The Weight of Numbers Read Online Free PDF Page B

the obvious.’
    â€˜As if I would stoop to a cheap gag like that.’
    â€˜As if.’
    â€˜It’s a laptop.’
    â€˜You could not resist.’
    â€˜I felt a terrible compunction.’ She set her laptop down beside my drink, loosened her robe and turned – all this in one fluid action. She headed for the pool and performed a goofy little dive: anything more dramatic, and she would have cracked her head on the bottom. Shemoved well through the water; her movements were so economical it was hard to see how they managed to propel her. When she was done, she pushed herself out on her arms. Her body had the sallow sheen one gets from regular indoor exercise. She walked back to her chair. The scar extended beyond the cut of her one-piece. It was a well-healed thing, perhaps from childhood. I wanted to trace it.
    She dried herself off and belted herself into her terry robe. ‘Can I have that back now?’
    I was tapping at her keyboard, scrolling through the presentation she had been working on. ‘Wait. I’ve nearly worked it out.’
    â€˜Really.’
    â€˜What this thing is.’
    â€˜Give it back.’
    I lifted the laptop into her hands.
    She closed the machine down and shut the lid.
    I finished my drink. ‘My room will be ready now,’ I said.
    â€˜Is that some sort of invitation?’
    â€˜I like your aura of calm authority,’ I said. ‘I like how you move in water.’
    â€˜You want to know me better.’
    â€˜I can’t ask you out for a drink, it’s only ten in the morning. Anyway, you’ll be gone in a few hours.’ I gestured at the black box on her lap. ‘According to your calendar.’
    We left for our respective changing areas. I collected my card key from reception and went up to my room. There was a minisystem, but only one CD by Phil Collins. I tried tuning the radio, without success. When I turned on the TV it flashed up a greeting for Saul Coogan, whoever he was. I didn’t expect her to knock.
    When I found her there outside my door I said, ‘You forgot your laptop.’
    â€˜I thought it might distract you.’ She was dressed for leaving. She told me her luggage was already at the desk. It became clear that she was more practised at these encounters than I was.
    She asked me what I did. I told her, with some necessary elisions, about the past year. About the camp at Al Ghahain, in the Yemen. About the Somali refugees I had befriended, and their plight. At some point her hand, which had slid from my knee to the crotch of my pants, ceased to move. She did not understand. Struggling to find some point of connection, she told me, ‘In my sports centre, they let asylum-seekers in
for free
.’
    â€˜Asylum-seekers are not allowed to work,’ I pointed out.
    â€˜
Exactly
,’ she said.
    I moved us onto safer ground. ‘Your laptop,’ I said, and while she talked I took off her clothes.
    â€˜It crawls from connection to connection,’ she said. ‘It closes the gaps between things.’
    It learns who you are, she told me, and intuits the things you most desire. Which bottle of wine. Which book. Which holiday. Which human being. I took off her bra and took each nipple into my mouth.
    The thing on her laptop was a search engine. This was her work, her reason for being. The crowning glory of a life of project management. Though she told me the project’s name, I never saw it again, and I imagine both it and she fell victim to the stock crash which consumed her industry, just a few months later.
    I laid her flat on the bed and lifted her arms above her head to stretch her scar. It ran at a slight diagonal from her throat to a point below her rib-cage. She told me they had cracked her chest when she was a baby, to plug a hole in her heart.
    The cut had healed very well: the casual stroke of a tailor’s chalk, splitting her in half. I knelt down to taste her, and, when she