The Weight of Numbers

by Simon Ings

  Whatever strategy Kathleen picks and puts her trust in, it lets her down. There is no compass in this life, no way to measure latitude or longitude. There is no certainty in Life but Death. She knows this now. So the cold white walls of her Second Chance have risen around her. Within them, imprisoned by them, Kathleen has become bullet-proof. She will never be fooled again.

  ‘Look how heavy the traffic is!’

  ‘Why is the traffic so heavy tonight?’

  ‘I’ve never seen the traffic so heavy!’

  Kathleen stands before the window, chanting. Powerless. She is beginning to frighten even herself. This is what she wants: to be frightened by something other than life, that wellspring of escalating terrors. If she can only frighten herself, then it will be like being frightened by a friend; in other words, hardly frightened at all.

  Heavy traffic.

  ‘So many accidents, Saul!’

  Heavy traffic.

  Evoked by her panic, an image forms behind my eyes. William, my father, sat in his Hillman Minx, jostled from side to side by great juggernauts and tankers. He squeezes his elbows in and straightens his back, as though proper posture might save him. He keeps to his lane and maintains his speed, but this pathetic assertion of will only makes a collision more likely.

  I would like to give my mother some comfort – for my sake, as much as hers. God forbid she gets any worse. Her panic is an emotional flash-flood that leaves me winded and trembling. ‘Dad will be all right,’ I assure her, with all the hard-won authority of my nine years, and – painfully aware of my insufficiency – I hug her waist.

  Kathleen’s imagination is contagious. I can see, behind my mother’s eyes – clearly, as though it were a painted miniature – my father torn to shreds, strung between steering column and door pillar in a cat’s cradle of bleeding ribbons in the rain, somewhere outside Cosham, or Waterlooville, or Cowplain – all these wet barnyard names.

  Misery loves company. ‘What are we going to do?’ Kathleen cries.

  Ten years later: 1962.

  ‘Everybody makes mistakes,’ says William Cogan, the day he takes his final leave of the Southern Electricity Board. Today is the first day of the rest of his life – it says so on his card.

  To William Cogan: ‘The very best of luck’; ‘Be missing you’. No one has had the faintest idea what to write.

  A radio, tuned to an easy-listening station, snags the air the way a torn fingernail catches on clothing. The air is hot and chlorinated. A cake. A glass of warm white. For a leaving present, a crystal decanter.

  ‘Everyone makes mistakes,’ William says, towards the end of his thank you speech, as though excusing his colleagues for their shoddy performance today.

  Acutely aware, in this moment, of the possibility of making one of those inevitable mistakes.

  His eyes fixate on a point a few inches above his small, shuffling, distracted audience. ‘Everyone makes mistakes. The thing is—’ He swallows. ‘The thing is, to make as few mistakes as possible.’

  Saul, his son, gives a sober nod. Ah, my boy!

  The truth is, I’m finding something stirring and tragic about my dad today. Not much thought of by his workmates. Misunderstood (‘Relax! Have fun! Travel the world!’). Unacknowledged master of the straight line and sharpened pencil, amidst these messy office girls. (‘Look who he’s had to work with!’ Kathleen sighs in my ear: her sucked-lemon face.)

  In a couple of months I’ll be leaving home for Trinity College, Cambridge, where I will be studying Russian literature. Product of a sheltered upbringing, denied bicycles and sleepovers and childhood friendships, I have not the remotest conception of the world that is about to hit me.

  ‘Machines will take over what I did there,’ William says, with not one hint of regret, when we are home. Machines reduce the world to black and white. To zeros and to ones. Everything is either one thing or the other. Something or nothing. Such a system cannot make mistakes. ‘Machines will do this now.’ For another few years his pianola chest will labour, gears turning: his hands moving automatically across the paper, drafting a mill, a turbine, the plan of a granary. (To fill his retirement, he has joined a local society set up to encourage an interest in such things. He goes on trips to mills and goods yards and derelict factories to measure and draw for the little pamphlets the society prepares, two or three times a year. His drawings are professional, accurate, useful. Art without mistakes is art reduced to the techniques of draughtsmanship.)

  He says: ‘I have to get this done.’ He says, ‘They want me to do this.’ And: ‘This has to be finished by…’ I understand that these are expressions of happiness.

  William’s retirement means that there is little by which one day might be distinguished from another. Shopping day follows washing day. Gardening follows cleaning follows decorating follows gardening. In such an atmosphere, change becomes synonymous with accident, and novelty brings with it a tremor of fear.

  Kathleen, however, finds she cannot heighten her experience of life with the usual anxieties. She no longer has any reason to stand at the living-room window, looking out at the rain, dreaming up accidents. Now she says, ‘Do you have to leave all this everywhere?’ She says, ‘Do you have to do that at the table?’ She says, ‘Do you have to have it on so loud?’

  Come winter, returning home after my first term at Trinity, I find my father fixing strawberry netting over the garden pond.

  ‘Why are you doing that?’ I ask him.

  ‘Your mother is afraid the hedgehogs will drown.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We have hedgehogs,’ William says. ‘They can’t swim.’

  ‘Of course they can swim.’

  ‘The netting will keep them away from the water.’

  ‘Everything can swim.’

  ‘If they want a drink they can use the bird bath.’

  ‘You just need to prop something up in the water so they can crawl out. There’s nothing in there for them to crawl out on.’

  ‘She has it all arranged.’

  ‘A bit of wood or something.’

  ‘She has it how she likes it.’

  ‘They’ll still drown.’

  ‘This is good netting.’

  ‘They’ll still drown. They’ll still find a way in and then the netting will trap them and they’ll drown.’

  ‘I’m fixing this properly,’ he says.

  ‘It won’t make any difference.’

  ‘It will if I do it properly,’ he says.

  ‘No,’ I tell him, ‘it won’t.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Kathleen calls out from the kitchen. ‘Saul? What have you done?’

  Even now that I have left home, it will be a while before I acquire much mature coloration. I remain, in my dress and manners, that gifted, shy, nineteen-year-old schoolboy. My interests are broadly the interests I had as a child and I make a point, during the vacation, of visiting our neighbour – Mrs Wilson, an old woman, long widowed – so that I can thump about on her bizarre, oversize piano.

  ‘What are the pedals for?’ I remember asking her, many years before, confronted by the instrument for the first time.

  Mrs Wilson, a diabetic and double amputee, had her little legs on that day: stubby metal legs without joints, paddles in place of feet. They helped keep her upright in her chair. They were pretty useless for walking unless you were simply heaving yourself over from one piece of furniture to another. ‘Pedals?’ said Mrs Wilson, blinking at her paddles, where they dangled over the edge of her Cintique chair. ‘These?’

  ‘No! In there. The piano pedals.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said, and smiled. ‘The pedals.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, Saul, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, they make the piano softer or louder.’ Playing a little game with me.

  ‘Not those pedals. The others.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Mrs Wilson.

  It was a pianola. Mrs Wilson, perched precariously on the piano stool, directed operations: ‘Now turn t
hat catch. There. Yes. Now let it down. Gently, Saul, gently.’

  The belly of the instrument lay revealed: a handsome gutwork of rollers and spindles, needles and hammers.

  ‘See over there? In that basket? Get a roll.’

  I fetched a roll of paper from the basket. It was heavy, the paper thick like parchment. Mrs Wilson showed me how to string the punched paper roll between the sprockets. ‘There. Help me down now,’ she said.

  ‘Take a seat,’ she said, exhausted, balanced on her little legs. ‘You pump them. Those pedals. Like riding a bicycle. Do it hard, they’ll be very stiff.’

  I sat down before the pianola. I pretty much had to slide off the stool to reach the pedals. I began to pump, hard and heavy, on the wide rails set to either side of the usual piano and forte pedals.

  Within the belly of the pianola, something stirred.

  The thing played itself.

  Bar after bar, line after line and unfailingly, the pianola realizes its self-idea. As I stood in the Fratton office, sipping Blue Nun with his coworkers, I imagined spoked drums turning in my father’s chest. His narrow perfection.

  2

  ‘Must enjoy filing,’ it said on the card – and a Bloomsbury address. The library of a private society, requiring temporary assistance.

  I imagined the place, its pre-war interiors given over to elegant decrepitude. I pictured hallways lined with glass-fronted cabinets, and books and manuscripts in teetering piles. Portraits and small Byronic landscapes, steeped in a thick brown lacquer, lined the faded, silk-panelled walls; and were I to negotiate my way through the complicated, dust-smothered window-dressing in the first-floor drawing room, I would come at last, through the age-rippled glass of a sash window, upon a view of a secret garden contained by high walls, swathed in thick ivy of the deepest green. At first glance, the garden would appear deserted. Then, at the last moment, through the straggling knitwork of budleia and rhododendron, there would come a suggestion of movement, a figure. A young woman in a white dress. Were I to wind up my courage and raise the matter with my shadowy employers, of course they would deny her existence.

  ‘Six shillings an hour,’ my temp agent told me. Poodle perm; miniskirt; smooth, sallow thighs; thick ankles; large, unlikely breasts. Whenever she stood over me during my typing training, they hung over my head like a threat.

  On Monday morning I climbed the stairs and pressed the buzzer. The door honked angrily. I tested it with my hand. It gave smoothly, and I walked in.

  Fluorescent light robbed the hall of shadows. The sand in the fire bucket by the door was littered with fag-ends, all of the same make: the banded white filter of Gauloises Disque Bleu cigarettes.

  I moved towards the only open door, at the far end of the corridor. From it issued the sound of an old typewriter, as loud and loose-actioned as a steam loom. It stuttered, clack following clack at a rhythm just slower than a heart’s beating. The music of depression.

  Her name was Miriam Miller. She was tall and bird-like, her greying hair folded softly into a shapeless bun; fastidiously groomed but with a face so lined, dry-cured in French tobacco, it could not help but look dirty. A white blouse trimmed with navy blue.

  ‘Your attention to specifics is very important.’ Miriam’s gnomic turn of phrase was less distracting to me than her strangely impeded speech. It sounded as though a tape were stretching inside her, shifting everything vowel-wards. ‘S’s shushed like waves lapsing on a gravel shore.

  What was this place? I wondered. What did it do?

  ‘We service an international clientele,’ Miriam said. She made the place sound like a high-class knocking shop.

  ‘We concern ourselves with preservation,’ she said.

  I supposed at first she was talking about herself.

  ‘We foster Research.’

  What kind of research?

  The Society’s library resembled less an academic collection, more the well-worn core of an underfunded public library. What coherence could there be in a collection that rubbed the nasty blue-edged pages of Robert Heinlein’s Revolt in 2100 against six volumes of rambling theosophist autobiography entitled Old Diary Leaves?

  ‘Researchers’ came and went: men with unkempt beards and unreliable trouser zips; one or two utter derelicts (baffling hints of public library again); well-groomed women of a certain age. The more flirtatious of them would sometimes ask me, ‘What’s a handsome young man like you doing here?’

  In 1965, my last year at Cambridge, my father suffered his first stroke. Because my mother needed my help, the college authorities agreed to defer my final few semesters. This saved me the trouble and embarrassment of dropping out. It also entailed going home – something I had solemnly sworn never to do.

  In the featureless shell Mum had made of our home, Dad’s cerebral accident took on a terrible rightness: as though he, too, had been integrated into her vision of interchangeable white walls and wipe-clean surfaces.

  Mercifully, the repugnant fact of my father’s condition – the obscenity of adult helplessness – took my mind off home’s other horrors, at least for a while. His infantile walk, his arms extended, hands interlocked to straighten his paretic arm. The way he slumped in his chair, as though unstrung. The keening sounds he made when my mother and I forced his arm and shoulder through their exercises. The ridiculous bright ruler he used when he read the Express, so that his eyes would remember to travel to the left to start a new line.

  ‘He doesn’t even try!’ Mum cried.

  She brandished the word the way a maniac brandishes a blunt instrument.

  ‘Why don’t you try?’

  ‘You’ve got to try.’

  ‘Just try a little.’

  ‘Try just once!’

  Sadly, in this instance, she had a point. He did not fight back. He did not speak. He did not walk. Now and again – and according to the nurse this should have come under his control long since – he shat his pants.

  The truly grotesque element in all this was the degree to which none of it was novel. It was more like the physical manifestation of a psychological state with which Mum and I were already familiar.

  Throughout my childhood, he had depended entirely upon my mother for every bite of food, every drop of drink, every clean sock, every fresh towel; at the same time, he seemed entirely self-sufficient. Our affection left him indifferent, and so did our anger. He could take anything the world threw at him. How do you wound a ghost? How do you make a ghost stay? It was only his own inertia which kept him here with us. Had he had a fraction of the energy of other men, I am certain he would have found a way to leave us; and I would have run across him eventually, pursuing some solitary happiness.

  As it was, my father had done little for years but sit in his chair in the corner of the living room, watching the football results. When he rose from his chair, which was rarely, he moved from room to room with an air of muted dissatisfaction, like a commercial traveller, forever delayed, who has decided to eat just one more passable meal with the same reliable but overbearing landlady. Not forgetting her son.

  So though I trusted him, and even admired him, as children do, my father had never given me any reason to feel that I was related to him. Year after year we had observed each other through the thick glass of our mutual reserve.

  When Dad suffered his first stroke, I found myself bursting with such energy, I couldn’t sit still, I had to walk up and down the carriages of the train. By the time I was jogging up the hill out of Guildford towards the big new county hospital – I hadn’t the patience to wait for a bus – I could no longer pretend to myself that these feelings were normal. I was excited, but not anxious. I was happy to think of my father gone out of control at last. I wanted to hear him say ‘Gah’ and ‘Wonk’. I wanted to see him dribble.

  The fact was, I wanted him to be someone different.

  I remember when I got to the hospital, the nurses had only just found him a bed, so for a while we had to wait outside the ward. My mother’s fac
e was white as though dusted. She was full of that queer, nervous energy I had dreaded to see in her: an overwound toy, exhausting and useless.

  ‘What have I done!’ she wailed. (Six hours into my father’s stroke and she had already cast herself in the lead.)

  They let us in to see him.

  Half his face was missing. Where the left-hand side of his face should have been, there was only a greyish bag of loose skin. Where his eye should have been, there was a slit in the skin, and a black marble swimming inside it. His lips were bleary and thick and very pink. There was something grotesquely sexual about the smear his mouth made.

  Home again, and in her gleaming kitchen – impossible to imagine these surfaces have ever been contaminated by food – my mother weaves her web of unenticing possibilities: tea or apple juice, or there’s some orange barley water in the pantry; Jaffa Cakes or homemade scones. There are some chocolate biscuits somewhere, only she can’t find them, she’s been looking everywhere. You bite into a scone and she says, ‘Or there’s some cake.’ You stir your tea and she says, ‘Or would you rather have coffee?’ You tip strawberry jam onto an edge of a scone and she says: ‘Would you rather have honey?’ You take a bite of scone, raw flour coats the inside of your mouth and she says, ‘Ooh! There’s some quiche!’

  In the middle of the night, a scream.

  ‘Saul!’

  ‘Saul!’ she wailed, and entered my room, my old room, this room she had kept for me, and painted white for me, and which I had sworn never to sleep in.

  ‘Saul, he was such a good man!’

  Mum wanted to get her elegy in early.

  ‘He took me in, Saul! He took me in!’

  ‘Go to bed, Mother. Try to get some sleep.’