Heavy Water_ And Other Stories - Martin Amis [59]
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