The Weight of Numbers

by Simon Ings

  He opens the connecting door.

  The room beyond is lighter, busier, more modern. Fluorescent lights hang from a ceiling stained with damp. The uneven floor is covered with a thin carpet of an indeterminate colour. A big, unhealthy man waves him to a desk. There is a radio playing, tuned to an international station. The voice of Mission Control comes through uncluttered by translation: ‘We have loss of signal as Apollo Eleven goes behind the moon. Velocity 7,664 feet per second, weight 96,012 pounds. We’re seven minutes and forty-five seconds away from lunar orbit insertion.’

  Seven minutes and forty-five seconds later, the means and timing of Anthony Burden’s departure from Lourenço Marques have all been dealt with, quickly and without fuss. The false name on his documents sounds the only unorthodox note. Otherwise he might be any other independent traveller signing aboard a tramp steamer.

  ‘Apollo Eleven, Apollo Eleven, this is Houston, can you read me?’

  ‘The captain will hand you your new passport shortly before your arrival.’ The man’s patter could only have been acquired by his dealing with a dozen similar requests a day. Burden imagines this stream of men who enter the shipping office, more or less desperate, more or less confused, only to emerge, a few minutes later, rebranded.

  He knows of no reason why he should run, much less why he should abandon Mozambique, or why he should make his getaway in so uncomfortable a mode of transport, and under a false name at that. At the same time, he is finding it increasingly difficult to think up reasons why he should stay. Everything about his life here is evaporating like the toils of a dream a minute after waking.

  How can he go home? He cannot even remember the name of his road.

  Neil Armstrong says: ‘We’re going over the Messier series of craters right at this time, looking vertically down on them and, hey, we can see good-sized blocks in the bottom of the crater. I don’t know what our altitude is now but those are pretty good-sized blocks.’

  Anthony walks reluctantly out of range of the radio, out of the room and the building, and into the eyeblink-short tropical evening, boarding papers crumpled in his hand, and with the dizzying sensation of having been flushed through a gap no wider than a clerk’s anonymous smile into a new world.

  Back in the office, Buzz Aldrin sighs: ‘When a star sets up here, there’s just no doubt about it. One instant it’s there and the next instant it’s just completely gone.’

  PQRD

  1

  Summer 1944.

  Dick Jinks – a merchant seaman long since invalided out of the service – takes apart his customer’s starter motor and spreads the pieces across his work table, its surface scarred by years of plier-work, chisel-work, horse-chains mended, bridles restitched, saddles restuffed and invisibly repaired. The table’s legs are raised on bricks so that Dick can work standing up. Sitting down, alas, is a fond and ever-dimming memory for him, whose red-faced ‘oofs!’ and ‘aahs!’ have given way this past year to more clenched forms of suffering. Dick picks up a piece of the dinky little motor, studies it – what will they think of next? – and pops it into his mouth as though it were a plum. He swills it around his mouth until it is clean, spits it out onto a cleanish rag, dries it and picks up the next.

  Alice, Dick’s wife of eleven years, threads her way into the covered yard, their new baby in her arms, and tries not to muss up her cotton frock on the gear piled all around: farrier’s irons in a rusty tin drum, heavy rubber tyres, some of them inflatable, most the solid sort, huge wooden horse collars, an anvil; a broken tractor wheel, higher than a man. Sunlight shines into Dick’s dark nook through her frock, silhouetting thighs grown thick from child-bearing, calves still shapely, and knees – well, knees, as ever, too small; fragile knots of bone. Dick Jinks harbours a secret, wincing fear for her knees.

  Their first child, the trigger for their shotgun marriage and young Dick’s precipitate flight to sea in 1934, would have been eleven now, had she not died within hours of her birth, leaving Alice, fresh sea-widow, heartbroken and alone. For his part, Dick was none the wiser for the longest while, for he was already out in mid-Atlantic and, at the moment of his baby girl’s death, only hours away from the engine room explosion and the defining cataclysm of his own life.

  So this new arrival, apple of his mother’s eye, this little Nicky Jinks, represents an unexpected second chance (cafeteria sign still faced ‘Open’, gingham-curtained door unlocked, a memorably swift, stiff violation against the serving counter, the only copulatory position of which Dick, her poor spinelocked darling, is now capable).

  From 1934 to now, in the interval between their dead child and their live one, between Dick Jinks’s running off to sea and his return, what has his life been?

  He cannot remember.

  Dim impressions of a horsehair couch, leather, like an operating table. Pictures on a wall, a foreign city, nowhere he knew or could imagine. The echo of a name, Pál, as in, ‘me and my pal’, the pun as hollow as a skull’s grin. The taste of rubber.

  Nothing coheres.

  ‘Come along, Mr Jinks.’

  Instructions. Admonitions. Corridors of pale green or mustard yellow. Doors with numbers. Hoses. Beds.

  ‘Where are we?’ says a voice inside his head. A woman’s voice.

  He looks around him for an answer. This grotto, filmed with oil. These things – tat for farmers’ horses, tyre irons, lifting tackle, all the stuff of a modern blacksmith’s trade. It should be colourful in here. Yellow paper wrappers round the tins of engine grease. Wheel jack a cheery red enamel. Saddle leathers tan and butterscotch. The colours here have been first muted, then swallowed up utterly by dust, grit, the sump impurities of his trade.

  This is no grotto.

  He knows what this is.

  This place of black and white.

  Fighting for breath, Dick drools the motor part out of his mouth onto the table. It glistens there, grey, like a spent tooth.

  Alice, babe-besotted, does not see the panic in her husband’s eyes, the hollow tremor of his diaphragm as he fights for air. She says, ‘A nice day out. The plums are ready for picking. You can hold the ladder for me when you’re done in here.’

  Even as he draws breath for his terrible Eeeee!, the normal, friendly strains of his wife’s voice avert catastrophe. They sever the red wire, disarming the terrible thing inside him, and he is back in the present. He lets go a ragged breath and covers, as he always does, with a big piratical ‘Yo! Ho!’

  One thing is certain: whatever the other details of his history, Dick, like a pocket-knife rusted open, has seized up to the point where he can be of no imaginable wartime use. So he is cast up here – after many strange and shadowy excursions – like a timber shivered from a wreck. He has much to be grateful for. This blacksmithing business for a start, pride and joy of his lowering father-in-law. And his wife, of course. Above all things, this wife he had practically forgotten. Not for a second had he imagined – returning, like a wounded animal, back to his starting point – that he would find her still living here and, if not exactly waiting for him, still amenable enough to his seaman’s bluster, his rough re-wooing and finally, his cap-in-hand suggestion that they take up where they had left off, a dozen years before.

  He remembers the ripe eighteen-year-old who’d straddled him in 1933, child that he was, for want of older suitors. This girl he’d had to marry. He remembers feeling proud and ashamed at once of such necessity, afraid of his bride, and at the same time unable to believe his luck, his hair plastered down for the ceremony with a redolent dressing he half-suspects, knowing his mother’s humour, was plain lard.

  This girl, after such an interval, is grown even more buxom now, and she’s not at all the bitter shrew she might have become, the jealous termagant of every sailor’s fears.

  ‘Take little Nicky, Father,’ says Alice, bending forward over him, cleavage branding a holy Y into each confused eye. ‘We’ve customers.’

  The business: this smithy, sliding seamlessly to garage
now horsepower has had its day; a clean dirt forecourt with two hand-operated petrol pumps; a tea-house for the haulage trade; round the back of the house, an orchard of plum trees.

  Gently, Alice lowers their infant son into Dick’s arms. Dick would protest, only the space under his tongue is a tray of grit. Of their own accord his brawny arms, built for furnaces and fisticuffs, arrange themselves into a cradle for twelve pounds of alien life.

  Already, Mother is vanished, her frock catching for an oily split-second on a pile of articulated metal plates, once a tractor’s treads, now – the tractor done for – bound for the foundry, so that the base metal might be granted a brand-new and deadly incarnation at the hands of de Havilland, Browning, Marconi.

  Dick cannot imagine achieving greater happiness than this: he has a new trade, and his old wife; he even has a son. But present pleasures, he has found, do not content the past. The happier his present, the more furiously Dick’s past bangs on the gates for his attention. Perhaps this is what happens as you grow old. Or maybe that infernal Professor Pál played one too many shocking tricks. In any event, the slightest thing can set him reeling through time. One careless turn of thought, and he is back there. The explosion. The sick tilt of the deck. Seawater bursting chamber after chamber of their ship, as solid-sounding as a hammer swung by a maniac, scampering from compartment to compartment. The struggle to escape. The things in his way. The young able seaman he killed. The look in the boy’s eyes as the metal stanchion oyster-knifed the back of his skull.

  Sat there in the monochrome gloom, father and son share a look of mutual horror: for Little Nick Jinks, at four months old, is unmistakably the boy Dick killed, reborn, returned and bent on who knows what subtle revenge.

  Dick has said nothing to Alice. It is too absurd. But just look at that nose.

  Those little eyes, so close together.

  That rosebud mouth.

  2

  Sixteen years later: 1960, a weekend in late March.

  It is a dank, chilly, febrile sort of spring. The sky is overcast, with bands of cloud staining the eastern sky. They are sitting in the garden of the local pub. It is a Saturday. Dad is drinking his pint. Deborah is sucking her lemon-and-lime up through a straw. It is so much nicer than Coke, so much sharper. It is what her mother used to drink.

  ‘For over nine hundred years people have been drawn to visit and admire one of this country’s finest towns…’

  Deborah Conroy unpicks what she can from the Tourist Board pamphlet. Her father Harry, a retired wrestling promoter, helps her over the few difficult words. They are reading about their home, about the windmill that launched Deborah’s first word, ‘Win-will!’ About the church in whose grounds her mother is buried.

  Deborah is eight years old. She opted out of her school trip – her class’s wild week away on the Suffolk coast. She feigned an illness, and though Harry saw through her in an instant, he did not say anything. It is a guilty secret they share: since her mother’s death, neither one can bear to be parted from the other.

  At school, for the handful of children who did not go on the trip – those whose parents could not afford to send them, or whose behaviour was atrocious enough to disqualify them – there is another project. ‘Penance’ might be a more apt term. While their gadabout friends are exploring the creeks and quicksands of the River Alde and the River Ore, Deborah and the rest of them – the poor, the wicked and the lame – are meant to be exploring ‘this place right here’. This is just one of many formulations which, like a fixed grin of embarrassment, convince no one: ‘this place we call home’; ‘this exciting place we walk past every day’; ‘this place we think we know, but we don’t’. Thaxted: the English country village as it never was. Such a solid, bumptious place. Until the rain comes. In the rain, the whole place looks hollowed out. Only the frontages on the high road stay solid. Everything else hangs in a weird, contingent relationship with the planes of the rain, the twist of the branches of the few trees, the line of a wall here, a roof angle there, as if in a second it might all screw itself up and tumble away in the wind.

  Deborah is thinking a lot about the rain. She is doing ‘The Geography of Thaxted’ this week. She is writing about rainfall. About weather. Dad is trying to be helpful, he got hold of this pamphlet for her, but he isn’t keeping up. History was last week. This week is geography.

  The weather improves in time for Easter.

  The Saffron Waldon District Children’s Biblical Weekend is a big outdoor event: an extravaganza of egg-and-spoon races, jolly Bible songs, competitions and prizes for everyone. It’s growing year on year. There are four tents in the field this year – four ‘houses’ – though how the organizers choose which ‘house’ a child belongs to is a mystery. They are: Panda House, Penguin House, Pony House and Pigeon House. Nobody wants to be in Pigeon House. Even ‘pony’ is a bit of a kludge. The boys cavil: ‘Father Peter, a pony is only a kind of horse!’ But the girls are besotted; they surrender unquestioning to the animal’s aura of leather and rhythm, obedience and hot breath.

  Of course, a panda is only a kind of shrew, but you don’t hear Panda House complaining. Pandas are endangered. The kids in Panda House have drunk deep from this particular well. Ennobled by visions of mortality, they have been religiously tattooing bear-outlines into each other’s upper arms with sharpened pencils.

  Here they were, the organizers of this year’s Saffron Walden District Biblical Weekend, looking for neutral house names – names picked purposely so as not to put off the more anti-clerical parents – and now these kids are bootstrapping their own theologies around ponies and pandas, a system of personal ethics around penguins. Pigeon House is the only manageable group of the four, because the name has left everybody feeling uniformly dispirited.

  The bald fact is, some animals are religious, and some are not. It is easy to imagine the existence, somewhere, of a Horse Cult, even a Pony Cult. But whoever heard of a Pigeon Cult? Some things are religious, and some are not. The Divine pervades precisely half of everything.

  In the afternoon of the second day, Sunday, the Lord’s Day, Father Peter (Saffron Walden), Father Gerry (Thaxted), Father Richard (Great Chesterford) and Father Neil (Linden) erect a bright white marquee in the centre of their camp. They call this the Big House. Deborah Conroy, eight years old, is filled with quiet certainty: she is going in this year, whatever the flutters in her belly.

  It is the final event. Ponies, pandas, pigeons and penguins sit cross-legged and higgledy-piggledy facing the bright, pure white marquee. Their parents perch on tiny tubular school seats at the back, and children and parents alike squirm and shudder. The Big House!

  Because God slips in without invitation. God in motley, capering.

  Which of you is brave enough to step into the Big House?

  Eight-year-old Deborah Conroy rises.

  Beside her, another child stands, turns and follows her. And another. Then a great rush of children. They are pressing past Deborah now. They are overtaking her, stepping on her toes. The priests are beside themselves. Hard-shelled old tortoises. Something has wormed its way into them: a gift of tongues. ‘Are you ready? Ready! Steady! Are you ready? Ready, steady, go!’

  This isn’t the way Deborah imagined it. It isn’t a solemn procession. It is something rough, a great herding, Jesus’s flock mounting the metal ramp into the cramped stink of His lorry.

  She nears the great white wall of the house of the Lord, and she sees how it flaps in the wind like a sail. This House does not stay still. If she enters, it will bear her away for ever. Everything will change. She is afraid suddenly. She wants to enter, but even if she changed her mind, she would not be able to evade that great wide rent.

  So Deborah lets the crowd bear her towards the bellowing House of the Lord; there, she is filled with a joy so all-consuming, it blasts her awareness clean of everything except itself.

  Dick Jinks is dead.

  Nick, his surviving son, prises the bedsheet from his frozen grip
and pulls it up to cover him. The sheet settles over Dick’s face and smoothly idealizes its shape. A hollow forms over the mouth, the jaw dropped open as if to scream.

  Nick draws up the room’s only chair and waits. There will be no more Eeeee! in the night. No more of his father’s tongue, weaving molten in the air. Silently Nick sits, scratching absently at his oil-stained corduroys, and plumbs the depths of his relief.

  Crossing to the dressing table, Nick leans forward and studies himself in the fly-spotted mirror. Even now, at the narcissistic height of his adolescence, Nick accepts he is no oil painting. His head is too small for his body; his features are too small for his head. But what is there about him to make anyone so afraid?

  There is no doubt in Nick’s mind that his father died of fear; that over the years fear ate through his guts, caustic as an acid. Nick tried to reassure his father and win his trust, never with much success.

  Nick wipes away a tear and turns back into the room. He knows his father loved him. Even as he stumbled away from him, or backed into his room’s corner, even as he drooled and shook, there was love.

  They had learned to live together, to love each other as father and son, by indirect means: in the empty morning kitchen, a bowl of warm porridge; clean clothes outside the bedroom door; shoes cleaned for the next day, and occasionally polished; a little money on the table and a list made out in one hand (milk, bread, bog roll), that by day’s end, unfailingly, was ticked off by the other. So they looked after each other, cooked each other’s food, cleaned each other’s clothes. They were not happy, they were not friends and they hardly knew each other, but they did love each other.