The Weight of Numbers (28 page)

He says, without looking at Anthony, ‘Do exactly what it says. Don't ask questions. Don't wait here. Don't go home.'

Anthony scans the paper. Typed on a faded ribbon are the details of an escape route. The name of a shipping company. A telephone number. The accompanying instructions are so infantile, they can only be a kind of code:

If time allows, be sure to obtain a sufficiency of warm clothing.

Do not under any circumstances accept rides from strangers.

Discard your house keys.

Avoid intercourse.

Stout shoes must be worn.

Once the papers are back in the safe, Gregor bends awkwardly, reaches into the top right corner of the safe, and pulls out a metal pineapple.

Anthony blinks.

It is a grenade.

Gregor pulls the pin, tosses the grenade into the safe and heaves the door shut.

The door is heavy. It takes a second to close. In that second, the grenade rolls off the papers piled willy-nilly inside the safe, and falls onto the floor. Anthony gasps. Gregor heaves the door open again on smooth, silent hinges, plucks up the grenade as though it is hot, and places it on the papers, all the while pushing at the door to close it again.

The door slams shut.

The grenade goes off. The safe is well built, and the explosion makes no more impact than if someone had rapped it with a spanner.

Far louder is Gregor's wail as he spins up and away. The stub of his amputated forefinger drizzles blood across the floor, the table, Gregor's trousers, his shoes, Anthony's shoes, the door and the door-handle, leaving a trail for Anthony to follow, as Gregor makes his getaway.

Anthony, mystified, follows Gregor out of the building, only to lose his trail across a busy junction. He wonders where to go. He pulls out his paper and reads:
‘If time allows, be sure to obtain a sufficiency of warm clothing… Stout shoes must be worn.'

He wonders if he shouldn't just go home. He wonders what is going on, and what it has to do with him. Of course he should go home.

And tomorrow?

What should he do tomorrow? Should he come into work? What will he find? Will Gregor be there, his hand in bandages, full of apologies and explanations? Or will the place be locked up, secured by the police, surrounded by military vehicles and PIDE men in dark ill-fitting suits?

Or will the room be empty, unlocked, just as they left it, a chaos of imported newspapers and out-of-date gazetteers? If it is, should he sit down? Should he wait for the phone to ring?

Utterly at sea, Anthony thrusts the mysterious paper into his trouser pocket and sets off at random through the town.

In his rush to follow Gregor, Anthony has forgotten his stick. He wants to go back for it. He wants to return and sit down with a cup of tea and listen some more to the little Bush radio on the office window sill; to hear again the miraculous conversation, conducted over a distance of some quarter of a million miles, with the men who will soon be setting foot on the moon. But he is afraid: Gregor's panic and the strange, minatory instructions in his pocket have taken hold of his imagination. There is no way he can go back.

In the yard beside a rundown hotel two old women stand beneath a
fig tree, pounding maize for
nsima.
In the street opposite, another woman stirs a pot of
caril de amendoim
– he can smell it from here. The cook's face is covered with the garish white pan-stick make-up you see women use in Tete, against the sun.

He comes to the bluff overlooking the bay. A woman calls to him from a doorway. He knows that if he looks at her, her smile will break his heart.

There is nothing from which he has to run away. There is no need for him to flee. Flee what? Yet he keeps on walking.

‘Do not under any circumstances accept rides from strangers.'

Well, really.

He looks around him. This is not the way home. This is not the way back to the office. It is not that he is consciously walking
away
from these places, exactly. On the contrary, when he analyses what few feelings he can muster in response to these bizarre events, it seems to him that he is walking
towards…

Towards what he doesn't know: whatever shadowy existence is implied by the strange paper in his hand.

‘Christ,' he says aloud, reading his instructions over for the third or fourth time. He is not sure whether to be disgusted or amused; it has just dawned on him that this list could just as well double as an account of his life: ‘
Discard your house keys… Avoid intercourse.'

The shipping office occupies the first floor of an old Portuguese villa to the north of the port. The room's shelves are lined with old fabric-bound ledgers, and its heavy furniture swims in a dark, resinous light. Near the window, a white girl pecks at a typewriter. She glances at him, then returns to study the keys before her. Her tongue edges between her lips and glistens in the nicotinic light.

He hands over his paper. The girl's tongue withdraws, leaving a wet trail upon her lower lip. Idly, she waves at a connecting door, lays the paper down on her desk and goes back to her typing. Anthony reaches over for the paper. The girl's hand shoots out and slaps the paper,
keeping it from him. He meets the girl's belligerent eyes, but lets his gaze slide away. Asking her a question will force her to speak, and he is afraid of what her voice will sound like.

He opens the connecting door.

The room beyond is lighter, busier, more modern. Fluorescent lights hang from a ceiling stained with damp. The uneven floor is covered with a thin carpet of an indeterminate colour. A big, unhealthy man waves him to a desk. There is a radio playing, tuned to an international station. The voice of Mission Control comes through uncluttered by translation:
‘We have loss of signal as Apollo Eleven goes behind the moon. Velocity 7,664 feet per second, weight 96,012 pounds. We're seven minutes and forty-five seconds away from lunar orbit insertion.'

Seven minutes and forty-five seconds later, the means and timing of Anthony Burden's departure from Lourenço Marques have all been dealt with, quickly and without fuss. The false name on his documents sounds the only unorthodox note. Otherwise he might be any other independent traveller signing aboard a tramp steamer.

‘Apollo Eleven, Apollo Eleven, this is Houston, can you read me?'

‘The captain will hand you your new passport shortly before your arrival.' The man's patter could only have been acquired by his dealing with a dozen similar requests a day. Burden imagines this stream of men who enter the shipping office, more or less desperate, more or less confused, only to emerge, a few minutes later, rebranded.

He knows of no reason why he should run, much less why he should abandon Mozambique, or why he should make his getaway in so uncomfortable a mode of transport, and under a false name at that. At the same time, he is finding it increasingly difficult to think up reasons why he should stay. Everything about his life here is evaporating like the toils of a dream a minute after waking.

How can he go home? He cannot even remember the name of his road.

Neil Armstrong says:
‘We're going over the Messier series of craters right at this time, looking vertically down on them and, hey, we can see
good-sized blocks in the bottom of the crater. I don't know what our altitude is now but those are pretty good-sized blocks.'

Anthony walks reluctantly out of range of the radio, out of the room and the building, and into the eyeblink-short tropical evening, boarding papers crumpled in his hand, and with the dizzying sensation of having been flushed through a gap no wider than a clerk's anonymous smile into a new world.

Back in the office, Buzz Aldrin sighs:
‘When a star sets up here, there's just no doubt about it. One instant it's there and the next instant it's just completely gone.'

Summer 1944.

Dick Jinks – a merchant seaman long since invalided out of the service – takes apart his customer's starter motor and spreads the pieces across his work table, its surface scarred by years of plier-work, chisel-work, horse-chains mended, bridles restitched, saddles restuffed and invisibly repaired. The table's legs are raised on bricks so that Dick can work standing up. Sitting down, alas, is a fond and ever-dimming memory for him, whose red-faced ‘oofs!' and ‘aahs!' have given way this past year to more clenched forms of suffering. Dick picks up a piece of the dinky little motor, studies it – what will they think of next? – and pops it into his mouth as though it were a plum. He swills it around his mouth until it is clean, spits it out onto a cleanish rag, dries it and picks up the next.

Alice, Dick's wife of eleven years, threads her way into the covered yard, their new baby in her arms, and tries not to muss up her cotton frock on the gear piled all around: farrier's irons in a rusty tin drum, heavy rubber tyres, some of them inflatable, most the solid sort, huge wooden horse collars, an anvil; a broken tractor wheel, higher than a man. Sunlight shines into Dick's dark nook through her frock, silhouetting thighs grown thick from child-bearing, calves still shapely, and knees – well, knees, as ever, too small; fragile knots of bone. Dick Jinks harbours a secret, wincing fear for her knees.

Their first child, the trigger for their shotgun marriage and young Dick's precipitate flight to sea in 1934, would have been eleven now, had she not died within hours of her birth, leaving Alice, fresh sea-widow, heartbroken and alone. For his part, Dick was none the wiser for the longest while, for he was already out in mid-Atlantic and, at the
moment of his baby girl's death, only hours away from the engine room explosion and the defining cataclysm of his own life.

So this new arrival, apple of his mother's eye, this little Nicky Jinks, represents an unexpected second chance (cafeteria sign still faced ‘Open', gingham-curtained door unlocked, a memorably swift, stiff violation against the serving counter, the only copulatory position of which Dick, her poor spinelocked darling, is now capable).

From 1934 to now, in the interval between their dead child and their live one, between Dick Jinks's running off to sea and his return, what has his life been?

He cannot remember.

Dim impressions of a horsehair couch, leather, like an operating table. Pictures on a wall, a foreign city, nowhere he knew or could imagine. The echo of a name, Pál, as in, ‘me and my pal', the pun as hollow as a skull's grin. The taste of rubber.

Nothing coheres.

‘
Come along, Mr Jinks
.'

Instructions. Admonitions. Corridors of pale green or mustard yellow. Doors with numbers. Hoses. Beds.

‘
Where are we?
' says a voice inside his head. A woman's voice.

He looks around him for an answer. This grotto, filmed with oil. These things – tat for farmers' horses, tyre irons, lifting tackle, all the stuff of a modern blacksmith's trade. It should be colourful in here. Yellow paper wrappers round the tins of engine grease. Wheel jack a cheery red enamel. Saddle leathers tan and butterscotch. The colours here have been first muted, then swallowed up utterly by dust, grit, the sump impurities of his trade.

This is no grotto.

He knows what this is.

This place of black and white.

Fighting for breath, Dick drools the motor part out of his mouth onto the table. It glistens there, grey, like a spent tooth.

Alice, babe-besotted, does not see the panic in her husband's eyes, the hollow tremor of his diaphragm as he fights for air. She says, ‘A nice day out. The plums are ready for picking. You can hold the ladder for me when you're done in here.'

Even as he draws breath for his terrible
Eeeee!
, the normal, friendly strains of his wife's voice avert catastrophe. They sever the red wire, disarming the terrible thing inside him, and he is back in the present. He lets go a ragged breath and covers, as he always does, with a big piratical ‘Yo! Ho!'

One thing is certain: whatever the other details of his history, Dick, like a pocket-knife rusted open, has seized up to the point where he can be of no imaginable wartime use. So he is cast up here – after many strange and shadowy excursions – like a timber shivered from a wreck. He has much to be grateful for. This blacksmithing business for a start, pride and joy of his lowering father-in-law. And his wife, of course. Above all things, this wife he had practically forgotten. Not for a second had he imagined – returning, like a wounded animal, back to his starting point – that he would find her still living here and, if not exactly waiting for him, still amenable enough to his seaman's bluster, his rough re-wooing and finally, his cap-in-hand suggestion that they take up where they had left off, a dozen years before.

He remembers the ripe eighteen-year-old who'd straddled him in 1933, child that he was, for want of older suitors. This girl he'd had to marry. He remembers feeling proud and ashamed at once of such necessity, afraid of his bride, and at the same time unable to believe his luck, his hair plastered down for the ceremony with a redolent dressing he half-suspects, knowing his mother's humour, was plain lard.

This girl, after such an interval, is grown even more buxom now, and she's not at all the bitter shrew she might have become, the jealous termagant of every sailor's fears.

‘Take little Nicky, Father,' says Alice, bending forward over him, cleavage branding a holy Y into each confused eye. ‘We've customers.'

The business: this smithy, sliding seamlessly to garage now horsepower has had its day; a clean dirt forecourt with two hand-operated petrol pumps; a tea-house for the haulage trade; round the back of the house, an orchard of plum trees.

Gently, Alice lowers their infant son into Dick's arms. Dick would protest, only the space under his tongue is a tray of grit. Of their own accord his brawny arms, built for furnaces and fisticuffs, arrange themselves into a cradle for twelve pounds of alien life.