SPIKE presents an exclusive extract from this hilarious cigarette obsessed debut novel
DAY 1
DR WILLIAM BARCLAY, born 7 March 1936, died 3 March 1994, age 57. Mysterium Magnum. The principle of all generation is separation, he used to say.
Distract your mind. Take up a new hobby. Occupy your hands.
He said that the Mosaic Virus could sweep through a field of sweet tobacco leaves or potatoes or tomatoes in a single day, causing devastation to entire agricultural eco-systems.
Try not to think about it. Spend time in public places. Keep very very busy all day long.
{365 x 20 x 10} + { 2 x 20} ( leap years). Equals exactly 73,040. Plus 17 irregulars. Not give or take, not approximately, but exactly seventy-three thousand and fifty-seven. All the same, it’s difficult to prove.
Walter once told me that the old steam-trains in the old days, all steamed up and stretching homewards, used to say Cigarettes tch tch, Cigarettes tch tch. The sound of a train then, an old train on an old track, steaming homewards, smoking.
I knew about this, the concentration. That concentration would be part of the problem. That a restless, dissatisfied mind would rip from one dissatisfaction to the next, like a child stuck in a hawthorn tree in a high wind, on a high hill, in winter. All night.
Lucy Hinton, big-bellied and surrounded by children. The back of her head turns into a chimney, the blackened smoke-stack of a steam train, steaming smoke-signals saying, at the very least, good-bye.
Steer clear of friends who smoke. Repress your desire.
Feeding the dog would distract the mind. Scientists experiment with animals to save people like me from unnecessary discomfort.
Julian Carr, Dr Julian Carr, went to work in his sister’s bra.
Breathe deeply. Indulge yourself in every other way.
Always boxes of Carmen No 6, and never soft-packs, although at one time soft-packs were very fashionable, especially in Paris, where I once was.
I hate and despise more things than I can name. My lungs ache. Avoid tense situations. Use public transport.
In the flat where we used to live above Lilly’s Pasty Shop, Theo would hop once and jump once and Lilly would bring up a Jumbo Pasty No Chips. He had a range of jigs for different orders, and I swear the cat could recognise the step which meant cod.
I wonder if Dr Julian Carr would have made my parents happy if he’d been their only child instead of me. The Hamburg episode notwithstanding.
Carmen No. 6 in endless white boxes, on the beds and tables and chairs, in all the pockets of my life. The logo of black castanets, in silhouette, looks like a split scallop shell. Nowadays, the sign of the double castanet is most often seen beside the air-intake of Formula 3 racing-cars, of discreetly positioned in posters for the English National Opera.
He once said you can change the world and I said no you can’t.
There is also hypnosis, aversion therapy, psychoanalysis, acupuncture, electric shock treatment, and possible conversion to the Seventh Day Adventist Church, who maintain that cigarettes are an invention of hell itself.
My name is Gregory Simpson. I am thirty years old. I am trying to keep my hands occupied.
DAY 2
She introduced me to the Olympians of smoke. She taught me its mythology through black and white cinema, showed me its gods and rituals and villains. I marvelled at Greta Garbo and Sam Spade and the way the smoke of cigarettes made sophisticate the silver of the silver screen.
She took me to see the Gitanes series of pre-war film-noirs at the Arts Cinema, where a sign in the toilet said No Smoking Rauchen verboten Ne Pas Fumer Non Fumare while the screen filled with unrepentant images of the twentieth century’s most proficient smokers. Their lives and our lives were enhanced by tobacco, confirming beyond doubt that in times of stress like love and European war the only fully human action was always a smoke. Smoking was as decent a response to hysteria as it was to boredom. It was as reassuring in victory as it was in defeat. And most comforting of all, it was one hundred percent safe. I saw nobody die of lung cancer, not on screen. Nobody even coughed or had a sore throat, except perhaps Marlene Dietrich.
Lucy told me that all this could be mine. That smoking and not smoking was the difference between entry and no entry into a cinematic world where post-coital cigarettes were shared in large beds in all the premier hotels of the world. By people like us. She held out cigarettes to me like an apple. It was love and desire. It was knowledge and everything.
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 in 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?’
DAY 10
On 1 March 1962, an Ash Wednesday, the Royal College of Physicians published their first ever report on smoking and health. The initial print-run of ten thousand copies sold out, as did the twenty thousand sent to America for re-distribution by the United States Cancer Society, The report received wide-spread publicity and in 1963 cigarette sales in the UK fell by 14.5%.
The college pointed out that in 1960 10,000 people died from lung cancer in comparison to 250 in 1920. In an extensive study of British ex-servicemen a 20-a-day smoker was found to have a 14 times greater risk of dying from lung cancer than a non-smoker. As many as 3 out of 10 smokers would die from a smoking-related illness.
Industry spokesmen were quick to respond. No casual connection had yet been demonstrated between smoking and cancer, so the results given in the report were merely inferences from statistics. They had no more authority than mathematical expectation at a roulette wheel. The increase in lung cancer could be explained by improvements in diagnostic method. And a study of ex-servicemen was inherently unreliable because it wasn’t random: ex-servicemen might have a higher rate of lung cancer for entirely different reasons. It was all a question of presentation: even according to the RCP, 70% of smokers remained in robust good health. To suggest otherwise was to deny British tax-payers their citizen’s right to enjoy a pleasant and perfectly legal pastime.
The RCP couldn’t explain why certain smokers were more susceptible to disease than others. It was entirely possible, even after the findings of the Royal College, that a smoker could go through three packs a day for fifty years without losing a single day of smoking-related ill health. Or he could die horribly of lung cancer before he was forty.
What a gamble that was.
DAY 15
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 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 next century, and not funeral number 1, sometime soon. Think of all those liberated minutes to spend doing something else. And. But.
Smoke: Up at the unit, week after week, they declared me fiddle-fit, and causality was as 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 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 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.