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‘20 cigarettes a day. You know the rules.'

‘I'm sorry,' I said. ‘I need to sit down.'

‘What about the contract?'

‘Fine,' I said. ‘I'll sign it.'

I was still feeling groggy. Theo and Bananas popped up behind Julian's back and I looked at them and thought a single word. Advice. Over Julian's shoulder Theo mouthed: ‘Don't be frightened.'

‘Alright then,' I said to Julian. ‘I'll sign it. But not here.'

Julian followed me back inside, and waited while I called a taxi. He hardly raised an eyebrow when I told him we were going to the Estates. All he wanted was for me to sign his contract, and he kept quiet in the taxi, across the waste-ground, in the lift, and only spoke when I opened the door to flat number forty-seven.

‘What a dump,' he said.

The flat smelt familiar, of stale tobacco and dust, and in the room which used to be the clinic I told Julian to make himself comfortable. He wiped the dust off Theo's chair and sat down behind the table. I sat in the patient's chair. He took an envelope out of his suit-jacket and put it in front of me.

‘Let's not waste any more time,' he said. ‘It stinks in here.'

He handed me a pen and I took the contract out of the envelope. I read a few lines. I noticed I was holding the pen like a cigarette.

‘Oh, I get it,' Julian said. ‘You're pretending to hesitate, winding me up for old time's sake.'

‘You always said I could stop whenever I wanted.'

‘Of course I did. But you're so obviously Mr X it should never occur to you to stop. Stopping just doesn't apply to your personality type.'

‘It's a bit stupid though, isn't it? I might get lung cancer.'

‘And you might not. Anyway, in Hamburg you said you wanted to die. I thought that was the whole point.'

‘Well it was,' I said. ‘But then I met Theo.'

I couldn't see him anymore, but I knew he was still with us. I could feel him urging me on. I said to Julian:

‘You knew he could immunize against TMV, didn't you?'

‘How would I know that? All his plants were destroyed in the fire.'

‘What about the one you stole?'

‘It died,' Julian said, straight-faced, even though we both knew that immunized tobacco plants were just about indestructible. ‘The contract, Gregory.'

‘Why did you burn down the lab?'

Julian's eyes went blank. He brought out his packet of Centuries. He selected a cigarette and lit it, and then held the smoke in his lungs for a long time, as if this was an admissible reason not to reply.

‘You were with me at the time,' he said, smoke surrounding every word.

‘You were in my house. You were drinking my beer.'

‘You wear a suit, Julian. You give orders. That's what you do.'

‘Why would I set fire to Theo's lab? There were plants in there which could have made a safe cigarette.'

‘I don't believe you. And anyway, how would you know? The tobacco would have to be tested, and the tests could take forever and still be inconclusive, just like they are already.'

‘You think I made it up?'

‘It was an excuse to get your hands on one of Theo's plants. Theo was right. You wanted nothing to change. You found out about his discovery and you were scared he was going to sell it'

‘I promise you,' Julian said. ‘I know nothing about this.'

‘You invited me to your house to keep me out of the way.'

‘Who told you that?'

‘Then you destroyed the lab to protect Buchanan's. Theo actually beat the TMV years ago, but he knew this would happen. He never told anybody because he knew someone like you would come and destroy it all.'

Julian glanced down at his packet of Centuries. He slid them towards me. ‘Let's resolve this like adults,' he said.

It was some time since Julian had stamped on my Carmens. I took a Century out of his pack. I turned it carefully in my hand, and read the writing above the filter. I put it back in the box, upside-down, and slid the box back across the table.

‘For luck,' I said.

He took out the upside-down cigarette and lit it.

‘But only if you save it until last.'

'Stop fooling around, Gregory. What else would you do with your life?'

‘I could do anything. I could buy a motor-cycle. I could go to New York.'

‘With whose money?'

‘Where as a non-smoker I will rarely be treated as a pariah.'

‘Yes, very good, Gregory, but the joke wears thin, even by your standards. Including the farce of bringing me down to this dump in the first place. Now sign the contract. You know what's in it'

Another ten years of retreat and the dangerous illusion that I was impenetrable, that I offered no purchase to the outside world, and was inaccessible behind my smoke-screen of cigarettes. Only now I'd learnt that refusal was impossible. Nobody could remain completely detached and incurious because the world was always offering itself to be unmasked, and it couldn't do otherwise. It was time to stop being a statistic, and prove I had more than collective significance.

I tossed Julian the key to the flat. ‘Keep it,' I said. ‘In exchange for the days left on the first contract.'

Julian sighed. I could see he felt sorry for me.

‘Remember the monkeys?' he said. ‘They never set them free, you know. They didn't send them back into the wild with a gross of Carmens each and a typewriter between every thousand, to spend their retirement writing
Hamlet:

‘I once had respect for you, Julian. Can you believe that?'

‘We kill them, Gregory. At the end of the tests we kill them all, and then we have a very close look at what the cigarettes have done from the inside out.'

‘Are you threatening me?'

‘Of course not.'

‘You've changed, Julian.'

‘I'm a fully qualified doctor.'

‘You're like a low-tar version of your former self.'

‘I have a first-class degree. I get results.'

‘You're filter-tipped.'

‘Everything you have is because of me.'

‘And aerated.'

Julian stood up and leant over the desk, his weight spread across his splayed fingers. ‘So sign the damn contract' he said.

‘No.'

He lunged at me across the table. I swayed out of his reach, stood up, opened the door to the waiting-room. I was nearly at the outside door when he said:

‘Lucy Hinton.' I stopped where I was. I turned round. Julian hadn't moved. ‘She only slept with you for a bet'

I opened the outside door and went out onto the walkway. I started walking towards the lift.

‘Lucy Hinton!' he shouted out, his voice carrying clearly from behind the table, through the waiting-room, following me along the walkway. ‘I fucked her. I fucked her all the time!'

I made it to the lift. The door opened on a woman holding a sleeping baby wrapped in an anorak. The woman had a fag in her mouth. She stepped out of the lift.

‘Three weeks!' Julian screamed. ‘I give you 3 weeks,
maximum!'

The lift doors shuddered closed, shutting off Julian's voice. Sooner or later, inevitably, he would have to notice the queue which had formed outside the flat. He would know what to do. He was a doctor.

20

I've made a big mistake.

Inside the house, on the desk in front of me. A Helix tin, originally designed to hold scientific instruments, now containing tobacco leaf. Stripped, cured, shredded and flavoured by my own hand.

A packet of cigarette papers.

I must have misunderstood. It's highly unlikely that Miss Bryant would have said the narrator can never die. More reasonably, she probably taught us that the narrator can't describe his own death. Not all of it, not to the very last moment, for obvious reasons. According to Miss Bryant then, the narrator either lives to see another day, or dies silently.

Outside the house, the early morning blue of a bright spring day, this day and no other. Outside my window right now. High white clouds. Hang-gliding weather.