The Weight of Numbers

by Simon Ings

  ‘I AM AN OLD MAN!’

  You can’t end a phone call by slamming your mobile satisfyingly onto a surface. He has tried. Instead, obedient to the limitations of the new technology, Pál monkhouses his juddery thumb over to the little red telephone button. Right a bit… left a bit… up a bit… there.

  Anthony Burden owns a hammer, but he no longer has the strength to wield it. When he raises it to strike – bones augmented, being extended, reach and strength increased, and every inch Tool-Maker Man – the hammer yanks itself out of his grip and goes clattering across the linoleum.

  When his wrist has stopped ringing, he raps his bread knife across the coconut, once, twice, three times. The coconut rolls off the kitchen counter onto the floor – and does not crack.

  He drops the coconut out of the window of his eighth-floor council flat. Then he goes to the elevator and presses the call button. What possessed him to buy this stupid fruit in the first place?

  Classical music is being piped into the elevator to soothe the troubled spirits who tag the interior each week with yet another, seemingly innocuous one-syllable word: CHUTE, PUFF, VIM, DECK. Last week: BULB.

  He is an old man, with an old man’s mistrust of things and people, but tags and taggers do not rile him, even when the words appear on his front door. They are decorative enough, in a world that would erode all difference. If, as his neighbours claim, the tags mark some gangland boundary – well, then, so much the better: the old geography has not yet lost its power. When this machinic Eden shakes us off finally – the boy thrown from his till – perhaps we will go primitive again and treat this chrome and concrete mess we’ve made as just another nature.

  The lift stops. The door opens. Anthony explores the purlieus of the tower block, hunting his coconut.

  It is lying on the grass, beside a cat turd. It is intact.

  Burden picks it up and rides it back to his flat, scrubs it clean and places it on the floor. He tries to balance the leg of the kitchen table on top of the coconut. If he sits down hard on the table, the nut will crack. The nut keeps rolling away. He uses tins from the store cupboard to steady the coconut. The tins are not heavy enough to hold the nut in place, and now his back is singing and he has no strength left to lift the table.

  He pauses, panting.

  The music has followed him from the lift. A passionate piano; swooping strings. He recognizes it, almost. It jags against his ear, then goes swooping off again on a whim of its own. Rachmaninov? No. Tchaikovsky?

  Then it comes to him, and all the mistakes of his life bubble up in his heart and he is crying for the first time in forty years. Poor Anthony, at his life’s end, with nothing at all to show for his obsession with numbers, birds and bees.

  It is the Budapest Concerto. The tears run unchecked down his cheeks as he leans against the table, sobbing, for what he has lost of himself. It is the work performed to extraordinary raptures, the night he first met his wife, Rachel, in the basement of the National Gallery.

  What is it doing here? Is the lift stuck outside his door? A little recovered, Burden goes and opens his front door. The lift doors are closed, and the light above them indicates that the car is resting at ground level.

  Are they piping music through the corridors, now? Are they piping music into our rooms?

  Back in his flat, the music grows predatory: diminished fifths for the left hand scratch at the air.

  Angrily, he wipes his face – stupid, stupid, ignominious, teary-eyed old age. I would be Lear, he thinks. I would rage rather than cry. But the piano is weeping and he sees himself for what he is: an old man in his bedsit, drizzling tears, and he knows where the music comes from now. It is in his head.

  He goes into the kitchenette and picks up the coconut. He sets it down against the doorframe between the kitchenette and his bed-sitting room. He half closes the door, then stands with his back against it. He lets himself fall against the door. He loses his balance and falls to the floor. He cracks his head against the floor.

  When he opens his eyes, he finds that something has gone wrong with the light in the room. Things have been sapped of their colour. A narrow, actinic light shines up into the room from sources far below, lighting ceilings and leaving floors in shadow. Streetlights. It is night-time.

  Gingerly, he moves one limb at a time. He moves his head. Incredibly, nothing hurts. His head does not smart when he touches it. He sits up without a struggle. A dozen so-so movies replay themselves in his head: touching comic scenes in which a ghost gets up out of its own corpse, yawns and stretches, unaware of what it is. He thinks, I am dying, and he is filled with relief.

  A piano, muted and passionate, sobs out a discordant cadence; minor strings put it out of its misery, then go spinning off.

  The coconut.

  It lies in two neat halves, one on the thin white carpet of the bed-sitting room, one on the black linoleum of the kitchenette. The husks are black, the flesh is white. Most of the coconut milk has run off into the carpet. A little puddle lingers in each scoop. Burden, crouched on the floor like an old cat, lowers his muzzle, and inhales.

  Life’s sweetness eddies through him, and away.

  Weary, Burden staggers to his feet.

  He goes to his chair by the window. Tower blocks rise around him, self-similar, peppered with trivial differences. In the street below, the new primitives are gathered: gangs of boys from Turkmenistan, Havant, Albania, Portsea, Nigeria, Hayling Island, Congo, Cosham, China, Horndean, Iraq, Waterlooville, Afghanistan. They smoke cigarettes. They ride their mountain bikes in circles in the road. They shelter mysteriously in doorways, then wander off, as though grazing.

  Burden sighs: these are merely the movements of livestock. He would have tribes in bright colours clashing in the streets! But over the years some vital human thing has been invested in this chrome and concrete nature; something that cannot be retrieved. He is glad he has never had children.

  A woman in a mackintosh and a white headscarf appears. She is heading for his tower block. She is old, he thinks, watching from his eighth-floor eyrie. She is as old as he is.

  The longer he watches her, straining his eyes, the more she resembles a loop cut from a film. It is as though she were super-imposed: there, but not there. Fascinated, his hands white claws, Anthony watches as the woman nears.

  The boys spot her. They agitate around her, vaguely threatening. One of them throws a lit cigarette at her back. It strikes her mackintosh. There are sparks.

  Oblivious, she keeps walking. She pulls away from them, and they have not the energy to follow her.

  She disappears from sight. He imagines her below him, walking the last few yards along the asphalt path. He imagines her climbing up the stairs to the main entrance. She taps in the entry code. She opens the door. She steps inside. He has seen her somewhere before.

  He imagines her rising through the building. In his mind she does not take the lift. She climbs the stairs. Though she is as old as him, she climbs the stairs smoothly, mechanically, as though the stairs were a scale in music. Music surrounds her, as it surrounds him. The Budapest Concerto. The walls, the floors, the ceilings of this structure are made of music.

  Of music. Suddenly he knows what this is. He knows what is happening. After all these barren years it is happening again.

  The woman leaves the stairwell and passes Burden’s open door. She pauses, turns; gingerly, she knocks. ‘Hello?’

  She waits. When there is no answer, she leans into the room. She sees an old man, weeping with frustration.

  ‘Is everything all right in there? Only I saw the door open. I thought maybe—’

  ‘Hello?

  ‘It’s just me. Don’t worry. From eight-oh-three. Are you all right?’

  He does not turn round. He watches her in the window’s reflection. She steps into the monochrome room. She is out of place here, but so is everything else. Everything is disordered. She is no more absurd than the coconut lying broken on the floor, or the bag of prawns he l
eft to defrost in an empty fruit bowl. Stripped of context, every object shines.

  She shines. She does not appear to be moving. She appears instead to be expanding. She fills the glass. She fills the room. He feels the air compress as she steps beside him.

  She follows his gaze through the window, beyond the towers, out towards the invisible sea.

  ‘Hello,’ she says, patient, insistent. ‘Hello. It’s Mrs Cogan,’ she says. ‘Kathleen Cogan, just across the hall in eight-oh-three.’ He still does not answer, so, gathering her courage, she takes hold of his hand.

  The piano swirls. It capers. Anthony imagines temples, aqueducts, arenas, embankments, kiosks, statuary, railways, theatres, formal gardens, vistas, bandstands, playgrounds, fountains, amphitheatres, parades…

  Kathleen shifts her hand in his. With a fingertip she traces the scar across his thumb.

  ‘Hello,’ he says, at last. ‘Hello. Thank you, Mrs Cogan. Thank you, Kathleen, for looking in on me.’

  He turns and takes her by the hands. ‘I am quite well,’ he says.

  Outside, lights play over Portsmouth’s last remaining marshes. Helicopters belly in the air.

  Grade Seven civil servant Noah Hayden, disappointed, exhausted and soon to retire, comes to a nameless mud track between Portsmouth’s few undeveloped reed-beds and climbs with trepidation from his car. Above him, police helicopters quarter and dice the landscape with their floodlights, tearing the hot night to shreds.

  Today’s anonymous tip-off has disturbed them, the way you might disturb a wasps’ nest with a stick.

  Hayden steps away from the car, testing his footing at every step. There are old moorings among the reed beds. The oldest have long since vanished from view, leaving only holes behind, where the wooden piles have rotted away. The holes have a petrolish sheen over them where nothing grows.

  What fills these holes is an essence of rotted wood and the microscopic carcasses of whatever fed on it, mingled with the liquefied remains of whatever fed on the microbes – and on and on, who knows how long a food chain? Though water covers the holes for much of the day, what fills them has very little to do with water. It has the consistency of porridge. Dogs have been known to disappear into them. One or two children. So Noah Hayden treads carefully, and even though there is a line of plastic police tape to follow, it takes him a good five muddy minutes to cross the fifty feet or so to the burial site. The police team, forewarned, are waiting for him.

  He is close. Saul Cogan, who was Hayden’s room-mate at Cambridge, and his friend. Who stood him a steak sandwich in the Mount Soche Hotel in Blantyre, Malawi. Saul Cogan: gangmaster and entrepreneur; trafficker (this is known, but not yet proven) in men, women and children.

  He is blurred. In the files, the tax records, the police tapes, the depositions of foreign governments and the internal inquiries of international aid agencies, nothing adds up. There is no Saul Cogan, or there are too many Saul Cogans. He is nowhere and everywhere, a ghost in the globalized machine.

  The helicopters have their lights trained on the work of recovery. The result is a kind of shifting, multi-angled daylight. Shadows leap about as if with a life of their own. Perspectives wheel and collapse. It is impossible to say what are two reed-stalks nearby and what are four reed-stalks far away. The policemen are dressed in identical waders and paper masks, and Hayden finds it no easier to focus on them. How many men are here? How many holes? How many jetties? How many helicopters? Is he going to faint?

  The bodies so far recovered are lying in a row to one side of the burial site. In their anaerobic resting place, they have come to little harm. Through the greasy plastic, each horror is still recognisably human.

  Why did they call him out here? To what end? He did not have to see this. He passed on the email, didn’t he? He made no fuss when they took away his computer. He answered all their questions. He kept his temper when they insisted on interviewing his wife and even his children.

  ‘Who do you think sent this to you?’

  Well, really, it hardly took a genius to answer that one.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he can afford to.’

  ‘Meaning?’ They were very excited.

  ‘Either Saul Cogan knows you will find him, or he knows that you will not find him.’ Hayden could not resist a little smile as he added, ‘I suspect the latter.’

  No, they did not have to make him see this. It is spite. Punishment for his smile. The Third Floor is spitting blood. All over Europe, the nets are tightening, the gates are swinging shut. The whole northern hemisphere is swaddled in meshes of infra-red and ultrasound. Still, this one man eludes them. Try as they might, they cannot pin him to their card. Saul Cogan, pooping and farting at the new world order, refusing to fit in their file.

  At what point, Noah wonders, did I start to like him again?

  He heads back to his car. The reeds before him sway and hiss. They tickle his hands, the back of his head, his groin. Reeds spring up between him and the police tape he must follow, back to dry land and his car.

  The tides. He imagines the waters encroaching, the little patch of dry land around him shrinking, shrinking. His footing gives way…

  Perhaps he has been here before. The place reminds him of the bilharzia-ridden shallows of the Shire River. He has seen the Shire only once, as a functionary for the Department for International Development, when he toured the camps thrown up to accommodate refugees, Mozambican and Malawian, dispossessed by the 2000 floods. The river, which had marked the border between Malawi and Mozambique, was rife with rumours of Saul Cogan and his operations. Diligently, Hayden reported these back to his friends on MI5’s Third Floor.

  But it is impossible, at such a remove, to imagine what, if anything, they had made of them. Cogan’s men stealing food aid. Cogan’s men distributing food aid. Cogan, the lender of tractors and ploughs, collector of tithes and tribute.

  Saul Cogan, régulo.

  Yes, this might be any break along the Shire, where starving skeletons of men cook bushmeat on little fires, wary, as easily put to flight as the animals they hunt.

  Might two such different places not be one place, after all? Hayling Island, the Shire River, Mozambique, Malawi, Britain – there is no difference. All places are the same place. How close are the walls of the world? Unnerved, he turns around and returns to the place where Saul Cogan has buried his dead.

  Up comes another. A helicopter hovers directly overhead, winch spinning, lifting the corpse free of the mudlark’s hole. Noah Hayden, craving company, re-enters the circle of men surrounding the hole. The light and sound of the recovery operation are at their fiercest here. Everything shakes in the downwash, vivid in magnesium light.

  Up it comes, through the pink-blue skein, through the interface between worlds: the corpse in its plastic wrapper.

  Over fifty dead have already been recovered. Men, women, children. Where are they from? What happened, that there are so many?

  The black, poisoned water settles. A metallic film forms over the hole. Pastel colours shoot and swirl across the black water, until the black is hidden.

  Hayden knows these colours. They belong on maps of the world. Throw a stone into the water, he thinks, and all these pretty colours will disappear.

  This is one for his friend.

  Throw a stone.

  EPILOGUE

  Christmas Eve, 1968

  Each time their link with Mission Control hissed out, without drama or fanfare, Apollo Eight command module pilot Jim Lovell was reminded of a journey he and his wife once made, driving their car through lonely Florida countryside to Lake Kissimmee: how the radio stations faded out, one by one.

  Apollo Eight has not landed on the moon. It has flown by, tantalizingly close, less than seventy miles above the surface: a reconnaissance mission. Altogether, Borman Anders and Lovell have made ten lunar orbits. Each took two hours, and every other hour – when the moon got in the way of their radio communication with Earth – they spent the time in s
ilence, taking it in turns to look out of the window at the Moon’s dark side: a secret face no one had ever seen before.

  The first thing Jim Lovell noticed about the Moon, seen this close up, was its lack of colour – though why this should have startled him, this self-evident fact, he cannot say.

  Ten orbits; twenty hours. All the while they looked at the Moon, their eyes were tuned to the colours of home. Looking on this other world, they saw nothing but shades of grey. For Jim, it was as if the place was holding something back. As though a vital datum were being withheld.

  Apollo Eight’s purpose is to prove that the dream can be realized: that men can travel this far away from Earth and come home safe again. When they emerged from behind the Moon for the tenth and final time, Mission Control welcomed the crew back on air with more fanfare, relieved for them and proud of themselves. Now, hours later, the Apollo Eight spacecraft is starting its journey home, and it is time for the astronauts to speak to the waiting world.

  Jim says to the world, ‘The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring.’ He tries not to wince.

  ‘It makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth,’ he says, wishing he did not have to listen to the words coming out of his mouth.

  Lovell’s words are weak. His carefully chosen, utterly inadequate words. They lack fuel. They lack thrust. He launches them and watches, helpless, as they struggle and stall and plummet back to the cold, unmeaning ground.

  He has been up here often enough – with Aldrin on Gemini Twelve; before that on Gemini Seven, with Frank Borman – to know that he will never find the words. The words do not exist. All he can do, over the course of his career as an astronaut, is to encourage as many people out here as he can. Floating together, they might think up some new words, unearthly words – divine words, even – to do the job he cannot do like this, the TV camera in his face (another Apollo Eight first) and too little time.

  ‘For all the people on Earth,’ Bill Anders says, ‘the crew of Apollo Eight has a message we would like to send you.’