A Secret Duty

by John Dale

My uncle died at the weekend. He had emphysema and pulmonary oedema and for the last three years had been kept alive by an oxygen cylinder which stood in the corner of his bedroom. He was seventy-four. Although I had seen him rarely since I moved to Sydney, I remember him as a good-humoured man who loved cricket and tennis, and wore sports shirts and navy blazers. In every photograph I’ve seen of him he is tanned with a cigarette burning between his fingers. 

When I was nine, he flew down to Hobart to star in an advertisement shot at the new Wrest Point casino, overlooking the river. For months after, whenever that ad appeared on television, my sisters and I would run in to watch Uncle Arch on the small screen. We saw him chatting to a younger woman with shiny lipstick and a head full of gorgeous hair. Although we must have seen that ad a dozen times, I don’t recall my uncle ever talking, only this orchestra music playing, while he flips open a pack of Benson and Hedges, peels off the silver foil and the woman’s long manicured fingers reach over the cocktails to ease out a cigarette. The woman slides it between her shiny red lips, a sleek waiter appears alongside and with a flourish of his lighter fires both their cigarettes. My uncle and this young woman inhale deeply, smiling at each other with the satisfaction of shared intense pleasure.

It was simple but effective advertising I guess, for both my sisters and I took up smoking early. I started on Marlboros at thirteen and then moved up to Viscounts at fourteen. For a while I tried Courtleighs. I bought an imitation silver cigarette case from Coles and used to keep my daily ration in it until I lost the case at football practice. In my last year of high school, I began smoking a pipe at the weekends and, though it seems hard to believe now, none of the other boys found the sight of a fifteen-year-old puffing away on a clay pipe strange. It was only when my tongue developed blisters from the cracked stem that I gave the pipe away to a younger kid down the road and went back to buying cigarettes or begging them from relatives. All my friends smoked and there was a serious edge to our habit as if this were a secret duty imposed on us by the adult world. 

When I moved to Sydney to live I dropped in to visit my uncle one time. He was out the front of his unit in Sylvania mowing his lawn and the smell of cut grass hung in the air. For some reason he didn’t invite me indoors; he had no children and a much younger wife, and I was driving a dented yellow FC Holden with a second-hand mattress in the back. We leaned our elbows on his low wooden fence and talked a little and, as I was about to leave, my uncle, delighted that his only nephew had come to visit, went inside and came out with a carton of Benson and Hedges. He tore open that carton and pressed two unopened packs of cigarettes into my hands and said how great it was to see me and if I phoned in advance next time, well maybe we could do something.

***

My father flew up for the funeral on Monday. I found him standing outside the Qantas terminal guarding his piece of luggage and checking his watch, a curl of blue smoke drifting over his right shoulder. 

In the car I said to him, ‘I thought you’d given up smoking.’

‘I have,’ he said.

‘Didn’t I see you smoking back at the terminal?’ 

‘Not me you didn’t.’ My father gave his head a firm shake. ‘I haven’t touched a cigarette in years.’

I wasn’t sure now if I had actually seen the cigarette in my father’s hand or just imagined it. We drove to the crematorium in silence, while I glanced over at him from time to time as if I might catch him out. When I first quit cigarettes twenty years ago the first thing I re-discovered was the power of smell. I could detect cigarette smoke in my father’s sweat and in his hair and clothes. Even in the toilet after he’d used it. 

At the crematorium my father placed a framed photograph of his brother in his police uniform on top of the sealed coffin. Orchestra music played and the coffin slowly disappeared through a curtain. Standing in the grey light afterwards, I watched my father comfort his brother’s wife. She called me over and took off her sunglasses and looked me up and down. She told me how pleased she was to see me, that my uncle used to talk about me sometimes, used to tell her that I was a lot like him. She gave my arm a squeeze and I went and stood over with the line of great aunts and distant cousins underneath the flowering bottle brushes. 

The undertaker, a large awkward man dressed in black, with shiny oiled hair parted down the middle, took out a pack from his inside pocket, placed a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and lit it urgently. I watched the muscles on his face relax and heard him sigh as he stared off down the road. He took two quick drags, dropped the cigarette half-finished onto the path and crushed it out with the heel of his boot. I went over and asked if he had a spare cigarette. He looked at me guiltily, as if I’d caught him out.

‘I’ve given up,’ I explained.

He whipped out his pack. I saw the words WARNING SMOKING CAUSES and caught a glimpse of something green and gangrenous before he palmed the pack back into his pocket. He handed me a single cigarette. ‘S’pose you need a light?’ 

But I shook my head, told him I’d smoke it later. I went back and stood under the bottlebrushes with the thin cylinder of paper and tobacco enclosed in my hand. I looked around and when no-one else was watching I brought that cigarette up to my mouth, pushed the filter in between my lips and let it hang there. Staring down at a bend in the road, I realised what I missed most about smoking — it wasn’t the rush as your lungs filled with smoke or the hit of nicotine in the back of your throat — it was the way you could stand and stare at a bush, a rock, or nothing at all, and get lost in the moment. That never happens to me now. A light rain was falling, the tall trees were heavy and bent against the sky and mourners began moving slowly towards their cars. I watched them go. I took the unlit cigarette from my mouth, placed it in my shirt pocket and walked across the gravel to the emptying car park. I felt a great sense of loss that both my uncle and my days of smoking were gone. My father was waiting by the passenger’s door, impatient, checking his watch. ‘Thought you’d given up,’ he said. 

‘I have.’

‘Didn’t I see you smoking over by those trees?’

‘Not me you didn’t.’ And I climbed into the car beside the old man.

© John Dale, 2020

John Dale is Professor of Writing at UTS. He is the author of seven books including the best-selling Huckstepp which was republished in 2014 and three crime novels Dark Angel,  The Dogs Are Barking, published with Serpents Tail Press in the UK, and Detective Work. He has also published a memoir, Wild Life, an investigation into the fatal shooting of his grandfather in 1940s Tasmania.