Heavy Water and Other Stories Page 6

  “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.

  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. Maybe she was onto something. But here goes. Since I left you and little Jet I… It’s like I got gangrene or something. It’s all right for about ten minutes if I’m reading the paper or watching the golf. You know. Distracted. Or knocking a ball about with Val and Rodge.” Val and Rodge were, by some distance, the most elderly couple that Mal and Sheilagh played mixed doubles with at Kentish Town Sports. “Then it ain’t so bad. For ten minutes.” By now Mal had both his arms round his head, like a mouth-organist. Because he was talking into his phone and crying into his sleeve. “I lost something and I never knew I had it. Me peace of mind. It’s like I know how you… how women feel. When you’re upset, you’re not just pissed off. You feel ill. Sick. It goes inside. I feel like a woman. Take me back, She. Do it. I swear I—”

  He heard static and felt her hand on his shoulder. They hugged: A!

  “Christ, Mal, who messed with your face?”

  “Ridiculous, innit. I mean some people you just wouldn’t believe.”

  And she breathed out, frowning, and started straightening his collar and brushing away its scurf with the back of her hand.

  6. MOTOR SHOW

  “Park inna Inn onna Park,” said Fat Lol.

  “We ain’t doing it in there, are we?”

  “Don’t talk fucking stupid. Pick up me van.”

  Access to the innards of the Inn on the Park having been eased by Fat Lol’s acquaintance with—and remuneration of—one of the hotel’s garage attendants, the two men drove boldly down the ramp in Mal’s C-reg. BM. They then hoisted themselves into Fat Lol’s Vauxhall Rascal and proceeded east through Mayfair and Soho. Mal kept peering in the back. The clamps lay there, heavily jumbled, like land mines from an old war.

  “They don’t look like normal clamps. Too big.”

  “Early model. Before they introduced the more compact one.”

  “Bet they weigh.”

  “They ain’t light,” conceded Fat Lol.

  “How’s it go again?”

  Mal had to say that the scheme made pretty good sense to him. Because it relied on turnover. Mass clamping: that was the order of the day. Clearly (or so Fat Lol argued), there wasn’t a lot of sense in tooling round the West End doing the odd Cortina on a double yellow line. Clamp a car, and you got seventy quid for declamping it. What you needed was cars in bulk. And where did you find cars in bulk? In a National Car Park.

  But hang about: “How can you clamp a car in a National Car Park?”

  “If they not in they bay. The marked area.”

  “Bit harsh innit mate?”

  “It’s legal,” said Fat Lol indignantly. “You can clamp them even in an N.C.P. If they park bad.”

  “Bet they ain’t too pleased about it.”

  “No, they ain’t overly chuffed.”

  Fat Lol handed Mal a sample windscreen sticker. “Warning: This Vehicle Is Illegally Parked. Do Not Attempt to Move It. For Prompt Assistance…” On the side window of his Rascal additional stickers indicated that Fat Lol welcomed all major credit cards.

  “Give them a while and they cool off by the time you get there. Just want to get home. What’s it going to be anyway? Some little slag from Luton bring his wife in for a night onna town.”

  They decided to kick off with a medium-rise just north of Leicester Square. No gatekeeper, no bouncer to deny them entry.
The automatic arm of the barrier rose like a salute. On the second floor: “Bingo,” said Fat Lol. Twenty prime vehicles packed tight at one end, crouching, waiting, gleaming in the dangerous light of car parks.

  Out they dropped. “Fucking Motor Show,” said Fat Lol. And it was true: the chrome heraldry, the galvannealed paintwork. They hesitated as a family saloon swung down from Level 3.

  “Let’s do it.”

  Disappointingly, only four vehicles were adjudged by Fat Lol to have outstepped their prescribed boundaries. But he soon saw another way.

  “Okay. Let’s do them if they’re touching the white lines.”

  “In tennis,” said Mal moderately, “the white lines count in.”

  “Well in clamping,” said Fat Lol, in a tight voice, bending low, “the white lines count out.”

  It was warm and heavy work. These ancient gadgets, the clamps—they were like fucking steamrollers. You had to free them from the van and from each other and hump them into position. Next you got down there—A!—and worked the pipe wrench on the snap ratchet. Then: thwock. There was the clamp with its jaw fast on the car’s wheel. One bit was quite satisfying: spreading the gummy white sticker all over the windscreen.

  Fat Lol was down there doing a K-reg. Jag when Mal said, “Oi. I can see your bum crack.”

  “Bend down.” Fat Lol stood up. “I can see yourn.”

  “You said dress casual.”

  “With a car like this,” Fat Lol announced huskily, “it tears you apart. I mean, with a car like this, you don’t want to clamp it.”

  “You want to nick it.”

  “Nah. To clamp a motor such as this, it’s…”

  “Sacrilege.”

  “Yeah. It’s fucking sacrilege to mess with a motor such as this.”

  Mal heard it first. Like something detaching itself from the siren song of Leicester Square, where the old sounds of various thrashed and envassaled machines contended with the sound of the new, its pings, pips, peeps, beeps, bleeps, tweets and squawks and yawps… Big Mal heard it first, and paused there, down on one knee with his pipe wrench. A concentrated body of purposeful human conversation was moving toward them, the sopranos and contraltos of the women, the sterling trebles and barrelly baritones of the men, coming up round the corner now, like a ballroom, like civilization, uniforms of tuxedo and then streaks and plumes of turquoise, emerald, taffeta, dimity.