Heavy Water: And Other Stories (7 page)

Sheilagh called him on his mobile to say that the boys’ buses had finally arrived.

3. M
ORTAL
K
OMBAT

He felt he was a man in a classic situation. Its oddities were just oddities: happenstance, not originality. As he moved outside into the air, exchanging the Irish colorations of the saloon (best expressed, perhaps, in the seething browns of Bern’s bourbons) for the polar clarity of a mid-September noon, that was all he saw: his situation. The sun was neither hot nor high just incredibly intense, as if you could
hear
it, the frying roar of its winds. Every year the sun did this, subjecting the kingdom to the fiercest and most critical scrutiny. It was checking up on the state of England. Sheilagh in her lime boiler suit came and stood beside him.

He turned away. He said, “We’ve got to talk, She. Face to face.”

“When?”

“Later,” he said. Because now the boys were filing in through the gateway from the car park. Mal stood there, watching: a lesson in bad posture. In his peripheral vision Sheilagh breathed and swelled. How light the boys looked: how amazingly light.

For a younger woman. Abandoning his wife and his child
 … How true was that? Mal considered it possible to argue that Sheilagh wasn’t really his wife. Okay, he’d married her. But only a year ago. As a nice surprise—like a birthday treat. Honestly, it didn’t mean a thing. Mal had thought at the time that She overreacted. For months she went around with that greedy look on her face. And it wasn’t just a look. She gained ten pounds over Christmas.
Abandoning his child
. Well, that was true enough. They had him bang to rights on that one. On the day he broke the news: the idea was, Mal’d tell him, and then She’d take him off to
Mortal Kombat
. Which Jet had been yearning to see for months—aching, pining. And Jet didn’t want to go to it. Mal watched Sheilagh trying to drag him down the street, his gym shoes, his gray tracksuit bottoms, his stubborn bum. Mal took him to
Mortal Kombat
the following week. Fucking stupid. Booting each other in the face for twenty minutes without so much as a fat lip.

Here came the kid now, with his mother already bending over him to straighten the collar of his polo shirt and pat his styled hair. Styled hair? Since when was that? Jesus: an earring. That was Sheilagh playing the fun young mum. You know: take him down Camden Market and buy him a leather jacket. Keeping his counsel, for now, Mal crouched down
(A!)
to kiss Jet’s cheek and tousle his—wait. No, he wouldn’t want that tousled. Jet wiped his cheek and said, “Dad? Who beat you up?”

“We was outnumbered. Heavily outnumbered.” He did a calculation. There’d been about thirty of them. “Fifteen to one. Me and Fat Lol.” He didn’t tell Jet that fifteen of them had been women.

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you running in the Fathers’ Race?”

“No way.”

Jet looked at his mother, who said, “Mal, you got to.”

“No way, no day. It’ll do me back in.”

“Mal.”

“No shape, no form.”

“But Dad.”

“No way José.”

Mal looked down. The boy was staring with great narrowness of attention, almost cross-eyed, and with his mouth dropped open—staring into the hills and valleys of his father’s wound.

“You just concentrate on your own performance,” Mal told him.

“But Dad. You’re meant to be a
bouncer,”
said Jet.

Bouncing, being a bouncer—as a trade, as a calling—had the wrong reputation. Bouncing, Mal believed, was misunderstood.

Throughout the seventies, he had served all night long at many an exclusive doorway, had manned many a prestigious portal, more often than not with Fat Lol at his side. The team: Big Mal and Fat Lol. They started together at the Hammersmith Palais. Soon they worked their way up to West End places like Ponsonby’s and Fauntleroy’s. He did it for fifteen years, but it only took about a week to get the hang of it.

Bouncing wasn’t really about bouncing—about chucking people out. Bouncing was about not letting them in. That was pretty much all there was to it—to bouncing. Oh, yeah. And saying “Sir,” and “Gentlemen.”

See a heavy drunk or one of those white-lipped weasel-weights, and it’s “Sorry, sir, you can’t come in. Why? Cos you’re not a member, sir. If you can’t find a taxi at this hour, sir, we’d be happy to call you a minicab here from the door.”

See a load of obvious steamers coming down the mews in their suits, and it’s “Good evening to you, gentlemen. No I’m sorry, gentlemen. Gentlemen, this club is members only. Oi! Look, hold up, lads. Gentlemen! Lol! Okay. Okay. If you’re still wide awake, gentlemen, may I recommend Jimmy’s, at 32 Noel Street, bottom bell. Left and left again.”

About once a week, usually at weekends, Mr. Carburton would come down to the door, stare you in the eye, and say, with dreadful weariness, “Who fucking let
them
in?”

You’d go, “Who?”

“Who? Them two fucking nutcases who’re six foot six with blue chins.”

“Seemed all right.” And you might have added, in your earlier days, “They was with a bird.”

“They’re
always
with a bird.”

But the bird’s disappeared and the blokes are hurling soda siphons around and you head up the stairs and you … So the only time you did any actual bouncing was when you had failed: as a bouncer. Bouncing was a mop-up operation made necessary by faulty bouncing. The best bouncers never did any bouncing. Only bad bouncers bounced. It might have sounded complicated, but it wasn’t.

 … In their frilly shirts, their reeking tuxes, Mal and Fat Lol, on staircases, by fire exits, or standing bent over the till at five in the morning when the lights came on full, and at the flick of a switch you went from opulence to poverty—all the lacquer, glamour, sex, privilege, empire, wiped out, in a rush of electricity.

That was also the time of genuine danger. Astonishing, sometimes, the staying power of those you’d excluded and turned away—turned away, pushed away, shoved, shouldered, clipped, slapped, smacked, tripped, kicked, kneed, nutted, loafed. Or just told, “Sorry, sir.” They’d wait all night—or come back, weeks or months later. You’d escort the palely breakfastless hatcheck girl to her Mini and then head on down the mews to your own vehicle through the mist of the Ripper dawn. And he’d be waiting, leaning against the wall by the car, finishing a bottle of milk and weighing it in his hands.

Because some people will not be excluded. Some people will not be turned away … Mal bounced here, Mal bounced there; he bounced away for year after year, without serious injury. Until one night. He was leaving early, and there on the steps was the usual shower of chauffeurs and minicabbies, hookers, hustlers, ponces, tricks, twanks, mugs and marks, and, as Mal jovially shouldered his way through, a small shape came close, saying breathily, dry-mouthed,
Hold that, mate
 … Suddenly Mal was backing off fast in an attempt to get a good look at himself: at the blade in his gut and the blood following the pleats of his soiled white shirt. He thought, What’s all this you hear about getting stabbed not hurting? Comes later, doesn’t it—the pain? No, 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 José.

4. B
URGER
K
ING

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.