The Weight of Numbers (3 page)

There then came the sound I imagine a cricket bat makes as it strikes a cabbage, a thud as of a body falling into sand, and Jenkins was silent.

I charged like an idiot into the darkness.

I couldn't see a thing. Arms upraised, I swung about, hoping I might collide usefully with Jenkins's attacker. I stumbled and fell headlong. I tried to get up. Something buried itself in the sand by my right ear. I grabbed it. The stick came free without a struggle. I scrambled to my feet. I was afraid to swing the stick blindly, but then the assailant, disarmed, stumbled out of the vehicle's shadow into the moonlight. Austrian Boy, of course. I ran at him with the stick held point-first. It was a flimsy sort of weapon – the best the boy's fool mind could come up with in all the hours Jenkins and I had been drinking. I did what I could with it, punching him
deep under his ribcage. Winded, he fell back another couple of paces. Jenkins was already up on his feet. He blundered past me and swung his clenched fist back and forth in front of the boy's face: his features disappeared in a splash of black blood.

‘Jesus,' I said.

Jenkins turned past me. The boy was staggering blindly about the track, hands pressed to his face, holding it together.

I followed Jenkins across the sand. It was a magnificent night, the sky white with stars. At the water's edge, each wave gave a faint burst of greenish light as it rolled into the sand. Jenkins kneeled, oblivious to the water swilling round his knees, and washed the blood off his Stanley knife. He dried it fastidiously on his shirt.

I said to him, ‘Don't do things by halves, do you?'

He ignored me, scooped up seawater in handfuls and threw it over his face, washing off the blood dribbling from the scratch on his scalp.

When he was done bathing his head he sank back on the sand. ‘We never stood a fucking chance,' he said, his face empty of all feeling. I couldn't tell whether he meant tonight, or 16 April 1961. I didn't much care, either. The war had acclimatized me to Jenkins's brand of cheap violence, but it had not got rid of my distaste.

I helped him up and back towards the vehicles. The boy had vanished again. Once I had got Jenkins into the passenger seat of the Toyota, I turned on the cabin light and examined his cut. There was still blood running behind his ear and into the collar of his shirt, but the cut itself was trivial; the seawater had already begun to staunch the flow. I studied his pupils, and got him to hold out his hands for me. I found no sign of concussion. ‘Sit tight,' I said.

Taking the flashlight with me, I went to check what damage the boy had done to his Land Rover. The worst I found were a couple of deflated tyres, but, when I returned to the pick-up, Jenkins had disappeared. I called and, when I got no reply, I seriously considered driving off and leaving him there. Every instinct told me I should leave
this evening behind as quickly as possible.

Then I heard Jenkins ranting in bad Portuguese: ‘What the bloody hell is the point?' His angry exclamation came to me muffled by distance. ‘If I was a burglar you'd be dead by now!' Jenkins was fairly screaming. I turned my flashlight back on and shone it towards the bottle store. He must have gone round the back.

Another, unfamiliar voice replied, ‘
Eeh? Eeh, chiyani?
What? Where are they? I have a club! Look, I have a club!'

For the second time that evening, it sounded as though my host was being threatened. With a heavy heart, I approached the back of the bottle store. I found Jenkins towering over a small man by the side of a watchman's hut not much bigger than a kennel.

‘Why don't you use the bloody
light
?' Jenkins shouted. ‘You should be round the
front
.'

His watchman laughed at such absurdity. ‘To light the burglar's way? They can't see in the dark, you know.'

‘How are you meant to spot them, then? Wait till they trip over you? Look, you fucking idiot,
there's one out there now
. What are you going to do about him, eh?'

‘The hut is here! I have my gun! I never sleep, I listen all the time.'

‘Get out the front. He won't do you any harm, not now I've done your bloody job for you. Find him and get him to clear off.'

Jenkins noticed me waiting for him, and suddenly lost interest in his watchman. ‘Oh, stay where you are, then. Get your throat cut, why should I worry?' Mumbling, nursing his head, Jenkins joined me and together we returned to my truck.

I mentioned his flat tyres, and since there had been no other visible damage to his vehicle, Jenkins, much recovered, took this as good news.

‘It was so bloody dark we couldn't see a thing,' he said, as I dug about for my keys. He was picking up where he left off, practically mid-sentence. ‘We were running into each other. Knocking each other down. Everyone was screaming. Most of us couldn't swim.'

After all that had happened tonight, I was losing my patience. ‘If you were captured after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, if you were a convicted contra, how come a couple of years later you were working in a Havana nightclub?'

‘That was the length of my sentence,' he said, surprised, as if the answer were self-evident. ‘Twenty-two months in La Cabaña. Come on, I was only a kid, anyone could see that.'

He curled forward and bent his head for me to examine his shorn scalp, presenting me with incontrovertible proof of his story. ‘There,' he said, playing his fingers over the cut the boy had dealt him. He wanted me to see something else, something beneath: the scar from a wound inflicted by an oar wielded by an outraged Cuban fisherman, twenty-six years before, on the day CIA-backed Cuban contras came to grief in the Bay of Pigs. ‘Tottery old fucker, he was. Found me hiding in his boathouse.' Jenkins laughed, head still bent for my inspection. ‘A sinking ship to escape from in the middle of the night, a fucking
reef
to climb over, couldn't see a thing, shells and bullets and God knows what whizzing everywhere, and this is my one and only battle scar.'

I could see that he needed a couple of stitches after tonight. What I couldn't see was any old war wound.

Jenkins sat up too fast, groaned and held his head. ‘The shit must have clobbered me in the same place. Bloody feels like it, too –
there
he is…'

I had just that moment turned on my headlights. Austrian Boy was slumped some distance up the track, covered in blood. His eyes shone out of the mess of his face like two blue stones.

I drove towards him. Shock had made him stupid: he just sat there, waiting to be run over. I braked. ‘Now what?' I said.

‘All right, give me a hand.' We got out and went over to the boy. Jenkins took his arms and I took his feet. We ignored his keening and manhandled him into the bed of the Toyota. There were a couple of NGOs newly opened on the highway into town; if we dumped him in front of the right gate, some well-meaning Swedish doctor would see to him soon enough.

September 1998

Heathrow. The airliner makes a lumbering turn, engages its engines and pushes TV and movie actress Stacey Chavez back in her seat.

The acceleration is oddly comforting, as the upholstery enfolds her stick-thin body, wrapping it away from harm, but the moment the plane leaves the ground, all this is lost and Stacey realizes she has made a terrible mistake.

(
‘I wonder how you are,'
her father wrote to her recently, a quarter-century too late. How did he get her email address?
‘The clinic didn't tell me anything. They just send me the bills.'
Moisés Chavez – a wanted man.)

Stacey is flying to Mozambique to film a short documentary about landmine clearance. Three years ago there were about three million landmines seeded across the country. How many remain to blow off a farmer's genitals here, an inquisitive toddler's head there, is uncertain; her producer Owen has already conducted interviews with a couple of the half-dozen organizations employed in mine clearance, and they have said that the problem will never entirely go away.

(Stacey claws at the armrests as the plane punches through pocket after pocket of dead air. She is afraid, not of flying, but of this sensation, this lurching and dropping which she associates, after years of illness, with the flutters of her starved heart.)

In twenty-four hours or less, Stacey Chavez will be standing in front of a camera, got up in the sort of protective gear – kevlar tabard, plastic visor – sported just last year in Angola by Princess Diana. Disaster is assured. She can see the tabloids now, feasting on the conjunction between her clothes-hanger body and a continent's starvation. (Her
knowledge of Africa hardly extends beyond the Live Aid concert, and she imagines everyone there is chronically short of food.) She can rehearse in her own head, long before they are written, the ugly comparisons that will be drawn between her and Saint Diana. ‘Who does she think she is?' they will say and people will snigger.

(‘I see your name in magazines but I don't believe them, I just look at the pictures. It looks to me like you're better now. Are you?')

There is, after ten years of self-starvation, no possibility of Stacey making a full recovery. If she is careful, her heart will not fail her just yet. But it
will
fail. A neat irony, this: the very moment you decide that you want to live, they tell you how many years you have shaved off your life. Yes, she has made a terrible mistake, and not even the attentions of Ewan McGregor can soothe away the fact.

He touches her wrist for the briefest of moments and gives her one of those how-are-you? smiles. His good looks are an affront. By his touch he has made her aware of her hand, and she rather wishes he hadn't: her hand, this pallid claw that is somehow attached to her and is, for some reason, her responsibility, its nails dug deep in the armrest's plastic padding. She lifts it, turns it, examines it: an unfamiliar domestic implement. McGregor, taking its movements for an invitation, takes her hand in his.

McGregor, the star of
Trainspotting
and tipped to play Obi-Wan Kenobi in Lucas's new
Star Wars
trilogy, is flying with Stacey as far as Johannesburg. Stacey Chavez has a three-hour stopover there before flying South African Airways to Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. Over the next couple of months, nine other celebrities will be flying to locations all over Africa. Their punchy, insistently upbeat documentaries will go to support a popular annual TV appeal.

A week before, Stacey's producer Owen sent her the rushes of their initial to-camera. The footage was worse than she'd feared. Who was that dead-eyed brat with her shock-white hair and her chemical tan? Could this really be her? Could those really be her thoughts? Every opinion she
spouted came larded with junk words like ‘exclusion' and ‘branding'.

Owen's pre-fabricated style of documentary is ruthlessly efficient. Over gin and tonics in Blacks on Dean Street, Owen and Benjamin, their cameraman, have talked her through every shot. Each one of Stacey's sentiments and reactions is to be manufactured according to an already written plan. The technique will save a lot of time but this hurried style of rehearsal reminds her, ironically enough, of
Grange Hill
, the children's school soap opera which first launched her acting career. Stacey had been looking forward to something different.

The clearance programmes have lent a boom-town atmosphere to Manhiça, the town where they are filming. With all these foreigners around, Dutch and English and American, Benjamin wondered aloud, over his second G&T, how he was going to keep them out of his footage.

Stacey was slightly scandalized – she is unused to documentary and its compromises – and wondered aloud if this really mattered.

‘One random white face and the whole thing's buggered,' Owen assured her, passing his expenses card to the waitress.

A television set domesticates whatever you happen to be watching. This is his theory. The exotic has to be pointed up, exaggerated, even manufactured, or the foreigness of their location – so obvious to them – will simply not translate to the screen. Neither Owen nor Benjamin expressed the slightest faith in the camera's ability to tell the truth.

The drinks trolley passes. McGregor insists they share one of those mini-bottles of champagne and, making conversation, slides unwisely into shop-talk. He asks her, ‘Weren't you doing something for Amiel?'

Jon Amiel: director of
The Singing Detective
, back in the eighties. Look closely during the rendition of ‘Dry Bones' in episode three and you will spot Stacey kick-stepping her way out of her five-year
Grange Hill
gig in a nurse's hat, white fishnets and a smile. Now Amiel is reinventing himself as a Hollywood action director. Stacey was his first choice for the part of the insurance investigator in
Entrapment
, a role since snapped up by Catherine Zeta-Jones.

‘Events got in the way,' Stacey tells McGregor, fixing him with wide, black, mischievous eyes that, though sunken, have not lost all their glamour.

It is all a terrible, grotesque mistake, her being here, her doing this, and what makes it worse, she can't even blame her agent. Did she not burst into the offices of ICM, days after her return from Los Angeles and the eating disorders clinic, to demand work, exposure, media coverage, face-time? Begging for a second shot at the very life that knocked her down?

Looking back on her oh-so-promising past, Stacey senses its sterility. Even before she went to Hollywood, she had reduced her every passion to an ambition, every ambition to a career plan. By the time of her collapse she had stripped her life down so far it felt as though she had run her every permutation a hundred, a thousand times. No wonder death had seemed a welcome novelty; in that state of mind nothing, least of all success, could ever seem fresh or new or exciting.

(‘I want to be something to you now. You were doing so well before, I was only a liability. I hope you see that. I hope you see that things are different now.')