Free Ten Stories About Smoking by Stuart Evers Page A

right thing; but her second she decided upon without hesitation, while drinking a glass of red wine by the fire, her flushed cheeks
reflected in its brass surround.
    Two weeks later, Peter arrived home to find a suitcase packed in the hallway. She was sitting on the bottom step of the stairs already wearing her coat. ‘We’re going away,’ she
said. ‘We’re going on a magical mystery tour. Come on, get showered and changed. Quick, okay?’
    She drove them both to a ramshackle cottage on the seafront at Aldeburgh. He loved its odd shape, its worn-down furnishings. They arrived late and he managed to sleep through till five or so.
She woke with him and suggested they walked together down by the seafront.
    ‘This is the perfect start to a day,’ he said. ‘If I could, I’d live by the sea. I’d walk by it every day.’
    ‘We’ll do that,’ she said. ‘One day we will do that.’

    That evening she cooked his favourite meal of potted shrimp followed by steak and mashed potato. They could hear the waves as they ate, and both had appetites emboldened by the
sea. In the lull before cheese and biscuits, she proposed to him just as she’d planned. In her right hand she held a velveteen box containing a simple engagement ring she’d bought from
a flea market. She asked him to marry her, and he fell silent and wiped his mouth on a linen napkin. He sipped his wine and looked at the debris of the meal in front of him. His face, crumpled and
with a small dab of sauce at the edge of his mouth, looked papery. He rapped his knuckles on the table. She felt her stomach plummet, as though she’d taken a jump from a diving board into a
recently drained pool.
    ‘Say something,’ she said. ‘Oh please, honey, say something at least.’
    He wiped at his mouth again and put his head in his hands. He shook his head.
    ‘No,’ he said. ‘I can’t. I can’t do that to you.’
    ‘Do what?’ she said.
    ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I promised myself I wouldn’t do this.’
    He looked away from her as he spoke. He told her he loved her very much. He told her that she had made him happier than he could ever have imagined. He told her that he never meant to let it get
this far. He told her that she gave him hope and that there was nothing he would like to do more than marry her.
    ‘So what is it? What?’ she said. He looked up at her.
    ‘I think I killed some people.’

    It was the Thursday before the wedding, a little after three in the morning. Beside Jean, Peter slept peacefully. Since their engagement, decided upon after that long night in
Aldeburgh, he had slept through every night. The night terrors – a product not of genetics, but of genuine horror – had disappeared, replaced by long dreamless periods of sleep. He
could not remember such restfulness; she could not think of anything but the dreams that now plagued her.
    In the recurring nightmare, she saw bodies blistered by heat, felt the air thick with the stench of flesh and hair afire. The screams and the pleas and the stretching arms, the metal melting on
belt buckles, shoes dissolving into the floor. And him, her lover, watching, somehow flame retardant and dressed in his suit, smoking a cigarette lit from the inferno around him.
    That Thursday she had been woken by it again, the fifth time in the last three weeks, and had been unable to rouse Peter or go back to sleep herself. Jean looked at her fiancé, his
breathing easy and his body foetal. She put down the book she had been looking at rather than reading, then inched out of the bed. Pulling on a T-shirt with N O P ROBLEM written on the front –
a present from Jamaica – she moved into the hallway and then down the stairs. They creaked as she descended, but she no longer cared about waking him. Let him wake, she thought, let him
suffer too.
    It was late summer and the air was close and muggy. She went into the kitchen and put on the kettle and opened the fridge. From a plastic container she