The Weight of Numbers (2 page)

One by one, between the slowly stirring branches, stars are going out.

The waters off Japan, February 1954.

This is shortly after the Korean War and two years into Jim's marriage to Marilyn, effected just a couple of hours after graduating from the Naval Academy at Annapolis. At this point in his career, Jim is just a humble aviator, assigned to the SS
Shangri-La
from Moffet Field. He's flying McDonnell F2H Banshees: brutal turbo-powered monsters that cheerfully nudge the stratosphere.

The airframe wraps around him in the night, the dark itself turned metal, stuffing eyes and mouth, as he takes stock. What he's been following all these hours, burning up his fuel, what he thought was his homing beacon – well, it turns out that it wasn't. He's been following the wrong signal for – how long is it now? – and there are no ground lights, no ships in the vicinity, to help him find his way back on course. Neither are there any stars. He can't afford to waste fuel punching the cloud layer, because any navigation reading he takes will be meaningless by the time he descends again, and anyway he hasn't the fuel. Thank God the instrument lights are working. Without them, how could he be sure which way is up? It is at this point that he thinks to plug in the little geegaw he's made to boost the cockpit illumination – and in doing so, he fuses every light in the cockpit.

In a lonely bubble, bobbing above the Pacific, Jim Lovell, navy pilot, looks out from his blacked-out Banshee at the sky. If it is the sky. There are no stars. His instruments are out and his lights are out and there are no stars and there is no carrier, there is no
Shangri-La
. Where is the goddamn S
hangri-La
?

Jim Lovell, astronaut, climbs from the car. He misses the path and pushes through the undergrowth to the shore of Lake Kissimmee. Marilyn is stood at the end of a narrow wooden jetty, facing away from him. A red flare arcs and gutters as she tosses her cigarette into the water.

The screws of the carrier
Shangri-La
agitate the waters of the Pacific. The water, rich in plankton, glows. In the extremity of his failure, Jim Lovell, navy pilot, sees a green light: the wake of a ship. He follows the wake. It leads him home.

He steps onto the jetty. He walks up to his wife. An F2H Banshee stays in the air using two Westinghouse J34-WE-30 turbojets, each rated at 3,150 pounds of thrust. It takes off by means of a rubber catapult. It comes to rest by means of a grappling hook. It is very important for him to control his speed at this point. It is vital that he not overshoot and topple off the end of the jetty into the bass-rich waters of Lake Kissimmee. He bites his lip against laughter. The day has shaken loose so many bits of himself, all the joy and fear of what he does. He touches Marilyn on the shoulder.

She turns. ‘Oh,' she says, looking straight into his eyes. ‘You again.' She lets his laughter roll on a little way, then stops it with a kiss. ‘Time to go home.'

November 1992

In 1992, Mozambique's seventeen-year-old civil war was ended by the worst drought in living memory. Even fertile Gorongosa, in the interior of the country, found itself dependent on food aid. From trains grinding their way west along the contested Beira–Machipanda rail-line, armed men rolled sacks of grain into the dust. The sacks split. It could be days since the last train and I would still find boys from my class crawling about the embankments, sifting grains from fistfuls of gravel.

With the region in such disarray, I found it relatively easy to desert my post. So I returned to the coast and settled in Beira, Mozambique's second city.

Beira was a port town. It depended for its income on Mozambique's landlocked neighbours to the west, and on the busy overland corridor through which their trade was conducted. Attacks on this corridor by RENAMO, the apartheid-backed faction in this war, had rendered Beira redundant, and today's famine relief effort, shipping grain for onward distribution, was too little and too hesitant to revive the city's fortunes. Consequently, the streets had acquired a timelessness that was not romantic. There was no light, no water, no food, no sanitation. There were only people.

Shelter was at a premium. In my building whole families lived out diagonal lives in the stairwell. There was no electricity to run elevators, so the cheapest apartments in the city were on the upper floors of the tower blocks. None of the blocks was especially high by Western standards, so my tenth-floor eyrie gave me views across the whole city.

It was the piano, rather than the views, which first sold the apartment to me. I hadn't had a piano since I was a child. It was an antique upright from colonial days, shipped from Portugal and abandoned during the exodus. Its lid was locked, so I couldn't try it out, but once I'd
established that it came with the apartment, I agreed to take the place, overpriced as it was.

For the most part of each day, I would sit out on my handkerchiefsized balcony and watch the city consume itself. There was no firewood to be had, and since most of the windows in town were mesh, not glass, people had decided that it was an easy and a relatively harmless thing to chip out the window frames for fuel. When that supply was exhausted, people turned on their furniture. Those who had run out of furniture pulled up sections of floor. By evening, the woodsmoke from 10,000
braiis
made my eyes smart, and I went indoors. Usually I went to bed around this time. There was little else to do. The radio was useless as batteries were hard to come by.

The piano was a different story.

The day I moved in, the first thing I did was break open the keyboard. I sat down to play. The instrument emitted a dreadful dead thumping and wheezing. I pulled off the top and looked in.

The strings had been cut.

The piano came with a piano stool; lifting up the lid, I discovered that it was full of sheet music. Bach's
Well-Tempered Clavier
. I managed, with a deal of effort, to wheel the unstrung piano onto the balcony, and there I sat down and played: clippety-clop, clippety-clop –
bonk
. As the weeks went by, so my coordination improved to the point where I could hear the shape of the music and the pattern of the parts. At last the piano's hammers found their mark, tapping, ever so lightly, the strings inside my head.

I stopped my playing and looked over the city to the old holiday camps sprawled along the seafront. Beach huts were being adapted to accommodate refugees flooding to the coast from the parched interior. It seemed to me that, with this latest influx, Beira would achieve a critical mass. All it had going for it was the size of its population, but maybe this was enough. After twenty years of this bare existence, the city had learned how to feed off its own refuse for ever. I imagined it
spreading in a chain reaction across the whole world: a self-sustaining half-life.

Communications were unreliable. The city had decayed to the point where it had learned to do without the outside world. There was little in the way of entertainment. A handful of bottle stores operated out of mud-brick houses along the shore, and it was to these that I thumbed my way, come late afternoon – or drove sometimes, if there was fuel enough for the pick-up.

With transport so hard to come by, every vehicle on the road was an unofficial bus; driving without passengers attracted the attention of the police. One afternoon, out on the coastal road, one of the men I had picked up rapped on the roof of the cabin and pointed me down a track towards a bit of beach I had not explored before. Several others seemed to know of the place, so once I had let off the onward travellers I rolled the pick-up down to the beach. At the tree-line, an enclosure fenced off with rushes marked the site of a new bottle store. The place had an ambitious layout. The tables and benches in the enclosure were cast concrete, but their surfaces were decorated with inset fragments of pottery and mirror. Under a raised veranda, I saw the walls of the store had fresh murals.

Inside, a white kid with a slurred Austrian accent was giving the girl behind the bar a hard time.

‘I know every fucking owner on this coast,' he said, more or less, his speech a druggy mishmash of German and Portuguese.

Dumb, impassive, the girl shook her head.

‘Fucking
bitch
.'

From out the back a white man – a real bruiser – joined the girl. ‘Out,' he said, barely bothering to make eye contact. He and Austrian Boy must have run into each other before, because the kid began straight away to retreat towards the veranda. ‘You're
fucked
,' he shouted. ‘You'd better watch your back. I know people.'

The barman blinked. He was a big man, clean-shaven, crew-cut, built for a fight. His eyes were mean and set close together. His mouth let him down: small and pursed above a weakling chin. ‘What crap was
that
?' he asked no one in particular, in English, when the boy was gone. I was surprised to hear the man's Norfolk burr: I had assumed, from the sheer size of him, that he was a Boer.

By way of conversation, I translated the boy's German.

‘Really.'

‘Or words to that effect,' I said.

All the other bottle stores were locally run and I wondered what had driven a European to set up in so unrewarding a business. The drinks here were the usual trio – orange Fanta, green-label Carlsberg and
chibuku
, a locally produced granular swill I had never got used to. I supposed he must be, like me, an ideological recruit to FRELIMO, the country's beleaguered socialist government. I couldn't think what else would bring an Englishman to such a miserable pass. He was about my age: a middle-aged drifter for whom home was by now a distant memory. He was happy to talk to a countryman and, when I offered to buy him a beer, he plucked a Carlsberg off the shelf and led me to an outdoor table.

His name was Nick Jenkins. I told him something about myself. I mentioned Gorongosa, and it surprised me how much I was prepared to relive of that time, merely to feed a casual chat.

We talked about the war, and when I explained how, in spite of my politics, I had come to work as a teacher in RENAMO's apartheid-funded heartland – how I had fomented Marxist revolution among my seven- and eight-year-olds under the very noses of the party hierarchy – Jenkins chuckled.

My own life, eventful as it might have appeared from the outside, had been dictated by the sweep of political events. Nick Jenkins, on the other hand, like all true adventurers, had somehow sidestepped the big events of his day. This was his second time in Mozambique. The first, the late sixties, had seen him working the merchant lines out of Maputo when it was still
Lourenço Marques, the colonial capital. From there he'd gone to the Caribbean, where he'd built up a small import-export concern. ‘It was my second time there, and all,' he laughed. ‘I can't seem to make up my mind.'

I did a quick mental calculation. ‘You must have been young the first time, then. Your first time in the Caribbean. When was that? Early sixties?'

‘Damn right.' He nodded. ‘A bloody kid.'

It was when he told me about Cuba that I began to doubt his tale.

‘Six bloody battalions,' he sighed, reminiscing. ‘Fifteen hundred men. Christ!'

‘You were in the Bay of Pigs landing?'

‘Not “in” it. We just happened to be berthed in Puerto Cabezas for a refit. The boat was chartered. We came with the boat. We were deckhands, not squaddies.'

The enormity of this new anecdote, artfully shaped out of hints and hesitations and the occasional buzz-word, took my breath away. That a seventeen-year-old boy from the fens should have washed up on the beaches of Havana in 1961 seemed incredible.

He did not stop there. A couple of years later, he told me, one night in October 1963, he found himself washing glasses in the very nightclub where Yuri Gagarin, hero of the Soviet Union and the first man in space, was celebrating the first leg of yet another world friendship tour. Jenkins had a gift for detail. The motley quality of Gagarin's official retinue – every suit an arms supplier or party dilettante – was lent added spice by the invective he had saved up for their wives: monstrous, shot-putting hags obsessed with translating Neruda and Borges into Russian. He even had it in mind that the Playa Girón – the bay where a band of coral had, he said, been fatally mistaken for seaweed – later gave its name to the national honour the Cuban president Fidel Castro awarded Gagarin during this goodwill trip.

‘He showed it to me, right there in the bar. Yuri did. His medal. And I showed him my scar. And Yuri laughed and told me, “You too wear the Order of Playa Girón!”'

I was tempted to ask what language they had used, that Jenkins could converse so freely with a Russian cosmonaut. Together with his highbrow literary references, so lovingly mispronounced (‘Georgie Borkiss'), his story convinced me that I was in the company of a gifted imposter.

It was night by the time we were done, and the kerosene was running low in the lamp. I waited for Jenkins to lock up, and walked with him to where our vehicles were parked. My deepening silence should have warned him that the evening's game was up, but Jenkins could not resist further embroidery.

‘Seaweed!' he laughed. ‘Fuckers in American intelligence had it down for seaweed. Fucking
coral
, more like. I felt the deck lurch, the whole bloody boat started to roll, and I didn't hang around, I can tell you. I jumped, and it's a bloody miracle I didn't spit myself on the reef.' He thought about this and added, ‘Some did.'

Jenkins's Land Rover was drawn up a few feet from where I had parked the Toyota. The moon came out from behind a cloud, and I saw that the Land Rover was leaning drunkenly to the right. Before I thought to stop him, Jenkins had walked over to investigate. He was still spinning his tale as he vanished into shadow. ‘I heard them screaming in the dark. I tasted their blood in the water—'