The Weight of Numbers (46 page)

‘I can surely wait outside the office?'

‘Oh,' says the receptionist, and because I am already through the door: ‘All right, then. Don't go far.'

Beyond the packing houses lies a crackled criss-cross of tractor and trailer tracks. And there they are, Chisulo and Happiness, picking Sweethearts out of the smashed earth.

Happiness is younger than her husband. Her skin is pale and freckled, her blood bleached by a globe-trotting Danishman, her fly-by-night dad.

Felix, on the other hand, is old and dark, and all his life in this country the
Azungu
– his old-country word for the whites he has grown old among – have congratulated him on his black twistedness. ‘Like mahogany,' they say, which proves, he says, they are no carpenters.

Thorn would be a better choice; Felix is as twisted as though a mountain wind has sculpted him. When he sees me, he stands and smiles, because it is the custom of his people to smile. It signifies no friendliness whatsoever.

It is a strange sort of service I have done these two, and nigh-on impossible to explain to the natives of this merrie shopkeepers'
England, where making one's voice heard above the din has become the highest good. I have erased them – and as a consequence, there is much that Chisulo and Happiness cannot do. Banks refuse to handle their meagre earnings. Public libraries choose not to lend them books. On the other hand, there is much they cannot be made to do, and this, in their lives, was a welcome novelty – at least at first – for they came from a place where the State gives little, and asks much.

Happiness, working beside her husband, looks up, and though her freckled face is a blank, her eyes are full of stratagems. But this is, in turn, merely the customary look of her people, the people of Djibouti, that hell on earth where people chew leaves incessantly like cows simply in order to have something to do.

I tell them I have a job for them, and I pick a figure to turn their heads, but not too extreme: I don't want to scare them off.

Still they hesitate, for they have good work already here. Come the days of high yield, ordinary human sweat can earn them up to £1.50 an hour.

It's Chisulo who relents, finally: ‘I'll go and fetch Asha.'

Asha is their daughter. An unwelcome complication, but I don't want to spook them now by saying she can't come.

Leaving Happiness to her pluck and drop, I follow Chisulo down the hill. The whole valleyside is one huge field, planted everywhere with melons, melons for every taste, here green stripy Sweethearts, there crazed yellow Passports, further down the hill the phallic wrongness of
Caroselli di Polignano
, towards woods the managers keep in the bottom for the shooting of great tribes and nations of grouse. (The company's recreation division call this venture ‘The Lucky Brakes', but I doubt whether their city-analyst clientele know enough country lore to pick up on the pun.)

We enter the woods, deep enough so that the light begins to gutter. I can't imagine where their daughter must be, among these tangles and paths criss-crossing, these fallen trees.

Chisulo turns sharp left, past a fallen oak – and there is a caravan, a dilapidated Hurricane, abandoned wheel-less among the furthest
brakes, the plastic airstream bubble over its rear window long since smashed away, the trellis skirting round its bottom kicked in at precise intervals, suggesting the tantrum of a strictly governed child.

There has at some point in its history been a half-hearted attempt to paint the sides of the caravan Windsor green. Concrete breeze-blocks make steps up to the door, and from inside comes the laughter of children.

The concrete blocks wobble under Chisulo's feet as he climbs. He opens the door.

From the foot of the steps I glimpse children. One of them, a boy, his skin a curdled Balkan colour, is waving a metal contraption over his head, out of the reach of a black girl in a green polyester party dress with a silver ribbon round her waist, undone now and dangling, the ends scuffed and dull where she, along with everyone else, has trodden on them.

The girl hops, panting. This is a game, she is smiling. No, she is not smiling, she is panting, she is exhausted.

She is hopping. She only has one leg. The boy is swinging the other above his head.

Chisulo says something in a language I don't recognize, and smartly, without a trace of fear or embarrassment, the boy hands him his daughter's leg.

Asha hops to the door and Chisulo gathers her up in his arms and steps backwards, gingerly, down the breeze-block stairs. The boy swings the door shut. I catch a glimpse of the caravan's interior: its wallpaper, its mobiles, the pink tricycle, the space-hopper; empty boxes, piled into a half-hearted den.

Chisulo wants to put Asha's leg on, but there's no time. She wouldn't be able to walk across the field anyway, the ground is so uneven.

‘We can put her together again in the car,' I tell him.

We ride the A14 – Happiness and the girl in the back, Chisulo riding shotgun beside me – and half an hour later I pull in ‘to rest'.

So here we are now, staring numbly out of the window of the service station, blowing on coffee that is both scalding and tasteless. How am I supposed to say what I have to say with the little girl sitting here between us like this? I am still puzzling this through, muzzy from lack of sleep and too many hours behind the wheel, when Asha says, ‘Chipsss. I want chipsss.'

I go and buy her some chips.

Then she says, ‘Can I have ketchup with my chipsss?'

‘Over there,' I tell her, sitting down again. ‘See? Those packets over there.'

Asha returns with a fistful of sachets of tomato ketchup and a woman in a giant dishcloth smock running after her because she has not paid for them. They are seventeen pence each. I hand the woman a pound coin, but she says she has to put the sachets through the till – she means scan them. I tell her to use some initiative, pick a sachet from the can by her till and scan it through a few times, but she says she cannot do this, so I ask for my quid back, but she does not want to give me back my money, so I tell her to fuck off.

The till operator returns with the manager. The manager gives me change from my pound and tells me not to make further purchases from his food hall.

‘Chipsss!' says Asha, eating them. Chips vanish without effort, without chewing – even without swallowing, it seems – down the little girl's gullet. Watching her, Chisulo's eyes grow grey and wet: windows on stormy weather. (Two years before, back home, Chisulo was studying law. But they were all something.)

‘Carsss!'

Asha is done eating; now she pulls on her mother's sleeve. ‘Carsss!'

I ask Happiness, ‘What cars?'

‘The games,' Happiness replies. ‘The games, she means, downstairs, the games with cars. No, Asha.'

‘The arcade games,' says Chisulo. He stands.

‘Stay where you are. I want to talk to you.'

Chisulo sits but, as he does, Happiness stands: it is like they are being operated off the same pulley.

The girl takes her mother's hand.

‘Go with her, then, Happiness,' I tell her, ‘It's fine.'

‘Carsss!' the girl chirrups, hand in hand with her mum, clunktapping away over the dog-hair-thin industrial carpeting towards the arcades.

‘What is it, boss?'

I never expected to charge them so high a price for their freedom. But what can I do? Fifty-eight men, women and children. Imagine. The volume of human flesh. It is too much for one man to manoeuvre, let alone conceal.

Stripping, handling, wrapping, packing. Plastic and tape. After months spent trimming and stacking groceries at Ferrer's Grange, Happiness and Chisulo will find the whole process eerily familiar.

My hands frozen to the wheel, heavy with nostalgia, sick with it, I hacked back and forth over the South Downs, through villages with names like Hurtmore and Noning. The hills of my childhood had been scrubbed clean. It was a modern, monochrome landscape now. The soil was so thin, modern ploughs had cut great gobbets out of the chalk bed and left the fields flecked white and grey. From a distance, it was as though someone had gone over the land with sandpaper, revealing a grey primer beneath. The crops, when they came, were a sickly yellow-green, and rounded off the imperfections of the hedgeless hills, leaving them as smooth as the features on a golf course.

I could not go back. I would have to go forward. I thought about that.

I had grown bored of the modern arrangement Stacey and I had fallen into. Its lack of commitment was exhausting. I decided to do something selfless, if only for the sake of the change. I tried to make myself, if not useful, then present: a silent partner, someone for Stacey to turn to, to rely on.

But she already had Jerom, and how could I compete with him? Jerom had all the advantages: education, youth, a sense of humour, a missing ‘e'. No sooner did I try to participate in their lives, than Stacey and Jerom set about seeing to my every need, hoping perhaps that I would leave them alone.

When I wrapped my BMW around a bus near St Katherine's Dock, Stacey took me to a showroom in Mayfair and bought me a replacement. ‘What do you think?' she asked me as we drove back to Wapping along the Strand. I said something about the positive feel of the controls, the hard ride, the snugness of the seat: anything to paper over my wretchedness.

Just then her phone rang. Jerom dug it out of his pocket; Stacey never took her own calls. ‘Well,
hello
, Jeff,' Jerom cooed, wriggling into the leather of the back seat. Since I had decided to be Stacey's best friend, Jerom never seemed to leave her side.

He was not so petty that he did not allow me to make some contribution to the household. I took charge of the coffee machine and the herbal teas. I kept house. I swept and tidied. I threw away newspapers before Jerom was done with them, wanting him to stop me, itching for an excuse. This was how I stumbled on the other key story of my year – though this was harder to miss; John Gridley's worn muzzle splashed across the front of a
Guardian
pull-out.

The senator for Illinois was familiar for his maverick politics: by and large a good Republican, Gridley was, at the same time, outspoken in his determination to get the Bush administration to grasp the nettle of foreign aid. Long before debt relief reached the international agenda, Gridley had advocated a unilateral writing-off of African debt. The terrorist atrocities of September 2001 only strengthened his old-school belief in the importance of winning hearts and minds abroad; above all, in being seen not to rip people off. A year ago, the critically ill senator told a
New York Post
interviewer that he would soldier on – and die in office, if necessary – until this ‘vital pillar of national security' was enshrined in policy.

The year since had made a nonsense of the
Post
's valedictory. Not only had the senator's health improved to an improbable degree; there was now a better-than-evens chance that an international agreement would be struck on forgiving Third World debt.

Gridley's response?

Last week, he had declared his intention not to contest the next Senate race.

I was so nervous about what I would find in the
Guardian
, I couldn't even read the article at first; I had to scan it, hunting for tell-tale words like ‘clinic' and ‘kidney'.

Gridley was intimate, as few others are, with the economic disparity between rich and poor nations. Right now his only functioning kidney belongs properly to a former RENAMO lieutenant by the name of Felix Mutangi. That Gridley, hopelessly compromised, dared to continue his lobbying was admirable, I thought. The hypocrisy he had shown in buying a poor man's kidney, thereby saving his own life, was small beer by comparison.

The
Guardian
piece, after a lot of hand-waving, excused the Senator's resignation with a mere paraphrase of his own announcement. I could only hope its lengthy, saccharine approach would spike the story for other, more inquisitive editors.

I threw the paper in the bin and tried to forget about it. I emptied the ashtrays. I made a salad. I tried to straighten out the mess Stacey was making of her home.

One whole room was devoted to Stacey's wardrobe. There were shelves, floor to ceiling, stacked with her shoes, all in their original boxes. The contents of the bathroom medicine cabinet were sparing in comparison to the powders and lotions and mascaras and God knows what else cluttering her make-up tables; there were two of them, one in her dressing room and one in the bedroom.

Did I ever see her in the same outfit twice? In the unlikely event she ever ran short of cash she could have opened an agnes b museum.

Though the apartment was airy enough, I could never stay inside for long. I found the presence of all these Staceys hard to handle: Staceys hung up on the backs of doors, Staceys spilled from cupboards, laid out over beds and chairs, stacked in boxes, bottled, jarred. There were so many women Stacey could be. She could be anybody she wanted to be, now that she was nobody. She had rendered herself down to the bone. She was starving her life the way she had starved her body. Jerom's phone log in the morning; Vera's pie-charts in the afternoon; in bed, a man twice her age: what kind of life was this?

Similar thoughts must have crossed Stacey's mind, too, because come October she began to take lovers from among the students she met while delivering guest lectures at Goldsmith's and Central Saint Martin's. They were usually girls. The affairs would last a few days; never more than a couple of weeks. They shouldn't have mattered. Though we sometimes shared a bed, Stacey and I hardly ever fucked any more. Come night-time, we had our separate rooms. Still, it angered me to find myself cast in the role of an infinitely indulgent uncle. Someone who would pick up the pieces afterwards. This, my second experiment at living with a woman, had proved just as sexless as the last.