It’s a long time since I dreamed of smoking cigarettes, the delicious zing down the back of my throat and into my lungs, the exhilaration that comes with each puff. The terrible taste left behind such as you’d need to chew on mint gum or brush your teeth more regularly to freshen your mouth.
I began to smoke in my early twenties, a late start, when the man I was to marry smoked Galois cigarettes and gave the impression of such comfort in the short colourful sticks of tobacco, the brightly lit end, the ash as it fell, I could not resist. I thought it might help me overcome other hungers, for food and control, at a time in my life where my self-confidence was non-existent. Where every undertaking was fraught with peril.
To smoke as my father once smoked, as every one of my sisters and brothers once smoked, as most of my friends smoked, brought me into a club of confidence even as I worked in a Community Health Centre where nicotine was on the nose and the filthy habit frowned upon. Even the director of medicine at the Southern Memorial Hospital next door smoked, and all of us indoors.
Meeting rooms were thick with the fog of cigarette smoke floating above our heads and ashtrays were full to overflowing in all the consulting rooms, even at the front desks for visitors to stub out their cigarettes on arrival. It seemed then that everyone who was anyone smoked, even as the word was well and truly out: smoking was dangerous. It killed.
For five years I kept up the habit. One New Years Eve – both the man and I had married by then – we decided to stop after we realised how this habit controlled us. But we resumed soon after over an argument about what to cook for dinner, his preference pork chops, or mine, chicken schnitzels. I stormed off to the shops for yet another pack of Alpines.
We made up over cigarettes and more, and in time were back into the habit, until my youngest brother chucked the habit and the guilt bit deeper. Then another good friend followed his wife into not smoking. Our social times together were harder. It was not so okay to light up a cigarette in a restaurant before the meal came when you sat with friends who made conversation with longing and determination in their eyes. For them and with them as a model and with the beginnings of publicity campaigns that nipped at your heels I re-considered the need to stop smoking cigarettes.
Then I fell pregnant and what was hard became the easiest thing imaginable. On top of which I took to putting the money we spent on cigarettes into a separate account. After three months, we had saved enough money from not buying cigarettes, to take our no longer smoking friends to Stephanie’s Restaurant in Hawthorn. An expensive proposition but we had saved enough for dinner for four, which in those days came in at a whopping $20.00 per head, not including wine, which I no longer drank while pregnant.
For years afterwards I kept the thought alive: if things get too hard, if someone dies or if something feels impossible I can always take up smoking again. These last couple of decades the desire has gone, and I have stopped dreaming of smoking cigarettes. The thought now fills me with a type of terror, as if a single puff of smoke would constrict my airwaves and send me closer to my death.