Shedding light
Jeremy Clarke
There’s a stone-built shed in our garden. The floor is cobbled with smooth pebbles collected from the beach 150 years ago when the shed was built. Likewise, the mortar holding it together is made with coarse sand and miniature seashells. Gaps in the roof let in the wind and rain. It was a pigsty, I think. Latterly I kept ferrets in there. Now it’s a woodshed.
I’m the only person who ever goes in there. I use it as a refuge and sanctuary. The knotty tree ring I use as a chopping block is comfortable enough to sit on in a contemplative or depressed mood. A Victorian pine kitchen-dresser, painted green, on which I’ve pinned all the rosettes I’ve ever won at ferret shows, takes up one wall. Reds for firsts, blues for seconds, yellows for thirds, and a brown one as big as a dinner plate commemorating a golden summer Sunday afternoon when King Sulieman the Magnificent, my albino hob, won best in show.
When I gave up smoking 15 years ago, I used go out to the shed and rub down the dresser with sandpaper to take my mind off the craving for nicotine. I got about a fifth of the green paint off and then the craving went away and I left it at that. Now I’m back smoking again, secretly this time, I creep out to the shed, perch on my chopping block and enjoy a crafty fag. In winter, with an easterly gale hammering against the door and raindrops dripping loudly through the gaps in the roof, the enjoyment of an illicit cigarette in the woodshed becomes an almost transcen dental experience, though why this should be so I can’t say. I was sitting on the chopping block the other evening — it was almost dark — when the door opened and who should come in but my boy. I’d finished my fag but was staying on, transfixed by the solitude and the nicotine rush.
My boy didn’t see me crouched there in the gloom. He closed the door carefully, took a cigarette out of one pocket, a disposable lighter from the other, and lit up. I nearly fell off the block. I had no idea my boy smoked. Judging by the way he held his cigarette (like a spiv, between thumb and first two fingers) and the way he inhaled the smoke (deeply and gratefully), he’d been smoking for a long time, too.
I didn’t know what love was until my boy came along. Ever since I’ve known him, he’s been a kind, loyal, helpful, attentive boon companion who understands the patterns of my mind better than I do. He’s the only person in the world with whom I can be silent in complete comfort, which is a great thing. He never asks for anything, he’s had a paid job since his 13th birthday, and we’ve never had a cross word.
All his life I’ve been hoping and praying he wouldn’t grow up to be a smoker. I even promised him £500 on his 15th birthday if he didn’t smoke. Came the day, he duly stated that he didn’t smoke and collected. I was so pleased, I coughed up an extra £250 bonus. My boy stays with me only at weekends, so I had to take his word for it that he didn’t smoke, supported by his mother’s testimony.
Last year I took him to Trieste, his first trip abroad, and we were continuously together for 72 hours. He was the perfect travelling companion: polite, dignified, appreciative, irreverent. If he was a smoker then, he concealed it well. But now, as I watched him light up and suck in a lungful of smoke, I remembered that he did have this odd habit of continually popping out of the hotel on his own ‘for a wander’. I’d encouraged him in this, heartened by what I saw as this growing sense of independence in what was previously a quite reserved person. Now I unhappily realised that the person I felt most at home with hadn’t been feeling entirely at home with me for some time.
‘All right?’ I said, a voice in the darkness. He shied like a spooked stallion. And so how long had he been smoking? He wouldn’t say. ‘No comment,’ he said. No comment! Then he became unexpectedly aggressive. What was I doing in the shed, then? And how old was I when I’d started to smoke? Thirteen, was it? I was a hypocrite. (I was 14, actually.) I was a hypocrite and bore. Worse, my boy said this as if he meant it: the first hard words ever spoken between us. We looked at each other. Hatred glinted in his eyes. I wanted to cry. I took out another cigarette. ‘Oh, give us a light, then,’ I said.
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