Free Ten Stories About Smoking by Stuart Evers Page B

took a block of cheese and cut a chunk off
at an angle. The kettle boiled and she made tea, which she took through to the living room. Most nights she ended up there, sitting on the sofa, blue-lit by the television. She watched talk shows
and documentaries and programmes signed for the deaf, whatever night-time fare she could find. These days, she knew so much about all manner of trivial things.
    Jean turned on the television and lowered the volume. It was a nature documentary about the wildlife of Siberia. She blew on her tea and watched the programme until the commercial break. Her mug
empty, she put it on the coffee table and got up from the deep red couch and started to rustle around inside the cushions of the armchair. Somewhere, in a hollow she’d fashioned inside the
padding, there was a packet of cigarettes.
    She’d taken to hiding her cigarettes in ever more elaborate, deceitful places; even though Peter didn’t even know she had started smoking again. ‘We have no secrets,’
Peter was fond of saying, which she thought a stupid, idiotic thing to say: what he really meant was that the big secret was out and that the little ones didn’t count. But for Jean the little
secrets were the ones worth keeping. Which is why she hid the cigarettes with such ingenuity.
    As she scrabbled around inside the chair, she began to hope that the packet wouldn’t be there after all; that Peter had discovered them, torn them up, and thrown them away. When she found
them she counted them out, even though she already knew precisely how many there were.
    Jean walked through the lounge, opened the patio doors, and sat down on the folding canvas chair. She lit a cigarette and inhaled as much of the smoke as her lungs could take. She did this every
night and often wondered whether she could die that way: asphyxiated by too much smoke taken too quickly into her lungs.
    The night was still and calm. She flicked the ash from her cigarette into a small barbecue. Peter had bought it months before as a challenge to himself; but they’d only used it once. It
had not been cleaned since and stubborn pieces of charred meat remained stuck to its grill. Every time she saw it, she thought she should clean it, but she never did. Some nights she was even
tempted to pull some of the flesh off the metal and eat it. But she never did that either.
    As she smoked, she tried not to think about the fire, nor think about Peter. She’d spent most of the nights since he’d told her thinking about it in one way or another. Sometimes
simply recalling exactly what he’d said. Not the main part, not what he thought he’d done, but that first sentence that cracked and splintered her life. I think I killed some
people .
    She could hear the words crisply in her mind, recall the dampness of the rented cottage’s rooms, see him sitting at the table, his hair well styled and his sweater well pressed and that
dab of sauce still at the corner of his mouth. The softness of his voice, its soothing timbre saying something so brutal, so stark. I think I killed some people .
    The more she thought of it, the more angry those six words made her. The non-specificity of some people , the prefacing of such unspeakable violence with I think . It made her want
to shout and scream, to beat at his chest with her balled-up fists. You think you killed some people? You think?
    Inevitably then she’d imagine the dead bodies, the ash of the living cremated, the fireball whoosh of the explosion. In those first months, she did a lot of research on the fire, research
which, like the smoking, was another closely guarded secret. She read transcripts of firemen’s testimonies, newspaper reports, the official governmental inquest. Nowhere was there blame
attached; at no point did anyone say that there was someone culpable for the deaths of thirty-one people in a fire at King’s Cross Underground station. But someone’s fingers had dropped
the match that had ignited the