Heavy Water and Other Stories

Martin Amis HEAVY WATER and Other Stories

To Delilah and Fernanda

CAREER MOVE

WHEN ALISTAIR FINISHED his new screenplay, Offensive from Quasar 13, he submitted it to the LM, and waited. Over the past year, he had had more than a dozen screenplays rejected by the Little Magazine. On the other hand, his most recent submission, a batch of five, had been returned not with the standard rejection slip but with a handwritten note from the screenplay editor, Hugh Sixsmith. The note said:

I was really rather taken with two or three of these, and seriously tempted by Hotwire, which I thought close to being fully achieved. Do please go on sending me your stuff.

Hugh Sixsmith was himself a screenplay writer of considerable, though uncertain, reputation. His note of encouragement was encouraging. It made Alistair brave.

Boldly he prepared Offensive from Quasar 13 for submission. He justified the pages of the typescript with fondly lingering fingertips. Alistair did not address the envelope to the Screenplay Editor. No. He addressed it to Mr. Hugh Sixsmith. Nor, for once, did he enclose his curriculum vitae, which he now contemplated with some discomfort. It told, in a pitiless staccato, of the screenplays he had published in various laptop broadsheets and comically obscure pamphlets; it even told of screenplays published in his university magazine. The truly disgraceful bit came at the end, where it said “Rights Offered: First British Serial only.”

Alistair spent a long time on the covering note to Sixsmith—almost as long as he had spent on Offensive from Quasar 13. The note got shorter and shorter the more he worked on it. At last he was satisfied. There in the dawn he grasped the envelope and ran his tongue across its darkly luminous cuff.

That Friday, on his way to work, and suddenly feeling completely hopeless, Alistair surrendered his parcel to the sub post office in Calchalk Street, off the Euston Road. Deliberately—very deliberately—he had enclosed no stamped, addressed envelope. The accompanying letter, in its entirety, read as follows: “Any use? If not— w.p.b.”

“W.p.b.” stood, of course, for “wastepaper basket”—a receptacle that loomed forbiddingly large in the life of a practicing screenplay writer. With a hand on his brow, Alistair sidled his way out of there—past the birthday cards, the tensed pensioners, the envelopes, and the balls of string.

When Luke finished the new poem—entitled, simply, “Sonnet”—he photocopied the printout and faxed it to his agent. Ninety minutes later he returned from the gym downstairs and prepared his special fruit juice while the answering machine told him, among many other things, to get back to Mike. Reaching for an extra lime, Luke touched the preselect for Talent International.

“Ah. Luke,” said Mike. “It’s moving. We’ve already had a response.”

“Yeah, how come? It’s four in the morning where he is.”

“No, it’s eight in the evening where he is. He’s in Australia. Developing a poem with Peter Barry.”

Luke didn’t want to hear about Peter Barry. He bent and tugged off his tank top. Walls and windows maintained a respectful distance—the room was a broad seam of sun haze and river light. Luke sipped his juice: its extreme astringency caused him to lift both elbows and give a single, embittered nod. He said, “What did he think?”

“Joe? He did backflips. It’s ‘Tell Luke I’m blown away by the new poem. I just know that “Sonnet” is really going to happen.’”

Luke took this coolly. He wasn’t at all old but he had been in poetry long enough to take these things coolly. He turned. Suki, who had been shopping, was now letting herself into the apartment, not without difficulty. She was indeed cruelly encumbered. Luke said, “You haven’t talked numbers yet. I mean like a ballpark figure.”

Mike said, “We understand each other. Joe knows about Monad’s interest. And Tim at TCT.”

“Good,” said Luke. Suki was wandering slenderly toward him, shedding various purchases as she approached—creels and caskets, shining satchels.

“They’ll want you to go out there at least twice,” said Mike. “Initially to discuss… They can’t get over it that you don’t live there.”

Luke could tell that Suki had spent much more than she intended. He could tell by the quality of patience in her sigh as she began to lick the sweat from his shoulderblades. He said, “Come on, Mike. They know I hate all that L.A. crap.”

On his way to work that Monday Alistair sat slumped in his bus seat, limp with ambition and neglect. One fantasy was proving especially obdurate: as he entered his office, the telephone on his desk would actually be bouncing on its console—Hugh Sixsmith, from the Little Magazine, his voice urgent but grave, with the news that he was going to rush Alistair’s screenplay into the very next issue. (To be frank, Alistair had had the same fantasy the previous Friday, at which time, presumably, Offensive from Quasar 13 was still being booted round the floor of the sub post office.) His girlfriend, Hazel, had come down from Leeds for the weekend. They were so small, he and Hazel, that they could share his single bed quite comfortably—could sprawl and stretch without constraint. On the Saturday evening, they attended a screenplay reading at a bookshop on Camden High Street. Alistair hoped to impress Hazel with his growing ease in this milieu (and managed to exchange wary leers with a few shambling, half-familiar figures—fellow screenplay writers, seekers, knowers). But these days Hazel seemed sufficiently impressed by him anyway, whatever he did. Alistair lay there the next morning (her turn to make tea), wondering about this business of being impressed. Hazel had impressed him mightily, seven years ago, in bed: by not getting out of it when he got into it. The office telephone rang many times that Monday, but none of the callers had anything to say about Offensive from Quasar 13. Alistair sold advertising space for an agricultural newsletter, so his callers wanted to talk about creosote admixes and offal reprocessors.

He heard nothing for four months. This would normally have been a fairly good sign. It meant, or it might mean, that your screenplay was receiving serious, even agonized, consideration. It was better than having your screenplay flopping back on the mat by return post. On the other hand, Hugh Sixsmith might have responded to the spirit and the letter of Alistair’s accompanying note and dropped Offensive from Quasar 13 into his wastepaper basket within minutes of its arrival: four months ago. Rereading his fading carbon of the screenplay, Alistair now cursed his own (highly calibrated) insouciance. He shouldn’t have said. “Any use? If not—w.p.b.” He should have said, “Any use? If not—s.a.e.”! Every morning he went down the three flights of stairs—the mail was there to be shuffled and dealt. And every fourth Friday, or thereabouts, he still wrenched open his LM, in case Sixsmith had run the screenplay without letting him know. As a surprise.

“Dear Mr. Sixsmith,” thought Alistair as he rode the train to Leeds. “I am thinking of placing the screenplay I sent you elsewhere. I trust that… I thought it only fair to…” Alistair retracted his feet to accommodate another passenger. “My dear Mr. Sixsmith: In response to an inquiry from… In response to a most generous inquiry, I am putting together a selection of my screenplays for…” Alistair tipped his head back and stared at the smeared