The Weight of Numbers

by Simon Ings

  ‘No one else would touch me. No one.’

  ‘Is there anything in the bathroom cabinet that would help you sleep?’

  ‘Saul, you don’t understand.’

  ‘Some hot milk?’ I was baiting her. It was irresistible. I was so tired.

  ‘He’s been like a father to you. Hasn’t he? Hasn’t he been like a father to you? He’s given you everything, hasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. Biting my tongue. Crossing my fingers. ‘Yes, of course he has.’

  ‘Not every man would do that, Saul.’

  She was calming down now. She was Delivering a Lesson.

  ‘I know that, Mum. He’s been a great dad.’

  She burst into tears.

  I laid my hand on hers.

  She clutched it.

  ‘He did know, Saul. I didn’t trick him. He knew before we were married. I did tell him.’

  ‘Tell him what?’

  She blinked at me. ‘That I was pregnant,’ she said.

  ‘That you were what?’

  She tried to get into bed with me.

  I eased past her and out of the room, touching her as little as possible.

  ‘What have I done!’

  ‘Kathleen,’ I said, from the kitchen, ‘shut up.’ I filled the kettle. My hands were shaking with excitement. I was filled with a sense of sudden and unexpected freedom.

  As soon as my mother had learned how to handle things, so that the spotlight of her anxiety shifted naturally onto me:

  ‘Have you done your university work?’

  ‘Have you got much university work to do today?’

  ‘Don’t forget your university work.’

  ‘Leave this – go and do some university work.’

  (‘Wonk,’ my father added. ‘Gah.’)

  – then I got the hell out of there. I couldn’t face going back to my studies and, without my college grant, I had no money. So I did the only thing left to me. Yet another thing I had sworn never to do. I got a job.

  The Society hosted speakers. There were talks on Wednesday evenings, sometimes illustrated by means of slides or an overhead projector. P. J. Mills of Surrey University presented ‘Teaching Systems, Present and Future – a Multiple Image Tape/Slide Presentation’. There were poetry readings.

  When I first began working here I used to wonder how on earth the Society – this dowdy old maid off Gower Street – survived the modern world. It should surely have perished of its own anachronisms years ago. So much for the arrogance of youth. As I began to understand the Society’s past, I began also to understand its strength.

  The Society had accreted around the writings of the Polish-born American linguist Alfred Korzybski. In the early 1930s Korzybski had developed a theory of relations that did away with the notion of cause and effect. (He was, like all his generation, besotted with Albert Einstein’s recently published General Theory of Relativity, and his misreading of it made him the first and greatest of the century’s many quantum quacks.) Korzybski declared that everything exists, not because it acts, not even because it thinks (which is, after all, only another kind of acting), but because it is already related to everything else. Cause and effect are merely special manifestations of a relation that already exists.

  But if everything is connected to everything else, then the dimensions that separate things from each other – the three spatial dimensions that place things at a distance, and a fourth dimension, time, which makes that distance meaningful – these have no absolute reality. They are, in fact, contingent upon this higher relation of universal connectedness. That being so (the Society’s earliest pamphlets argued) might we not use dimensions to our own advantage? They might not turn out to be barriers at all, but doors…

  So the spirit of the times drew the Society away from a dry study of Korzybski, and into a frequently confused relation with the many other societies trying, with varying degrees of rigour, neurosis and faith, to come to terms with the scientific ideas of the time. Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott spoke here, and for a while the Society toyed with the principles of theosophism. Bequests from leading spiritualists sustained the Society during the war years, and after the war, science fiction had a major impact on the Society: files of correspondence with A. E. Van Vogt and Robert Heinlein – both at one time or another devotees of Korzybski – were treasured between sheets of acid-free tissue in a fire-proof safe.

  The Society had been gorging itself on the new ever since. The second week into my job, I nearly passed out to discover that John Lennon topped Miriam’s wishlist of future speakers. (He never came.)

  Sat at the back of the Society’s puzzling library with my card indexes, my sharpened pencils and my plastic loose-leaf binder detailing the Society’s bizarre scherzo on the Dewey system, I was cut off from anything resembling a lived life. Three years went by while I sleepwalked among the stacks.

  In March 1968, I woke to discover I had become one of the Society’s less vital internal organs.

  A spleen.

  A gland.

  Something unspecialized as yet. Something barely aware that it served a greater metabolism, that discerned only dimly that it lived in a body at all. Something which, if you excised it and grafted it elsewhere, would survive; and not only survive, but adapt, adopting over time the structure and function of the part to which it was newly joined. (‘Saul, do the books’, ‘Saul, introduce our speaker’, ‘Saul, type a letter’.) The outside world had been coming through to me so thoroughly digested, so strongly flavoured by the Society’s guts, I was hardly aware what strange times these were.

  It was Noah Hayden who woke me. We ran into each other on the street, one evening at the beginning of March.

  ‘Saul!’

  I didn’t recognize him at first. An honours student at St John’s, the latest in a long line of academics and political players, my old room-mate had exhibited, all the time I had known him, the careless charm and casual irony of a privileged caste. Darling of the left-wing, founder of the New Left Reading Group; wits had it that Noah Hayden put the champagne into socialism. It had never occured to me that he would turn native. Bumping into him three years later on the corner of Frith Street and Old Compton Street, confronted with his beard, cravat and velvet coat, I stepped backwards and practically fell into the road.

  We went for coffee to Bar Italia – a brightly lit utilitarian café so long and narrow it was more a sort of corridor. We perched on stools beside a chrome shelf which ran the length of the room. Everything glittered: tiles, mirrors, crockery. The broiling reflections in that place were an open invitation to schizophrenia.

  ‘So what are you doing now?’ Hayden asked me.

  What was I doing? His lack of self-consciousness amazed me. In that get-up – he looked like a demonic ring-master fallen on hard times – it was surely Noah who owed me the explanation.

  I opened my mouth to tell him about the Society, the library – and no words came. This was the moment it dawned on me that maybe three years was a long time to spend treading water. Maybe it was too long. I made some noises eventually, using my father’s condition as an excuse for my lack of news. Noah Hayden reached over and squeezed my arm in sympathy, and I felt like a shit.

  At college, Hayden’s inherited self-confidence had made him class-blind. He would drink himself under the table with a party of hoorays one evening, all political differences suspended for the sake of good companionship; the next day he’d be talking protest tactics with the sons of Jarrow marchers in a little diner in the Backs, stuffing his greenish, hungover jowls with cheap waffles.

  I was the petty-bourgeois dullard in the corner, the one who belonged in neither camp, and I was as solemn as an owl. Though the first in the family to go to university, I could hardly pretend to be working class, what with my piano lessons and my Penguin Classics paperbacks for Christmas.

  If I had kept to myself, it wouldn’t have mattered; no one would have stopped me living an anonymous life. But I had discovered, dr
agged along to meetings by my room-mate, that politics offered a different sort of anonymity: identification with a tribe.

  While student revolt gathered pace in Paris and London and Madrid, in the New Left Reading Group we contented ourselves with organizing sit-ins to protest the college curfews. The rest of the time we spent living up to our name: we read. Because I had the knack of languages, I proved useful to Noah Hayden and his precocious Group when it came to unpicking the gnomic pronouncements of Guy Debord, founder of the Situationist International in Paris. It is possible that I was Debord’s first English translator. This was, for my money, a much better thing to be than what I truly was: the passive beneficiary of my parents’ graft and saving; the grammar-school-educated child of parents who had had to buy their own education late in life, in church halls and schoolrooms after hours, who believed it was a right and good thing to aspire, to amass everything they could in order to invest it, all of it, in their child.

  My parents believed, as no generation since has been able to believe, in the overwhelming moral power of financial generosity. Having lavished so much on me, they took my gratitude as a done deal. Their psychological incompetence was extraordinary. At the end of my first term at university my father sent me a cheque, bailing me out of a debt I’d run up at Heffers bookshop. He signed his accompanying letter, ‘Yours sincerely, your Father.’

  ‘Why’s he writing “yours sincerely”?’ Noah Hayden asked me, when I showed this letter to him. ‘That cap “F” is very good, by the way.’

  ‘Because I am known to him,’ I replied. ‘If I was not known to him he would have written “Yours faithfully”.’

  I had to tell someone. I had to turn it into a joke. I didn’t think I could bear it otherwise. For these first, difficult months Noah Hayden was my lifeline, and he never let on that he knew.

  ‘And what about you?’

  He told me the New Left Reading Group had fallen apart not long after I dropped out, stifled by its own inertia. Hayden took his finals, but claimed not to know whether he had even got his degree. ‘I’m not bloody going back there again,’ he said. His scowl was extraordinary. It was ludicrous. It was pasted on – the worst sort of bad acting.

  ‘St John’s?’ I said, not really understanding him. ‘Cambridge?’

  He waved his hand, dismissively. ‘Any of that shit.’

  For all the fierceness of his political rhetoric and his increasing obsession with the situationists, I had never had Hayden down for a drop-out. But how else was I to interpret his words? Or his clothes? The longer we talked, the more it seemed that Hayden had fallen out the bottom of his political convictions into some hyper-theatrical space of his own.

  ‘Are you coming on the march?’ he asked me.

  There was a big demonstration planned in Grosvenor Square the next day, a Saturday, to protest the war in Vietnam.

  ‘We’ll show those Trot bastards a demo!’ he exclaimed, rubbing his hands.

  It was a different language he was speaking: a puerile rhetoric of cheap aggression. Vietnam was a distant blur on his radar: he was more interested in the other marchers and how misguided they were.

  They weren’t his own words, of course. They were something he had learned over three years of drifting and unemployment – what he called ‘action’. This was a good time for Svengalis, and just as I had fallen under Hayden’s spell at university, Hayden – unexpectedly daunted by the world outside St John’s – had found himself someone to believe in.

  The real story, such as it was, came out in asides and gestures. It was all ‘Josh went to Strasbourg in sixty-six.’ ‘Did you read Josh’s piece in IT?’ ‘Josh is planning this freak-out happening in Selfridges.’ (Even his syntax had been torn down and rebuilt in his master’s image.) It was all ‘Josh’s barmy army’ and ‘Josh’s knit-your-own revolution’. Scathing and intimate, Noah’s off-hand comments revealed his infatuation.

  I don’t remember much about the march itself. I only went along to meet up with Hayden, and in the press of people we somehow missed each other. From the Society’s top floor, I had got not a hint of how strange the world had become. Now I was in the thick of it, trapped by the press of marchers up against a party of German students, row after row of them, running on the spot, then performing lusty squat thrusts, as though they belonged to some sort of youth movement. There were even a handful of bona fide clowns and jugglers. A welter of languages I’d not heard before outside the classroom dissolved, as we paraded along Oxford Street, into one long monotonous chant: ‘Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!’

  Three men in gorilla suits and straw boaters passed me, howling in reply: ‘Hot Chocolate! Drinking Chocolate!’ One of them took off his head to grin at me. It was Noah Hayden. The next second, he was gone.

  I don’t remember much else.

  I remember Grosvenor Park; the darkening of the day; the sealing of the exits.

  I remember the sky filled with clods of earth, and from this I know I must have been near the embassy, right near the front of the line, because the clods were raining down on us, and they hurt.

  I remember someone screaming, and the hooves of the police horses and the sound they made, that non-sound, so unthreatening, like a thousand packets of soft butter falling onto a wooden floor. A great turbulence swept through us, the whole crowd knocked off-balance, and I remember, in that crowd, it felt as though the world itself were dipping and swinging like a passenger plane hitting a pocket of dead air. I remember the crowd scattered, and a white horse reared, and I remember a man with a stick, and the stick coming down.

  I remember the taste of earth, and hands under my shoulders, testing my weight. And a gorilla’s head, seconds before a boot stoved it in, and another boot, scissoring, kicked it away.

  I woke up on a mattress on the floor of a big, tatty room in a house I didn’t know. The trees outside the window were orange, and the sky was black. It was night-time. Beside the bed there was a bedside lamp, and a scarf over the bulb, and a smell of scorched linen. I pulled the scarf away. The light lanced my eyes. I groaned and turned away, and found myself facing a door. It was ajar. Beyond the door, a chair dragged; there were footsteps.

  A teenage girl with blond hair shorn close to her scalp came in and knelt down beside me. She laid her hand on me: my brow, my hand, my shoulder. Her eyes glittered oddly in the light coming from the lamp. She went out again and came back with a bowl of tinned tomato soup and a cup of tea. While I ate I heard other footsteps; a loud, laughing conversation, curtailed suddenly by the careless slam of a door. Comforted, I slept a while more.

  I had a crashing headache when I woke up again, and the room was full of people. I sat up.

  My shoulder was red raw: there would be a bruise the size of a plate there tomorrow. But it moved OK. I wondered who had undressed me.

  ‘Hey there,’ said the girl, noticing me from where she sat, propped up against the opposite wall. She wasn’t much more than a child. The rest of them were hardly older. A boy came in with a bundle of something wrapped up in newspaper. I assumed it was chips, but I couldn’t smell them.

  ‘Where’s Noah?’ the boy asked, glancing round.

  ‘Still in the Rio trying to get served, I’d guess.’

  The boy knelt down and unrolled the newspaper, revealing a bundle of cannabis.

  There were books propped up on the window ledge. I could tell I was coming to, because the spines began popping into focus. (Colin Wilson. John Braine. No wonder the revolution failed.)

  ‘Hey there.’

  It was easier to interrogate the books than the people. I couldn’t maintain eye contact with anyone for more than a couple of seconds before their faces began to distort, as though their eyes were little gravity wells.

  ‘Hey.’

  The air was spiced suddenly; someone was holding a joint under my nose.

  The girl who’d fed me soup went out and came in with a wicker sewing basket under one arm and a bundle of black fur trailing across the carpet behind her
.

  It was a gorilla suit.

  She dropped without ceremony onto the middle of the floor and began unpicking the threads at the gorilla’s sides. Without thinking, I took a drag of the joint and handed it over to her.

  ‘How you doing?’ she asked me.

  ‘The gorilla suits.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You’re urban gorillas.’

  She smiled. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘You just got it.’

  ‘I did?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s to get?’

  ‘That,’ she said, nodding at the gorilla fur spread over her lap.

  ‘The pun?’

  ‘The deconstruction.’

  ‘The what?’

  She was really very young, maybe sixteen or so, and wanted to be taken for someone older. I thought about Noah Hayden and his extraordinary transfiguration from political player to anarchist clown. Was everyone here playing a part?

  She pushed the suit aside, crawled over and hunkered down beside me on the mattress. ‘“The Spectacle is a slave society’s nightmare, merely expressing its wish for sleep.”’

  Guy Debord again: a more elegant rendering of his famous line than any I had ever come up with. ‘What’s your name?’ I asked her.

  ‘Deb,’ she said. ‘Debbie. Deborah.’ She seemed unsure.

  Another handful of people walked in and Debbie nudged me over, making room on the mattress. It was then, glancing at her, that I noticed, through her fuzz of blond hair, that her skull had a perfect dent in it, the size of a half-crown. Her brutal hairstyle suddenly took on a new and disturbing meaning for me. What if it wasn’t some sort of statement? What if it were something to do with that frightening dent?

  About an hour later, Noah came in. He was still in full Jerry Cornelius get-up. Debbie got up and went over to him and kissed him on the mouth. Noah had a black eye and news from Vine Street, where two of their number were spending a night in the cells. ‘You know Josh is still bound over?’

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Josh is fucked.’

  News of Josh’s fuckedness rattled around the room like a bean in a can. Underneath their anger, people seemed secretly delighted, as though, of all of them, Josh had made it to the next round.