The Weight of Numbers Read online

  A week before, Stacey’s producer Owen sent her the rushes of their initial to-camera. The footage was worse than she’d feared. Who was that dead-eyed brat with her shock-white hair and her chemical tan? Could this really be her? Could those really be her thoughts? Every opinion she spouted came larded with junk words like ‘exclusion’ and ‘branding’.

  Owen’s pre-fabricated style of documentary is ruthlessly efficient. Over gin and tonics in Blacks on Dean Street, Owen and Benjamin, their cameraman, have talked her through every shot. Each one of Stacey’s sentiments and reactions is to be manufactured according to an already written plan. The technique will save a lot of time but this hurried style of rehearsal reminds her, ironically enough, of Grange Hill, the children’s school soap opera which first launched her acting career. Stacey had been looking forward to something different.

  The clearance programmes have lent a boom-town atmosphere to Manhiça, the town where they are filming. With all these foreigners around, Dutch and English and American, Benjamin wondered aloud, over his second G&T, how he was going to keep them out of his footage.

  Stacey was slightly scandalized – she is unused to documentary and its compromises – and wondered aloud if this really mattered.

  ‘One random white face and the whole thing’s buggered,’ Owen assured her, passing his expenses card to the waitress.

  A television set domesticates whatever you happen to be watching. This is his theory. The exotic has to be pointed up, exaggerated, even manufactured, or the foreigness of their location – so obvious to them – will simply not translate to the screen. Neither Owen nor Benjamin expressed the slightest faith in the camera’s ability to tell the truth.

  The drinks trolley passes. McGregor insists they share one of those mini-bottles of champagne and, making conversation, slides unwisely into shop-talk. He asks her, ‘Weren’t you doing something for Amiel?’

  Jon Amiel: director of The Singing Detective, back in the eighties. Look closely during the rendition of ‘Dry Bones’ in episode three and you will spot Stacey kick-stepping her way out of her five-year Grange Hill gig in a nurse’s hat, white fishnets and a smile. Now Amiel is reinventing himself as a Hollywood action director. Stacey was his first choice for the part of the insurance investigator in Entrapment, a role since snapped up by Catherine Zeta-Jones.

  ‘Events got in the way,’ Stacey tells McGregor, fixing him with wide, black, mischievous eyes that, though sunken, have not lost all their glamour.

  It is all a terrible, grotesque mistake, her being here, her doing this, and what makes it worse, she can’t even blame her agent. Did she not burst into the offices of ICM, days after her return from Los Angeles and the eating disorders clinic, to demand work, exposure, media coverage, face-time? Begging for a second shot at the very life that knocked her down?

  Looking back on her oh-so-promising past, Stacey senses its sterility. Even before she went to Hollywood, she had reduced her every passion to an ambition, every ambition to a career plan. By the time of her collapse she had stripped her life down so far it felt as though she had run her every permutation a hundred, a thousand times. No wonder death had seemed a welcome novelty; in that state of mind nothing, least of all success, could ever seem fresh or new or exciting.

  (‘I want to be something to you now. You were doing so well before, I was only a liability. I hope you see that. I hope you see that things are different now.’)

  She has to find something else to do with her life. Something less fatuous.

  ‘Who’s having the special meal, then?’

  The stewardess’s interruption is fortunate. It is hard to know, otherwise, what response McGregor could have made to Stacey’s candid reference to ‘events’. He cannot possibly have remained ignorant of them. From Variety to Hello!, rags of every hue have anatomized the fall of Stacey Chavez, child star turned gymslip pin-up turned LA wannabe. Her collapse. The half-minute she lay flatlined on the gurney.

  ‘The special? Ooh, that will be me.’

  What saved her? If she knew that, then maybe this word ‘recovery’ would hold more meaning for her. If she had ‘recovered her faith’, for example. But she is not aware of recovering any sort of faith in anything. It feels to her as if she simply woke up one day, found herself in hospital and decided that she was, after all, still afraid of death. Everything else – her gains in weight, her improved blood pressure, the ketones vanished from her urine – seem to have followed logically from that reawoken fear.

  What kind of victory is that? It does not feel at all as though she is ‘winning out over her condition’. It is rather as though she has simply swapped her love of death – so grand, so romantic – for the common-or-garden terror of it.

  This sense of anticlimax is, she knows, part of her life now: a necessary consequence of her recovery from addiction. How shameful though, how embarrassing, to have to acknowledge that what she has been hooked on all this time is neither drink nor smack nor sex, but simply the glamour of her own will. Dying to please herself, she was larger than life. Actually having to live with herself, day after day – this is a harder, more humbling proposition.

  (‘Of course I heard about Deborah. I am truly sorry for everything. Not a day went by I did not think of her and of you.’ Moisés Chavez, absent husband, absent father, playing catch-up after all these years. ‘I believe your mother had the very best care. Is there anything I can do for you?’ Though wanted by law enforcement on three continents, Moisés still contrives to pay his family’s medical bills.)

  ‘Is it special, then?’ McGregor is still trying to get her into conversation.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Is it a special meal?’

  ‘Oh…’ She cannot think how to respond. She casts around her compartmented plastic plate, looking for clues. She cannot think of a single thing to say that will not either embarrass or discomfort him. For instance, how the food on aeroplanes reminds her of the meals in the hospital, each portion so carefully presented, under foil, under plastic, the way a transplant surgeon might receive a donor’s organ.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, and tries to laugh.

  Her special meal. Stacey’s circulation is geared by now to the meagre wants of a five-stone body, and her programme of weight-gain, painfully circumspect as it is, makes difficult demands of her ill-used vital organs. She will eat everything they put in front of her. This is the deal. She will neither toy, nor conceal, nor rearrange. Not that it is likely, so soon after treatment, that she will slide into her old, obsessive-compulsive behaviours.

  (‘Call me. Please.’)

  It is much more probable, at this point in her recovery, that her shrivelled heart will explode.

  Glasgow, UK

  —

  Friday, 12 March 1999

  The receptionist wore an orange Jimmy-wig, a propeller tie and a big red nose. As I came in the door, he squeezed his nose at me. It squeaked.

  I told him, ‘I have a room booked. Saul Cogan.’ I had gone back to using my real identity. I was beyond aliases.

  ‘I am afraid your room is not quite ready, sir.’ He made to squeeze his nose at me again, then thought better of it.

  I said to him, ‘Is this an airport hotel?’

  ‘I am terribly sorry, sir.’

  ‘Have you any idea how long I have been awake?’

  ‘Your room would normally be ready for you, sir, only the staff are taking a little longer this morning.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ I said, ‘the maids are wearing gigantic clown shoes.’

  ‘Yes, sir!’ he agreed, brightly. ‘If you would care to wear a hooter today, sir,’ he pointed to a cardboard tray piled with squeaky joke-shop noses, ‘we undertake to contribute five per cent of your final bill to—’

  ‘Look at my face.’

  ‘It should only be a matter of minutes, sir. The breakfast bar is now open.’

  I had spent almost a year working in places where the only food was nsima, a kind of gruel, with – as
an occasional treat – Maggi instant noodles (‘Asam Laksa Flavour’). I had had twenty hours or so of airline food with which to sate my yearning for all the tastes I had been going without. I had eaten everything the stewardesses had put in front of me. I licked the butter raw out of its tiny plastic ramekin. It was not enough. As soon as I entered that room and saw the laden tables, the fresh fruit, the ten different kinds of cereal, the serving bowls of prunes, dried figs, banana chips, mixed nuts, the cold-meat selection, the cheese-board, the tray of fruit-flavoured yoghurts, plain yoghurt, Greek yoghurt, I knew I was going to have to put all of it, everything, at the very least a little bit of everything, into my mouth.

  Afterwards there was no point even trying to sleep, and I looked around for some amusement. There was a swimming pool; I liked the notion of standing about in warm water, relieved of my own weight. I could as easily have gone up to my room, assuming it was ready, and run a bath, but I was afraid I might fall asleep. I pictured myself choking on my own swill.

  By the door to the pool area there was a keep-fit franchise. Though the hotel staff were bowed beneath the kosh of Comic Relief’s Red Nose Day, the girl serving in the franchise had left her circus gear at home. The only swimming trunks she had left in stock were size XXL. They were fluorescent pink. ‘Christ,’ I said, handing her my card.

  The pool was enclosed in a glass dome, the panes held in place by a complex spider-web of white-painted steel struts. The pool was an amoeboid shape that made ‘lengths’ impossible and off-putting displays of jock athleticism unlikely. The remaining space was filled with white plastic recliners and potted palms. There was one other guest, sat with her feet up on a recliner at the far end of the space, holding the hotel’s standard-issue white terry robe tightly to her chin. Every so often she would take a moment to peck intently, one-handed, at a heavy black laptop computer.

  I took a bathsheet from the pile by the door and tossed it onto a recliner far away from hers. Once I had found a deepish-looking corner I slipped into the water. The tiles beneath my feet were pimpled, anti-slip affairs that tickled all my cuts and sore places. Underwater light glanced off my trunks and lent the water a pleasant blush.

  The water was so hot – practically bath heat – I could not stay in for long. After a desultory paddle or two I heaved myself none too elegantly out of the water. As I got to my feet I caught my neighbour’s eye. The defensive way she was clutching her robe was belied by her smile.

  I said, ‘I just want to make it clear, these were the only trunks they had.’

  She took a moment to study them. ‘They do not necessarily reflect your opinions?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘I am reassured.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want you to think that these trunks speak for me in any way.’

  It began to rain. Raindrops driven against the hexagons and pentagons of the dome caused the structure to ring slightly. It was an exhilarating effect, and one the designers had probably not anticipated. ‘I’m going to call for a drink. Do you want anything?’

  She shook her head.

  When my gin and tonic arrived she raised her eyebrows at me.

  ‘It may be your morning,’ I said, ‘it certainly isn’t mine.’ I crossed to the recliner next to hers. The crow’s feet at her eyes suggested a woman in her forties, and she had one of those perfectly preserved figures that childlessness gives some women.

  She adjusted the fold of her robe and took her hand away from her neck. I set my drink down on the table between us and glimpsed, between her collar-bones, the start of a deep and beautiful scar.

  She pretended to concentrate.

  ‘What is that you’re working on? Beyond the obvious.’

  ‘As if I would stoop to a cheap gag like that.’

  ‘As if.’

  ‘It’s a laptop.’

  ‘You could not resist.’

  ‘I felt a terrible compunction.’ She set her laptop down beside my drink, loosened her robe and turned – all this in one fluid action. She headed for the pool and performed a goofy little dive: anything more dramatic, and she would have cracked her head on the bottom. She moved well through the water; her movements were so economical it was hard to see how they managed to propel her. When she was done, she pushed herself out on her arms. Her body had the sallow sheen one gets from regular indoor exercise. She walked back to her chair. The scar extended beyond the cut of her one-piece. It was a well-healed thing, perhaps from childhood. I wanted to trace it.

  She dried herself off and belted herself into her terry robe. ‘Can I have that back now?’

  I was tapping at her keyboard, scrolling through the presentation she had been working on. ‘Wait. I’ve nearly worked it out.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘What this thing is.’

  ‘Give it back.’

  I lifted the laptop into her hands.

  She closed the machine down and shut the lid.

  I finished my drink. ‘My room will be ready now,’ I said.

  ‘Is that some sort of invitation?’

  ‘I like your aura of calm authority,’ I said. ‘I like how you move in water.’

  ‘You want to know me better.’

  ‘I can’t ask you out for a drink, it’s only ten in the morning. Anyway, you’ll be gone in a few hours.’ I gestured at the black box on her lap. ‘According to your calendar.’

  We left for our respective changing areas. I collected my card key from reception and went up to my room. There was a minisystem, but only one CD by Phil Collins. I tried tuning the radio, without success. When I turned on the TV it flashed up a greeting for Saul Coogan, whoever he was. I didn’t expect her to knock.

  When I found her there outside my door I said, ‘You forgot your laptop.’

  ‘I thought it might distract you.’ She was dressed for leaving. She told me her luggage was already at the desk. It became clear that she was more practised at these encounters than I was.

  She asked me what I did. I told her, with some necessary elisions, about the past year. About the camp at Al Ghahain, in the Yemen. About the Somali refugees I had befriended, and their plight. At some point her hand, which had slid from my knee to the crotch of my pants, ceased to move. She did not understand. Struggling to find some point of connection, she told me, ‘In my sports centre, they let asylum-seekers in for free.’

  ‘Asylum-seekers are not allowed to work,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Exactly,’ she said.

  I moved us onto safer ground. ‘Your laptop,’ I said, and while she talked I took off her clothes.

  ‘It crawls from connection to connection,’ she said. ‘It closes the gaps between things.’

  It learns who you are, she told me, and intuits the things you most desire. Which bottle of wine. Which book. Which holiday. Which human being. I took off her bra and took each nipple into my mouth.

  The thing on her laptop was a search engine. This was her work, her reason for being. The crowning glory of a life of project management. Though she told me the project’s name, I never saw it again, and I imagine both it and she fell victim to the stock crash which consumed her industry, just a few months later.

  I laid her flat on the bed and lifted her arms above her head to stretch her scar. It ran at a slight diagonal from her throat to a point below her rib-cage. She told me they had cracked her chest when she was a baby, to plug a hole in her heart.

  The cut had healed very well: the casual stroke of a tailor’s chalk, splitting her in half. I knelt down to taste her, and, when she came, the scar flushed suddenly, a streak of red lightning under her skin. I traced it with my finger.

  ‘The heart’s signal,’ I said.

  She laughed. ‘I can never fake.’

  ‘A message from the heart.’ I was determined to have my meaningful moment.

  She told me some men wouldn’t kiss her scar; or they would kiss it in a manner they fancied would not be noticed. Some pretended not to notice it at all. I understood why
, when I first saw her, she had held her robe closed so tightly around her throat. It was to attract my attention.

  I told her I wanted to pull her scar open. That I had this desire to touch what was inside.

  Apparently I was not the first to say that, either.

  We played each other like instruments, a finger here, lips there, with very little passion. She drew my foreskin down, wetted me with her mouth, and while she ran the palm of her hand in slow circles over me, she told me about her work and its philosophy. (She wanted me to know her work had a philosophy.) About webs and matrices. How things and people are bound together. About the shadow separating a desire and its satisfaction, and how that shadow is banished in the white glare of modern information technology.

  ‘Now I want to fuck you.’

  ‘Do you, now?’ she said.

  I reached over to the bedside table and fished a condom out of the packet. ‘Make me wet,’ I said. I held the back of her head while she did it, and then I put on the rubber and climbed on top of her. I wanted to see that white line go red again. I wanted to see that subtle, subterranean eruption along the old fault line: the halves of her yearning to separate. I slid inside her.

  The door to the corridor opened and in walked a maid wearing a green fright-wig, a red nose, striped pantaloons and metre-long plastic overshoes.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ I said.

  The maid mumbled something about the door being open and hurried to leave. Her feet wouldn’t let her turn around. She kept treading on them. Humiliated, she had to edge backwards through the doorway.

  The interruption had ruined any chance that lightning might run through that scar a second time. Patting each other, reassuring each other, we abandoned the attempt. ‘I need to freshen up,’ I said, and locked myself in the bathroom, hoping that by the time I came out, she would be dressed again.

  She was faster than I was: the room was empty when I emerged. I returned to the bed. She had straightened the duvet for me: a gesture with so little redeemable meaning, in the end I had to throw the thing off and lie on the bare sheet, just so I could stop thinking about what it meant.