The German Numbers Woman

by Alan Sillitoe

  Couldn’t think why, but he changed his mind about the M1, rolled around the Birmingham conurbation to the M40 turn-off, and headed southeast for London. He pressed the window button, to get rid of the beer and druggie stench of the hitchhiker, glad of the cold air to keep him awake. By-passing London, he would drop his load as arranged at Tonbridge, and keep on for the coast.

  Howard couldn’t know that, on the other hand, he was worth his weight in gold for his latest intelligence, that he was now part of the decision as to what should be done with it. Or when. He would ask Howard to type up a log of what exactly he had heard, or maybe only a résumé, giving black-and-white page proof, so that nothing more incriminating would be spoken by Judy or her girlfriend after it was handed in.

  Stopping at the next call box to inform Waistcoat would be seen as another startling exhibition of his power, for them to marvel at. On the other hand to wait a little longer might mean getting more information which he could use in some way for himself alone. To hang on for a typed log would make the matter easier to credit, while to delay telling what he knew would give more time for Howard to play his sentimental game. You could only handle Howard with the velvet touch, because he was the sort of person who had a mind that talked to him all the time, and so had to be treated with respect.

  No need to spoil Howard’s life unnecessarily, though at the same time he didn’t want him to spend all his listening hours on this one matter. He needed him back on day work, where he might for example find something more useful about the Afghan and central-Asian traffic. In that case it would be better to stop Judy’s mouth sooner rather than later. Yet Howard seemed so besotted that if she went off the air his despondency could put him out of action for a while.

  He had to be handled carefully. Being blind, he was a man of feeling, and it was strange that he had become his only friend after Amanda, a person he could talk to more or less freely – which he couldn’t always even with her. It had come about because of his attraction to Laura, though how far she looked on him as friendly – apart from merely charitable – was hard to say. She was even more of an enigma than Howard, as if she knew that to become open might let slip a deadly secret gnawing inside her. If such was the case, only some kind of psychic dynamite, of the kind well packed in the back of his car, would solve her problem.

  In spite of their long married life he thought Howard wasn’t as aware of her secret self as he imagined. Every woman had a secret self, and that was a fact. If you thought about it few people did or could get close because if they did there would be nothing to hold them together. Such a truth struck him as bleak, but obvious. With Amanda, their most violent quarrels occurred when the final barrier before mutual revelation was about to give, but they always kept it in place, by embarking on a wonderful bout of bedroom love. Perhaps they knew each other better than they thought, an observation which was not so bleak. He enjoyed long distance driving because the monotony allowed him to think, but he only wanted to deliver the packages and get home as soon as possible, so that he could rattle off a tape letter to Howard. He didn’t yet know the text but was confident that one would come as soon as he sat down at the key.

  SIXTEEN

  White gulls mocked him with their freedom, squealing in the unlimited blue. They concentrated on the area as if waiting for a house to break free, head for the open sea like a ship, and begin discarding choice leftovers for them to eat.

  He took off his cap to feel the wind. Instead of wondering what he would do if Laura went shopping and didn’t return, he thought: what if I didn’t go back from my morning walk? What if I was hit by a car, was incinerated by lightning, or strolled off the breakwater and drowned? Better still, what if I took a train to London, got to the airport, and boarded a jet for Brazil? Secret preparations would be necessary so, like a prisoner of war, I would work at my escape for weeks.

  On the other hand, how far can a blind man get on his travels? Hard to disguise myself as someone with sight, and clever is that man who can act blind without detection. The alarms would go off as if I really had escaped, and I would be brought home like a mental case, shackled to a triumphant social worker, a number painted on the back my jacket in case I made a run for it again. Even the gulls would become part of the search, circling the copse in which I had crawled to hide or die.

  He sat on a low wall halfway down the winding steps, relishing the touch of spring breeze. A man was digging in his garden, and Howard knew that the soil was rich and black from the easy sound of the spade going in. The leaf mould of last year and the emerging leaves of this had a cool vegetable smell, reminding him of his infants’ school when the teacher managed them across the road and into the hedged field for a lesson on how to recognise flowers and trees.

  Before leaving he had taken a signal from his wireless telling of nine stowaways who had been arrested some miles inland. The captain of the ship they had come on, now at sea again, was disputing the fact that his company should pay for their repatriation. The local police had checked the ship before leaving Casablanca, and found no stowaways, so how could it be his responsibility?

  Everyone in the world was on the move legally or without formality, and it was easy for those who had the will to get up and go. Even if the stowaways were sent back, their journeying would fill part of their lives, and the memory stay to be talked about. No doubt they would set off again, an enterprise to envy.

  He walked on when the man rested from his rhythmical digging, and the sea breeze took over from the smell of earthy life on rounding the bend, counting the taps with his stick so as to know when he was about to reach level ground.

  The igniting signal had lit a way through a lifetime of regrets. He would rather not have heard it, except that he could pass the message to Richard in his next morse letter. There was little to tell. Even the story about old Charlie coming back from Cherbourg with his launch full of drugs, heard supposedly in the pub, had been invented. A man must say something amusing when writing to a friend, and such items as smugglers getting caught appeared often enough in the newspapers. Still, it wasn’t good to spin a lie, and he wished he hadn’t done so, regarding the unease as an indication that he would not do so again.

  Instead of continuing to the beach at the bottom of the hill he turned and climbed slowly back, impatiently counting the steps so as to know when he reached the house. He imagined Laura’s lift of the eyelids as he opened the door. ‘What have you forgotten?’

  ‘I had my walk.’ He put his stick in the rack and took off his cap. ‘I got to the bottom, but suddenly felt it was futile to go any further.’

  ‘I’ll make your coffee, then.’ To think of her concern as worry would be extreme, yet his breaking of habit was always done for a reason. For weeks, instead of shutting down his wireless at eleven, he had stayed as if mesmerised till well past midnight. He no longer told her stories about what he intercepted. Was what he picked up responsible for his reticence, and if not then what could be? Nothing ever received had been of the sort to chill her, or surprise her, or alarm her, but it wouldn’t do to question him about a world they had agreed should be his own. A blind man needed more inviolable territory than anyone else, but what afflicted him must have something to do with what was part of him and not of her.

  A few days ago she’d heard the hum and click of morse as she stood in the kitchen. He must have been sending for at least half an hour, and on asking him why, he responded in a tone of not liking to be asked, which she hadn’t heard before. Then he admitted it was a tape letter to Richard, who sometimes wrote to him in that same way. They exchanged information about what each had heard on the radio and, if there happened to be nothing of interest, just what came into their heads.

  She didn’t therefore see how that could be the reason for his morose state, since they had been communicating for months. Nor did she think that if she knew morse she would gain any enlightenment by listening to Richard’s tapes. Another reason for his moods could be that the year-in and yea
r-out sameness of existence preyed on his spirit.

  She laid the coffee before him. ‘Perhaps it’s time we had another holiday.’

  ‘I’m happy enough here.’

  ‘I sometimes think you might not be.’

  He put sugar into his coffee, the first time in years. ‘I’m as happy as you are, my love,’ touching her wrist and joining thumb and finger around as if to gauge the span, one of his oldest caresses.

  Today the gesture annoyed her, though again it was too strong a word, merely that together with his new remoteness he was shackling her into a situation he wouldn’t explain. ‘I know, but I worry. Stupid, probably.’

  ‘I’m well, except that a shadow goes over me now and again. But it’ll pass. It always has.’ He wanted to get back to the radio, a drug impossible to do without, by day now as well as night. Judy might come on at any time.

  ‘Maybe we should go for you to have a check-up.’

  The cat brushed his ankles, and he pushed it forcefully away. ‘That won’t be necessary.’

  He was putting on weight, but eating gave pleasure. No harm in that. He had so few, apart from her. Going on a diet would seem too regimented to put up with.

  ‘I don’t want you to worry about me.’ He laughed, his old self. ‘That would really make me ail. I’ll go for a long walk after lunch, and it would be a pleasure if you’d join me.’

  He stroked the cat, and its rattling harmonised with her agreement. ‘I’d love to. We can go to the Pot and Kettle on the front, and have tea.’

  ‘We will,’ he stood. ‘In the meantime me and Ebony will listen to a few funny squeaks coming out of the wireless. Won’t we, pussy cat?’

  ‘We’ll get a novel on tape from the library later, to take your mind off things.’ She watched him go, no diverting him from whatever it was, and feeling still more desolate, though she couldn’t think why. There was no reason, except there must be. As he had often said, there was a reason for everything.

  A shake of the hand as he readied himself for the search. She hardly ever came on during the day, being busy in the galley serving three-course meals for a boisterous and hungry crew. The waving bush of atmospherics on her frequency sounded like the wash of water around the boat as it plied tricky channels of the Dodecanese. He consoled himself with the weather forecast: ‘A moist and unstable air circulation is still affecting the eastern Mediterranean. Patchy cloud and moderate visibility. Outlook similar.’ And so, he thought, is my future, though similar to what?

  The ten-o’clock transmission from France was useful for honing his brain. Even when I’m close to dying, or halfway to being ga-ga, I’ll still be able to take morse and work a typewriter. If my brain loses its sharpness for that it’ll prove I’m going into a darkness greater than the one I’m in now, and I’ll enter it quietly because there’ll be no option.

  The French station emitted a few score groups of letters, cunningly throwing in a figure now and again to fox whoever was taking it. Then came ten minutes of prose, which Howard got the gist of because he had taken the language for Higher School Certificate. Every little endeavour or event before the age of twenty had been drawn on to reinforce his life-long effort of survival.

  Laura once remarked as a compliment that only the simplest people could live their lives to the full, but he had never known till now how right her observation was, recalling it because today’s French transmission ended with: ‘… l’homme le plus simple du monde, ce n’est pas assez dire, il est avec les autres comme il est dans l’obscurité silencieuse de sa demeure,’ which he rendered as: ‘The simplest man, needless to say, remains, when among others, in the silence and obscurity of his own soul.’

  He moulded the daily aphorisms to the demands of his own mind, messages from God manipulated to distil the basic beliefs of his life, an innocent conceit, but supportive all the same. Some he recorded on tape for listening to whenever he needed to speculate on who he was, and ponder the reason for being on earth. They were more relevant than if coming through in English, for his imperfect French could suggest meanings that may not have been intended, or weren’t there in the first place. They tested his wits, prompted him to formulate questions and search for answers, unable to deny that any disturbance elevated his often deadened mind into a higher state than boredom or the mere transcribing of morse.

  He sometimes forgot the station for weeks until, one morning, without knowing that he needed to, he would give up his walk, and tune into the half-hour transmission, the hundred or so code groups inducing a mindlessness which prepared him for the gnomic utterance of the prose.

  The older he got, merely inhabiting himself wasn’t enough to satisfy his existence. The blister of discontent, there since birth, plagued him more because he was blind, an anguish of uselessness sometimes close to madness, as if he were an animal in the zoo and he the only member of the public looking on.

  An undignified picture but maybe it would guide him towards making a better situation for himself. If he could take morse, he was still sane, which was good. If he told Laura of his lack of moral fibre she would say he was restless, needed to see a doctor, or could do with a holiday, so he wouldn’t hint that anything was wrong because nothing was. Rather, in some ways, it was more right than since taking off for that last bombing raid over Germany. The flimsy covering of renewal was lifting with an effect as painful as when plaster was taken from a healing wound. He could only endure, knowing that uncertainty and discontent could be tolerated as long as you gave no sign to anyone else.

  He pressed the radio button, and put on earphones. A crushing phase of interference, like a load of gravel sliding from the uptilted back of a lorry when a new road is being laid out, obliterated a few words of the weather forecast from the Gulf of Mexico. What electrical machine caused the disturbance was impossible to know, the noise not lasting long enough to give clues. He heard the voice of Judy, the tone as if she was in danger, though most likely from exasperation.

  Judy:‘Still don’t hear you very well. I woke up at four this morning. I had a bad dream.’

  Carla:‘What it say?’

  Judy:‘Horrible. That’s all I remember. Then I thought about you, and went back to sleep. It was bliss.’

  Carla:‘What do you do?’

  Judy:‘Don’t be rude. It’s you I want, not me. It’s driving me crazy. Maybe it would be good if we didn’t talk like this nearly every day. I’d feel more settled perhaps. I hate the radio sometimes.’

  Carla:‘If you want.’

  Judy:‘I don’t want. It’s you I want, but I can’t have you. I want to be near you again. In two weeks I fly to England, and stay a fortnight at my aunt’s place in Boston.’

  Carla:‘Boston in America?’

  Judy:‘No, silly.’ (laughs) ‘Boston in Lincolnshire. That’s where the people came from who went to America. So they called their town Boston. Don’t you know about the Pilgrim Fathers?’

  Carla:‘Don’t like fathers.’

  Judy:‘Nor me. Somebody will take my place here on the boat, then I can leave. Maybe you can come with me.’

  Carla:‘I can’t. I work here.’

  Judy:‘Ask your boss for leave.’

  Carla:‘Maybe not possible.’

  Judy:‘I’ll see you in Madrid then, on my way up.’

  Carla:‘Yes, I think. Two nights, I can. You meet old boyfriend in England?’

  Judy:‘Don’t worry. I’ve only seen him once since I met you. He took me out to dinner but I told him he was wasting his time. It’s no good, I said to him. Forget me. I only love you, Carla.’

  Carla:‘I’m jealous.’

  Judy:‘You needn’t be. We should live together.’

  Carla:‘We can’t. You don’t understand.’

  Judy:‘I do. I know we can’t live together. Anyway, I like this job, but only for a few weeks at a time. But why can’t we live together, I should like to know.’

  Carla:‘We damn lovers. In autumn yacht go in dock. I have more time. Maybe we see m
ore each other.’

  Judy:‘Yes, that’ll be good. In September we’re going to do things in the Azores. I can’t say more.’

  Carla:‘Tell when we meet. If long way away, in Atlantic, no radio talk, too far, maybe.’

  Judy:‘We’ll have to write letters.’

  Carla:‘Difficult for me. Telephone could be. We find way.’

  Judy:‘You’ll have to come to England.’

  Carla:‘No good for me.’

  Judy:‘I know. You’ll be with your man. You never talk about him.’

  Carla:‘What the use? You know about him from start. No secrets.’

  Judy:‘I know. I love you. I don’t want to upset you. Lots of mosquitoes in this place. I swat them. I see all the rooms we’ve been in, I go through the list of places we’ve been together in, every night I do it, over and over again, so that I can get to sleep. It always works.’

  Carla:‘I think of you. Much pain, though. I think of restaurants we eat in. But time to go to sleep. Siesta time for me.’

  Judy:(laughs) ‘You don’t love me anymore.’

  Carla:‘I do. I prove it when we meet, OK? What about your crew, what they do?’

  Judy:‘Oh, don’t worry. The captain’s forty-eight years old, and he’s got a girlfriend called Brenda. She goes back tomorrow. I can’t hear you very well. Maybe I’ll let you go. Let’s talk at the same time tomorrow.’

  Carla:‘All right. I’m sleepy now. I call you.’

  Judy:‘We call each other. Love you, Carla.’

  Carla:‘Kiss, kiss, Judy.’

  A Niagara of atmospherics scraped his eardrums to an itch. Able to hear both voices on the air, which neither of them could, he caught a tone in Carla’s that Judy missed, and something in Judy’s that Carla wouldn’t notice. Judy was infatuated (you might say almost in love) to the point of destruction. Carla no doubt liked her, flattered to have her on the line, and proud to have such a compliant English girlfriend, though they met so rarely – and she may not be the only one. She’s a sailor, after all. He speculated as to how long the affair would go on, and hoped not for much longer. They were near the end, but who would break first? He noted impatience in Carla’s tone at Judy’s importunities, which she couldn’t control, or didn’t care to. From his God-like position he felt the threads weakening, yet hoped they wouldn’t break because he wanted to continue listening, keep them under control. On the other hand he would like them to separate so that he could have Judy to himself, at least in memory.