The Weight of Numbers

by Simon Ings

  It occurs to Stacey, sat in front with a view of the coffin, that some of what she feels is relief. For a start, there is only one coffin; whereas there had definitely been more than one Grandpa, especially towards the end. There was the absent man, the man depressed by all the misfortunes he had failed to prevent: Deborah’s childhood accident, Deborah’s marriage, Ben’s public and very bloody maiming. Then there was the smiling Harry, who was somehow worse: the man determined to shoulder every burden, prevent every misfortune, reliably accompany everyone he loved through every step of life, padding the world’s every blow. The needy man. The drunk.

  It’s been nine years, following Mo’s trial and sentence for marijuana smuggling – and, Stacey wonders, where was the snake Jessup while all this was going on? How slippy did he turn out to be, that all the shit was laid at her daddy’s door? – nine years, then, since Harry stepped in to save the day, playing both father and grandfather to little Stacey. His daughter and his granddaughter were his burden, and he shouldered them gladly, dismissing every protest. He never let them down.

  Ben settles into the pew a few places to the left of her, and she wonders if, sat before Harry’s coffin, he feels the same secret relief she does. Ben was Harry’s friend, but it must have been exhausting being friends to so many different versions of the same person. Absent Harry had no friends, had betrayed his friends, was a danger to his friends. He did not deserve them and did not know what to do with them. And needy Harry? The hospital bills, the school, could only be the tip of the iceberg: needy Harry would not have stopped there. Desperately wanting to be wanted, he was a smothering presence, his cheerful manner an unhappy, rum-fuelled fiction. No wonder Ben has been keeping his distance. Between one version of himself and another, Harry’s been tearing everyone in two.

  At home, at school, her name is Stacey Conroy. The name does not do justice to her Miami tan, and at the television studio, in her acting classes and on the billing for this amateur show, that student revue, Stacey uses the name she intends to adopt permanently when she is old enough, especially now that Harry is no longer around to be hurt by the change. A name to reflect her tan, her memories, hers and her mother’s heart.

  Stacey Chavez.

  The priest’s homily is rushed and nervous. Surrounded by wrestlers in wild costumes, perhaps he expects the service to climax in an eruption of spectacular comic-book violence. Stacey loves to watch the fights, not least because Deborah tries to steer her away from them.

  Instead, once the service is done, everyone files meekly out of church, the men’s costumes tawdry, the bodies beneath them lumpen and stiff and the worse for wear, the women thickened by childbearing, the children, in their best clothes, bored and whining, and one thought hanging over all their heads: is it over?

  Have we been dreaming?

  This good life: is it all over now?

  The funeral tea and the wake are being held at Donoso’s wrestling school, one of those white, ship-like Deco properties in Little Havana that the realtors get so excited about these days. Tables are set out front among the trees and flowerbeds. It looks like a rest home more than a place of sweat and strain – and before Harry took over the lease, this is exactly what it was.

  The inside looks like some sort of political prison. A Time magazine photo special from darkest Latin America. Punchbags dangle from the ceiling, their khaki wrappers sweat-stained: complex, liquid patterns that lend the bags a personality. There are mats and weights. Stacey tries hefting a dumb-bell from its stand. The showers smell.

  She has come to think about her grandpa, to lose some of the flipness that has been her armour and support during the service and the funeral; to cry, maybe; and to stay well away from the food Deborah has had catered in, weird English nonfoods made of filo pastry and frozen prawns and spit. Later comes the beer, the key lime pie, the hog-roast – probably in that order. Michio’s sweating his guts out round the back of the property now because the kid he left in charge of his fire has let it reduce to smoulder and fizz.

  She looks at herself in the wall of mirrored tiles, her hair a green cloud, her body broken, factored into neat squares. Like maps of hill country, flattened, idealized. All those damn bags of potato chips her mother kept forcing into her hands, every recess and pee break: ‘Got to keep your strength up, little one.’

  Throwing up comes naturally to her. She found that out in the courthouse. It was easy to do. Most of her friends at school use two fingers, three, hell, the entire hand, but she can do it with the tip of one finger: as quick and reliable as pressing an elevator button.

  Her whole body trembles when she does it. Not to mention before and after. The tremble seems out of scale with the pleasure, as if her body is getting more out of it than she does. It’s the same when she touches herself, and it’s the same tremble she gets when she does it, if she has the patience, if she doesn’t fall asleep or just get so damn bored and sore and what-really-is-the-point? She doesn’t like to touch herself so much, because when it’s really good it only reminds her of all the other tricks her body is playing on her.

  She really ought to try and eat something, but by the time there’s any real food around here, Deborah will have whisked them both through their quick-change routine and off to one damn starchy place or another for pine nuts, edible flowers and ceviche. Next week it’ll be nuts and dried fruits from a post-Woodstock hole in the wall and the following week, God knows, some ethnic horror. One of the great things about your own sick, Stacey tells her friends, in her best, most urbane style, is the constancy of the flavour.

  She walks out through the entrance hall, pausing to study the framed photographs: Harry, Harry’s crew, Harry’s empire: maybe this is why she cannot cry. It is virtually impossible to imagine that he is dead. There is so much evidence of him.

  ‘Come along, little rabbit, eat a little something.’

  Right by the door, there is Deborah, waiting to spring her trap. Stacey plucks a vol-au-vent from off the tray, palms the crumbly, slimy thing and secretes it, when her mother isn’t looking, in the fork of a nearby tree.

  Yesterday, tickling up her sick, she overdid it and hawked up blood. She didn’t even know that this was possible . She wants to eat, but even if there were some real food here, she’s too freaked out to put it in her mouth. After all – blood.

  Who wants to throw up blood?

  A man is watching the property from across the street. He is leaning against a beat-up cream Thunderbird. She spots him through the chainlink.

  ‘Stacey!’ Deborah is calling her. ‘Jackie’s leaving. Come say goodbye to Jackie.’

  Stacey goes off to say goodbye to Jackie, and there is a little flurry as some other acquaintances take their leave. Rod Rodriguez – ‘The Rod’, another of Harry’s early discoveries, rescued from a roadhouse outside Teponahuasco where Harry found him trading bouts for beers – is handing round the bourbon now, driving the event forward: Stacey can only imagine how things will be tonight: the wake’s raucous, teary-drunk conclusion. She wants to be a part of it. She deserves to be a part of it. She’s fourteen, for heaven’s sake, she needs release.

  Deborah has other ideas.

  Everyone who’s leaving wants to say goodbye to Stacey and, by the time she returns to her tree, both man and car have gone.

  2

  Where Harry Conroy led, many have followed. Right now on TV a man in a black cape and mask is driving Hulk Hogan’s head repeatedly into a table.

  Transfixed before the screen, fingers up to the knuckle in her careful hairdo, Deborah absent-mindedly strokes the bald dent in her skull.

  Following Harry’s death, Deborah has returned to England with her daughter. She wants Stacey to know the old country. She also had it in the back of her mind that the schools are better here, but as things have panned out, Stacey’s first love has won out over her studies; a full-time TV actress at sixteen, she does the very minimum the schoolwork regulations will allow.

  Mother and daughter live
together in Vauxhall, on a forgotten street, in an old Edwardian terrace house with high moulded ceilings. They have money. Deborah’s stock options have seen to that, as well as the numerous financial provisions Harry made for his granddaughter. They have no attachments.

  It has been a strange few years for Deborah. Out from under her father’s heavy care, thirty-two years old, she had thought she might begin again, acquire a lover, travel; she even entertained a certain nostalgia for her last bid for freedom – the disastrous summer of 1968 when, smothered by her father’s difficult affection, she ran away to London, just a kid, and fell in with a succession of unsuitable lovers: men who were never kind.

  Four years on, 1986, she realizes that this kind of freedom is no longer possible. She is not a teenager any more. The life she has hankered for does not pertain to who she is now. Besides, the times are different. She is happy on her own, happy not to be travelling, happy to sit and steer, as best she can, her daughter’s career.

  Now the Hulk has hold of the man in the black cape. He is twirling him around and around, over his head, as though he were spinning dough for a pizza. Even the very worst the world has to offer can be controlled now, with only a small loss of realism. Deborah glances at her watch and lights her joint. Although this ersatz world can never be hers, Deborah is glad Stacey lives surrounded by scenarios and mere appearances.

  The Hulk is slamming the man down, head-first into the floor. The man’s head connects with the sprung floor of the ring. He sprawls. He does not get up.

  For her daughter’s sake, Deborah will do everything she can to preserve the illusion that the world is harmless: a place of rules, prepared stories, angles and sleights of hand. Stacey knows that she used a walking frame until she was twelve years old. It is evident too that her life has been dominated by the threat of grand mal seizures. But the cause of it all, the details of the event…

  To this day Stacey thinks her mum was in a road traffic accident.

  Hulk Hogan stamps on his opponent’s chest. Deborah expects the man in black to grab the Hulk’s foot – to twist it, to rise, even as the Hulk falls. But the man does not move. A pause. Hulk Hogan steps away. Paramedics clamber into the ring and carry the man in black out on a stretcher. Impossible to tell whether this is part of the scenario or not.

  Perhaps there was a time, as Stacey reached her early teens, when Deborah could have told her daughter the truth. How she had woken from a dream of God’s white house to a blast of pain, trapped in the hollow metal dark of a car boot. To tell her this now – what would Stacey be able do with this information? She would only use it to psychologize her mother. To her mother’s every check and word of reason: ‘You only say this because of what some maniac did to you.’

  How can Deborah admit her sufferings have no meaning? Her broken skull; her stroke; her epilepsy. Her tongue bitten half away in excruciating increments, the struggle she had to prove herself a fit mother, baby Stacey so often nearly taken away from her; her husband’s incarceration and subsequent disappearance; her father’s slide into alcoholism, the way he punished himself to death. The fits themselves, their cruel variety. The way they cluster sometimes round her frontal lobe, twisting her moods. All the times she has sat frozen in her chair, staring into the middle distance, counting down, quite rationally and white with fear, to the end of the world.

  Her daughter’s early success – the speed with which the school soap Grange Hill has propelled her into the teen magazines and even the gossip columns – has robbed Deborah of those few moments when an adult intimacy between mother and daughter might have been possible. There is also the conviction – couched in the back of Deborah’s mind, a small but certain voice like tinnitus – that she is not wrong; that the higher her daughter climbs, the more terrible the fiend will be who, with one blow of his hammer, will cast her down into the metal dark.

  Hulk Hogan leaves and Captain America enters the ring with a bandaged knee. Even before he has finished acknowledging his fans, a man in a sort of beetle costume has wrestled him to the ground. When, Deborah wonders, did the world cease to be real?

  She studies the girls surrounding the ring – the show’s lean, muscular eye-candy in their swimsuits and cheerleader gear. It is becoming more and more difficult for her to feel easy with Stacey’s looks. Even by these girls’ streamlined standards, her daughter is becoming painfully thin. The columnists are whispering. Stacey and the rest of the Grange Hill cast are in America this week, singing ‘Just Say No’ for Nancy Reagan. She hopes someone’s on hand to make sure Stacey eats properly.

  Now the beetle is jumping up and down on the Captain’s wounded knee.

  Deborah will not always be here to take care of her daughter, so it is good that this new world has come to trivialize her pain. The world is nanny now. Watching these choreographed atrocities, Deborah has convinced herself that this is how her daughter lives these days: the world scripting every line for her; weakening every table; padding every hammer.

  Hands held behind her back to thrust her small bust against the cotton of her white school blouse, Stacey kneels on the tiled floor of the players’ toilet cubicle and lets her co-star Darren slide his already rock-hard cock between her teeth.

  An over-achiever in all things, she takes him all the way to the back of her throat, then, pulling back, she lifts his penis, pressing it against her face as she tongues his balls with a rapacity that is frankly frightening: he wilts.

  It is Darren’s dick in her face, but neither of them is in any doubt that Stacey Chavez is out to pleasure herself. She is known for this kind of thing, this athletic approach, as if she has something to prove. It does not take much to make Darren hard again. She dry-kisses the vein running along his shaft, pulls his foreskin back and tongues around the groove, then takes him in again. Darren thrusts a little against the roof of her mouth, unsure how much of this she will let him get away with. Stacey, determined to Win, to ruin him for all the others, grabs his hands, presses them to the back of her head and keeps them there, her hands on his, urging him to fuck her face.

  The tiles are cold against her knees; her sensible school shoes pinch her feet. There is indignity in this, and perversity too, dressed as the schoolchild she never was; and Darren, in grey jumper and school tie, baby-faced Darren, at twenty playing fourteen-year-old heroin addict Biff McBain.

  This American tour rides on the back of Biff’s plot-line, for its poignancy has captured the imagination of a drug-paranoid world. Yesterday, at the White House, they sang for Nancy Reagan – Nancy’s big on anti-drugs. Today they’re in New York, half an hour away from the game at Yankee Stadium, where they will perform their single ‘Just Say No’ in front of fifty thousand baseball fans.

  When Darren comes finally, he ejaculates so far in the back of her throat, Stacey doesn’t even taste his semen, only the musty afterbreath, mixing unappetizingly with the toilet’s just-scrubbed smell. Still she sucks and sucks, taking him in, further and further, as he softens, Christ, what is she planning to do? Bite? Darren pulls her to her feet – a brave move, given she is a good four inches taller than him. Now he is kissing her, lifting her shirt, trying to wedge his head between her breasts, probably for balance, his whole body a-tremble with the aftershock of what is easily and for all time his best-ever blowjob.

  She lifts her shirt for him. She doesn’t wear a bra. She doesn’t need one. Her breasts are so precise and tiny you can fit them in your mouth.

  There you go.

  Good boy.

  She is eighteen years old – the age her mother was when she gave birth.

  Deborah has always expected her daughter to do well. She has demanded it. At the same time, she is afraid that Stacey will make her mother’s mistakes. So Deborah has set bounds on what her daughter can reasonably be expected to achieve. She has tried to manage her expectations. It is a strange sort of encouragement that begins ‘Are you sure…?’ ‘Do you really think…?’ ‘Maybe, but…’ ‘Do not forget…’ and its effects ar
e equally strange.

  For Stacey, these minatory utterances are not the soft upholstery Deborah meant them to be. They are chains and prison walls, tying her to her mother, this woman who has no life of her own but lives through her. They are goads, reminding Stacey of her own uselessness, driving her forward from one over-achievement to the next.

  ‘I – I think I love you,’ Darren stammers, pleasure-drugged.

  Good. Meaningless as the words are to her, this is what Stacey wants to hear. This moment is what she has learned to manufacture. It is her solace; otherwise she drowns, every waking minute, in the ghastly conviction of her own weakness.

  A bell rings.

  Quickly, they dress.

  Stacey is first out of the gents’, leaving Darren with his fly still undone, his school tie still askew. There are fifty thousand people out there, at the bright end of that tunnel, waiting to hear her sing. Thousands of men and boys who have yet to fall in love with her.

  Nine years later. First-time Hollywood director Jon Amiel orders the crayfish. He has done what he can to persuade Stacey Chavez to order from the menu; Stacey is adamant, and has brought along her own muffin.

  She has lost the part. There is no way Amiel is going to present the producers of Entrapment with such an obvious insurance risk, especially now he’s had Zeta-Jones’s agent on the line. But it would be tactless to let Stacey Chavez in on his snap decision during their very first face-to-face meeting. Besides, he likes her showreel, and life is long; he may be able to do something for her if she can get her head sorted out. All Brits go a bit crazy the first time they hit LA.

  Tuesday, 9 May 1997. It is eight years since Stacey left Grange Hill. She has had her share of bit parts, a starring role in a more-than-dodgy Ken Russell B movie, a walk-on in The Singing Detective. The work that’s really put her on the map is ITV’s explicit reworking of The Moth – Catherine Cookson must have choked on her teeth, but enough critics looked beyond the carnal distractions and tissue-thin script to discover Stacey Chavez, her hunger, her fire. If she can only learn to harness it, her energy might make her great one day.