Free Heavy Water: And Other Stories by Martin Amis Page A

edge of it with a clipper or whatever, leaving a shaved track two or three inches wide … As Mal followed him outside he realized something. Jet on the starting line with all the others: he had looked completely exceptional. Not the tallest. Not the lithest. What, then? He was the whitest. He was just the whitest.
    Now that prejudice was gone everyone could relax and concentrate on money.
    Which was fine if you had some.
5. R HYMING SLANG
    To be frank, Fat Lol couldn’t believe that Mal was still interested.
    “You?” he said. “You? Big Mal: minder to the superstars?”
    Yeah, that was it. Big Mal: megaminder. Mal said, “How you doing then?”
    “Me? I’m onna dole, mate. I’m onna street. So I put myself about. But you?”
    “That’s all kind of dried up. Joseph Andrews and that. I’m basically short. Temporarily. Hopefully. So with all the changes going down I need any extra I can get.”
    Mal could not speak altogether freely. With the two men, round the table, sat Fat Lol’s wife, Yvonne, and their six-year-old son, little Vic. They were having lunch in Del’s Caff on Paradise Street in the East End—and it was like another world. Mal and Fat Lol were born in the same house in the same week; but Mal had come on, and Fat Lol hadn’t. Mal had evolved. There he sat, in his shell suit, with his dark glasses—a modern person. His son had a modern name: Jet. He could call his Asian babe on his mobile phone. And he had left home. Which you didn’t do. And there was Fat Lol in his Sloppy Joe, his sloppy jeans, and his old suedes, with his wife looking like a bank robber and his son flinching when either parent made a move for the vinegar or the brown sauce. Fat Lol was still in the muscle business (this and that). He had felt the tug of no other calling. He had stayed with it, like a brand loyalty.
    “So,” said Fat Lol, “what you’re saying, if there’s something going—this and that—you’d be on for a bit of it.”
    “Exactly.”
    “On a part-time basis. Nights.”
    “Yeah.”
    Fat Lol: he provided dramatic proof of the proposition that you are what you eat. Fat Lol was what he ate. More than this, Fat Lol was what he was eating. And he was eating, for his lunch, an English breakfast—Del’s All Day Special at £3.25. His mouth was a strip of undercooked bacon, his eyes a mush of egg yolk and tinned tomatoes. His nose was like the end of a lightly grilled pork sausage—then the baked beans of his complexion, the furry mushrooms of his ears. Paradise Street right down to his bum crack—that was Fat Lol. A loaf of fried bread on legs. Mal considered the boy: silent, cautious, eyeing the fruit machine with cunning and patience.
    Yvonne said, “So you’re having a bit of bother making ends meet. Since you went off with that Lucozade.”
    “No unpleasantness, please, Yv,” said Mal, aghast. They didn’t see each other so often now, but for many years Yv and She had been best mates. And Yv was always sharp, like her name, like her face. “She ain’t a Lucozade anyway. Come on, Yv. In this day and age?”
    Yvonne went on eating, busily, with her head down. Last mouthful. There.
    “She ain’t a Lucozade anyway.” People thought that Lucozade was rhyming slang for spade . But Mal knew that spades weren’t called Lucozades because spade rhymed with Lucozade. Spades were called Lucozades because spades drank Lucozade. Anyway, Linzi was from Bombay and she drank gin. “She’s of Indian extraction but she was born right here on Paradise Street.”
    “Same difference,” said Yvonne.
    “Shut it,” said Fat Lol.
    When closed, as now, it —Yv’s mouth—looked like a copper coin stuck in a slot. No, there wasn’t any slot: just the nicked rim of the penny jamming it. Dear oh dear, thought Mal: the state of her boat. Boat was rhyming slang for face (via boat race) . It had never struck him as appropriate or evocative until now. Her whole head like a prow, a tight corner, a hairpin