Heavy Water and Other Stories

Then a tall, sidling young man appeared and, after some confusion with the compere, unceremoniously proposed to drink a pint of brown ale without at any point using his hands: he lowered himself out of sight on the flat stage and, a few seconds later, his large sandaled feet, quivering and very white, craned into view, the tall brimmed glass wobbling and sloshing in their grip; there followed, in succession, an abrupt crack and a fierce shout of anger and pain. Drunk, thought Mother wearily. Now there was a rumpy blonde in a white bikini: acrobatics. Mother readied herself to leave. She poked John and directed a sharp finger toward the end of the aisle. No response. She pinched his thigh: the fleshy underside which was always so sore and chapped. At last they stood. “Sit down, woman,” said a voice from behind. They turned, glimpsing a clump of hate-knotted faces. Disgusted male faces, one with a cigarette in it saying, “Get out the fucking road.” And she couldn’t tell how it happened. John did sometimes get like this. He gave a tight snarl or retch and just crashed forward at them. A chair went over and John was flat on his face—pounding, but pounding at nothing but the floor. And of course she had to listen to their laughter until the steward arrived and started helping her with her boy…

No bottle for John that night. You had to be firm. But then he moaned with each intake of breath—till well past midnight. Mother passed it down. Their hands touched. She had it ready anyway. She always did. She always would.

Now the ship moved landwards, nearing Gibraltar and the pincers of the Mediterranean. And now those entities known as foreign countries would occasionally present themselves for inspection—over the littered and clamorous sundecks where Mother dozed and where John sighed and stared and wept. Potted travelogues squawked out over the Tannoy. It hurt Mother’s mind when she tried to make out what the man said. She just turned and gazed with a zestless “Look, John!” What was out there? Rippling terraces salted with smart white villas. Distant docklands, once-thriving colonies where a few old insects still creaked about. A threadbare slope on which bandy pylons stood waiting. Then, too, there was the odd stretch of hallowed shore: the line of little islands like the humped coils of a sea serpent, blank cliffs frowning disconcertedly over the water at the ship, a pink plateau smothered in tousled gray clouds—all of it real and ancient enough, no doubt, all of it parched, grand, indistinguishable.

Oh, but there would be memories! Of course there would be memories! On 007 Night the Purser asked her to dance. Two numbers: “You Only Live Twice” and “Live and Let Die.” On Casino Night she lost ?35 but then backed her lucky number (seventeen) and won, almost breaking even. On Island Night there was a limbo competition and Gary from their table came first. The prize was a bottle of Asti Spumante. Mr. and Mrs. Brine got a glass, and so did Drew, and so did Mother—out under the stars. Ah, that Asti—so sweet, so warm!

In the course of its voyage the ship stopped at five key cities. But Mother’s rule said: You don’t leave the boat. Never leave the boat. What would John want with Seville? Delphi. What did John have to do with Delphi? You stayed on board. That was all right. Many others did the same. And those that ventured ashore often had cause to rue their error. The Brines, for example, debarked at Trieste and made the day trip to Venice. But they got lost and took the wrong train back and, that night, their taxi came screeching and honking through the docks and delivered them to the gangway with only minutes to spare. And the ship would have sailed without them: make no mistake about that. The next day Mr. Brine tried to laugh it all off; but Mrs. Brine didn’t. They had the doctor down to see her and she barely stirred from her cabin until they sank Gibraltar on their way home.

The last stop was somewhere in Portugal. A short bus trip along the coast to a little resort, and all so modestly priced…

“Would you like to go ashore, John?” she said to him idly, as they took their seats in the Robin’s Nest. “Over there. On the land. Tomorrow.”

“Gur,” he said at once. And nodded.

“So you’d like to go ashore,” she mused. Thinking it might be quite nice, saying (to someone or other) that you had once set foot on foreign soil.

But it was one of John’s bad days. The steward brought them their tea and biscuits an hour early, as agreed; and to begin with John seemed incapable of lifting himself from his bunk. Calmly, wryly (this had of course happened before), Mother did what she always did when John was being difficult first thing. She mixed his bottle, gave it a forceful shake—that violent drowning sound—and eased the teat between his lips. John’s lids slid back and he stared at her—in such a way that made her think he was already staring at her, staring with his eyes closed. He cuffed the bottle from her hand and gave a moan of—what? Fear? Outrage? Mother blinked. This was new. Then with relief she remembered that she had given him a whole extra bottle the night before. No, a bottle and a half, to quell his unusual restiveness. Perhaps he’d just lost his taste for it: that was all. But there was no going back now, what with the coupons already bought. “Come on, my boy,” she said. She grasped a soggy leg and dropped it to the cabin floor.

Like a mirage of power and heat the touring-coaches throbbed on the quayside. Down the gangway they inched, and stepped on to Iberia: deliquescent macadam. First on board, thought Mother, as they exchanged the smell of ship for the smell of coach. Forty-five minutes passed, and nothing happened. Such temperatures… The foreign cooling system made heavy weather of the air. John seemed deafened by the bank of sun that smeared him to his seat. Mother watched him: she had the bottle ready but shrewdly withheld it until they were out of the docks and on to the coast road. He reached out a hand. Up ahead, cars made of liquid metal formed on the hilltop and then instantly ricocheted past their window. He managed two swallows, three swallows. The bottle danced in his hands like a bar of soap. “John!” she said. But John just dropped his head, then turned his drenched gaze on the boiling sea and its million eyes.

Well, what could she say except that the whole idea was obviously a most unfortunate mistake? They had them trooping through the town in busloads, each with its own guide (theirs was a local person, Mother surmised): the square, the market, the church, the gardens. Mother followed the others, who followed the guide. And John followed Mother. All of them flinching, cringing, in the heat, the lavatorial gusts and crosscurrents, the beggars, the touts. Mother felt herself obscurely demoted. Language had sent them all to the bottom of the class, had expelled them. They were all like children, all like John, never knowing what on earth they were expected to do. At the restaurant everyone absolutely fell on the wine, and then sat back, rolling their eyes. Even Mother, against the panic, had a couple of glasses of the pink. John took nothing, despite her managing to get the guide to get the waiter to put his soup in a cup.

After lunch the guide was dismissed (with a round of bitter applause) and the ship’s officer announced through a faulty megaphone that they had an hour to shop and souvenir-hunt before reassembling in the square. Mother led John down an alley, about a hundred yards from the coaches, and came to an intransigent halt. If she stood there, in this bit of shade, keeping a careful eye on her watch… Minutes passed. A little boy approached and spoke to them, asking a question. “I can’t understand you, dear,” said Mother in a put-upon voice. Then she had a nasty turn when an old tramp started pestering them. “Go away,” she said. That language: even the children and the tramps could speak it. And the British, she thought, once so proud, so bold… “I said: go away.” She looked around and she saw a sign. It could only mean one thing. Couldn’t it? She urged John forward and when they gained the steps she was already feeling in her purse for the changed money.

The Municipal Aquarium felt like an air-raid shelter, squat, windowless, and redolent of damp stone. Apart from a baby’s swimming pool in the center of the room (in which some kind of turtle apathetically wallowed), there were just a dozen or so square tanks built into the walls, shimmering like televisions. With no prospect of pleasure she tugged John onwards into the deserted shadows. And almost instantly she felt her disaffection loosen and disperse. By the time she was standing in front of the second display, why, Mother fairly beamed. All these strangely reassuring echoes of color and shape and tone… There were some sea anemones that looked just like Mrs. Brine’s smart new bathing cap with its tufted green locks. Coin-shaped mooners bore the same leopard dots and zebra flashes as were to be found among the dramatic patternings of the Parakeet Lounge. Like the ladies on Ballroom Night, flounced, refracted tiddlers waltzed among the dunce’s-hat shells and the pitted coral. Three whiskered, toothless old-timers took a constitutional on the turbid surface while beneath them, in the tank’s middle air, a lone silvery youngster flickered about as if nervously testing its freedom. Lobsters, cripples with a dozen crutches, teddyboy snakes smoothing their skintight trousers on the sandy floor, crabs like the sulphurous drunks in the Kingfisher Bar… She turned.

Where was her son? Mother’s light-adapted eyes blinked indignantly at the dark. Then she saw him, kneeling,