Heavy Water_ And Other Stories - Martin Amis [18]
Sheilagh called him on his mobile to say that the boys’ buses had finally arrived.
3. MORTAL KOMBAT
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