Heavy Water and Other Stories

Mal said, “Now, what?”

“Two-twenty.”

“Oi. Listen. Jet. I’ll run if you will. Okay? I’ll run the dads’ race. And give it me all. If you will. Deal?”

Jet nodded. Mal looked down at his hair: seemed like they’d gone round the edge of it with a clipper or whatever, leaving a shaved track two or three inches wide… As Mal followed him outside he realized something. Jet on the starting line with all the others: he had looked completely exceptional. Not the tallest. Not the lithest. What, then? He was the whitest. He was just the whitest.

Now that prejudice was gone everyone could relax and concentrate on money.

Which was fine if you had some.

5. RHYMING SLANG

To be frank, Fat Lol couldn’t believe that Mal was still interested.

“You?” he said. “You? Big Mal: minder to the superstars?”

Yeah, that was it. Big Mal: megaminder. Mal said, “How you doing then?”

“Me? I’m onna dole, mate. I’m onna street. So I put myself about. But you?”

“That’s all kind of dried up. Joseph Andrews and that. I’m basically short. Temporarily. Hopefully. So with all the changes going down I need any extra I can get.”

Mal could not speak altogether freely. With the two men, round the table, sat Fat Lol’s wife, Yvonne, and their six-year-old son, little Vic. They were having lunch in Del’s Caff on Paradise Street in the East End—and it was like another world. Mal and Fat Lol were born in the same house in the same week; but Mal had come on, and Fat Lol hadn’t. Mal had evolved. There he sat, in his shell suit, with his dark glasses—a modern person. His son had a modern name: Jet. He could call his Asian babe on his mobile phone. And he had left home. Which you didn’t do. And there was Fat Lol in his Sloppy Joe, his sloppy jeans, and his old suedes, with his wife looking like a bank robber and his son flinching when either parent made a move for the vinegar or the brown sauce. Fat Lol was still in the muscle business (this and that). He had felt the tug of no other calling. He had stayed with it, like a brand loyalty.

“So,” said Fat Lol, “what you’re saying, if there’s something going—this and that—you’d be on for a bit of it.”

“Exactly.”

“On a part-time basis. Nights.”

“Yeah.”

Fat Lol: he provided dramatic proof of the proposition that you are what you eat. Fat Lol was what he ate. More than this, Fat Lol was what he was eating. And he was eating, for his lunch, an English breakfast—Del’s All Day Special at ?3.25. His mouth was a strip of undercooked bacon, his eyes a mush of egg yolk and tinned tomatoes. His nose was like the end of a lightly grilled pork sausage—then the baked beans of his complexion, the furry mushrooms of his ears. Paradise Street right down to his bum crack—that was Fat Lol. A loaf of fried bread on legs. Mal considered the boy: silent, cautious, eyeing the fruit machine with cunning and patience.

Yvonne said, “So you’re having a bit of bother making ends meet. Since you went off with that Lucozade.”

“No unpleasantness, please, Yv,” said Mal, aghast. They didn’t see each other so often now, but for many years Yv and She had been best mates. And Yv was always sharp, like her name, like her face. “She ain’t a Lucozade anyway. Come on, Yv. In this day and age?”

Yvonne went on eating, busily, with her head down. Last mouthful. There.

“She ain’t a Lucozade anyway.” People thought that Lucozade was rhyming slang for spade. But Mal knew that spades weren’t called Lucozades because spade rhymed with Lucozade. Spades were called Lucozades because spades drank Lucozade. Anyway, Linzi was from Bombay and she drank gin. “She’s of Indian extraction but she was born right here on Paradise Street.”

“Same difference,” said Yvonne.

“Shut it,” said Fat Lol.

When closed, as now, it—Yv’s mouth—looked like a copper coin stuck in a slot. No, there wasn’t any slot: just the nicked rim of the penny jamming it. Dear oh dear, thought Mal: the state of her boat. Boat was rhyming slang for face (via boat race). It had never struck him as appropriate or evocative until now. Her whole head like a prow, a tight corner, a hairpin bend.

“Linzi—when she signs her name,” said Yvonne. “Does she do a little circle over the last ‘i’?”

Mal considered. “Yeah,” he said.

“Thought so. Just like any other little English slag. Does she do the same with ‘Pakki’?”

“Shut it,” said Fat Lol.

Later, in the Queen Mum, Fat Lol said, “What you doing tonight?”

“Not a lot.”

“There’s some work on if you fancy it.”

“Yeah?”

“Clamping.”

“Clamping?”

“Yeah,” said Fat Lol. “Onna clamps.”

Yv had a been-around face, and so did She. She’s boat, as he remembered it, because he couldn’t look at it, was trusting, gentle, yokelish, under its duster of shallow red hair. Soon Mal would be obliged to look at that face, and look into it, and face that face with his.

But first Jet in the two-twenty!

“Stick to the game plan,” Mal was telling him. “Remember. Run it like it’s three seventy-meter sprints. One after the other.”

Jet leered up at him. What Mal’s game plan came down to, plainly enough, was that Jet should run flat out every step of the way.

“Go for it, son. Just do it.”

The raised starting pistol, the ragged lunge from the blocks… By the halfway point Jet had pelted himself into a narrow lead. “Now you dig deep,” Mal murmured, on the terrace, with She’s shape at his side. “Now it’s down to your desire. Dig, mate, dig. Dig! Dig! Dig!” As Jet came flailing on to the home straight—and as, one by one, all the other runners shot past him—Mal’s cold right hand was slowly seeking his brow. But then Jet seemed to topple forward. It was as if the level track had suddenly been tipped at an angle, and Jet wasn’t running but falling. He passed one runner, and another…

When Mal went over Jet was still lying facedown in the rusty cinders. Mal knelt, saying, “Fourth. Talk about a recovery. Great effort, mate. It was your character got you through that. It was your heart. I saw your heart out there. I saw your heart.”

Sheilagh was beyond them, waiting. Mal helped Jet to his feet and slipped him a quid for a tin of drink. The running track was bounded by a low fence; further off lay a field or whatever, with a mob of trees and bushes in the middle of it. There She was heading, Mal coming up behind her, head bent. As he stepped over the fence he almost blacked out with culture shock: the running track was a running track but this was the country…

He came up to her wiggling a finger in the air. “Look. Sounds stupid,” he said. “But you go behind that bush and I’ll call you.”

“Call me?”

“On your mobile.”

“Mal!”

Turning and bending, he poked out her number. And he began.

“Sheilagh? Mal. Right. You know that woman we went to said I had a problem communicating? Well okay.