The Weight of Numbers (49 page)

Lesser known. All right, so Loránt Pál is not the first name you'll hit when you look up the encyclopaedia entry. But what does that signify?

He closes the book and tosses it onto his desk.

He thinks: She'll outlive the lot of us.

In the driveway below his window, a taxi blows its horn.

The exigencies of war prevented them.
How can she write like that and not want to fry her own face?

He eases himself down the stairs to the lobby. No lifts, no escalators for him; well into his eighth decade, he daren't let himself seize up for fear he might never get going again. Halfway down, a sudden convulsion seizes his hip. Frightening, insistent, alien – Good God, is this it? Is this how it ends? He imagines the clot in his thigh shattering into greasy brown shards, the shards racing helter-skelter for his heart and brain…

It is only his mobile phone, which he set to vibrate before this morning's staff meeting, then forgot to reset. Cursing, he wheedles the spiteful silver nugget out of his pants. Damned thing has nearly given him a heart attack.

‘Hello?' he says.

This is the gauntlet that Pál runs now: the stuff of articles in the
TLS
; graduate papers on the internet; phone calls from ‘freelance researchers'; an uncomfortable lunch or two with some gimlet-eyed bastard from the
New Scientist
, ‘just to tease out wheat from chaff'.

Isn't there something, well,
unnatural
about all this? That Miriam Miller of all people, so much the Society's servant and retainer, should suddenly acquire her own voice, and at such a late date, suggests to Pál – a keen reader and re-reader of Dumas,
père
and
fils
– some long-nursed mission of revenge. Is it not treacherous, the way she has turned the Society's dull and muddled papers to her own account?

In any event, Miriam's unexpected foray into biography is stirring up no end of trouble for poor Pál. To begin with it had amused him to see how popular her long and tedious opus became. Whatever its stylistic limitations,
The Idealist
had somehow succeeded in awaking the forces of canonization in this nation that forgives failure so much more readily than success.

Now everyone wants a piece of Anthony Burden, the absentee genius, the prophet whose brain was so cruelly fried, who almost invented the computer, the network, the world-wide web; who set down the theoretical principles of virtual reality in the late forties, in a set of school exercise books that he never gave anyone to read.

Pál's own amusement cooled quickly. Watching this fad – this fascination with what might have been – coagulate in backwater after backwater of the public mind has become about as edifying as watching damp spread across a ceiling.

In response to enquiries, Pál has gone over his original notes again and again. He has reported faithfully and discussed candidly everything
he can about the case, in so far as it does not transgress his professional code. After all, Anthony Burden may still be alive. His privacy must be respected.

Nobody really wants to know the reasoning behind Pál's treatments, of course. People just want to believe that it wouldn't happen now, to them, to their children. People want to believe that medicine is
getting better
.

Better! And no sooner do we denigrate the therapies of our fathers, their shocks and surgeries, than we start
feeding amphetamines to schoolchildren
, for fuck's sake!
Better
, indeed! As if medicine could ever
get better
!

Whatever you say to them about what medicine really is – where it sits in the realm of social practice – all they want to hear is that you are sorry for what you have done.

Of course, Pál would not treat a man today as he treated poor Burden then. Then was then. Now is now: the AIDS-riddled, porn-infested Now. Why is this so hard to understand? To forgive? Truly, the past is another country, and old men are merely refugees. Go on, tell us to go back where we came from. Spit at us on the street, if you must. Kick us in the head.
I dare you…'

A polite cough calls Professor Pál to order. The pleasant young man at the other end of the line experiments with a laugh: ‘Perhaps I should call back at another time…'

Pál tries to swallow. Lord, what has he said now? He was never able to make much distinction between thinking and speaking, even at the height of his youth and powers. Old age has hardly improved him.

‘I am an old man. I am an old man, do you understand? I am old.'

The fact of it is, he is being haunted by his younger self. ‘I was a young man then. I was young. Do you understand? Now I am old. I am an
old man
.'

It is the irony of his life that he wasted his youth in pursuit of a certain notoriety. The best marks in his class? An assured future in
provincial medicine? What did he care for trivia like that? No, he had to throw all that up, of course, if he was ever to live a real life, following Cerletti and Bini around Europe, snapping at their heels like a crazy little dog…

‘I AM AN OLD MAN!'

You can't end a phone call by slamming your mobile satisfyingly onto a surface. He has tried. Instead, obedient to the limitations of the new technology, Pál monkhouses his juddery thumb over to the little red telephone button. Right a bit… left a bit… up a bit…
there.

Anthony Burden owns a hammer, but he no longer has the strength to wield it. When he raises it to strike – bones augmented, being extended, reach and strength increased, and every inch Tool-Maker Man – the hammer yanks itself out of his grip and goes clattering across the linoleum.

When his wrist has stopped ringing, he raps his bread knife across the coconut, once, twice, three times. The coconut rolls off the kitchen counter onto the floor – and does not crack.

He drops the coconut out of the window of his eighth-floor council flat. Then he goes to the elevator and presses the call button. What possessed him to buy this stupid fruit in the first place?

Classical music is being piped into the elevator to soothe the troubled spirits who tag the interior each week with yet another, seemingly innocuous one-syllable word: CHUTE, PUFF, VIM, DECK. Last week: BULB.

He is an old man, with an old man's mistrust of things and people, but tags and taggers do not rile him, even when the words appear on his front door. They are decorative enough, in a world that would erode all difference. If, as his neighbours claim, the tags mark some gangland boundary – well, then, so much the better: the old geography has not yet lost its power. When this machinic Eden shakes us off finally – the boy thrown from his till – perhaps we will go primitive again and treat this
chrome and concrete mess we've made as just another nature.

The lift stops. The door opens. Anthony explores the purlieus of the tower block, hunting his coconut.

It is lying on the grass, beside a cat turd. It is intact.

Burden picks it up and rides it back to his flat, scrubs it clean and places it on the floor. He tries to balance the leg of the kitchen table on top of the coconut. If he sits down hard on the table, the nut will crack. The nut keeps rolling away. He uses tins from the store cupboard to steady the coconut. The tins are not heavy enough to hold the nut in place, and now his back is singing and he has no strength left to lift the table.

He pauses, panting.

The music has followed him from the lift. A passionate piano; swooping strings. He recognizes it, almost. It jags against his ear, then goes swooping off again on a whim of its own. Rachmaninov? No. Tchaikovsky?

Then it comes to him, and all the mistakes of his life bubble up in his heart and he is crying for the first time in forty years. Poor Anthony, at his life's end, with nothing at all to show for his obsession with numbers, birds and bees.

It is the
Budapest Concerto
. The tears run unchecked down his cheeks as he leans against the table, sobbing, for what he has lost of himself. It is the work performed to extraordinary raptures, the night he first met his wife, Rachel, in the basement of the National Gallery.

What is it doing here? Is the lift stuck outside his door? A little recovered, Burden goes and opens his front door. The lift doors are closed, and the light above them indicates that the car is resting at ground level.

Are they piping music through the corridors, now? Are they piping music into our rooms?

Back in his flat, the music grows predatory: diminished fifths for the left hand scratch at the air.

Angrily, he wipes his face – stupid, stupid, ignominious, teary-eyed old age. I would be Lear, he thinks. I would rage rather than cry. But the piano is weeping and he sees himself for what he is: an old man in his bedsit, drizzling tears, and he knows where the music comes from now. It is in his head.

He goes into the kitchenette and picks up the coconut. He sets it down against the doorframe between the kitchenette and his bed-sitting room. He half closes the door, then stands with his back against it. He lets himself fall against the door. He loses his balance and falls to the floor. He cracks his head against the floor.

When he opens his eyes, he finds that something has gone wrong with the light in the room. Things have been sapped of their colour. A narrow, actinic light shines up into the room from sources far below, lighting ceilings and leaving floors in shadow. Streetlights. It is night-time.

Gingerly, he moves one limb at a time. He moves his head. Incredibly, nothing hurts. His head does not smart when he touches it. He sits up without a struggle. A dozen so-so movies replay themselves in his head: touching comic scenes in which a ghost gets up out of its own corpse, yawns and stretches, unaware of what it is. He thinks, I am dying, and he is filled with relief.

A piano, muted and passionate, sobs out a discordant cadence; minor strings put it out of its misery, then go spinning off.

The coconut.

It lies in two neat halves, one on the thin white carpet of the bed-sitting room, one on the black linoleum of the kitchenette. The husks are black, the flesh is white. Most of the coconut milk has run off into the carpet. A little puddle lingers in each scoop. Burden, crouched on the floor like an old cat, lowers his muzzle, and inhales.

Life's sweetness eddies through him, and away.

Weary, Burden staggers to his feet.

He goes to his chair by the window. Tower blocks rise around him, self-similar, peppered with trivial differences. In the street below, the new primitives are gathered: gangs of boys from Turkmenistan, Havant, Albania, Portsea, Nigeria, Hayling Island, Congo, Cosham, China, Horndean, Iraq, Waterlooville, Afghanistan. They smoke cigarettes. They ride their mountain bikes in circles in the road. They shelter mysteriously in doorways, then wander off, as though grazing.

Burden sighs: these are merely the movements of livestock. He would have tribes in bright colours clashing in the streets! But over the years some vital human thing has been invested in this chrome and concrete nature; something that cannot be retrieved. He is glad he has never had children.

A woman in a mackintosh and a white headscarf appears. She is heading for his tower block. She is old, he thinks, watching from his eighth-floor eyrie. She is as old as he is.

The longer he watches her, straining his eyes, the more she resembles a loop cut from a film. It is as though she were super-imposed: there, but not there. Fascinated, his hands white claws, Anthony watches as the woman nears.

The boys spot her. They agitate around her, vaguely threatening. One of them throws a lit cigarette at her back. It strikes her mackintosh. There are sparks.

Oblivious, she keeps walking. She pulls away from them, and they have not the energy to follow her.

She disappears from sight. He imagines her below him, walking the last few yards along the asphalt path. He imagines her climbing up the stairs to the main entrance. She taps in the entry code. She opens the door. She steps inside. He has seen her somewhere before.

He imagines her rising through the building. In his mind she does not take the lift. She climbs the stairs. Though she is as old as him, she climbs the stairs smoothly, mechanically, as though the stairs were a scale in music. Music surrounds her, as it surrounds him. The
Budapest
Concerto
. The walls, the floors, the ceilings of this structure are made of music.

Of music. Suddenly he knows what this is. He knows what is happening. After all these barren years it is happening again.

The woman leaves the stairwell and passes Burden's open door. She pauses, turns; gingerly, she knocks. ‘Hello?'

She waits. When there is no answer, she leans into the room. She sees an old man, weeping with frustration.

‘Is everything all right in there? Only I saw the door open. I thought maybe—'

‘Hello?

‘It's just me. Don't worry. From eight-oh-three. Are you all right?'

He does not turn round. He watches her in the window's reflection. She steps into the monochrome room. She is out of place here, but so is everything else. Everything is disordered. She is no more absurd than the coconut lying broken on the floor, or the bag of prawns he left to defrost in an empty fruit bowl. Stripped of context, every object shines.

She shines. She does not appear to be moving. She appears instead to be expanding. She fills the glass. She fills the room. He feels the air compress as she steps beside him.

She follows his gaze through the window, beyond the towers, out towards the invisible sea.

‘Hello,' she says, patient, insistent. ‘Hello. It's Mrs Cogan,' she says. ‘Kathleen Cogan, just across the hall in eight-oh-three.' He still does not answer, so, gathering her courage, she takes hold of his hand.

The piano swirls. It capers. Anthony imagines temples, aqueducts, arenas, embankments, kiosks, statuary, railways, theatres, formal gardens, vistas, bandstands, playgrounds, fountains, amphitheatres, parades…