Heavy Water: And Other Stories by Martin Amis Read Free Book Online Page A

your jaw you could enter the arena enclosed in your own concerns, your own preoccupation, your own business. “Cheers, lads,” he said, with a wave, and then frowned into his phone. He’d called Linzi, and was therefore saying things like “Did you, babes? … Have a cup of tea and a Nurofen … Go back to bed. With them brochures … They the Curvilinear or the Crescent? … Are you, darling?” Hunched over his mobile, his knees bent, Mal looked like a man awaiting his moment in the shot put. He was doing what all the other dads were doing, which was putting in an appearance. Presenting an appearance to one another and to the world. And what did Mal’s appearance say? With fights and fighting, this was ancient knowledge. When you received a wound, you didn’t just have to take it, sustain it. You didn’t just have to bear it. You also had to wear it, for all to see, until it healed.
    Nodding, winking, grasping an arm or patting a shoulder here and there, he moved among them. Blazers, shell suits, jeans and open shirts, even the odd dhoti or kaftan or whatever you like to call them. The dads: half of them weren’t even English—thus falling at the first hurdle, socially. Or so Mal might once have thought. “Manjeet, mate,” he was saying. “Mikio. Nusrat!” Socially, these days, even the Pakkis could put the wind up him. Paratosh, for instance, who was some kind of Sikh or Pathan and wore a cravat and acted in radio plays and had beautiful manners. And if I can tell he’s got beautiful manners, thought Mal, then they must be really ace. “Paratosh, mate!” he now cried … But Paratosh just gave him a flat smile and minutely re-angled his stately gaze. It seemed to Mal that they were all doing that. Adrian. Fardous. Why? Was it the wound? He thought not. See, these were the nuclear dads, the ones who’d stuck with their families, so far, anyway. And everybody knew that Mal had broken out, had reneged on the treaty and gone non-nuclear. These men, some of them, were the husbands of Sheilagh’s friends. Clumping and stamping around among them (and trying Fat Lol again now), Mal felt ancient censures ranged against him in these faces of ochre and hazel, of mocha and java. He was pariah, caste polluter; and he thought they thought he had failed, as a man. Awkward, massively cuboid, flinching under a thin swipe of dark hair, his fingers hovering over the contours of his damaged cheek, Mal was untouchable, like his wound.
    Other dads talked on mobiles, their conversations disembodied, one-way. For a moment they sounded insane, like all the monologuists and soliloquizers of the city streets.
2. A SIAN B ABIES
    Linzi’s real name was Shinsala, and her family came from Bombay, once upon a time. You wouldn’t guess any of this, talking to her on the phone. Most of the foreign dads—the Nusrats, the Fardouses, the Paratoshes—spoke better English than Mal. Much better English. While presumably also being pretty good at Farsi, Urdu, Hindi, or whatever. And he had to wonder: how could that be? How come there was so little left over for Mal? Linzi, on the other hand, prompted no such reproaches. She spoke worse than Sheilagh, worse than Mal. She spoke as bad as Fat Lol. She spoke straight East End, with only this one little exoticism, in the way she handled her pronouns. Linzi said he where an English person would say him or his . Like “compared to he.” Or “driving he car.” Same with she . Like “the way she wears she skirts.” Or “I hate she.” It sometimes gave Mal a fright, because he thought she was talking about She. Sheilagh. And Linzi was always threatening a confrontation with She: like today, for instance. Mal didn’t want to think about those two getting together. A!
    But now the big man was shouldering his way indoors. He passed a Coke machine, bulletin boards, the entrance to the changing rooms, a snack hatch and its hamburger breath. Jesus. Mal wasn’t a big boozer, like some. But