The Weight of Numbers (8 page)

Far in the distance, Kathleen glimpsed the frameworks of their oh-so-secret sheds.

Mr Zuckerman –
Professor
Zuckerman – was quite right: even as they registered on the eye, they were gone. There was no real risk of discovery.

‘Feckit!' Sage exclaimed.

She smiles to think of it. The boy with the infected face comes and sits beside her. Her smile has been misinterpreted as a reply to something he has said, which she has not heard. He flicks a cigarette jauntily into his mouth but fumbles the catch, so for a moment the cigarette hangs precariously between prehensile lips. His erupted face boils over in a blush. He thrusts the cigarette pack under her nose.

‘No, thank you,' Kathleen says. She turns back to the window.
Watch… Watch…

It seems the sheds have been dismantled.

Thick clouds of tobacco smoke press white hands against the window.

School ended for Kathleen when she was fourteen. Working in her uncle's office at the abattoir was undemanding. There were clerks employed to tally the animals brought to slaughter, to calculate the number of different cuts, to calculate wastage, the company's profits, the workers' wages. There was a secretary, a long-nosed woman, no longer middle-aged, who saw to her uncle's business correspondence. For Kathleen, there were files to keep in order; ‘to do' lists to type for her uncle; wages to hand to the boys who worked on the cutting floor; errands to run in town. Now she has left, Kathleen understands that her uncle employed her, above all, so that he might see her from time to time. He had played no real role in her childhood – the consequence of some nebulous rift between him and his brother, Kathleen's father.

Shortly after her father walked out for good, her uncle visited her and her mother at home. She has a vague memory of being sent upstairs by her mother; of lying on her bedroom floor and pressing her ear to a crack between the boards. If she heard what her uncle said, she has no memory of it.

She understands, now that she is leaving, that her uncle enjoyed her company, that many of the errands and tasks he set for her were made up so that the two of them might spend time together when by rights they should both have been working.

She remembers making blood puddings with him. ‘We waste hundreds of gallons of blood a year, Kathleen. Well, what can we do about this? How can we turn this wastage into profit?' Whatever they were up to – visiting a neighbour's farm, experimenting in the firm's huge galley kitchen, taking drives through the country – he had a way of describing the activity so that it seemed important to his business.

‘The blood'll splash my dress,' she protested.

‘Nonsense.' Her uncle's dark, friendly features wobbled uncertainly towards what he thought was a ‘business-like' expression. He looked as though he were sucking a boiled sweet.

He brought her an apron – a long one, it reached almost to her feet – and helped her lift the bucket. Together they strained the pig's blood through a muslin cloth into a pan, and added spices, oatmeal, fat in tiny dice. He showed her how to fill the casing, how to tie it off. Everything had to be a bravura performance with him, even the making of puddings. ‘Here, you try!' She was afraid that she might mark her clothes, her shoes. What would her mother say? He could not persuade her. He shook his head, and did the job himself. She watched him, and though it was a trivial thing, she felt that she had let him down.

When the puddings were done, he lifted one from the boiling water by its string, laid it on a board, and cut it through with a knife. It was light like a soufflé. Delighted, he told her to fry some up for them. She did not know how. He showed her, dripping a knob of lard off a butter knife into a hot pan: ‘You cook this at home, surely?'

Tongue-tied, she shook her head. He set places for them. He sat her down, adjusting the chair beneath her, as though she were in a hotel. She blushed.

‘Eat up!'

She speared a mouthful with her fork. The black blood melted on her tongue.

*

On the bus home, and as usual, the Bridgeman boys – George and Robert, brothers, apprentice slaughtermen, who lived at the end of her street – came and sat behind her. They sniggered at her, and one of them said something disgusting about her and her uncle. She knew nothing she could say would heal their resentment of her: their boss's favourite, his poor relation.

As the bus rolled over the bridge into the village, the bigger of the boys dug about in the pocket of his trousers and produced a twist of bloody paper. He unwrapped it, leaned over and dropped a pig's eye into Kathleen's lap. Kathleen leapt out of her seat, speechless, pale with disgust. The smaller boy practically fell off his seat for laughing. ‘Oh George,' he cried, and patted his brother on the arm, ‘th'art a proper one!'

Her mother scolded her. ‘I'll never get it out,' she snapped, scrubbing at the bloody mark on Kathleen's dress. ‘I never shall. It's quite ruined.'

Kathleen mentioned the puddings and lied about how the stain was made: a splash, she said, an accident. While she talked she wrapped her arms around her body. She was cold without her dress.

‘Put your hands by your sides,' her mother said.

Kathleen did as she was told.

‘Stand up straight.'

The dress was a good one. The sun had set by the time the surface of the material gave way under her mother's scrubbing brush. Kathleen's mother sat at the kitchen table and cried a while, absently tearing threads from the dress she had ruined.

Kathleen stood with her hands by her sides. She did not move. She did not make a sound.

When she was done destroying the dress, Kathleen's mother began her nightly clean of the kitchen. She boiled water in a pan. She added soap flakes. She scrubbed the stove. She scrubbed the table. She swept
the floor and scrubbed it. She boiled up more water in a pan. She scrubbed the pan. Knowing her daughter had handled blood, she scrubbed at Kathleen's hands till they were raw.

Kathleen's mother kept the kitchen clean. The pans and plates shone, then she put them away in deep drawers, and the drawers, too, she kept them clean. Each knife was sharp, unblemished: ‘Don't touch.'

That evening, because of the dress, and the time taken to clean it, and the time taken to establish that it was altogether ruined – the time spent mourning it, in fact – there was no supper. Normally, supper consisted of tea, bread and butter.

By morning, however, her mother's mood had improved. Night-time had wrought its necessary revisions upon the events of yesterday. It was the shoddy dress at fault, that would not clean up. It was her uncle's fault, that he was careless: ‘Why, you might have been
scalded!'

Her mother's mood was so solicitous, Kathleen dared to ask her for a second slice of bread. Mother laughed. ‘Little piglet,' she said. ‘Greedy little piglet ears.' It was true: Kathleen was always hungry.

Rather than give her a second slice, Mother poured her a glass of milk. ‘Drink up,' she said, ‘it's good for you.' There was a tap in the kitchen. She ran the jug under the tap, thinning the milk out for another day. The milk was never actually bad, but the jug lent it a certain sourness.

‘Drink up, love, you'll be late.'

Sometimes there would be jam. Never anything hot.

During the weeks of the experiment, John Arven – the man his friends called ‘Sage' – took lunch at an isolated pub, about a mile away from the sheds. He drank weak ale and ate sandwiches: huge doorsteps of white bread crammed with thick strips of baked ham. A piece of ham, ointment pink, fell out the bottom of his sandwich onto the table. ‘Pitch in, lovey,' said Arven, handing her a sandwich.

Her blush was deep and prickly like a fever.

Arven was curious-looking. His nose hung down as a continuation of his forehead, like the guard on a helmet. This arrangement gave a certain power to his eyes, which were forever laughing and always focused on you. He had dreadful bouffant hair in which he took great pride; she could smell the dressing he used from where she sat. His clothes were unpressed and he hardly ever wore a tie. He talked incessantly, his voice rising to accommodate the broad Lancashire vowels he had picked up at school.

Kathleen swallowed down slivers of crumbly, juicy ham. She forced herself to eat slowly: first her uncle's pudding, now this ham – her shrunken stomach did not know how to handle it all.

‘Mr Hosken says you're good with figures.'

Kathleen folded her hands on her lap and nodded. She expected a test. She was ready.

‘Do you see 'em?'

He met her blank look. ‘Figures, I mean. Only when a chap is good with figures, quite often – this is my experience – he sees them. As colours, as shapes. It's not a question of thinking. It's a question of looking. The inner eye. You know?'

She shook her head, abashed. Amazing, that he should have guessed, that he should have seen so far inside her, to where her private colours lay. ‘No,' she said.

‘It's a bloody business,' Arven warned her, walking up the dirt track to where the sheds were now nearly complete. The sound of hammers rose on the air in weird syncopation. ‘You'll be used to that, I expect.'

A van rocked past them. Arven took Kathleen's arm and drew her up onto the verge bordering the track. The van had a horse-box on tow, and the box slid and teetered in the ruts of the track.

The sheds were wooden but for one wall, made of different stuff: brick, corrugated tin, sandbags; even a patch of dry-stone wall. Some of the sheds had windows. Others did not. The windows were either left
open or fitted with a test material: wire mesh, or a coarsely woven material; glass of various sorts. Some of the panes were taped with a white criss-cross. Windows fitted with ordinary window glass were shielded by curtains of different materials.

The sheds had birdcages fixed at different heights on one interior wall, and a larger, waist-high wire enclosure bolted to the floor.

Arven showed Kathleen what to do; how the sheds were numbered, and the walls too, and the cages on the walls; how to use the record sheets he had prepared.

From inside the van, Arven drew out cage after cage of pigeons. Inside cramped mesh containers, the rat-grey birds broiled over and around each other. Arven carried pigeons into the first shed and released them, one at a time, into cages mounted at different heights on the wall facing the window.

‘What are you going to do?' she asked, mystified.

A truck in army livery rolled up, drowning out his answer.

The driver and his mate lifted green metal boxes from the back of the truck and carried them towards the sheds. Kathleen, under Arven's instruction, noted down the distances between the boxes and the sheds. She found it hard to concentrate. She had heard strange sounds coming from the horse-box. Professor Arven had disabused her: ‘Not horses. Apes.'

She wanted to see the apes. She had never seen an ape except once in a zoo in York, and then it was sleeping, just a big deflated ball of grey-black fur.

She wondered what their eyes were like; their hands. She imagined a troop of gorillas – huge, taller than a man – scampering out of the horse-box, rolling about, playing rough-and-tumble games. But the horse-box was opened only at the last minute, and the apes were in cages, and the cages were much smaller than she had expected, and draped in coarse cream cloths.

At about four in the afternoon, they gathered behind the army lorry: the two soldiers, Arven, Kathleen and the driver of the van – a happy,
snub-nosed man about Arven's age who turned out to be his colleague, Solly Zuckerman.

One of the soldiers was fiddling with a box held close to his chest. Wires trailed from the box. When she stepped out to see where the wires led, Arven pulled her back and took her hand.

The explosion tore the roof right off the shed and blew the inner wall away. The silence which followed was punctuated, first by the clatter of shattered timber, then, from inside the broken shed, by screams. They were like the cries of a child. The driver's mate strode over to the site of the explosion, to where the air had coagulated into wisps of smoke and steam. He turned and waved a flag: all clear.

Arven and Zuckerman slogged over to him. Feeling numb, Kathleen made to follow. Arven gestured her to stay where she was. She found a flattish rock to sit on and listened, with an educated ear, to the screaming. There was more humanity to it than even a pig's cry, or a lamb's. When she saw no one was watching her, she covered her ears.

Arven and Zuckerman picked morosely over the wreckage of the shed, peered inside, then beckoned the driver's mate over.

The flat slap of a pistol shot.

A grey feather fell, smouldering, onto Kathleen's dress. She leapt up and shook it away.

Arven and Zuckerman's eventual findings were to run quite counter to the impressions left on them by that first, calamitous experiment. Back at the abattoir, in a room given over by Mr Hosken to the government scientists, the zoologist Zuckerman would spend far more time studying live, undamaged animals than dead or injured ones.

Arven, meanwhile, went from shed to shed, marking the effects of blast upon different kinds of wall: this was where Kathleen's record sheets came in. Arven read out measurements; Kathleen entered the numbers into boxes.

Back at her uncle's office, Arven showed Kathleen how to move the
numbers between the boxes, shifting their values as she went. She followed him. She copied what he did.

He stared at her.

She looked up at him. ‘What?' she said.

When he didn't reply, she said, ‘Did I do it wrong?'

He laughed, and shook his head. He drew his chair closer to hers. He showed her how to make numbers out of other numbers, making them bloom.

Afterwards – ‘to celebrate,' he said – he took her by train to Darlington.

‘Mother will wonder where I am,' she protested. She was so insistent that, when they got to the hotel, Arven made a call to her uncle, to see to it that her mother was reassured.