The Weight of Numbers (45 page)

Stacey picked up her coffee cup. It was empty. She turned it around in her hands, examining it.

I stood up. I caught the edge of the breakfast trolley with my hip and it rolled away. Cups rattled.

‘Saul,' she said.

‘I have to go.' I stumbled for the door.

‘Saul.'

I rode the elevator down to the garage. I had no memory of where I'd left my hire car, but dumb luck led me to the right corner. I climbed in and locked the door. I dug my phone out of my pocket but my fingers were trembling so much, I kept fudging the numbers. The first available flight to Heathrow was at a quarter past three that afternoon. It would have to do. I booked myself a seat with a credit card, and swung by the hotel for my clothes and passport.

On the plane that afternoon, in the seat beside mine, already settled, fussing with her earphones, sat Stacey Chavez.

Stacey's apartment occupied the top three floors of a converted wharf in Wapping, a ten-minute walk from the City of London. White walls, mahogany-stained floorboards. The rooms at the front were shielded from the road behind linen blinds. Windows at the back looked over the Thames. If I leaned out and turned my head to the right, I could see Tower Bridge. The riverbank opposite was dark: a pub, a strip of park, a line of council housing.

Stacey's was the kind of life encapsulated on certain Finnish postage stamps. In the living room, back copies of the art magazine
Parkett
lay neatly stacked on the table by the flatscreen TV. Her bathroom cabinet boasted non-abrasive facial scrub and soapless soap. When I began staying over, she bought me some perquisites. This is what she called them. ‘I've bought you some bathroom perquisites,' she said, and laughed. I added her purchases to the shelf she had cleared for me: perfumeless aftershave; scruffing lotion.

The top shelf held her medicines. She took small doses of Zoloft every day to balance her mood. ‘I am better than well,' she would say, whenever the rigours of the day grew too much. ‘Better than well.' And sometimes we went to bed, even if Jerom was there, tap-tapping at his iBook in the kitchen on the floor below. Jerom was Stacey's assistant. Jerom without an ‘e'. He arrived early each morning before we woke. He had his own key.

‘Hello, Saul,' he'd say. ‘How are you? Sleep well?'

He wanted me to know that he was here.

‘Good morning, Saul, how do you want your coffee this morning?'

He let me know, always nicely, that I was in the way.

Jerom had a double first from Oxford. When he spoke to Vera on the phone – Vera Stofsky, Stacey's agent, or anti-agent – he called her Vera. It was all first names with him. Phil was Philip Dodd, who ran the ICA at that time. Jeff was Stacey's New York dealer, Jeffrey Deitch.

It was a strange sort of work they were engaged in together: complex, carefully minuted, mediated through emails, websites, PDFs; there was always a biker at the door, collecting a DVD, delivering a printer's proof. At the same time, and perhaps because so much of this work was conducted in the non-spaces of the internet, I saw virtually no evidence of product – as though the art business were an abstruse strand of international politics.

Sometimes it was necessary for me to manufacture an interest; more often I was left to myself. I had my living to make, after all.

The US businesses were ticking over pretty much regardless of Nick Jinks's disappearance. Occasional work for the Chicago clinic supplemented the trickle of clients passing through my employment agency.

The UK was a different matter. After the accident, I had drastically reined in my operation, and for that reason my work had acquired a pleasing simplicity and immediacy: ‘Two navvies this way!' and ‘Three navvies that!' and ‘Jump in the back of the van!' Each week another batch of new arrivals came to me, looking for cash-in-hand: navvies and hod-carriers, brickies and cement artists. Even for the ones who had no transferable skill – the ones for whom being a brickie meant making your own bricks, for whom lighting was synonymous with kerosene and lunch was bushmeat on a
braii
of stones and rusted cementation rods – I was usually able to find them casual work of one sort or another.

Most weekdays saw me plying the M25 in my 3-series BMW. Stabbing at my handsfree with nicotine-stained fingers, I deployed my network of white vans across the country, from Glencoe (cockles) to Glastonbury (mushrooms), Sussex (salads) to Sheffield (greenhouse produce). Most every labourer travels a long way for the privilege of trimming our leeks
and hand-selecting our beetroot. There are Lithuanians and Poles, Bulgarians and Turks. Most are legal, but a handful are not. These few are the invisible people, the wainscot people, the people adapted to live undiscovered up against the edges of things. My people.

It was a wrench, come Friday evening, moving from the brute immediacy of this life back into Stacey's orbit: her life lived between inverted commas. All those dinner parties: catty anecdotes about Vanessa Beecroft and Pipilotti Rist. Entire conversations consisted of nothing but other people's names. I did my best to act like a thug – mobile phone pressed to my ear, tales of congestion on the A3 arterial – but my heart wasn't in it.

I wanted her to stop taking the Zoloft. I wanted to know who she was without that crap in her system.

‘No, you don't,' she said, and loosed one of her minatory laughs.

Every Sunday, Jerom insisted on filling the apartment with Sunday newspapers. Stacey never read them, and after a hard week's driving and dealing, I rarely got further than the TV listings. It was by accident that I stumbled, early that summer, upon an article about a little distinguished-sounding philosophical society near Malet Street – my first employer.

I showed Stacey the piece: a fragment of biography for her to play with.

She said, ‘That man looks like you.'

I leaned over to see. Accompanying the article was a photograph of one of the Society's former members.

‘Look,' she said, ‘there's going to be a party.' Stacey's enthusiasm for my past was something I had not predicted and did not want.

The picture was of Anthony Burden, the subject of
The Idealist
. This book – the author's first foray into biography – was, according to the paper, the surprise hit of the literary year. ‘This is your chance to take me to something,' she said. She had opened up her life to me, but had seen precious little of mine.

Poised midway between Senate House and the Fitzroy pub, the Society had not only survived the years of my absence; it had flourished. Its combination of academic fustiness and public library had matured into something more eclectic and engaged. Its rooms were washed and repainted, the staircases stripped and stained ink-blue. The basement had been leased to a small juice-and-falafel chain called Open Sesame.

By the time we arrived, the party – to celebrate some literary award or other – had spilled onto the pavement. There was no one there either of us knew, but everyone recognized Stacey Chavez. I introduced her to Miriam Miller, the society's receptionist, secretary and general factotum. It was obvious Miriam did not remember me. When Stacey pointed out the uncanny physical similarity between me and the subject of her biography, Miriam blinked at her as though she was mad. She spoke to us for exactly three minutes, then passed on through the crowd.

I had expected a little happy reminiscence; at the very least, I had imagined wandering between the stacks of the library where I had worked for so long. But the collection had been sold off years before. So I watched with something like admiration as Miriam and Stacey, the two women in my life, the old and the new, worked their different and eccentric orbits around the room. At a loss, I hunted down the table where Miriam's book was piled high.

I read: ‘
Anthony Burden was as much fascinated by people as he was afraid of them.'
I skimmed ahead, looking for pictures. There were pages and pages of them: faithfully reproduced sketches of shells and ferns and matrices, natural patterns and what looked like, but could not possibly be, computer code. None of it seemed remotely fathomable, and I wondered how on earth Miriam had found a publisher willing to foot the expense of so many plates and photographs.

Miriam's stabs at exegesis seemed as stilted as the articles she used to write for the Society's pamphlets: ‘
Anthony Burden was as much
fascinated by people as he was afraid of them. The patterns they made as they went about their business daunted him. Their movements seemed very unpredictable to him, and he imagined these movements were more complicated than his own. Society wasn't just bigger than he was. It was More.'

The nostalgia I felt while skimming this tosh was, I imagine, similar to the rush of feeling one experiences for a doughty elderly relative once they are past the point where they can damage anyone. I looked for more pictures of her subject. There were very few, and none which resemble me so closely.

Stacey passed behind me, chatting to a short, swarthy man in a T-shirt too young for him. ‘We visited a hospital—'

I recognized, in her earnest cadences, the overture to one of her favourite anecdotes: the documentary she had made for Comic Relief. ‘… A regional centre for the treatment of landmine injuries.'

Manhiça, north of Maputo, this was. I followed a pace or two behind, listening in.

‘… This half-human, half-plastic mass. All the ways they had of moving around. One stick. Two. Wheelbarrows. Skateboards made out of crates.' As though the more Stacey told this story, the more weight it would acquire. The truth, as she had told it to me, was that she had been very little moved by her journey. The suddenness of her arrival and departure, the technical difficulties attending the shoot, never mind her own disorientation, so recently released from the clinic, had conspired to place her at several removes from the things she had seen.

‘I never expected it to remind me so vividly of the clinic I had just left. Its head-height mirrors and curtainless showers. But the cupboards stocked with limbs, the injuries, the burns. The little boy without hands.' She was speaking of the experience the way one speaks of a particularly gut-wrenching gallery exhibition. The pair paused to have their glasses filled by a teenage girl in a white smock. ‘I was not upset,'
Stacey said. She noticed me. She held her hand out for me, drawing me in. ‘I have spent so long among monsters,' she said.

Do Goliata's farmers, crippled by anti-personnel mines, ever visit the graves where their limbs are interred?

As summer wore on, I found it harder and harder to concentrate on my work. I lost whole days sometimes, driving for hours through the spoiled southern countryside of my childhood. When I came to, it was late afternoon, the low sun was dazzling, and the clean, mathematical shapes of the rolling hills stood out dark against the sky. I would take long glances out the side windows and in my mirrors, looking for a glimpse of the walls of this world, and the hills changed shape as I passed between them, remoulding themselves, tightening, relaxing, like graphs representing a series of mathematical formulae.

I can only explain these excursions as an attempt – late in life, and hopelessly – to evoke dim childhood memories: the South Downs above Horndean, their rolling, rain-soaked slopes, their valleys boxed off into tiny irregular rooms by overgrown hedgerows.

My past: my missing limb.

Saturday, 13 March 1999. I have not slept. I've tried calling Nick Jinks back but he isn't answering.

Around four this morning I found our lorry, abandoned in a lay-by outside Fort William. There was no sign of Nick Jinks. I hadn't the nerve to break the trailer's TIR seal and look inside. After so many hours, what would be the point? I drove our spoiled shipment south, parked it safely, hired a car and went to drum up some assistance.

Ferrer's Grange. The company name is spelt out in stainless steel letters fused alchemically to the granite. Underneath, scuffed into the stone, a sans-serif assertion: ‘We Make a Meal of Farming'. In the yard, a fingerpost in white weather-resistant plastic points the way to reception, where the girls – school-leavers from faceless greenfield conurbations outside Spalding and Stamford – have the sallow patina of high-street travel agents.

From inside the Portakabin, with its cheap, crunchy carpet, I can hear the packing houses: the dentist's-drill syncopations of Lincolnshire light industry, plastic bearings squealing in the rollers of stuttering conveyor belts, the squeak-snap of table-top shrinkwrap machines. Every one a sound of protest, barely an honest rumble or clunk anywhere.

‘Have you been here before?' the receptionist asks.

Oh yes, I know these places, these draughty barns stacked high with plastic trays, rolls of corrugated paper, brown, purple, green, reams of colourful print, dusky smiling island women, buxom farmer's daughters, headscarves, shell necklaces,
capulanas
slit to the thigh, cheap, badly registered three-colour pornographies of ripeness and increase; in another corner, industrial-sized bails of Clingfilm, boxes of sticky labels; underfoot a smeared confetti, Class I, Class II, Union Jacks, tricolores,
dinky little ‘Farm Assured' tractors,
marques regionaux
; and beneath them, ingrained, immune to the twenty-four-hour schedule of broom and vacuum, blue-green crumb of broccoli, shred of carrot top, imprinted yellow leafshape of Brussels sprout, liquefaction smears, tomato pips.

The receptionist hands me a yellow plastic hard-hat, a dayglo jerkin, fluorescent gumboots and a laminated name badge: ‘Visitor'. In this motley, nothing can mark me; they can always wipe me clean.

‘I need a breath of air. I'll just be outside. All right?'

The fear these words plant on the receptionist's face suggests that hers is the sort of job where you have to account for every toilet break. She starts gabbling the company's safety policy. I might trip. I might slip. I might wander into an Orange Work Zone and, intoxicated into madness by the whirl of industry, hurl myself giggling into the shrink-wrap machine.