The Count of Eleven (11 page)

Perhaps he could. Suppose only he had shown interest in the videotapes at the auction? If they hadn’t been sold, mightn’t the auctioneers accept an offer even Mr. Hardy would have to admit was reasonable? Jack was tempted to wait until eleven o’clock, but of course that was silly. He stuffed a piece of buttered toast into his mouth and sprinted out of the house.

By the time he’d finished munching he was at the traffic lights. A faint taste of charring lingered in his mouth while he jogged uphill, and a sooty smell troubled his nostrils as he reached the burned-out shop. At the top of the hill he strode into the huge cluttered room. The auctioneer’s assistant who had shown him the cartons of videocassettes was tagging a dining-suite which would scarcely have fitted into the ground floor of the Orchards’ house. “Remember me?” Jack said. “Fine Films.”

“I remember,” the assistant said, marking his forehead with ink as he flicked a lock of hair away from his eyes. “We were looking for you yesterday. Matter of fact, we phoned you, but there must have been nobody home.”

“Here I am.”

“Too late, I’m afraid. Pity.”

“I’m afraid, I’m so afraid …” Jack struggled not to outshout himself. “Why were you after me?” he said aloud.

“Wanted to give you a chance at the lot you came to view.”

“Can’t you still?”

“Wish we could. Gone.”

Jack felt as if they were competing to discover who could do without the most words. “Where?”

“Some young geezer. Private collector. Only wanted the horrors but didn’t mind buying the whole lot to get them. Said he’d tape over the rest.”

Something like fever was crawling hotly over Jack’s skin. “He paid all that just to use the tapes for blanks?”

“Didn’t pay that much. We let him have them ‘cos he put in the only bid. He paid less than a fifth of what I told you we expected.”

Jack clutched at the nearest support, a set of antique fire-irons which clanged like a broken bell. “Are they still in the building, by any chance?”

“Took them as soon as he’d counted out his wad.”

The assistant was turning away, looking embarrassed by Jack, who restrained himself from grabbing his arm. “Do you have his address?”

“We never give out addresses. Would you mind putting that poker back? We charge for any damage.”

Jack hadn’t been aware of holding the poker. He hung it carefully on the hooked stand and went after the inky man, who was several padded chairs distant by now. “If I give you my address,” he pleaded, ‘could you pass it on to him?”

“Afraid we can’t. A sale is a sale. Better luck next time,” the assistant said, probably sincerely. “Maybe you should look for libraries that aren’t doing so well and make them an offer.”

He wasn’t poking fun at Jack. He wasn’t trying to imply that there could be libraries in a worse state than Fine Films. Jack opened his mouth and his clenched hands, but none of those seemed to be any use. His brain felt clogged with a substance that was spreading through his blood and weighing down his limbs as he trudged out of the auction rooms, feeling as though he was walking automatically and yet having to employ all his concentration to move his legs. The smell of Fine Films caught in his throat, and he swallowed and swallowed as the slope rose behind him. Then a bus came straight at him it seemed as if a house was falling on him. The brakes screeched, the bus swerved, and for a moment Jack was certain it was toppling over. “Where do you think you’re going, you clown?” the driver yelled as the passengers gaped.

Jack was in the middle of the crossroads with no memory of having got there. “We don’t know,” he said.

He stumbled to the pavement and held onto the pole of a traffic light and watched the lights count up and down. He felt as though he couldn’t move until he solved the problem they were posing. How much were the colours worth? They seemed to be brightening spasmodically, like three kinds of fire. At last he shoved himself away from the pole, and for a moment no, longer he couldn’t remember which way led home. As soon as he managed to remember he reeled in that direction, afraid of forgetting again before he reached the house.

He sat in the front room, one hand over his eyes, waiting for the family. Eventually Laura arrived, then Julia, but he’d forgotten why he was waiting. Whatever was clogging his brain seemed to have spread into the air, isolating him from them. He found himself counting the number of times each of them spoke.

At least now he knew what was lodged in his brain: numbers. Later, when Julia was asleep, he lay beside her and counted the values of letters in words, desperately hoping that if doing so didn’t suggest a solution it would at least put him to sleep. Whenever he ran out of words the amounts of his debts started chasing one another inside his skull, or he heard his voice in there, growing louder and more urgent: “I’M AFRAID, I’M SO AFRAID …” He began to work out the values of phrases, which at least used up more time than single words did. “Traffic accident’ didn’t add up to eleven, nor did ‘suicide’; he wasn’t insured for nearly enough for that to be a help. He dozed and jerked awake at once, as though the clamour of numbers had roused him. He ransacked his mind for another phrase to count, and found one: Turn ill luck into good.”

He totted up the values of the letters, and his eyes widened at the dark. He did a recount to be certain, and as he did so he heard a distant clock strike twelve. It was Friday Good Friday, the thirteenth. A light seemed to flame into his eyes. “We’re saved,” he whispered.

This letter is part of a chain of good fortune.

Mrs. Marsha Indick of Iowa sent thirteen copies to her friends and was cured of a twenty-year-old cancer.

Mr. D. Vincume of London, England found a picture in his mother’s attic which fetched 100,000 at auction.

Mr. A. Plumb of Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire won the first dividend of the football pools 24 hours after mailing thirteen copies of this letter.

Mrs. Maria Carbone of New York threw her letter in the trash and was knifed to death in the street less than a week later.

Mrs. Amy Dallas of Nevada left her letter in her purse, and her husband was diagnosed as having a brain tumour. However, when she mailed thirteen copies of this letter the doctors were able to successfully operate on Mr. Dallas.

You need send no money. Just make thirteen exact copies of this letter and mail them to thirteen different people, then wait for your luck to improve. Don’t deny the world good fortune. The more there is, the better it will be for all.

This letter can change your life. What are you waiting for?

It explained so much. It explained why the Orchards’ luck had been growing worse ever since April Fool’s Day, when Jack had first dismissed the letter. No wonder he seemed to recall having felt blameworthy ever since. Everything had been his fault, whatever the family said. The idea was surprisingly comforting: at least he knew why he felt responsible, and more important he knew what to do.

As he sat on the edge of the bed, rereading the letter, the sunlight on his face and chest made him feel he was reading by the light of an enormous benevolent fire. When he heard Julia coming upstairs he folded the page quickly but carefully and slipped it into a pocket of his trousers which were sprawling broken-legged on the bedside chair. “Aren’t you dressed yet?” Julia said. “We thought we could all go for a walk by’ the river.”

“You go. I need to write some letters while there’s room to work on the computer.”

Applying for jobs?”

He didn’t want to lie to her. “It’s time I took control of my life.”

“We’ll muddle through somehow. We always have.”

Soon he heard the front door closing. He went downstairs at once and lifting the computer onto the table, typed an exact copy of the letter and set the printer chattering. Once the first of thirteen copies had risen from the printer, Jack hefted the Merseyside telephone directory and found the names and addresses of the lucky recipients of the letter.

He started at the first page of the listings and having counted ten pages for J, addressed an envelope to the last name on the page. One page further for A, then three for C, and eleven for K … He broke off in the middle of his surname, thinking he’d heard Julia’s key in the lock, but it was next door. The distraction made him careless, so that he wrote his address on the back of the envelope. He would have torn it up except that he had just thirteen envelopes. He crossed out the address until he couldn’t read it, and counted onwards.

He laughed when he reached the end of his name. He had never realised that it consisted of eleven letters as well as adding up to that number. He still had to address two envelopes, and so he went back to the start of his name,

noticing with pleasure that the first two letters added up to eleven too. If he needed signs, he was surrounded by them: ‘turn ill luck into good’ added up to two hundred and fifty-four, which reduced to eleven; the date, 13, reduced to four, which was both the number of the month and the number of letters in “Jack’; “Good Friday the’ reduced to eleven, so that eleven and thirteen were inextricably linked today. He had to count past four pages of advertising for the gas company in order to reach the last names two double-page spreads about gas, and ‘gas’ twice reduced to eleven. That made him grin, and so did the coincidence that three of the addresses on the envelopes, two of them consecutive, were in the same town. He felt as though reality was cracking jokes around him, only these weren’t jokes at his expense.

He finished addressing the envelopes as the eleventh copy emerged from the printer. He was sealing the eleventh envelope as the printer finished its run. He was so eager to post the letters that he had to remind himself to switch off the Amstrad. He sprang the floppy disc from its slot and replaced it in the box of discs and glanced at his watch.

Twenty to eleven. He should have ample time to buy stamps and post the letters at eleven o’clock not that it mattered, of course, except as a small additional reassurance, a kind of wink at himself. He sprinted to Victoria Road, to the post office near the traffic lights. But the post office was shut on Good Friday.

Posting the letters wasn’t so urgent now that he intended to do so, he tried to persuade himself. Tomorrow would do. He wandered to the crossroads and tried to think, as best he could for the distractions of the traffic lights. Was green the solution they kept reaching, or did they keep counting up to red? General stores and corner shops sometimes had postage stamps, and surely there was one nearby which did. “Red, amber, green,” he muttered, ‘go on, green, amber, red,” and almost remembered, or at any rate broke into a run along Victoria Road, peering hot-eyed at the shop fronts

Wasn’t that the shop on the third block? He dashed in, saying “Excuse me’ to an inflated float in the shape of a dragon, which the draught from the opening door rocked towards him. The woman behind the counter raised her head from totalling amounts in a newspaper-deliveries ledger and thrust a fat stump of pencil through the greying curls behind her right ear, and gave Jack an odd look. “Stamps?” he panted.

Was she deaf? If she continued to stare mutely at him he would have to find another shop but then he realised what she might be awaiting. “Please?” he said.

“Hmmm,” she commented, than which no lecture could have been more eloquently reproving. “How many are you after?”

“Thirteen sevens, please.”

“I can’t promise you that many.” She retrieved the stub of pencil and bent to the ledger. Jack waited while she finished the calculation he’d interrupted, but when she turned the page he said “Can I hurry you? I’m rather in one.”

“In one what?” she wondered, then growled under her breath to indicate she’d understood. She dragged open a creaking drawer in her side of the counter and produced two stamps. After some rummaging she found a strip of them folded diagonally in half, which she flicked onto a computer magazine lying in front of Jack. “You’re in luck. A baker’s dozen.”

“Thirteen thirteens, please.”

“You said sevens.”

“Yes, and thirteens too. I mean, I didn’t say that, but I want them.”

“What you want is twenties,” she said as though addressing an in numerate child. “Thirteen twenties are half the trouble.”

Jack was suddenly afraid that she would retrieve the sevens, and so he stuck one on the top envelope. “Here, don’t go licking those,” she cried. “You haven’t paid for them.”

Jack dug a ten-pound note out of his pocket and slapped it on the counter. “Now I have,” he said, and ran his tongue along the back of the strip of eleven stamps. “Can I have my thirteens, please.”

The woman’s square face seemed to set like concrete.

“What’s the point of doing it that way?”

For a moment he couldn’t remember. Of course, the digits of seven and thirteen added up to eleven, and they were also the digits of the sum of “Laura Julia Orchard’, though in a different order. These friends of mine and I,” he said, brandishing the envelopes, ‘we’re stamp collectors.”

“You’re telling me my stamps are something special?”

Jack saw her refusing to sell him any thirteens, hoarding them for herself. “Not by themselves, no. Only to collectors. Two stamps with the same postmark, you see, postmarked Good Friday the 13th,” he babbled. “You don’t see that every day.”

Thank God for that,” she said as though she was holding Jack at least equally responsible, and yanked the drawer out further. “Hmmm,” she said discouragingly, and Jack was poising himself to rush out in search of more stamps, leaving his change to be collected later, when she fished a somewhat crumpled strip of stamps out of the drawer. “If these aren’t it, there’s nothing I can do.”

When she smoothed out the strip it proved to contain fifteen thirteen-penny stamps. She tore off two and passed Jack the remainder, declaring “Well I never’ at the sight of his tongue waiting. By the time she’d sorted out his change he had stamped the envelopes. She counted the coins aloud onto his palm seven pounds and forty pence and Jack heard the digits add up to eleven. Thanks for all your help,” he said.