Heavy Water: And Other Stories

by Martin Amis

  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

  THE JANITOR ON MARS

  1

  POP JONES WAS TELLING the child why he couldn’t watch the news that day.

  “Special regulation, Ash. You have to be eighteen. It’s like an X-certificate.”

  “I want to see the Martian.”

  “Well you can’t. And he’s not strictly speaking a Martian. They think he must be some sort of robot.”

  “He’s the man on Mars.”

  “He, or it, is the janitor on Mars.”

  And Pop Jones was the janitor on earth—more specifically, the janitor of Shepherds Lodge, the last nonprivatized orphanage in England. Remote, decrepit, overcrowded, and all male, the place was, of course, a Shangri-La of
pedophilia. And Pop Jones was, of course, a pedophile, like everybody else on the staff. To use the (rather misleading) jargon, he was a “functional” pedophile—which is to say, his pedophilia didn’t function. Pop Jones was an inactive pedophile, unlike his hyperactive colleagues. He had never interfered with any of the boys in his care: not once.

  The child, Ashley, a long-suffering nine-year-old, said, “They’re taking us to the beach. I want to stay and see the robot.”

  “To the beach! Remember to take your starblock.”

  “But I want to starbathe.”

  “You’ll get starstroke out there.”

  “I want a startan.”

  “A startan? You’ll get starburn!”

  No one called it the sun anymore: the nature of the relationship had changed. It was 25 June, 2049, and every television on earth would soon be featuring the live interview with the janitor on Mars.

  Outside, the boys were being marshaled into queues under the awning as the first electric bus pulled up. Each of them clutched his white umbrella. Pop Jones was pleased to see that Ashley was wearing his starglasses and his starhat. All the children were flinching up at the sky. Each mouth wore a wary sneer.

  The thing had been building for nine months.

  On 30 September, 2048, at 12:45 P.M., West Coast time, Incarnacion Buttruguena-Hume, the most frankly glamorous of CNN’s main newscasters, received an encrypted message on her PDA. Incarnacion’s computer failed to recognize the cipher but then quickly cracked it. The message was written in the Blacksmith Code, unused for a century and considered obsolescent in World War II. It began, CKBIa TCaAIa-CaBTKaCa: Dear Incarnacion. Decoded, the message said:

  FORGIVE THE INTRUSION, BUT I‘M GOING TO BE COMING IN ON YOUR AIRTIME TONIGHT. I HAVE NEWS FOR YOU. I’M THE JANITOR ON MARS. TALK TO PICK AROUND FIVE-THIRTY.

  Pick was Pickering Hume, Incarnacion’s husband, who, noncoincidentally (it was soon supposed), worked in the public-relations and fund-raising departments of SETI—or Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Incarnacion called Pick right away at his office in Mountain View. They discussed the transmission: which of their friends, they wondered, was responsible for it? But at 17:31 Pick called back. In a clogged whisper he told her that they were receiving a regularly repeated radio signal on the hydrogen line from the Tharsis Bulge on Mars, in straight Morse. The Morse from Mars was saying: PICK—CALL INCARNACION.

  It was five-forty in Los Angeles. Within fifteen minutes the sat links were engaged and the floor of Incarnacion’s studio was filling up with astronomers, cosmologists, philosophers, historians, science-fiction writers, millennarians, Rapturists, UFO abductees, churchmen, politicians, and five-star generals, gathered for a story that just kept on breaking—that went twenty-four hours and stayed that way. On the stroke of six o’clock the screen turned a rusty red.

  Pop Jones himself was watching, on that day, along with every other adult in the building, called to the Common Room by the Principal, Mr. Davidge. The screen went red, then white. And the message appeared, unscrolling upwards, B-movie style, in heroic, backward-leaning capitals. It said:

  GREETINGS DNA, FROM HAR DECHER, THE RED ONE, AS YOUR EGYPTIANS CALLED OUR WORLD, OR NERGAL, AS YOUR BABYLONIANS HAD IT: THE STAR OF DEATH. GREETINGS FROM MARS. OUR TWO PLANETS HAVE MUCH IN COMMON. OUR DIURNAL MOTION IS SIMILAR. THE OBLIQUITY OF OUR RESPECTIVE ECLIPTICS IS NOT VERY DIFFERENT. YOU HAVE OCEANS, AN ATMOSPHERE, A MAGNETOSPHERE. SO DID WE. YOU ARE LARGER. YOU ARE CLOSER IN. WE COOLED QUICKER. BUT LIFE ON OUR PLANETS WAS SEEDED MORE OR LESS COINSTANTANEOUSLY—A DIFFERENCE OF A FEW MONTHS, WITH EARTH TAKING TECHNICAL SENIORITY. OUR WORLDS, AS I SAY, ARE SIMILAR, AND WERE ONCE MORE SIMILAR. BUT OUR HISTORIES RADICALLY AND SPECTACULARLY DIVERGE.

  IT’S GONE NOW, VANISHED, ALL MARTIAN LIFE, AND I’M WHAT REMAINS. I AM THE JANITOR ON MARS. AND I HAVE BEEN WATCHING YOU, TRIPWIRED TO MAKE CONTACT AT THE APPROPRIATE TIME. THAT TIME HAS COME. LET’S TALK.

  I’LL BE IN TOUCH WITH NASA ABOUT LAUNCH WINDOWS. ALSO SOME TIPS ABOUT CLIMBING YOUR GRAVITY WELL: A FUEL THING. AND A SUGGESTION ABOUT YOUR COSMIC-RAY PROBLEM AND WAYS OF REDUCING PAYLOAD. DUPLICATES OF ALL COMMUNICATIONS WILL GO TO CNN AND THE NEW YORK TIMES. LET’S PLAY THIS ONE STRAIGHT, PLEASE.

  YOU NEVER WERE ALONE. YOU JUST THOUGHT YOU WERE. AND HOW COULD YOU EVER HAVE THOUGHT THAT? DNA, MAKE HASTE. I AM IMPATIENT TO SEE YOU WITH MY OWN EYES. COME.

  Under his dirty white umbrella Pop Jones limped quickly across the courtyard. He glanced up. Although his flesh wore the pallor of deep bacherlorhood, Pop’s face often looked childish, tentative; this, plus his pertly plump backside, his piping yet uneffeminate voice, and his chastity, combined to earn him his nickname. His nickname was Eunuch. (His forename, moreover, was Enoch.) The children he treated with bantering geniality. But with his fellow adults Pop Jones was a janitor, through and through; he was all janitor, a janitors’ janitor, idle, disobliging, truculent, withdrawn. And, in his person, defiantly unclean. Overhead the star wriggled goopily in the sky, with slipped penumbra, like one of the cataracts it so prolifically dispensed. The sun hadn’t changed. The sky had. The sky had fallen sick, but everybody said it was now getting better again. Pop limped on up the steps to the Sanatorium. He turned: a square lawn supporting two ancient trees, both warped and crushed by time into postures of lavatorial agony. Shepherds Lodge looked like an Oxford college as glimpsed in the dreams of Uriah Heep. Pop Jones, taking pride in his profession, maintained the place as a sophistical labyrinth of sweat and shiver, the radiators now raw, now molten, the classrooms either freezers or crucibles, the taps, once turned, waiting a while before hawking forth their gouts of steam or sleet. The plumbing clanked. Locks stuck. All the lights flickered and fizzed.

  He passed the medical officer’s nook and glanced sideways into the old surgical storeroom, now a mini-gym, where two male nurses were talc-ing their hands for the bench press. They glanced back at him, pausing. Pop Jones could feel the hum of isolation in his ears. Yes, he thought, a dreadful situation. Quite dreadful. The whole moral order. But someone has to… The patient he had come to see was an eleven-year-old called Timmy. Timmy suffered from various learning disabilities (he was always injuring himself by falling over or walking into walls), and Pop Jones felt a special tenderness for him. Many of the boys at Shepherds Lodge, it had to be said, were somewhat soiled and complaisant, if not thoroughly debauched. Indeed, on warm evenings the place had the feel of an antebellum bordello, with boys in pyjamas straddling windowsills—training their hair, reading mail-order magazines—to the sound of some thrummed guitar… Timmy wasn’t like that. Sealed off in his own mind, Timmy had an inviolability that everyone had respected. Until now. Pop and Timmy were chaste—they were the innocents! That was their bond… To be clear: it is not youth alone that attracts the pedophile. The pedophile, for some reason, wants carnal knowledge of the carnally ignorant: a top-heavy encounter, involving lost significance. So far as the child is concerned, of course, that lost significance doesn’t stay lost, but lingers, forever. On some level Pop Jones sensed the nature of this disparity, this preemption, and it kept him halfway straight. The merest nudge or nuzzle, every now and then. His use of the bathhouse peepholes was now strictly rationed. In any given month, you could count his rootlings in the laundry baskets on the fingers of one hand.

  “How are you this morning, my lad?”

  “Car,” said Timmy.

  Timmy was alone in the six-bed ward. A TV set roosted high up on the opposite wall: it showed the planet Mars, filling half the screen now, and getting ever closer.

  “Timmy, try to remember. Who did this to you, Timmy?”

  “House,” said Timmy.

  The boy was not in San for one of his workaday injuries, something like a burn or a twisted ankle. Timmy was in San because he had been raped: three days ago. Mr. Caroline had found him in the potting shed, lying on the duckboards, weeping. And from then on Timmy had lapsed into the semi-autistic bemusement that had marked his first two years at Shepherds Lodge:
the state that Pop Jones, and others, liked to think they had coaxed him out of. The flower had partly opened. It had now closed again.

  “Timmy, try to remember.”

  “Floor,” said Timmy.

  Rape—nonstatutory rape—was vanishingly rare at Shepherds Lodge: rape flew in the face of everything its staff cherished and honored. Intergenerational sex, in that gothic mass on the steep green of the Welsh border, was of course ubiquitous, but they had a belief system which accounted for that. Its signal precept was that the children liked it.

  “Who did this, Timmy?” persisted Pop, because Timmy was perfectly capable of identifying and, after a fashion, naming every carer on the payroll. The Principal, Mr. Davidge, he called “Day.” Mr. Caroline he called “Ro.” Pop Jones himself he called “Jo.” Who did this? Everyone, including Pop, was edging toward a wholly unmanageable suspicion: Davidge had done it. It seemed inescapable. The last time something like this happened (in fact a much milder case, involving the “inappropriate fondling” of a temporary referral from Birmingham), Davidge had pursued the matter with Corsican rigor. But the investigation into the attack on Timmy seemed oddly stalled: three days had passed without so much as an analdilation test. Davidge’s shrugs and prevarications, by a process of political trickledown, now threatened a general dissolution, Pop sensed. The janitor was on his own here. Already he felt at the limit of his moral courage. The only whispers of support were coming from a confused and indignant eleven-year-old called Ryan, Davidge’s current regular (and, therefore, the cynosure of B Wing).

  “Was it… ‘Day’?” he asked, leaning nearer.

  “Dog,” said Timmy.

  The two male nurses—the two reeking sadists in their sleeveless T-shirts—were snorting rhythmically under their weights. Pop called out to them: