The Weight of Numbers

by Simon Ings

  Straining, cursing, Nick pulls the rubbish heap apart. Slavering and silent, the Rat Catcher watches for movement within. Little by little, the nest is crumbling. Rats pause, quivering, before their transformed surroundings, uncertain where to run. Their familiar warrens are being erased, and new and deadly vistas spread before them. The bright white light of day expunges the warren’s old chiaroscuro, turns everything shoddy and contingent, demoralizing the rats still further. So they head down, deep down, into the loamy tunnels beneath the rubbish pile, there to encounter a lost tribe of terrible red-eyed sub-rats who have never seen the sun.

  Escaping them, his ear torn to cauliflower shreds, his left hind paw stabbed through, his right eye bleared and bleeding, one rat, a sorry sight, stumbles up into the upper air: a deadly mistake.

  The rat hurtles pell-mell between Nick Jinks’s legs, heading for the corner of the house. Nick Jinks, startled, cries out. The dog makes no sound. The rat powers on. It rounds the corner of the house. The gun goes off. Brick explodes in a red cloud as the rat, unscathed, hurls itself towards the road. Behind it come the heavy, clumping footfalls of the boy; beneath it the faster, softer, deadlier scratchings of the dog’s paws, scrabbling on the flags of the path, building up speed.

  The rat reaches the road. The ditch is in sight. Safety beckons. Death comes so suddenly, the rat does not even hear the discharge of the gun. A bundle of unwitting, mangled joy, the rat tumbles, propelled by the shot, into the ditch on the far side of the road.

  The Rat Catcher, her blood up, ignores her master’s call and pursues the dead rat over the road.

  George Bridgeman has driven the route to his magical wartime shelter countless times in preparation for today. He does not need a map as he tacks smoothly from lane to lane, east toward the fens. He does not need to consult, or even navigate in any conscious sense. He knows the way.

  All hell inside him now. Time to think means time for doubt. Time in which George can measure his loneliness, and feel the weight of responsibility: only he can mess this up now. It’s up to him.

  He stops the car. A quiet spot. He gets out, walks round to the boot, opens it up. She’s still out cold. He touches her. If she wakes up, if she screams, then he can panic, run back to the glove compartment, take out the hammer and spoil everything.

  She does not wake up.

  The world absolutely refuses to give him an ‘out’. It’s up to you now, George. It’s up to you.

  He lifts up the girl’s skirt, drags it up, up past her white cotton knickers. He sticks a finger into the band of her knickers and pulls. Her hairlessness there gives him an immediate erection, and it frightens him, this fierce bodily response. Of course he is planning to rape her. He has a room full of objects carefully selected over the years, common household objects, tools purloined from the abattoir, a handful of china souvenirs – ‘A Gift From Bridport’ – to rape her with. But this sudden – well, what would you call it? Lust?

  He pulls her roughly over, so one leg falls free of the boot and dangles, shoe half-off, toes tickling the long grass of the verge. She slumps onto her front, her bottom upraised over the sill of the boot.

  He checks her pulse. It ticks back against his finger, slow and strong.

  He pulls her knickers down and off – much struggling and slapstick here – and crams them into her mouth.

  Now what?

  He listens for approaching traffic.

  He waits.

  Nothing comes.

  By now thoroughly demoralized, tremble-kneed, George shoves the girl’s leg back in the boot, slams the lid shut, climbs back in the car and drives.

  George’s mission is, he believes, essentially spiritual. Even his earliest experiments lean in this direction. Since the day he flensed out a lamb’s eye and dropped it, still warm, into the lap of that stuck-up neighbour girl, that Hosken girl – what was her name? Katherine? Kathleen? – it has been his mission to awaken his fellow man to his contingent and temporary nature: his equivalence, in other words, to beasts. In better circumstances, and with a better gene-pool to draw from, Bridgeman might have made small, gloomy contributions to moral philosophy. As it is, he is something more imbecile, more direct. He plans to expunge the little girl’s spirit, drag her down into his animal reality. Marry her in darkness on all fours and no more words ever again. An end to meaning, sequence, rule. Only cries, a flash of teeth, the bliss of living without thought, his own pet lamb to warm him in the night. But how does he think he can scrape the girl out of that little animal body? How?

  It comes to him that his plans do not extend beyond the first couple of days of the child’s suffering. What if a couple of days are not enough? He has this image of her, a few days in, tattered beyond further violation, exhausted – and still not an animal.

  The tools he has amassed. They’ll mortify her flesh, but who’s to say they will not leave her girlishness intact? What to do?

  In need of comfort now, unnerved by his success, George Bridgeman takes one hand off the steering wheel to knead his groin. Ejaculation is a great comfort. Always has been. He imagined, in his twenties, that this endless, importunate tossing would wear itself out, but here he is, balding, hands chewed to red rags by years of handling raw ice-cold meat, sharp slivers of bone, knives slippy with blood and fat, and still he cannot leave his John Thomas alone. It is his only friend.

  The car leaps out from a wooded hollow, jerky and undependable as a foal, as George Bridgeman wrestles with his fly. There is a house ahead, an old garage, hand pumps in the yard. By now, crushed by his own success, Bridgeman has retreated into the sort of thinking a child might employ. He tells himself that if he ejaculates before he reaches the garage, he will persevere with his plan, he will smuggle the little rabbit into his theatre of horrors, he will operate upon her, he will do his very best. If orgasm eludes him, however, the game is up.

  George’s right foot responds, pressing hard against the accelerator, so all his scary, too-ambitious plans might come to nought. No, no way he will be able to toss himself off in time. Oh well. What a shame. He will just have to dump her somewhere.

  He thinks about this.

  Of course, he’ll have to kill her.

  He thinks about this.

  Just in case.

  Very stiff now.

  With the hammer.

  He thinks about this.

  Glans wet and slippery.

  The long, cool, polished shaft of the hammer.

  He thinks about this.

  A black dog runs across the street ahead of him.

  Her beautiful white bottom.

  He thinks about her buttocks.

  Semen leaps acrobatically to splash the decal of his steering wheel, silver ‘Ford’ inscribed on shiny black enamel.

  The dog runs back across the road, something in its teeth.

  George Bridgeman is captivated by the sight of his semen, the F of Ford flecked shut to make a P, the o tailed to a q – Pqrd. As if by magic he is driving a Pqrd.

  Before him, unregarded, the dog hunkers down in the surety of death, and its head, impacted at high speed by the car’s nearside wheel, absorbs all the forces of the collision, shaping them like a bell, so that the wheel, vulnerable at the point of contact, conducts the energy of the crash back into itself and twists itself out of true. As soon as it is back in contact with the tarmac, the car wobbles like a drunk all over the road, squealing horribly, tyres smoking, before it settles softly, as if relieved, into a ditch, barely fifty yards beyond the dirt forecourt of the garage.

  *

  Nick Jinks is reloading his weapon when the car runs over his dog. Stunned, he walks over to the body. There is no question that the Rat Catcher is dead. Her head is a rubbery smear.

  George Bridgeman raises his head from the steering wheel. He touches his hand to it. The top of his head explodes, like a knife has sliced the cap off his skull. When he can bring himself to look at his fingers, George is surprised to find no blood.

  Nick, nu
mb and cold, looks up the road. The car has come to grief in a ditch, just beyond the forecourt. Is the driver all right? Nick drags himself away from the ruined body of his companion.

  Something moves in the rear-view mirror. It hurts when George moves his eyes. He moves his whole head instead, and freezes, abject, at the sight that greets him: a man with a gun. What if the girl wakes up now? What if the accident has woken her? He has to do something. He has to take control. He reaches for the door. His spermy fingers slip off the catch, reminding him to fasten his fly. He yanks up the zip.

  The man inside the car lets out a scream. How badly is he injured? Will Nick know what to do? Daunted yet determined, Nick hurries towards the car to see how he can help.

  Gingerly and gasping, George Bridgeman attempts to ease folds of his foreskin from between the teeth of his trouser fly. The pain is too great. Sobbing, sick, he abandons the attempt. Perhaps the youth will help him. It is a garage, after all. There will be tools. Pliers. Cutters. Saws. He looks up into the rear-view, seeking succour.

  Oh my God, the youth is running towards the car. George has killed his dog and now the youth is going to kill him. George stares helpless into the mirror. The gun is getting bigger. There is nothing he can do. It’s all falling apart around him, as he surely knew it would. He’s just going to have to make a run for it. He fumbles his door open. Every slightest movement threatens to split him. Keening horribly between gritted teeth, he edges his way out of the car.

  The car door opens, and from the cabin comes a terrible squeal. Of their own accord, Nick Jinks’s hands perform their ballet, snapping the gun breach shut.

  George Bridgeman hobbles into the road, His white, sweating face stretched in an O of agony, arms spread for balance, bloody swollen penis dangling like a fruit. Terrified and helpless, he cannot run; he shuffles round to face his nemesis.

  With an efficiency born of long practice, Nick Jinks’s eyes rake the scene, hunting out the squealing thing. Astounded, his gaze settles upon the stranger’s groin. Never has his enemy been so savagely inventive! The rat dangles there by its teeth, spattered with blood.

  A split-second later, and Nick will see things differently. His senses are acute. His powers of reasoning are adequate. It will take him no time at all to shake off his rat obsession and see the man’s plight for what it actually is. The whole process of revision will happen so blindingly fast, and unthinkingly, that Nick will not even remember why he fired the gun.

  None the less, the gun has gone off.

  George Bridgeman sprawls in the road, his groin a bloody mess. A piece of shot has shredded an artery in his thigh. Death is coming very quickly now. It towers over him. George Bridgeman sees that his youthful attacker is Death, and that Death is an angel. It has a small, pursed mouth and a smooth, rounded, cherubic head. It might be any angel, were it not for the eyes. Eyes that bore into him, pitiless and strange. As his consciousness falters, so the eyes seem to move closer and closer together…

  Nick Jinks stands above the stranger, helpless. What to do? A chill creeps over him. Was this what his poor dead father feared? Was this something of which he knew his son was capable? Blood pools at his feet. Nick begins to tremble all over. Why did he fire the gun? He has not the remotest idea.

  The stranger’s eyes glass over. Nick crosses to the car. The garage has a phone, but it has been disconnected. Nick has a confused idea that he will drive the car to the nearest village in order to summon help.

  The ditch into which the car has been driven is not deep, and the rear wheels are still in contact with the road, more or less. Nick, at fourteen, has grown up among cars and knows how to drive. Besides, he has his father’s confidence with machinery. He wrestles the car back onto the road, shifts into first and wobbles away.

  He passes through the first village bolt upright in his seat, buttocks clenched to raise him that vital extra half-inch, afraid someone will notice that a child is driving. He passes through the second village, more confident this time: he is getting away with it. By the time he reaches Ipswich and the first breath of sea air, he can no longer pretend that he is going to be making a clean breast of this appalling incident to the authorities. How can he? He cannot even explain why he pulled the trigger. Perhaps he is a killer, after all.

  As he drives he comprehends for the first time just how big the world really is. He can count on his fingers the number of times he has set foot outside the county of his birth. Apart from occasional, lacklustre visits to zoos and seasides – journeys buried so far back in his childhood, he can barely remember them – Nick Jinks has never known another landscape. His whole upbringing has been morbidly inturned.

  As Nick cruises the streets of Felixstowe, and sees the port cranes towering over the roofs of the drab terraces, it occurs to him that he is truly free for the first time in his life. Liberty has been thrust upon him. He not only has the opportunity to run away, he has a positive obligation, as fast and as far as he can.

  He finds his way to the harbour, parks the car and climbs out. The salt air fills his lungs with energy and hope.

  Why not?

  The ships, the jetties, the very buildings seem to thrum with unfamiliar and purposeful life.

  Why not?

  It will only take the slightest nudge, and Nick Jinks’s destiny will be set.

  It comes.

  The faintest scratching. The faintest squealing.

  Nick Jinks stiffens where he stands.

  The old curse has pursued him. Somewhere in the toils of the motor car, that old grey curse sits, preening – but it has overreached itself. It has become separated from its source. It has no power now. It is just one miserable rat, trapped in the belly of a greasy old car.

  One more movement, and Nick will be free of the curse for ever.

  He steps away from the car. As he goes he smiles, to hear the curse calling him, a thready squeal, desperate, weak, as piteous in its defeat and final extremity as the pleas of a child.

  3

  It is 10.30 a.m. on Sunday, 20 July 1969. One man is preparing to set foot on the moon; another is going to die, assassinated by a bomb. For now, though, it’s like any other mid-morning in Lourenço Marques, and the street-sellers are setting out their wares. There are toy cars made of cans, random pharmaceuticals and pictures of Elvis Presley. Along the promenade, girls are selling themselves.

  Nick Jinks passes by, pondering the choice on offer. The girl he settles on finally is not a typical street-walker. For a start she is a good ten years older than the others. Nick assumes this must be the reason why the competition have gathered around them, hissing. Really hissing: from two dozen rouged and milktoothed Mozambican mouths comes a great long ssssssssss!

  Nick leads the girl into the doorway of a Sunday-closing barbershop. That he has already forgotten her name is hardly his fault. They all have such nutty names round here. The two he bought before her were called Majesty and Hope…

  His line of thought is broken as he feels her hands moving to the straps of his wartime canvas satchel, a satchel he has promised his masters not to remove. This inevitably triggers the first of many minor contretemps with which encounters like this are inevitably gritted (‘Don’t kiss my mouth’ – ‘Don’t touch my feet’ – ‘You’ll put my arm to sleep’) so that the satchel remains strapped, as per instructions, to his back, no way he is going to let go of it until he is safely in off the street. He pushes her hands away; they purse instead around his groin like a codpiece while, shoulders drawn back manly by the weight of his burden – what the fuck is in this bloody thing? – he cops his feel of her between the folds of her capulana: a line of sweat beneath each little tit, a line of fur up her tight tum, from thick-pubed mons, her bush V-d to a clit-bound arrow. Some stubble there, and he thinks about offering to tidy up her topiary with his fancy new Gillette, ask her nicely, say please, winning smile. It is an arrow that might Braille the most insensate fingers, the burned and calloused pads of firemen and dockers, to their mark. Fi
nding it for himself, pressing it cruelly so she squeals, Nick Jinks laughs a hearty seaman’s ‘Yo ho!’ and swells into her hands.

  Back home, every once in a while, an ambitious young detective will open the file on Nick Jinks: wanted for murder, wanted for the abduction of a child. Nothing is ever resolved. There is next to no information on the suspect – not even a photograph – and besides, the circumstances of both crimes are so confused, it is hard to see how a prosecution would get past a sceptical judge.

  Nick, for his part, keeps a weather-eye on the British press, concerned for the child as well as himself. The story of the little girl’s abduction, widely reported at the time, is as horrifying as it is baffling. What child? Was there a child? And how on earth did this story get caught up with his own? The grotesque details trouble him nearly as much as the risk of false accusation.

  Eight years have passed since Nick took to the high seas. There is little about him now to remind one of the taciturn rat catcher of his youth. In the time he has been at sea, Nick has grown hardier and happier. He knows something about the world and this has made him less afraid of himself. He knows what stone-cold killers look like, from brawls in Singapore and from one dangerous, ridiculous feud on a container run from Japan to San Francisco. He knows he is not one of them. Knowing this he has begun, over the years, to put the accident behind him. He calls himself Jiggins now, Nick Jiggins, and with the new name comes a sunnier outlook on life.