Free The Weight of Numbers by Simon Ings Page A

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 sweptthe 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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Mr Hosken says you’re good with figures.’
    Kathleen folded her hands on her lap and nodded. She expected a test. She was ready.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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