Heavy Water and Other Stories

firing a car when it was in first gear and the hand brake was on: a forward lurch that took you nowhere. Mal had had an extreme experience with burgers. Burger hell: he’d been there.

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you running in the dads’ race?”

“Told you. Can’t do it, mate. Me back.”

“And your face.”

“Yeah. And me face.”

They watched the races. And, well, how clear do you want it to be, that a boy’s life is all races? School is an exam and a competition and a popularity contest: it’s racing demon. And you saw how the kids were equipped for it by nature—never mind the interminable trials in the rec (never mind the great bent thumb on the stopwatch): lummoxy lollopers, terrifying achievers, sloths, hares, and everything in between. They began as one body, the racers, one pack; and then as if by natural process they moved apart, some forging ahead, others (while still going forward) dropping back. The longer the race, the bigger the differences. Mal tried to imagine the runners staying in line all the way, and finishing as they had begun. And it wasn’t human somehow. It couldn’t be imagined, not on this planet.

Jet’s first event was called.

“Now remember,” said Mal, all hunkered down. “Accelerate into the lengthened stride. Back straight, knees high. Cut the air with the stiff palms. Shallow breathing till you breast that tape.”

In the short time it took Jet to reach the starting blocks—and despite the heat and color of Sheilagh’s boiler suit as it established itself at his side—Mal had fully transformed himself into the kind of sports-circuit horrorparent you read about in the magazines. Why? Simple: because he wanted to live his life again, through the boy. His white-knuckled dukes were held at shoulder height; his brow was scrunched up over the bridge of his nose; and his bloodless lips, in a desperate whisper, were saying, “Ventilate! Work the flow! Loosen up! Loosen up!”

But Jet was not loosening up. He wasn’t loosening and limbering the way Mal had taught him (the way TV had taught Mal), jogging on the spot and wiggling his arms in the air and gasping like an iron lung. Jet was just standing there. And as Mal stared pleadingly on, he felt that Jet looked—completely exceptional. He couldn’t put his finger on it. Not the tallest, not the lithest. But Jet looked completely exceptional. The starting pistol gave its tinny report. After two seconds Mal slapped a hand over his eyes: A!

“Last?” he said, when the noise was over.

“Last,” said Sheilagh, steelily. “Now you leave that boy be.”

Soon Jet was squirming his way through to them and Sheilagh was saying unlucky and never mind, darling, and all this; and his impulse, really, was to do what Mal’s dad would have done to Mal at such a loss of face, and put Jet in hospital for a couple of weeks. See how he liked that. But such ways were old and gone, and he had no will, and the impulse passed. Besides, the boy was uneasily casting himself about, and wouldn’t meet his eye. Mal now felt that he had to offer something, something quixotic, perverse, childish.

“Listen. This Saturday, down the rec, we’re going to work on your pace. We’ll get a burger down you, for your strength, and then we’re going to work on your pace. And guess what. I’ll eat a burger. I’ll eat two.”

This was a family joke; and family jokes can go either way, when you’re no longer a family.

Sheilagh said, “Hark at Burger King.”

Jet said, “Return of Burger King.”

Burger King was a kind of nickname. Jet was smiling at him sinisterly: teeth still blue.

“I will. I swear. For Jet. Blimey. Oop. Jesus. It’s happening. I’m for it now. Here, She. Whoop.”

Eat burgers? He couldn’t even say burgers.

California. When Joseph Andrews’s final face-lift went so badly wrong, and he had to cancel the Vegas thing and shut down his whole West Coast operation, Big Mal decided to stay out in L.A. and give it a go on his own. He shifted his real money to London but kept back a few grand, as his stake. There were offers, schemes, projects. He had made many good friends in the business and entertainment communities. Time to call in a few favors.

And this was how it went: after twenty-three days he was, he believed, on the brink of clinical starvation. People had let him down. He had given up eating, drinking, and smoking, in that order. He was seeing things, and hearing them, too. In the motel, at night, strangers who weren’t really there moved round him, solicitously. He’d be sitting on a patch of grass somewhere and a bird in the tree would start singing a song. Not a bird’s song. A Beatles song. Like “Try and See It My Way,” with all the words. By this stage he was rootling through supermarket dumpsters and discovering that food, so various in its colors and textures, could lose identity and become just one thing. Everywhere he went he was turned away. Even the supermarket Dumpsters were often guarded, in case the trash was tainted, and you ate it, and then sued.

Dawn on the final morning: it was Mal’s forty-fifth birthday. He awoke in the driver’s seat of the old Subaru —in a cinema parking lot out by the airport somewhere. Sheilagh had sorted a ticket for him from the London end: fourteen hours to go. He regarded the flight home not as a journey, not as a return, not as a defeat, but as a free meal. Peanuts first, he thought. Or Bombay Mix.

When he saw the sign he thought it was just another hallucination. “Maurie’s Birthday Burger”… All you had to do was show up with your driver’s license. You could expect a free burger, and a hero’s welcome. Maurie’s had more than seventy outlets in Greater Los Angeles. And once Mal got going, there didn’t seem any good reason to stop. After the thirtieth or thirty-fifth burger, you couldn’t really say he was in it for the grub. But he kept going. It was because Maurie was doing what nobody else was doing: Maurie was letting Mal in.

Gastrically things were already not looking too bright when he arrived at LAX and checked in his luggage: a ripped ten-gallon bag containing all he owned. He made it to the gate more or less okay. It was on the plane that everything started getting out of hand. It appeared that Maurie, that week, had been sold a dodgy batch of meat. Whatever the facts of the matter, Mal felt, as he reached for his seat belt, that he was buckling in twenty pounds of mad cow.

Five hours later, over the Baffin Bay: serious flight-deck discussion of an emergency landing in Disko, Greenland, as Mal continued to reel around the aircraft patiently devastating one toilet after another. They even let him loose on Business. Then, finally, as they cruised in over County Cork, and the passengers were being poked awake, and some of them, stretching and scratching, were slipping away with their wash-bags… well, it seemed to Mal (shrunken, mythically pale, and growing into his seat like a toadstool) that the only possibility was mass ejection. Three hundred parachutes, like three hundred burger buns, streaming down over the Welsh valleys, and the plane heading on, grand and blind.

At the airport he asked She to marry him. He was trembling. Winter was coming and he was afraid of it. He wanted to be safe.

“Jet!” cried Mal. He could hear the kid fumbling around outside.

“Dad!”

“In here!”

Mal was in the clubhouse toilet, alone, cooling his brow against the mirror and leaning on the smudged sink.

“You all right?”

“Yeah, mate. It passed.”

“Does it hurt?” said Jet, meaning his wound.

“Nah, mate. Bit of discomfort.”

“How’d you get it? Who did it?”

He straightened up. “Son?” he began—for he felt he owed Jet an explanation, a testament, a valediction. The fall rays were staring through the thick wrinkled glass. “Son? Listen to me.” His voice echoed, godlike, in the Lucozade light. “Every now and again you’re going to get into one. You go into one and it’s not going to go your way. Sometimes you can see one coming and sometimes you can’t. And some you can never see coming. So you just take what comes. Okay?”

“You and Fat Lol.”

“Me and Fat Lol. Should see the state of him.”

The boy wagged his haircut toward the door.