I never took it up properly, but I have a cigarette now and again. Everybody should, I think, just to remember or discover what it's like. Months between them these days, sometimes years. I'm very brand-loyal, though – I don't smoke anything but one particular German brand called Smart. Whenever I go to the continent I try to pick up a packet. One pack, no more. I don't cry myself to sleep if I can't get hold of them, but I like to always have a few in my drawer. The taste is unusual – they're quite strong, and have a slightly liquorice flavour.
Keeping a pack of cigarettes in my room – even though, as I say, I never really smoked, is a hangover from my University days. Most of the girls smoked back then – it's that time, isn't it, when you do whatever's new enough to still be exciting? Drinking, smoking, drugs and sex – anything but essays, basically. And getting a light or bumming a cigarette is a great way to flirt. And if you take a girl back to your room, and she smokes, and she runs out, and you don't have any … well, it sort of ruins the moment to have to pop out to the twenty-four-hour shop, is all. Condoms, cigarettes and coffee, the three Cs of seduction. For me, anyway.
Why Smart? All right.
Picture me at a party in my first term – still a fresher, hardly knowing my way around the campus, let alone the city, tagging along with one of my tall good-looking new best friends to the house of some unbelievably sophisticated second-years, carrying our shitty white wine and supermarket quarter-bottle of vodka. I'm dressed in the eternal default uniform of the boy who doesn't know what to wear to a party – jeans and a band T-shirt. God knows what band. One that I hoped girls would like, I suppose.
We walk in and it's a blast of smoke and yelling chatter and loud bad music from the stereo in the corner. There's gritty red wine in white plastic Tesco cups and empty beer bottles forming green pile-ups along the walls and couples, already drunk, snogging awkwardly on the cheap landlord furniture. There's something brutal about that kind of party, but they also throb with possibility – like every party, I suppose, if you're young and single and don't really want to be either. Age 18 I was still getting ID'd in Oddbins. My bumfluff goatee didn't help. I shaved it off a few months later, and got a girlfriend the next week.
So.
I go to get beer for me and Dave and Steve – everyone's got a mate called Dave, or Steve, or both, I think it's some sort of immutable rule of the universe – anyway, I go into the kitchen to fetch us some beer and say hello to the girl whose party it is. She's like the cheerleader of the second year language students, everyone fancies her. Stephanie. And she's glamorous because she's half-German and her brother's a pop star or something in Germany. Though given that so is David Hasselhoff, I'm not that impressed.
I find her all right, but she's pushed up against the fridge getting off with some guy I don't recognise who's about twice my height and is probably – no, definitely – on the rugby team. This means I can't get to the fridge. I don't want to go back to Dave and Steve beerless, so I decide to chill out in the garden, which I can see just outside the kitchen window – there's a little patio and some scrubby grass behind. The smoke and the noise is giving me a headache, anyway.
It's late October, so it's cold, and I don't think anyone else is out there until I see the spark and flash of a lighter, and then the glow of a cigarette end.
"Hi," I say in the direction of the little red dot. My eyes are adjusting to the night and slowly a figure emerges, sitting on a bench at the end of the garden.
"Hey," he says. He's got some sort of accent, European, I don't know what. There's a lot of foreign students in our year.
"OK if I join you?" I say.
"Sure. You don't mind music, do you?"
"Only the shitty Europop they're playing in there," I said.
"Me too. Acoustic, I mean. I came out here to practise. I have a gig later on." I've pegged it now: his accent is German. Light, but definite.
"No," I say. As I get closer I see he's cradling a guitar. I sit at the other end of the bench to give him room to play. I realise I've left our wine and vodka on the table in the kitchen, but I don't want to leave – not now, anyway. It would be rude.
"You got a drink?" he says, reading my mind.
"Not really. Shall I –"
"You want one?"
"Sure."
He passes me a square green bottle, filled with something black. The top is already off. I hesitate. I don't have a glass.
"Just swig it," he says. I do.
"Christ," I gasp when I can speak again. "What is that stuff?"
"Jagermeister," he says, and I can hear the smile in his voice even though his face is in shadow. "Don't you like it?"
"No, er, it's … unusual."
"Aniseed flavour. And it's strong."
Next time I was in a cocktail bar I asked for a shot, just to see if it was as awful as I remembered. It's a thick evil brown, like tar, and it tastes pretty much how it looks. He stuck another cigarette in his mouth and absently offered me the packet. It looked like a weird brand, so I took one, out of curiosity. He lit both and started tinkering with his guitar, tuning it up. I wondered if he was about to serenade me.
"Are you German?" I asked, just to say something.
"Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" he asked me back.
"Eine kleine bischen," I said, remembering my stock phrases from GCSE.
"Enough to understand song lyrics?" he said in English.
"Wie komm'ich am besten zum Bahnhof is about my limit," I said.
His face was in the light from the kitchen window now, as he leant over his guitar, and I could see him smile this time.
"Good," he said. "This is a very sentimental song and I don't want to embarrass you."
But you know what always happens when someone has a guitar at parties – people hear the music drifting from the kitchen, or the bedroom, or the garden, or wherever, and they come out to listen. Usually I hate the sort of wanker who cracks out his acoustic at a party, but this guy – Max was his name – genuinely seemed to want privacy to practise. But at the same time he was too polite to tell anyone to fuck off, including me. So by the end of the third song there's a little crowd out there in the garden, standing around or sitting on the damp grass, listening, even though they don't understand the words any more than I do.
But someone does. Stephanie stands at the back, a cigarette smoking in her hand, the rugby player long discarded. When he finishes the song and there's a little ripple of applause, she calls from the back: "Play the new one!"
Max turns and smiles at me conspiratorially.
"I wrote it for her. She hasn't heard it yet."
I don't know what to say.
He starts playing the first song, the one he'd warned me was sentimental. The tune is pretty and mournful, slow and longing. I don't understand most of the words, only the refrain – something about breaking the fall. Breaking her fall. Everybody goes quiet and respectful as he sings, the way people do when they know something's serious but they don't really understand it – like in a museum, or a church.
Stephanie stalks through the crowd when he's finished and throws her arms around his neck, kissing him. Their heads press together, hers straw-blonde and his dark. She whispers something in his ear that sounds like "einfach klasse", and he laughs.
"Better than Schiller?" he asks, leaning back and looking at her.
"Much better," she says, and he laughs again, but she doesn't. I find myself wishing that someone would look at me like that, ever, but mainly that Stephanie would look at me like that, now, tonight. I feel a bit awkward being so near to them. I hope I'm more in shadow than I actually am, because Stephanie turns to me and says,
"Don't I have a talented brother?"
"Oh," I say, "yes."
"Come on Max," she says, "you've given us enough free entertainment tonight. You'd better get to your gig."
He nods and smiles.
She plucks the packet of cigarettes form his shirt pocket – I can see the brand name now, they're called Smart – and she tuts.
"No more of these," she says. "They're bad for your singing."
"OK." He hands the pack to me. "Here, you have them." He turns back to Stephanie.
"And how about yours?"
She makes a face. "Oh all right. It's your lucky night, fresher."
I am left sitting on the bench holding two half-smoked packs of Smart cigarettes, one in each hand, as I watch them walk away, arm in arm.
All that night the girls want to know what Max said to me and what the songs meant (as though I knew any better than they did!), and the guys wanted to know why Stephanie gave me her cigarettes.
I went back with a blonde third year called Claire who said I was cute and smoked all of Max's cigarettes. I didn't let her have Stephanie's, and she didn't sleep with me, but I like to think she would have. Maybe if I hadn't pretended to run out of cigarettes and we'd stayed awake a bit longer, she might have. I never made that mistake again. As it was, that night, I slept on the floor.
Who knows why anybody smokes, why anybody drinks, why anybody writes songs or sleeps with somebody or does anything?
It's funny, but every time I light up a Smart, every time I drink a shot of Jagermeister for old times' sake, that night comes spiralling back. It's like a snatch of music or a smell from childhood that takes you to that moment, that time, completely and just for a second. But if you hear that music, smell that smoke every day, the associations fade and it becomes commonplace: the magic won't work anymore.
I suppose that's why I never really started smoking. And I suppose that's why I can't stop.
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