What the smoke left behind

What the smoke left behind

I teeter along the narrow aisle that leads to the back of the staff room in kitten heels, already aware that I don’t quite belong anywhere I can be seen—or reached. A few bobs of acknowledgment are thrown my way as I move through the fug. The GANG OF FIVE, as I’ve come to think of them, sit together inhaling cigarettes with varying degrees of impunity. Bodies curl into the shabby sofas, lightly touching—conspirators in a world that may not like our smell, but still tolerates us. Health warnings on packets don’t matter. Yet. The writing is so small, we barely notice it.

I sit with them because I want to belong. For these stolen moments, I feel almost part of the human race. I’m able to forget my failings as a teacher. I lean over, rearranging the red biros into a neat line on the coffee table before choosing one for marking exercise books later. The plastic leaves a phantom chill against my skin, a small illusion of order in a world that refuses to stay still. My heels click softly as I adjust my weight, a fragile attempt to anchor myself. Sometimes I feel like one of the metal green waste paper bins waiting to be emptied with a thunk at the end of the day—tipped out, dented, and full of scrunched paper.

Nicky, Sue, Brenda, Lesley, and the only male teacher present, Denis, enjoy a good old smoke. Undoubtedly as soon as I leave, they’ll gossip about my deficiencies, but that’s in some unknown future. I’ve long realised it’s too late to succeed now. I don’t need them to tell me what I already know.

In the 1980s, they call it discipline, not classroom management—schools on the cusp of change. A good thing. I deplore violence—I saw too much of it at home. Even when sorely tempted, I would never raise a hand to a pupil. Corporal punishment vanishes before my eyes, all slippers and canes consigned to gather dust in cupboard corners.

Sitting here with my “family” of smokers, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve felt I belonged.

I don’t expect admiration.

I only want someone to look at me and not see disappointment.

The joy of joining the ranks at the back of the staff room is that it’s out of reach, out of earshot. An oasis in a parched desert. Here, I can say what I like—or at least think it. Feet up on the coffee table. Papers spread. Biros lined. Smoke curling toward the ceiling. For a while, I exist without judgment.

I know I’m a figure to be mocked along tired corridors; a slight woman in my pale woollen dress, thick tights, and faded cornflower-blue cardigan. My stiletto heels are a concession to happier times. Brenda—her hand lightly brushing mine, the closest thing I have to a friend—offers me a cigarette.

A magical moment. The strike of a spark. I drag in deeply.

“Oh, thank you, just what I need,” I say, and for a moment I’m the woman I might have been.

“How’s it going today, or shouldn’t I ask?”

“You shouldn’t ask. Definitely not.”

I inhale freedom, not poison. I smoke to forget that in ten minutes I will cross over into the classroom, where my lip will quiver and the hell that is teaching will begin.

But for now, I disappear into the smoke whorls of long-lost dreams.

The sootiness carries me back to the sulphury scent of wartime London. Streets dusted with the ashes of bombardment. Sharing a pew in a ruined church with my cheeky brother, Tom. I am nine; he is twelve. Outside, the world is burning and we wonder where our older brother is—Bill the fighter pilot. Perhaps he is protecting us in his plane as we huddle together in the wreck of a blast. I don’t know where Tom got the cigarettes from—they taste foul. We smoke, spluttering away like good’ns.

“There’s a war on,” he says, sounding very wise. “We have to grab what happiness we can while we still can.”

Of course I believed him. I believed in lucky charms too—I clutched at anything that might prove useful. That was why I had knitted two identical dolls in khaki cloth and string. I gave the best one to Bill, to take on his missions, and kept the other for myself.

Even then, what I yearned for most was not safety but reunion—to know that someone I loved would return to me. I learned how to love someone who was beyond my reach..

***

I force myself back to the present and the clock on the staffroom wall.

Tick tock.

The beats of a lonely heart.

I’ve spent my whole life waiting for someone to come back for me.

Our relationship was held together by hope and a scrap of cloth.

“Well, I must get to my lesson,” I say, defiantly stubbing out the last of my cigarette in the thick metal ashtray.

Laura Grange breezes past in her lilac power suit, trailing confidence and expensive perfume. I try not to let bitterness cloud me, but she’s a younger version of everything I might have been. She lives in some unreachable universe—happily married, two children, a flourishing career.

“Can you continue with Romeo and Juliet this afternoon?” she asks, glancing past me.

“Yes, of course.”

“Oh—and Dena Hartless won’t be in the lesson. Glandular fever.”

I reserve my smile. Dena is the shadow that hangs over the classroom, a girl who scents weakness like a predator. Without her, the air will be easier to breathe.

The classroom door opens. Penny Jackson, the girl with the cleft lip, meets my eyes. Dena torments her too. Our silent understanding is a rare gift. She sits rigid at her desk, shoulders braced as if for a blow.

“She’s not here today, Penny,” I whisper.

She visibly relaxes.

Later, I notice a tattered bookmark peeking from another student’s exercise book, frayed at the edges. Inside, I smile. Someone cares enough to mark where they left off. Someone wants to be remembered.

Like I always have.

As the second hand crawls, I imagine Bill flying through skies I will never reach. Each tick is a promise I can almost touch—and a reminder of how far away everything I love has become.

***

London, August 1941

Bill wakes at dawn and checks his jacket pocket for the doll before climbing into his Spitfire. The rough cloth. The uneven stitches. He smiles to himself. The sooner this is over, the sooner he can see me. He plans to bring me cornflowers to match my eyes.

The plane rises into a brilliant crimson sky, the engine roaring like some mighty beast awakened. Each heartbeat measured, precise. And yet, in that roar, he carries the fragile hope of a girl clinging to a scrap of khaki cloth.

***

I stand at the edge of the staff room once more, glancing at the smoke-filled corner I can no longer join.

I haven’t told anyone yet. Not even Brenda. The oncologist didn’t have to say very much.

But then I realise Brenda isn’t looking at me.

She’s staring at the empty seat I just left.

Her eyes fill with something I don’t recognise at first. Not surprise. Not concern.

Grief.

“Brenda?” I say. “You look pale. Are you alright?”

She doesn’t hear me.

She turns to Nicky.

“I still see her there sometimes. Over there. Coming in—wobbling in those heels.” She swallows, hand trembling. “She never got a chance to retire, never got the dignity she deserved did she? The cancer got her before the term ended.”

I freeze.

I look down at my hands. I am still holding the red biro, but I can clearly see the grain of the coffee table through my palm, as if I’ve already begun to fade. My kitten heels are silent on the linoleum.

I understand now.

I didn’t have lung cancer.

I was what the smoke left behind.

I was the faded cornflower-blue cardigan.

I am the memory of a woman who never learned how to leave.

The words rise anyway, as they always have.

“I’ve decided to give up smoking.”

No one answers.

I walk down the corridor. Or perhaps I remember walking. The walls flicker. Paint peels back into stone. The smell of chalk gives way to charcoal.

My hand slips into my pocket and finds the doll.

In the classroom, Penny answers a question correctly. Pride flares so sharply it almost hurts. For a heartbeat, the room isn’t a battlefield. I am not a failing teacher.

I belong.

***

August 1941

Bill reaches for the doll and it isn’t there.

He is caught in the loop of a crimson sky, hands white-knuckled on the controls. For eighty-two years he has climbed into the Spitfire and crossed these skies. He looks at the empty patch on the dashboard where the doll should be, then at the clouds beyond.

He no longer searches for the enemy.

He is searching for the way back to the girl in the cornflower-blue cardigan.

He flies upward, circling the same patch of English sky, yearning for the sister who promised him he would return.

***

I reach the end of the corridor. The school dissolves into the blasted stone of a London church. Smoke thickens. Time loosens its grip.

Bill’s plane dips low, breaking through the fug.

He sees me. His eyes are ablaze.

He has been flying in circles for a lifetime.

I have been walking these hallways. Lost.

As he climbs into the crimson once more, I let the red biro fall. It hits the floor without a sound.

No longer a disappointment.

I am light.

I am free.

At last.