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Another time a young boy said his mum had sent him to pick up a packet of Embassy Legals. The boy had the face of an apple-eater and a milk-drinker. He had freckles and a hard, cheeky look that in adults becomes a kind of endearing blunt-ness. Theo told him to sit down and unrolled the photo of the diseased lung. When the boy understood what it was his eyes opened wide and he stood up and backed towards the door. He couldn't keep his eyes off the photo. He said:

‘I don't believe you.'

‘Believe me.'

‘It's just a piece of bubble-gum.'

Then he ran through the waiting-room and away, leaving the door wide open so that we could all hear his trainers slapping along the walk-way.

‘The youth of today,' Theo said, shaking his head.

She took off her clothes. When she was naked she shaped herself into the bean-bag. I remember her bones.

Tuesday arrived. I pulled my desk into the middle of the room and covered it with my spare blue duvet cover. I bought two red candles and stuck them in lumps of Blu-Tack. I went next door to borrow Julian's desk-chair. I was very nervous.

‘You need hot food for a seduction,' Julian said.

He thought he always knew best. I planned to give Lucy three courses, all of them cold so I wouldn't have to leave the room once while she was with me. Julian pointed out that I'd also chosen the wrong colour wine.

‘You could take her out for an Indian,' he said.

Lucy had once told me that I shouldn't upset myself about Julian because he didn't fancy her. But anyone can change their mind, and I thought he might be jealous and getting worse at hiding it, which was one more worry to add to the already considerable anxiety which was gathering in my chest, making me linger too long in Julian's doorway, still holding his desk-chair. I asked him if he thought Lucy liked me. I mean really.

‘Of course she likes you.'

‘How do you know?'

'She told me.'

‘Did she?'

'She said she liked you because you were straight.'

'Straight?'

'Square.'

‘I'm not square.'

‘You hardly drink. You don't smoke.'

‘Did she really say that?'

‘Why should I lie about it?'

‘You told me that all smokers lie.'

‘I was lying.'

The Marlboro cowboy never had conversations like these. He was totally unhurried, unworried, unmodern. He was exactly how I imagined myself, tomorrow.

Some months before he died Theo gave a plant to Emmy Gaston, Walter's daughter, as a present. Today Walter has brought the plant back and it doesn't look very healthy. It is about a metre high, but the broad leaves look sorry for themselves, slack in the mouth, in full contemplation of death. There are no flowers on the plant. Theo told Emmy there would be white flowers.

'She wants you to save it,' Walter says. ‘She imagines Theo passed on the secret. And she gave me a message but I've forgotten what it was. I think she wanted you to meet somebody.'

I tell him not to worry, and he doesn't. He settles in his chair and starts puffing at his pipe, flicking through a
National Geographic
feature about cash crops in the Pacific basin. He is wearing a tweed flat cap, with a crimson-feathered fishing fly attached to the cloth stretched over the peak.

I move the plant slightly to the left so that I can see him better. He looks up and asks me what I want. I'm embarrassed that he catches me looking so I say nothing and bend my head over the desk and write this sentence and will carry on writing it until he goes back to his magazine as if none of this ever happened and now he is reading the magazine again and I think I can stop.

She was very generous and she refused to let me fumble. Her limbs curled out of the bean-bag, wrapping me in.

Faced with the possible intimacy of the evening, I felt friendless. I wasn't sufficiently close to anyone else to take the risk of explaining how much Lucy meant to me. I couldn't ring home, obviously, and either I was feeling guilty in advance or my mother already suspected something. The last time I'd phoned I'd asked her about Uncle Gregory's cancer.

‘Are you sure he got it from smoking?'

‘Of course I am.'

‘I mean, are you absolutely positive that this is factually accurate?'

‘Gregory. Your Uncle Gregory smoked sixty high-tar cigarettes every day of his adult life. What else did you want him to die of? You're not thinking of smoking are you?'

‘Of course not.'

‘Promise?'

Julian didn't understand either. He became arch and suggestive when I wanted him to be sympathetic, as though Lucy was just another blonde girl. He said the important thing was to stay calm and not to worry. I asked him if he was going out for the evening and he said he didn't know. I was terrified, abject before my desire.

I lit the candles with my Swan Vestas. I turned off the electric light. Wanting something to do with my hands, I opened the bottle of wine. Julian had said it needed to breathe. I was wearing a tie. I was a boy dressed up and pretending to be a man in one of the smallest rooms in the William Cabot Hall of Residence for Men, and I suddenly realized that nothing here could possibly match the incomparable success I'd imagined for the evening. I felt out of place, absurd, worthless.

And anyway, it was too late. She wasn't coming. She would have found something more interesting to do than dinner on this evening with me, like watch television. I licked my fingers to snuff out the candles, and then decided it would be less dangerous to blow them out instead when there was a gentle knock, three times, tap tap tap, on the door.

A club for smokers is not a new idea. At the end of the nineteenth century there were a number of smoking clubs thriving in London. They were called Divans and among the most famous were Whites in Devonshire Street and The Slipper Club in the Strand. Divan as a word derives from the Persian. It has vacillated its way through the English language swerving in meaning from a collection of poems to a courthouse to a room entirely open on one side towards a garden to a type of long seat but at one stage stopping at a club for smokers. The word divan then, is a good example of how a single point of departure, in this case a word, can come to mean many different things and travel far beyond itself.

The Divans of the late nineteenth century allowed gentlemen to smoke in peace (see Disraeli,
Endymion
XX 1880). They were also places of refuge from women, who were strictly excluded from membership. It's different now of course, at the end of another century. Smoke has been democratized, and it features in everyone's photographed past. It has become a sign of the commonness of our humanity, the link between a Maori and a Mau-mau. It has been the century's open addiction, the world-wide admission that breathing by itself is simply not enough.

But it's different now, like I said. It turns out that pleasure kills, as the strictest of history's theologians always promised. A hundred years ago it must have all seemed so splendid, such an innocent pleasure so cleverly packaged and so obviously harmless that with hindsight it almost convinces, as feared by the Seventh Day Adventists, as the most perfect invention of hell itself.

‘When I first wake up and feel depressed. When I'm tired and worn out or when the children get a bit stroppy. When I'm violently mad and about to throttle them. You know.'

‘Here. Take these whenever you like. Do not exceed the recommended dose.'

It was mostly women who came to Theo's clinics, often with young children. They had a lifetime's habit of sacrificing their own desires to please other people, and smoking was the solitary repeatable indulgence that could be called exclusively their own. Small comfort through it was, it was still a comfort.

‘I was sort of on my own, and you can't really sit and read a book so you think what the heck can I do and instead of twiddling your thumbs. I don't know what made me do it. I just went round the corner, bought a packet of cigarette? and smoked a cigarette.'

‘Here. Take these whenever you like. Do not exceed the recommended dose.'

Most of them were unfamiliar with the blind optimism needed to give up anything as consoling as cigarettes. One woman said that at least finding a match was a reason to get up in the morning.

'Sometimes I put the baby outside the flat, shut the door and put the radio on full blast and I've sat down and had a cigarette, calmed down and fetched him in again. Then I give him his tea. I think it's all in the mind really, you know like it calms you down, just in your mind.'

‘Here, take these.'

Her hair, released, fanned into the black of the bean-bag. The allelujah of eyes closed and open, open and closed. Her shoulders.

‘The carrots aren't glazed. They're more alert than that.'

It was going brilliantly. Lucy was dressed as a gypsy, with Creole hoops in her ears and her black hair tied back. She was wearing make-up which brought her features into focus like a portrait photograph, and she had a wraparound top thing and a long red skirt, threaded through with gold. The candle-light flecked deeply in her eyes and I realized this was the point and I hoped it was doing the same for me. She was laughing a lot, which made me think she was happy. Her teeth gleamed. She touched my arm when she wanted me to really
visualize
her sister in a wet-suit, trying to water-ski. She was happy about everything that ever was. She was absolutely bloody fantastic.

After the starter (grated carrot salad), she lit two cigarettes at once. I drank some wine and watched her hands. She offered me one of the cigarettes.

‘This is a magic cigarette,' she said.

She leaned towards me. ‘It's enchanted. Whoever smokes this cigarette will fall in love with the next person they see.'

I took the cigarette from her hand.

‘Will they live happily ever after?'

‘Yes.'

I offered it back to her.

‘Why don't you smoke it yourself then?'

‘I will, once someone falls in love with me first.'

I looked at the magic cigarette and watched it burn. Then I placed it carefully in the Courage ashtray so that the filter rested in the indentation designed for just this kind of emergency. I dropped a twenty-pence coin over the glowing ash and watched the smoke dwindle and die. Just like Lucy had taught me.

‘Inevitable,' I said. ‘But we haven't even had the main course yet.'

‘Oh we're still a long way from the main course.'

I poured more wine, and she complimented me on the way I'd arranged the slices of avocado at right angles to the smoked chicken.

Between 1945 and 1980 there were 423 publicly recorded atmospheric nuclear tests. There are thought to have been at least the same number again which were never announced. Radioactive fallout from these explosions is mostly in the form of Carbon-14 and Plutonium-329. Carbon-14 converts to carbon dioxide and is taken up by plants and then incorporated into organic material and the food chain. It has a half-life of 5,730 years. Plutonium-329 has a half-life of 24,400 years. Between them these two isotopes are expected to cause 2.4 million deaths from cancer, 670,000 of them before the end of the century.

In July 1962, the US exploded a 1.4 megaton bomb in space, 400 kilometres above Johnston Atoll. As a result of this explosion nitrogen oxides were injected into the stratosphere, where they continue to catalyse ozone destruction. The breakdown of the ozone layer is a primary factor in the increase of skin cancers in the southern hemisphere.

Statistically, by comparison to the effects of nuclear testing, cancers caused by known carcinogens such as asbestos or the polycyclic hydrocarbons in used engine oil are negligible. Between 1945 and 1980 there were also 1,400 nuclear tests conducted underground, the full consequences of which have yet to be calculated.

The Estates confirmed most of the conclusions I'd reached in Paris. It was better to have money than not. Don't involve yourself because the worst will always happen. And if the worst doesn't happen then you can still be run over by a bus.

Since de-regulation there had been no bus service to or from the Estates. There were still fights and broken-bottles and sometimes even petrol-bombs. But worst of all was the sheer bus-crushing tedium of the repeats of underfunded days and the kids crying their eyes out and the other one hundred and ninety-nine people in exactly the same position as you and all of them after the job you wanted, which you only wanted because it was the only one on offer. Have a fag. Calm down.

Once, Theo sent me down to the Estates on my own. He had a cold.

‘You should see a doctor if you're ill.'

‘I'm not ill. Never been ill in my life.'

I went down to flat No. 47 by taxi and handed out the familiar advice and the cartons of 200 cigarettes. I acted like a doctor and kept my mind on the great mercy of the thin white tube which could communicate the idea of what it meant to want something and also be able to have it. It offered a small proof that desire wasn't exclusively a source of pain. Theo had taught me this.

There was a new girl I hadn't seen before. She looked very tired and her thin brown hair hung stranded over her face. She was younger than me and she was carrying a small child wrapped in a V-neck sweater. She looked over my head when she spoke.

‘I was meant to be with her dad, but he left me when she was one day old.'

‘Here,' I said, ‘take as many of these as you like. Do not exceed the recommended dose.'

Her eyes met mine for the first time.

‘I don't even smoke,' she said.

It was as if what we'd done was exactly what she'd wanted to do. I remember her bones and everything else I mostly speculate because I can never remember it clearly enough. Her hair, her shoulders, her bones. Her legs, I think. I think it was over very quickly and it was never over. It was too soon and too late and she was unhappy and never happier.