The Weight of Numbers

by Simon Ings

  ‘Do I remember?’ I thought I remembered. Voices like tides. The drunkard’s walk we did: one miles-long, mutual jostle all the way to Grosvenor Square: ‘Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!’ These are the sorts of memories that manufacture themselves out of photographs, TV dramas, advertisements, celebrity reminiscences on Desert Island Discs; that widen the cracks between the flagstones of recall and smother them completely in the end. Cliché is a word we give to memories that don’t need us to validate them any more. They have their own life.

  I tried to show willing: ‘I remember writing admiring articles about “Great Leader and Teacher Jack Straw”,’ I said. ‘As I recall, my magazine was called Letter Bomb.’

  Hayden grinned. ‘Maoist.’

  It was all bluster, all nonsense. I was worried we might run dry, anxious in case he mentioned Deborah. I didn’t want to have to act out all those old lies again, years after the event. So I was boisterous: ‘What the fuck’s happened to Jack, anyway? Did he take something?’

  ‘I think the question we are here to discuss,’ Hayden said, ‘is, have you?’

  For years an industrious civil servant, Noah Hayden was now, by way of reward, a middle manager in the Department for International Development, with an impressive list of ‘interests’ to do with New Labour’s foreign aid strategy. I knew what he was doing here. The Third Floor wanted a familiar hand to tug my leash. Noah Hayden was their man.

  He was here to close me down, or at least, make a show of closing me down. So it was hardly surprising that I had gone into this meeting with a less than level head, teeth gritted against Hayden’s complacency, his cereal-packet convictions, his infallible New Labour ideas about right and wrong.

  As I saw it, Mozambique had held out against Rhodesia, then South Africa, and weathered all the blandishments of the Cold War, only to lose its independence at last to a handful of western NGOs. Every move the government made had to be countersigned by them or it risked forfeiting its aid. All around the harbour at Beira, international relief organizations were snapping up cheap real-estate. From inside their gated compounds, Scandinavian engineers, sipping imported beer, looked out upon our devastation with a speculative eye.

  Although FRELIMO had clung on to power after the civil war, misfortune had softened it up nicely. In following the advices of the World Bank, it had had to defer indefinitely its promise of free universal education. Marxism-Leninism was abandoned. In Maputo, meanwhile, the UN operation ONUMOZ had revived the local economy so that the daughters of famous Lourenço Marques streetwalkers – girls of fifteen, girls of twelve – were trading out of their mothers’ old trysting places along the bay and promenade. When I finally shook myself out of my torpor and took a good, hard look at what my adopted country had become, it seemed obvious what career I should pursue.

  For months I had being watching from my glassless tenth-floor window as, one by one, my fellow cooperantes had abandoned Katalayo’s dream of independence for menial jobs in the aid industry. I wasn’t ready to buckle under, but there was obviously no future in education, still less in government service.

  The first people Nick Jinks and I ever ‘trafficked’ were families made homeless when the World Bank insisted on denationalizing Mozambique’s rental market.

  Hayden had neither the sophistication to understand nor the desire to conceal how angry and disappointed he was over my new line of work. ‘Have you?’

  ‘Have I what?’ I said, teasing him.

  ‘Taken something.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I smiled, leaving him shipwrecked on the shoals of metaphor, ‘I don’t follow you.’

  Hayden had his alibi for this ‘accidental’ meeting already prepared, and when the direct approach guttered out, he treated me to the scenic route: ‘The F.O.’s getting rather jittery about the spread of the Congolese mafia. You know they run the bus concessions around here?’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ I said. ‘No.’

  Noah Hayden smiled. ‘But you have dealings with them.’

  That my work so offended the sensibilities of men like Hayden wearied me. What would he rather I dealt in? Drugs? Diamonds? Ivory? Africa’s export markets had been so spectacularly decimated, human beings were one of the few resources we had left to trade.

  To trade in people? In Hayden’s mind, I had fallen off the map in the most spectacular fashion, abandoning FRELIMO and my principles. He couldn’t see why I was so hostile to the charitable intervention he was here to promote. What was I kicking against? The truth – that I was still fighting Katalayo’s revolution, shaking off the colonial yoke and flying the flag of liberty and self-determination when half FRELIMO had thrown in the towel – this was something Hayden didn’t know how to respond to. If I was such an unreconstructed sixties throwback, how come I was so successful, travelling for business between my home in Beira, Maputo and the northern capital, Nampula; then abroad, as far as Kenya and Nigeria, Mali and the oil states of the Middle East? Or look at it the other way: how could a man claim political principles who provided under-fives as jockeys for camel-races in the United Arab Emirates one day, and rushed an ice-box full of human kidneys air freight to an exclusive clinic in Botswana the next? Of course Hayden didn’t understand me. He imagined politics and crime were different things.

  It pleased Noah Hayden to show himself to me. (Easy enough to imagine his home: cricket cups on the mantelpiece, music certificates framed in the bathroom.) It pleased him to know, from his extensive and industrious reading of the CIA Yearbook and who knew what other dryas-dust public sources, things about the region that I appeared not to know. In his mid-fifties, Noah Hayden was still a puppy, eager to please, pleased to impress. Was he dangerous? Certainly – as a man is dangerous who is set in motion by others; whose actions are innocent of their effects. A man like that cannot be read.

  A waiter passed our table. Hayden waved him over and handed him back his steak sandwich: ‘Could you? The meat’s a bit underdone. Thank you so much. Thank you.’

  Hosting this year’s Southern Africa Development Conference – the region’s major annual political event – had thrown tiny, poor, lackadaisical Malawi into a tizz. Special SADC numberplates had been issued. Every bank in town had a dedicated SADC window, always open, for the negotiation of local currencies. Police and army helicopters hovered precariously above the streets, trailing convoys of statesmen and dignitaries from the airport. Army checkpoints littered the streets in and out of major towns. In Blantyre, Christmas decorations cheered the only roundabout, and men in orange boilersuits were working around the clock to fill the worst potholes with sand and pitch. The town’s hundreds of street traders had been banished to the derelict football ground.

  Here we were, drinking gin and tonic in a country where life expectancy was plunging through the mid-thirties and the government had just voted to bury the country’s former dictator in a gold coffin, and any minute now Hayden was going to start using words like ‘human rights’.

  ‘The trouble with you, Saul,’ said Hayden, ‘is you’re political to just the right degree to excuse your cynicism.’

  I blinked at him.

  ‘I imagine you say to yourself: “They’re better off where they’re going than where they are now.”’

  ‘Not really,’ I said, determined not to show a hit. Of course they were bloody better off.

  ‘Why then?’ It was his big moment. ‘Why do you do what you do?’

  Did he really think, for one second, that people like me were incapable of philosophy? That we had no idealism?

  I didn’t answer him. I had no wish to play politics, or to match his belligerence. And how else would it have come over? The world I live in. The world I have had a hand in shaping.

  Each moonless night, hulks registered in Cambodia ply the seaways from Lebanon to Syria to Cyprus. Fishing boats from Somalia run aground on the beaches of Mocha. A whole mile from the Spanish shore, snakeheads throw children into the sea first so the women will follow; then they torch the ship. />
  The waiter came back with Hayden’s sandwich; this time there was no steak in it. ‘You said you didn’t want it,’ said the waiter, nonplussed, when Hayden complained.

  The waiter was local. The following week the conference got started, and the hotel laid off every waiter, cook, bell-boy and maid, and hired South Africans in their place.

  That same week, in the northern Transvaal, irate, unemployed locals were throwing Malawian immigrant miners out of speeding trains. In France, meanwhile, an Iraqi Kurd died after leaping twenty feet from a bridge onto the roof of a goods train, only to slip and fall across an electrified rail; six Russians stole a speedboat from a Calais marina, gunned the engine so brutally it exploded, and found themselves having to row across one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes; and a middle-aged Lithuanian couple spent ten hours floundering around in the English Channel on children’s toy air mattresses. When the English coastguard picked them up barely five hundred yards from the Kent coast they were still, somehow, in possession of a set of matching luggage.

  What Hayden couldn’t or didn’t want to see was that this ‘crime’ he is so keen to stem is itself a kind of revolution. The vision of Franz Fanon and Jorge Katalayo is dead. Only has-beens like Mugabe believe in it now. So be it. The Third World’s revolution – the need in the Third World for revolution – lives on.

  This time, we are going to do things differently. There will be no attempt at, or expectation of, fair dealing. From our first meeting in 1992 to the operation’s collapse in 1999, Nick Jinks and I arranged cross-border transportation for more than ten thousand men, women and children. Ten thousand pioneers, missionaries, merchant adventurers. Compared to the big distributed family networks, the trans-national combines, not to mention the refugee grapevines themselves, Nick and I were small beer.

  Ten thousand mouths. The West wants to play by the market? Then so will we. It doesn’t matter how many Noah Haydens there are in the world, chasing myopic agendas across continents they think still belong to them. We are going to eat the West, the way the West ate us.

  *

  ‘So what went wrong?’

  Stacey was scraping up the remains of a dish of yoghurt. There was a mouthful of eggs benedict left on the plate in front of me. Numbly, I scooped it up, chewed, swallowed. It didn’t taste of anything.

  Through the plate glass windows of the hotel room, the bright sky was dirtied here and there with scraps of last night’s raincloud. For the first time in my life I was making confession.

  ‘Saul?’

  I drank my coffee, and I told her. What the hell.

  Friday, 12 March 1999. After nearly twenty-four hours of air travel, I booked into a Glasgow airport hotel, only to discover the circus had come to town.

  Red Nose Day. For lunch, an unsatisfying encounter, interrupted by the maid. In the evening, Johnny Depp and Dawn French in a Vicar of Dibley charity special.

  About ten to midnight, Nick Jinks finally phoned me. By his voice – it cracked like a crust of salt – I could tell he was crying.

  He’d been supposed to call mid-evening, to tell me our consignment of fifty-eight men, women and children were safely delivered to the tender mercies of the Scottish casual labour market. Instead he was ringing me from a layby outside Carlisle to tell me he had killed them all.

  And where the button was, to operate the fan on his T.I.R. trailer.

  And where the levers were, to open the vents.

  And where the vents were, which he closed before Portsmouth customs and forgot to re-open. On and on, round and around.

  ‘Open the doors.’

  Fear had made him stupid.

  ‘Open the doors. Look inside.’

  ‘Fuck,’ he said, between inhales. ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘The ventilation is on, yes?’

  ‘I’m not fucking looking.’

  ‘Is the ventilation on now?’

  ‘I’m not looking.’

  ‘Tell me you’ve turned the ventilation on.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘Nick, turn the ventilation on.’ I went to the window with the mobile pressed to my ear, and I looked up into the sky.

  ‘Nick, listen to me, they could still be alive. Nick.’

  There was nothing to see. No star shone fiercely enough to penetrate the airport’s sodium glare.

  Stacey picked up her coffee cup. It was empty. She turned it around in her hands, examining it.

  I stood up. I caught the edge of the breakfast trolley with my hip and it rolled away. Cups rattled.

  ‘Saul,’ she said.

  ‘I have to go.’ I stumbled for the door.

  ‘Saul.’

  I rode the elevator down to the garage. I had no memory of where I’d left my hire car, but dumb luck led me to the right corner. I climbed in and locked the door. I dug my phone out of my pocket but my fingers were trembling so much, I kept fudging the numbers. The first available flight to Heathrow was at a quarter past three that afternoon. It would have to do. I booked myself a seat with a credit card, and swung by the hotel for my clothes and passport.

  On the plane that afternoon, in the seat beside mine, already settled, fussing with her earphones, sat Stacey Chavez.

  2

  Stacey’s apartment occupied the top three floors of a converted wharf in Wapping, a ten-minute walk from the City of London. White walls, mahogany-stained floorboards. The rooms at the front were shielded from the road behind linen blinds. Windows at the back looked over the Thames. If I leaned out and turned my head to the right, I could see Tower Bridge. The riverbank opposite was dark: a pub, a strip of park, a line of council housing.

  Stacey’s was the kind of life encapsulated on certain Finnish postage stamps. In the living room, back copies of the art magazine Parkett lay neatly stacked on the table by the flatscreen TV. Her bathroom cabinet boasted non-abrasive facial scrub and soapless soap. When I began staying over, she bought me some perquisites. This is what she called them. ‘I’ve bought you some bathroom perquisites,’ she said, and laughed. I added her purchases to the shelf she had cleared for me: perfumeless aftershave; scruffing lotion.

  The top shelf held her medicines. She took small doses of Zoloft every day to balance her mood. ‘I am better than well,’ she would say, whenever the rigours of the day grew too much. ‘Better than well.’ And sometimes we went to bed, even if Jerom was there, tap-tapping at his iBook in the kitchen on the floor below. Jerom was Stacey’s assistant. Jerom without an ‘e’. He arrived early each morning before we woke. He had his own key.

  ‘Hello, Saul,’ he’d say. ‘How are you? Sleep well?’

  He wanted me to know that he was here.

  ‘Good morning, Saul, how do you want your coffee this morning?’

  He let me know, always nicely, that I was in the way.

  Jerom had a double first from Oxford. When he spoke to Vera on the phone – Vera Stofsky, Stacey’s agent, or anti-agent – he called her Vera. It was all first names with him. Phil was Philip Dodd, who ran the ICA at that time. Jeff was Stacey’s New York dealer, Jeffrey Deitch.

  It was a strange sort of work they were engaged in together: complex, carefully minuted, mediated through emails, websites, PDFs; there was always a biker at the door, collecting a DVD, delivering a printer’s proof. At the same time, and perhaps because so much of this work was conducted in the non-spaces of the internet, I saw virtually no evidence of product – as though the art business were an abstruse strand of international politics.

  Sometimes it was necessary for me to manufacture an interest; more often I was left to myself. I had my living to make, after all.

  The US businesses were ticking over pretty much regardless of Nick Jinks’s disappearance. Occasional work for the Chicago clinic supplemented the trickle of clients passing through my employment agency.

  The UK was a different matter. After the accident, I had drastically reined in my operation, and for that reason my work had acquired a pleasing simplicity and immediac
y: ‘Two navvies this way!’ and ‘Three navvies that!’ and ‘Jump in the back of the van!’ Each week another batch of new arrivals came to me, looking for cash-in-hand: navvies and hod-carriers, brickies and cement artists. Even for the ones who had no transferable skill – the ones for whom being a brickie meant making your own bricks, for whom lighting was synonymous with kerosene and lunch was bushmeat on a braii of stones and rusted cementation rods – I was usually able to find them casual work of one sort or another.

  Most weekdays saw me plying the M25 in my 3-series BMW. Stabbing at my handsfree with nicotine-stained fingers, I deployed my network of white vans across the country, from Glencoe (cockles) to Glastonbury (mushrooms), Sussex (salads) to Sheffield (greenhouse produce). Most every labourer travels a long way for the privilege of trimming our leeks and hand-selecting our beetroot. There are Lithuanians and Poles, Bulgarians and Turks. Most are legal, but a handful are not. These few are the invisible people, the wainscot people, the people adapted to live undiscovered up against the edges of things. My people.

  It was a wrench, come Friday evening, moving from the brute immediacy of this life back into Stacey’s orbit: her life lived between inverted commas. All those dinner parties: catty anecdotes about Vanessa Beecroft and Pipilotti Rist. Entire conversations consisted of nothing but other people’s names. I did my best to act like a thug – mobile phone pressed to my ear, tales of congestion on the A3 arterial – but my heart wasn’t in it.

  I wanted her to stop taking the Zoloft. I wanted to know who she was without that crap in her system.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ she said, and loosed one of her minatory laughs.

  Every Sunday, Jerom insisted on filling the apartment with Sunday newspapers. Stacey never read them, and after a hard week’s driving and dealing, I rarely got further than the TV listings. It was by accident that I stumbled, early that summer, upon an article about a little distinguished-sounding philosophical society near Malet Street – my first employer.