Smoking is dangerous. So is sucking sweets. I liked to go to get my father’s packet of Players from a pocket of his jacket, hung in the hall. One night he brought home a cigar in a tube. I liked that smell better. Another night he said he was stopping. He just did. Like that. But he started sucking goodies – boilings and mints. He never stopped that. I got hooked on toffees for a while but I’ve told you about that. I still like it when my nose catches the sweet stink of resin, lingering amongst the tobacco exhaust, in the narrows or round a corner in the streets of our island city. The purpose of smoking, when I was young, was to take dope.
I’d already been taught about smoking, at school. This is how. The science teacher with bobbed dark hair and a close fitting, medium length, tailored skirt and kinky boots spoke to us about particles. Kinky boots weren’t that kinky. They were just black ordinary boots with flat soles. They started just below the knee. I don’t think hers were anything special. And I don’t think they had heels at all. It’s partly Emma Peel’s fault. Mind you, the original designs for her Avengers outfit are available for scrutiny. Her leather costume was adapted to be more suitable for view before the evening watershed. She was tall enough anyway, without the spike-heels. So was my science teacher.
You looked up to her for sure when you were called out to hold out your hands; the science teacher, I mean. I never got belted by Diana Rigg. I can’t remember if I had to cross my hands or not. Some asked you to and some didn’t. It was better if she didn’t because she might just touch yours with the tips of her fingers so you stretched them out further to receive the strap. She’d put the tan leather Lochgelly right back over her shoulder but it wasn’t that hard when she swung it down so the tails wrapped round your fingers. I think her strap had two tails. Most belts did but I’ve seen one with three. And most I saw were tan, not black.
Then usually you had to hold out the other hand. That was about it but sometimes you were instructed to change hands until you took a total of four of the belt. I never got six. It was usually the deputy who gave six and you didn’t see it done in front of the class. Only once we were all assembled in the gym to watch the boss himself give six to an older guy. I don’t know what it was for. He was a hero.
But we were gathered round the Bunsen burner, quite close, so we could see smoke particles in a tube. She probably didn’t smoke normally because the cigarette didn’t come from a packet. She probably just got one from another teacher for the experiment. She just struck a match and lit it and blew smoke into the tube and put it out again. There was something about the sight of the white from her mouth and the flick of flame and the brief, brief smell.
It was a different class but I remember the glossy photo of the lung. We were shown a smoker’s lung. I still remember it. Heart transplants were becoming more successful after the first operations by Professor Christian Barnard, in South Africa, but I don’t think they’d been able to install a new lung yet, without it being rejected.
So that lung had come from someone who was certainly dead.
It felt good being that close to that teacher. She was alive all right. I must have been about fourteen or so. These were really hard times. I didn’t find the knack of masturbating but it came out one night, in sleep. I can’t remember the detail of the dream.
It’s still strong when it happens; sensing the smell of a woman, I mean, not a wet dream. You just realise you’re close enough to sense the breathing. I’m going to tell you about being at a do. It’s the civil equivalent of Combined Services. Nothing military, though guys from the TA and the ATC might have been there. Definitely a leader from the Boys Brigade and that’s more military than any of them. I’d already been a year or two out of the Coastguard Service but one day I got a phone call, requesting my jacket.
Mairi Bhan was going to this shindig and she had nothing to wear, darling. ‘What’s wrong with your orange boiler suit?’ I asked. ‘And you’ll be coming in town on the Fergie.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s a posh do. So I’ll need to take the Fordson Major.’
She never asked me if I’d seen Kenny lately. She just said, it should be a good night but it would be a gas to go in uniform and the Fisheries Office sweatshirt just wouldn’t cook the mustard.
‘Cut it,’ I said, ‘you don’t cook it. You cut it, in the town. Out beyond the grids you probably boil it for six hours with a change of water.’
‘Are you going to keep this shit going or are you going to talk to me properly?’ she asked.
‘I’m going to keep it going. It will be unrelenting.’
‘In that case, you can come,’ she said. ‘You’ll catch up with your old mates.’
She just wanted to borrow my number one jacket, the one with the brass buttons, if it wasn’t on a scarecrow yet. ‘We don’t have scarecrows on Leverhulme Drive,’ I said.
‘Are you still living there?’ she asked.
‘Sort of.’
But the uniform jacket was available. It was still pressed, in wraps in a cupboard. A couple of the other local guys had gone back to sea. So it wasn’t just me got pissed off with being told how the Hebs were like this or like that. But there was still a few guys I’d like to see. I’d paid for the jacket out of my wages so it belonged to me, though I was supposed to hand in the buttons when I left. I thought I might just run the risk of being prosecuted for failing to remove them.
‘If you behave yourself, I might just shine up the buttons for you, before handing it back.’
So I dropped the parcel round at her office, just left it for her there. And aye, it was time to catch up with the old colleagues. Most of the job was a waiting game but we’d ran a few casualties.
You know that feeling? You see someone you know well but it’s like the first time you’re looking at them. I was half aware of Mairi’s style. And I knew she was in good shape. But I looked twice when I met her along with a few folk in the County Lounge. It wasn’t just my own eyes went to her. The jacket fitted her snug so the buttons were done up, looking formal, not just a mock-up. It was a bit longer on her than me, but not by much. She’d grown the hair a bit and had the ponytail tight so the smooth dark strands were slick against her face. She had the dark skirt and dark shoes with heels but not stilettoes. Nothing fancy. Just total class.
‘You scrub up well, blone,’ I said.
‘Yes, but we could do with a bit more braid.’ As she held up her cuff to show the one rosette.
‘Aye, I never hung in there long enough for another ring.’
We all had one drink and then we were along the road to the Crow’s Nest, top of the Legion. Then I was circulating, playing it cool on the vino collapso. Spacing it with water. I wasn’t sober but I wasn’t drunk.
‘You don’t mind a smell of smoke on your jacket?’
‘You’re very considerate, my dear.’
I don’t know why I followed her out. Just maybe there was a memory of the snatch of a roll-up with something worth inhaling. But I’d only had a toke of a joint a few times in twenty years – just for the memory of it.
And she was in a wee gaggle of folk. Some I knew, some I didn’t. Maybe I was curious to catch the yarn in the community of smokers, the lull from the music. And it was a stunning evening. Yes, you do get them in SY. This was one of these clear September nights. The year was changing. The temperature was dropping and the visibility was burning with clarity. Stars were jumping.
Everyone was saying stuff like, ‘I’m seeing you in a new light, girl. It hangs better on you than on that lanky bastard.’
Affectionate things like that. And then I caught the image. She wasn’t milking it too much. Just lingered for the right pause for effect. She brought the tube out of her inside pocket and twisted the red cap off. Time for a Havana. That was another coastguard connection. A very old-fashioned present. Sometimes we got a bottle of malt for the Christmas do. This time there was a box of Havanas but not many takers for them. So the guys had shared them out with the neighbours in the Fisheries Office.
It wasn’t a huge one, and not one of these really fat ones either, but a proper cigar. I always liked the smell of them. The first smell, before it fades to bitter. She placed it in her mouth and I wished I had the Zippo lighter but someone else clicked a Bic and she was away. Just that surprising first burst of smoke and then it was natural.
‘I thought I’d better bring something appropriate to the rig,’ she said. ‘And the Old Holborn tin didn’t quite fit in the pocket.’ She took a draw and let the smoke out over her lip, very slowly. She was enjoying that.
The others were settling to their own chats, they were a bit further on than me. Mairi was sober. Maybe she’d had one glass. She was driving back.
‘You might as well have a taste,’ she said. ‘Be a bad lad.’
She held it out for me and I felt the curl of smoke roll round my mouth a bit. There was also a tinge of her. We were standing close enough for that. In the huddle.
She passed it on then, like a joint. The smokers were all up for trying the Havana. And I was back inside with her.
The room was full now so it was impossible not to be touching someone. I knew when I was touching Mairi Bhan. There was no need to move. I wasn’t hard. There was just a gentle pressure, maybe hip to thigh. We stopped being social. We just talked to each other. The usual stuff. Boats and fish and fathers.
We were outside the door when my lips found hers. There was still a taste of the cigar. It was not unpleasant.
Gabriele and me were ten months into the ‘see how it goes’ period. We’d agreed on a year. We were getting on a bit better but sometimes I’d sleep the other end of town. Right at the edge. A cousin had a house there and I’d keep an eye on it when he was at sea. We’d agreed to keep letting the olaid’s house till the books balanced. It’s difficult to admit you need breathing space and even more difficult to admit that something you thought was forever might not be. I might not have been able to do it at all but my inner brain started talking to me. It kept me awake at nights but it was talking in riddles. It gets easier once it registers that you’re not the first one to go through something like this.
Stop. Look around. Here it comes. But I think I only had two nervous breakdowns. One about a year after the death of my father and one a year after the death of my mother. Quite symmetrical.
The second one was a bit confused with the issue of achieving the aforementioned fifty years of ageing. Once you admit you’re going to die, there’s a few experiences you want to have first, if you can squeeze them in.
I signed up as crew on a tough delivery trip, along for the ride to nurse an old Perkins. Second night in, I realised that three out of the seven of us were up for it because it might be the last chance of a big seagoing adventure. Not counting me.
One heart condition, one cancer scare and one living very close to clinical depression. About the usual. I wasn’t feeling that great myself but I came off that boat counting my blessings.
‘Did I hear you’re staying over at the Battery?’ Mairi said.
‘Time to time. I’m there this week. Bit of head space.’
She held my eye and said, ‘Shit, I could have tried that Châteauneuf-du-Pape. I’m not driving, am I?’
It wasn’t really a question.
‘No, and we don’t have to find a machine either. It’s a snip really.’
Then we were walking, on the way home, just leaving her car across the road. It wasn’t just a matter of miles. I knew why we weren’t going to Garyvard.
It was exciting and calm at the same time. I was peaceful when I did fall into her hold. Yet it was her eyes holding mine all the time, never wavering. Her nails made direct contact too and this was signalling. You never knew when you would sense that sharpness. I was responding to her and I was aware of when she wanted me to drive and when to slow. I lay inside her just pulsing and waiting for her signal to move strong again.
I’ve never known such ease with someone along with the excitement and with such sadness at the same time. She didn’t say anything. There was only different degrees of touch. I don’t think either of us wanted it to stop but it wasn’t over with our little deaths.
I think I knew that this was also the death of at least one friendship and possibly three. And that my marriage really had died in one form quite a while before. Now that calm and desire were happening at the same time again, I knew that part of me was coming back to life. And part of me was killing things.