The Weight of Numbers Read online

  The jaw offered to buy Kathleen a drink. She asked it for a pink gin; it was the only drink she could think of by name. A woman in a dress made of tiny mirrors had ordered one at a swank bar in a film she had seen with Margaret the night before.

  He handed it to her and their eyes met. His eyes sparkled. They were pretty blue eyes. She liked them. Then he smiled – and her gaze fell, magnetized, back to his jaw again: the cleft chin, the muscular smoothness of it.

  She turned away, blushing, as from something obscene. She sipped her drink and tried not to splutter. The drink was bitter, like hedge clippings.

  ‘What do you do, then?’

  At this time, she still nursed ambitions for the person John Arven believed she could be. She still held out hopes for the letter she had sent him. So she said: ‘I’m a computer.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Ask me anything,’ she said. Not a lie, she told herself: an experiment in identity.

  He smirked. ‘What’s the square root of a hundred and forty-four, then?’

  ‘Twelve.’

  He laughed. ‘Very good.’

  Wrinkling her nose, she drank off a good mouthful of pink gin. She tightened her throat over the burning liquor, counted to five and risked a breath.

  ‘Ask me another,’ she said.

  ‘The square root of a hundred and forty-five?’ He said it like it was the easiest calculation in the world.

  It certainly wasn’t hard. ‘Twelve point oh-four-one-five-nine-four-five-seven-eight-eight… what?’

  His smile had gone. He folded his arms.

  ‘You’re making that up.’

  ‘How would you know?’ This from Margaret, sprung from nowhere; she muscled in between them.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, coldly. He knew Margaret. ‘Friend of yours, is she?’ He picked up his pint and moved along the bar, away from them.

  Kathleen watched him go, disappointed.

  Margaret grabbed Kathleen by the arm and led her off to the other side of the central counter. She hissed in Kathleen’s ear, ‘Can’t you tell a bloody policeman when you see one?’

  Kathleen tried to maintain eye contact with the man but he had turned his back, nursing his pint. She had to take Margaret’s word that he was a policeman. He could have been anything. Munitions. Railways.

  Apparently policemen didn’t count. ‘A policeman!’ Margaret railed. ‘Hobnobbing with a bloody policeman!’ She parked herself down beside Kathleen on a padded bench near the toilets. Two sailors came up and offered them drinks. ‘What’ll you have, ladies?’ asked the older of the two: he had one of those permanently flushed faces you imagine might bleed if you touch it.

  ‘A pale ale,’ said Margaret, ‘ta, love.’ She glanced at Kathleen. The thought of pink gin made Kathleen queasy, but she didn’t know any other drinks. ‘Two pale ales,’ Margaret said, covering for Kathleen’s silence.

  The younger sailor went off to the bar. He was exceptionally tall and his straw-coloured hair, though regulation short, grew out at all angles. In the buffet and slew of the crowded bar, he tottered about like a young, well-groomed scarecrow.

  With a strange convulsion – a red pocketknife clipping shut – the older sailor bent forward at the hip, then fell back into his chair. ‘Oof!’ he said. He was short, and squat, and his limbs had no flexibility. As he got comfortable, he moved his arms with convulsive jerks, clicking them into position. His hands were red, too.

  His name was Dick. Dick Jinks. A funny name for a sailor. ‘What are you drinking?’ Kathleen asked him, an experiment in conversation.

  ‘Wallop,’ Dick grinned, creasing his swollen red face so that it looked as if it might pop. He meant draught bitter. ‘Wallop by name and nature.’ He laughed, revealing large, cramped teeth. All evening he came out with these catchphrases. He laughed at them, as at a joke someone else had made.

  The sailors had met during the Dunkirk evacuation, and had run into each other again by accident, a couple of nights before. They had stories about Dunkirk. The younger sailor, Donald, went first. Donald seemed nervous, unused to company. He ran his hands through his hair, which ignored him and sprang back into place. His tale began dashingly enough. He was still in civvies at the time of the evacuation. He was one of those gallant yachtsmen who had joined the flotilla out of pure patriotism and fellow feeling. He had borrowed his father’s yacht. Kathleen imagined his father waving him off at the jetty. The boy was very well-spoken. Almost BBC. What was he doing in a mere rating’s uniform? ‘Do you know Hayling Island?’ he asked them.

  ‘“Do you know Hayling”!’ The elder sailor’s laughter boomed around the lounge. Heads turned. Donald blushed. He was really very young. Margaret laid her hand on his arm. ‘Go on, love.’ But Dick wanted his turn. ‘Pissing their pants they was!’ He didn’t have much of a story, though his description of the strafings was vivid. ‘Pissing their pants!’ He laughed. Kathleen saw right down his throat.

  Dick and Donald walked them home. It was impossibly dark. Kathleen staggered. The paving stones were treacherous in the shoes Margaret had lent her. Dick offered her his arm, and she hung off it, gratefully. It surprised her to notice how short he was: he was barely taller than her. His young friend dawdled, or Margaret was holding him back; she seemed to be having trouble with her heel. Kathleen and Dick got to the door of the hostel first. He took off his cap and braced himself as though for inspection. ‘Maybe I can call on you. We can have a drink again sometime,’ he said.

  ‘Sometime,’ she said.

  ‘You knows what I drink,’ he said, and laughed his great red booming laugh. Even his eyes were red.

  ‘Wallop,’ she said.

  ‘That’s the ticket,’ he said, stepping forward, as though she had uttered a password. He took her hands in his. An odd look spread over his face. It was bloated and empty, all at once. No one had looked at Kathleen with need before. She did not understand. ‘Spare us a kiss, love – a little kiss.’

  The impossibility of it was suddenly, liberatingly funny. She laughed. Surprised, he let her go. She coughed to cover her laughter. ‘Frog in my throat,’ she said. It was as good a catchphrase as any of the sailor’s, but he did not smile. An experiment: she pecked him on the corner of his mouth. He tasted of beer and cigarettes. He ran his hand around her waist, squeezed, and kissed her cheek. She experienced a moment’s revulsion towards his flushed face, his too-red lips, as though the lips might leave a mark on her. Then he let go, and she found herself wanting to repeat the kiss.

  ‘Goodnight, then,’ Dick said.

  That was all.

  She went inside and waited for Margaret. The sitting room was empty. She slipped Margaret’s shoes off her feet – they had been too big for her, and far too high.

  Weary of waiting, she went up to her room in her stockinged feet, carrying Margaret’s shoes. She took off Margaret’s slip. She unclipped Margaret’s stockings and eased them off, ever so carefully.

  Margaret was still not back.

  Kathleen went to bed.

  She lay still, wondering what else there was. What else she did not know.

  Margaret knew, but Margaret wasn’t telling. She had vanished again.

  A week passed, and Kathleen didn’t see Margaret once.

  She was not worried or put out. She was growing used to Margaret’s rhythms. Margaret’s men overrode the girls’ friendship for only a little while. So this time, while she waited for Margaret’s man to depart, Kathleen tried to shake off her loneliness. She braved the sitting room.

  The other residents were stenographers from Shepherd’s Bush, WAFS from Tottenham, fellow nippies from the Lyons corner houses on the Strand and Oxford Street. They intimidated Kathleen: great iconic hulks of girls. By now, though, she knew how to smile, what to say when she entered or left the room, the gestures she should make. She loved to listen to them. The girls spoke a different language, a Margaret sort of language.

  ‘So I said to her…’

  ‘And he said to me…’<
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  At night, bits of their conversation swirled about her, punctuating her dreams, a sort of verbal shrapnel, highly coloured, piecemeal and surreal. Billy drops leaflets over Berlin and Becky does firemen two at a time. David wants me to do it with him. James bought me a ring.

  Each evening, as they got ready for this movie, that meal, this man or that, they gathered to listen to the BBC. The strange names of the cities the Nazis had overrun lent the news an operatic quality. The fall of Norway. In Denmark, something rotten. The names erupted like fantasies through the wireless – a huge mahogany box which took pride of place in the room.

  One early evening, as Kathleen sat listening to the radio, breathing in the heady acetone of the other girls’ nail polish, there was a knock on the door, and it was for her.

  ‘Remember me?’ he boomed, and laughed.

  There on the stoop was Dick Jinks, the powerful, squat, red-faced sailor, much older than her, who had walked her home the week before.

  Kathleen blinked at him, surprised. She had imagined him in deep Atlantic, shepherding the convoys or whatever it was he did.

  ‘Surprised to see me, baby?’ His words, glib and saucy, sat ill with the anxiety in his eyes. He raised his hand towards her – a wave? a handshake? – and stopped mid-gesture. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hand. It trembled. ‘Ho, ho,’ he sang. ‘You’re the port in my storm!’

  London sunsets were a marvel, since the bombing had begun in earnest: cities of vapour taking leave of a city of stone.

  ‘Dick?’

  He sang, ‘Yo, ho, ho.’

  ‘Where’s your friend?’

  Blood darkened Dick Jinks’s face; in the sunset, his flushed face appeared polished and hard. ‘That poofter? That nancy? That queen? Fuck him, darling.’ He blinked. ‘Ha, ha,’ he added, in mitigation.

  ‘Dick?’

  ‘Will you take a turn with me?’ The words struck his funny bone immediately. ‘A turn! A turn, Ho!’

  ‘Dick?’

  ‘Will you? I’ll stand you a Watney’s.’ He winked. ‘Say you will.’

  She looked at him. He was no more ready for a night on the town than she was. He was in uniform of a sort, but so threadbare it looked more like labourer’s clothes. Lines of braid hung off the sleeves of his jacket in tatters. The material where the braid had been was crusted white. His bell-bottoms, uncreased and shapeless like a cowboy’s chaps, scuffed the steps as she led him inside.

  He came forward, flinging a leg out in front of him, then falling onto it. Flinging, falling. As he passed her, she smelled something clean but unappealing, like disinfectant.

  She showed him into the sitting room and ran upstairs to dress. She was as quick as she could be. She was nervous of him, afraid of what he might say to the other girls. Every so often his ‘Yo, ho, ho!’ would shiver the floor under her feet, as though he were directly beneath her, calling to her, his red, wet mouth pressed like a sucker to the ceiling.

  When she came downstairs she found him sitting in the armchair by the radio. His grin was fixed and ghastly, his lips as white as his clenched knuckles. ‘Dick?’ she said, in a small voice. He turned to her. His smile grew more terrible. ‘Ah! Ha ha!’ It was not laughter so much as a struggle for breath. He sprang open from the waist like a flick knife and rocked upright on heavy, scuffed shoes. He led her outside.

  A cab passed them; Dick hailed it. ‘Let’s paint the town red!’

  In the taxi, he tried to relax.

  ‘Oof,’ he said.

  ‘Aah.’

  ‘What you been up to, then, baby?’ he said.

  ‘A bomb came through Lyons’ roof last week,’ she told him. ‘The ovens were out of action all day.’

  ‘Ha,’ he said.

  The week before, walking back from the pub, when he asked her what she did for a living, Kathleen had bit her tongue against the disappointment – she had so been looking forward to meeting Sage again – and told the truth. She was training to be a waitress.

  ‘A fireman came to defuse it, then a soldier.’

  ‘Ho—’ He opened his mouth to laugh, and there was something shapeless about the set of his lips, something ragged, like a wound.

  ‘There was plaster dust everywhere,’ she said, warming to her theme. ‘We stayed open, though. We served soup…’

  He began humming.

  She broke off.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘You were saying?’

  He shook his head vigorously. ‘Ah. No. Tell me,’ he said, and just as she was about to speak, ‘Soup. Yes. And?’

  She drew breath to speak.

  ‘It’ll be right again,’ he said.

  ‘What will?’ said Kathleen.

  He blinked at her. ‘It will,’ he said. ‘I will.’ He tried to smile – and if it was not quite a smile he made, at least it was not a rictus. ‘Ha!’ He had surprised another pun. ‘I’ll right myself!’

  They turned down St Giles High Street. Dick said to the driver, ‘This’ll do.’

  East of St Giles, the bomb damage was immense. Tall brick terraces straggled towards St Paul’s, pale under a biscuit of crumbled plaster. Dick and Kathleen avoided the pavements; walls that had not yet been pulled down slanted dangerously over them. You could see the cathedral sometimes, far in the distance, down long, treeless vistas. She could not imagine where he was taking her. She began to be afraid.

  The smell of wet plaster, on the contrary, seemed to give Dick a lift. He swung her hand, back and forth, as though they were walking along a promenade.

  ‘Ow. Dick.’

  He let go, grinned at her and skipped ahead.

  ‘Dick?’

  He capered in the blacked-out streets.

  ‘Dick, where are we going?’ Kathleen’s ankle was sore. Her shoe was rubbing it raw. She had not worn walking shoes. Her feet hurt. ‘Dick,’ she called after him. ‘Dick!’

  She felt a hand on her arm. Startled, she struggled. There he was – right beside her. ‘Easy there, now,’ he crooned, stroking her arm. ‘Easy!’ As though it was she who had slipped ahead of him.

  They turned north, then east again, then north – was it north? They could have been anywhere, going anywhere.

  ‘Do you know where we are, Dick?’

  ‘Easy does it,’ he said. The word he had used to soothe her stuck to him like a burr. He could not shake it off.

  ‘Easy as pie,’ he said.

  ‘Easy virtue, eh?’ He laughed, and caught her up in his arms.

  Kathleen hung there, looking up at him, afraid of him. There was a moon tonight. His head blocked it out. His head loomed over her, a silhouette, a blank.

  ‘Here,’ he said, ‘don’t cry, baby. Don’t cry.’

  He set her down without kissing her. He took her hand and stared up the road.

  ‘Dick,’ she said, in a small voice, ‘that’s the way we’ve just come.’

  Dick shrugged. He took her hand, pulling her gently along, retracing their steps, then turned, at random, to the left.

  They weren’t going anywhere. She understood that now.

  The fronts down one side of the street were all torn away, revealing doll’s house interiors. Wallpaper shone in the moonlight.

  He tightened his grip on her hand. ‘Oh, that’s better,’ he said, ‘to be moving, that’s better. I feel so tight afterwards. You know? Damned tight. Feel.’ He stopped suddenly, snatched her hand and pressed it to his upper arm, the muscles there, the knots. The tremors running beneath his skin.

  Plaster crunched under her heel.

  ‘After what?’ she said.

  ‘After the shocks,’ he said. ‘After he shocks me. My pal the trick cyclist. My pal, ha!’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she sobbed.

  ‘It’s new,’ he said.

  The back of her heel felt cold and damp. It was bleeding. It was hard for her to follow his story. ‘Oh, the popping!’ he cried. ‘The popping in my ears!’ Eventually she realized th
at he was not describing his ‘shocks’ now. He was telling her about something else. Something for which the ‘shocks’ were a treatment.

  Something terrible had happened to him.

  He drew the words out painfully, as though he were drawing his fingernails across a blackboard. He had been involved in an accident at sea. An explosion. The vessel had ruptured. It had sunk. Dick had sunk. Dick was trapped with a young rating in a compartment deep in the bowels of the stricken ship. Dick went down with the ship. As he talked, she could feel the popping in her ears, the liquid iciness of the water rising around her calves, her knees. She was there with him in the compartment. She could barely breathe.

  How deep was the stricken vessel by the time Dick fought free of the boy trapped there in the compartment with him? The boy had panicked. The boy was clawing at him. How deep when Dick drove the boy’s head back one final time, impaling his skull upon the stanchion? How deep when he took his breath, dived, crawled and, at last, his chest on fire, kicked free of the sinking ship?

  ‘Oh, deep, deep,’ he sighed.

  You have to scream, he explained. As you rise through water, the air in your lungs expands. You have to scream, otherwise your lungs will burst.

  They stood alone in the street: the monochrome dark.

  ‘Like this,’ he said.

  He let go her hand.

  ‘Dick?’

  He had lost the sense of her entirely now. ‘Like this,’ he said.

  She reached up for him. She couldn’t see him. She touched his face. She surprised tears.

  ‘Eeeeee!’

  She fell back, gasping, fingers in her ears.

  He walked on, not looking at her. She followed him. She thought he had forgotten her. After a little while, he went on with his story. ‘How deep?’ The question fascinated him. ‘Black it was. Black.’ He meant the water. ‘It was daylight when we drowned. But we was too deep, you see. By the time I kicked free. Too deep for daylight.’

  He stopped again. They had come out into a square. A bomb had fallen in the very centre, and there were gobs of mud over the road. Leaves. They filled the gutters. The trees stood out white in the moonlight. The branches were bare. It was deep midwinter here.

  ‘There was stuff in the sea. Bits of stuff. From the ship. Sinking, floating. A jumper, a Bible, a set of false teeth, a child’s teddy-bear. Nothing had any colour. Like here. Like this. Now.’ He turned a circle in the middle of the street.