Lavender and Nicotine by Andrew Leach

The door swung open; the bell rang. It sounded a hundred times louder than the reality, like a command to church. Which it was, in a way. We entered and while I stood there gawping at the sheer array of stuff for sale, my father stepped up to the counter and received the eucharist from Mr Pierce.

Sitting on a steel bench in Emmett Square I remember how it was. (I can still hear the essence of my father talking low, the whispered replies coming from behind the till. I could never make out the words of their conversations.) Now everything's silver. Silver and glass. In front of me a fountain pulses, spraying a silver jet of water into a silver column six and a half feet high. Two metres if you prefer. Its height recorded on a small steel plaque that announces the fountain as a memorial. It isn't clear to what. These days it seems as though every street corner has a memorial to something. So much has been lost. When the water from the fountain hits the ground it sounds like the slap of something more substantial than just water. Blood, or meat, or something.

I take a Marlboro Light from my pack. Put it to the flame using the same silver Zippo I've carried forever. The familiar smell of petrol. Blow a silver river of smoke towards the fountain. The drowning villages in the news wouldn't think of it as just water. I can feel Mr Pierce's steel blue eyes appraising me.

I watched my father working in his shed from the kitchen. As he laboured among his papers, his scissors and glue, operating his small printing press, his ever-present roll-up cigarette glowed like a beacon (the tobacco religiously passed over the counter to him by Mr Pierce). Its light scrawled patterns on the window as he bobbed his head, tiny embers breaking away like fireflies. We were all happiest when the fireflies returned.

'I'm glad he's back,' I said to my mother.

Her hand on my shoulder. 'So am I.'

Her French scent. Lavender and nicotine.

The fireflies dancing.

There was a patchwork of signs adorning the shadowed walls of Mr Pierce's shop, like tattoos on a sailor. Each championing a different brand. One said 'Smoke "Nut Brown" for that NUTTY flavour.' Another, 'Craven "A" Will Not Affect Your Throat.' St Julien, Player's Weights, Waverley, Capstan, Nosegay. Like poetry.

The fountain is reflected in the smoke grey glass windows of the new health and leisure centre. Behind the glass, shadows on cross trainers purposefully thrust limbs in silent spasms. Strange how there was always a gymnasium on this site. Like some sort of homage. Plain Emmett Street, then, not Emmett Square.

I met Sugar Ray at the gym.

My father had held the cold flannel to my swollen eye when I returned from school.

'They said you were a commie,' I told him.

'Maybe it's time for you to learn how to fight back.'

Sugar Ray Tomkins, a year older than me. Decent left hand and already twenty a day. Sugar Ray after Robinson and an aspiration never fulfilled. We became pals and sparring partners. Always felt he took it easy on me on account of that extra year. We'd share an Embassy outside on the steps after ringwork. I'd have been thirteen. Smoking an inevitability. Never something I considered starting. I just began, like shaving. My father once told me he'd had his first cigarette aged nine so in some ways I was a late developer.

Above, cirrus clouds scull across a Wedgewood sky. Caught reflected in the mirror of the leisure centre. I wonder whether the clouds are natural or man-made. An aeroplane passes overhead, its engines boom. For a second it's at the right angle to be reflected by the glass. Its impact doubled.

You can hear your mother's voice. Your mother's voice. Your mother's—

'It's his work,' she says. 'Sometimes he needs to go away for work. He loves us. He doesn't mean to leave us.'

Button my jacket and walk. Rubber soles squeaking on polished, pedestrianised slabs. Slivers of quartz like diamonds. Where the road forks (the city to the left, open scrubland to the right), there's now a flyover. Cars fly over the neighbourhood. They flash in a continuous roaring procession. More aeroplanes fly over them. Everything flies. Fumes are de rigueur.

Beneath the flyover, St Luke's still broods, blacker than before. It used to be enormous, like Notre-Dame. Its sculpted crucifixion threw gothic shadows under the streetlights each dusk. The first time I saw its cavernous insides was the year we couldn't go to Aunt Pamela's for Christmas because Uncle Doug had been taken poorly. My mother decided we'd stay at home and attend midnight mass since we hadn't been before. I remember we sang carols and prayed for Uncle Doug. His flu turned into pneumonia and he didn't last long into the new year. None of us held much truck with prayer after that. The woodland behind where we used to live now a housing estate. The roads are named in memoriam after what went before. Edgewood Drive. Chestnut Avenue. Arteries without lungs.

Sugar Ray and I used to wash what cars there were for change. We'd knock on people's doors armed with buckets. Earning money with vague plans of saving for cars of our own which back then felt like planning to own spaceships. And then there was Marianne Ashwell.

*

Nobody answered Ray's front door despite the arrangement made earlier around the punch bags. The summer had started coolly. At least the rain had finally ceased. That morning I'd read in the newspaper about the American president sending the flower of youth into battle. That phrase stuck with me. He said that he wanted to convince the communists. I wasn't sure of what. The air smelled of change. Someone had broken the stems of the pelargoniums in our window box. I waited awhile. After two or three minutes Ray still hadn't appeared. I struck out solo. Petals had lain on the damp pavement like gunshot wounds.

The Sunbeam Rapier parked outside the Ashwells' house was the colour of sky before snow. It had taken fifteen minutes to walk to Brindle Close but the pickings were likely to be better here. The Rapier's grey vinyl roof like an early mist. It would be another eight years before I was able to take out a loan and buy one of these beauties for myself. I fell in love twice that day.

The front door opened.

'Can I help you?'

Her hair was dark blond, and long. Her eyes grey-blue. A voice soft as rabbits.

I asked if she wanted the car washed. My heart turned full Buddy Rich. My usual sales patter lost to the wind. She said that her parents were away. I was listening with my eyes and couldn't process the information. She said again, her parents weren't there. They were away. Her mouth was pelargonium petals.

'Do you want to come in?'

I don’t know why Marianne invited me in initially. Perhaps she was bored. Lonely, looking for company. I know that I followed her into the house like a dog.

The words remembered like school poetry. Repeat something often enough you can make a suit out of it.

'What's your name?'

'Adam.'

'I'm Marianne.'

'Nice to meet you.'

'You too, Car Wash Adam.'

Her parents had gone to Hastings by train. Something about visiting her Aunt Joyce. She asked if washing cars was my thing. I mentioned Sugar Ray and she asked where he was. I said that I didn’t know, that he didn’t seem to be home. She said that was lucky, that she wouldn't have invited me in if I was with someone else.

'Do you smoke?'

I managed an affirmative monosyllable. She handed me a cigarette. Took another between crimson lips. I retrieved my lighter from my pocket, offered a flame. Tried to stop my hand shaking as I leant towards her. The familiar smell of petrol. She took a long drag, smoke bloomed. She stood and opened a window. The light diffused around her, stirred the smoke and made her a saint.

Family portraits studied us from within silver frames. A Bruegel print on the wall threatened to melt. Hunters in the Snow. I saw it again years later. Wondered which of us was the prey, although I'd always known the answer. Slowly conversation became easier, like a flower opening. She asked how old I was.

'Sixteen. Well, nearly.'

'Goodness.'

The flower of youth.

My head back at the punchbags. Pounding myself for not coming up with a bigger number. I asked her a similar question and found myself three years in arrears. We talked about Vietnam. She said that she thought Bob Dylan was brilliant. My agreement was genuine yet I'd have beatified Shostakovich. When Marianne said she had Dylan's new LP in her bedroom and did I want to listen to it I forgot how to breathe. She stubbed a cigarette into a cut glass ashtray. A red band around the filter drove me insane.

There were stairs on which the carpet ran down the centre. Gold fleur-de-lis on navy blue. A bedspread in a pink and blue check. A Dansette record player, a red box with a cream lid. A peace sign in hand drawn flowers, Make Love Not War. The taste of lipstick, Love Minus Zero playing on the record player.

*

I walk as far as the florist. It's a constant in a world of difference. Somehow resolute when all around it shapeshifts. I breathe in its abridged garden.

'Yes, love, what can I get you?'

'Two small matching bunches. Loosely hand-tied.'

'Anything in particular?'

'Red.'

At St Luke's cemetery I find the graves easily enough. Him next to her. The route through the crooked stones has become environmentally unsound. Plastic trinkets adorn memorial monuments. Foil balloons lose weight and gain wrinkles, attempt flight in the breeze yet remain anchored to death. No thought for the planet in grief.

I lay my two bunches down, one for each of them. Red, all red. Roses, carnations, calla lilies. Two scarlet ribbons. Below me the two other occasions I stepped inside St Luke's. Neither a religious ceremony. Dylan and Guthrie ringing out among the candles and the stained glass. No need to go away for work anymore. I crouch down. Inhale the scent of lavender and nicotine. Chat to them both for a minute. Half-sing what passes for a prayer. Tell them I miss them and thank them for who they were. Who they all were. Her lipstick somehow presumed I'd come calling. She stays with me still. All of them do. In my mind, my heart, my lungs. Above me the flyover roars. So much has been lost. When I stand I take a step backwards and light a cigarette. A strand of tobacco breaks free and hangs on to the wind. The fireflies dancing.

………………..

Andrew Leach is a writer of fiction and screenplays. His work has been published in a number of anthologies, notably The Mechanics' Institute Review issue 16 (the Climate Issue), and he was Highly Commended in the 2019 Seán O'Faoláin International Short Story Prize. He splits his time between North Yorkshire and South London and makes a great risotto.

Twitter: @4ndrewJames