The Weight of Numbers (32 page)

It is 10.30 a.m. on Sunday, 20 July 1969. One man is preparing to set foot on the moon; another is going to die, assassinated by a bomb. For now, though, it's like any other mid-morning in Lourenço Marques, and the street-sellers are setting out their wares. There are toy cars made of cans, random pharmaceuticals and pictures of Elvis Presley. Along the promenade, girls are selling themselves.

Nick Jinks passes by, pondering the choice on offer. The girl he settles on finally is not a typical street-walker. For a start she is a good ten years older than the others. Nick assumes this must be the reason why the competition have gathered around them, hissing. Really hissing: from two dozen rouged and milktoothed Mozambican mouths comes a great long
ssssssssss!

Nick leads the girl into the doorway of a Sunday-closing barbershop. That he has already forgotten her name is hardly his fault. They all have such nutty names round here. The two he bought before her were called Majesty and Hope…

His line of thought is broken as he feels her hands moving to the straps of his wartime canvas satchel, a satchel he has promised his masters not to remove. This inevitably triggers the first of many minor
contretemps
with which encounters like this are inevitably gritted (‘Don't kiss my mouth' – ‘Don't touch my feet' – ‘You'll put my arm to sleep') so that the satchel remains strapped, as per instructions, to his back, no way he is going to let go of it until he is safely in off the street. He pushes her hands away; they purse instead around his groin like a codpiece while, shoulders drawn back manly by the weight of his burden – what the fuck is
in
this bloody thing? – he cops his feel of her between the folds of her
capulana
: a line of sweat beneath each little tit,
a line of fur up her tight tum, from thick-pubed mons, her bush V-d to a clit-bound arrow. Some stubble there, and he thinks about offering to tidy up her topiary with his fancy new Gillette, ask her nicely, say please, winning smile. It is an arrow that might Braille the most insensate fingers, the burned and calloused pads of firemen and dockers, to their mark. Finding it for himself, pressing it cruelly so she squeals, Nick Jinks laughs a hearty seaman's ‘Yo ho!' and swells into her hands.

Back home, every once in a while, an ambitious young detective will open the file on Nick Jinks: wanted for murder, wanted for the abduction of a child. Nothing is ever resolved. There is next to no information on the suspect – not even a photograph – and besides, the circumstances of both crimes are so confused, it is hard to see how a prosecution would get past a sceptical judge.

Nick, for his part, keeps a weather-eye on the British press, concerned for the child as well as himself. The story of the little girl's abduction, widely reported at the time, is as horrifying as it is baffling. What child? Was there a child? And how on earth did this story get caught up with his own? The grotesque details trouble him nearly as much as the risk of false accusation.

Eight years have passed since Nick took to the high seas. There is little about him now to remind one of the taciturn rat catcher of his youth. In the time he has been at sea, Nick has grown hardier and happier. He knows something about the world and this has made him less afraid of himself. He knows what stone-cold killers look like, from brawls in Singapore and from one dangerous, ridiculous feud on a container run from Japan to San Francisco. He knows he is not one of them. Knowing this he has begun, over the years, to put the accident behind him. He calls himself Jiggins now, Nick Jiggins, and with the new name comes a sunnier outlook on life.

His father's fear of him was his own affair. No use picking at it now. Loyal as Nick tries to be to his father's memory, he's come to understand the limits of Dick's philosophy. ‘Not worth the candle,' Dick Jinks had
said of the seaman's life. God knows it was a brutish kind of existence, but who could say it was not worthwhile? If it had been up to his dad, and had it not been for the accident, Nick might never have left the fenland of his birth. Then what would he know of anything? He imagines himself sometimes – when nostalgia and weariness threaten to rain on his parade – crouched in his father's room, loaded shotgun across his lap, listening to the rats scuttling behind the wainscots. Picturing this, his appetite for the sea comes rushing back to him.

Rats, the sound of them paddling in the bilges, the sight of them at dusk, playing tag along the chains and hawsers; rats alone have the power to taint Nick Jinks's happy-go-lucky present. He stays as far away from them as he can. Not for him the flop-house floor, the budget brothel, the knee-shaker in the alley. An inadvertent consequence of this is that Nick has acquired a reputation as a man who conducts his shore leaves with a certain amount of panache. Take, for instance, this woman's well-appointed theatre of delectable operations.

(Her hands move across his tired back, hot and slick and warm from the coconut oil she is working into his skin. He turns his head, sees the old army satchel lying at the foot of the bed, the satchel he must deliver, the brown-wrapped package inside, yes, it is there. What can possibly go wrong?)

This upmarket taste of his requires funding additional to his meagre seaman's wage. Nick's courier work has been relatively smalltime up to now, but his inventiveness and discretion have not gone unremarked. The years he spent with his dad – concealing signs of his presence, so as to minimize the old man's terror of him – have made Nick an unobtrusive operator.

This most recent courier job represents the high-water mark of his career. Afterwards, he intends to lay low for a while. Frankly, the whole business has unnerved him.

To start with, the men he went to see refused to come out of their basement. Then, when he had been persuaded to join them in their
cellar, he found himself in the middle of some bizarre musical number. At least, this is the only way he has to interpret what he saw. He's never confronted black-face outside
The Black and White Minstrel Show
, let alone seen it used as a disguise. Impossible to tell even the race of these men under such fairground slap. The ointment smell of the local sun-screen – a crackly white porridge – mingled sickly with the smell of black shoe polish, as he slipped their satchel round his back.

‘Item: if you look inside the package, we will know. Item: if you take the satchel from your back in a public place, we will know. Item: if you discuss our arrangement with a third party, we will know. Item: if you fail to deliver the package to the correct address, we will know.'

Overkill enough to make the young seaman grin through his sweat – a rictus of fear to answer their painted white grins. Afterwards, he wrote the address he was meant to memorize (‘Item: do not write down or share this address with anyone') in big crayon letters all over the packet, just to make doubly sure he couldn't fuck this up.

He balks at the memory, muscles tensing. Bad enough that he should have been led under the ground, let alone that he should be confronted with this. Fatigues without insignia. Guns. Somewhere in that cellar, unmistakable, the scurry and scratch of rats.

‘Shhh,' the prostitute soothes, hot hands working him.

It is not the tension of the moment that will spoil his first day's shore leave here, in infamous Lourenço Marques. Nor even the anxiety he feels about the delivery he must make, a couple of hours from now. What scuppers him is, oddly enough, the tale he decides to tell, his favourite ice-breaker, a tale of derring do on the high seas.

‘It's proppant,' he says, his voice muffled by the pillow. ‘
Proppant.
I'm telling you.'

It's little china beads with a coating, a resin, they use it in drilling, in the offshore industry, on drilling rigs, and he is getting dizzy, all the ways there are to explain this thing, this material, which is frankly the least of his story.

‘Not “propellant”. I'm telling you. What's
propellant
? What kind of
propellant
do you know comes in
sacks
?'

‘Proppant.' The girl tries it on her tongue. Her fingers dig his shoulders, like there are gold coins between his muscles, dubloons between the muscle and the bone, and she is rifling these secret pockets in his flesh, not so much a back rub, more an intimate mugging. The trouble with asking for a massage is you occasionally end up with a real masseuse, whatever else she is, with frightening thumbs, really strong, like her day job is screwing on the lids of jars you can't undo.

‘Proppant,' she says, ‘OK,' in that tone of voice, how do women do that? Letting him know in four syllables that nothing he says now is she possibly going to take seriously. Discouraged, he recalls that at some point in his story he is going to have to use the word ‘phenolic'. Though he hardly looks the part, Nick is wedded to an ethic of accurate
reportage
. Words should fit closely the events and situations they describe. Because the world is big, he needs many words, the more accurately to render the truths around him. Word-power is his unlikely passion. So that the third mate, rigging a vacuum line for their second loading attempt, and still white-faced and shaky-fingered from the explosion, couldn't have been more startled when Nick rose up on his ladder out of the silo – where, anyway, he had no place being – a stained rag held close to his mouth and saying: ‘What kind of dust, d'you say? Fen-something? How d'ya spell that, then?' The third mate was unable to take his eyes off the Stanley knife tattooed on Nick's arm, an eye where the shank screw should be and shark teeth for a blade. You could tell it was a Stanley knife because the word ‘Stanley' was picked out along the thing in the red of venereal rashes. Without it, it might have been anything. A razor shell. A baby eel. A banana.

‘Mmm,' the woman says, over him, behind him, and something brushes him, an unmistakable tantalizing point of rubbery contact that is definitely not a finger and this ought to excite him, only that…

The thing is, he's pretty sure her
capulana
was secure before she started this – he expecting her to strip at his word and she instead wanting to tantalize, oh, very European – and both her hands are on him now, either side of his hips, working the handles there. So assuming this
is
a nipple – well, not that he's ungrateful or anything but O! the mysterious toils of this world – if both her hands have been working the flab above his hips all this time,
how in Hell did she get her tits out?

And here's its twin, tracking through the oil spread like engine lubricant over his back. He arches his back, kitty-friendly, feels the nipple snub and turn, the half-moon of her tit against him. ‘Lie down, now.' She pulls away, then tracks again, with both tits now, no hands, just the nipples against his back, angled perfectly like something mechanical come to read his skin. She must be angling them with her hands to maintain such precise and even contact and then it comes to him, a great wave of mystery and unknowing:
how come she doesn't fall over?
Leaning over him all that way, her tits in her hands, how is she able to balance? Maybe, he thinks, she has climbed up onto the table. Maybe she has hooked her feet around the end of the table. He has lost track of her nipples now, he has completely dropped out the bottom of the whole experience, he is off in the land of levers, the land of weights and measures and GOD DAMN WOMAN WATCH WHERE THE JESUS YOU ARE PUTTING THAT THING – but her hand is deep in the crevice of his freshly washed, sweet-smelling buttocks by now – when in hell did that happen? – fingers questing for his BALLS NOT MY BALLS NOT – AHHHHHHHHHHH and she's PULLING THEM now, she is LIFTING HIM OFF THE TABLE BY HIS BALLS and he is kneeling and he thinks, if I hook my feet to the edge of the table I wouldn't need my hands to balance, and really, it is enough to make him despair sometimes how his mind goes wandering off without him and this is really too fucking homosexual she is actually tonguing his balls and where the hell is her nose all this time? Oh CHRIST, there it is, her lips grazing the hair of his balls as her hand reaches round to his prick and she mumbles,
‘Proppant, then, come on,' and she is milking him like a cow so he goes on with his story because this is what you do when some mad bitch has your testicles between her teeth you do
exactly what she says.

The sunlight that morning was of a sort that has resisted his every subsequent attempt to describe it. The low, even white cloud, far from barring the sunlight, trapped the light and pressed it against the sea's surface, so that everything appeared incredibly bright and reflective and the sea was turned to liquid chrome.

The lensing effect of the clouds extended even to sounds, magnifying them and at the same time stripping them of all reverberation, so that every sound seemed to come from inside the ear. In the early-morning quiet, when they were still a nautical mile off the harbour, Nick swears he could hear the footfalls of the crane man, dawdling on the quay. A car starting on the hill above the harbour. A conversation between two elderly men, one out walking his dogs, the other leaning on his gate.

A Navy helicopter hammered by, rotors clipping the clouds. Even this racket was transformed, each element sounding pure, precise, as intimate as the flob of Antonio Carlos Jobim's spittle on ‘The Girl from Ipanema'
.

It was a strange sort of landfall. No town, no din of machinery. Just a couple of houses – and the quay itself was an untenanted, industrial thing, thrown up as a handy transfer point for the tons of aggregates and chemicals that would one day be consumed by the rigs.

No real town for twenty miles. No pub. A tea shack for the men. One public telephone on a piece of hard-standing that, for sheer size, dwarfed the quay itself: big enough to land a SeaKing on. Why was the phone-box set slap bang in the middle like that? What use was it meant to serve?