Smoke alarm
Jeremy Clarke
very Friday for the past three months
' I've been doing my boy's mother's shopping. She's unable to get out to the shops because she's agoraphobic, and her boyfriend has been unable to do the shopping since he fell off a ladder and broke his ankle, So on Friday evenings me and my boy are issued with a list and we trot round the supermarket for her. Because my boy, 14, is more responsible than I am, he has control of both the list and the cash. We do the shopping, then buy his mum 80 Mayfair King Size at the fag counter on the way out. Because I look over 16, the buying of the fags is my job. But I hand the fags and change over to my boy, and the receipt, straight away.
Last week I had a phone call. At first I thought 1 was listening to a recording of Hitler speaking at the Reichstag. I have a knee-jerk liberal friend in Southend-onSea who pointedly leaves Hitler perorations on my answerphone. Then I realised it wasn't Hitler at all. It was my boy's mother and she was angry about something.
Had I been buying Mark Anthony cigarettes? 'Me?' I said. Did she not know I'd promised him £500 on his 15th birthday if he hadn't taken up smoking by then? Hadn't she been told about the colour print of the grinning skull with lighted cigarette in its mouth by Van Gogh that I'd hung in his bedroom? And wasn't I constantly reminding him about Mrs Lucas, a resident at my mother's residential home, and fanatical smoker, whose death from emphysema we'd both found so horribly fascinating? 'Not guilty,' I said. Well, she'd caught him with a pack of Mayfair King Size, she said. A further three packets had been found in a briefcase under his bed. Subsequent interrogation had revealed that it was none other than I, his father, who had been buying him cigarettes at the supermarket every Friday. What had I got to say for myself?
I was very sorry to hear that my boy had started to smoke, but I couldn't blame him. Every single adult on his mother's side smokes, except Uncle Jeff, who has been told by his doctor to give up or die within six months, can't quite make up his mind and smokes intermittently. Sit around a table and smoke is all they do. It must be odd for a 14-year-old to see his elders and betters mysteriously in thrall to those little white sticks and the accompanying rituals — yet be expressly forbidden them himself.
Furthermore, he has the rotten example of a father who preaches passionately against the evils of tobacco yet smokes secretly in the garden shed. In his bluff, no-nonsense Easy Way to Stop Smoking, the celebrated anti-smoking crusader Allen Carr gives secret smokers very short shrift. We who steal away into sheds and shrubberies for a quiet puff are, according to Mr Carr, in many ways more abject than somebody with advanced smokingrelated emphysema drowning in their own lung fluid. 'When you become a secret smoker, warns Mr Carr, 'you sink about as low as any human being is capable of sinking. You have lost every vestige of self-respect.' I think he's right. In retrospect there were times during the past three months, at the weekly car auction, for example, when my boy and I were taking it in turns to make a fallacious excuse to nip away for a crafty one. Which is a very long way from the transparently honest kind of father–son relationship I like to aim for.
There were, however, positive sides to my boy's smoking. I was relieved that, just as I was beginning to worry that it was never going to happen, he'd rebelled against parental authority for the first time in his life. And I thought it grand that he'd started his smoking career with consign ments of 80 Mayfair King Size, instead of scratching around as I did for dog-ends and the occasional packet of ten No. 6. I liked the smoothness of his deception too. It was executed with verve and consistency.
But how should I react to his mother's accusation? Should I be angry or sad? Should I take some of the blame and cover his deception by pleading guilty to knowingly buying the cigarettes? Should I recommend sanctions, and if so which ones? Or should my boy and I become brothers in arms and smoke publicly from now on? I made a snap decision. I would shop him to his mother for deception, and up the no-smoking-by-his-15th-birthday bounty to 050.
'I'm waiting,' growled my boy's mother. 'Let's see you get out of this one, you hypocrite.'
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