The Weight of Numbers (47 page)

How could Stacey answer my disappointment? With pity, or with laughter? ‘Sometimes I feel too delicate for cock,' she told me once, on her way out to a date. She stroked my cheek. She was trying to titillate me, to make me an accomplice in her adventures. A silent partner indeed.

Even when I hit her it didn't make any difference. The next morning I entered the kitchen, wobbly with remorse, to find Jerom taking photographs of her black eye. I couldn't work out if this was for her art or something to do with insurance.

Her tour. Imagine.
SCTV05
.

The walls of the bathtub rise around her, high, grey-white, and smutted. The brine supporting her in the bath is thick enough, salt is precipitating out of the water along the tideline, crystallizing wherever a smut greases the enamel.

Her tour begins late in the year in Milan, at the Inga-Pin gallery. The following week she participates in the closing days of the Venice Biennale. In the new year, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

SCTV05
. Stacey licks salt from her lips – naked, shrunken, she is not eating any more – as, little by little, the water in which she floats evaporates under the gallery's halogen lights.

The atmosphere at the Inga-Pin is business-like. Franca Sozzani, editor of
Vogue Italia
, arrives a few minutes before the end of the technical run-through. (There will be only two performances of
SCTV05
at each venue: once for the public, and once for the DVD.)

Sozzani has arranged for Helmut Newton to take a snap of Stacey this evening for the magazine; he wants to accompany her in person and write up the meeting.

Stacey nods agreement, shivering and dumb. She is not dressed yet. Fan heaters are going full-blast, three of them, plugged into the same extension lead. They have been arranged in a triangle, an almost-safe distance from the bath, and Stacey stands in the middle, scooping the towel up her outstretched arms in the shaft of hot air.

‘The studio is half an hour by car,' Sozzani explains. He is struggling, in this white space and in the vacuum of Stacey's wide-eyed regard, to express his solicitude. His panic is palpable. ‘We will be driving
north
.'

Nobody pays any attention to me.

Stacey crosses to the chair where her clothes are piled. Her flesh has retreated so far it has abandoned its defence of her sex. Now the gap at the top of her thighs is so wide, were I to put my fist between them, I doubt we'd even touch.

‘Here.' Sozzani offers Stacey his coat and leads her from the gallery. I wander over to the bath.

I dip my hand into the water. It is stone cold.

A jangle of keys.

Closing time.

This is the pattern of our days. By the time I wake up, Stacey has already left for work at the gallery. I throw on a dressing gown and I wander into the lounge to find the TV on, muted, and a line of orange Tic Tacs lined up, uneaten, on the arm of the hotel's easy chair. The suite is a sea of half-drunk bottles of mineral water. There is no Zoloft in the bathroom. She has decided not to take it any more, and because of all the stupid things I have said against it in the past, there is nothing I can say in favour of it now.

I leave the hotel and I look for something to do. More often than not, this is a waste of time. I am out of joint with Europe. I am too old to learn the tricks of Stacey's generation, these cut-and-paste people with their French-fried philosophy. Even their films leave me cold. There is more to life than entertainment, of course, but, having spent so long in Stacey's apartment, among Stacey's friends, drinking Jerom's coffee and listening to his end of complex, fruity transatlantic telephone conversations, I am not sure I can remember what it is. By the time Stacey gets back from the gallery, I am already slumped in front of the TV, hunting the channels for those game shows where the girls take off their bras. A nice hobby for a sixty-year-old.

The evening Stacey had her photograph taken by Helmut Newton, I found something else to watch instead:
Fox News Live
hosted by Martha MacCallum.

John Gridley, former Illinois senator, was dying of AIDS.

I reached for my phone, decided against it, went out into the street and hunted down a public booth. The lines to the Chicago clinic were engaged; a bad sign. I tried Felix and got his wife. Felix was out at work. She gave me a mobile number but I couldn't get it to work. I tried the clinic again.

There was no one there willing to speak to me.

How long had Gridley been keeping a lid on his HIV status? Was he clean last year, when he went in for his operation?

As he was carried into hospital this evening, Gridley's lawyer had issued a public statement to the effect that the senator's HIV infection had been contracted, not through sexual contact, but during the course of a surgical procedure. No journalist in America could fail to spot the invitation in that. The lazy ones would be waiting for news of a lawsuit. The more ambitious among them might notice, perhaps, that according to his medical notes, the senator, for all his troubled health the past few years, had not gone under the knife since his tonsils were removed in 1966.

His foul blood and failing kidneys – these were a matter of public record, so that the miraculous improvement in his health over the last year had been a source of grudging media celebration. But there was still plenty for him to tell. Gridley must even now be juggling offers for his death-bed confession. With a good ghost, you could probably make a book of it. Part One: the family's vain hunt for an appropriate donor. Part Two: and at last,
in extremis
, through discreet channels, via contacts in the overseas aid industry, certain parties are able to offer the dying man a final stab at life. An operation. A transplant.

What was Felix's HIV status now? What had it been, the day they gave his kidney to John Gridley? How could the clinic not have known?

Whether out of remorse, or to head off blackmail, or simply out of a dying wish to light the blue touch paper, and end his cantankerous career in a blaze of controversy, Gridley was getting ready to talk. The clinic's only hope, and by extension mine, was that the pneumonia
would get to him before
ABC News
's dictaphone clicked on. Except that Gridley was a man of education and foresight; he would have prepared his confession already.

I went back to the hotel and waited for Stacey.

She got back from the photoshoot after two in the morning, knowing full well she was in trouble. She put on the bikini she had worn for Newton. It was leather. Expensive. Tiny. They had given it to her.

‘What do you think?'

She tried to prance.

SCTV05.

Every so often, heads appear over the sill of Stacey's giant bath-tub. Imagine: the heads lean down and study her, their faces invisible against the glare of the halogen lamps. Stacey can only guess at their expressions.

Horror?

Desire?

Imagine: the computer-controlled canula at her left wrist releases a little of her blood into the water.

‘No,' says a woman, looking down at Stacey, floating in water pinked by her own blood. ‘No.' Trembling and tense. Her voice can't find the right register. ‘No.' It sounds as though someone were offering her a canapé – something to which she is allergic.

‘No, no.'

The head retreats. Poor hapless punter. Doesn't know much about art but she knows what she likes. Quick footsteps lead away, making little ripples in the bathwater that tickle Stacey's ears. Hunger twangs her gut like a piano string, and she struggles against the deadly urge to turn her head and drink the brine.

Everybody can see that she is dying. It isn't in me to save her. I know myself too well by now.

*

The clinic phoned me yesterday. A conference call. At least, they said they were calling from the clinic. Only someone used my real name. I cut the line and threw away the phone.

Today I'm phoning Felix again. Once more I get his wife. ‘How are you, Lovemore?'

Anyone else buying a kidney transplant would have flown to South Africa or Pakistan for his operation. Not Gridley. Not in his position: the foreign travels of a gravely ill US Senator would not have gone unremarked. Gridley had insisted on shitting in his own back yard. From his deathbed, slowly murdered by the very kidney that saved him, he is even now giving statements to the FBI.

‘How are the kids?'

Last year I set up Felix and Lovemore as my new caretakers for the northern states. I saw to their relocation, freed them from their files and police records, their government numbers and other bureaucratic spoors. In doing so, however, I have become the very world they would escape from. I am every policeman, every government official, every doctor, every care worker, every petty bureaucrat. So as I enquire, with a more than casual insistence, into the health of Felix's family – his wife, his two young sons – I must choose my words carefully.

In a couple of hours, the family's bank cards and mobile phones will cease to function. A couple of hours after that, a van will turn up at their door. I think they will cooperate. In any event their Chicago life is over.

If they phone the newspapers, if they tell their story, it won't make any difference: as of yesterday, my American business interests are not simply terminated; they never were.

The call goes as well as such calls can, and yet another SIM-card joins its fellows in the mud of the Arno. I am good at this, and I like to think I conduct myself professionally. I never resort to bluster or threats. The world is the way it is; Felix and Lovemore surely know better than to throw themselves and their children upon the mercy of US Immigration.

*

Venice in November. In the mornings, high water rises through the pavements.

We teeter along duckboards down flooded alleys, pausing distracted at this church or that, this paper shop, that stand-up patisserie. Rain ricochets off the brick walls of the alleys. Tourists in yellow galoshes huddle under the awnings of the ink-and-paper shops, the Murano glass outlets, the porticos of churches. We slip up like a couple of drunks on stone footbridges, their steps edged in marble slick as soap. Come rain or shine, summer or winter, Stacey tells me, the canals of Venice are always the same colour: the blue-green of plastic garden furniture.

(
SCTV05
. The gallery closes. The halogens go out, their glittery, schizophrenic light curdling for a second before it dies, blue to sepia to the brown-black of ashes.)

At lunchtime, from our table at Quadri, overlooking St Mark's Square, we watch as the lagoon water drains away – a clear foot of it, vanishing in minutes through tiny sink-holes between the flagstones.

In the centre of the piazza, a man and a woman in smart casual clothes trot in circles round and round. Every so often they point at random into the air, as though firing imaginary weapons.

Stacey is playing her ‘Come here, go away' game with the staff. She wants the waiter to dry her shoes. She wants the waiter to bring her shoes back. She wants the waiter to bring her some dry shoes. Stacey wants a drink. Stacey wants the waiter to know, me to know, the world to know, that she can't be expected to just sit there with wet feet and no drink.

The couple's gestures are ungainly and unpractised. When I lean back in my chair to examine them, I realize I've been watching them through a flaw in the glass; that they are smaller and nearer than I assumed; that they are children.

Paulo, Eduardo: the names of Felix's sons.

I say to her: ‘I don't think I can do this any more.'

Monday, 17 July 2006

A despairing email from Jerom, Stacey's PA (‘former PA', he styles himself), has led Moisés Chavez, criminal mastermind and underworld enforcer, out of his Guatemalan hiding place, across the Atlantic and up to the door of his adopted daughter's apartments in Wapping, near the City of London.

He rings the bell.

Jerom comes to the door. He has his jacket on already, his outdoor shoes. As Mo comes in, Jerom goes out, muttering something about an errand.

Mo knows Jerom won't be back. He can spot a coward by the smell.

Mo climbs the stairs up to Stacey's apartment; they issue directly into the main living space, no walls or doors.

It is a relief to find the room clean and well ordered. Jerom has done this much for her, anyway.

On the floor in front of a wall-mounted flatscreen TV, huddled under a Zambaiti blanket, Stacey Chavez kneads her PlayStation remote, slotting her virtual wheels through impossible gaps in her hunt for the closure of digital sunset in
Gran Turismo 4
.

Mo sinks to the floor beside his adopted daughter. This child twice abandoned. ‘Stace,' he whispers. ‘Stacey. Stace.'

He tries to look her in the face, but this is not so easy, because there is very little face left. It is all skull, the skin shining over the bone as though embalmed.

‘Look at you.' Mo strokes his daughter's head. ‘You can't even walk.'

He had not expected it to be like this. He had expected a fight, when Stacey found out about Jerom; the way Mo has been keeping tabs on her condition.

He strokes her head, her sunken cheeks, her neck, as loose and folded as the neck of a chicken. ‘Please.'

He expected her to recognize him.

Stacey flexes her torso uselessly. Her head bobs and tosses.

Mo remembers playing with Stacey as a child. Her rough giggle. The way in the mornings she would clamber into bed to hug his head.

‘It's a good place, Stace,' Mo urges her. ‘Your mother went there,' he says, as if this were an inducement.

Through an anonymous account he will pay Coronation House for Stacey's care, as he paid for Deborah – this other ruin of a beautiful girl, the wife he abandoned, for her good, he thought at the time. For her good, and for the good of her child, because in 1983, with eight years of jail behind him and his youth fading fast, Mo knew there was no way that he could lead a legitimate life.