X20 by Richard Beard

might be me,’ Theo said.
    â€˜It says here that twenty-five per cent of smokers die of cancer. That means one of us four.’
    â€˜Let’s hope it isn’t the one in four who’s Chinese,’ Walter said. When he chortled he had to take his pipe out of his mouth.
    â€˜John Wayne died of lung cancer,’ Humphrey said. ‘I used to really like John Wayne.’
    I remember looking at Humphrey and hoping it would be him. Or if not, then Walter. It ought to be Walter, at his age, or Humphrey, for the simple but convincing reason that I knew him the least well. But I didn’t really mean that about Walter. I didn’t mean I wanted him to die. I just meant that he was old and I was young, and I have more of a right to see the other side of the year 2000. I intend to astonish children with stories about the twentieth century, stories which Walter will be far too senile by then to remember.
    That nasty thought just won’t go away.
    On television, on every channel, Superman was regularly crushing the evil Nick O’Teen. People started jogging. The Clean Air Society experienced a revival. Cigarette taxes were increased and medical research confirmed that filtered cigarettes led to no significant decrease in the incidence of heart disease. The first papers were published on passive smoking, and more than 600,000 British children were awarded Superman certificates attesting their personal commitment to the fight against tobacco products.
    Everywhere, tobacco was in retreat. In the portrait gallery at St John’s College Cambridge a pipe was painted out of the hand of Dr Samuel Parr, a hot-tempered, cricket-loving cleric whose proudest memory was of the tobacco he once shared with the Prince Regent at Carlton House. Smoking was banned from cinema auditoriums, and a year later every window of every carriage on the London Underground had its very own No-Smoking sticker.
    All the same, if you smoked a cigarette the nicotine still reached your brain in seven seconds and made you feel good. This was one of the reasons a hundred and forty different cigarette brands remained on sale in tobacconists throughout the country. It also explained why none of the adverse publicity made any difference to the Long Ashton Tobacco Research Unit. Theo still had his job. I still jogged up there twice a week and was regularly given clean bills of health. I watched my money pile up in the bank.
    The Buchanan’s people were most reassuring. They emphasized that statistics only indicated correlation and not causation, which meant, just as an example, that incipient cancer might be causing people to smoke. Equally encouraging were the discoveries being made at Buchanan’s own labs in Hamburg, where Syrian Hamsters proved as likely to contract cancers from exposure to distilled nicotine as they did from a leading brand of hair-gel.
    Walter is dead.
    The weather knows this, and hacks frenzies of anguished rain against the windows. Walter has been run over by a bus, like in one of his stories. He would have called it The Centenarian Smoker Run Over by a Bus story. Probably while on his way to buy tobacco. Yes, just like one of Walter’s stories.
    He could have been run over by a bus, all the same.
    He has been run over by a bus.
    He has toppled into the radiator grille of a Leyland Cityhopper travelling at thirty miles an hour which has scorched his coat and then bundled him under its front axle.
    Or. The wind has pressed him, ever so gently but irresistibly (a man of his age) over the railings of the bridge and down into the gorge. He is so old and frail that instead of falling straight down he is blown some distance up-river before making contact with the water.
    Or struggling against the wind his heart has failed. Or he died of an undiagnosed cancer of the brain, lung, larynx, pancreas, oesophagus while unlatching his front-door. Or he choked to death on a strand of half-inhaled pipe tobacco. I don’t