Cigarette

Cigarette

The last one, like the first, was smoked furtively in the white-skied October outdoors. It was windy enough to have to duck into the corner between shed and house to light up, cold enough to fully appreciate the warmth passing over pale fingers. 

I’d followed the advice to the letter, cleansed the house of every trace, thrown out every last piece of paraphernalia.

Consequently the final indulgence had to come from a cupboard in my father’s kitchen. Looking over my shoulder, I cupped the contraband in a familiar fist inside a long sleeve – a move that came back as easily as a lost mother tongue.

For a few years Dad gave up, or at least pretended to, age forty-five, still making trips out to the garden in the snow, coming back with a soft, old scent to him, mixed with spearmint, soil and damp wool.

I try to pinpoint exactly when this became an anti-social habit. At one time it was difficult to imagine anything more sociable:  five of us crushed against the peeling corrugated iron of the school bike shed, shallow-puffing through hushed giggles, discussing like connoisseurs whether the scent was best hidden with an aniseed ball or a swift squirt of Charlie Red.

I breathe deeper and visualise my lungs: rotting and preserved in tar like a bunch of withered grapes. If I clenched a fist around one it would stick to my skin all gloopy and hot like the resurfaced playground that summer we cut through on a Sunday, ruining new trainers with telltale goo.

Or it would crunch up and flake away to nothing, flakes of ash settling on my diaphragm like nuclear snow.

I try to blow a smoke ring and fail. I never could master it. Really impresses the lads, said Sarah, the Queen of Tricks. She could blow smoke out of her nose as well.  I spent hours hanging out of my bedroom window trying to emulate that, usually ending with a series of splutters.

We argued about something, not long before she left school and I went on to the Sixth Form and now she’s fossilised in my mind at sixteen. Not even as a full face, but a pair of candy floss lips forming a little round “O” under a crisp blonde perm.

I suck on the last few hot drags until I’m close to burning my mouth. I wonder how many cigarettes I’ve wasted, not smoking right down to the filter

The glow of the last Marlboro finally fades. I stub it out in a nearby plant pot, cover the dog end with a layer of dirt and turn back towards the spotless house.  The smell clings to my disinfected fingers.