Heavy Water and Other Stories

mate: it comes now. Like a great paper cut to the heart. Mal’s belly, his proud, placid belly, was abruptly the scene of hysterical rearrangements. And he felt the need to speak, before he fell.

The moment was familiar to him. He’d seen them go down, his comrades, the tuxed custodians of the bronze door knocker and the coachhouse lantern. The big schwartzer Darius, sliding down a lamppost after he’d stopped a tire iron outside Ponsonby’s. Or Fat Lol himself, in Fauntleroy’s, crashing from table to table with half a beer bottle in his crown. They wanted to say something, before they went. It made you think of fifties war films. What was it? “I’ve copped it in the back, sir.” Not that the falling bouncer ever managed to blurt much out: an oath, a vow. It was the look on their faces, wanting acknowledgment or respect, because here they were, in a kind of uniform—the big black bow tie, the little black shoes—and going down in the line of service. Going down, they wanted it recognized that they’d earned their salt. Did they want to say—or hear—the word “Sir”?

He walked backward until his shoulders crashed into the windowsill. He landed heavily on his arse: A! Fat Lol knelt to cradle him.

“Here, Lol, I’m holding one,” said Mal. “Jesus, I’m gone, mate. I’m gone!”

Fat Lol wanted the name of the man who’d done him. And so did the police. Mal couldn’t help them with their inquiries. “Don’t know him from Adam,” he insisted, reckoning he’d never before set eyes on the bloke. But he had. It came to him eventually, his memory stirred by hospital food.

Hospital food. Mal would never own up to it, but he loved hospital food. Not a good sign, that, when you start fancying your hospital food. You hear the creak of the trolley, instantaneously suffusing the whole ward with that smell of warm damp newspaper, and suddenly your mauled gut rips into life like an outboard motor and you’re gulping down half a pint of drool. It shows you’re getting institutionalized in the worst way. He had no use for the pies and quiches that Sheilagh brought in for him. Either he’d bin them or give the grub to the stiffs on his ward. The old guys—in the furnace of the night they whinnied like pub dogs having nightmares under the low tables…

It was as he was kissing his bunched fingertips and congratulating the dinner lady on her most recent triumph that Mal suddenly remembered: remembered the man who’d done him. “Jesus Christ,” he said to the dinner lady in her plastic pinafore. “Ridiculous, innit. I mean I never even…” Warily, the old dear moved on, leaving Mal frowning and shaking his head (and digging into his meal). It was the fried skin of the fish fingers: in this surface Mal recognized the dark ginger of his assailant’s hair. On the night of the stabbing, and on another night, months earlier, months… It was late, it was cold: Mal on the steps of Fauntleroy’s, sealing off the lit doorway like a boulder with his bulk, and the little ginge going, “Am I hearing you saying that I’m not good enough?”

“I don’t know what you’re hearing, mate, but what I’m saying is it’s members only.”

Calling him “mate” and not “sir”: this meant that Mal’s patience was being sorely tried.

“It’s as I’m a working man like.”

“No, mate. I’m a working man too. But I won’t be if I let you in. Regulations. This is a clip joint, mate. What you want to do, come in here and buy some tart a glass of Lucozade for eighty-five quid? Go off home.”

“So you don’t like my kind.”

“Yeah, it’s your ginger hair, mate. Ginger-haired blokes ain’t admitted. Here. It’s late. It’s cold. Walk away.”

“Am I hearing you saying I’m not good enough?”

“Look fuck off out of it.”

And that was that. Something of the sort happened ten times a night. But this little ginge waits until spring and then comes back and leaves a blade in Mal’s gut: “Hold that, mate.” And now Mal was on the Lucozade, and eating fish fingers off a tray that slid up the bed.

I’ve copped it in the back, sir… From The Dam Busters, the film that, as a child, he had so pined to see. Like Jet with Mortal Kombat. He thought of another of its lines: “Nigger’s dead, sir.” Delivered awkwardly, tenderly, the man breaking it to the senior officer. Meaning the dog. They had a dog called Nigger. Their little black dog, their unofficial mascot, who dies, was called Nigger. You couldn’t do that now. No way. In a film. Call a dog Nigger? No way, no day. Times change. Call a black dog Nigger? No shape, no form. Be down on you like a… Call a dead black dog Nigger in a film? No way Jose.

4. BURGER KING

So class and race and gender were supposedly gone (and other things were supposedly going, like age and beauty and even education): all the really automatic ways people had of telling who was better or worse—they were gone. Right-thinkers everywhere were claiming that they were clean of prejudice, that in them the inherited formulations had at last been purged. This they had decided. But for those on the pointed end of the operation—the ignorant, say, or the ugly—it wasn’t just a decision. Some of them had no new clothes. Some were still dressed in the uniform of their deficiencies. Some were still wearing the same old shit.

Some would never be admitted.

Mal looked on, and stiffened. The gym master went by with his bullhorn like a prototype mobile phone, calling the names for the first event. The parents faced the track, and the fantastic interrogation of the low sun, with binoculars, cameras, camcorders, and all their other children—little sisters, big brothers, and babies (crying, yawning, dangling a pouched foot). Mal looked on, careful to maintain a distance of at least two parents between himself and Sheilagh, her green boiler suit, her fine, light, russety hair. Between them bobbed other heads of hair work—gray streaks, pageboy, urchin, dyed caramel; and, among the men, various tragedies of disappearance, variously borne, and always the guy with a single strand pasted across his dome, as if one sideburn had thrown a line to the other. Maybe the sun wasn’t staring but turning the lights on full, like at Fauntleroy’s when dawn came (and you wondered at the value of what you’d been guarding), so everybody could just see for themselves.

Runners in regulation off-white shorts and T-shirts were gathering on the starting line. Mal consulted his program: a single cyclostyled sheet. Lost in concentration (lips working), he felt a pull on his arm.

“Oi,” he said. For it was Jet. “Better get out there, mate.”

“This is the fourth form.”

“What are you in then?”

“Seventy meters and two-twenty.”

“…So you ain’t on for a while. Right. Let’s work on your preparation.”

Jet turned away. The styled hair, the gold earring. For a second the backs of his ears gleamed orange and transparent. Now Jet turned again and looked at him with that shy leer in the raised upper lip. Jesus: his teeth were blue. But that was okay. It was just the trace of a lolly he’d managed to get down him, not some new way of deliberately looking horrible. The law of fashion said that every child had to offend its parents aesthetically. Mal had offended his parents aesthetically: the drainpipes and brothel creepers, the hair like a riptide of black grease. Jet had contrived to offend Mal aesthetically. And Jet’s kids, when they came, would face the arduous task of aesthetically offending Jet.

“Okay, let’s get your head right. Go through the prep drill. Point One.”

And again the boy turned away. Stood his ground, but turned away. For two academic years running, Jet had come nineteenth in his class of twenty. Mal liked to think that Jet made up for this with his dad-tweaked excellence on the sports field. The gym, the squash court, the pool, the park: training became the whole relationship. Of late, naturally, their sessions had been much reduced. But they still went to the rec on Saturday afternoons, with the stopwatch, the football, the discus, the talc. And Jet seemed less keen these days. And Mal, too, felt differently. Now, seeing Jet bottling a header or tanking a sprint, Mal would draw in breath to scold or embolden him and then silently exhale. And feel nothing but nausea. He no longer had the authority or the will. And then came the blackest hour: Jet dropped from the school football team… A distance was opening up between father and son, and how do you close it? How do you do that? Every Saturday lunchtime they sat in the tot-party toy town of McDonald’s, Jet with his Happy Meal (burger, fries, and a plastic doodad worth ten pee), Mal with his Chicken McNuggets or his Fish McCod. They didn’t eat. Like lovers over their last supper in a restaurant—the food not even looked at, let alone touched. Besides, for some time now the very sight of a burger was enough to give Mal’s stomach a jolt. It was like