The Weight of Numbers Read Free

that it was full of sheet music. Bach’s
Well-Tempered Clavier
. I managed, with a deal of effort, to wheel the unstrung piano onto the balcony, and there I sat down and played: clippety-clop, clippety-clop –
bonk
. As the weeks went by, so my coordination improved to the point where I could hear the shape of the music and the pattern of the parts. At last the piano’s hammers found their mark, tapping, ever so lightly, the strings inside my head.
    I stopped my playing and looked over the city to the old holiday camps sprawled along the seafront. Beach huts were being adapted to accommodate refugees flooding to the coast from the parched interior. It seemed to me that, with this latest influx, Beira would achieve a critical mass. All it had going for it was the size of its population, but maybe this was enough. After twenty years of this bare existence, the city had learned how to feed off its own refuse for ever. I imagined itspreading in a chain reaction across the whole world: a self-sustaining half-life.
    Communications were unreliable. The city had decayed to the point where it had learned to do without the outside world. There was little in the way of entertainment. A handful of bottle stores operated out of mud-brick houses along the shore, and it was to these that I thumbed my way, come late afternoon – or drove sometimes, if there was fuel enough for the pick-up.
    With transport so hard to come by, every vehicle on the road was an unofficial bus; driving without passengers attracted the attention of the police. One afternoon, out on the coastal road, one of the men I had picked up rapped on the roof of the cabin and pointed me down a track towards a bit of beach I had not explored before. Several others seemed to know of the place, so once I had let off the onward travellers I rolled the pick-up down to the beach. At the tree-line, an enclosure fenced off with rushes marked the site of a new bottle store. The place had an ambitious layout. The tables and benches in the enclosure were cast concrete, but their surfaces were decorated with inset fragments of pottery and mirror. Under a raised veranda, I saw the walls of the store had fresh murals.
    Inside, a white kid with a slurred Austrian accent was giving the girl behind the bar a hard time.
    â€˜I know every fucking owner on this coast,’ he said, more or less, his speech a druggy mishmash of German and Portuguese.
    Dumb, impassive, the girl shook her head.
    â€˜Fucking
bitch
.’
    From out the back a white man – a real bruiser – joined the girl. ‘Out,’ he said, barely bothering to make eye contact. He and Austrian Boy must have run into each other before, because the kid began straight away to retreat towards the veranda. ‘You’re
fucked
,’ he shouted. ‘You’d better watch your back. I know people.’
    The barman blinked. He was a big man, clean-shaven, crew-cut, built for a fight. His eyes were mean and set close together. His mouth let him down: small and pursed above a weakling chin. ‘What crap was
that
?’ he asked no one in particular, in English, when the boy was gone. I was surprised to hear the man’s Norfolk burr: I had assumed, from the sheer size of him, that he was a Boer.
    By way of conversation, I translated the boy’s German.
    â€˜Really.’
    â€˜Or words to that effect,’ I said.
    All the other bottle stores were locally run and I wondered what had driven a European to set up in so unrewarding a business. The drinks here were the usual trio – orange Fanta, green-label Carlsberg and
chibuku
, a locally produced granular swill I had never got used to. I supposed he must be, like me, an ideological recruit to FRELIMO, the country’s beleaguered socialist government. I couldn’t think what else would bring an Englishman to such a miserable pass. He was about my age: a middle-aged drifter for whom home was by now a distant memory. He was