Extracts from Thank you for not Smoking
We were walking towards the tube station. Miles was looking totally gutted. Maybe he just had the mother of all hangovers...
"So is your family loaded?" I asked him, to try to snap him out of it. Money always does it for me. He could be in for a good whack in the near future.
"My dad's a doctor. He's got good insurance. God, I could do with a fag."
"Have one then."
"I can't."
"Buy some Polos. Your father won't be able to tell. He's ... er ... got other things on his mind."
"That's not the point. I promised him."
But I thought it was the point. We all say stuff under pressure we don't mean. What choice had Dr Johnson left his son? Maybe his only son? He had to agree to quit the fags, even if only for form's sake.
"Have you got any brothers or sisters?" I said.
"Yeah. Two of each."
"So what's all the fuss about? He's not going to know anyway, is he?" There were plenty of Johnson juniors to fill any gap that might or might not be left by a dead Miles. "My father smoked until he was fifty," I said.
"Then what happened?"
"He gave up." That was a lie, but a necessary one. He'd died in a car crash, fatally distracted by a malfunctioning cigar lighter. "I'm just saying you've got a margin of error before you get lung cancer yourself," I said cheerily. "How old are you?"
"Thirty one."
"See? Twenty years, Miles. You're alright for a while. Giving up smoking when you're really stressed doesn't work. You have to prepare yourself, get psyched up."
"How would you know?"
I was stamping out my cigarette in front of the tube station.
"I nearly gave up once. I realised I wasn't ready. It's better not to try than to try and fail. You don't want to set up a pattern."
I realised my mistake as soon as we sat down in the conservatory. This was not a good place for Miles: everyone was smoking, or almost everyone. All the residents had a fag between their nasty yellow fingers. Most of the visitors were smoking too, stressed to the edge of junkydom themselves by the sorry state of their inmate. I refrained from lighting up, for Miles' sake, and reflected that it was still better for him to be with me than wandering the public bars of Clapham in his pissy boxers.
"Can't we sit somewhere else?" he said.
"This is where the visitors go," I said. "We're not allowed in the rest of the house."
"How many people stay here?" he said.
"Don't know. Twenty?"
"Then they're all in here. The rest of the house must be empty."
"The rest of the house always is empty," I said. "This is the smoking area."
"Why can't we sit in it? If it's empty?"
The rest of the house, a vast Victorian pile, was reserved for the privacy of the residents. They had to have their privacy. It was essential to their recovery. I told Miles this.
"But they're not getting any privacy if they're all in here," he said. "It's so smoky."
"Yes. That's because it's the smoking area," I said. "They've got to have one vice left to them, Miles. Everyone needs one good vice."
I was bored with Miles. I think he was bored with himself. I thought he was keeping this up because he was actually enjoying exercising his unwrapped self, letting rip for the first time ever. But I was bored with it now. I was even bored with the awful irony of Dr Johnson's health directive for his youngest son. That'll teach you to meddle, I thought, as the deconstructed Miles, standing by a tea rose, lit his first pipe of the day.
I lit a cigarette. I only had two left. Maybe I should think about making a change, giving up. I rattled the two lonely little fags in their empty pack. They'd be useless nails for anyone's coffin. They were much too bendy ... but as it turned out, they were the pins that were holding Miles' life together. I looked at him, still face down in the dark. And there was Dr Johnson, face up in a refrigerator. I wondered if the light stayed on when they closed the door.
"Really more like
a Philippino hooker
than a contemporary novel, this book is short, cheap and fun."
Campaign for Shorter Novels
WARNING:
This book contains a wealth of offensive language, scenes of wild narcotics abuse and descriptions of gratuitous violence. On the downside, there is absolutely no sex whatsoever.
"Law-breaking, hard-drinking, drug-taking musicians on a slightly worse than average week in Clapham. I laughed and laughed ... "
The Right Reverend
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