone would come in, sit down, tell Theo why they started smoking and why they carried on, and then at the end he would give them cigarettes. It was all formally done, and there was no show of gratitude.

At the end of the clinic we were left with a single carton of 200 Kensitas. I called for a taxi which would only come as far as the pub, and as we walked back across the open space, Theo said,

‘Best keep it quiet.'

‘Yes Theo.'

‘Doesn't look too good. Tobacco men handing out cigarettes.'

‘No, I can see that.'

‘Freud's early work was on fish. He specialized in the noses of fish.'

‘I didn't know.'

‘Nobody likes Freud anymore.'

‘No.'

‘But he was right about one thing. Everybody has a story.'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘I can see that too.'

Outside Lilly's Pasties, the beggar was still begging. Theo gave him the carton of Kensitas.

6

Time, memory; the usual problems.

I remember her bones. When I dreamed her she had no bones at all, and I hadn't expected her pelvis and her hips to be so hard. I hadn't expected her to
move
so much.

But that was later. First I had to surrender, which was inevitable once I reached the stage where every morning I woke up with a nagging sense of dissatisfaction. It was as if all the dreams I never remembered had secretly ended unhappily, and only Lucy could change the endings. But then Lucy was also the smoking of a cigarette.

Once too often, she stood up and shook out her hair and threatened to go next door.

‘Why?'

‘Julian watches me smoke without frowning.'

‘Wait.'

‘What now?'

‘Come to dinner.'

‘Where?'

‘Here. On Monday, no, Tuesday.'

‘I'm getting very impatient, Gregory. Pretty soon I'm just going to give up.'

‘Great news.'

‘You know what I mean. Give up on you. I've tried everything and I don't believe you even like me.'

‘You know I like you.'

‘Then prove it.'

‘If you say yes to dinner, I will.'

‘You'll what?'

‘You know what. I promise. We can make it a special occasion.'

She lit a cigarette and smiled.

‘Please, Lucy.'

‘I'll dress up shall I? If we both know what it means.'

The more often I went to the Estates, the more radically I had to revise my opinion of Theo. His approach was disciplined, rigorous, the exact opposite of his hair. I concluded he wasn't entirely confident he was doing the right thing.

His prescriptions for cigarettes were never automatic. There was once a lank young man, in a surplus East German combat jacket and blondish dreadlocks. In a bad teeth contest he would have run Theo a close second. He didn't sit down, and his head bobbed in a reflex memory of years viced in a walkman. Or maybe it was just because he was completely stoned.

‘It's like they told me you hand out cigarettes.'

Theo said he was a doctor.

‘Like to the oppressed, man.'

‘I conduct counselling clinics.'

‘That last woman had 200 Raffles. I saw her.'

‘Tell me how you started smoking.'

‘I'm a traveller. I could really handle a few fags, you know?'

‘Do you like travelling?'

‘Yeah, well. Like it's the only honest response?'

'Sorry.'

‘A couple of hundred would be fine.'

‘I'm mostly just an endurance man. I'm sorry.'