Our grandfather’s father smoked himself to death. Each morning he’d wake up, plod towards the bathroom, splash his face with water and his chest with cologne. He’d keep his packet of cigarettes in the cabinet, and before he shaved, before the rays of sunlight hit the brass edges of the mirror in such a way that it illuminated his face like some shining angelic light, he would light a cigarette.

Our grandfather’s mother would be awake first, and would say the same thing every morning, her voice full of weight: no smoking in this house. The birds in the lemon tree outside looked at each other and shook their heads. The returning sound of bare feet padding down the pinstripe-wallpapered hallway preceded grandfather’s father’s otherwise silent march with cigarette still lit, an obstinate parade with an ever-lengthening thin grey banner of smoke wafting behind him.

We were never sure, but it was hypothesised that grandfather’s father smoked not because he was addicted, but because he was told that he was. In the very striking of the match against the red bumps of the matchbox, there was a sense of perversity. The camera zooms in close, closer, so close that the screen is filled with indistinct colours, impossibly close. Two atoms should bump each other, but they don’t, atoms being what they are. The crackling sound of a match striking a matchbox is the sound of two atoms unable to touch, no matter how close they get.

So with each breath in, now standing out on the back porch wearing the morning sun like a smoker’s jacket, grandfather’s father let the tobacco fill up every part of his lungs, imagining each cell being invaded in a silent (but for the echo of atomic howls) rebellion against his lover. Contrary to popular belief, not all suicides are attention-seeking acts. In fact, not all suicides are acts at all – many of them are lifelong endeavours. That is not to say that people are destined to kill themselves, or that suicide is something inherent to personalities of those unlucky ones chosen by fate to bring the asp to their milky white necks. But the fact is, Cleopatra would have objected to the idea that she was being perverse as much as if we had said she was just that type of girl. To rationalise or justify suicide is to imply that it means nothing. Is death meaningless? Two schoolgirls have an awkward silence in their philosophical late night sleepover conversation. Cleopatra stares the asp in the eye. Lights, curtain down. Grandfather’s father blew smoke rings that did the shimmy-shake before leaving and not saying goodbye.

Some suicidals are, of course, totally bonkers. Some, however, kill themselves not for love, specifically, but rather out of love. Perhaps it could be said that love kills them. Grandfather’s father, stubbing out his cigarette, would have believed the latter for its romantic value but not let the desire to contradict orders go unnoticed, either. He squashed out the butt on the stone step, flicked it in to the flowerbed and buried it with his toes. The plants sighed and shrugged their shoulders. He held his breath for a moment and exhaled the last cloud over their leaves. He felt old.

In France, age is a matter of having years, rather than being them. Time is possessed and accumulated, like empty matchboxes. Time is piled up; measured out with coffee spoons, so to speak. Consequently, every statement of age is bragging. I have twenty years.  I have lived them all. And I have arranged them in a delicate balancing castle. Sometimes they need dusting.

With all of their years, our great grandparents’ house was getting quite full. Calling out that breakfast was ready was an effort, what with all the years blocking the way of the words, but our grandmother’s mother still managed, and knew that her voice would bring back a cloud of smoke with a man inside. The kettle whistled as if to echo her words, and the morning sun from the bathroom had quietly slipped in and made itself at home.

The second part of this story begins with a change in the weather. It was overnight that the rain began, and after a week it still had not stopped. It soaked the ground until it was soft like skin in a long, hot bath. Our great grandfather stood on the porch in the grey morning in his cloud of smoke.

Our great grandmother was sickly. The rains had given her a cold, and she though she couldn’t smell the tobacco she could feel it deep inside her chest, like an instinct. With bleary eyes and a pink nose, she stormed out in a whirl of floral nightgown and simply picked the stub from great grandfather’s mouth and threw it in to the rain.

In the air there lingered a guilty haze. They looked at each other, we imagine, for a long while, without saying a word. Only the drips of the broken guttering and the lone calls of a deranged magpie interrupted their staring. Then great grandfather turned and walked inside the house, letting the screen door bounce behind him.

She could never have expected his reaction.

The next morning, great grandfather went out in the old rusted Holden and came back with boxes – many, many brown boxes. He put them all in the small room next to the lounge that had been empty for years since our mother moved out. Soon the room was half full, and our great grandfather went out again and came back with more. He only grunted his hellos to avoid any awkward questions, and in his wifebeater and dusty brown shorts, hair pomaded back and stubble on his cheeks, he continued his labours.

Eventually he appeared to be done. No one was sure what it was he had finished doing, but there was a sense of completion when he closed the door of the spare room and the sound of footsteps pressing up and down the hallway finally ceased. Great grandmother sighed a motherly sigh of relief and swept up the dust off the floor along with great grandfather’s smug footprints.

It wasn’t long before the wisps of smoke curled around the bottom of the door and up through the air like tendrils to tickle the hairs of great grandmother’s nostrils. Little fingers of smoke beckoned her to follow, and soon enough she was banging her heart out on the door of the room. You stop it, she screamed. You stop that filthy puffing in our house! Her voice was high and cracking and the coffee in her hand was shivering, dripping down her elbow. The smoke tendrils curled out ominously, as if the room itself were full of death. Trying the handle, great grandmother found herself locked out and with a bellow we never heard again, she ordered it to be opened. There was no sound from inside the room.

From outside, the room was equally impenetrable. The window was blocked off by a stack of boxes. A few stray curls of smoke escaped through the cracks in the glass, only to be instantly swallowed up by the rain. The birds in the trees eyed off this phenomenon with great interest.

And so a year was passed, if what they say is true. The banging on the door eventually stopped, and (as old people do) great grandmother gave up, first slumped to the floor like a sheet falling off the line, then washing the clothes, and then wading through her day much like, if not exactly like before. Whatever great grandfather was doing, she thought, was nothing to do with her anymore, and not her responsibility, as long as he cleaned up after himself and kept the screen door shut. She was over her sickness now, by the way. The camera shows us a montage of daily skills in lonely beige clothes and flat shoes. Curled up over the kettle with droplets from the steam running off her chin. Emotional piano music. Fade out.

Eventually, great grandma noticed that the birds had packed up and moved away from the window. She could never figure out why. All of a sudden her stereo avian soundtrack cut out the left side. Instead they sat at the kitchen window, silently peering in, as if watching the television over her shoulder as she washed her dishes.

Whether it was coincidence or fate that caused the heart attack, no-one knows, but the loud crash from the locked room and the jolt of pain in the left arm happened in harmony and on cue, perfectly orchestrated and heard by only the birds, who, after a short pause and a nod resumed their withheld song as if they had been waiting for this moment after all.

When our parents found great grandma on the floor, it wasn’t long before they found great grandpa on the chair facing the window. The door was unlocked, and as our mother opened it she felt herself almost blown away by the mushroom cloud of stale smoke that rushed into the house. Of course, not even the old trees outside were surprised that when our great grand parents were gone, the smoke clouds and the years still filled up the house more than we have ever managed to do, even with all of the stuff we put on shelves and in corners and in piles on the bench tops, over tables and under rugs, hanging from doorframes and stuck to walls; things we keep to pretend that the years and the cigarettes are barely building up at all.