This snippet comes from the same story as this one. The main character, Adrian (although he is never named), is the same between them.
“I need a smoke,” he groaned.
She didn’t look up from the papers she was reading. “That’s a vestigial response,” she said. “Ignore it. Eventually your soul will forget the body’s nicotine dependency.”
He ran his fingers through his hair, leaving chaotic tufts in their wake. “That’s what I kept telling myself, but it’s only getting worse.” He flopped on the couch and looked pitiably up at her. “I think I’m going to die.”
She held back a sarcastic remark about his lack of self-awareness, and instead asked, “How many did you use to get through a day?”
“A pack and a half.”
“For goodness’ sake!” She let the papers drop to the table, finally paying him some real attention. “It’s a good thing you were poisoned, it spared you a slow painful death by cancer.”
His only response was a sad, imploring look.
She sighed and got up. “Come on. I know somebody who could help.”
**
She took him to the ghost city that lodged under the railway bridge and stretched all the way to Borough Market, unknown to the human droves that wove amongst them. The man they were looking for sat cheerfully playing cards, dressed jauntily in attire from the early previous century. “Ah, Noor,” he said as he caught sight of them. “What can I do you for?”
“I’m not asking a favor today, Damien. He,” she said, indicating her companion with a tilt of the head, “needs a smoke.”
“Aaah.” Damien gestured. “Right this way, boy.” They followed.
The man’s room, crammed somewhere in between damp brick, was top-to-bottom with knickknacks and paraphenalia. He drew out a bottle filled with dark, nebulous smoke. Gently uncorking it, he withdrew a thin strand of smoke, which shaped itself into a cigarette in his graceful fingers.
“How do you do that?” he asked. Damien simply winked and held out the cigarette.
He reached for it, but just then Damien teasingly withdrew it out of reach. “Ah, there’s a price.” His smile was like a cat’s, warm but dangerous. “A kiss.”
He looked at Noor, flabbergasted. “What kind of price is that?”
“It’s a memory he’s offering you. You must pay him in kind.” When still he hesitated she asked, “Do you want the smoke or not?”
He conceded that he did.
The other man’s lips felt cool and dry against his. It didn’t feel like he was kissing a dead person – dead was relative anyway – but it was nothing like any of the kisses he had ever received. Nothing like Marcus, his lips rough and soft and warm and moist at the same time, tongue darting playfully in between like a fish, a schoolboy. Firm hands roughly pushing at the waistband of his trousers.
Marcus welled up in him like a plume of magma, shared Italian dinners and smoky wine, crinkles at the edge of blue eyes, tousled hair turning lighter, almost reddish in the morning light. And his anger, explosive; the fear he used to feel when a mug might go flying and smash itself into ceramic ruin against the kitchen tiles; the loneliness he had felt standing at the platform at King’s Cross with one ticket punched and one not. Then there was Marcus, red-eyed, hiding in the back of the cemetery between two trees because he had been too afraid of being seen, of being alternatively comforted and shunned, fingers wound so tight the flower stems ended up broken.
Damien drew back, snapping him back into his current version of reality. “Easy, my friend. You’ve got some issues to work through there.”
“Did- did you feel all that?”
“Of course.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. He hadn’t meant to get carried away, but he did.
“Don’t be. Thank you for reminding me why I don’t miss being alive.” He reached around and picked up the jar of smoke again. “For that, you get extra.”
Damien shaped the smoke into an entire pack this time, Marlboro Lights. Marcus had introduced those to him; before that he had been a menthols sort of guy. He reached out to take them, then hesitated, looking at Noor, who had become bored, resting against a wall with her hands in her pockets. She shrugged. “It’s your afterlife you’re ruining.”
“Thank you,” he said in a hushed voice to Damien, as he squirreled the smokes into a jacket pocket.
“No, thank you,” Damien said, and he thought he saw the other spirit wink at him. “You’re welcome to return and feed your habit anytime.”
(I have a few more snippets written about Adrian and his (after)life, which I think I will try posting at some point.)
nicole c (@tumblenc)
November 26, 2011
I like this!!