Ten Stories About Smoking by Stuart Evers Read Free Book Online

eating dinner at the Sunbird – a restaurant highly recommended by one of David’s guidebooks – they were sitting around a smoked-glass
table in a neon-lit cocktail bar. Nearby, too close for David’s liking, clusters of young Americans stood in short dresses and sportswear, their teeth glowing a ghoulish blue-white. They made
David feel old; tired, niggardly and old.
    ‘Little Angels,’ John’s future brother-in-law, Richard, said. ‘You can’t come to Vegas and not go to Little Angels. There’s like a law against it. It’s
like the law of the stag.’
    Brightly coloured spotlights bounced off the table. David’s itinerary was being used as a coaster; Richard had said they didn’t need it anyway: he’d been to Vegas loads of
times. Whatever you wanted, whether it was the perfect steak and eggs, the finest champagne cocktail, the lowest buy-in Texas hold ’em game or the most enthusiastic whore, Richard always
seemed to know the best place in town.
    In his broad Yorkshire accent, Richard was describing a Chicana prostitute called Rosalita: her mouth, her legs, her breasts, her behind. David looked to John, hoping to exchange a raised
eyebrow; but John was listening intently. Richard was enjoying himself, recreating in lavish detail Rosalita’s floor show; the four other men lapping it up. To David it sounded both painful
and intensely unerotic. For a moment he wondered whether this was all an act, another of Richard’s tall tales, but the details seemed all too plausible.
    John leant forward and asked Richard something that was muffled by the sound of a party cheering another stag to down his drink.
    ‘Five hundred in all,’ Richard replied. ‘And believe me, I’d have paid double that just to see those tits.’
    David picked up a spare packet of cigarettes and lit one. He’d not smoked in thirteen years.

    More drinks arrived and they drank them down, then ordered another round, then another. David watched John laugh, watched the others laugh, and felt like he was watching himself
laugh along. He smoked his cigarette down to the filter, the taste uncommon and salty in his mouth. He plucked another from a pack and lit it from the butt of the one he was smoking. He wished he
could be sitting outside somewhere smoking that cigarette, anywhere but there, there with Richard and the others. These are my friends, he thought. Phil, Ben, Simon, Dan, John. And I know nothing
of them now: nothing. It was as though they’d abandoned their personalities at the airport.
    Richard was telling a story about the guy he went to the Little Angels with. He did all the accents and his timing was clockwork; despite himself David laughed along with the others. He shook
his head and tried to hide it, but he was laughing. Richard was a salesman by trade and he’d sold himself to Phil and Ben and Simon and Dan; though David knew something wasn’t quite
right with John.
    On the surface, John seemed to be having a good time, but David could see the clench in his jaw, the same sense of disappointment that had been there the first time he’d got married. This
time was supposed to be different: the 3,000 mile journey, the identical suits, the celebration of a man passing from one stage of life to another. But it was not enough. It was not extraordinary;
not in the way that John had imagined it. And though John was being loud and boorish, David was sure that part of him was imagining himself there fifteen years before, how it would have felt back
then, after Helen, but before Alice, and before everything else.
    David missed the punchline of Richard’s story and looked out over the room while the men laughed again and reached for their drinks. He saw himself reflected in the glass of the bar and
put the cigarette to his lips. His face ghosted behind the smoke, his mouth almost obscured.
    ‘You’re smoking?’ John said, clapping David on the leg. ‘Christ, I haven’t seen you smoke in years.’
    David