The Weight of Numbers by Simon Ings Read Free Book Online Page A

people-mover; an honest-to-God van, with scratched blue panels and a faded campaign sticker: ‘Vote John Gridley for US Senate’. Which was ironic, given that Gridley’s lawyer was in the clinic even now, paying, in cash, for the senator’s life-saving operation.
    The woman in the passenger seat leaned out to speak to me. Her shock of short white hair was dazzling, her face was strangely sunken. At first I thought she was young – twenty-five or thirty – then that she was much older.
    â€˜I don’t suppose you’ve got a cigarette?’
    I leaned in through my window and got Felix to hand me his packet of 555s. I opened the packet and offered it to her.
    â€˜What are these?’ she said. However unfamiliar she was with the brand, it wasn’t going to stop her taking one.
    There was a lighter inside the pack so I fired up her cigarette for her, cup-handed, shielding the flame from the wind. I handed it over. She smoked. Where it emerged from the cuff of her coat, her wrist was as thin as a child’s. She did not cough, but she certainly changed colour. ‘Jesus,’ she said. She climbed down from the cab. Now I saw why I had not been able to guess her age. Her bright yellow North Face jacket hung off her as though from a peg. She was terrifyingly thin. It had to be an illness.
    I glanced through the windscreen and glimpsed her driver: a porcine woman with a double-chin and dykish hair. I thought to myself: Laurel and Hardy.
    â€˜The radio said something spilled,’ said the girl.
    â€˜Yes,’ I said, teeth chattering. I lit a cigarette for myself, breaking a twenty-year pledge.
    Felix got out the car and walked around, smiling his smile.
    Things were in danger of degenerating into a social occasion. I tried to relax. I looked at my watch. Eleven fifteen.
    â€˜You’re English,’ she said.
    Her own accent was a mid-Atlantic thing I couldn’t pin down.
    My Englishness seemed to fascinate her; I couldn’t work out why. Poor Felix didn’t get a look-in. She seemed to want me to reciprocate her interest and, since it was a good way of not talking about myself or my passenger, I asked her where she was going. This was all the prompting she needed. She leaned back into the truck and came out again with a couple of flyers for us. ‘I’m opening tonight,’ she said, ‘if we ever bloody get there.’
    Was the English swear-word for my benefit?
    It was only as she climbed back into her van that it occurred to me: she was familiar for some reason.
    The flyer was headed
SCTV02
, and underneath there was a picture of a bubble. There was something odd about that bubble. I unfolded the flyer, revealing the rest of the photograph: a hand was holding a disposable cup, and a trail of misshapen bubbles had spilled from the rim of the cup and were hanging in the air.
    The bubbles were water, floating in air.
    The photograph had been taken in space.
    I went to see her show. There were no films I especially wanted to see, Jonny Lang had sold out at the Rialto Square weeks before and I couldn’t think what else to do with my time. Felix was in good hands, and I would be seeing him in the morning.
    If the venue for
SCTV02
had been some left-field place I might not have gone, but back at the hotel I read the flyer properly and discovered it was playing early at the Museum of Contemporary Art opposite Jan Svankmeyer’s
Alice
. I figured if I didn’t like the one I could go and watch the other and still have time to hunt down a decent meal.
    The woman’s name was Stacey Chavez and I understood why my Englishness had intrigued her. From her potted biography I learned that she had been a British TV star. Hearing my accent, she had expected me to recognize her.
    Perhaps this was arrogant of her, perhaps not: I had found her vaguely familiar, after all, even though her active years coincided with my time in Mozambique. I had never seen
The