The Weight of Numbers (29 page)

Already, Mother is vanished, her frock catching for an oily split-second on a pile of articulated metal plates, once a tractor's treads, now – the tractor done for – bound for the foundry, so that the base metal might be granted a brand-new and deadly incarnation at the hands of de Havilland, Browning, Marconi.

Dick cannot imagine achieving greater happiness than this: he has a new trade, and his old wife; he even has a son. But present pleasures, he has found, do not content the past. The happier his present, the more furiously Dick's past bangs on the gates for his attention. Perhaps this is what happens as you grow old. Or maybe that infernal Professor Pál played one too many shocking tricks. In any event, the slightest thing can set him reeling through time. One careless turn of thought, and he is back there. The explosion. The sick tilt of the deck. Seawater bursting chamber after chamber of their ship, as solid-sounding as a hammer swung by a maniac, scampering from compartment to compartment. The struggle to escape. The things in his way. The young able seaman he killed. The look in the boy's eyes as the metal stanchion oyster-knifed the back of his skull.

Sat there in the monochrome gloom, father and son share a look of mutual horror: for Little Nick Jinks, at four months old, is unmistakably the boy Dick killed, reborn, returned and bent on who knows what subtle revenge.

Dick has said nothing to Alice. It is too absurd. But just look at that nose.

Those little eyes, so close together.

That rosebud mouth.

Sixteen years later: 1960, a weekend in late March.

It is a dank, chilly, febrile sort of spring. The sky is overcast, with bands of cloud staining the eastern sky. They are sitting in the garden of the local pub. It is a Saturday. Dad is drinking his pint. Deborah is sucking her lemon-and-lime up through a straw. It is so much nicer than Coke, so much sharper. It is what her mother used to drink.

‘For over nine hundred years people have been drawn to visit and admire one of this country's finest towns…'

Deborah Conroy unpicks what she can from the Tourist Board pamphlet. Her father Harry, a retired wrestling promoter, helps her over the few difficult words. They are reading about their home, about the windmill that launched Deborah's first word, ‘Win-will!' About the church in whose grounds her mother is buried.

Deborah is eight years old. She opted out of her school trip – her class's wild week away on the Suffolk coast. She feigned an illness, and though Harry saw through her in an instant, he did not say anything. It is a guilty secret they share: since her mother's death, neither one can bear to be parted from the other.

At school, for the handful of children who did not go on the trip – those whose parents could not afford to send them, or whose behaviour was atrocious enough to disqualify them – there is another project. ‘Penance' might be a more apt term. While their gadabout friends are exploring the creeks and quicksands of the River Alde and the River Ore, Deborah and the rest of them – the poor, the wicked and the lame – are meant to be exploring ‘this place right here'. This is just one of many formulations which, like a fixed grin of embarrassment, convince no one:
‘this place we call home'; ‘this exciting place we walk past every day'; ‘this place we think we know, but we don't'. Thaxted: the English country village as it never was. Such a solid, bumptious place. Until the rain comes. In the rain, the whole place looks hollowed out. Only the frontages on the high road stay solid. Everything else hangs in a weird, contingent relationship with the planes of the rain, the twist of the branches of the few trees, the line of a wall here, a roof angle there, as if in a second it might all screw itself up and tumble away in the wind.

Deborah is thinking a lot about the rain. She is doing ‘The Geography of Thaxted' this week. She is writing about rainfall. About weather. Dad is trying to be helpful, he got hold of this pamphlet for her, but he isn't keeping up. History was last week. This week is geography.

The weather improves in time for Easter.

The Saffron Waldon District Children's Biblical Weekend is a big outdoor event: an extravaganza of egg-and-spoon races, jolly Bible songs, competitions and prizes for everyone. It's growing year on year. There are four tents in the field this year – four ‘houses' – though how the organizers choose which ‘house' a child belongs to is a mystery. They are: Panda House, Penguin House, Pony House and Pigeon House. Nobody wants to be in Pigeon House. Even ‘pony' is a bit of a kludge. The boys cavil: ‘Father Peter, a pony is only a kind of horse!' But the girls are besotted; they surrender unquestioning to the animal's aura of leather and rhythm, obedience and hot breath.

Of course, a panda is only a kind of shrew, but you don't hear Panda House complaining. Pandas are
endangered
. The kids in Panda House have drunk deep from this particular well. Ennobled by visions of mortality, they have been religiously tattooing bear-outlines into each other's upper arms with sharpened pencils.

Here they were, the organizers of this year's Saffron Walden District Biblical Weekend, looking for neutral house names – names picked purposely so as not to put off the more anti-clerical parents – and now
these kids are bootstrapping their own theologies around ponies and pandas, a system of personal ethics around penguins. Pigeon House is the only manageable group of the four, because the name has left everybody feeling uniformly dispirited.

The bald fact is, some animals are religious, and some are not. It is easy to imagine the existence, somewhere, of a Horse Cult, even a Pony Cult. But whoever heard of a Pigeon Cult? Some
things
are religious, and some are not. The Divine pervades precisely half of everything.

In the afternoon of the second day, Sunday, the Lord's Day, Father Peter (Saffron Walden), Father Gerry (Thaxted), Father Richard (Great Chesterford) and Father Neil (Linden) erect a bright white marquee in the centre of their camp. They call this the Big House. Deborah Conroy, eight years old, is filled with quiet certainty: she is going in this year, whatever the flutters in her belly.

It is the final event. Ponies, pandas, pigeons and penguins sit cross-legged and higgledy-piggledy facing the bright, pure white marquee. Their parents perch on tiny tubular school seats at the back, and children and parents alike squirm and shudder. The Big House!

Because God slips in without invitation. God in motley, capering.

Which of you is brave enough to step into the Big House?

Eight-year-old Deborah Conroy rises.

Beside her, another child stands, turns and follows her. And another. Then a great rush of children. They are pressing past Deborah now. They are overtaking her, stepping on her toes. The priests are beside themselves. Hard-shelled old tortoises. Something has wormed its way into them: a gift of tongues. ‘Are you ready? Ready! Steady! Are you ready? Ready, steady, go!'

This isn't the way Deborah imagined it. It isn't a solemn procession. It is something rough, a great herding, Jesus's flock mounting the metal ramp into the cramped stink of His lorry.

She nears the great white wall of the house of the Lord, and she sees how it flaps in the wind like a sail. This House does not stay still. If she
enters, it will bear her away for ever. Everything will change. She is afraid suddenly. She wants to enter, but even if she changed her mind, she would not be able to evade that great wide rent.

So Deborah lets the crowd bear her towards the bellowing House of the Lord; there, she is filled with a joy so all-consuming, it blasts her awareness clean of everything except itself.

Dick Jinks is dead.

Nick, his surviving son, prises the bedsheet from his frozen grip and pulls it up to cover him. The sheet settles over Dick's face and smoothly idealizes its shape. A hollow forms over the mouth, the jaw dropped open as if to scream.

Nick draws up the room's only chair and waits. There will be no more
Eeeee!
in the night. No more of his father's tongue, weaving molten in the air. Silently Nick sits, scratching absently at his oil-stained corduroys, and plumbs the depths of his relief.

Crossing to the dressing table, Nick leans forward and studies himself in the fly-spotted mirror. Even now, at the narcissistic height of his adolescence, Nick accepts he is no oil painting. His head is too small for his body; his features are too small for his head. But what is there about him to make anyone so afraid?

There is no doubt in Nick's mind that his father died of fear; that over the years fear ate through his guts, caustic as an acid. Nick tried to reassure his father and win his trust, never with much success.

Nick wipes away a tear and turns back into the room. He knows his father loved him. Even as he stumbled away from him, or backed into his room's corner, even as he drooled and shook, there was love.

They had learned to live together, to love each other as father and son, by indirect means: in the empty morning kitchen, a bowl of warm porridge; clean clothes outside the bedroom door; shoes cleaned for the next day, and occasionally polished; a little money on the table and a list made out in one hand (milk, bread, bog roll), that by day's end,
unfailingly, was ticked off by the other. So they looked after each other, cooked each other's food, cleaned each other's clothes. They were not happy, they were not friends and they hardly knew each other, but they did love each other.

Nick Jinks walks with heavy tread over to the room's only window – a rattly sash that looks out over the rear of the property.

Their life had not always been like this. Nick can remember a time in his childhood when he and his father were still able to speak together. It is from these dimly remembered, yet dearly cherished conversations that Nick knows of an even more distant time, before memory, when his mother was still alive. From his father's stuttering descriptions, Nick knows that Alice was a beauty. There are snapshots, too, though in the absence of memories pictures can never convey much. The truth is, Nick cannot really envisage her, but thinking of her brings a scent to mind, which he concocts from all Dick's talk of what she did: the cakes she'd bake, the fruit she'd pick, the jams she'd stew, the plum trees she would walk among, tending them, eating the fruit, so that the crimson juice would run down her chin onto her apron – ‘Always sinkin' her teeth into a plum!'

Nick shudders to recall his father's story, told and retold to the point where it has become a sort of memory: the ladder's fatal toppling, the way his mother, clinging grimly to the top rung, acquired all the lever's deadly momentum. The tree-trunk and her head in spectacular dry collision. Her mouth a mess of blood and fruit pulp. Soon, leaking from her ears, not blood but something clear. Aqua vitae. It drained away into the orchard earth, leaving her brain parched, her spine hollow. Her seizure. Her shoe coming off, kicked off. In that magic instant, death.

Nick presses his head against the cold window pane, hard, harder.

The pane snaps.

Nick pulls back, surprised. He raises a hand to his forehead. No blood. He focuses on the crack in the glass, a crude Y, then beyond the crack, down, to the ruined lot.

The times have not been kind to businesses like these. Highways have funnelled off all trade, stranding the old trunk roads as surely as a river cuts its coils free, leaving them beached, strange shingle hieroglyphs. Still the faithful tanker comes, once in a blue moon, to top up their reservoir with four-star. The pumps are so old they can barely suck, but there is no money for a refit. The tea-house that was his mother's pride is long gone, the country measled now with Little Chef. As for the smithy, its subtle craftwork, that is all forgotten, leaving nothing for Nick to inherit.

To that extent, the whole is doomed, but the lot at the back of the house where the plum orchard once stood – here a deeper, darker curse is lodged.

A curse is a sequence of operations, each one of which will stand the light of day and reason. A curse never shows its hand. Of course the orchard came to grief, once Nick's mother died; how could it not? She knew these trees and loved them. She had tended them all her life. She knew how to bring them on. They flowered and fruited for her. Naturally, under Dick's uncertain management, they would not perform so well.

Then there was Dick: the man the trees had widowed, whose late happiness they had destroyed. He did his best by them. He pruned. He plucked. He cut away dead branches with a dull and rusty saw. Sickness spread. He snapped and tore. He bared green timber to the filthy air, beneath hot summer's eye.

The seasons cycled. The fruits of his first year's husbandry emerged: hard pips, crisp and healthy. All seemed well. They grew. Dick waited impatiently for them to take on their mature coloration, their dark bloom. For a few, strange, happy days, he forgot what the trees had done to his wife; he remembered only how his wife had taken care of the trees. He watched the fruit, and was proud.

The plums swelled to the size of apricots; then, to the size of pears. Their greenish-yellow skins burst, but if he tried to pluck one, it would
resist his fingers, the branch would dip and toss, then the skin would give way, revealing a thready, whitish pulp that smelled of nothing. He did not dare taste it.

His son mewling in his brawny arms, Dick watched the trees, dumbfounded and afraid. Their delicate branches began to sag, dragged down to snapping by the mutant fruit. The skins of the plums split and dropped of their own accord, leaving balls of pulp to drip-dry in the autumn air. The pulp was not white now, but the brownish yellow of diarrhoea, and it was not tasteless; it had the corrupt sweetness of spoiled meat. Wasps gorged on the useless fruit. They smothered each soft dung-ball with a broiling, black-orange carapace. Then, as evening approached, drunk and dying from the season's cold, they would crawl away into the house. A moment's inattention, and they would fill your shoe, your slipper, a fold of your sock. Objects had to be examined from all sides before one dared take hold of them. Dressing of a morning, Dick would shake each piece of his and his son's clothing from his window and Nick, listening carefully, heard the husks of the stricken wasps bursting on the flagstones of the path.