The Weight of Numbers Read online

  I got out my mobile phone and laid it on the pillow beside me. There was still no call from Nick Jinks – Nick Jenkins, as I had first known him. (By the sixth month of our unlikely and profitable partnership, Jinks had drunkenly revealed his real name to me – but not his reason for changing it. That revelation would come later, and until then I more or less assumed that it was a seafarer’s superstition that had made him keep Jinks a secret.)

  I looked at my watch: why was I worrying? It was still far too early; the ferry wouldn’t even have docked. I closed my eyes and tried a relaxing breathing exercise – something I had picked up, in spite of myself, from my long-haul’s wakey-wakey prior-to-landing video.

  She had told me how everything is architecture.

  People, she had said, are the patterns they make.

  People are rhythms, reverberating along the strands of an all-encompassing web.

  I imagined myself embedded in her web of global connections, the futile syncopations of my gluey little feet, and fell asleep.

  Portsmouth, UK

  —

  the same day

  Fifty-seven-year-old former merchant seaman Nick Jinks rolls his juggernaut off the ferry and up the narrow causeway – tarmac over steel; the whole structure trembles – to the Portsmouth Harbour customs area. He shuts off the container’s ventilation so as not to arouse the officers’ suspicion, presents his paperwork, and waits.

  Nick Jinks has travelled all over the world. In Havana, he has swapped jokes in bad Spanish with Yuri Gagarin. As he celebrated his twenty-eighth birthday alone in a jazz bar by the docks in Port-au-Prince, a man claiming to be John Kennedy’s real assassin stood him a mojito, lacing it generously with cocaine from a silver spoon. He was in Port Canaveral, December 1972, closing the deal on a Cuban exile’s sport fishing boat, in time to see a Saturn V booster carry Apollo Seventeen, the last ever manned moonshot, into orbit. He was in Auckland harbour in 1985, actually staggering along Marsden Wharf with a beer tin in his hand, the night the French secret service blew up the Rainbow Warrior. He has been brushed by newsworthy events. He has had more than his share of luck. But Nick Jinks has never acquired the knack of accumulation. What he earns, he spends.

  Now, in his late fifties, Jinks wants an end to his seafaring life. He is weary of hard work and difficult hours, the identikit familiarity of ports, the insincerity of port women. He is nettled by the insolence of the young as they scamper up the merchant marine career ladder ahead of him, who never could be bothered to climb. He wants his boyhood before the mast to come to a stop before it is too late. He wants to put away childish things. He wants a wife. A kid. Even someone else’s kid, whatever, he is not fussy. He wants to come home.

  Saul Cogan, his long-standing business partner, has seen to it that he can return, without fear of arrest. Saul has even made it possible for him to enter the country under his own name.

  The way is open to him, and Nick is beginning to wonder what, exactly, he is coming home to. Last time he was in the UK – trying on his real name for size, after nearly forty years of aliases; of Jenkinses and Jenningses, a Jiggins, a Jeves, a Jessup – he took the time to drive, in a rented car, past his boyhood home. The garage and the tea shop were gone, razed, a greenfield Tesco in their place, and the road that led him to the site of the erasure was itself a new thing: smooth, lit, signed, marked, cambered, mathematically curved, like the race-track on a computer game.

  He pulled up in Tesco’s car park and tried to get his bearings.

  Curses perturb only those who are sensitive to them. It was impossible to believe that Tesco’s greengrocery section would ever be troubled, as he and his father Dick had been, by fat, shit-coloured flies, wasps, rats, mysterious white galls. It was a different world.

  As evening descends, Nick Jinks drives his juggernaut into the lorry park of a service station outside Carlisle. Three magic letters hang off the back of Jinks’s lorry: T.I.R., ‘Transport International Routier’. By international agreement, rigs with a T.I.R. certificate are exempt from customs inspections at national borders. It is generally agreed that there is little point chilling expensive foodstuffs down to a tidy minus five, if some bureaucrat with a clipboard is just going to open up the back of the van and let everything spoil in the dusty heat of the Spanish–Portuguese border. ‘T.I.R.’ is the people smuggler’s favourite. Uncomfortable, but effective.

  Jinks is practised enough at his business to know that he should not leave his vehicle unattended, so once he’s washed and fed himself he leaves the service station, crosses the parking area and climbs back on board. In truth, spending a night on the lorry is not such a hardship. The driver’s cabin is fitted for long-haul comfort. Nick turns the heater up full, draws the blinds over the insect-spatted windows and settles back to watch TV. There’s a little colour set mounted off to one side of the cab. Reception is surprisingly good. The decent programmes haven’t begun yet. It’s still London Tonight. Nick is too exhausted to read (Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo; his Spanish has fallen away with disuse and he is finding the going very hard) and there is nothing else to do.

  The early-evening magazine programmes offer up the usual mix of crime horror, community news and celebrity froth, and around 7.30 p.m. they segue, with disconcerting ease, into the antics of Red Nose Day’s charity programming. On the promise of ‘one hundred and one game lads and lasses going starkers for the nation’, Nick Jinks holds fast to BBC1. He weathers Richard Wilson, and a Kate Bush medley. He even weathers Stephen Fry and Geri Halliwell in Uganda. After Boyzone’s ‘When the Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going’ he is reaching for the off-switch when the screen goes dark for a moment and comes back to life on a place he knows: Manhiça, north of Maputo. He spent a while in hiding here, following the fiasco of 1969. Little seems to have changed, except that some scrawnier-than-usual celebrity is now picking her way along its dirt lanes and fly-ridden market.

  Time to sleep.

  Nick Jinks snaps off his portable television. He turns the powerful cabin heater down one notch, undresses, turns off the lights and climbs stiffly up into his bunk. He closes his eyes.

  Nothing happens.

  His eyes open.

  His whole body is wired.

  This is nothing new. Without a woman, he has never found sleep easy – not since he was struck on the head with an oar, the day he came ashore, a hapless seventeen-year-old, at Playa Girón. With weary resignation, he reaches down. He thinks of Manhiça, and the girls there. He thinks back to a time before his muscle turned to fat. Before fear of disease drew his zipper permanently shut. Before he lost his hair, and before his partnership with Saul expanded to its present, burdensome scale. He thinks about tits, comes, and closes his eyes.

  Nothing happens.

  Too tired to sleep, he figures. A long day. A rough crossing, and a busy road. Tomorrow shouldn’t be so bad.

  He closes his eyes.

  There is a sound in the cab.

  Movement. Scampering.

  He struggles up onto his elbows to listen.

  Nothing.

  He lies back down again.

  The sound is gone.

  He still can’t sleep. He reaches down a second time. His cock is slippery and disgusting. He manages somehow and lies back, waiting for a sour second wave of endorphins to carry him away.

  Nothing happens.

  He cannot remember when sleep finally overtook him. He wakes from troubled dreams, fingers aside the blind by his head. Sodium orange spills over his pillow. It is still dark out. What time is it? He has his watch on. He turns on the cabin light. Christ. Has he slept at all?

  There is a sound in the cab. A scratching. Then, a thumping. Then, a scratching again.

  He knows, now, what has kept him awake.

  The familiar sound takes him back to his childhood home and his father, the old sea-dog Dick Jinks; back to the accident, and the terrible death at his hands which first drove him into exile.

  It is the curse.

>   Even after all this time, the curse is alive. All these long years of his madcap absence, it has been waiting here for him.

  Nick Jinks struggles into his clothes, lifts the blinds and takes his seat at the wheel. He turns the key in the ignition. He has to wait, agonizing seconds, for the diesel to warm. A thready keening fills his head. He stuffs fingers into hirsute ears. The light on the dash goes out. He turns the key, and the rig rumbles into life, drowning out the rat-sound of his curse. Roughly, wrestling the wheel, Nick Jinks hauls his rig back onto the A74. How far is Fort William? Eighty miles; a hundred at most. He will not stop again.

  His foot comes down hard on the accelerator, though Nick Jinks should know by now that this is something he cannot outrun.

  Chicago, Illinois

  —

  2.30 p.m., Saturday, 11 March 2000

  Nineteen ninety-nine had been a bad year. Following Jinks’s disappearance in March, I had had no choice but to dismantle the British end of the business. This inevitably meant that I owed favours. Relocating to the States, I had hoped to revive the fortunes of my moribund employment agency. But competition had grown fierce and word of my problems had arrived before me.

  Blessing and Femi, my housekeepers for the northern states, fell foul of US Immigration at the beginning of March 2000, and there was no one on the books I really trusted to take their place. I debated whether to bring Chisulo and Happiness over from London. But they had their daughter to look after, and I had already asked too much of them.

  Until I found somebody new, then, it fell to me to meet the arrivals we had already booked in for the spring. Arrivals like Felix Mutangi: I was there to greet him at the gate. It was a risky business, but no riskier than letting this son of the African soil wander alone through all the snares and brakes of late Western capitalism. I was pleased to hear that the paperwork I had prepared for him had seen him past the desk without a hitch. In the car, driving him to his motel and subjected to his boyish burbling, relief was added to pleasure: if he had had to open his mouth for any extended period he would surely have found himself on the first flight home.

  He seemed hearty enough when I left him that evening, but the next morning when I picked him up he sneezed almost the moment he got in the car. I thought nothing of it at first; long-haul travel always leaves you feeling depleted. The sneezes did not stop. He was in his mid-twenties and, according to the medical report I had ordered, he was in good health. Still, even a head-cold could delay, by precious days, what we had planned for him. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Fine, fine,’ he grinned. He pulled out a packet of 555s and offered me one.

  ‘They didn’t tell me you were a smoker,’ I said, waving it away. Where he came from, what twenty-something man didn’t smoke? But I wanted to disconcert him a little; I wanted him to think about what we were doing, and what it would mean for him. The opportunities it represented. ‘I don’t know that the clinic’s going to like you doing that,’ I said.

  Felix’s smile was irrepressible. He wound down his window to let out the smoke. It was freezing outside. Literally: minus one according to the dashboard. He sneezed, spat and noisily inhaled the gasoline fumes of the promised land. Blood and urine tests were booked for 11 a.m. Assuming the authors of the medical report had not been altogether fraudulent, the operation would take place that night and by Monday Felix would be on a plane home.

  The Stevenson expressway had other ideas: after half an hour’s driving, just as we were passing under the Gilbert Road flyover, everything ground to a halt. I couldn’t believe our ill-luck. The Tri-State Tollway was right ahead of us, straddling the expressway on an inclined curve. The whole arrangement of structures, piles and embankments here looked like something sculpted by the sea. We couldn’t get near it. The feedlanes were barely half a mile away, and they might as well have been on the other side of Lake Michigan.

  We were there so long we started picking up radio bulletins about the tailback building behind us, stretching far along the canal. It was a clear day, bitterly cold. The radio said something about a spilled load, and a couple of fire trucks, with lights but no sirens, slid sedately past us on the hard shoulder. I got out of the car, found my parka in the back and zipped myself up. I glanced around, looking for newscopters. This close to Chicago Midway it probably wasn’t worth their while negotiating such a busy airspace. Domestic jets howled over our heads.

  ‘Hiya.’

  The voice seemed to come from above me; it made me start. I turned around. Beside my own rental there was a van. Not a pickup, or a people-mover; an honest-to-God van, with scratched blue panels and a faded campaign sticker: ‘Vote John Gridley for US Senate’. Which was ironic, given that Gridley’s lawyer was in the clinic even now, paying, in cash, for the senator’s life-saving operation.

  The woman in the passenger seat leaned out to speak to me. Her shock of short white hair was dazzling, her face was strangely sunken. At first I thought she was young – twenty-five or thirty – then that she was much older.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got a cigarette?’

  I leaned in through my window and got Felix to hand me his packet of 555s. I opened the packet and offered it to her.

  ‘What are these?’ she said. However unfamiliar she was with the brand, it wasn’t going to stop her taking one.

  There was a lighter inside the pack so I fired up her cigarette for her, cup-handed, shielding the flame from the wind. I handed it over. She smoked. Where it emerged from the cuff of her coat, her wrist was as thin as a child’s. She did not cough, but she certainly changed colour. ‘Jesus,’ she said. She climbed down from the cab. Now I saw why I had not been able to guess her age. Her bright yellow North Face jacket hung off her as though from a peg. She was terrifyingly thin. It had to be an illness.

  I glanced through the windscreen and glimpsed her driver: a porcine woman with a double-chin and dykish hair. I thought to myself: Laurel and Hardy.

  ‘The radio said something spilled,’ said the girl.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, teeth chattering. I lit a cigarette for myself, breaking a twenty-year pledge.

  Felix got out the car and walked around, smiling his smile.

  Things were in danger of degenerating into a social occasion. I tried to relax. I looked at my watch. Eleven fifteen.

  ‘You’re English,’ she said.

  Her own accent was a mid-Atlantic thing I couldn’t pin down.

  My Englishness seemed to fascinate her; I couldn’t work out why. Poor Felix didn’t get a look-in. She seemed to want me to reciprocate her interest and, since it was a good way of not talking about myself or my passenger, I asked her where she was going. This was all the prompting she needed. She leaned back into the truck and came out again with a couple of flyers for us. ‘I’m opening tonight,’ she said, ‘if we ever bloody get there.’

  Was the English swear-word for my benefit?

  It was only as she climbed back into her van that it occurred to me: she was familiar for some reason.

  The flyer was headed SCTV02, and underneath there was a picture of a bubble. There was something odd about that bubble. I unfolded the flyer, revealing the rest of the photograph: a hand was holding a disposable cup, and a trail of misshapen bubbles had spilled from the rim of the cup and were hanging in the air.

  The bubbles were water, floating in air.

  The photograph had been taken in space.

  I went to see her show. There were no films I especially wanted to see, Jonny Lang had sold out at the Rialto Square weeks before and I couldn’t think what else to do with my time. Felix was in good hands, and I would be seeing him in the morning.

  If the venue for SCTV02 had been some left-field place I might not have gone, but back at the hotel I read the flyer properly and discovered it was playing early at the Museum of Contemporary Art opposite Jan Svankmeyer’s Alice. I figured if I didn’t like the one I could go and watch the other and still have time to hunt down a decent meal.

 
; The woman’s name was Stacey Chavez and I understood why my Englishness had intrigued her. From her potted biography I learned that she had been a British TV star. Hearing my accent, she had expected me to recognize her.

  Perhaps this was arrogant of her, perhaps not: I had found her vaguely familiar, after all, even though her active years coincided with my time in Mozambique. I had never seen The Singing Detective. I had never seen The Moth. I had no idea, come to that – beyond the none-too-subtle clues buried in SCTV02 – how or why a mainstream actress came to be creating intricate, difficult and (for my money) downright unenjoyable performance art for a Chicago museum.

  The premise was simple: in space, everything floats, so it is very difficult to eat and drink. Afterwards I couldn’t tell whether Stacey’s performance, a weird fusion of mime and dance and gesture, had gone over my head, or whether what I had seen was really all there was to get: the sterile white set, part hospital, part spaceship interior; plates that would slip out from under her hand; cups that hovered above her, just out of reach; the pink ‘space food’ she squeezed into her mouth from an upended detergent bottle.

  I had had a belly-full of art for one evening, and rather than repair to the MCA bar – wall-to-wall twenty-somethings in tea-cosy hats – I braved a snow flurry and walked the couple of blocks to the nearest dive.

  There was an old episode of Cheers running on a TV above the plasticated bar, as if to emphasize the degree to which this watering hole failed to live up to tourist expectation: characterless beer, sterile wood-effect surroundings, bar staff who bore all the behavioural stigmata – bright smiles, gimlet eyes – of some sort of customer-service boot camp. Everything designed and arranged so as to convince us that nothing bad was going to happen. No wonder the people around us were hardly drinking.