X20 (12 page)

‘Gregory'

‘What should I do, Julian? Just tell me.'

‘Go and see her. Be nice to her.'

‘I
was
nice to her.'

‘Hell, Gregory, if you really like her buy a pack of fags, break down her door and smoke every single one of them in front of her face.'

‘I mean apart from that. You're sure there wasn't a bet?'

‘Do you really think she'd sleep with you just for a bet?'

‘I never told you she slept with me. Who told you we slept together?'

‘Go and see her, Gregory.'

‘There must be something I can do.'

'Sure. You could give up everything and go to Paris or New York, packing only your self-pity. When you arrive unwrap it carefully from your cardboard suitcase and mould it into art objects in the tradition of suffering lovers since the eve of time.'

‘Come on, Julian, be serious.'

‘Imagine it. Gregory Simpson in New York, the man who even gets worried about leaving his room in the morning.'

‘It was a bet, wasn't it?'

‘For God's sake, Gregory.'

‘Well fuck you. Fuck everything.'

‘Gregory, come back. Where are you going?'

‘New York. Where d'you think?'

He was always cracking jokes and larking about. When we were playing in the garden he'd pull me aside and ask me what did the big chimney say to the little chimney and I'd say, I don't know, what did the big chimney say? And then I'd run off on a circuit of the lawn, turning my arms into wings and banking heavily into corners while dropping atomic bombs on Australian opening bowlers. By the time I landed I'd forgotten what the joke was.

Uncle Gregory and my father spent a lot of time that summer talking in private. They once called me into the dining-room and Uncle Gregory solemnly gave me an envelope with my name written on the outside in capital letters. My father then took it away from me before I could open it. He said there was money inside so it was better if he looked after it for me. It was a very thin envelope, so I didn't think it could be very much money.

Uncle Gregory spent the next summer in the Royal Adelaide Hospital, and I used to send him a different Get Well card every month, because Mum told me to. They never worked. At Christmas, to hide the fact that there was no present from Australia, I had an extra present from Mum and Dad. It was an Airfix 1/20 model of a Canberra bomber with a detachable observation turret.

Uncle Gregory died in hospital before I finished making it.

8

She knocked on the door for the third time and I told her to go away.

‘Are you alright? Come downstairs.'

‘Later.'

I hadn't unpacked either of my cases. I'd thrown the bean-bag into the corner, but only to clear a space and not to position it. I stayed absolutely still, lying on my bed and hardly breathing until she went away. Of course I wasn't alright.

Then I jammed all the questions she'd asked me into a single senseless lump, like plasticine: What about your exams? Are you hungry? Don't you want to talk about it? Is it a girl? Would you like some tea? Have you heard about your father? Were you being bullied? You're not taking drugs are you? Is history too hard a subject? Coffee instead then?

And when they were all mashed together I tossed them onto the bean-bag and out of sight.

This room was much bigger than the one in William Cabot, with a window over-looking the front garden and the road. It was big enough for a double-bed which didn't touch the wall on either side, and I lay there listening for the neighbours, Seventh Day Adventists who were usually out, standing on other people's doorsteps. I felt so lethargic I could hardly move my head, and the silence wasn't helping. My eyes locked onto a faded Nick O'Teen sticker on the side of the book-case which held my science-fiction novels.

Every day, before Superman found and destroyed him, Nick O'Teen would tempt little children with cigarettes. He used to say: ‘If you want to grow up fast, take one of these.'

I can't remember what Superman said.

Theo lived with his mother in two rooms at the station end of Buchanan Street. They often had disagreements, either about botany, which Theo's mother dismissed as a vain attempt to label God, or about cigarettes. She would ask him if he didn't trust God to take good care of her, while all Theo really wanted was some clean air for the aspidistras he was cross-pollinating on the window-sill.

Often, at the weekends, his mother would take bus-trips. Acting on information received from a widespread network of friends and acquaintances, most of them Calvinists, she travelled all over Scotland to check on the latest sighting of her husband. The information was consistently incorrect, but she did think she'd once recognized the slope of his back in the wheel-house of a lobster boat receding from Craobh Haven.

At the age of nineteen Theo was awarded a first-class degree. His mother accused him of getting ahead of himself, but for the graduation ceremony she bought them both a new pair of shoes and stood proudly at the very front of the Assembly Rooms as her son was officially made a Bachelor of Science. Theo then submitted a proposal for a PhD, provisionally entitled
Patterns of Deception in Plant Virus Infections,
and became the youngest research student ever to be accepted by the University, a record he held until the mid-seventies when the Maths department began admitting students from China.

Maybe Walter really
is
dead.

He isn't here again and maybe in fact in reality he really has been run over by a bus.

This feeling now is completely different from the feeling I had yesterday. That was just a bad and ugly thought, and dark, and sharp-shaped. But today, on the second day running, I'm thinking that perhaps he really is dead, and what should I do now? Smoke? Pathetic. There is this huge difference between how I think things will be and how they actually are. I have to phone up Emmy. I have to know what's happened to Walter.

Okay, right. So that's settled.

I just phoned up Emmy and after asking me how the plant was getting on and whether Walter had told me about Stella, she eventually understood why I was sounding so worried. Fairly convincingly, she told me that Walter wasn't dead. He was at Humphrey King's house, comforting Mrs King.

'So he's alright?' I said.

‘He's fine. It was good of you to ring.'

Walter isn't dead. He hasn't been run over by a bus. I'm so relieved I could almost listen to his Firing Squad story. I'm so relieved I could tell it myself.

This wouldn't be the first time I'd asked for Uncle Gregory's money. I once stole some Lucky Boy chocolate cigarettes from the sweet display at one of my father's shops. A new assistant whose name I didn't know took me into the stock-room for a telling-off, and then I had another one from my parents when I got back home. I nearly cried and I wanted to be tougher than I was, so I imagined being Uncle Gregory in the cockpit of a Canberra or at the start of a motor-bike race.

After the telling off, I stood up straight and said I was sorry and asked if I could have the money to pay for a ticket to Adelaide, where I was going to start a new life as a cricketing airline pilot. My mother said no, I had to learn to be honest if I was going to run a chain of tobacconist shops. Then my father said no. So I started crying after all, and mum hugged me and said I could have the money when I was older if I promised never to steal again. I promised.

‘And never to start smoking,' she added.

After that I rarely thought about it, except vaguely when I suspected that only a top skateboard or a motorized go-kart or a decent stereo stood between me and widespread popularity at school.

But this time, as soon as my father came home, I was going to go downstairs and ask him straight out for Uncle Gregory's envelope. He would object, and we'd probably fight, but I was prepared for fighting if it meant I could have the money and therefore be in New York by the end of the week. I'd probably find a new lover within a month. That would show Julian Carr, and Lucy. That would teach them.

And then everything would be alright.

About twice a year he used to get the most terrible flu which he would cough out of his system over a period of weeks. He always refused to see a doctor.

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

Then I would go to the Estates on my own. Otherwise, we went together and often Walter would come and join us, though not always in his Rastafari hat.

Jamie was vigilant in pacing the walkway, travelling up and down in the lift, and patrolling the block for any sign of a lady with grey eyes wearing too much make-up. And even though Theo gave him film-posters and Bounty bars, he never stopped asking for cigarettes. At the end of the evening we'd smoke and Walter would tell stories while Jamie flipped through the pages of the waiting-room magazines looking at the adverts. Then he'd gabble on about what he was going to do when he was rich. Jamie and Walter would always set off for home together, both of them convinced they were protecting the other.

And Emmy came to see us most weeks. The Bluebell Drama Club also met on Wednesdays, so sometimes Emmy looked older, and sometimes younger. Her eyes, however, were always the same. Because of the carriage layout of the flat and Jamie's warnings we could always hide Walter by pushing him through into the bathroom, and then into the toilet for good measure.

‘I promise you,' Theo would truthfully tell her, ‘I have never given cigarettes to an old man.'

However, Theo always acted strangely for at least an hour after any visit from Emmy. He would ask a different type of question to the people who came for cigarettes, like had they really thought
properly
about the danger of an earlier death. The replies were predictable:

‘You have
plans
for those extra years? Like holidays, or something?'

Or he'd ask someone if they minded losing their sense of taste, or smell, which always raised a smile.

I sometimes slipped into the waiting-room for a quick Carmen and while I was there I watched the way the others used to smoke. There was an intensity to it which said that each cigarette had to stand for everything — for bread and meat and beer, for shoes and blankets and the tinsel on the Christmas tree and the Christmas tree itself, and for tins on the shelves and something decent on the telly. Something, anything, to look forward to. Something to depend on.

A panacea is a miraculous plant which cures all known diseases. It is a universal remedy, a catholicon, and Pliny ambitiously identified it as lovage. Later, panacean qualities were variously claimed for other plants, among them ligusti-cum and opopanax, wound-wort and witch-hazel.

The first connection between the elusive panacean plant and tobacco was made in England by Edmund Spenser, author of
The Faerie Queene,
and by the time of Queen Elizabeth's death it was well known that tobacco could cure colds, eye inflammations, involuntary tears, headaches, migraines, dropsy, paralysis, slowness of the blood, apoplexy, death trances, childbirth pangs, hysterical passions, dizziness, memory loss, restlessness, black melancholy, mental derangement, plaque, bad air, and all infectious illnesses known to mankind.

Later, the universal remedy was sought not in a single plant, but instead in a single action, or in a single chance happening, or in a single idea. All our daily dissatisfaction could be turned round in one easy moment of panacean discovery, a hope well served by casinos and product advertisements and the promise of emigration to paradises like Australia. The panacea skipped from plants to chemicals to grand ideas to thoroughbred horses to fortunate combinations of numbers by way of the changeable moods of moody men and women.

But always, even since Pliny, the panacean hope has had a regular home in the miraculous love of the one good man or the one good woman. This is the most common of catholicons, and guaranteed to cure everything.