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Theo had a tan which made him look unseasonably healthy, and which made a nice contrast with the starched white of his lab coat. But it was his hair which was always the most striking thing about him. Already greying, it stood up from his head like a school performance of surprise. Different sections gave up growing at different lengths, and some bits just kept on going so that his head looked completely out of control, the hair escaping the skull in every possible direction. I noticed he also had a small vertical scar on his upper lip.

We walked aimlessly through the landscaped grounds, past the cinder running track and the asphalted tennis court, timing the walk by the burn-speed of a cigarette, an instinct I still admired in others. Eventually, we reached the narrow pond which marked the boundary of the Unit, just inside the security fence. Theo asked me if I was new and I said I was.

‘Got somewhere to live?'

I said I had.

He said he'd won the trip to French Guyana in a Spot the Ball competition.

Seven minutes and forty-five seconds ago, roughly, Walter arrived. Walter is one hundred and four years old, but he doesn't look much over eighty. He uses a stick and always wears a hat or a cap, inside and out, no matter the weather. What started as vanity, to cover his bald bareheadedness, is now habit, and today it is a green canvas rain-hat. There is an enamel badge pinned to the front showing the ruins at Tintagel with a red TINTAGEL printed in a crescent underneath.

Walter is sitting in his favourite chair beneath the framed publicity poster of Paul Heinreid and Bette Davis in the film
Now Voyager.
He is smoking a pipe, peaceful as an Indian chief, staring into the middle distance of his memory.

He has already asked me what I'm doing.

‘Writing,' I said.

‘Writing what?'

‘This, that, anything.'

‘Why?'

‘Distracts the mind. Keeps the hands busy. You know.'

‘Thought I'd just pop in. See how you're bearing up.'

‘I'm fine.'

My lungs are shrinking and my heart aches: I am about to suffocate from unrequited desire. ‘It's really a lot easier than I thought it would be.'

But Walter isn't listening. He's looking round the room.

‘When was the last time you went out?'

‘The funeral.'

‘Oh. Well, the less said then.'

My parents waved me off to University as though I was embarking on a single-handed sail around the world, when between the two of them they knew full well that the world was flat. It had always been flat: in their own lives they had found it nothing but flat. They stood cardiganed together in the frame of the doorway, in primary colours, waving imaginary handkerchiefs.

Unexpectedly, unwillingly, I found I missed them.

My mother used to write a weekly letter in which she hardly ever used full-stops. Mostly, she wrote exclamation marks! She had therefore discovered how to make the events of her life tremendously exciting, not through exaggeration or alcohol or drugs, but simply through punctuation.

Scared that I might choose cigarettes to perform the same function in my new life at University, she often sent me cautionary items from the papers. Attached to her letters with a coloured plastic paper-clip I would find neatly-trimmed columns from the
Daily Express
or the
Guardian,
and sometimes from
Cosmopolitan.

Half of all smokers expected to die from smoking-related illnesses.

One hundred and ten thousand premature British deaths caused by smoking.

Smokers' chance of lung cancer increased by 980%.

I read endless columns of percentages of danger, and learned from them the equal and equivalent measure of parental fear, always fearing the worst. In my occasional written replies, and always on the telephone, I promised my mother I still wasn't smoking and didn't plan to start. The repetition of the promise became a kind of ritual, a habit it was hard to break. More importantly, it became my easy and English way of saying I loved her.

Even though I didn't smoke myself, I soon discovered that I enjoyed the company of smokers. It was a kind of rebellion by proxy, each smoky room a moment of passive rebellion. I was particularly impressed by Julian Carr, who could smoke before breakfast and in the middle of meals, and who could light matches into his cupped palms like Humphrey Bogart in Paris in
Casablanca.
I lent him sugar and gave him my last rasher of bacon. When he ran out of matches, I let him light his cigarettes from the glowing tube of my electric bar fire.

I learnt how many brothers (one older) and how many sisters (one older) he had. He openly admitted to a happy childhood, which made it sound true. At school, he'd lost his virginity at fourteen and been elected captain of the rugby team. He'd sold marijuana to the fifth-form girls. He was reading James Joyce. I gave him my last egg.

In return, he invited me to the parties he was invited to* which were always the best parties. They had the biggest barrels of beer and the loudest music and the blondest girls, most of whom, at some time, came back to his room and smoked quiet cigarettes far into the morning.

Which is how I met Lucy Hinton. Who had black hair.

Starting in his sleep, jumping and spluttering to attention in the trenches of the First World War, Walter wakes up suddenly, spilling the triangular ashtray perched on the arm of his chair.

I tell him it's alright. I calm him down. I pick up the ashtray and give it back to him.

‘I was dreaming,' he says.

‘I should hope so. I'd hate to think you were getting senile.'

‘Did I ever tell you,' he says, ‘about this monkey-skin pouch I once had, dyed the colour green, which I lost during a boar-hunt in the forest of Compiegne in 1903? I was only thirteen.'

But his heart isn't really in it, not like it used to be, and he remembers the Compiegne forests without telling them, stepping off alone into the vast protected reservation of his past.

Among other distinctions, Walter has the largest cigarette-card collection in the county. Sometimes I ask to look at a particular set
(Kings and Queens of England,
for example, or
Great Stories of the Opera)
as a quick and always reliable source of historical reference.

‘You're pregnant,' I said.

‘Well bugger me, so I am.'

Lucy Hinton lay on the floor beneath the curtained window of Julian Carr's room in the William Cabot Hall of Residence for Men. Her shoulders and her head were cradled in Julian's beige-coloured bean-bag, and she was wearing a denim maternity dress fastened up the front with big black and white yin-yang buttons. Her hands, fingers splayed, rested on her swollen stomach. She had a single feather stuck into a thin beaded headband.

‘It's difficult to make an effort,' she said, ‘considering.'

Her voice was languid, throaty, like a code which when deciphered always read a breathy
Hello Baby,
a message her pregnant body did its best to confuse. It was as if she was speaking two languages at once, making no sense at all.

I was sitting on the bed, watching her, ignoring Julian who had passed out next to his record collection while searching for the latest Suzanne Vega CD. He was now using the head from his gorilla suit as a pillow, and had unzipped and peeled down the top half of the gorilla to show a T-shirt which said
Buchanan's Silverstone Spectacular
on the back. He was breathing deeply, evenly.

I was dressed as a doctor, with a white coat and a head-torch and a stethoscope round my neck.

‘Bung me his cigarettes,' she said. ‘I'm dying for a fag.'

Julian's cigarettes were on the floor by my feet.

‘Is it due soon?' I asked, ‘how long is it before it's due?' I didn't reach for the cigarettes. ‘I mean, how long is there to go?'

‘Well, let's put it this way,' she said, ‘I only go to parties with a full complement of medical students. The cigarettes?'

‘You're not really going to smoke, are you?'

‘Why not?'

‘Smoking by pregnant women can result in foetal injury, premature birth, and low birth weight.'

At the last minute, I managed to erase my mother's exclamation mark.

Theo finished his Celtique. He looked at the filter, then looked over his shoulder, then flicked the filter into the grass at the side of the pond, disturbing a duck which splashed into clear water. He offered me a cigarette, which of course I had to refuse. I noticed one of the cigarettes in his pack was turned upside down.

He smoked, then swore, then clamped his new cigarette between his teeth and waded down towards the water, found the previous filter, which he wiped against the grass and then dropped into the pocket of his lab coat. As he clambered back up the bank, he said,

‘The tiresomeness of conscience. They told me at the desk you didn't have anywhere to live.'

‘I'm in a hotel.'

‘Company paying?'

‘Yes.'

‘I've a room free at my place.'

I retreated instinctively and immediately, making excuses. I explained at some length how I had to have my own room, with its own lock. How I absolutely had to be left alone. How I needed to use the kitchen and the bathroom when no-one else was there. How what I wanted most of all was just a simple uninterrupted life, with no intrusions and no involvements and with the minimum possible peripheral activity.

I wouldn't even want to talk to anyone very much, to be honest.

Lucy Hinton gasped and slipped down the bean-bag, her fingers splayed wide across her belly. ‘Oh!'

‘What?'

‘I think it's ..'

‘No!'

‘No,' she said, breathing heavily but managing to push herself back up the bean-bag. ‘False alarm.'

‘Spontaneous abortion,' I said, ‘is another well-documented risk.'

‘Medical student.'

‘History.'

‘Give me the pack of cigarettes,' she said. ‘I won't smoke one, I'll just hold it, for old times' sake.'

‘Promise?'

‘Promise.'

I passed her the cigarettes. Our fingers touched, briefly, and I was even more disturbed by the difference between the
Hello Baby
and the baby baby. I glanced at the denim straining at the yin-yang buttons. I thought of the tense surface of a snare drum and had the idea that if her skin were tight enough it might achieve translucence in the last days before birth. All the workings of the baby and the belly would then be visible like television.

‘Did you want to get pregnant?'

‘I wanted to have sex.'

She took a cigarette out of the packet. She held it up to the light, then ran it along under her nose, her eyes closed.

She asked me if I smoked and I said no.

‘It's only I was thinking,' she said, ‘you could smoke the cigarette and I could just kind of
smell
it.'

Uncle Gregory died when I was nine years old.

It is breakfast time. Uncle Gregory has come to stay. I'm about to leave for school and he is going to take me in Mum's car. Mum is washing up at the sink under the window facing the garden. Uncle Gregory is in the garden, lighting a cigarette. Mum shouts out to him that it's almost time to leave for school. He can't hear her so she taps on the window. Still smoking his cigarette he steps round the whirligig washing line, spinning it like in a musical, and says ‘What?' with his mouth moving very clearly. He cups his hand to his ear. Mum shouts at him that it's almost time to leave for school. Uncle Gregory mouths, ‘What?'

He eventually understands what she's saying at the exact moment he finishes his cigarette. I can't remember if we were late for school or not.

I did nothing about finding a place to live. I could hardly see the point. Then the Company said they'd stopped paying for the Bed and Breakfast.

In those days I still had to go up to the Unit twice a week, and on the Thursday I took my break when I saw Theo kicking the dew off the grass as he sauntered down towards the pond, smoke sometimes enveloping his head like an extension of his hair. I caught up with him and took a light for my Carmen. I asked him if we were the only two smokers in the place.

‘Looks like it,' he said.

‘Don't they give them free cigarettes or anything?'

‘Sure. But most of them have seen what it does to the animals.'

‘You'd think they'd need a fag after that.'

‘Yes, you would.' Theo smiled. ‘I said almost exactly the same thing once. To somebody I have successfully forgotten. They told me it was in bad taste.'

‘Do you? I mean you yourself, are you, experimental? I mean do you personally work with the animals?'

‘It's not a wildlife park.'

He lit another Celtique and I opened my mouth to say I'd been thinking about the room in his place when

‘Shhhh!' he said. ‘Did you hear that?'

‘What?'

‘Shhh!'

There was a rustling in the reeds by the pond. It was like the sound a blackbird makes in forest undergrowth, pretending to be a rat or a badger, fooling passers-by, exciting them for no reason.

‘It's only a bird,' I said, but Theo was already half-way down the bank.

‘You
have
smoked at least
one
cigarette before, haven't you?'

She had the unlit cigarette between her lips. She pulled off the beaded head-band, and caught the feather as it swooped towards her breasts. She placed it on her belly, where it quivered as she breathed.

She took the cigarette out of her mouth, looked at it.

‘Would you smoke
this
cigarette, if I asked you nicely?'

‘Really, I don't smoke.'

‘Have you ever heard what a womb sounds like?'

I looked at her belly, rising and falling, the feather trembling, the denim warping to the yin-yang buttons.

‘Would you like to? You can put your ear against my skin.'