Where was everyone?

Mother looked out the window and she hardly even puffed on her cigarette now. It burnt down and down until I had to remove it so it didn’t burn her fingers.

On Friday I went to school, even though she hadn’t wanted me to. She got up and made me toast with honey and sandwiches with white bread (also with honey) for my lunch. I had already decided I would go to La Coccinella after school. I didn’t think I could bear to see Mother anymore with her bunged-up head and dead eyes. I couldn’t think about her book going through the shredder either. The story was in the newspaper again that day, I checked at the milk bar. It was on page seven: ‘Author’s book to be pulped’. ‘Mr McMannish of Vellum Press has signalled the publisher’s intention to withdraw The Poems of Veda Gray from sale on the grounds of indecent language.’

So that was it. I left the newspaper on its stack. I bought a packet of cigarettes. Real cigarettes. Not Fags, which were training cigarettes made of sugar. You could still get candy called Nigger Boy in those days. You could get Blackie Toothpaste. But you couldn’t say fuck in a poem, not if you were a woman. Not if you were a respectable one.

I bought a real packet of cigarettes. I had pinched enough money from the jar in the kitchen. Cigarettes didn’t cost much. No one cared if a kid bought cigarettes—how many times had I bought them for Mother? The shopkeeper didn’t flinch. I bought a packet of Craven and I smoked them in the lane off Church Street. I smoked three of them in a row and then I threw up in the gutter.

By the time school had finished, the sickness from the cigarettes had receded, so I smoked another one. I loitered outside the school grounds and kicked the dust and didn’t know where to go. Which home should I go to? I couldn’t bear to see Mother. I couldn’t bear how the fight had gone out of her. I knew she needed sympathy, but I wanted to shake her. I wanted to shake her and then give her a slap whack across her cheekbones. Toughen up, you stupid broad. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. I didn’t want to go to Papa either—La Coccinella was the scene of a crime, and now he’d gone off with his stuff in a suitcase, I was the man of the house. He’d stepped down. I was not going running back. And I wouldn’t go to you Ornella because you’d purse your lips about Mother and shake your head, and I couldn’t bear that either. And of course I would not go to Mr Parish. I wanted to kill him.

The cigarette made me sick but it also made me feel tough and self-possessed. Cigarettes made Mother feel elegant. Cigarettes made Mr Parish guilty, Kitten saucy, Rosa cough. Cigarettes ruined Papa’s palate.