Heavy Water and Other Stories

HEAVY WATER

JOHN AND MOTHER STOOD side by side on the stern deck as the white ship backpedaled out of the harbor. Some people were still waving in friendly agitation from the shore; but the great machines of the dock (impassive guardians of the smaller, less experienced machines) had already begun to turn away from the parting ship, their arms folded in indifference and disdain… John waved back. Mother looked to starboard. The evening sun was losing blood across the estuary, weakening, weakening; directly below, the slivers of crimson light slipped over the oil-stained water like mercurial rain off fat lilies. John shivered. Mother smiled at her son.

“Tired and thirsty, are you, John?” she asked him (for they had traveled all day). “Tired and thirsty?”

John nodded grimly.

“Let’s go down then. Come on. Let’s go down.”

Things started heating up the next day.

“What, so he’s not quite all there then,” said the man called Mr. Brine.

“You could say that,” said Mother.

“Bit slow on the old uptake.”

“If you like. Yes,” said Mother simply, gazing across the deck to the sea (where the waves were already rolling on to their backs to bask in the sun). “Are you too hot, John, my pet? Say if you are.”

“Does he always cry then?” asked Mr. Brine. “Or’s he just having a good blub?”

Mother turned. Her nicked mouth was like the crimp at the bottom of a toothpaste tube. “Always,” she consented. “It’s his eyes. It’s not that he’s sad. The doctors say it’s his poor eyes.”

“Poor chap,” said Mrs. Brine. “I do feel sorry for him. Poor love.”

Mr. Brine took his sopping cigar out of his mouth and said, “What’s his name. ‘John’? How are you, John? Enjoying your cruise, are you, John? Whoop. Look. He’s at it again. Cheer up, John! Cheer up!”

Drunk, thought Mother wearily. Half past twelve in the afternoon of the first full day and everyone was drunk… The swimming pool slopped and slapped; water upon water. The sea twanged in the heat. The sun came crackling across the ocean toward the big ship. John was six feet tall. He was forty-three.

He sat there oozily in his dark gray suit. John wore a plain white shirt—but, as always, an eye-catching tie. Some internal heat source fueled his bleeding eyes; otherwise his fat face was worryingly colorless, like an internal organ left too long on its tray. His chin toppled into his breasts and his breasts toppled into his belly… With some makes of car, the bigger the model, the smaller the mascot on its bonnet; and so, alas, it was with John. A little shy sprig for his manhood from which Mother, at bathtime, would politely avert her gaze. Water seeped and crept and tiptoed from his eyes all day and all night. Mother loved him with all her heart. This was her life’s work: that John should feel no pain.

“Yes,” said Mother, leaning forward to thumb his cheeks, “he’s still a child really—aren’t you, John? Come with Mother now, darling. Come along.”

Mr. and Mrs. Brine watched them start to make their way below. The little woman leading her heavy son by the hand.

At eight o’clock every morning they were brought tea and biscuits and the Cruise News in their cabin by the adolescent steward: Mother thought he looked like the Artful Dodger with rickets, for all his cream blazer and burgundy slacks. With a candid groan John rolled off the lower bunk and sat rubbing his eyes with his knuckles, very like a child, as Mother nimbly availed herself of the four-runged wooden ladder. She drank two cups of the taupe liquid, and then gave John his bottle—the usual mixture she knew he liked. Next, tenderly grunting, she inserted his partial (John fell down often and heavily, and one such fall had cost him two incisors—years ago). As she withdrew her hand, threads of saliva would cling yearningly to her fingers: please don’t take your hand away, please, not yet. In the bright stall of the bathroom she put him through his motions. And at last she clothed his cumbrous body, her tongue giving a cluck of satisfaction as she furled the giant Windsor of his flaming tie.

Dreamily she said, “Do you want to go down for your breakfast now, John?”

“Gur,” he said. (“Gur” was yes. “Go” was no.)

“Come along then, John. Come along.”

Out through the door and the smell of ship seized you by the sinuses: the smell of something pressurized, and ferociously synthetic. They entered the zigzagged dining room, with its pearl-droplet lighting, its submarine heat, and its pocket-sized Goanese staff in their rusty tuxedos. In a spirit of thrift Mother consumed the full buffet grill—omelette, sausage, bacon, lamb chop—while John did battle with a soft-boiled egg, watched with enfeebled irony by Mr. and Mrs. Brine. There were two other guests at their table: a young man called Gary, who had thoughts only for his sunbathing and the inch-thick tan he intended to present to his co-workers at the ventilation-engineering plant in Croydon; and a not-so-young woman called Drew, who came largely for the sea air and the exotic food—the chop sueys, the Cheltenham curries. Then, too, perhaps, both Drew and Gary had hopes of romance: the pretty daughters, the handsome officers… There’d been a Singles’ Party in the Robin’s Nest, hosted by the Captain himself, on the night they sailed. An invitation was waiting for John when he and Mother came staggering into their cabin. She slipped it out of sight, of course, being always very careful, you understand, not to let him get upset with anything of that sort. Taking a turn on deck that evening, they passed the Robin’s Nest and Mother, with maximum caution, peered in through the wide windows, expecting to witness some Caligulan debauch. But really: whyever had she bothered? Such a shower of old bags you’d never seen. Wherever were the pretty daughters? And wherever were the officers? “At it already,” said Mr. Brine at dinner that night, in a slurred undertone. “The officers nail down all the talent before the ship weighs anchor. It’s well known.” Mother frowned. “Going abroad, the girls want looking after,” said Mrs. Brine indulgently. “It’s the uniform…” Soft, see-through white of egg bobbled hesitantly down John’s long face, pausing on his chin to look before it leapt on to the expanse of the serviette secured to his throat by Mother.

Up on deck two Irish builders were stirring and swearing beneath the lifeboats, having slept where they dropped. Mother hurried John along. Soon those two would be up in the Kingfisher Bar with their Fernet Brancas and their beers. The ship was a pub afloat, a bingo hall on ice. This way you went abroad on a lurching chunk of England, your terror numbed by English barmen serving duty-frees.

Mr. Brine was a union man. There were many such on board. It was 1977: the National Front, the IMF, Mr. Jenkins’s Europe; Jim Callaghan meets Jimmy Carter; the Provos, Rhodesia, Windscale. This year, according to Mother’s morning news sheet, the cruise operators had finally abandoned the distinction between first and second class. A deck and B deck still cost the same amount more than C deck or D deck. But the actual distinction had finally been abandoned.

At ten o’clock John and Mother attended the Singalong in the Parakeet Lounge. And here they sang along to the sounds of the Dirk Delano Trio. Or Mother did, with her bloodless lips. John’s head wallowed on his wide bent back, his liquid eyes bright, expectant. It was a conviction of Mother’s that John particularly relished these sessions. Once, halfway through a slow one that always took Mother back (the bus shelter beneath the sodden Palais, larky Bill in the rain with his jacket on inside out), John went rigid and let forth a baying moo that made the band stall and stutter, earning him a chuckling rebuke from handsome, dirty-minded Dirk at song’s end. John grinned furtively. So did everybody else. Mother said nothing, but gave John a good pinch on the sensitive underflab of his upper arm. And he never did it again.

Afterwards they would take a turn on deck before repairing to the Cockatoo Rooms, where Prize Bingo was daily disputed. Again John sat there stolidly enough as Mother fussed over her card—a bird herself, a nest-proud sparrow, with new and important things to think about. He gave signs of animation only at moments of ritual hubbub—when, say, the contestants wolf-whistled in response to the Caller’s fruity “Legs Eleven!” or when they chanted back a triumphant “Sunset Strip!” in response to his enticing “Sevenny Seven…?” This morning Mother got six numbers in a row and reflexively yelped out “House!” as if making some shameful declaration about her own existence. Now it was her turn to be stared at. Rank upon rank of pastel cruisewear. Faces contracted in disappointment and a sense of betrayal… The Caller’s assistant, a girl in a catsuit who was actually called Bingo, came to validate Mother’s card. But what was this? Oh dear: she’d got a number wrong. Mother’s head dipped direly. The game resumed. No more numbers came her way.

At about twelve-thirty John was taken down for a quiet time, with his bottle. Much refreshed, he escorted Mother to the Robin’s Nest for the convenient buffet lunch. It took John a long time to get there. For him, dry land was as treacherous as a slewing deck; and so, as the ship rolled, John found himself doubly at sea… With trays on their laps they watched through a hot glass window the men and women playing quoits and Ping-Pong and deck tennis. Mother appraised her son, slumped over his untouched food. He didn’t seem to mind that he couldn’t play. For there were others on board, many others, who couldn’t play either. You saw crutches, orthopaedic boots, leg calipers; down on C deck it was like a ward at Stoke Mandeville. Mother smiled. Her Bill had been a fine sportsman in his way—bowls on the green, snooker, shove-ha’penny, darts… Mother’s smile, with its empty lips. She did have secrets. For instance, she always told strangers that she was a widow. Not true. Bill hadn’t died. He’d walked away, one Christmas Eve. John was fourteen years old when that happened, and apparently a normal little boy. But then his panics started; and Mother’s life became the kind of tired riddle that wounding dreams set you to unlock. Such a cruel year: Bill gone, the letters from the school, the selling of the house, the move, and John all hopeless now and having to be kept at home. Bill sent checks. She never said he didn’t send checks. From Vancouver. Whatever was he doing in Vancouver…? Mother turned. Ah there: now John slept, his chin tripled over his plump tie knot, the four trails of liquid idly mapping his face, two from the corners of his mouth, two from his eyes, eyes that never quite went to sleep. Mother let him be.

Not until five or so did she gently massage him back to life. Waking was always difficult for him: the problem of re-entry. “Better now?” she asked. “After your lovely nap?” John nodded sadly. Then, together, hand in hand, they shuffled below to change.

For John the evenings would elongate themselves in interminable loops and tangles. Half an hour with Mother in the Parakeet Lounge, a friendly tweak on the cheek from Kiri, tonight’s Parakeet Girl. Parakeet Tombola, while the pianist plays “The Sting.” Dinner in the Flamingo Ballroom. The ladies’ evening wear: a fanned card pack of blazing taffeta. And then all the food. Mother went through the motions of encouraging John to eat something (she had his bottle ready but didn’t want to shame him, with the Brines there, and Gary, and Drew). John looked at the food. The food looked at John. John gave the food a look. The food gave John a look. John didn’t like the look of the food. The food didn’t like the look of John. To him, food never looked convincingly dead. And he got into hopeless muddles and messes with his partial (was that alive too?). He ate nothing. On the way to coffee in the Robin’s Nest, Mother liked to linger in one of the Fun Alleys, among the swearing children and the smoking grannies. John stood behind Mother as she lost her nightly fiver on the stocky fruit-machines. The barrels thrummed, the symbols twirled: damson, cherry, apple, grape. Exes and zeros, jagged, unaligned. She never won. The other machines constantly and convulsively hawked out silver tokens into their metal bibs, but Mother’s was giving nothing away, all smug and beaming, chockful of good things sneeringly denied to her. Maximize Your Pleasure By Playing All Five Lines, said a notice above each machine, referring to the practice of putting in more than one coin at a time. Mother often tried to maximize her pleasure in this way, so she lost quickly, and they were never there for long.

What next? Every evening had its theme, and tonight was Talent Night—Peacock Ballroom, ten o’clock sharp. The sea was high on Talent Night, with the waves steep but orderly, churning out their fetch and carry… Couples eddied toward the double doors, the prismatic women with their handbags, the grimly spruced men with their drinks. They staggered, they gagged and heaved, as the ship inhaled mightily, riding its luck. Someone flew out across the floor in a clattering sprint (this was happening every five minutes), hit the wall, and fell over; a purple-jacketed waiter knelt down by the body, yelling out orders to a boy in blue. Mother shouldered John forward, keeping him close to the handrail. She got him through the doors and into the spangled shadows, where at length she wedged his seat against a pillar near the back row. “All right, my love?” she asked. John hoisted his head out of his saturated suit and stared stageward as the lights went down.

Talent Night. There was an elderly gentleman with a sturdy, well-trained voice who sang “If I Can Help Somebody” and, as a potent encore, “Bless This House.” There was a lady, nearly Mother’s age, who with clockwork vigor performed a high-stepping music-hall number about prostitution, disease, and penury. There was a dear little girl who completed a classical piece on the electric organ without making a single mistake. That was the evening’s highpoint. Next, a man got up and said, “I, uh, I lost me wife last year, so this is for Annette” and sang about a third of “My Way” (“Go on,” he shouted as he stumbled off. “That’s it. Laugh.” Drunk, thought Mother.) Then a tall, sidling young man appeared and, after some confusion with the compère, 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, like a knight, by the inflated swimming pool. Softly she approached. There lay the heavy shadow of the turtle: with all its appendages retracted, the humped animal extended to the very perimeter of its confines. Now she saw that John’s hand was actually resting on the ridges of the creature’s back, and she pulled his hair and said,

“John, don’t, it’s—”

He looked up, and with a sobbing gasp he wheeled away from her into the alley and the air. My goodness, whatever had he been eating these last few days? Mother could only stand watching as John sicked himself inside out, jerked and yanked this way and that by ropes and whips of olive drab.

The following evening, somewhere in the Bay of Biscay, John disappeared.

He was sitting on his bunk as Mother rinsed his bottle in the bathroom. The connecting door leaned shut in the swell. She was chatting to him about one thing and another: you know, home, and the coziness of autumn and winter. Then she stepped into the cabin and said,

“Oh my darling, wherever have you gone?”

She went out into the corridor and the smell of ship. A passing officer dressed in white shorts looked at her with concern and reached out as if to keep her steady. She turned away from him guiltily. Up the steps she climbed, and wandered down Fun Alley after Fun Alley, from the Parakeet Lounge to the Cockatoo Rooms, from the Cockatoo Rooms to the Kingfisher Bar. She ascended the spiral staircase to the Robin’s Nest. Her John: wherever would he go?

Alone in the thin rain John faced the evening at the very stern of the ship, a hundred feet from the writhing furrows of its wake. Spreading his arms, he received the bloody javelin hurled at him by the sun. Then with his limbs working slowly, slowly attempting method, he tried to scale the four white bars that separated him from the water. And the sequence kept eluding him. The foot, the hand, the rung; the slip, the swing, the topple. It was the sequence, the order, that was always wrong: foot, slip, hand, swing, rung, topple…

But Mother had him now. Calmly she moved down the steps from the sundeck to the stern.

“John?”

“Go,” he said. “Go, go.”

She walked him down to the cabin. He came quietly. She sat him on the bunk. With her empty lips she started to sing a soothing lullaby. John wept into his hands. There was nothing new in Mother’s eyes as she reached for the bottle, and for the gin, and for the clean water.

New Statesman, 1978; rewritten, 1997