Barry Lee Thompson

I heard a delightfully subversive lyric on community radio the other morning. Something like: I’m going to come to your house in the middle of the night and put a cigarette in your baby’s mouth. It got me thinking about a childhood event. My brother, a generation older than me, used to describe an occasion from my infancy when our Uncle Jimmy came to the house and put his cigarette in my mouth. This story intrigued me, partly because I’d apparently started smoking so early — also because my brother remembered the event so keenly, while nobody else seemed to. No one corroborated — but no one denied it either. The silence must have landed for my brother too, because he brought the memory up several times over the years. His attempts to get an acknowledgement grew more desperate — to my mind, anyway — until one day he asked outright, ‘Does nobody else remember this?’. Silence.

Reflecting on it all, two questions emerge. Was the cigarette lit? I think so — otherwise, why bring it up? And what lay behind the silence that met my brother’s memory? Did it represent complicity, or did more transpire after the cigarette was administered, a nuance my brother missed or forgot? Perhaps something darker occurred that he isn’t aware of. Maybe my father took Uncle Jimmy outside for a ‘word.’ Maybe my mother did. In that case, was the memory too difficult for them to dwell on, or even acknowledge?

A cigarette in the mouth of a child, encouraged by a responsible adult, inspired the title story from my collection Broken Rules and Other Stories (Transit Lounge). It was one of the first pieces I wrote after moving to Australia. Told from the point of view of a grown child, the story depicts a young boy being given a cigarette by one of his mother’s friends, while in another room his father marks student papers. The mother is complicit, the father corrective. The portrayal of a maternal figure subverting conventional caregiving expectations may strike a reader as both unsettling and powerful — it also invites reflection on the complexity of adult behaviour and moral choices. But was there even a breach of care? Long-held anger simmers within the father’s perspective, hinting at layers the child can only later perceive.

‘Broken Rules’, a prizewinner in the CAE Short Story Competition, can be read here.