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

– and smiles softly, knowingly, to appease them.
    A lad with infected acne lets out a cheer. The company of friendly elders has made him boisterous. ‘Knew you could do it, love!’
    She notes, for future reference, the success of her strategy. She has identified, confronted and resolved a problem in her human relations. For the first time in her life, the boys have not made her cry.
    She remains – for all their barracking – in the seat she has chosen for herself, riding backwards, facing west. She is looking her last at the moorland of her childhood. More than that: she is looking out, past barren scarps and low stony ridges, over long-abandoned dry-stone walls and between hawthorns stunted by the wind, for the remains of a series of sheds. Given the lie of the land, it is only by facing backwards to the direction of travel that she will be able to spot them.
    That these sheds have been visible from passing trains at all is an error Sage made early on in the project, when he misread the contour lines on his Ordnance Survey map. He spotted the error while studying the map for other sites, and before the sheds were ever erected – a feat of magic which amazed Kathleen at the time. The error was tiny, however, and Solly Zuckerman, Sage’s colleague and keeper of the project’s top-secret experimental menagerie, persuaded him to let it go.
    Kathleen remembers her first train ride with Sage. Since going to work for him, she had persisted in calling him Mr Arven, and he was teasing her, telling her that, since he was a professor, she should call him ‘Professor Arven’; that he had letters after his name and, since she was so fond of honorifics, she ‘ought to recite them, an’ all’. Abruptly, he had broken off his jesting and took out his watch. He paused a moment – he appeared to be counting – then he glanced at the window. He took her hand and pulled her with him onto the seat opposite, facing backwards.
    â€˜I feel sick this way,’ she protested. He did not reply. She wondered when he would let go of her hand. Instead, he squeezed it, painfully hard, and pointed out the window: ‘Watch… watch now… There!’
    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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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