Free Heavy Water: And Other Stories by Martin Amis

sitting on a patch of grass somewhere and a bird in the tree would start singing a song. Not a bird’s song. A Beatles song. Like “Try and See It My Way,” with all the words. By this stage he was rootling through supermarket dumpsters and discovering that food, so various in its colors and textures, could lose identity and become just one thing. Everywhere he went he was turned away. Even the supermarket Dumpsters were often guarded, in case the trash was tainted, and you ate it, and then sued.
    Dawn on the final morning: it was Mal’s forty-fifth birthday. He awoke in the driver’s seat of the old Subaru—in a cinema parking lot out by the airport somewhere. Sheilagh had sorted a ticket for him from the London end: fourteen hours to go. He regarded the flight home not as a journey, not as a return, not as a defeat, but as a free meal. Peanuts first, he thought. Or Bombay Mix.
    When he saw the sign he thought it was just another hallucination. “Maurie’s Birthday Burger” … All you had to do was show up with your driver’s license. You could expect a free burger, and a hero’s welcome. Maurie’s had more than seventy outlets in Greater Los Angeles. And once Mal got going, there didn’t seem any good reason to stop. After the thirtieth or thirty-fifth burger, you couldn’t really say he was in it for the grub. But he kept going. It was because Maurie was doing what nobody else was doing: Maurie was letting Mal in.
    Gastrically things were already not looking too bright when he arrived at LAX and checked in his luggage: a ripped ten-gallon bag containing all he owned. He made it to the gate more or less okay. It was on the plane that everything started getting out of hand. It appeared that Maurie, that week, had been sold a dodgy batch of meat. Whatever the facts of the matter, Mal felt, as he reached for his seat belt, that he was buckling in twenty pounds of mad cow.
    Five hours later, over the Baffin Bay: serious flight-deck discussion of an emergency landing in Disko, Greenland, as Mal continued to reel around the aircraft patiently devastating one toilet after another. They even let him loose on Business. Then, finally, as they cruised in over County Cork, and the passengers were being poked awake, and some of them, stretching and scratching, were slipping away with their wash-bags … well, it seemed to Mal (shrunken, mythically pale, and growing into his seat like a toadstool) that the only possibility was mass ejection. Three hundred parachutes, like three hundred burger buns, streaming down over the Welsh valleys, and the plane heading on, grand and blind.
    At the airport he asked She to marry him. He was trembling. Winter was coming and he was afraid of it. He wanted to be safe.
    “Jet!” cried Mal. He could hear the kid fumbling around outside.
    “Dad!”
    “In here!”
    Mal was in the clubhouse toilet, alone, cooling his brow against the mirror and leaning on the smudged sink.
    “You all right?”
    “Yeah, mate. It passed.”
    “Does it hurt?” said Jet, meaning his wound.
    “Nah, mate. Bit of discomfort.”
    “How’d you get it? Who did it?”
    He straightened up. “Son?” he began—for he felt he owed Jet an explanation, a testament, a valediction. The fall rays were staring through the thick wrinkled glass. “Son? Listen to me.” His voice echoed, godlike, in the Lucozade light. “Every now and again you’re going to get into one. You go into one and it’s not going to go your way. Sometimes you can see one coming and sometimes you can’t. And some you can never see coming. So you just take what comes. Okay?”
    “You and Fat Lol.”
    “Me and Fat Lol. Should see the state of him.”
    The boy wagged his haircut toward the door.
    Mal said, “Now, what?”
    “Two-twenty.”
    “Oi. Listen. Jet. I’ll run if you will. Okay? I’ll run the dads’ race. And give it me all. If you will. Deal?”
    Jet nodded. Mal looked down at his hair: seemed like they’d gone round the