Two Smokers

Like you’ll find at most stations in our larger cities, it’s impossible to reach the entrance to Manchester Piccadilly without walking through one and a half miles of smokers hacking up lungs, swilling rusty phlegm from their throats, and otherwise spewing lumps of their own flesh into buckets. Despite the signs that read, ‘Do Not Smoke In This Area’, the place is as toxic as a Ukrainian village downwind of the latest leaking nuclear pile.

The smoke usually takes me unaware. Rushing for a train, I rarely register that I’ve moved from the city’s traffic pollution and into the nicotine cloud. Today, however, I was actually running a little early for the express back to London. I anticipated the danger of the Marlborough Miasma and my lungs didn’t go into mild shock when they started to suck up the tobacco. I also had a chance to examine the vertical exhaust pipes that we collectively describe as smokers.

For the most part, they were the shrivelled men, the yellow teethed youths, obese girls looking to make themselves thin. Yet on the far side of the crowd, there were two women standing by the doors. One was a very attractive young woman who could easily have modelled teeth. With enough of an overbite to chew me weak at the knees, her face was blemish free and welcomingly free of makeup. She was a beauty. Or she would have been but for the clouds of yellow coming from her nose.

Her friend was some years down Tobacco Road. Her skin was like Moroccan leather and her lips probably sealed with the strap of flesh that hung beneath her neck. At some distant time, she too had been attractive but now sallow eyed and with features worn down like an outcrop of sandstone years in the desert, hers was the face that should launch every packet of cigarettes.

I can’t explain it now. I doubt if I could explain it then. I don’t look to do good deeds. Sometimes good deeds just demand that I fulfil their destiny.

‘Look here, Miss,’ I said to the former ravishing beauty with all the teeth. ‘Do you want to look like this in a few years? Cut out the fags and I promise that you’ll never really age.’

And with that I walked away before another word could be said.

Cruel? Some might say so. But I think I might just have saved a young life.

But that’s me down the ankle. Madeley: activist, poet. nomad, and saviour.