Patmos, Part One
Nick was stepping quickly through the early afternoon, East along the canal. One of his hands was pink and numb with cold as it pressed his phone tightly to his ear. He was on his way to spend the day with his friend, Sarah, at her cozy flat; they were going to watch two films, an arduous one and a lovely one, with things roasting in the oven during the lovely one, and then he would help her to ready the place for a nice little party — only seven or eight of them. It was New Year’s Eve. They were both in a silly mood, and she was thinking aloud about what he should pick up from the shop.
“I have literally never heard of it. I thought you said like, ‘crabby smack’. — Right, nice! — It sounds very… warming. — Yeah, it sounds it. —” Nick laughed, loudly. “It is! Is he coming?”
Nick became aware of some activity on one of the boats a few yards ahead. As he approached it, Sarah described what she knew of their mutual friend’s plans; and, since those plans may have been fraying, she described the state he was currently in according to his most recent bulletins.
“He’ll be fine,” said Nick. “The last time I saw him he was so hungover he couldn’t eat, he just had about nine cups of tea — Yeah, after Gareth’s, exactly — I bumped into him near the shop and we went for breakfast and he was a mess. But, he had to drive to Colchester and back that day, and he was fine. Oh, you know what! We should see if he—”
Gasping in shock a wiry man with an untidy beard dropped something, clapped his hands over his mouth and stared at Nick, wide-eyed. Nick jumped, his hands involuntarily jolted about, and then he froze, staring back at this bizarre sight. It was a miracle he didn’t drop his phone. This man was very frightened, and somehow very frightening. Nick thought maybe he was high, or mad, or both. After a cavernous three seconds, he croaked out “... Can I help?”
Sarah had noticed something was happening, and she was speaking Nick’s name, but his phone was nowhere near his ear.
The strange man became a little less tense, but looked now as if he was about to faint, or cry. He slid his hands down but they remained tightly pressed round his chin, into his slightly wild beard. “I’m so sorry,” he breathed, and then a little more audibly: “It’s just” —and there was a very long pause — “… you look exactly like my brother.”
“Oh. I —”
“My late brother, I should say. I lost him, we lost him, eight years ago.” He was still staring, unbelieving, right at Nick. “This week actually. The 27th.”
Nick tried for what he felt was far too long to find some words. “I — I’m really sorry to hear that.”
The tired-looking man raised his eyebrows, blinked hard for a few seconds, shook his head as if there was something rattling in it, and stared with a ‘phew’ gesture at nothing in particular on the towpath. Then he looked at Nick’s shoes, avoiding the sight of his face.
After a few more seconds he steeled himself, looked back up, and briefly made very intense eye contact, as if warily peering right in to Nick’s soul, double-checking; but they both relaxed when he sighed, and smiled a big warm smile. He seemed okay. “At any rate, I’m sorry, again. I didn’t mean to startle you.” He shrugged, and said, “Happy New Year.”
“Yes!” said Nick, perhaps a little too enthusiastically, but relieved that this jarring meeting had so soon come to a close. “It’s absolutely okay. Not a problem. Happy new year, to you too!”
Suppressing an instinct to apologize as he walked on, he raised his phone to his ear again. “Sarah? Sorry, hello. — No, nothing. Nothing, I’m fine! — Like… I don’t know! I don’t know. — I don’t know! My heart’s going like a hammer though. — This funny little man appeared, and looked really messed up, and, he said I looked like his brother. And then he said his brother died, ages ago. — I know! — I think so, probably? He didn’t say. He didn’t say anything, really. I mean, he seemed nice, he did say Happy New Year. Honestly though, he looked like he’d seen a ghost.”
Sarah ventured that, in a way, he kind of had done.
“Don’t say that! That’s made my knees go all funny —”
1.
On the low roof Ned hit his head, hard, getting out of bed. He made a pathetic little noise, hunched himself like a goblin and padded over to the tiny galley with the duvet pulled round his shoulders. He began to tremor a little, as it was unbelievably cold, and the roll of yellow dusters with which he’d tried to plug the inch-wide gap in the wooden access hatch astern had fallen out in the night. They were now damp, on the floor, where rain had got in. He poured the remaining half-pint of still water from a plastic litre-bottle into the cheap kettle. Leaning on the broken sink as the kettle hissed itself awake, he rattled a large jar, previously for olives but now repurposed for coffee beans, unscrewed its red lid, took out the dedicated teaspoon which lived in it, and counted aloud, quietly but clearly, five spoonfuls into the electric grinder.
This noisy device had been a treat to himself a few days ago, the very first luxury for the boat after a period in which his money had gone only on essentials. The most expensive had been a portable oil-filled radiator, which he cursed himself for still not having picked up yet. Last night had been the coldest yet, and the entire bottle of expensive scotch he had drunk alone — in bed, wearing several layers of clothes, and a scarf and a keffiyeh and two hats — seemed to be stinging in his eyes now, and smearing and gunking his vision, just as the unhappy hours spent chain-smoking dry dusty tobacco until he’d finally passed out had left him now with as painful a graze in his throat as if he were about to get ill. He persuaded himself it was the smoking, because the idea of getting ill right now was more than he could think about.
His right hand clapped the plastic lid back over the grinder, and in almost the same movement the heel of his hand pressed the button on the front of the lid which set it grinding. Although he could not hear himself over its overwhelming chainsaw yowl Ned once again counted aloud, this time to nineteen, approximately one second per number; and in that moment when the number ‘twenty’ would have arrived, he released the ‘grind’ button with his right hand and tapped the radio on with his left. He had been alarmed to notice, this summer just gone, at almost thirty-two years old, that if you started doing something on the count of one, and ended it bang on the count of ten, you were only doing something for a duration of nine. Plus a tiny bit, maybe. The precise but unspoken ‘twenty’ at the end of his count guaranteed that all nineteen durations, vague as they were, lasted a fully-counted length.
This careful attention to counting was perhaps six months old with Ned, as was the fact that he preferred things to come in prime quantities. To begin with, this had been a deliberate, private affectation, developed toward the end of the relationship he had only just escaped. To choose seven instead of six or eight, eleven instead of ten, had been a pitiful consolation, a desperate attempt to cherish something personal and undiscoverable. His boyfriend had become so monstrous a bully, had grown so affronted by Ned wanting to maintain any vestiges of his own life, even his own inner life, that he had jealously wrenched their relationship into a sick parody of the love and affection and attraction that had shaped it so powerfully.
Time and again, even as friends warned Ned that what he was putting up with was unambiguously intolerable — the word ‘abusive’ had been used repeatedly — he had balanced instances of truly despicable behaviour against whatever his imagination most readily alighted on, however precariously. One day he would accept these things as a reasonable consequence of his boyfriend’s stressful day at work; the next, it was all mitigated by the stability and quality of their accommodation — and, of course, the hardest habit of all to break, Ned far too easily allowed himself to believe that what he endured was offset by a sex life which had somehow lost none of its verve and joy. Dick had long been the only good thing they had left to give each other, and it was very, very good; but the rest of their life together was simply a punishing erosion of his will and his happiness. Any device or document, any thing of any kind, was no longer private, and well over a year ago Ned had completely given up on taking the risk, in case whatever it was should be discovered. At last, at length, he had sought sanctuary somewhere the monster he loved would never think to look for him: in the integers. Something as simple as a preference for how to choose quantities became as much of a pocket of escape and sanctuary as it was safe to resort to. Even in the dangerous event of it being discovered, Ned had desperately reasoned that the primes were something that could, at least, never be taken from him.
Now, in the aftermath, in these freezing months where it was all still recent and his nerves still jangling, Ned took pause — when he counted out five chocolates, or sliced a carrot into eleven, or did seventeen press-ups on the towpath when nobody was about — he took pause, on purpose, to acknowledge how unspeakably cruel the surveillance and the bullying had become, and to marvel at how deeply into hell the years of small concessions had sunk him. He thought, casting his mind back, that he must have gradually lost the capacity to notice it was happening at all, let alone how bad it had got. And so it had gone on, and on, and on, until very recently, something relatively minor and trivial had so incensed Ned that his emotional ductility failed, and failed completely. This lightning-fast crisis had buckled him physically, with a pulse of nausea so intense that it became a real vomit, and everything had been thrown retrospectively into terrible clarity, as if the years of maltreatment were a dusky scrapyard suddenly floodlit, so that every single sharp edge still so threateningly present seemed brand new. His boyfriend, clear as day, was a tyrant, and a cunt. A glacier of advice and warnings and downright pleading from his friends had suddenly calved upon him all at once, had become an urgent impetus to escape.
That same November evening, while his boyfriend was in the shower, Ned had shoved five days’ worth of clothes, and eleven days’ worth of underwear, in a very big rucksack — his passport, which he hadn’t even thought of, was already in it — along with a toothbrush and five books. As he got to the door he had suddenly and assertively said aloud, at the last second, “boy stuff” — a phrase he had never used before — and had dashed back to collect a plastic bag of toys and equipment, both his and his partner’s because fuck him: already thinking of the future, it had occurred to Ned that when he was set up in a new place he would have more-than-earned a sustained period of ardent wanking when he wanted it, and frequent hookups when he didn’t. The escape had been unplanned, but when he left the building into the pissing rain he had straight away telephoned an old friend, one who knew. An hour on public transport, and Ned had been safe on the other side of the city, welcomed with a warm towel he was told he could keep, since he’d forgotten about towels, and an astonishingly comfortable sofa-bed that was ready before he arrived.
Ned’s friend was very good to him. They’d got completely drunk together, cried a lot, been genuinely delighted by each other’s talent for improvising violent revenge fantasies, and the point was sincerely and lovingly made, many times, that Ned did not need to hurry; he was welcome to stay even through January if need be. Nevertheless, on the eighth day, seized by a galvanizing if unruly and disturbed craving for new adventure, Ned had announced that he was going in the morning to buy a boat, named Patmos, moored on the canal. It was a piece of shit, as reflected in its price, but it wasn’t totally derelict. Friendly advice from literally everyone he mentioned it to did not stave this wild plan off, and despite the time of year Ned had first laid his hat in the boat three days later, on the first day of December. It was now the fourth. Almost nothing worked, still, and the Patmos was an especially unforgiving habitat in the mornings.
Five spoonfuls of beans, ground for nineteen seconds. On the side were laid out three objects: his mug, the coffee pot, and the thing that he kept his drugs in. He had adjusted his regimen in order that each day’s compartment could contain seven pills. Using a different spoon he dumped three extravagantly heaped spoonfuls of freshly-ground coffee powder from the metal holder into the pot. What remained, and clung to the sides, he loosened by smacking the side of the pot twenty-three times — five quick fours, then three slower to finish — with a small bit of stained wood he had found on the boat. Finally the boiled water went in the pot. The primes he chose were often arbitrary, of course: in this case, he had happened on his first go to have tried five spoonfuls of beans, and ground them for nineteen seconds, one morning back in the flat, and it had seemed to work well; so the five/nineteen coffee routine had become habitual, and the ornaments of three and twenty-three had accrued unbidden. It had all bedded in so reassuringly, had become so automatic, that as soon as he had got himself his own grinder, for the boat, not just the numbers but the physical fluency of the routine returned immediately; and Ned welcomed it, as if this easy dance were a benevolent entity, like a beloved cat who had vanished for a few weeks and suddenly returned, gracing in an instant with its warmth and its gestures a life made lonely and still by its absence.
These miniature routines gave Ned much-needed anchors in a time of chaos, and he was grateful to the primes in general for their having been so hospitable to his secretly cleaving to them. It was for them, as much as it was for himself —celebrating that he no longer needed to be secretive — that he made a point of counting to them out loud. He felt they had been one of the more curious and unexpected guy-ropes with which he had dragged himself back onto the solid bank of his own identity, after years of being swayed and buffeted and all-but-drowned in someone else’s. Eight years, he sometimes slowly mouthed to himself in disbelief. There seemed no reason to let go of any guy-rope that had helped him escape, however fragile and intangible, before he felt ready to do so. But neither did he feel any great desire to learn more about these numbers — it didn’t seem to Ned that any deep knowledge about the primes, beyond simply knowing what they were, was required in order to have his friendship with them.
His 07:11 alarm went off. He had woken before it, unusually; but he badly needed a piss, and he sort of needed to be sick, too. The toilet — Ned had forgotten the word ‘head’ as soon as the seller of the boat told him what it meant — was broken, and had been for years. He had pissed in the canal before, justifying it to himself on the grounds that it was full of piss anyway, but he did not like to do so in daylight; and besides, it was too cold to be going outside and getting his dick out. Briefly he thanked the heavens that he didn’t need a shit, as the nearest public toilets were apparently permanently shut, and he already hated asking for the code in the nearest cafe, which was not very near. It was routine, rather than coffee itself, that had temporarily overridden the need to piss, but now it would no longer be ignored. He grabbed an empty litre-bottle and almost filled it. He felt somehow insulted that his warm piss seemed in the bitter air to be exhaling as visibly as he was, and it annoyed him, when he screwed the bottle shut and put it with three others in a low wooden cupboard, that it kept toppling over to join them; so he gave up, let it thud to horizontal and petulantly shoved the door shut with his foot.
Only now, just a little, did his friendship with the primes threaten to firm up into an obsession, and Ned had recently noticed a first tangible consequence: at this point, counting out a non-prime quantity of anything, as sometimes he was forced to do, made him feel uncomfortable, as if he had put his shoes on the wrong way around. However gently, it distressed him. Powers of two were the worst — they struck Ned as perilous, liable to fracture, yet they somehow constituted too a kind of relentless substance, to the point of seeming positively baleful to him: what sort of entities were these, that can be snapped in half so many times, yet still retain their character? It hadn’t been deliberate, but his imagination, let wander one morning, had encouraged him toward a downright mystical attitude in which the powers of two represented the relationship he had escaped — its relentlessness and its harshness, its quality of somehow being irrefragably riven at all scales — while the primes, in all their unpredictability and inscrutability, were like pleasing mushrooms, with the relief and reassurance of stepping-stones, and represented the life he had now begun to rebuild. The fact that in this image his hellish recent past somehow met and joined with his future, at the very bottom of everything — coexisted with a shared root in the improbable pivot of the only even prime — Ned had affectionately frowned when he stumbled into that one, laughed a tiny laugh, and breezily conceded it to the eternal mysteries.
The Patmos, especially in its current state, was too small for a separate table and bed. Supposedly it berthed four, but that seemed insane at present; and after all, four was a bad number. The ‘mattress’ of the one currently usable sleeping area was a jigsaw-like assemblage of five (mercifully, five) padded cushions, the middle two of which could be shoved out of the way somewhere; and a plank of wood below them which bridged a central cavity could be removed and slotted a foot higher up, between the wall and a central wooden pillar, to form a table. The head and the foot of the bed became padded facing seats. It was neat, clever, as satisfying as algebra. Sitting on one of them, facing astern, Ned drank his coffee and stared at the index finger on his left hand, which he splayed in the air before him. It seemed to curve to the left, strikingly so against the other three, which were dead straight.
It was so fucking cold. Ned resentfully recognized how badly he wanted to be naked against the warm body of the selfish, spiteful, remorseless bastard he had just fled, with his eyes shut and his face pressed on the familiar skin — and still vivid was the memory of his smell. In seconds Ned had a very powerful erection, which not for the first time this week he despairingly willed to go away, to leave him alone. The bag of “boy stuff” hadn’t yet come out of the rucksack. It distracted him a little when he forced himself to acknowledge that it was in no way to his ex’s “credit” — in those words the thought had arrived — that he had never been a bully whilst asleep, and Ned considered reassembling the bed immediately, so unlikely was his mood to improve.
His desire to vomit was not strong enough to be acted upon, even when he for some reason sniffed the one glass and it still stank of single malt. He was brutally hungover; he’d run out of food, he’d even run out of water. Maybe he should have stayed on the sofa-bed. He’d run out of alcohol, he’d run out of tobacco. He was bored, and lonely, and regretful. He couldn’t get a muscle twink or a nice hairy top in as a treat, as he’d been craving for so long, because he had no data on his phone, and because the place was a state, and because, which galled him most of all, he didn’t even want to any more. The one thing on board that wasn’t as cold as ice was a bottle of his own piss, which he now imagined he could hear rolling around, on the damp floor of the grimy cupboard. Maybe if he wrapped it in a blanket and used it as a hot water bottle — Ned upbraided himself for the thought immediately, and shook it physically from his mind. Fuck off. He could buy a real hot water bottle: he already should’ve. But having that thought was a red line; that was plenty. Fortified, perversely, by his own abjection, he stood up, smacked his head hard on the low roof, barely reacted at all, and ditched the already-cold last inch of coffee in the broken sink. He switched the radio off, and began turning the table back into a bed. He would sleep, if he could, til the alarm at 11:13.
End of Part One