The Weight of Numbers (15 page)

‘Researchers' came and went: men with unkempt beards and unreliable trouser zips; one or two utter derelicts (baffling hints of public library again); well-groomed women of a certain age. The more flirtatious of them would sometimes ask me, ‘What's a handsome young man like you doing here?'

In 1965, my last year at Cambridge, my father suffered his first stroke. Because my mother needed my help, the college authorities agreed to defer my final few semesters. This saved me the trouble and
embarrassment of dropping out. It also entailed going home – something I had solemnly sworn never to do.

In the featureless shell Mum had made of our home, Dad's cerebral accident took on a terrible rightness: as though he, too, had been integrated into her vision of interchangeable white walls and wipe-clean surfaces.

Mercifully, the repugnant fact of my father's condition – the obscenity of adult helplessness – took my mind off home's other horrors, at least for a while. His infantile walk, his arms extended, hands interlocked to straighten his paretic arm. The way he slumped in his chair, as though unstrung. The keening sounds he made when my mother and I forced his arm and shoulder through their exercises. The ridiculous bright ruler he used when he read the
Express
, so that his eyes would remember to travel to the left to start a new line.

‘He doesn't even try!' Mum cried.

She brandished the word the way a maniac brandishes a blunt instrument.

‘Why don't you try?'

‘You've got to try.'

‘Just try a little.'

‘Try just once!'

Sadly, in this instance, she had a point. He did not fight back. He did not speak. He did not walk. Now and again – and according to the nurse this should have come under his control long since – he shat his pants.

The truly grotesque element in all this was the degree to which none of it was novel. It was more like the physical manifestation of a psychological state with which Mum and I were already familiar.

Throughout my childhood, he had depended entirely upon my mother for every bite of food, every drop of drink, every clean sock, every fresh towel; at the same time, he seemed entirely self-sufficient. Our affection left him indifferent, and so did our anger. He could take anything the world threw at him. How do you wound a ghost? How do
you make a ghost stay? It was only his own inertia which kept him here with us. Had he had a fraction of the energy of other men, I am certain he would have found a way to leave us; and I would have run across him eventually, pursuing some solitary happiness.

As it was, my father had done little for years but sit in his chair in the corner of the living room, watching the football results. When he rose from his chair, which was rarely, he moved from room to room with an air of muted dissatisfaction, like a commercial traveller, forever delayed, who has decided to eat just one more passable meal with the same reliable but overbearing landlady. Not forgetting her son.

So though I trusted him, and even admired him, as children do, my father had never given me any reason to feel that I was related to him. Year after year we had observed each other through the thick glass of our mutual reserve.

When Dad suffered his first stroke, I found myself bursting with such energy, I couldn't sit still, I had to walk up and down the carriages of the train. By the time I was jogging up the hill out of Guildford towards the big new county hospital – I hadn't the patience to wait for a bus – I could no longer pretend to myself that these feelings were normal. I was excited, but not anxious. I was happy to think of my father gone out of control at last. I wanted to hear him say ‘Gah' and ‘Wonk'. I wanted to see him dribble.

The fact was, I wanted him to be someone different.

I remember when I got to the hospital, the nurses had only just found him a bed, so for a while we had to wait outside the ward. My mother's face was white as though dusted. She was full of that queer, nervous energy I had dreaded to see in her: an overwound toy, exhausting and useless.

‘What have I done!' she wailed. (Six hours into my father's stroke and she had already cast herself in the lead.)

They let us in to see him.

Half his face was missing. Where the left-hand side of his face should
have been, there was only a greyish bag of loose skin. Where his eye should have been, there was a slit in the skin, and a black marble swimming inside it. His lips were bleary and thick and very pink. There was something grotesquely sexual about the smear his mouth made.

Home again, and in her gleaming kitchen – impossible to imagine these surfaces have ever been contaminated by food – my mother weaves her web of unenticing possibilities: tea or apple juice, or there's some orange barley water in the pantry; Jaffa Cakes or homemade scones. There are some chocolate biscuits somewhere, only she can't find them, she's been looking everywhere. You bite into a scone and she says, ‘Or there's some cake.' You stir your tea and she says, ‘Or would you rather have coffee?' You tip strawberry jam onto an edge of a scone and she says: ‘Would you rather have honey?' You take a bite of scone, raw flour coats the inside of your mouth and she says, ‘Ooh! There's some quiche!'

In the middle of the night, a scream.

‘Saul!'

‘Saul!' she wailed, and entered my room, my old room, this room she had kept for me, and painted white for me, and which I had sworn never to sleep in.

‘Saul, he was such a good man!'

Mum wanted to get her elegy in early.

‘He took me in, Saul! He took me in!'

‘Go to bed, Mother. Try to get some sleep.'

‘No one else would touch me. No one.'

‘Is there anything in the bathroom cabinet that would help you sleep?'

‘Saul, you don't understand.'

‘Some hot milk?' I was baiting her. It was irresistible. I was so tired.

‘He's been like a father to you. Hasn't he? Hasn't he been like a father to you? He's given you everything, hasn't he?'

‘Yes,' I said. Biting my tongue. Crossing my fingers. ‘Yes, of course he has.'

‘Not every man would do that, Saul.'

She was calming down now. She was Delivering a Lesson.

‘I know that, Mum. He's been a great dad.'

She burst into tears.

I laid my hand on hers.

She clutched it.

‘He did know, Saul. I didn't trick him. He knew before we were married. I did tell him.'

‘Tell him what?'

She blinked at me. ‘That I was pregnant,' she said.

‘That you were
what
?'

She tried to get into bed with me.

I eased past her and out of the room, touching her as little as possible.

‘What have I done!'

‘Kathleen,' I said, from the kitchen, ‘shut up.' I filled the kettle. My hands were shaking with excitement. I was filled with a sense of sudden and unexpected freedom.

As soon as my mother had learned how to handle things, so that the spotlight of her anxiety shifted naturally onto me:

‘Have you done your university work?'

‘Have you got much university work to do today?'

‘Don't forget your university work.'

‘Leave this – go and do some university work.'

(‘
Wonk
,' my father added. ‘
Gah
.')

– then I got the hell out of there. I couldn't face going back to my studies and, without my college grant, I had no money. So I did the only thing left to me. Yet another thing I had sworn never to do. I got a job.

The Society hosted speakers. There were talks on Wednesday evenings, sometimes illustrated by means of slides or an overhead
projector. P. J. Mills of Surrey University presented ‘Teaching Systems, Present and Future – a Multiple Image Tape/Slide Presentation'. There were poetry readings.

When I first began working here I used to wonder how on earth the Society – this dowdy old maid off Gower Street – survived the modern world. It should surely have perished of its own anachronisms years ago. So much for the arrogance of youth. As I began to understand the Society's past, I began also to understand its strength.

The Society had accreted around the writings of the Polish-born American linguist Alfred Korzybski. In the early 1930s Korzybski had developed a theory of relations that did away with the notion of cause and effect. (He was, like all his generation, besotted with Albert Einstein's recently published General Theory of Relativity, and his misreading of it made him the first and greatest of the century's many quantum quacks.) Korzybski declared that everything exists, not because it acts, not even because it thinks (which is, after all, only another kind of acting), but because it is already related to everything else. Cause and effect are merely special manifestations of a relation that already exists.

But if everything is connected to everything else, then the dimensions that separate things from each other – the three spatial dimensions that place things at a distance, and a fourth dimension, time, which makes that distance meaningful – these have no absolute reality. They are, in fact, contingent upon this higher relation of universal connectedness. That being so (the Society's earliest pamphlets argued) might we not use dimensions to our own advantage? They might not turn out to be barriers at all, but doors…

So the spirit of the times drew the Society away from a dry study of Korzybski, and into a frequently confused relation with the many other societies trying, with varying degrees of rigour, neurosis and faith, to come to terms with the scientific ideas of the time. Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott spoke here, and for a while the Society toyed with the principles of theosophism. Bequests from leading spiritualists
sustained the Society during the war years, and after the war, science fiction had a major impact on the Society: files of correspondence with A. E. Van Vogt and Robert Heinlein – both at one time or another devotees of Korzybski – were treasured between sheets of acid-free tissue in a fire-proof safe.

The Society had been gorging itself on the new ever since. The second week into my job, I nearly passed out to discover that John Lennon topped Miriam's wishlist of future speakers. (He never came.)

Sat at the back of the Society's puzzling library with my card indexes, my sharpened pencils and my plastic loose-leaf binder detailing the Society's bizarre scherzo on the Dewey system, I was cut off from anything resembling a lived life. Three years went by while I sleepwalked among the stacks.

In March 1968, I woke to discover I had become one of the Society's less vital internal organs.

A spleen.

A gland.

Something unspecialized as yet. Something barely aware that it served a greater metabolism, that discerned only dimly that it lived in a body at all. Something which, if you excised it and grafted it elsewhere, would survive; and not only survive, but adapt, adopting over time the structure and function of the part to which it was newly joined. (‘
Saul, do the books', ‘Saul, introduce our speaker', ‘Saul, type a letter'.
) The outside world had been coming through to me so thoroughly digested, so strongly flavoured by the Society's guts, I was hardly aware what strange times these were.

It was Noah Hayden who woke me. We ran into each other on the street, one evening at the beginning of March.

‘Saul!'

I didn't recognize him at first. An honours student at St John's, the latest in a long line of academics and political players, my old room-mate
had exhibited, all the time I had known him, the careless charm and casual irony of a privileged caste. Darling of the left-wing, founder of the New Left Reading Group; wits had it that Noah Hayden put the champagne into socialism. It had never occured to me that he would turn native. Bumping into him three years later on the corner of Frith Street and Old Compton Street, confronted with his beard, cravat and velvet coat, I stepped backwards and practically fell into the road.

We went for coffee to Bar Italia – a brightly lit utilitarian café so long and narrow it was more a sort of corridor. We perched on stools beside a chrome shelf which ran the length of the room. Everything glittered: tiles, mirrors, crockery. The broiling reflections in that place were an open invitation to schizophrenia.

‘So what are you doing now?' Hayden asked me.

What was I doing? His lack of self-consciousness amazed me. In that get-up – he looked like a demonic ring-master fallen on hard times – it was surely Noah who owed me the explanation.

I opened my mouth to tell him about the Society, the library – and no words came. This was the moment it dawned on me that maybe three years was a long time to spend treading water. Maybe it was too long. I made some noises eventually, using my father's condition as an excuse for my lack of news. Noah Hayden reached over and squeezed my arm in sympathy, and I felt like a shit.

At college, Hayden's inherited self-confidence had made him class-blind. He would drink himself under the table with a party of hoorays one evening, all political differences suspended for the sake of good companionship; the next day he'd be talking protest tactics with the sons of Jarrow marchers in a little diner in the Backs, stuffing his greenish, hungover jowls with cheap waffles.

I was the petty-bourgeois dullard in the corner, the one who belonged in neither camp, and I was as solemn as an owl. Though the first in the family to go to university, I could hardly pretend to be working class,
what with my piano lessons and my Penguin Classics paperbacks for Christmas.

If I had kept to myself, it wouldn't have mattered; no one would have stopped me living an anonymous life. But I had discovered, dragged along to meetings by my room-mate, that politics offered a different sort of anonymity: identification with a tribe.

While student revolt gathered pace in Paris and London and Madrid, in the New Left Reading Group we contented ourselves with organizing sit-ins to protest the college curfews. The rest of the time we spent living up to our name: we read. Because I had the knack of languages, I proved useful to Noah Hayden and his precocious Group when it came to unpicking the gnomic pronouncements of Guy Debord, founder of the Situationist International in Paris. It is possible that I was Debord's first English translator. This was, for my money, a much better thing to be than what I truly was: the passive beneficiary of my parents' graft and saving; the grammar-school-educated child of parents who had had to buy their own education late in life, in church halls and schoolrooms after hours, who believed it was a right and good thing to aspire, to amass everything they could in order to invest it, all of it, in their child.