The Weight of Numbers Read online

  A hand settles upon her back. There is someone beside her. She steps forward a little, to let him by, and the pressure on her back is lifted. However, the man does not move by. She senses him there, to her left, not reading, looking at her. She pretends to ignore him. The light is failing. Words swim about, tadpoles in the reticular grey pool of the page.

  One by one, visitors are leaving the ruined library. She listens to them: shoe leather against stone and brick; a coat-tail brushed over planks; something dislodged; a hollow, confused sound from within the teepee of broken joists, charred linoleum and ceiling lathe which fills the room.

  The hand settles on her back once more. Her heart races. She does not step away.

  The man has a scent. It is mild and pleasant. It is the scent of tar soap and aftershave, and sherry after lunch. It is smoky and adult. It is the smell of her uncle, who was so friendly to her, and who, she has guessed, is her real father.

  The hand moves down her back, over her rear, to the vent in her coat. The hand moves inside, then out again.

  She had said to her mother, ‘You married the wrong one,’ and after that, there was no going back. Her mother did not even come to the station to wish her well. This was all the confirmation she needed that it was true.

  She waits for the hand to settle on her back a third time. Browsing the stack opposite theirs, where the light is still strong enough to read, one or two men still linger. The man – her ‘uncle’, her real father, her fantasy taking root in the shelter of three tall, book-lined walls – waits, not touching her, but standing close beside her, so she can smell him. The scent of the cigars her uncle smoked behind the wheel of his low-slung car. Their famous ‘business trips’, so urgent, so important, ending always in a picnic in some pleasant spot, and him so kind and smiling, making conversation. Kathleen eating everything in sight. Falling in love with him.

  ‘Dear Father’ she had written: a letter she would never send.

  ‘Dear Uncle’: that, too, went in the bin.

  Did he know by now, that she had found out who he really was? Did he even know, himself? Had her mother told him? Or, once Kathleen had failed to turn up at the abattoir, had he worked it out?

  Has he come after her?

  Is it him?

  In the shadow of three ruined walls, the fantasy blossoms.

  They wait to be alone. The man bends forward and takes a book from the shelf. She turns aside. She does not want to see his face. She does not want to know who he really is – some civil servant, bank clerk, inspector of drains. She does not want to know the truth. She does not need the truth. She needs the dream.

  By chance, he has picked up the companion volume to her encyclopaedia. He opens it: ‘L to Z’.

  He leans in to her.

  He runs the edge of his volume against hers, back and forth. She studies his thumb. A clean, square-cut nail. Strong. A tiny scar above the knuckle. It might be her uncle’s hand.

  Yes, she decides. It is his hand.

  It has become too dark to read. Her uncle turns, making sure they are alone.

  They are alone.

  He closes ‘L to Z’, steps forward and slips the volume back into its place. Kathleen lets ‘A to K’ fall into the rubble at her feet. What does it matter?

  The man sighs. He bends down. She cannot help but look at him. When she sees that he is wearing a hat, she sighs with relief. He can still be her uncle. She has not seen him. He can still be who she wants him to be.

  He slides the volume into the stack, beside its mate. He turns to her.

  She turns away.

  He takes her arm, turning her to face him.

  She pulls away, keeping her back to him.

  He takes her arm again.

  Again, she pulls away.

  She feels his breath, fogging the back of her neck. He takes hold of her again – not her arm this time, her shoulder. His hand is heavy. It squeezes. It knows what she wants, now. It drives her forward, over the rubble, to an open doorway.

  It used to be the door to a reading room. The reading room is gone. There is a cluttered nothing beyond the door, a waist-high maze of shattered masonry and scorched timber. He pushes her and pushes her. She staggers, her ankle twists and she loses her balance. She falls to her knees. She stops there, on her knees, swallowing the pain. She gets up. Her knees are bleeding. Her stockings are torn. One of her shoes is missing.

  Hands reach around her and draw her coat from her shoulders. Her arms hang loose by her sides. She shivers. She waits. One hand at the back of her neck, one hand in the small of her back, he bends her over. She clasps her legs just above her grazed knees. He reaches up under her dress and pulls.

  Her knickers will not tear, however hard he tugs. He curses, lets her go. She stands up. It might all be over now. Dreadful. Mortifying. What if the moment is lost? She hoists up her skirts, hoping to keep him. She runs her hands in and down, pulling her knickers to her ankles with a fluid motion. She kicks off her remaining shoe. She steps out of her underwear. She waits.

  He lifts up her dress, higher, higher, around her waist, up over her breasts. He runs his fingers down her back, to the crack of her bottom, and in.

  She steps forward, surprised, away from him. There is a piece of wall in front of her. Brick, with something painted on it: letters from an advertisement. She leans against it. It shifts sickeningly under her hands, and she is afraid she will fall. She readjusts her weight. The surface holds under her hands. She spreads her legs.

  His fingers run lightly down between her buttocks. He cups her cunt with one hand, runs light fingers over her back with the other.

  He parts her lips with fingers that are already wet. He runs a finger between her lips, and finds the weak point, enters, curls. She sobs. He moves forward. The wings of his coat tickle the backs of her calves.

  He enters her quickly. It is like he is stubbing out a cigar inside her. She cries out. He leans forward, over her, and his free hand covers her mouth. She smells sherry and cigars and soap, closes her eyes and licks the palm of his hand as he snaps her head back.

  She thinks of her mother doing this. Bent over. Bent back. Filled. She tries to imagine her mother, given up to this dream. It is impossible. The mother she knows is a woman who looks things in the eye with a terrible dispassion. A woman who looks beyond every pretty dream to the inevitable rot. Beneath the skin, always the skull. Beyond the dress, a pile of rags.

  This, she decides, moaning against the restraining hand, is why Sage’s method is not enough. Not wrong – but nowhere near enough. Because, after all, there’s appetite, the human itch. No method can accommodate it. ‘Look what you made me do,’ her mother used to say to her. Perhaps, when he was spent, she said it to him, too – her real father.

  ‘Look what you made me do!’

  The image is so ludicrous, Kathleen laughs out loud.

  And wakes up.

  The man’s hand is gone from her mouth.

  How much time has she lost?

  She nearly forgets her purpose. She nearly turns around.

  The man’s hand falls on her just in time, firm across her buttocks, holding her to her intention. This dream she is having. Her daddy inside her. His fingers feeling for the other way in.

  He sucks his thumb and presses it between her buttocks, wetting her. He licks it again and brings it back to her bottom again. His thumb stirs the muscle there. His breathing becomes laboured. He withdraws from her cunt, then tugs at her hips, repositions himself, and presses his erection against the rose of her anus. He gasps. There is a wetness coming out of him. He presses harder against the muscle of her bottom, the wet lubricating him, so that he begins to penetrate her there. His thrusts are irregular and wet. Another kind of fire runs through her, and her body fights him, fights him, then suddenly, without her meaning to, surrenders, and his erection splits her.

  He holds her very still until she has stopped crying. She feels him inside her. She squeezes him, feeling him there. Little by l
ittle, savouring it, she squeezes it out like a turd.

  She stands upright. She looks for her shoes. The man’s hand curls around her arm.

  Shuddering, repulsed, she pulls away.

  ‘All right?’ he says.

  This is her fantasy, not his. She will not share.

  ‘Shall we have a cup of tea somewhere?’

  She needs to shut him up. She needs to get rid of him. Fast. She wishes there was a sign around her neck: ‘Keep Off’. She will have to speak to him. What should she say?

  She remembers the sailor Dick Jinks, the night he turned up at the guest-house door. What he said about Donald, his friend.

  ‘Poofter,’ she says.

  She hears the breath catch in the stranger’s throat.

  ‘Nancy!’

  The electricity between them is palpable. Behind her eyes, she sees his fists begin to curl, the knuckles whitening…

  ‘Queen.’

  She screws up her eyes, tight shut, anticipating the blow. She is afraid. What if his fists aren’t enough? What if he picks up a brick? It is too late now.

  ‘Fuck you,’ she says.

  She counts to ten.

  She opens her eyes.

  She feels that he is gone.

  Her coat is lying at her feet. She picks it up and slips it round her shoulders.

  Her shoes are nearby. Her knickers. She puts them on.

  Dizzy, disorientated, it takes her a moment to recognize the sound of the sirens. How much time has she lost? Where is she? Is she alone?

  She turns around.

  She sees the bomb. She actually sees it falling, the great mass of it, the unlikely speed, as though it has toppled out of the sky by accident. Surely this is not something anyone could ever mean to happen. The whistle at its nose glints in the moonlight as it bursts through the outstretched branches of a tree and the whistle is a terrible, familiar ‘Eeeee!’ as it fists the earth.

  Kathleen rises. Idly, she backstrokes the air. Something showers her. She is expecting plaster dust, but no, it is a rain of shredded leaves. Bright birds spin around and around the stripped trees. The birds are very bright. Their wings are on fire.

  Kathleen lies back and watches the burning birds.

  And wakes up.

  She is alone. The street smokes and crackles. She sits up. Ahead of her there is a great crater. She looks down at herself. She is covered with earth. She gets up, and the earth falls away from her, and as above, the burning birds wheel with a great scream towards the moon and vanish in its glare, so below, inside her belly, the stranger’s sperm, one flagellant stray, finds its mark.

  WHITE MAN’S MAGIC

  1

  It is 1952 and early in the year: already dark by five.

  ‘So dark out there!’ Kathleen wails. She is stood before the rain-beaded lounge window, framed by orange-and-brown geometrically patterned curtains. Her shoulders are hunched and rounded under a shiny blue nylon housecoat.

  She and I are the only ones home.

  ‘Saul! What are we going to do?’

  William, my father, is late home from work. Driving back from Fratton, it is not unusual for him to run into heavy traffic, especially in bad weather. You might think that the more there are of these unexpected late homecomings, the less frightened my mother would be. You might think that the more often William returns home unscathed, cursing the traffic, the less likely Kathleen is, on the next occasion, to assume the worst: the skid, the collision, the closed coffin. But Kathleen lives in a dangerous world, in which every act is a game of Russian roulette, and William’s safe homecomings are as the empty chambers in a pistol barrel which, turning, can only draw the fatal bullet, chamber by chamber, closer to the pin.

  Home – since she left London with her husband on one arm and me in the crook of the other – has been this new-build bungalow on a residential street running parallel to the London–Portsmouth trunk road. It is small and snug, though the gardens, front and rear, are huge and wild, as though they belonged to a much grander property. Kathleen reckons that I will have a lovely safe time here as I grow up, playing about in these gardens. I am such a happy, lively child! I am sure to have many friends!

  Beside the bungalow is a garage big enough for two cars. A second car is an unimaginable luxury, especially since Kathleen has no desire to learn to drive. More likely they will one day buy a caravan; when not in use they can keep it on the patch of hard-standing, screened by conifers, which William has already prepared. He is so practical. So very organized.

  Where will they go in their caravan? The Isle of Wight. The Lake District. Up to Darlington, even; Kathleen would like to visit the North again one day, and show me the landscapes of her childhood.

  Kathleen has painted every room of the house white. It is the colour of the starched tablecloths in the Lyons corner houses where she used to work. Also, it is the colour of her mother’s kitchen. Neither association is a wholly happy one, but associations, memories, the past – these are not the point. The effect of so much whiteness is clean and bright and aspirational. It is the décor of becoming, not of being. This is what her life is: a crisp new blouse, fresh from the wrapper.

  William insists that Kathleen need not go out to work. She is a mother. He, meantime, has a job in Fratton, introducing new breeds of calculating machine to the offices of the Southern Electricity Board. (In 1939, flat feet and childhood rickets saw to it that William waddled, ignominiously rejected, out of the Hackney volunteer station. Soon after, he had stumbled into one of the duller reserved occupations, doing sums for the electricity board. He has been in that line of work ever since.)

  In vain, Kathleen tries to talk to her husband about his job, the machines and the calculations they perform. In vain, she tries to engage. ‘It is very complicated, Kathleen,’ he says. He is tired, after a long day at the office and such a long commute. ‘It is too complicated for me to explain.’

  In idle moments during the day, while Saul naps or plays in the garden, Kathleen may take one of William’s books down from the shelf in the lounge. Flashes of colour light the backs of her eyes as she reads, ragged remains of her synaesthetic gifts.

  Binary notation.

  Boolean algebra.

  Algorithms.

  Regret is cheap, she knows that. She has much to be thankful for: a handsome, happy child, a generous and handy husband, a clean new home to treasure. But she is not so much of a Pollyanna that she cannot see the opportunities that have passed her by. The strange gift detected in her at the very beginning of the war – her easiness with numbers, her vivid understanding of them, almost a sixth sense – this gift has never found any outlet, for all the professor’s encouragement, for all the hopes he stirred up in her, for all the letters she sent him.

  She had wanted to be a computer, back in the days when a computer was still a person. A trained and respected computer, perhaps with her own office. How strange her hopes sound now, as though, with the change in the meaning of one word, some part of history has been erased. These days her wasted talents are worth nothing. Any adding machine can perform as well as she ever could, if not better. Even William could best her, armed with one of his precious machines. (‘It really is very complicated, Kathleen,’ he says, with an exasperating little smile. She finds herself hating him.)

  So it is not good for her to look back. She must look forward. She must always be looking forward, to the bright white future of her Second Chance as Wife and Mother.

  By day, the limitations of their new life mean less to Kathleen than her own project of improvements. Every year she repaints the bungalow’s interior with paint that, every year, promises an even more intense whiteness, a whiter-than-white whiteness, a whiteness that is (according to the changing fashions of the advertising industry) Chemically, Biologically, even Optically White. She longs for surfaces like shells, for the opalescent shimmer of mother-of-pearl. Surfaces from which would issue, on demand, a kind glow. An early convert to the pleasures of indirect lig
hting, she has asked William to fit dimmer switches in every room. William grumbles that with the lights turned so low, he cannot see to eat.

  As the daylight fades, so the colours of the street begin to leach away, and the bungalows to either side of them – early experiments in prefabrication – seem to flatten themselves out against the grey ground of the evening. The whole street becomes a shoddy simulacrum, and the bright white emptiness of Kathleen’s future closes around her like the cold enamel walls of a bath.

  ‘So dark, Saul!’ Kathleen wails.

  ‘The traffic is so heavy,’ she says, gazing across her road, and up, over the earth embankment and through its screen of trees, to the fleeting red-and-white tracer fire that marks the trunk road proper.

  ‘If only the traffic wasn’t so heavy.’

  And: ‘Please let him be careful in the heavy traffic.’

  There is panic in her use of the same image, over and over again, and there is poetry, too. Heavy traffic. While trying to find the words to express her fear, she has found that it is best expressed, not by the right word, the apt phrase – which, once uttered, can only leave her dumb – but by the wrong word, the trite phrase, repeated to the point where it acquires the ecstatic mumbo-jumbo of an incantation.

  ‘Why is there so much heavy traffic?’

  ‘This heavy traffic isn’t necessary.’

  ‘The traffic’s getting even heavier.’

  Reason cannot comprehend reality, and fantasy cannot manipulate it. This is the lesson Kathleen has drawn from life. Reason and fantasy are two sides of the same bent key. They unlock nothing. They reveal nothing. Step into the world expecting magic; cause and effect will crush your every expectation. Look at the world objectively, and everything before you turns fantastical and absurd. You only have to look at this place. Our address mentions the village of Horndean, but Horndean, pretty as it sounds, is not a village so much as a line of ribbon development, straggling pointlessly by the side of the trunk road as it carves its way through the South Downs. You drive for miles by lawns of tall dead grass and glimpse, now and again, far away down crazy-paving drives, houses of peeling green pressboard and untreated corrugated iron, sheds on concrete stilts surrounded by fences of rusted chicken wire; sometimes knee-high walls, their bricks Post Office red with a thick poisonous resin, the mortar white, a kitsch criss-cross. Hand-painted. Madness.