Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 124, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 757 & 758, September/October 2004

Smoking has always been social, associated with parties, drinking, fun. But these days there’s a new dimension. I’m talking about the way all us smokers gather in doorways outside office buildings and factories, the places where we’re sent now we’re banned from the insides. So those of us who persist, who resist, who continue, we’re all bound to bond. When you’re huddling together from the cold, you make friends.

And together we have common cause to complain. Fat people aren’t sent out to eat. Idiots don’t have to go make their dumb mistakes in the rain. Parents aren’t sent to the bike shed with the bore-the-knickers-off-you pictures of their bloody children. I’ve known people who pretended to be smokers just to get away from all that.

Yeah, we’re social on the doorstep, in ways the people left inside just aren’t. That’s what I find. I mean, I haven’t done, like, the kind of research you read about in the papers, but it’s my experience, and I’m not special or different, I’m just ordinary. So I bet it’s true.

There’s other things that follow from us being on the doorsteps. I mean, we’re out there at times when before everybody — us included — was inside. I won’t go so far as to say I think we’re healthier than our work mates because of the fresh air we get, but if some clever clogs did research that said so, it wouldn’t knock me down with a feather. And another thing is we see things that didn’t used to get seen, you know? We’re bound to, aren’t we? Being as how we’re out there looking around when nobody used to. So that’s the thing with smoking — there’s cons, but there’s also pros.

I work at Evening Eye, a fair-size factory for the Marston Trading Estate — we have thirty-eight of us on the production side. I don’t know what Evening Eye made when Jake, the owner, first picked the name. That was back when the factory was in the town center, and before my time. But you have to be flexible to keep a business above water these days, what with the market ups and downs and all the new technological stuff. You have to be ready to respond to the market. Jake says so, and it makes sense. Whatever he made back then, now we make handbags. Not lumpy, everyday bags a housewife will chuck all and sundry into. We’re upmarket, us. We make evening accessories for the posh and famous. Not Posh herself yet, but lots of other rich people, some of them so posh I’ve never even heard of them.

Our bags are finest quality, made from the best materials. A third of our output is filling special orders, but we do bread-and-butter top gear, too, sold in high-tone catalogues and in places like Harrods. Not like Harrods. In Harrods. Well, you know what I mean.

All of it, even the catalogue stuff, is handcrafted. It sells for a bomb. We’re in the haute fashion industry, so it ought to.

Evie says back when we were in town Jake didn’t let us smoke on the factory floor either, because of the combustibility of stuff like the silks and velvets. But back then you could smoke in the canteen, no problem. Out here he doesn’t even have a canteen. A sandwich wagon parks down the street every day in front of the double-glazing place. If you don’t bring your own, that’s where you get your grub. Unless you’re one of them that goes off-site for lunch every day. I say them, but I mean only the one who does that on a regular basis, from the thirty-eight of us on the floor.

Evie says Jake moved the business during really hard years when lots of companies were going under. He survived by selling the town site, moving to the unit in the trading estate, and using the cash difference to retool. Committed to Evening Eye, is Jake. It’s his life and soul, anybody can see that. It doesn’t make him likable, but we respect him for it. And the business is still here, even if the thirty-eight of us used to be ninety-six of us when he was in town, according to Evie.

Evie used to be a smoker, like me. She tried to stop half a dozen times, and then all of a sudden it worked. She doesn’t know why. There aren’t nearly so many smokers now as there used to be, only three now, among the thirty-eight. But we three nowadays get together on the doorstep with the mattress makers from across the road and the double-glazing people and the carpets man and the something-to-do-with-cars people. All the smokers of this section of the estate smoke together. And we have a good laugh. As I said, in some ways it’s more social than it’s ever been.

Which is just as well, because back inside, at work, it’s less social than it used to be. Jake has never been an easygoing guy, but now he’s being Monster Boss. That’s because he’s discovered that somebody’s nicking.