just_writing | I'm a non-smoker, actually.

He’s put each unlit cigarette in turn into the ashtray. Eight white tubes now in half an hour, and not a trace of ash.

He breathes in, taps his fingers, looks around the drab room a bit, and his hand is back on the packet, shaking out another with a precise, easy motion.

It would have been simple, when he’d done this just a couple of times, to lean over and make some slight remark, some quip on him being a chain non-smoker. Too late now, and each repetition just winds up the air between us making it harder and harder to break the ice.

It’s not as if he couldn’t smoke. They have, after all provided us with ashtrays, and little burn-marks on the melamine tabletops show where they’ve been misused, or overused to overflowing. A lot of nervous people have spent time sitting in one of these uneasy chairs. Waiting.

Perhaps it would work if I offered him eight – no, nine now – matches? I could even sneak out for a minute and strike them, so I could offer him burnt ones, underlining the whole not smoking jag he’s on.

Or it could be incredibly stupid and rude.

Anyway I haven’t got any matches. I passed up the opportunity to buy ten Bic lighters from a chap outside the tube station on my way here. I could have given him nine of them and still had one for myself; I’d keep a black one.

Two of the people who were here waiting when I arrived have now left. One of them smoked. If I stretch just a bit I can see the ashtray over there and one two three stubs. Is that right? He used matches, and I’m sure I heard the rattle of a matchbox and the sound of a strike more then three times. Perhaps one went out and he had to relight it?

I’m glad I didn’t buy them , because it would be even ruder than the matches and if I had them I might have gone ahead and done it without thinking it though, and he’d probably be cross and I wouldn’t even have thought to keep a black one.

Or perhaps he left while smoking one? I wasn’t watching him because I was counting the cigarettes in the ashtray.

Funny. the chap selling the Bics was smoking a pipe, and they’re no good for lighting those.

But what if he was already smoking one when he arrived?

I’m out of cigarettes myself, and there’s all this waiting…