Dead Water Read online

  REVIEWS FOR

  THE WEIGHT OF NUMBERS

  ‘A Scheherazade of a novel, executed with scope, daring, and humour. The Weight of Numbers is unerringly well written, and engrossing to the last page.’ Lionel Shriver, author of We Need to Talk About Kevin

  ‘Captivating… a shimmering tapestry, a truly networked work of fiction… In the corner of the literary landscape in which a few of us sit, hunting for ways to work ever exciting and dynamic thinking from the sciences into the contemporary novel, The Weight of Numbers is extremely good news. It’s a dynamic, innovative, and compelling book that brings into focus some of the most interesting trends in contemporary fiction, and Simon Ings deserves more than a sniff of at least one prize for his efforts.’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘And so it goes on, this rolling story, with its dazzling, admirable narrative nerve, travelling through space and time, across continents and generations… In Ings’s world we all become different people, less than the sum of our parts… A novel of explosions, of historical chain reactions… A new heart of darkness… It is unlikely there will be a finer written fiction this year.’ Guardian

  ‘The scale of Ings’s ambition is proportionally matched by the precision of his prose. Every sentence, image and line of dialogue is balanced and true. It isn’t its clever design or technical achievement that makes it compelling so much as its beating human heart.’ Independent on Sunday

  ‘Ings weaves an ingenious, shimmering web of contiguity and chance… A feat of meticulous plotting… Ings’s project is not dissimilar from David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, with which it has been compared.’ New Statesman ‘An ambitious, exciting novel… Ings’s prose can ascend into theoretical, visionary territory, but is rooted in the mess of human experience. A sudden sexual encounter in a bombed-out London library, an anorexic slicing a muffin in a Florida restaurant, a horror show of violence in Mozambique – these are unforgettable scenes, evoked with a lean, immediate physicality. The thrill of its unfolding connections pulls you inexorably to the end, and – if you’re like me – straight back to the beginning, to pick up your pencil and try the sums all over again.’ The Times

  ‘Ings displays great technical mastery in the construction of this novel… His ability to recreate history is keenly expressed… This novel triumphs, thanks to Ings’s discipline and quite fierce powers of imagination.’ Sunday Business Post

  ‘A virtuoso display of imaginative plotting.’ Financial Times

  ‘This stunning, gutsy novel takes a single incident and traces back its causes through the life stories of those involved. Dozens of deftly drawn characters, an acute understanding of geopolitics, an epic historical sweep and a serious talent for storytelling make this one of the most exciting – and relevant – books of the last year. Booker material, for sure.’ Arena

  ‘Like Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Simon Ings’s remarkable new work delivers nothing less than a secret key, a counterhistory, of the last sixty years. Ings’s fiction is vivid and swift, a thing of scenes and people, smugglers and astronauts, spies and revolutionaries. But beyond the topical excitements lies something even grander – a vision of our culture as a death ship. The Weight of Numbers is amazing.’ Mark Costello, author of Big If

  Dead Water

  SIMON INGS

  Published in hardback, eBook, and export and airside trade paperback in Great Britain in 2011 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © 2011, Simon Ings.

  The moral right of Simon Ings to be idenified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Hardback ISBN: 978-1-84887-888-4

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-84887-889-1

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-84887-891-4

  Printed in Great Britain.

  Corvus

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26-27 Boswell Street

  London WC1N 3JZ

  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  For Steve, who said

  ‘Everyone is in the intelligence business now’

  and for Leo, born into this:

  story time.

  CONTENTS

  Part One

  ONE

  An airship crashes near the North Pole – Survival on the ice – The red notebook – The Dunfjeld Circulation Theorem – He hits the water – He hits the water – He hits the water – He walks to Foyn – His mother’s embrace

  TWO

  At the mouth of the Persian Gulf, David Brooks stumbles upon traces of Chapter One – The coup has approval from Whitehall – Fog smothers the palace – The Sultan’s birds – The company finds him useful for something

  THREE

  Rishi’s beginnings in Uttar Pradesh – his home, ‘a tapeworm sucking feebly from a greedy gut’ – The dramatic arrival of a Moyse Line shipping container makes no sense whatsoever until Chapter Eleven – The river floods – The house collapses – Rishi’s family mourns and their wreaths burn all by themselves

  FOUR

  A rail crash in Firozabad – Something new is born – We introduce ourselves – Mummy? Daddy? – We recap the story so far (bonus materials include fifty-two years in a balloon with Kirk Douglas and James Mason, a man shooting himself in the foot, and a young pirate numbly jabbing at a frozen parrot) – Back to the rail crash – Poor Roopa: this is no place for a woman

  Part Two

  FIVE

  The Saffron tiger awakes – A bad marriage – Saved by thirty-seven revolvers, 1,280 rounds of ammunition and a silencer – Firozabad, ‘City of Glass’ – Roopa meets Mummy, but is too late to save her – The crash site again – Roopa gets her man – Two blue lines – ‘He wants to drive us out of town’

  SIX

  The rescue party – ‘We’re off to get ourselves killed!’ – Snowblind – Bears – Four feet of water – ‘The most well-equipped man on the ice’ – Reaching Foyn – Eric finds the red notebook

  SEVEN

  The bhangi – A long, queasy passage about Chhaphandi’s sewage disposal system – Roopa finds the man who kidnapped us – He tells her who killed Mummy and Daddy – At the crucial moment, the green Honda disappears – It’s going to take us about fifteen chapters to put this right

  EIGHT

  ‘Visitors as regular as birds’ – A love upstaged by ornithology – ‘Stay’ – The approach of war – Eric boards the Orange Horror – Imprisoned by the British – London’s larder is alight – Eric envisions the future of the shipping industry (with a little help from us)

  Part Three

  NINE

  Becalmed in Mumbai – An ocean crossing – The pirate from Chapter Four has found himself an honest job – The red notebook again – If it belongs to anyone, it belongs to Jakob Dunfjeld – A thousand German paratroopers march along Karl Johans gate – Vibeke in Lapland – She bears a son

  TEN

  Havard’s memories of his mother – An unlikely rescue – Life as Eric’s son and heir – Chicago, and another container – Cardiff, and another flood – Eric looks for Vibeke and finds the red notebook instead – Poor Eric, ‘Never really in love is my guess’

  ELEVEN

>   ‘People say the dark has taken him’ – Dinner at the Dorch – A secret burden – Missing, presumed dead – Havard takes over Moyse Line – The shipping container from Chapter Three reprises its dramatic entrance – ‘A puzzle halfway solved’

  TWELVE

  The fairground – Rishi’s sister – Love counts for nothing round here – The dowry, and how Rishi gets free of it – ‘Contains flavours’ – He’s Yash’s creature now – The bodies of our mummy and daddy are disposed of, and the cow from Chapter Four ambles past

  THIRTEEN

  A perfect blank

  Part Four

  FOURTEEN

  David’s ‘surprise’ – Mistaken for pirates – Boxing Day in Phuket, ‘There are fish flopping about on the rocks’ – Two waves – Ester hunts for her father – Another container

  FIFTEEN

  Havard’s private island – The Line – ‘How much does she know?’ – Havard offers Ester a job in Dubai – The visitor – ‘You can help us to help him’

  SIXTEEN

  Roopa picks up Yash’s scent – Back to Chhaphandi – She visits the room Yash left dripping with blood – Another lead

  SEVENTEEN

  Rishi in Mumbai – Piracy’s a paper game – ‘The coast is on fire’ – Roopa tracks him down – ‘You don’t fool me’

  EIGHTEEN

  Oh yes he does – In Dubai the elevators only go up – Roopa and Ester swap bags – Roopa phones Moyse Line – a rendezvous in Musandam – Roopa meets David – ‘It’s going to be all right’

  NINETEEN

  The Ka-Bham sails – Gangavaram, their first port of call – Captain Egaz Nageen explores his new command – His wife and son – ‘Sir, we have a companion’ – The ship is overrun – A stand-off – Chaos

  TWENTY

  Havard flies into London – An unreasonable demand – Dead Water is breached – Two incidental characters from Chapter Fourteen turn up near the MI6 building in fleecy track suits – ‘I’m afraid the crew will have to look out for themselves’

  TWENTY-ONE

  Egaz and his family are hostages – The pirates’ first mistake – Port and starboard – Light and dark – Transferring the cargo – ‘The sea valves are open!’

  TWENTY-TWO

  Conspiracy revealed – ‘I always said he was a cunt’ – Havard lets Ester go – Nageen breaks free – Rishi flees Mumbai – Or thinks he does – The last container – He cannot make out the back wall at all, it is so dark – But he can smell it – He can smell it all right – What he did to Mummy – What he did to Daddy – The stinking shreds of burning tyres

  TWENTY-THREE

  In which the world goes round and round, packed, palletized, boxed, numbered, turned to paper, turned to figures, turned to logic gates and light, to symbols we will never grasp and concepts that evaporate as soon as they are spoken – Why the weather will not die – Why the waters will not stop in their courses – Why the winds will not cease to blow – Why the heart will not cease to —

  Part One

  ONE

  Friday, 25 May 1928: half past ten in the morning

  Returning from its successful transit over the North Pole, at a point about seventy-five miles north of Spitsbergen, the airship Italia falls out of the sky. The gondola strikes the pack and cracks, scattering crew and equipment over the ice.

  Incredibly, all but a couple of the spilled men climb to their feet, uninjured, and go running across the ice after their ship. It’s hopeless: the envelope, trailing the remains of the gondola’s roof, ropes, and canvas shreds and spars, begins to rise. A massive tear has opened in the airship’s outer skin, exposing twisted fabric guts. Faces lean out of the hole. Half the crew were sleeping in the envelope, in a crude bunk space next to the keel. Now the storm is bearing them away.

  Arduino’s up there. The chief engineer. He knows he’s finished: marooned aboard an ungovernable balloon, plaything of a polar gale. He hurls supplies through the ragged gap where the companionway should be. Cargo rains down on to the ice: fuel, food, gear, whatever he can lay his hands on. Spanners. Pemmican. Oatmeal biscuits. Tobacco. Voltol oil. Arduino devotes his last moments to the welfare of those left on the ice.

  The bag is carried up into the fog and disappears.

  On the ice, the leader of the expedition, General Umberto Nobile, lies prone, his legs and right arm broken, drifting in and out of consciousness. The motor chief has a broken leg and a mechanic is dying amid the wreckage of the rear motor gondola. Lothar Eling, the ship’s Swedish meteorologist, lies bruised and winded under a wooden box he embraced a split second before the impact. Some minutes pass before he realizes what he has done. He lets out a shout.

  The Italia’s field radio is intact.

  A day later, the radio is operating. The aerial’s made of scraps of steel tubing, braced with scavenged lengths of control wire. There’s even a flag of sorts fluttering at its tip: scraps of cloth that add up to a crude Italian Tricolore.

  Biagi, the radio operator, is not happy. The Italia’s support ship, the Città di Milano, lies at anchor in King’s Bay and the ship’s crew are making the most of its radio: a popular novelty. The first message Biagi picked up read ‘ infine il mio pollo caro ha fatto il suo uovo’. Some sailor’s chick has laid her egg at last. The ship spends so much time transmitting sweet nothings to the girls back home, it’s impossible to get a message through. More infuriating still, the ship keeps sending out these meaningless reassurances: ‘Trust in us. Trust in us.’ ‘They keep telling us we’re near fucking Spitsbergen.’

  Eling grunts acknowledgement; he’s not really listening. He writes in his notebook: an ugly thing, red leather. He is calculating how long their supplies will last.

  Prunes.

  Curry powder.

  Jelly crystals.

  Bags of coal.

  Tripe.

  Assuming three hundred grams of solid nourishment per man, their supplies will last less than a month. They may be able to supplement their diet. There are clear channels where they can fish. There’s also the chance that the airship came down within a few miles, along with the rest of their gear. Depending on how far and how fast it came down, there may even be other survivors. Every hour or so someone stumbles across another find.

  A seal pick.

  A small plankton net.

  A barrel of kerosene crystals.

  A Newman and Guardia quarter-plate hand-held camera.

  (Eling itemizes everything.)

  Spratt’s dog biscuits.

  Seal oil.

  A box of Brock’s flares.

  Pants.

  Now and again, he turns back the pages of his notebook, to read what’s written at its start:

  To Uncle Lothar

  Wishing you a Merry Christmas

  Vibeke

  Sometimes, when he thinks no one is looking, Eling traces the words with gloved fingers. He closes his eyes. He remembers.

  Five months earlier: Christmas Eve, 1927

  ‘Merry Christmas, Uncle Lothar!’

  Professor Jakob Dunfjeld’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Vibeke, hands Lothar Eling a brown-paper package. Eling tugs the string and slips off the paper. The girl has got him a hideous red leather something. He turns it over and over. It is a pouch, cleverly stitched. Waterproof. Inside the pouch is a notebook covered in the same leather.

  ‘I’m sorry about the colour. It’s all they had.’

  ‘It’s perfect.’

  ‘For your expedition.’

  ‘Yes.’ Eling tries to swallow. ‘It is just what I need.’

  The next day, Christmas Day, while the professor attacks his evermounting pile of correspondence, Eling accompanies Vibeke to the funicular that runs up the side of Mount Fløyen, biggest of the seven mountains ringing the city of Bergen on Norway’s south-west coast. Together they explore the peak, the parapet, the cafe and the heavy telescopes, trained on the city below. Ten years have passed since the great fire and the city still carries the scars.


  ‘You have a look,’ says Vibeke, stepping away from the telescope. Eling puts his eye to the heavy barrel. It’s trained on the harbour, seed of the disaster that has shaped his career. In July 1916 three men were stocktaking in a wharfside warehouse and one of their candles brushed against a bundle of tarred oakum, setting it alight. Neighbouring bundles caught light immediately. The men threw the bundles into the sea, where they floated, burning, and the wind drove sparks of flaming hemp back on to the jetty, setting it alight, and a gale sprang up, driving fragments of burning wood deep among the crowded alleys of the town.

  The fire bankrupted the city and left Professor Jakob Dunfjeld in sole charge of its brand-new Meterological Institute. Lothar Eling is a Swede: a young physics graduate fresh from the meteorological laboratory in Trappes. He has spent the last couple of winters helping the professor turn his modest town house into the hub of an empire of the winds.