Dan Vyleta

Smoke

For Chantal, my love. In lieu of flowers.

For Mom. You showed me courage.

For Hanna, who lost her Big Man. I mourn with you.

Those who study the physical sciences, and bring them to bear upon the health of Man, tell us that if the noxious particles that rise from vitiated air were palpable to the sight, we should see them lowering in a dense black cloud above such haunts, and rolling slowly on to corrupt the better portion of a town. But if the moral pestilence that rises with them. . could be made discernible too, how terrible the revelation!

CHARLES DICKENS, DOMBEY AND SON (1848)

PART ONE SCHOOL

PART ONE SCHOOL

EXAMINATION

EXAMINATION

Thomas, Thomas! Wake up!”

The first thing he does upon waking is to search his nightshirt, his bedding for soiling. He does so quickly, mechanically, still more than half asleep: runs a palm over his skin feeling for the telltale grit of Soot.

Only then does he wonder what time it is, and who it is that has woken him.

It is Charlie, of course. His face keeps changing in the light of the candle he is holding. One moment it is steady, carved into plains of white and shadow. Then it buckles: eyes, nose, lips go roaming, rearrange themselves; and the light of the flame leaps into his reddish hair.

“Charlie? What time?”

“Late. Well, early. I heard a boy say it was two. Though the devil knows how he’d know.”

Charlie leans down to whisper. The candle swoops down with him, chasing shadows across the cot.

“It’s Julius. He says everyone is to assemble. In the toilets. Now.”

There is movement all around the dormitory. Pale figures stretching, rising, whispering in groups. Haste wrestles with reluctance. There are only a handful of candles; moonlight on the snow outside the windows, their panes milky with its ghostly glow. Soon the boys move in procession, out the twin doors. Nobody wants to be first, or last: not Charlie, not Thomas, not even the handful of boys who hold special favour. Best to be lost in the crowd.

ф

The bathroom tiles are cold under their feet. It’s a large room flanked by sinks, square white porcelain sinks, their surfaces crisscrossed by a spider’s web of fissures, too fine to be traced by your fingers and as though drawn with a fine pencil. Toilet stalls line the far end; beyond them, in a long, narrow annex, hulks a row of bathtubs, square and tiled with pale green tiles. The bathroom floor slopes, very slightly so, towards the middle. It’s something you learn when you spill water there. It forms rivulets, heads for the low ground. At the lowest point, the room’s centre, there is a drain, not large, scum-covered, its square metal grille half clogged with hair and lint.