The Weight of Numbers Read Online Free PDF Page A

faith’, for example. But she is not aware of recovering any sort of faith in anything.It feels to her as if she simply woke up one day, found herself in hospital and decided that she was, after all, still afraid of death. Everything else – her gains in weight, her improved blood pressure, the ketones vanished from her urine – seem to have followed logically from that reawoken fear.
    What kind of victory is that? It does not feel at all as though she is ‘winning out over her condition’. It is rather as though she has simply swapped her love of death – so grand, so romantic – for the common-or-garden terror of it.
    This sense of anticlimax is, she knows, part of her life now: a necessary consequence of her recovery from addiction. How shameful though, how embarrassing, to have to acknowledge that what she has been hooked on all this time is neither drink nor smack nor sex, but simply the glamour of her own will. Dying to please herself, she was larger than life. Actually having to live with herself, day after day – this is a harder, more humbling proposition.
    (‘Of course I heard about Deborah. I am truly sorry for everything. Not a day went by I did not think of her and of you.’
Moisés Chavez, absent husband, absent father, playing catch-up after all these years.
‘I believe your mother had the very best care. Is there anything I can do for you?’
Though wanted by law enforcement on three continents, Moisés still contrives to pay his family’s medical bills.)
    â€˜Is it special, then?’ McGregor is still trying to get her into conversation.
    â€˜I’m sorry?’
    â€˜Is it a special meal?’
    â€˜Oh…’ She cannot think how to respond. She casts around her compartmented plastic plate, looking for clues. She cannot think of a single thing to say that will not either embarrass or discomfort him. For instance, how the food on aeroplanes reminds her of the meals in the hospital, each portion so carefully presented, under foil, under plastic, the way a transplant surgeon might receive a donor’s organ.
    â€˜Yes,’ she says, and tries to laugh.
    Her special meal. Stacey’s circulation is geared by now to the meagre wants of a five-stone body, and her programme of weight-gain, painfully circumspect as it is, makes difficult demands of her ill-used vital organs. She will eat everything they put in front of her. This is the deal. She will neither toy, nor conceal, nor rearrange. Not that it is likely, so soon after treatment, that she will slide into her old, obsessive-compulsive behaviours.
    (‘Call me. Please.’)
    It is much more probable, at this point in her recovery, that her shrivelled heart will explode.

Glasgow, UK
—
    Friday, 12 March 1999
    The receptionist wore an orange Jimmy-wig, a propeller tie and a big red nose. As I came in the door, he squeezed his nose at me. It squeaked.
    I told him, ‘I have a room booked. Saul Cogan.’ I had gone back to using my real identity. I was beyond aliases.
    â€˜I am afraid your room is not quite ready, sir.’ He made to squeeze his nose at me again, then thought better of it.
    I said to him, ‘Is this an airport hotel?’
    â€˜I am terribly sorry, sir.’
    â€˜Have you any idea how long I have been awake?’
    â€˜Your room would normally be ready for you, sir, only the staff are taking a little longer this morning.’
    â€˜Let me guess,’ I said, ‘the maids are wearing gigantic clown shoes.’
    â€˜Yes, sir!’ he agreed, brightly. ‘If you would care to wear a hooter today, sir,’ he pointed to a cardboard tray piled with squeaky joke-shop noses, ‘we undertake to contribute five per cent of your final bill to—’
    â€˜Look at my face.’
    â€˜It should only be a matter of minutes, sir. The breakfast bar is now open.’
    I had spent almost a year working in places where the only food