The Weight of Numbers

by Simon Ings

  His father’s fear of him was his own affair. No use picking at it now. Loyal as Nick tries to be to his father’s memory, he’s come to understand the limits of Dick’s philosophy. ‘Not worth the candle,’ Dick Jinks had said of the seaman’s life. God knows it was a brutish kind of existence, but who could say it was not worthwhile? If it had been up to his dad, and had it not been for the accident, Nick might never have left the fenland of his birth. Then what would he know of anything? He imagines himself sometimes – when nostalgia and weariness threaten to rain on his parade – crouched in his father’s room, loaded shotgun across his lap, listening to the rats scuttling behind the wainscots. Picturing this, his appetite for the sea comes rushing back to him.

  Rats, the sound of them paddling in the bilges, the sight of them at dusk, playing tag along the chains and hawsers; rats alone have the power to taint Nick Jinks’s happy-go-lucky present. He stays as far away from them as he can. Not for him the flop-house floor, the budget brothel, the knee-shaker in the alley. An inadvertent consequence of this is that Nick has acquired a reputation as a man who conducts his shore leaves with a certain amount of panache. Take, for instance, this woman’s well-appointed theatre of delectable operations.

  (Her hands move across his tired back, hot and slick and warm from the coconut oil she is working into his skin. He turns his head, sees the old army satchel lying at the foot of the bed, the satchel he must deliver, the brown-wrapped package inside, yes, it is there. What can possibly go wrong?)

  This upmarket taste of his requires funding additional to his meagre seaman’s wage. Nick’s courier work has been relatively smalltime up to now, but his inventiveness and discretion have not gone unremarked. The years he spent with his dad – concealing signs of his presence, so as to minimize the old man’s terror of him – have made Nick an unobtrusive operator.

  This most recent courier job represents the high-water mark of his career. Afterwards, he intends to lay low for a while. Frankly, the whole business has unnerved him.

  To start with, the men he went to see refused to come out of their basement. Then, when he had been persuaded to join them in their cellar, he found himself in the middle of some bizarre musical number. At least, this is the only way he has to interpret what he saw. He’s never confronted black-face outside The Black and White Minstrel Show, let alone seen it used as a disguise. Impossible to tell even the race of these men under such fairground slap. The ointment smell of the local sun-screen – a crackly white porridge – mingled sickly with the smell of black shoe polish, as he slipped their satchel round his back.

  ‘Item: if you look inside the package, we will know. Item: if you take the satchel from your back in a public place, we will know. Item: if you discuss our arrangement with a third party, we will know. Item: if you fail to deliver the package to the correct address, we will know.’

  Overkill enough to make the young seaman grin through his sweat – a rictus of fear to answer their painted white grins. Afterwards, he wrote the address he was meant to memorize (‘Item: do not write down or share this address with anyone’) in big crayon letters all over the packet, just to make doubly sure he couldn’t fuck this up.

  He balks at the memory, muscles tensing. Bad enough that he should have been led under the ground, let alone that he should be confronted with this. Fatigues without insignia. Guns. Somewhere in that cellar, unmistakable, the scurry and scratch of rats.

  ‘Shhh,’ the prostitute soothes, hot hands working him.

  It is not the tension of the moment that will spoil his first day’s shore leave here, in infamous Lourenço Marques. Nor even the anxiety he feels about the delivery he must make, a couple of hours from now. What scuppers him is, oddly enough, the tale he decides to tell, his favourite ice-breaker, a tale of derring do on the high seas.

  ‘It’s proppant,’ he says, his voice muffled by the pillow. ‘ Proppant. I’m telling you.’

  It’s little china beads with a coating, a resin, they use it in drilling, in the offshore industry, on drilling rigs, and he is getting dizzy, all the ways there are to explain this thing, this material, which is frankly the least of his story.

  ‘Not “propellant”. I’m telling you. What’s propellant? What kind of propellant do you know comes in sacks?’

  ‘Proppant.’ The girl tries it on her tongue. Her fingers dig his shoulders, like there are gold coins between his muscles, dubloons between the muscle and the bone, and she is rifling these secret pockets in his flesh, not so much a back rub, more an intimate mugging. The trouble with asking for a massage is you occasionally end up with a real masseuse, whatever else she is, with frightening thumbs, really strong, like her day job is screwing on the lids of jars you can’t undo.

  ‘Proppant,’ she says, ‘OK,’ in that tone of voice, how do women do that? Letting him know in four syllables that nothing he says now is she possibly going to take seriously. Discouraged, he recalls that at some point in his story he is going to have to use the word ‘phenolic’. Though he hardly looks the part, Nick is wedded to an ethic of accurate reportage. Words should fit closely the events and situations they describe. Because the world is big, he needs many words, the more accurately to render the truths around him. Word-power is his unlikely passion. So that the third mate, rigging a vacuum line for their second loading attempt, and still white-faced and shaky-fingered from the explosion, couldn’t have been more startled when Nick rose up on his ladder out of the silo – where, anyway, he had no place being – a stained rag held close to his mouth and saying: ‘What kind of dust, d’you say? Fen-something? How d’ya spell that, then?’ The third mate was unable to take his eyes off the Stanley knife tattooed on Nick’s arm, an eye where the shank screw should be and shark teeth for a blade. You could tell it was a Stanley knife because the word ‘Stanley’ was picked out along the thing in the red of venereal rashes. Without it, it might have been anything. A razor shell. A baby eel. A banana.

  ‘Mmm,’ the woman says, over him, behind him, and something brushes him, an unmistakable tantalizing point of rubbery contact that is definitely not a finger and this ought to excite him, only that…

  The thing is, he’s pretty sure her capulana was secure before she started this – he expecting her to strip at his word and she instead wanting to tantalize, oh, very European – and both her hands are on him now, either side of his hips, working the handles there. So assuming this is a nipple – well, not that he’s ungrateful or anything but O! the mysterious toils of this world – if both her hands have been working the flab above his hips all this time, how in Hell did she get her tits out?

  And here’s its twin, tracking through the oil spread like engine lubricant over his back. He arches his back, kitty-friendly, feels the nipple snub and turn, the half-moon of her tit against him. ‘Lie down, now.’ She pulls away, then tracks again, with both tits now, no hands, just the nipples against his back, angled perfectly like something mechanical come to read his skin. She must be angling them with her hands to maintain such precise and even contact and then it comes to him, a great wave of mystery and unknowing: how come she doesn’t fall over? Leaning over him all that way, her tits in her hands, how is she able to balance? Maybe, he thinks, she has climbed up onto the table. Maybe she has hooked her feet around the end of the table. He has lost track of her nipples now, he has completely dropped out the bottom of the whole experience, he is off in the land of levers, the land of weights and measures and GOD DAMN WOMAN WATCH WHERE THE JESUS YOU ARE PUTTING THAT THING – but her hand is deep in the crevice of his freshly washed, sweet-smelling buttocks by now – when in hell did that happen? – fingers questing for his BALLS NOT MY BALLS NOT – AHHHHHHHHHHH and she’s PULLING THEM now, she is LIFTING HIM OFF THE TABLE BY HIS BALLS and he is kneeling and he thinks, if I hook my feet to the edge of the table I wouldn’t need my hands to balance, and really, it is enough to make him despair sometimes how his mind goes wandering off without him and this is really too fucking homosexual she is actua
lly tonguing his balls and where the hell is her nose all this time? Oh CHRIST, there it is, her lips grazing the hair of his balls as her hand reaches round to his prick and she mumbles, ‘Proppant, then, come on,’ and she is milking him like a cow so he goes on with his story because this is what you do when some mad bitch has your testicles between her teeth you do exactly what she says.

  The sunlight that morning was of a sort that has resisted his every subsequent attempt to describe it. The low, even white cloud, far from barring the sunlight, trapped the light and pressed it against the sea’s surface, so that everything appeared incredibly bright and reflective and the sea was turned to liquid chrome.

  The lensing effect of the clouds extended even to sounds, magnifying them and at the same time stripping them of all reverberation, so that every sound seemed to come from inside the ear. In the early-morning quiet, when they were still a nautical mile off the harbour, Nick swears he could hear the footfalls of the crane man, dawdling on the quay. A car starting on the hill above the harbour. A conversation between two elderly men, one out walking his dogs, the other leaning on his gate.

  A Navy helicopter hammered by, rotors clipping the clouds. Even this racket was transformed, each element sounding pure, precise, as intimate as the flob of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s spittle on ‘The Girl from Ipanema’.

  It was a strange sort of landfall. No town, no din of machinery. Just a couple of houses – and the quay itself was an untenanted, industrial thing, thrown up as a handy transfer point for the tons of aggregates and chemicals that would one day be consumed by the rigs.

  No real town for twenty miles. No pub. A tea shack for the men. One public telephone on a piece of hard-standing that, for sheer size, dwarfed the quay itself: big enough to land a SeaKing on. Why was the phone-box set slap bang in the middle like that? What use was it meant to serve?

  ‘Houses,’ said the second mate. ‘It’s foundations for houses.’ He broke into a weird country-and-western drawl: ‘Boom town a’comin’.’

  ‘Fuck that.’

  The proppant was waiting for them in sacks, paletted on the quayside. They had spent a day, about six weeks ago, vacuuming the material out of the hold, bagging it for later use. Now, coming to collect it, they had the whole job to do again in reverse. They used a mobile crane – the key, as usual, chewing-gummed to the inside of a wheel rim – to lift a smallish hopper, about a ton weight, over the aft silo. Nick guided the hopper into position over the mouth of the silo, thumbed off the karabiners and waved the crane away.

  The operator swung the arm back over the quay to the first sack. Men clipped extra chains to the crane arm and hooked it up. The engine laboured, the whole body of the crane shifted, as the operator raised the sack off the quay and began slowly to swing it over to the hopper.

  Nick gawped, for all the world as if this operation had nothing to do with him. It was only as the arm came to rest, the sack swinging with dreadful, pregnant force over the mouth of the hopper, that he remembered what he was supposed to be doing.

  He reached into his back pocket for his knife.

  It wasn’t there.

  Cursing, he hurried back to his bunk. It was hidden beneath his tiny pillow, nestled in its own, permanent dent in the cheap foam pallet. Not that Nick expected trouble, this trip or any other, but simply because it had become his talisman: slippy cold body, more like stone than steel, wicked lino-cutter blade. He ran his thumb crosswise over the scimitar edge – ah, a tell-tale roughness there. He dug about in his bag of books – Carpentier, Asturias and Marquez, his passion – and fished out his dad’s old tin box. From the box he pulled out a stubby screwdriver. Lovingly he loosened the screw in the knife handle. Gingerly he lifted out the blunted blade and reversed it. He did up the screw again and ran his thumb over the unused edge. There was something thrilling about a razor-sharp blade – how it could cut you and you’d not feel a thing, just a wet burn as you first put pressure on the cut, sliding one surface of the slice against the other, revealing damage slowly, by stages: the sick inevitability of it. Like the cartoon coyote, who falls only after he finds he’s hanging in mid-air.

  By the time Nick had recovered enough of himself to pull himself out of this latest excursion through his own head, the first sack of proppant had already stopped swinging, it was in position, suspended over the hopper, ready for emptying.

  ‘I’m there!’ Nick shouted, waving the Stanley knife over his head. ‘I’m there!’ – flinging and flapping his way across the deck.

  Anxious not to lose the highlight of his day to another, he threw himself on the sack as though it were a lover. The bright sliver of Sheffield steel slipped neatly through the coarse plastic weave. With a smooth downward motion, Nick disembowelled the sack and the proppant spilled through the hopper into the silo. The air filled with a dust that was, in its frenzy and iodine smell, a distillation of thunderstorms. The air crackled in his nostrils and laid a sourness on his tongue. Nick danced about by the side of the silo hatch, impatient, his blood up, while men fastened the second sack to the crane.

  He slashed the second sack back-handed and casual, as he saw his heroes slash their way to victory in the movies he preferred. ‘Thank you, Mr Jiggins,’ the second mate announced, dryly. A few private smiles among the ratings, quickly hidden, as Nick, brandishing his father’s doughty Stanley, frowned them away.

  So Nick stood, arms folded, Horatio on the bridge, waiting for more sacks. The crane lifted a third sack over the hopper. Nick, catching the second mate’s eye, cut the sack carefully, a five-inch gash, letting the proppant out in a steady stream. He stepped away, patient, waiting for the sack to empty. He rubbed his thumb over the blade and felt already, through long practice, a little dullness there.

  Black dust lapped the edge of the silo, busy, a midge-cloud, and fell back again. The sack sagged, the flow of proppant eased. Nick stepped forward.

  The explosion blew the hopper right off the top of the silo.

  The hopper’s dented sill missed Nick’s nose by inches.

  He felt the air on his face.

  He watched the hopper rise.

  It tumbled through the air.

  He felt a chill as its shadow crossed him.

  He was aware, for the first time, of the sound of the blast, the great blunt fact of it, ringing in his ears.

  The hopper rose and toppled. He watched it curve through the grey china air.

  He saw the crane operator throw up his hands in front of his face.

  The hopper hit the quay a yard or so in front of the crane, bounced, bounded along the quay, checked itself, ran off in a new direction, stopped, turned over, and rang – the sounds running always a fraction of a second behind the visuals, as though his brain were experiencing the world too fast to put everything in its proper order. The channels falling out of whack, the sound un-synching, and a mutter from the cheap seats: ‘Fuck’ and ‘Christ’; from the English captain, a ‘Christmas Day’.

  In his lungs, the taste of the forge.

  Nick knew that taste, was sent back twenty years by it. The rotting cars. The carcases of caravans, their plastic and fibreboard walls leant in upon each other like a ruined house of cards. The rats…

  ‘The cause of the explosion,’ says Nick, to the head bobbing at his lap (things, at his insistence, taking a more orthodox course now: his hand firm on the back of her head, directing the action), ‘was probably a combination of electrostatic charge built up during the loading operation and the volume of phenolic dust free in the silo.’

  There is a loud – and in tactile terms, not unpleasant – sputtering, followed by a monosyllable expressive of female incredulity.

  ‘Phenolic,’ he insists, succinctly, and his erection softens like a toffee between her teeth. He frowns. ‘Phenolic. What? I am telling you this.’

  She shrugs, climbs back on the bed and falls back, lifting her knees to her shoulders. ‘Whatever,’ she says.

  He fucks her once, hard, for her insolence. Twic
e, for the fun of it. A third time, intensely and with feeling, for romance. A fourth time, all wet eyes and slithering tongue and ‘I never knew my mammy’ –

  – and drifts pathetically to sleep.

  He dreams:

  The hopper, rising.

  He sees it rise, he feels the air stroke his face as the lip of the hopper leans over, as though to touch him, as though to kiss him goodbye.

  Up it goes, into the silver sky, and its shadow comes over him then, the hopper a gigantic black hexagon in the sky, rising, rising. The bright sky silhouettes it now, backing it like the satin cushion for a piece of jet. The sky is purest white.

  Nick Jinks has always wanted to see a rocket launch. This is what he has most wanted to see, ever since he was a child. And today – the very day a man sets foot for the first time on the Moon – at this moment, in this dream, it occurs to him: the accident he witnessed, and maybe even caused, was a launch. A detonation. Dead weight, hurled into the air by gigantic unseen forces. (The men on the quay reported a large blue flame shooting out of the silo; Jinks saw nothing like that.)

  So, when he wakes, and without quite being able to work out why, Jinks feels an extraordinary sense of fulfilment. Waves of contentment will continue to wash over him at regular intervals, driving him and sustaining him throughout his peril once he discovers, the moment he sits up, shivering in wet sheets, that

  (1) he is alone here

  and

  (2) his satchel is gone.

  4

  Apollo Eleven’s lunar module lands at 3.17 p.m., Eastern Standard Time, and once it is confirmed that astronauts Armstrong and Aldrin are safely settled on the surface of the Moon, Mo Chavez snaps off his dad’s little black-and-white TV.

  ‘Moisés!’