Heavy Water: And Other Stories Read Free

the depth. When, may I ask, can we expect another “slim vol.”?
    He sadly posted this letter on a wet Sunday afternoon in Leeds. He hoped that the postmark might testify to his mobility and grit.
    Yet, really, he felt much steadier now. There had been a recent period of about five weeks during which, Alistair came to realize, he had gone clinically insane. That letter to Sixsmith was but one of the many dozens he had penned. He had also taken to haunting the Holborn offices of the Little Magazine: for hours he sat crouched in the coffee bars and sandwich nooks opposite, with the unsettled intention of springing out at Sixsmith—if he ever saw him, which he never did. Alistair began to wonder whether Sixsmith actually existed. Was he, perhaps, an actor, a ghost, a shrewd fiction? Alistair telephoned the LM from selected phone booths. Various people answered, and no one knew where anyone was, and only three or four times was Alistair successfully connected to the apparently permanent coughing fit that crackled away at the other end of Sixsmith’s extension. Then he hung up. He couldn’t sleep, or he thought he couldn’t, for Hazel said that all night long he whimpered and gnashed.
    Alistair waited for nearly two months. Then he sent in three more screenplays. One was about a Machine hit man who emerges from early retirement when his wife is slain by a serial murderer. Another dealt with the infiltration by the three Gorgons of an escort agency in present-day New York. The third was a heavy-metal musical set on the Isle of Skye. He enclosed a stamped, addressed envelope the size of a small knapsack.
    Winter was unusually mild.
    “May I get you something to drink before your meal? A cappuccino? A mineral water? A glass of sauvignon blanc?”
    “Double decaf espresso,” said Luke. “Thanks.”
    “You’re more than welcome.”
    “Hey,” said Luke when everyone had ordered. “I’m not just welcome anymore. I’m more than welcome.”
    The others smiled patiently. Such remarks were the downside of the classy fact that Luke, despite his appearance and his accent, was English. There they all sat on the terrace at Bubo’s: Joe, Jeff, Jim.
    Luke said, “How did ‘Eclogue by a Five-Barred Gate’ do?”
    Joe said, “Domestically?” He looked at Jim, at Jeff. “Like— fifteen?”
    Luke said, “And worldwide?”
    “It isn’t going worldwide.”
    “How about ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’?” asked Luke.
    Joe shook his head. “It didn’t even do what ‘Sheep in Fog’ did.”
    “It’s all remakes,” said Jim. “Period shit.”
    “How about ‘Bog Oak’?”
    “ ‘Bog Oak’? Ooh, maybe twenty-five?”
    Luke said sourly, “I hear nice things about ‘The Old Botanical Gardens.’ ”
    They talked about other Christmas flops and bombs, delaying for as long as they could any mention of TCT’s “ ’Tis he whose yester-evening’s high disdain,” which had cost practically nothing to make and had already done a hundred and twenty million in its first three weeks.
    “What happened?” Luke eventually asked. “Jesus, what was the publicity budget?”
    “On ‘’Tis?’ ” said Joe. “Nothing. Two, three.”
    They all shook their heads. Jim was philosophical. “That’s poetry,” he said.
    “There aren’t any other sonnets being made, are there?” said Luke.
    Jeff said, “Binary is in post-production with a sonnet. ‘Composed at—Castle.’ More period shit.”
    Their soups and salads arrived. Luke thought that it was probably a mistake, at this stage, to go on about sonnets. After a while he said, “How did ‘For Sophonisba Anguisciola’ do?”
    Joe said, “ ‘For Sophonisba Anguisciola’? Don’t talk to me about ‘For Sophonisba Anguisciola.’ ”
    It was late at night and Alistair was in his room working on a screenplay about a high-IQ homeless black man who is transformed into a white female junk-bond dealer by a South Moluccan terrorist witch doctor. Suddenly he shoved