Free The Weight of Numbers by Simon Ings Page B

syncopation. ‘You’ll be used to that, I expect.’
    A van rocked past them. Arven took Kathleen’s arm and drew her up onto the verge bordering the track. The van had a horse-box on tow, and the box slid and teetered in the ruts of the track.
    The sheds were wooden but for one wall, made of different stuff: brick, corrugated tin, sandbags; even a patch of dry-stone wall. Some of the sheds had windows. Others did not. The windows were either leftopen or fitted with a test material: wire mesh, or a coarsely woven material; glass of various sorts. Some of the panes were taped with a white criss-cross. Windows fitted with ordinary window glass were shielded by curtains of different materials.
    The sheds had birdcages fixed at different heights on one interior wall, and a larger, waist-high wire enclosure bolted to the floor.
    Arven showed Kathleen what to do; how the sheds were numbered, and the walls too, and the cages on the walls; how to use the record sheets he had prepared.
    From inside the van, Arven drew out cage after cage of pigeons. Inside cramped mesh containers, the rat-grey birds broiled over and around each other. Arven carried pigeons into the first shed and released them, one at a time, into cages mounted at different heights on the wall facing the window.
    â€˜What are you going to do?’ she asked, mystified.
    A truck in army livery rolled up, drowning out his answer.
    The driver and his mate lifted green metal boxes from the back of the truck and carried them towards the sheds. Kathleen, under Arven’s instruction, noted down the distances between the boxes and the sheds. She found it hard to concentrate. She had heard strange sounds coming from the horse-box. Professor Arven had disabused her: ‘Not horses. Apes.’
    She wanted to see the apes. She had never seen an ape except once in a zoo in York, and then it was sleeping, just a big deflated ball of grey-black fur.
    She wondered what their eyes were like; their hands. She imagined a troop of gorillas – huge, taller than a man – scampering out of the horse-box, rolling about, playing rough-and-tumble games. But the horse-box was opened only at the last minute, and the apes were in cages, and the cages were much smaller than she had expected, and draped in coarse cream cloths.
    At about four in the afternoon, they gathered behind the army lorry: the two soldiers, Arven, Kathleen and the driver of the van – a happy,snub-nosed man about Arven’s age who turned out to be his colleague, Solly Zuckerman.
    One of the soldiers was fiddling with a box held close to his chest. Wires trailed from the box. When she stepped out to see where the wires led, Arven pulled her back and took her hand.
    The explosion tore the roof right off the shed and blew the inner wall away. The silence which followed was punctuated, first by the clatter of shattered timber, then, from inside the broken shed, by screams. They were like the cries of a child. The driver’s mate strode over to the site of the explosion, to where the air had coagulated into wisps of smoke and steam. He turned and waved a flag: all clear.
    Arven and Zuckerman slogged over to him. Feeling numb, Kathleen made to follow. Arven gestured her to stay where she was. She found a flattish rock to sit on and listened, with an educated ear, to the screaming. There was more humanity to it than even a pig’s cry, or a lamb’s. When she saw no one was watching her, she covered her ears.
    Arven and Zuckerman picked morosely over the wreckage of the shed, peered inside, then beckoned the driver’s mate over.
    The flat slap of a pistol shot.
    A grey feather fell, smouldering, onto Kathleen’s dress. She leapt up and shook it away.
    Arven and Zuckerman’s eventual findings were to run quite counter to the impressions left on them by that first, calamitous experiment. Back at the abattoir, in a room given over by Mr Hosken to the government scientists, the