The Information

PART TWO

There was the street, as midnight neared, after the rain, glossy, with a noirish wet-downed look. And there was the canal, sickly hued even in the dark, turbid, caustic, like a Chinese medicine of ferocious efficacy. The season was about to change.

Between road and water, Richard sat slumped over a Zombie in the Canal Creperie. He wore a deceptively cheerful red bow tie; he wore a deceptively opulent paisley waistcoat; he wore his hair long at the back to cover that strange and frightening lump on his neck; and he wore dark glasses, behind which the boiling beer-guts of his eye sacs now itched and seeped. Darko had said, on the telephone, that he and Belladonna would meet him here at eleven. It was 12:05. Now a young man sat down opposite in Richard's booth and flattened a book out on the table. His face was ectomorphic and asymmetrical and preoccupied. This wasn't Darko. This wasn't Belladonna.

Richard endeavored to persuade himself that he had good cause for celebration. That morning he had personally delivered the completed text of Unfilled to the offices of Gal Aplanalp. Over the last twelve days, applying himself with great clarity and focus, Richard had worked almost unprecedentedly hard: reading the Los Angeles Times. No, he didn't get Gwyn's copy off him ("Are you finished with that?"), nor did he crouch each midnight by the Barry dustbins waiting for the significantly bulky ten-gallon bag. He considered such stratagems. But instead he went and bought another one right away, incurring the familiar inconvenience and expense, down in Cheapside. This second copy of the Los Angeles Times he had just pummeled into a dustbin, en route to the Canal Creperie. He found what he was looking for.

Books, Arts, Entertainment, The Week in Review, Real Estate, Sports. It seemed that he knew the whole thing backwards anyway. Poise, Style, Flair. He read everything from the cookery column to the crossword clues. Could it be that there was a special way of preparing egg and chips in the mode of Gwyn Barry? Was it possible to contrive a crossword clue out of that vilely vowelless forename, that curt and surly surname (NY wry grab-wait-agitated by British novelist? 4,5)? When Richard walked the streets with all his fingertips on his forehead he was saying to himself, am I one? am I two? am I worse? am I better? At night, as he prepared to enter the forests of sleep and temptation, things looked like two things: the ironing board was a deck chair and the mirror was a standing pool. He was being informed-the information came at night, to inhume him. Jump-leads of agony: for all this time, jump-leads of agony went from Holland Park to Calchalk Street. What was it? A flux tube, an electric whip with scorpion sting. And now it seemed that the Grove itself was a league-long knout or sjambok, made of London, thoughtlessly wielded by Gwyn Barry and danced to, howling and sweating, by Richard Tull.

Thoughtlessly? It did of course occur to Richard, as he sat in his study scanning the college hockey results or the wheat futures, as he abandoned Barcaloungers, say, and started rereading the weather forecast, that he had been rumbled and finessed-that the Los Angeles Times was guilelessly and even winsomely Gwyn-free. But he was basically convinced that Gwyn wouldn't need to pull a flanker on him. The world would do it. Late in the evening of the tenth day he found it. Page eleven, column three: the personals page, in the Classified Section, under "Miscellaneous." It went like this:

"Stephanie." Pet Adoptions. Rottweiler 1 yr. Gentle girl. Plus free hamster given with purchase of cage. Summertown. Wanted. First ed. of novel by Gwyn Barry. Swap-Meet Garage Yard Sale. All welc.

He waved to the waitress. No, not another Zombie, thank you; he would try a Tarantula. The young man sitting opposite with his scalene face and his shoulders hunched over his book in the posture of a professional bicyclist-the young man took the opportunity to order a club soda. The waitress lingered, making notes.

The waitresses were less young and pretty than they used to be; but then the Canal Creperie was less young and pretty than it used to be- was now, in fact, the resort of insomniac boozers prepared to pay for,and sit quite near to, the platefuls of food which the law obliged them to order with their drinks. On the table, untouched, there stood a basket of sauce-glued nachos, and heavily cooling tortilla, as inert as an organ on a medical tray. Richard's waitress reappeared with his Tarantula. She looked right through him as he thanked her. Before, girls looked at him and showed interest or no interest. Then, for a while, they looked past him. Now they looked through him. Richard felt a generalized regret, mild, chronic, secretive-like, say, the pang of the domestic tutor with his chaste crush on the family four-year-old who, for once, says her good-nights without favoring him with the usual glance and smile, and he must sniff bravely, and tell himself that children ought to be allowed their childish concerns, and go on talking with the grownups about Aristophanes or Afghanistan .. . They used to look past him. Now they looked through him. Because he no longer snagged on their DNA. Because he was over on the other side, and partly invisible, like all the ghosts who walked there.

Suddenly the young man sank back; he raised his book to chin height and held it aloft like a hand of cards. Richard jolted. The book was Dreams Don't Mean Anything. Its author was Richard Tull. There, on the top corner of the back cover, above the bubbles and sequins of its artwork (the effect intended, and not achieved, was one of jazzy icono-clasm), perched a passport-size photograph: Richard Tull at twenty-eight. How clean he looked. How extraordinarily clean.

Richard blushed, and his eyes sought something else to stare at- other photographs, framed and hung, of grinning or glowering movie stars: examples, like the loaf-shaped paper-napkin dispensers and the fluted sugar-pours and the podgy old jukebox, of the eminently exportable culture to which the Canal Creperie had dedicated itself. There were even a couple of American writers up there on the wall, their faces scored by epic wryness, epic celebrity … A week after Aforethought was published Richard had seen a beamingly intelligent youth frowning and smiling over a copy of the book-on the Underground, at Earl's Court, where Richard then lived. He'd considered saying something. A tap on the shoulder, maybe. A raised thumb. A wink. But he had thought: stay cool. It's my first book. This is obviously going to happen all the time. Get used to it… It never happened again, of course. Until now.

"Do you want me to sign that for you?"

The book was lowered. The face was hereby revealed. Its asymmetries resolved themselves into a smile. The smile was not, in Richard's opinion, a good smile, but it did disclose surprisingly and even sinisterly good teeth. The lower set, in particular, was almost feline in its acuityand depthlessness. Richard's lower teeth were like a rank of men in macks on a stadium terrace, tugged into this or that position by the groans of the crowd.

"Sorry?"

"Do you want me to sign that for you?" He leaned across and tapped the back cover. He removed his dark glasses, but not for long. He smiled gauntly.

The young man did the thing of dividing his stare between photo and face until he said, "Who would have oddsed it? Small world. Steve Cousins."

Richard took the hand that was flexed out to him like a shot card. He felt the rare and uneasy luxury of letting his own name go unannounced. Also he asked himself, with what seemed to be abnormal pertinence, whether he was about to get beaten up. His nuts-and-violence radar used to be good, when he was soberer, and less nuts himself.

Steve said, "I think I saw you one time down the Warlock." "The Warlock: sure. Are you a player?"

"Not tennis. Not tennis. I always thought tennis was an effeminate game. No offense meant."

"None taken," said Richard sincerely. His impulse now was to flip his wallet onto the table and produce the photographs of his two boys.

"Squash is my game. Squash. But I don't play down there. I'm not even a Squash Member. I'm a Social Member."

Everybody knew about the Social Members of the Warlock. They didn't go down there for the tennis or the squash or the bowls. They went down there because they liked it.

"Well, I'm injured," said Richard. "Tennis elbow." This was true. Lift a racket? He could hardly lift a cigarette.

His interlocutor nodded: such was life. He was still holding the (closed) book out in front of him; it seemed inevitable, now, that he would have to say something about it. The anxiety this gave rise to led Steve Cousins to consider a rather serious change of plan: from plan A to plan B or plan V, plan O, plan X. To activate plan X he even reached into his pocket for the eyedrop bottle. This was plan X: lace his drink with lysergic acid and then, the minute he started looking nauseous or talking stupid about the funny lights, take him outside, for some air, down the walkway near the water, and kick his teeth out one by one. Scozz paused.

Plan A regained its substance. It was like the glow that came up on a stage set. With a soft gulp of effort he said, "I'm an autodidact." Yes, listen, thought Richard: he can even say autodidact… He wavedto the waitress. No, not another Tarantula, thank you: he would try a Rattlesnake. Actually Richard was undergoing a series of realizations. Which was just as well. He realized that the young man was not a type. Not an original, maybe; but not a type. He also realized (for the first time) that autodidacts are always in pain. The fear of ignorance is a violent fear; it is atavistic; fear of the unknown is the same as fear of the dark. And finally Richard thought: but, I'm nuts too! Don't be steamrollered: show your own quiddity in the field where the mad contend.

"I got a First at Oxford," said Richard. "Autodidact-that's a tough call. You're always playing catch-up, and it's never wholly that you love learning. It's always for yourself."

This turned out to be a good move of Richard's. It didn't calm the young man, but it made him more cautious. He weighed Dreams Don't Mean Anything in his hand and held it out at arm's length, to assess it, to see it in perspective, with parallax. "Interesting," he said.

"Interesting how?"

"You shouldn't smoke, you know."

"Oh really? Why ever not?"

"Toxins. Bad for your health."

Richard took the cigarette out of his mouth and said, "Christ, I know that about it. It says on the fucking packet that it kills you."

"You know what? I found it… very readable. It's a page-turner."

That proved it. It was clinically impossible that this guy was playing with a full deck. Richard knew very well that nobody found him readable. Everybody found him unreadable. And all agreed that Dreams Don't Mean Anything was even more unreadable than Aforethought.

"I read Aforethought too. Raced through that one as well."

It hadn't occurred to Richard that these admissions were bluff or hoax. Nor did it seriously occur to him now. And he was right: the young man was telling the truth. But he said because he wanted to cover himself,

"What big thing happens exactly halfway through Aforethought?"

"It goes into the-into italics."

"What happens just before the end?"

"It goes back again," said Steve, opening the book and gazing down "fondly," so to speak, at the copyright page (because the modern person isn't always well served by the old adverbs), which also bore, beneath a thick film of polyethylene, the borrowing card of the hospital library he

had stolen it from. Not the hospital library from which he had stolen Aforethought: the library of the hospital to which Kirk had been transferred, after his second savaging by Beef. With tears in his eyes (andblood-soaked bandages all over his mouth) Kirk told Scozz that Lee was going to have Beef put down. Now Kirk wanted Scozz to go over and do Lee! Scozzy said, "Don't talk rucking stupid." Yet Kirk swore that Beefs death would not pass unavenged … If literary courtesy compelled him to have the author sign his own book, then Scozzy had an answer ready. Dreams Don't Mean Anything was in very good condition: as new. The wonky-hipped old dears, the wraiths in towel robes awaiting the results of tests, the stoical criminals on the mend from line-of-work spankings and stripings-none of them, apparently had sought solace or diversion in the pages of Dreams Don't Mean Anything …

"At the Warlock. You play with the other writer."

"Gwyn."

"Gwyn Barry. Best-seller."

"That's him."

"Numero uno. Beyond meteoric. Quite an achievement."

"Yes, it is. Quite an achievement. When what you write is unadulterated shit."

"Total crock."

"The purest trex."

"Complete crap."

Richard looked at him. The eyes lit but narrowed. The bent slot of the mouth. A violent maniac who hated Gwyn's stuff. Why weren't there any more where he came from?

"With the junkie wife."

"Demi? Demeter?"

"Who has a distinct liking for-for our colored brethren."

"Oh come on."

"Do you or do you not know how it goes? First off: she was a classic coke rat. In and out of those deluxe dryout joints. NA. All this. A big blond Lady who likes black stuff. You think that don't get around?"

"When was this? Why didn't it get around?"

"See, it's face. It's face. You're lying on a floor somewhere, right? All blissed out. The reason you're feeling so good is that Lance or whoever has just come in with the white bag and helped you pump it up your nose. And there's this great big solemn schwartzer staring down at you and holding out his hand the way they do." He held out his hand the way they do, with palm slowly upturned. "Everyone else, okay, they're half out of it, but not Lance, who touches nothing stronger than Lilt. You telling me she's going to say no to Lance? 'No thanks, mate'? With the political pressure on her? Half them pushers are only in it for the flip." "The what??

"The skirt. The women."

Making it clear, making it entirely clear, how the young man felt about flip: how he felt about women. Often accused of this sin himself (though never by his wife), and largely innocent of it, in his view (in his view he was just candidly and averagely semi-fucked-up, along the usual male lines), Richard could spot genuine woman-hatred at twenty paces. It was something in the eyes or something in the mouth. The mouth, which would soon be thickly salivating as it began the joke about the skunk and the knickers. Again Richard cautioned himself. The young man contained sexual complication. But he wasn't a type. And his mouth wasn't going to start telling the joke.

"Her dad's the Earl of…"

"Rieveaulx," said Richard, supplying the simple duosyllable-and intercepting (he imagined) the young man's Polack tonguetwister.

"Big connections. With the so-called press barons. He kept it quiet. This was five years ago. Drug orgies with schwartzers. The Queen's twentieth cousin twice removed. You couldn't keep it quiet now."

"Fascinating," said Richard, who, at this stage, was sleepily considering the lunch he might soon arrange with Rory Plantagenet.

Steve had straightened up. He was looking shrewdly at the copyright page of Dreams Don't Mean Anything: there, opposite the pristine borrowing form. If Richard offered to sign it (which, as it happened, he never got round to) Steve would say that he'd fished it out of a cardboard box on the Portobello Road and paid thirty pee for it. He didn't know about literary pride, about literary face: not yet.

"I see-I see it was published . .. way back. What? You uh …"

"This very morning I delivered the new one. Breaking a long silence, as they say."

"Yeah? What's it called?"

Richard readied himself. "Untitled."

"Nice. Here's to it. Cheers."

"Cheers. All this with Demi." He was thinking: Demi doesn't drink. He was thinking of Demi at dinner, covering her empty wineglass with her hand. "That's all over now. I mean look. There she is. Happily married."

"My arse. Public relations that is. Don't want to believe everything you see on TV"

"How do you know all this?"

"You remember a Mrs. Shields? Cooks for them. Or did."

"Yeah," said Richard, with slow emphasis but without commitment. "That's my brother's mum." "… Your mum."

"Half brother."

"Same dad," said Richard, who unfortunately chose this moment to look at his watch. If he had gone on looking across the table he would have known for sure that the young man didn't have a half brother. Or a mum. Or a dad.

"She said she'd never seen a newlywed cry so much."

"And why would that be?"

"She wants kids: Catholic. And he won't have them."

Richard sipped his Rattlesnake with some wariness. He was wondering how good at walking he was going to turn out to be, when the time came. There was still a pretty good guy in here, he reckoned. But his voice was slipping from baritone to bass; and he knew the signs. He said,

"What do you do?"

"You've forgotten my name, haven't you? You've forgotten it."

"Yes. Come to think of it. I've completely forgotten it."

Again the hand was flexed out towards him, tense, vertical-the shot card.

"Steve Cousins. What do I do? Well I could say 'this and that.' As some do. 'Me? Ah you know. This and that.' You know. 'Bit of this. Bit of that.' Thing is I'm in a more fluid thing now. I don't need to interact now, financially. Semiretired if you like. My main activities now are what you'd call recreational."

For a moment they studied each other: quid pro quo. To Richard (who was "pixelated," and thoroughly, in the old sense), Steve looked like a white-and-gray chessboard: like a forensic suspect on TV, his face smeared into squares. To Steve (who was Sunday-best sober, as always), Richard looked like an artistic two-dimensionalization of himself, hollow, wavery, approximate and rendered with minimum talent: the work of a court portraitist. Richard was a witness. Richard was a character witness.

"So?" said Richard. He sipped and waited.

And Scozzy shrugged and said, "I fuck people up."

Richard turned in his seat. He felt that this called for another Rattlesnake.

The Little Magazine now lived in Soho, where it had only recently arrived and would not long remain. The Little Magazine had seen better days. The offices of The Little Magazine were little offices, and the rent was overdue.

The Little Magazine was born and raised in a five-story Georgian town house next to the Soane Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields (1935-1961). Dusty decanters, hammocklike sofas, broad dining tables strewn with books and learned journals: here a handsome philanderer in canvastrousers bashing out an attack on Heinrich Schliemann ("The Iliad as war reportage? The Odyssey as ordnance survey cum captain's log? Balderdash!"); there a trembling scholar with his eleven thousand words on Housman's prosody ("and the triumphant rehabilitation of the trochee"). From the swards of Lincoln's Inn The Little Magazine-increasingly nomadic and downwardly mobile-had made its way to Fenchurch Street, to Holborn, to Pimlico, to Islington, to King's Cross (1961-1979). It slept in attics, in spare rooms, it dossed down on the floors of friends; it was always seeking cheaper lodgings. There used to be something reassuringly Edwardian, something defiantly scapegrace, in these compulsive changes of address (1979-1983). No longer.

The Little Magazine, for many years now, had lurked and lurched across town with the ruddily averted face of bum or bag lady. Evicted often and forcibly from this or that blighted flatlet, it sometimes lingered in the dark behind the beaten door like a reeking squatter in his vest. The money was running out. The money was always running out. Its identity-the only thing it had plenty of-was patrician; its owner and editor, despite the desperate squalor of his surroundings, always wore a monocle and took frequent pinches of snuff. Prodigiously inefficient and self-pitying, The Little Magazine drained money from anyone who went anywhere near it. Push your way past its hardboard door, in your silk hat and cashmere overcoat, and after a couple of weeks you too would be sleeping rough. On the other hand The Little Magazine really did stand for something. It really did stand for something, in this briskly materialistic age. It stood for not paying people. And when it did pay people, it paid them little and it paid them late. Printers, landlords, tax-men, milkmen, contributors, staff: it paid them next to nothing and always at the very end of the eleventh hour. No one knew what happened to the "contributions"-the minor loans, the royal ransoms-which The Little Magazine impartially processed: the dole-checks and dowries, the nest-eggs, the five-generation brewing fortunes. Some magazines were success stories, but this magazine was a sob story: even Richard Tull, after a year of unremunerated labor in its offices, found himself writing out a check for a thousand pounds, made payable to the monocled thren-odist in the editor's chair … Richard edited the back half. He often edited the front half too. Every other Monday he went in and did the books. Every other Friday he went in and did the arts. All the rest of the time, it seemed, he spent writing the "middles"-unpaid, of course, and also unsigned, although "everybody" (in fact a select company) was supposed to know he had written them.

Today was Friday. Here came Richard. Umbrella, bow tie, portlybiography wedged into the armpit, cigarette. He paused, on Frith Street, as he approached the triptych of doorways which The Little Magazine shared with a travel agent and a shop that sold clothes to the very tall and the very fat-he paused, and looked down. He looked down because the tramp he was stepping over (who intently ate dog food from the can with a plastic spoon) bore a close resemblance to his opera critic. So close that Richard even said, "Hugo?" But the tramp wasn't Hugo. Or Hugo wasn't the tramp. Not yet: not this week. Richard went inside and was relieved to see Hugo lying facedown on the stairs to the first-floor office. He stepped over Hugo and paused again in a marveling attempt to identify the source of the seal-house or dolphinarium sound effects (the hooting and squealing, the egregious belly-flops) which issued from the half-landing toilet. It was his ballet critic: Cosmo. Then he entered the literary department. His secretary came forward and helped him off with his mack.

"Thank you. Well, Anstice?"

Anstice, with her head dipped, told him what he needed to be told. He didn't need to be told about the opera critic or the ballet critic-or the radio critic, who stood nearby with his head out the window, rubbing his eyes and panting rhythmically, or the art critic who sat at the books table weeping into his drenched hands. Richard asked about the film critic, who, very ominously, had slipped out some hours ago for a packet of cigarettes. But he was pleased to hear that the theater critic, who was writing the lead review that fortnight, was emplaced in his usual nook farther up the stairs. Very shortly Richard went to see how he was doing. There Bruno sat at his little table, his bearded face immersed, as usual, in his typewriter keys. Richard reached out for a firm handful of his crackling hair, and tugged: thus he saw that Bruno, before losing consciousness, had very nearly completed the first word of his piece. What he had written, so far, was "Chehko." And Richard happened to know that Bruno's subject that fortnight was a new production of The Three Sisters. He regained the literary department in time to see the film critic mount the stairs in such a fury of dissimulated torpor that he would surely have hurled himself into the far wall beyond Anstice's desk. But the kneeling figure of the ballet critic was there to check his stride. Richard stepped over them and went to the editor's office on the floor above, which he always hid in when the editor wasn't hiding in it.

What he wanted to know was this. Why had he received no word from Gal Aplanalp? Why wasn't the telephone bouncing on its cradle? Where was the long, favorable and riveted critique of Untitled? And how high were Steve Cousins's rates? Richard wondered what was stopping him from just going ahead and ringing Gal Aplanalp. Pride, he sup-posed; and a sense of his own artistic worth. So he lit a cigarette and went ahead and called Gal Aplanalp.

"It's all going forward," she said. "In fact it's placed."

She was referring, of course, not to his novel but to his projected five thousand-word profile of Gwyn Barry, which had inspired broad and competitive interest. Gal named a sum of money which exactly corresponded to Richard's annual salary at The Little Magazine. After a silence he said,

"What about my book?"

"I know. I've cleared the weekend for it. I'm taking it home tonight. Gwyn says it's remarkable."

"Gwyn hasn't read it."

"Oh," said Gal Aplanalp.

Having said good-bye and hung up, Richard managed to apply himself to some constructive work. Ringing round various publishers, he identified and called in three books for review. One was by Lucy Cabretti. One was by Elsa Oughton. One was by Professor Stanwyck Mills. These authors, we might remember, were the judges of the Profundity Requital. Ringing round various contributors, Richard then entrained three favorable notices. We must trust him on this. He had his reasons. Richard was about to get up and go and find her when Anstice slowly put her head round the door. Her face blinked at him.

"Is there anything I should be worrying about, Anstice?"

"Oh no. I expect we shall soldier through."

"Cosmo seems much improved. So does Hugo."

"You know, I really respect Hugo for the way he's getting to grips with it. No, it's Theo."

"Oh?"

By a long-established anomaly, the last page of the books (it was the batched fiction review) was put to bed on the same day as the arts. Now you expected no trouble whatever on the batched fiction review. It was The Little Magazine's plum job, often squabbled and feebly brawled over: he who wrote the batched fiction review ended up with perhaps a dozen new hardbacks to sell to the man in Chancery Lane. Richard wanted to write the batched fiction review. Even the editor wanted to write it.

Anstice said, "He wants to know if he can fax it in."

"He hasn't got a fax. We haven't got a fax."

"That's what I told him."

"Well tell him to get out of bed and get dressed and get on the bus and bring it in. Like he always does."

"He sounded a bit…?

"No doubt he did." Richard told her that if she could bear it-and if indeed Theo had written it-she should simply phone him up and have him slur it in. Before she went he said, "How are you?"

"Pretty well, really. For a ruined woman. One roughly used and then cast aside. R. C. Squires was in here."

"How horrible. Is he coming back?"

"I don't know. Will I be seeing you later?"

"Of course, Anstice," he said.

She left. She left slowly, her presence reluctantly receding from him. When it was there no longer his head dropped suddenly like a weight. It hung, at right angles to the sheen of his paisley waistcoat. Having dropped about forty-five degrees … Which is a lot, on some scales, by some reckonings. For example, Barnard's Star, as it is called, crosses 10.3 seconds of arc per year. This is a quarter of the Jupiter pinpoint-about a sixth of a degree: per year. Yet no other heavenly body shows so great a proper motion. This is why it is called the Runaway Star … And just by dropping his head like that Richard was changing his temporal relationship with the quasars by thousands and thousands of years. He really was. Because the quasars are so far away and getting farther away so fast. This is to put Richard's difficulties in context. The context of the universe.

Eleven hours later he was emplaced with Anstice in the Book and Bible. The paper had been put to bed. To put to bed was what you did with children-whereas grownups took each other there.

Crooned at and lullabied, given snacks and glasses of water, its fears assuaged, The Little Magazine had been put to bed. Bruno, the theater critic, had finished his major piece on The Three Sisters. Unfortunately it proved to be only thirty words long. The opera critic, Hugo, had failed to write anything at all, despite spending the afternoon in a sinkful of iced water and despite engaging, with Anstice, in a program of deep-breathing exercises which reminded Richard of the classes he had attended with Gina: the adults sitting around on the floor and gazing up at teacher like the children they would shortly bear. Otto, the radio critic, finished his piece and then tore it up and threw it out the window. Several heads slewed round, at first in dismay and then in hard suspicion, when Inigo, the film critic, said through his tears that he was betraying his poetry by writing for money. You mean someone around here was getting money'? Towards dusk it looked for a while as though Richard and Anstice would be faced with another Black Friday. This was the occasion on which all seven arts writers-grouped about the place in varying postures of weary contemplation-had produced not a syllable betweenthem. And Richard had hurled together a ragged quilt of house ads, overmatter, crosswords and killed chess columns.

"Inigo was amazing," said Anstice, finishing her white wine.

"Inigo was incredible," said Richard, finishing his scotch.

Inigo was also lying on the carpet at their feet. A man of great and curdled abilities, as they all were, kind of, Inigo had written 7,500 largely coherent words about a Bulgarian cartoon-the only thing he had seen, or remembered seeing, over the past two weeks.

Piously Anstice dipped her head. Richard stared, as he often stared, at the center-parting of her hair. Here, it seemed, two opposing forces met and with bristling difficulty contended. Oh dear, oh my: those people you see on streetcorners, when their hair is not just bad but wrong, too obviously comprising individual and uncoordinated strands, not just curled but bent, twisty, and propagating at all the wrong angles. Anstice's hair grew with futile force; here was the ponytail, as weighty as old navy rope, reaching to the gathered lap of her smock. Her hair looked never-washed, Rasta-like. She lifted her head and smiled at him slowly with that flicker of apologetic tenderness.

"Last one?" he said.

When he came back from the bar he thought Anstice might be turned to the wall and staring at the backs of her own eyes and singing scraps of songs-the crazed ditties, perhaps, of the ruined Ophelia. Not much less ominously, Anstice had her face over the table; her nose was perhaps an inch from its surface. Without stirring she said, as he sat,

"The time has come for us to tell Gina. Or else why go on? It's all right. We'll do it together. We'll tell Gina everything."

Richard thought he would probably end up with Anstice. He thought he would probably end up with Anstice. Would they marry? No. It was on his way out of her flat that morning, a year ago, that he had coined the word spinst. There was just no avoiding it. This is spinst, pal, he said to himself. We're talking spinst here. And I do mean spinst. He meant the blast-wave of spinst that he had walked into on arrival. He meant the mantle of spinst he had walked away with, as if he was wearing her clothes, her sheets, her towels, her hair. It was the smell of clothes not taken to the dry cleaners for many years; it was the smell of rain-damaged ceilings; but above all it was the smell of neglect. Richard knew about neglect and understood neglect. But neglect in the physical sense? These days he kept thinking he smelled of batch. Of old pajamas and slippers and cardigans and pipe cleaners. But I can't, he kept saying. I can't smell of batch. I'm married. In his study, with a biography on his lap, sniffing at his own shoulder, and then looking up suddenly, andfrowning, and waving a hand to adduce his fastidious wife, his sweet-smelling children, whom he still had. And then it wasn't long before he saw himself alone, and with his single worn suitcase mounting the damp stairs to Anstice's. Spinst and Batch would come together, in eternal head-to-head. Batch and Spinst, in timeless morris.

"Bloody hell," said Gina. "Have you seen this?"

Richard looked up long enough to make sure that this wasn't a ten-page letter from Anstice and then looked down again at Love in a Maze: A Life of James Shirley. Gina was reading an extensive account, in her tabloid, of a series of murders, somewhere in America. Nearby on the passage floor the twins were playing quietly and even tenderly with their violent toys. Saturday morning, at the Tulls'.

The trouble with getting Gwyn beaten up … Richard strove to be more specific. The trouble with getting Gwyn catapulted into his seventies was this: Gwyn would never know that it was Richard who had catapulted him there. Only a moron, true, would have failed to suspect (uneasily) that it was Richard who was responsible for the Los Angeles Times. But Gwyn was a moron: according to Richard. And you couldn't expect a moron-particularly a moron who was upside down in a dustbin or groping for consciousness in Intensive Care-to suspect that Richard was responsible for Steve Cousins. No, the whole thing lacked justice: artistic justice. Richard found himself increasingly drawn to another quest or project, something more classical, something simpler, something nobler. He was going to seduce Gwyn's wife.

"Why?" said Gina. "I just can't… Ooh."

His head, today, was full of women, as it always was, but not just the opposite sex. Genuine individuals-there was Gina, there was Anstice, there was Demeter. There was also Gal Aplanalp: lying on her bed and clad in her ankle bracelet, curled up with Untitled, and lightly frowning with amused admiration. There was also Gilda: Gilda Paul . .. When Gwyn took up with Demi, he ended it with Gilda, his teenhood sweetheart, and with some dispatch: he ended it the next morning. One moment Gilda was living with a little Welsh scrivener with two dud novels under his belt, plus a stack of A-Level Guides; the next, she was being helped on to a train by the cult author of a surprise best-seller, at Euston, with her cracked plastic suitcase and her podgy green overcoat, heading for Swansea and a full nervous breakdown. At that stage Richard was already in need of a good-looking reason for hating his oldest friend, and Gilda's collapse, at first, seemed like a breath of fresh air. To strengthen his case, morally, he even traveled, with the flat smile of thedeeply inconvenienced, to the cliffside hospital in Mumbles and sat for an hour with Gilda's dank white hand in his, while one TV spoke English and another TV spoke Welsh, in a room whose light seemed to come from the brick-red tea and the orange-brown biscuits, and peopled by women, none of them old, whose favorite food (how did this notion come to him, over the fumes of the bloody tea?)-whose favorite food was brains. Richard still wrote to Gilda. His letters tended to coincide with some fresh coup of Gwyn's, or with some new gobbet of praise that made mention of his humanity or-better-his compassion. Rather regrettably, perhaps, Richard sent her a print interview in which Gwyn mentioned Gilda and characterized their parting as "amicable." Only occasionally did he suggest that the true story was something that the public-or Rory Plantagenet-deserved to learn. Richard was pleased that Gwyn had never been to see Gilda. Richard hoped he never would. Richard didn't really care about Gilda, of course. Richard really cared about Demi. "I mean … why'?" said Gina. "Ooh, if I had my way." He looked up. Gina's hand was at her throat. An hour ago, his lips had been where that hand was now. And it hadn't worked out. .. Richard's stare returned to the index of Love in a Maze: A Life of James Shirley. The Maid's Revenge, The Traitor, Love's Cruelty, The Lady of Pleasure, The Imposture, Love in a Maze. While contemplating the seduction of Lady Demeter, Richard had no mustache he could twirl, no barrelly chortles he could summon: the Jacobean boudoir creeper had a big advantage over Richard. You couldn't imagine, say, Lovelace holding his shoes by their buckles as he limped from the bedroom in tears. You couldn't imagine Heathcliff propped up in the four-poster, with a forearm resting limply on his brow, telling Catherine how anxious and overworked he must be. Things seemed to start loosening up after 1850. Bounderby, in Hard Times: an obvious no-show merchant. And as for Casaubon, in Middlemarch, as for Casaubon and poor Dorothea: it must have been like trying to get a raw oyster into a parking meter. Acute and chronic impotence, Richard knew, was no kind of springboard for a seduction operation. But he had information on her now, which always meant the vulnerable, the hidden, the intimate, the shame-steeped. It panned out. And he couldn't be accused of trying to deceive Gwyn. Because there wasn't any point in it unless he got caught.

"Words," said Gina, "-words fail me. Why? Won't someone tell me."

Slowly sliding from his chair, Richard took up position behind her. The

center pages of Gina's tabloid described the trial, and conviction, of a child-murderer in Washington State. There was a photograph. You could see him. He stood there in his prison fatigues, his eyes introspectivelyrecessed, his upper lip exaggeratedly cupid's bow, the shape of a gull coming right at you. "I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" shouted one of his victims, according to witnesses: a little boy, stabbed to death by an adult stranger in the neighborhood playground. The little boy's brother was also stabbed to death. He didn't say anything. There was also a third and much younger child whom the murderer kept for several days, beforehand.

Gina said, "Look at the face on that horrible queer."

Marius entered the kitchen and, without ceremony, presented his parents with the contention that he "looked like shit" in his school photograph. The school photograph was produced and exhibited. Marius didn't look like shit.

"You don't look like shit," said Richard authoritatively. He felt he knew all there was to know about looking like shit. "You look good."

"I think that's so awful," said Gina, "the little boy saying 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry' like that."

The young swear more now, and the old swear more now. This is perhaps the only area in which your parents can shock you as much as your children. The middle-aged swear more too, of course, in reflexive protest against their failing powers.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" cried the little boy to the adult stranger in the neighborhood playground. The little boy's brother was also stabbed to death. He didn't shout, "I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" He was older and maybe he knew something that his little brother didn't know.

Among its many recent demotions, motive has lost its place in the old law enforcement triumvirate: means, motive, opportunity. Means, motive, opportunity has been replaced by witnesses, confession, physical evidence. A contemporary investigator will tell you that he hardly ever thinks about motive. It's no help. He's sorry, but it's no help. Fuck the why, he'll say. Look at the how, which will give you the who. But fuck the why.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" cried the little boy. He thought he had offended and angered his murderer in some way, without meaning to. He thought that that was the why. The little boy was searching for motivation, in the contemporary playground. Don't look. You won't find it, because it's gone. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

A square of city rather than a city square, it branched out like an inbred shim family whose common name was Wroxhall, Wroxhall Road, then

Wroxhall Street. Wroxhall Terrace, then Wroxhall Gardens. Then Court, Lane, Close, Place, Row, Way. Drive, then Park, then Walk. Richard locked the Maestro, whose days were numbered, and turned toconfront a landscape out of one of his own novels-if you could speak of landscape, or of locus, or of anywhere at all, in a prose so diagonal and mood-warped. Actually this is as good a time as any to do what Gal Aplanalp is doing and take a quick look at Richard's stuff-while the author stumbles, swearing, from Avenue to Crescent to Mews, in search of Darko, and of Belladonna.

Essentially Richard was a marooned modernist. If prompted, Gwyn Barry would probably agree with Herman Melville: that the art lay in pleasing the readers. Modernism was a brief divagation into difficulty; but Richard was still out there, in difficulty. He didn't want to please the readers. He wanted to stretch them until they twanged. Aforethought was first person, Dreams Don't Mean Anything strictly localized third; both nameless, the I and the he were author surrogates and the novels comprised their more or less uninterrupted and indistinguishable monologues interieurs. Untitled, with its octuple time scheme and its rotating crew of sixteen unreliable narrators, sounded like a departure, but it wasn't. As before, all you had was a voice. This was the basket that contained all the eggs. And the voice was urban, erotic and erudite … Although his prose was talented, he wasn't trying to write talent novels. He was trying to write genius novels, like Joyce. Joyce was the best yet at genius novels, and even he was a drag about half the time. Richard, arguably, was a drag all the time. If you had to settle on a one-word description of his stuff then you would almost certainly make do with unreadable. Unfitted, for now, remained unread, but no one had ever willingly finished its predecessors. Richard was too proud and too lazy and--in a way-too clever and too nuts to write talent novels. For instance, the thought of getting a character out of the house and across town to somewhere else made him go vague with exhaustion …

He reached a corner. Wroxhall Parade? Across the road was a wired children's playground populated not by children (note the silence) but by menacingly sober old drunks, behind seesaw, behind jungle-gym, between swings and roundabouts. Would New York be like this? On his way here Richard had noticed all the speed bumps. Sleeping policemen were the only kind of policemen you would find in such a land, a land of stay-away and no-go. Richard walked past yet another scorched mattress. Revelation would come, hereabouts, in the form of the mattress-fire . . . Richard continued to write about this world but he hadn't

actually walked around in it for six or seven years. All he did, nowadays, with this world, was drive through it, in the vermilion Maestro.

As he made towards the given address, and identified it, he paused and turned and gave his surroundings one last dutiful sweep of the eyes. Thepale wire, the brutalist hairdos of the lopped trees. Poverty said the same thing, century after century, but in different kinds of sentences. The sentences spoken by what confronted him here would be short sentences, rich in nothing but solecism and profanity. Now how did this tie in with the mangled syllogism, arrived at ten hours earlier over a cup of tea and a stupefied cigarette, following the usual failure with Gina. Going something like:

A. Gwyn's trex was loved by the world; his trex was universal.

B. The world loved trex; the world was trex.

C. Better use the world, in that case; better have Gwyn picked on by

something his own size . ..

No need for Richard to knock himself out, humping the Los Angeles Times all over town. Or seeking the hospitality of the pages of The Little Magazine for that gory "middle" he was forever rehearsing in his mind. Literature couldn't do it. The world could fucking do it… As Richard climbed the steps, the supposedly superseded notion of paying money to get Gwyn beaten up returned to him with all the freshness of discovery.

As promised, the front door was unlatched ("I guarantee it," Darko had said). Steadying himself in the hall Richard heard the sound of a sander or a plane-saw: a plane-saw whining for its plane-saw mummy. It was the noise of dental pain: it was the noise of pain. The weak link is you, Steve Cousins had said, in the Canal Creperie. If we do this, he had said, the weak link is you. If someone leaned on you-you'd break. People don't know pain and fear, he had said, I know pain and fear. Pain and fear are my friends. I'm watertight. The weak link is you . . . Richard had always thought that he knew pain and fear; but he didn't-not yet. Pain and fear were waiting for him, as they waited for everyone. A whole hospice of pain and fear, patiently waiting.

He knocked on the first inner door he came to. Darko opened it. A Transylvanian confrontation, just for a second: Darko's eyes were redder than his red hair, redder than the Maestro. He looked Richard up and down, and said, as if identifying him by name, "Charisma bypass." Very soon they were standing in a room roughly the size of a tennis court and filled with furniture that might have come from anywhere or even everywhere: from the SCRs of provincial sociology departments, from business hotels, from schoolrooms, from barracks.

Turning, Richard said boldly, "Where are you from, Darko? Originally."

"From the place I still call Yugoslavia.?

Darko was standing in the middle of the room's kitchen district and staring down at some kind of foodstuff splayed on a plate. Now he looked up, and smiled. Long upper lip with a feathery mustache on it; long upper gum, also gingery in hue.

"Are you Serb or Croat? Out of interest."

"I don't accept that distinction."

"Yes. Well. There isn't any ethnic distinction, is there. Just religion. Nothing visible." On the mantelpiece Richard thought he saw a devotional knickknack or icon, lit from within by a bulb the shape of a closed tulip; it was the Virgin Mary (he sensed), but travestied, with joke breasts outthrust like the figure of a redoubtable maiden on a ship's prow. "Isn't there some big deal about the sequence of making the sign of the cross? In the war, in the world war, Croat soldiers rounded up children and got them to make the sign of the cross. To see which way they did it. To see if they lived or died."

This was obviously news to Darko: fresh information. Richard tried to relax himself with the following thought: that nowadays, in a sense, you could know more about a stranger than the stranger knew about himself. Recently he had involved himself in an argument on his doorstep with a proselytizing Mormon (soon to be sent on his way with a taunt) who had never heard of Moroni: Moroni, the nineteenth-century American angel, the Messiah of the wild-goose chase in whose name the bearded ranter trudged from house to house. Big clue, that: Moroni. Moron with an i on the end of it. Moronic without the c.

Darko said, "I believe that everyone is a human being."

"I buy that too. Belladonna, I take it, is a human being. I mean I assume she exists. Where is she?"

"Getting dressed. Getting undressed. What's the diff? Now what do I do with this cholesterol bomb?"

He gestured at the dish and what it contained. The dish glowed back up at him like the palette of a busy artist: some modern primitive who worked in pastels.

"Bung it in the fucking MW," Darko decided.

MW equaled microwave. That was good. The word had fewer syllables than its abbreviation. Especially good, especially self-defeating, because the microwave was a device intended to cheat time. Anyway Darko had already heated it, and was already eating it-his mango pizza or pomegranate rissole-with both hands… On a video he'd hired and admired, Richard remembered the motorist hero referring to his FWD, or four-wheel drive. One might add that there are certain frolicsome cosmologists who refer to "the WYSIWYG universe," or "What You See Is What YouGet." To be fair, this isn't an abbreviation but an acronym. They don't actually stand there and say Double-U-Why-Ess-Eye-Double-U-Why-Gee. They stand there and say Wysiwig. Those assholes. Whom we ask to do the job of wondering how we're here. The wysiwyg universe is the one in which dark matter, the overarching shadow comprising perhaps 97 percent of universal mass, remains unexotic, the usual proton-neutron-electron arrangement, just planets, possibly, bigger than Jupiter but not big enough to shine, "massive compact halo objects," known (what is it with these guys?) as MACHOS. What is it with these guys? The "free lunch" universe. The "designer" universe. The "charisma bypass" universe? Sending their minds back eighteen billion years, they reach for catchphrases that were getting old eighteen months ago.

"Will Belladonna be joining us? And tell me more," said Richard, making sure there was plenty of amusement in his tone, "about her thing with Gwyn Barry."

Darko held up a ringer while he finished a demanding mouthful, one that involved much tongue work on all four sets of molars. At last he said, "Who?"

"Belladonna."

"You mean Diva. She's called Diva now. Now I don't know Diva mega-well."

"Is that right."

"With men, everywhere you look there's Divagate."

No, not divagate: Divagate. Like Watergate, etcetera.

"A lot going on," Richard suggested. "More than meets the eye."

"She gives good girlrock, I reckon. Yep."

Richard went on standing there.

"Oh yeh," said Darko with resignation. "Diva's wild for the wild thing."

"Have you known her mega-long? Where is she, for instance?"

Darko excused himself and left the room through a door beyond the kitchen. When he came back he looked at Richard suddenly and said, "Who are you?"

"Richard. Who are you?"

"Ranko."

"You mean Darko."

"Darko is my twin brother. He's Croat. I'm Serb. We look the same but we've got nothing in common."

"Well you both eat pizza. You've still got a bit of it hanging from your mustache."

The man stood there neutrally, continuing to clean his teeth with his tongue. "She's getting up," he said. "Me I'm off out.?

Richard was alone in the room he should never have entered for only five or six turbulent seconds, while one door closed and another opened. If you could have micro-monitored this time frame you would have found: fear of injury, disease and murder, fear of the dark that was now descending, fear of poverty, of poor rooms, fear of Gina and her swelling irises; despair for the stranded self and its timidly humming blood; and, among all these fears and hates, the sense of relief, of clarity and surety a man feels, at the prospect of temptation, when he knows he has washed his cock before leaving the house. He took one smeared glance at Diva as she came slanting into the room and thought: hopeless. He's safe. I'm safe. Not deadly nightshade. Just poison ivy. We're all safe.

"Hi."

"Hi."

"Richard," she said.

"Diva."

She turned a full circle and looked up at him, saying, "Belladonna. That's me."

Richard surveyed her, now (he felt), with a census-taker's detachment. No doubt she would have laughed in his face to hear him say so (she was probably a goth or a grrrl or a bombo: I haven't yet read the Saturday newspapers, he thought, with a self-fortifying swallow, but Belladonna was a punk. That is to say, she had gone at herself as if to obliterate the natural gifts. Her mascara she wore like a burglar's eye-mask; her lipstick was approximate and sanguinary, her black hair spiked and lopped and asymmetrical, like the pruned trees outside the window. Punk was physical democracy. And it said: let's all be ugly together. This notion held a lot of automatic appeal for Richard-for Richard, who would not mind being poor if no one was rich, who would not mind looking rough if no one looked smooth, who would not mind being old if no one was young. He certainly didn't mind being nuts, though, however many were sane; in fact he was really enjoying it, and believed it was the only good thing that had happened to him for years. She was very young and very small and very brown. With effective perversity she wore her underwear as overwear: floppy pink knickers over the black cycling pants; tight white bra emblazoning the black T-shirt. Her voice was London. Richard could not place her, ethnically. He thought she probably came from some island.

She said, "You're not like I imagined you."

"Really?" This was a novel idea: that anyone imagined him. He said lightly, "You mean I'm different from my book reviews?"

Belladonna looked for somewhere to sit down, and selected the sofa.

"You're not as I imagined you either.?

"Yeah?"

"You're so young. I don't know. You don't seem to be Gwyn's type."

"He's like … in love with me."

With a defiant shake or twitch of the head. On the word love.

"Is he now?" said Richard as he sat beside her. She was gazing down at her clasped hands: anchorectic Belladonna. He found himself entertaining the reckless hope that she was already pregnant. "And how do you feel about that?"

"Pleased, obviously. Proud. I know he's married or whatever."

"Are you .. .? I mean has this been going on long?"

She smiled secretively. "You know what my thing is? Read my lips." My thing, she said silently, is my mouth.

"Your mouth."

"That's what they call me: The Gob. The Mush. Ever since I was little I had this mouth." My thing is my mouth. I'm famous for my mouth.

"You're still little," said Richard.

Here, he thought, we had the second punk principle. Everyone their own artist. Everyone their own legend. That guy's thing is to have a kilo of old newspapers glued to his hair, that girl's to wear a clothespeg through her cheek. Belladonna's thing was her mouth. Richard felt the contradiction (or would later feel it: he was busy now), because the talent was still no-talent, still idly particular, with no claim on the universal. It picked on a contradiction of Richard's. He wouldn't mind having no genius, if no one else had any? No, not true. He did want people to have it, genius; he wanted it to be out there.

Come and look, Belladonna mouthed. Look closely. She leaned back and adjusted the head of the angle-poise lamp, as if she was her own dentist. Richard-a consultant, a second opinion-bent himself nearer. I've never had a filling, he saw her say, her lower lip answering, as in a dance, to the movement of the tongue. Her teeth were indeed pitilessly perfect. Look how long my tongue is . . . Belladonna's mouth: Richard almost had his nose in it. And he knew he would never feel the same way about women's mouths again, how internal they were, how red and pink and white and wet. Yes, that was right: like a lateral and platonically perfect pubis, containing thirty-two teeth. There was no confusion here. He knew where the teeth were and where they weren't. Before he sat back he let her breath register on him and he found its taste was sweet, but sweet like a medicine, not like a fruit.

"There are tricks I can do with it."

Her tongue appeared and arched up and settled its straining sting on the tip of her nose. Then it withdrew, and the mouth smiled, and said, "Orthis." Now the lips distended and scrolled away from one another. They said, "Blackface." The teeth and gums within looked distant, like a mouth within a mouth. Reconstituted, the mouth mouthed, Take my hand.

He obeyed her. It was a normal hand, too, but he could hardly connect it with Belladonna, who was, as she said, as her mouth said, just a mouth.

Which said "Watch" as the free hand approached it and then disappeared into it, wrist-deep.

Richard turned away, in search of his identity. All he could find was some very worn old stuff. "You want to be careful," he said, "who you show that to."

"I am." Her whole face was looking at him with indulgent reproach. I am.

When she switched off the lamp Richard realized that the room had been smoothly and silently invaded by the adulterous light of dusk; the light that lovers know, intimate and isolating and flatteringly amber. In this particular spasm of his spousal evolution, adultery was a red-light district, and the red just meant danger. He had been in wrong rooms before. He had been in wrong rooms before, but they tended to be better appointed than the one in which he now lurked. The circumambient red was the red of Darko's gums, closing on the fruit vert. A year ago, with Anstice, he had shed his clothes in one of these wrong rooms. What saved him from technical adultery, on that occasion, was a mysterious inner strength, something mysterious even to himself (though he knew a whole lot more about it now): impotence . . . What starts to go, around now, he had decided, is not necessarily the hard-on but the sensation of the hard-on. And with the loss of that sensation (the hurting blood) goes the loss of the belief, the loss of the transcendence and, very soon afterwards (before you know it, in fact), the loss of the hard-on. Such as it was. In its stead, the little death, the little death of ruined powers, of dud magic. Anyway, sensation informed him that impotence would not save him now, if it came to it. Some other dynamic would be obliged to intercede. The most likely candidate, at present, was premature ejaculation. He thought: I'm here because I'm scared of dying. I didn't do it. Death did.

His life, his whole life, was approaching its third-act climax. There would be two acts to follow. The fourth act (conventionally a quiet act). And then the fifth. What genre did his life belong to? That was the question. It wasn't pastoral. It wasn't epic. In fact, it was comedy. Or anti-comedy, which is a certain kind of comedy, a more modern kind of comedy. Comedy used to be about young couples overcomingdifficulties and then getting married. Comedy wasn't about that now. Romance, which used to be about knights and wizards and enchantment, was now about young couples getting married-romance, supermarket romance. Comedy was about other things now.

"There's a test I do on boys," she said. Richard showing interest, she continued, "Just tell me. I'll go out of the room and then come back in again and do whatever you want."

"How do you mean?"

"It's simple. Just tell me and I'll do it."

"What kind of thing?"

"Whatever. Your favorite."

"My favorite what?"

"Don't be shy. You know: any little thing. Your favorite."

"Say I don't have a favorite."

"Everyone has a favorite. They're funny, these little things, sometimes. It tells you so much about someone."

"Yeah, but what kind of thing?"

"Anything!"

Abruptly the room reminded Richard of the classroom in the crammer he had attended years ago, on Gwyn's street. Mostly it was the dimensions, he supposed, and the room's intransigently undomestic feel. Perhaps, too, the sense he had then, at eighteen, that he was being graded here for the rest of his life; that information about himself, welcome or unwelcome, was on its way, and getting nearer.

"Do you like doing this test on boys?"

"Yeah I really want to know it about people. What their favorite is."

"Because …"

"It tells you so much. About them."

"How many times have you uh, run this test on boys?"

She shrugged expressively-but not enlighteningly. Two or three times? Two or three times a day? Richard thought that there probably wasn't much point in trying to read her manner. Not much point in assigning adverbs to it, and so on (proudly, indignantly, flusteredly). As was the case with Steve Cousins, Belladonna had her feelings and reactions and affectations, but they played to a different and newer rhythm whose beat he didn't know.

"Give me an example. What was Darko's favorite?"

"Darko," said Belladonna (proudly, indignantly, flusteredly).

"… Okay. What's the most usual favorite? What do they usually want you to do?"

"Well, usually . . ." She paused-fondly, you might say. Her eyesopened wide, in all innocence. "Usually they ask me to go out of the room," she said, "and then come back in nude, and then do a little dance. And then like suck their cocks."

The room gained another magnitude of dark. Who else but lovers- and solitary depressives-would sit in light like this and make no move for the switch?

"I always think it's the trick I show them with my hand. That makes them choose that. So go on. What's your favorite?"

But Richard asked, "What was Gwyn's favorite?"

"Gwyn." And here the adverbs would say thoughtfully, wistfully, tenderly. She turned to him, her face still lowered in shadow. Her clothes, as you might expect, emphasized what she liked most about herself and her body, what she was best pleased with, not a body part (in her case) but a certain rotational quality in the waist and hips. She squirmed and smiled and said, "You know I've never actually 'met' Gwyn Barry."

Richard stood up. He was leaving. He was pretty sure he was leaving. "So you don't know him," he said, "mega-well."

"He loves me."

"You mean you think he loves you."

"It's the way he like looks at me."

"When does he look at you?"

"When he's on TV."

"Do a lot of people on TV look at you?"

"No. Only Gwyn," said Belladonna, staring straight ahead, as if conducting a conversation with Richard's trousers. Then she tipped her head back. "You think I'm all mouth, don't you," she said, and let it half-smile and pout and quiver. "I'm not. I'm not. What's your favorite? I want to know."

"Why?"

"So we can make Gwyn jealous."

And Richard was gone.

Gal Aplanalp didn't call.

"Gal Aplanalp is on the phone to me two hours a day," said Gwyn. "Foreign rights. She does it all herself. Alexander used to just give them away. But Gal gets decent bread even from the East Europeans. Gal's great. So much vivacity. So much exuberance. So much love of life."

It seemed to Richard that the maggot that lived in Gwyn's brain had got itself stuck in a corner or a U-bend between the two frontal hemispheres, causing its host to go on standing there (perhaps indefinitely) making faces of chaste and twinkly approval. The two men were in the outer bar of the Warlock, leaning on the quiz machine, or the Knowledge, as it was called hereabouts, even by the cab drivers, for whom the Knowledge had meant crouching for a year on a kid-sized moped with a clipboard up on the handlebars. Gwyn and Richard were not here to play tennis. They were here to play snooker (the Portobello Health and Fitness Center was closed for remodernization). This meant they had to wait for a table. At length, Gwyn's maggot freed its wiggling back leg. His face cleared, and then frowned, watchfully. He was wearing a new tweed jacket; the material was yellowish and tufty, like a lightly chewed corncob.

"Thanks for the first chapter of the new one," said Richard. "Mouthwatering. Is it all like that, more or less?"

"More or less. If it ain't broke, don't fix it-that's what I always say. Proofs will be ready next month. You'll get one."

"I can't wait."

A gum-chewing teenage girl in a hot-pink catsuit walked past, heading for the stairs and the aerobics room. They watched her go.

"Do you wonder," said Gwyn, "do you ever wonder, as you get older, about changing sexuality?"

"What the next batch is like?"

"Because that's progressing at the same rate as everything else. It's all speeded up. They're different now."

"Probably."

"But different in what way? My impression is … and this is only from the letters I get, mind .. . my impression is that they're more pornographic. More specialized."

"What letters do you get?"

"There's usually a photograph. And a broad hint at a certain- speciality.?

Richard realized that he had always found Gwyn erotically inscrutable. Who cared, when Gwyn was with Gilda? Not for the first time he wondered if-thanks to an impossibly humiliating complication-he was queer for Gwyn in some way. He thought about it. Richard didn't want to kiss Gwyn. It was surely inconceivable that Gwyn wanted to kiss him. Anyway, it wasn't going to happen, was it. And Richard didn't really care why he was doing what he was doing.

"Demi's young."

"Not that young."

And Richard felt power slowly absent itself from him as Gwyn said,

"She didn't really grow up in the sexual swim. Not sheltered, exactly. Between you and me, she's been around. Not that she remembers that much about it. This was in her cocaine phase. You know. Upper-class girls all have a cocaine phase. When they're born their dads put their names down for the smart dry out clinics. She's even been-she's even had several lovers of West Indian origin."

"You astonish me."

"I'm proud to say it. Good for her! But she's hardly your thoroughly modern miss. Now take fellatio. My impression was, years ago, that some girls did it and some didn't. Or they were like Gilda, and did it on your birthday. Well I bet they all do it now. It's not whether they do it. It's how they do it."

It was like a game when you lost the rhythm of dominance, and you never moved freely but always in reply. Richard said, "There's this girl who wants to meet you."

"Attractive?"

"Extraordinary mouth. She wants to ask you a question."

"What's my favorite color?"

"No. What's your favorite."

Richard then found himself giving Gwyn a gavel-to-gavel account of his experience with Belladonna. As he did so he thought: what was I playing at in there? Belladonna was barely seventeen, and out of her mind. Common sense demanded that he should have made her take her clothes off, at least, and do a little dance. Ever since that crepuscular encounter Richard had been adding to the large number of outrageous novelties that were, he discovered (now he came to think about it), his favorite. There was one favorite in particular: the kind of sexual intercourse that involved not an exchange of bodily fluids so much as a full transfer.

"Well," said Gwyn. "Send her over."

"What is your favorite??

"No, no. I just want to fill out the picture. Why knock yourself out for a hamburger when your wife serves Chateaubriand every night."

Yes, thought Richard, who had heard this line before: but a hamburger is sometimes just what you fancy. And do you really want chateaubriand every night?

"I would never-I mean, what I have with my lady is just…" Gwyn fell silent. The maggot kicked in for a while, as he shook his head with his eyes closed and then nodded his head with his eyes open. "We were making love this afternoon. No. It must have been last night. No. It was yesterday afternoon. Or this morning. Anyway. That's not important. We were making love and I was kidding her about one of her West Indian lovers. And she looked up at me and said, 'Darling. Believe-' Ah. Here she is!"

He broke off and greeted his wife as if-as if what? As if this was 1945, and he hadn't seen her since 1939. When that was over Demi regained her balance and stood there, with a change of clothes in her shopping bag, smiling weakly at Richard, who moved forward to kiss her, in his turn.

Gwyn said, "When are you two going to get together? For your in-depth chat about yours truly. It's the least I can do to fix you two up. In exchange for the 'sexy young fan' that Richard is bringing over for me. Come on, Demi-get up those stairs. We don't want any extra inches, do we love."

When Demi had gone on up for her class Gwyn spent the last few minutes filling Richard in on his European deals for Amelior Regained. While doing this he used several slang synonyms for the denomination of one thousand. Richard had noticed that as soon as any novelist clawed his way past three figures he immediately started trying out the word grand. He himself would never do this. He would never do this, even if he got the chance. It was a disgraceful capitulation to the here and now-to the secular, to the mortal. Why would you want to sound like a tycoon or a gangster? Whatever you were going to get, you weren't going to get it in your time. That was the gamble. That was the shot… Anyway, and more locally, Richard was feeling so poor these days that he switched off his windscreen wipers every time he drove under a bridge.

"So I said, 'Take the fifteen large from the Portuguese but subtract the dime on the audio deal. What's a K?' I said it," said Gwyn, steadying himself, "I said it just to get Gal out of my hair."

During the last couple of minutes of their wait, the maggot got itself stuck again, or ravenously burst into a whole new chamber, condemning Gwyn, in any case, to a series of imperious scowls and glares …

They went on up. Richard won 3-2 on the final black. His concentration was poor.

There are other ways of doing it, the young man had said. Botulism-in his sandwich. Or send a woman at him. Like an antibody. Work on him psychologically. Fear. Doesn't have to be straight physical damage.

Still, there's something about straight physical damage . . .

Same for everybody. Unlike the other stuff. It's simple.

Richard lay, with Marco, on the balding but still conspicuously elegant chaise longue; the child's cheek rested on his reverberating chest as he read aloud from the pages of The Jungle Book; he read uncommonly well… Damage is simple. As he read, Richard was discovering, rather to his surprise, just how much he admired simplicity. Not simplicity in fictional prose-but elsewhere. That which is universal is often simple. Scientific beauty (and beauty, here, was a sound indicator of truth) was often simple. He didn't want to hear any brusque or unfeeling remarks about simplicity.

So, talking hypothetically, Richard had said, if I wanted someone fucked up …

And the wild boy had said, You'd come to me.

He read on: the bit about Shere Khan's imminent approach and the wolfs affecting admonitions. He read on, until he noticed that Marco's immobility had long passed beyond raptness, noticed, too, the broad patch of drool on his shirt. Marco was asleep. Groaning at the use of many strange muscles, Richard slid out from underneath him and then stared down at his sleeping face: open-mouthed, sweat-slicked-the face of a desperate little doggy. A domestic doggy, one accustomed to being at home. Prodded awake, Marco mumbled of orangutans . .. Orangutan meant wild man. Mowgli was a wild boy, raised by wolves. Even Marco, to his pain, dreamed wildly, and went in his sleep to where the wild things were.

Another day. Another day off school. Having clothed him so heavily that the child could hardly move, let alone walk (he looked like a sports logo: a racetrack blimp), Richard took Marco to Dogshit, for some air. The green world, in autumn, in fall. So the wild boy, the young man, was the green man: in modern dress. You'd come to me. That was really the high point of the evening. Thereafter Richard had to sit there listening to literary criticism: Steve Cousins's assessment of Amelior.

Marco took his hand. As they walked, under a midterm daytime moon, like a mask flattened at the brow and sharpened at the chin, like a shield raised against arrows, Richard was remembering, how, in theCanal Creperie, between Rattlesnakes, he had reached for his food punnet and felt the lateness of the hour when the nacho clung to its sauce like a stirring-stick left too long in the paint, and the young man had said, "It's a sham, it's a sham. Sweetness and light? Out there? Jesus. Where's my violin. I know the wilds. I ran wild, mate. For years. Just me. Out there. For years." Steve Cousins: foundling of a new-age community? Or a borstal boy on the lam? It didn't become clear. What became clear was that Steve Cousins had read The Wild Boy of Aveyron (so indeed had Richard), and reread it, and misread it; and that he saw himself, somehow, as a contemporary update of that frazzled and swarthy mute-two centuries on. Richard sighed. He sighed then and he sighed now, with Marco's hand in his. Still, with his own confusions, Richard could certainly imagine disliking a book so much that you decided to do something, you decided to sort this shit out, by banning it or burning it or by getting hold of its author and beating him up. Not so strange, in a world where novelists needed bodyguards, hideouts, freedom railways. "When you feel you're ready," the young man said, out on the street, "activate me."

"Look!" said Marco.

Perhaps the urban pastoral was all left field. There was no right field. And now came a moment when London seemed to configure itself for the observing eye, and grossly, like a demonstration. Richard and his son were passing the toilets; again, one of its two pathways was cordoned off by orange crime-scene tape. How playfully the tape wriggled in the breeze: Marco yearned out towards it, the kiddie crime-scene tape! In attendance stood two police officers, protecting and preserving their crime scene. Richard moved through the loose talk of the loose clump of mums and heard their choric song: a little girl, this time; in the summer it had been a little boy, and the crime-scene tape had played on the other path. Heading west now, towards the exit, father and child passed a benchful of mid-teens snorting and giggling to something pornographic on their boombox. Not just a hot lyric either, but straight audio Adult: a man-woman duet, snarling-carnal. While snorting and giggling, one pale youth was also managing to taunt his dog and eat crisps, all at the same time. Congratulations: here was the culture, and he was living it, to the full. Ten feet away a boy and girl dressed in black were standing in a formal embrace like arrested dancers on the green floor. Richard recognized them, with a give in the back of the knees, as he ducked on by.

Darko, and Belladonna, They had about them an air of isolation that

made him think-that made him think of the Siberian lepers and also, unconnectedly, wildly, of the awfulness of unforeseen consequences … "Look!" said Marco, as he rested on the bench by the gate.

High in the thin blue east, on an angled collision course, two airplanes climbed towards their shared apex-like needles, with the twin strands of white thread trailing from their eyes. They passed: no contact. Briefly, though (for the sky hates straight lines and soon destroys their definition), the two white slipstreams formed a leaning cross: leaning backward, away from the earth. Something was over, over on the other side.

"Terryterry," said Terry. "That what it all come down to. Every man want to be cock of the walk. All the Indians want to be chief. That what it all come down to: terryterry."

"Yeah mate," said Steve Cousins, and turned to his other guest- Richard.

"What I want," said Richard, and it was all right to do this, because Scozzy was conducting two conversations at once, and could probably conduct many more, as many as necessary, like a chess master giving a simultaneous display, "is a free sample. Well, not free. We could come to an agreement on that."

"You want me to let him have a slap."

"… Yeah," said Richard. "More than a slap. More like a-"

"Yeah well, that's what we call a slap. It's more than a slap." Steve turned to Terry and said, "Listen, I got my territory. And it ain't on the fucking street." From under his hat he looked from Terry to Richard and back again, and back again, inviting the two men to contemplate each other. His sparse but uniform eyebrows were genially raised. And above the gray band the hat's slopes were indented in direct answer to the cheekbones beneath and their famished angularity. He turned to Terry and said, "Ah. Star! See the way how me vex!"

Like most London faces, Steve could do a pretty good Yardie accent. He had even read the novel called Yardie-as had most Yardies. But Terry wasn't a Yardie. Terry, as Richard had been apprised beforehand, through the bleats and squawks of Steve's mobile phone, was a Quacko: the next lot. Richard was sitting in on this meet "as an observer": good material. And that was exactly how he felt. He was an onlooker, but he was shorn of point of view.

Terry said, "Some of my boys-they totally rootless. Debt mean nutting to them. Normal to them. Debt is they way of life."

"Jesus, I spend my life with all these speech impediments. The schwartzers I know all say roofless and def and nuffing." Like when we were going to do Nigel, thought Steve. I tell Clasford, He's a fuckin hippy. And Clasford says, A nippy. And I say, Nah-a hippy. And Clasford says, An ippy? Jesus.

"They all want the big car and the chain round the troat as big as you fist. Gold taps. Diamonds in the ear and the teet."

Steve turned to Richard and said, "When do you want this to happen?"

"Soon. This week."

"Okay. I'll give you a freebie. A teaser. And we'll get a schwartzer. Clasford. Nice, that. It works out. You know: Demi. You all right? Try the bacon sandwich."

The three men sat in what Scozzy had referred to as a spieler: a private (i.e., illegal) gambling club, way up the Edgware Road. You reached the back room through a low-morale beauty parlor and a half-flight of stairs. The ambiance was one of entrenched and hallowed old-firm London villainy: Jesster's was the resort of senior felons, of various career sons of bitches, and it was no small thing to be here among them. But if you didn't know any of this you could look around Jesster's and mistake the place for the lounge of an indulgent granny, with the teapot on the counter in its tasseled cozy, the antique fruit machine which would certainly respond to no current coin, the pictures on the walls of soldiers and fox hunters and the four or five old stiffs at the card table, playing not poker or even brag or pontoon but some strictly indigenous whist-derivative called Swizzle. Steve Cousins had a nice word for old men: he called them results. And Richard quite liked flips or flip: for girls. Otherwise, Steve contented himself with a smattering of rhyming slang-and Richard had written off rhyming slang long ago. The only ones that were any good were jekylls (for trousers, via Jekyll and Hides-strides) and syrup (for wig, via syrup of figs). And there was something almost poetically crass about boat (for face, via boat race. What boat? What race?) It was midmorning. Jesster's seemed wholly innocuous. Richard, whose internal alarm system was not what it ought to be, felt quite at home.

"Terry mate," said Steve, applying himself to his concentration. He stared without blinking into Terry's face, which was in fact a kind of deep yellow, like the seam of an aging banana, but darkened by its innumerable impurities-pocks, brown speckles, black freckles. "I'm having no trouble understanding you. You want my thing, right. You want my ting."

"Yeh. They want you thing. The helt."

Steve Cousins liked to think of himself as a criminals' criminal. Every day he pulled off the crime of the century. They didn't have to be complicated or successful crimes, because he didn't mean this century. He meant the next one. Steve's thing was sweet-and it made money, unlike his other crimes, which were largely recreational (administering concus-sive beatings, for instance, to people whose drinks he had spiked with mind-expanding drugs). Steve's thing was: he sold cocaine and heroin tohealth clubs. No steroids or any of that buff stuff or sex-change shit. Coke and Smack. Frequenters of health clubs were by definition overin-terested in the body and often wanted to push it in both directions. All the way to detox, in some cases. Steve was proud of his thing, easy, safe, regular; but the point was that it came from left field. It was cute. It was cute, feeding a bushel of heroin to some stinking jock, a pinhead in a singlet under a crane of weights . . .

"Say you just changing you supplier," Terry suggested.

"You guys. You fucking guys. Where's it all leading, mate? You Quacks. I mean, when slicing up each other's kids and grans is what you nan with. That's dinosaur stuff. It's all paperwork now. That's how far we've come. From pickaxes-to paperwork."

Richard was wondering about the relationship between the history of modern crime and the history of modern armaments-or of modern literature. Gang A was in a garage polishing its knives. And Gang B showed up with handguns. And that was that until Gang C showed up with shotguns. And then Gang D showed up with machineguns. Old firms, then new firms, then Yardies, then Quackos. Gang Z. In the outer world, out there, the escalation ladder ended with-or pointed up towards-nuclear weapons. But the Quackos sounded more like Chaos Theory. That was the Quacks: tooled-up chaos. And the same with literature, getting heavier and heavier, until it was all over and you arrived at paperwork. You arrived at Amelior.

"We reach an understanding."

"Yeah I know about these understandings. I give you all my money,"

"Any message for my people?" said Terry as he got to his feet.

"If I wanted to send them a message, you know what I'd do?"

Terry's top lip curled up in appreciative anticipation.

"Send you home in three different minicabs."

They laughed. They laughed on, with willed raucousness. Then Steve turned to Richard and they worked out how they'd do it.

Half an hour later, as they were about to leave, Richard said, "I just want to see what it's like. Violence. It might not be … It might not be appropriate."

"Okay. We give him a slap. See how it goes down. Looking further down the road. Just thinking. Has he got any powerful friends?"

"One or two." Richard named the financier-Sebby.

"That one's connected," said Steve. "He's the fucking army.'"

"Yeah, but Gwyn's a moron. He'll never work anything out."

Now Steve said, "None of my business. You got your reasons. Nothing to do with me. I respect that. None of my business.?

Richard thought he saw where all these disclaimers were leading. He could open up a little now, or he could consign Steve Cousins to the merely menial.

"It's to do with your uh, literary …"

"No no." He hadn't thought of anything to say but it came out awful quick: "Son of a bitch fucked my wife."

"Piece of shit," said Scozzy.

Gal Aplanalp called.

"I'm sorry about the delay," she said. She was sitting at her desk.

"That's all right," said Richard. He, too, was sitting at his desk.

Gal always tried to be as straight as possible with her clients. She told Richard the plain truth. The weekend before last she had taken Untitled home with her, as promised. Like an old-style literary agent she had a light supper and settled down on the chaise longue, wearing a dressing gown and reading glasses. Halfway through page four, an acute migraine-and she never suffered from migraines, or even headaches- sent her crashing into the bathroom pill shelves. She still had a bruise where she'd barked her forehead against the mirror. She slept well enough that night, and got up early. On page seven the migraine returned.

"How unfortunate," said Richard.

"I'm afraid it's kind of missed its slot with me now." Gal had a seven-hundred-page family-saga novel written by a slimming expert to read and place by the end of the week. "I'm giving it to Cressida, my assistant. She's damn smart-don't worry. I'll have a report for you in the next four or five days."

Among the tacks and paper clips and unpublished novels on Richard's desk stood a jug of tapwater-tapwater boiled and then chilled (Gina showed him how). This was his new health kick: drinking water all the time, not instead of but on top of the usual quarts of coffee, the wriggling jolts of scotch, the cleansing beers. Drinking water all the time assisted him in the massive task of daily rehydration. Drinking water all the time didn't cost anything. And it didn't actually hurt.

Richard pushed the jug aside and sat there with his hand on his brow.

Midnight, and the orange van was parked on the corner of Wroxhall Parade.

13 sat at the wheel. He was alone-alone but for Giro, twitching in nightmare on his tartan rug. 13 wore his characteristically scandalized expression: evidence of yet another visit to Marylebone Magistrates'Court. They'd done him for breaching the peace. On Ladbroke Grove. On a Saturday night. And it was just a laugh: they were just having a laugh with all the milk bottles. Empty milk bottles. Could you believe it. Breaching the peace? On Ladbroke Grove? On a Saturday night? What rucking peace?

Shaking his head, 13 stared at the numbered door. Steve was within, sorting it with Darko, and with Belladonna.

The sentence, which, strangely and arrestingly, was non-value-free, said: And the good boy and the bad boy -went into the forest.

"Okay," said Richard-dressing-gowned, breakfastless: a little heap of nuclear waste. It was eight in the morning. Gina and Marius were eating their rustic cereal, in the kitchen, across the passage. Richard felt like a coal miner coming off night shift, dully gray except where he sparkled with cold motes of sweat. "Okay. Now what's the first word."

Marco addressed his frown to the page.

"Okay. What's the first letter?"

". .. A," said Marco. A short a. As in cat.

"A…?"

"Muh."

"Try again."

"… Nuh."

"Good."

". .. Buh."

"Try again."

". . . Duh."

"Good. Which spells . . .?" Richard waited. "Which spells . . .?" Richard waited. And then he stopped waiting and said, "And."

They were now staring at the fortress of word number two.

"Tuh," said Marco. Later, he said, "Huh." Later still he said, " #201;."

"Well, Marco?"

"Het," said Marco.

"Jesus," said Richard.

Actually, he was wondering how the little boy could bear being on his lap. Couldn't he hear the tuneless blues that was always playing in his father's head? As quite often happened Marco's pajamaed presence (his innocently silky writhings) had provided Richard with an erection. This used to cause him disquiet, and struck him as something he had better shut up about. But, again, he was enough of an artist to have faith in the universality of his own responses. He asked around among the dads and found that it was so. It was general-universal. It stillstruck him as essentially perverse. When you thought of all the other occasions which cried out for hard-ons that never came. And here you not only didn't need one. You didn't even want one.

So they somehow got through good (qood, yood, goob), and did and again, and the again, and bad (dad, dab, bab), and toiled their way (boy was all right, for some reason) past went and eventually into, and staggered towards the penultimate the. Marco stared at the the word for perhaps a minute and a half. At that point Richard got out from underneath him. That was it: you could forget forest. Forests .. . forests, which in Dante and Spenser and Virgil and Milton symbolize the temptations of life. Good boy and bad boy go there. Enchanted glades or drear woods, places of complication or places where complication falls away-but places where you will be tested. Richard wondered whether Gwyn, in the course of his experiments in childishness and childish amazement, ever read like Marco read: one letter every twenty seconds. How had Gwyn developed this habit? Perhaps it came on him automatically: say at maggot mealtimes. Or perhaps he just thought it was good for business. He did it for interviewers, who obediently and admiringly described the phenomenon. Gwyn falling silent midsentence and picking up an orange from the bowl and staring at it. Gwyn pausing in the street as he leaves the restaurant, transfixed by a toyshop window. And you especially can't do that any more, because the orange is designed by a spook in a labcoat, and the toyshop is no shrine of wonder but a synchronized thrash of tar-geters and marketers . . . Gwyn, incensingly, had gone off, still in one piece, on a ten-day promotional tour of Italy, where, he informed Richard, a relaunched Amelior was "on fire." The only real progress Richard could claim to have made was that he had successfully commissioned, received, subbed, and duly shepherded into print a favorable review of Double Dating by the Washington-based feminist critic Lucy Cabretti in The Little Magazine.

Marco slipped off his lap. and Richard tossed the kiddie book over his shoulder. For a moment his eye fell on the latest biography they'd sent at him: it was the size of a Harlem boombox. Richard rubbed his brow. The night before he had dreamed about some clubhouse in the Arctic, where women were eaten as if in a cafeteria, and where old Nazis hobnobbed with drugged monsters . . .

Heavily and dutifully, Richard moved up the stairs, to shower and dress-to put clothes on, to stand bent in the little cubicle while water fell. One glance in the mirror here, upon rising-the bruised scars beneath his eyes, his hair standing on end in terror-had caused him to scrap, or at least shelve, his immediate plan: seducing a lightly sun-kissedDemeter Barry. Had also caused him to think, to whisper: Where have I come from? Where have I been? Not in the land of sleep, not sleep as it used to be, but some other testing ground, some other forest. The forests of Comus and The Faerie Queened No. More like the forests that the wild boy must have known: the clearing, the picnic facility no sooner erected than rotten and ruined, the contemporary leavings and peelings, the rain, and all around the trees patiently dripping, in chemical lamentation. The bedcovers had as usual been pulled back, by Gina. Richard stood there naked, looking at the bared sheet, its crenellations, its damp glow. Every morning we leave more in the bed: certainty, vigor, past loves. And hair, and skin: dead cells. This ancient detritus was nonetheless one move ahead of you, making its own humorless arrangements to rejoin the cosmos.

Richard shaved. A fly, a London fly, was bumping and weakly buzzing around in the small and steamy cubicle; London flies are a definite type-they are fat, and slow, and, come October, they are the living dead. Richard shaved. He noticed that his bristles were getting bristlier, more ornery. But wait a minute, he thought: I am young. I still get spots, blackheads, whiteheads, and, yes, even the mirror-splatting bigboys of yore (often his face felt like one big bigboy). I still think about sex all the time, and beat off whenever I get the chance. I still stare at my own reflection. This is the journey we all make, from Narcissus to Philoctetes-Philoctetes, whose wound smelled so bad. Richard flinched, as if he'd cut himself. With Gina, he realized, he was now in the condition of sexual hiding. He couldn't even hug her anymore, because hugs led to kisses, and kisses led-kisses led to the little death. The poets were wrong when they said that sex was like dying. What he had, and kept on having, was the little death. How did Gina spend her Fridays? He had stopped snooping on her. He had lost the right to inquire. Christ, and there was that fat fuck of a fly, buzzing and weakly bumping around between his legs. Bristly and obese and hopeless, having outlived its season. When Gina watched frightening films she put her hands over her ears. Not over her eyes-over her ears. Richard didn't want to think about it. Where could he put his hands?

For the moment he fingered the lump on the back of his neck. Just a cyst, no doubt: he was a pretty cysty kind of guy. Telling himself not to worry about it, Richard decided that he had made tangible progress with

his hypochondria. He no longer suffered from the periodic panics of

early middle age, where a twinge here or a sting there made you suspect, for a while, that you had this or that fatal disease. Coping with his daily aches and pains, he no longer suspected that he had cancer or muscular

dystrophy or Ebola or Lassa Fever or rat-borne hantavirus or toxic-shock syndrome or antibiotic-resistant staphylococcus. Or gangrene or leprosy. Nowadays he was sure he had them all.

That morning there had been some idle prattle between Mr. and Mrs. Tull-would they never learn?-about the possibility of Marco taking a day off home and paying a visit to that fabled location, school. After all his temperature was barely into the low hundreds; he had woken just twice during the night, and then for no more than an hour each time. Only one of his ears was aching. Only one of his eyes was actually gummed shut with conjunctivitis (the other wasn't nearly so bad and even had the odd patch of white in it). At around eight-thirty, though, in an interval between coughing fits, Marco succeeded in throwing up his breakfast and could be heard crying for help from the bathroom as Gina went off with Marius (perfectly yet insouciantly uniformed, with up-to-date homework pouch, junior tennis racket and football kit bag festooned with rosettes). Richard would have Marco until four-thirty. Then Lizzete came, when her own schoolday was done. They paid her extra if she played hooky, and money was tight.

He wondered about Marius. That morning the senior twin had approached him and said, "Daddy? You're taking too much quack."Marius often neglected to sound his rs. So he must have meant crack.

Feral: that's what the wild boy was. That was what Steve Cousins was. And Richard could defend feral: it had to put up with a lot of dismissive talk (which it didn't like-which it didn't like one bit) from those who claimed that it was just a fashionable synonym for wild or untamed. Ooh, it hated it when anybody said that. Because feral derived not only from ferus (wild) but also from ferox (fierce). Now, something wild need not be fierce, may even be gentle. And the lion can lie down with the lamb. The lion can and must lie down with the lamb.

People who look at dictionaries all day keep seeing words at the top of the page-words they don't like seeing. Syzygy, crapulent, posterity, smegma, toiletry, dystopia, dentrifrice, bastinado, ferae naturae.

Two old ladies who lived in Calchalk Street did strange things for money. Old ladies, who wore the ovine uniform of the good.

One of these old ladies was called Agnes Trounce. She didn't just look old: she looked middle class and reliable and comfortably off. She had that benignly pleading expression of the diplomatically elderly in a youthful Culture. Normally you could meet an old lady on a dark night- with equanimity. But you wouldn't want to meet this old lady, any time, when she was doing her strange thing for money.

The target is driving along. Without a care in the world, as they say. Although of course no one old enough to drive is without a care in the world. No one old enough to drive a trike is without a care in the world. Everyone is right up there at the very brink of their pain limit. That was one of the reasons why it was so easy to hurt people: they were never ready. More pain? Nobody needed that. Nobody thought they could possibly have room for any more, until it came.

Anyway, the target is driving along, feeling relatively happy, immeasurably happier, certainly, than he is going to feel in about ninety seconds. These moments will in retrospect appear golden-age, prelapsarian. So that's right: he doesn't have a care in the world. Intense and lasting cares are arriving, brought to him by Agnes Trounce. For many years, also, he will look back on this interval as the last time that his powers of concentration were any good.

So that's right: the target is driving along without a care in the world. He may be whistling. Perhaps he is listening to music; and because he is driving some of his mind is just plugged into the city . . . He reaches the end of the side street and slows as he approaches the traffic lights that guard a main road. It is evening and the bloodbath of sunset is daubed over the rooftops. No, it is darker, and on its way to being a dark night. In front of him before the red light is a wood-framed Morris Minor, gentlest of cars. The red light spells arterial warning; then red-amber; then green. And the Morris Minor backs into him-and stalls.

Mrs. Agnes Trounce, a widow, sixty-eight years of age in a little-old-lady hat and a gray-white shawl (nice touch), climbs flusteredly from her car and turns the target with her eyes benign and pleading. He climbs out too. Well, these things happen. But you'd be surprised how impatient, how non-understanding, people can be in such circumstances. None of this "Dear oh dear-well, not to worry!" It's "What are you doing on the road anyway, you fucking old cow?" And this makes things easier for Agnes Trounce. Because then the two young men, big lads, who have been lying low in the back of the Morris suddenly extend their bodies into the street. Then it's "You rammed my mum!" Or, if you were using black talent, "You rammed my gran!" And so on. "That's my mum you're fucking swearing at!" Or "That's my gran you're calling a fucking old cow!" Agnes Trounce gets back into her woody Morris and drives away. And in the other car the target's head, by this time, is jerking and crunching around between the door and the doorframe. It was just a motoring dispute that got out of hand and you know how people are about their cars.

The other old lady who lived on Calchalk Street was seventy-two andweighed three hundred pounds and provided sexual relief over the telephone. She was called Margaret Limb. Her voice was hoarse and weathered but also high-pitched and musical, even maidenly, what with all that weight pressing down on it. The siren song of Margaret Limb could lure leaden businessmen out of humid hotel rooms on dark nights. An endless narrative of fat, she lay on a sofa doing the concise crossword and talking dirty. On the other end of the line, men arched and shivered to her tune.

Which old lady would you rather meet, on a dark night?

Now here is something very sad to think about.

The sun will die prematurely, in the prime of life, cut down at the age of fifty-three! One can imagine a few phrases from the obituaries. After a long struggle. Its brilliant career. This tragic loss. The world will seem a duller . . .

Looking on the bright side, though (and Satan, when he visited it, found the sun "beyond all description bright"), we mean solar years here, not terrestrial years. A solar year is the time it takes for the sun to complete an orbit of the Milky Way. And this is a good long while. For example, one solar week ago, man came stumbling out of the African rainforests. Herbiverous, bipedal-erect but by no means sapient. Four solar months ago, dinosaurs ruled the earth. One solar minute ago, we enjoyed the Renaissance. Having recently celebrated its twenty-fifth birthday, the sun will be with us for many solar years to come.

But it won't make old bones. Predictably, somehow (don't we see this every day?), the great decline will be presaged by increasingly hyper-manic activity (look out of the window, at the twanging joggers), by a frantic reassertion of once-infinite but now-vanishing powers. The doomed despot wants to leave nothing behind: its policy, then, is scorched Earth.

First will come the solar winds. It is not given to human beings to imagine the power of the solar winds. But we can make a start by trying to think of an ultimate hurricane consisting of heavy objects-things like trucks and houses and battleships.

During its life on the main sequence, the sun was never accused of being small or cold. Everyone knows that the sun is big and hot. Being big and hot is what it's always been so good at. Now, therefore, it gets even bigger and even hotter. It leaves the main sequence. The yellow dwarf becomes a red giant.

At this stage we give the sun about eighteen (solar) months-two years, at the most. In necrotic rage Chronos consumed its young. Now itretreats and shrinks and curls up and dies, a white dwarf, like all dead things, crystalline and embittered and entombed.

It would seem that the universe is thirty billion light years across and every inch of it would kill us if we went there. This is the position of the universe with regard to human life.

"The History of Increasing Humiliation, dear sirs, proceeds apace." "Please don't fret. I have got dear Den ton out of Repton and into the Goldsmith. He didn't live very long anyway, so completion is more or less in sight." "Gentlemen: Worry not! The ice and cobalt blue of Siberia loom ever nearer." In the haystack of Richard's desktop (he couldn't find the needle), among its schemes and dreams and stonewallings, its ashtrays, coffee cups, dead felt-tipped pens and empty staplers, were traces and deposits of other books: books he hadn't told Gal Aplanalp about; books commissioned yet unfinished, or unbegun. These included a critical biography of Lascelles Abercrombie, a book about literary salons, a book about homosexuality in early twentieth-century English literature with special reference to Wilfred Owen, a study of table manners in fiction, his half of a picture book about landscaping (his half was meant to be a 25,000-word meditation on Andrew Marvell's "The Garden"), and a critical biography of Shackerley Marmion . . . Richard definitely wasn't going to Siberia. But then again, all the other books felt like Siberia: they felt laughably inimical. There were leper colonies, in Siberia. Richard had read about them for a week. To think of the Siberian lepers made him feel cold-it wasn't the weather but the isolation. The Siberian lepers, with all their pathos and disgrace; and lost in time, too, because nobody went near their world and so nobody changed it, and there it was, preserved in ice. What drew him to the Siberian lepers? Why did he feel like one? Siberia wasn't all like that; it wasn't all quarantine and gulag, wasn't all bitter ends. Siberia had bears, and even tigers.

He reread the impatient and quietly menacing letter from the publishers-about Siberia and Richard's wanderings there.

"They're kidding. Fuck it, I'm just not going."

"You said a swear": this was Marco, who now half-entered the study, supporting himself against the doorway in a leaning embrace.

"I'm not going, Marco. They can't make Daddy go."

"Who?"

"Birthstone Books."

"Where?"

"Siberia.?

Marco took this in. After all it was, for him, a perfectly average conversation. His face framed itself to say something nice-something, perhaps, about not wanting Daddy to go anywhere; but he just ducked shyly. That's where I'll end up, he thought. After Gina goes, and after Anstice has wearied of me. Among the Siberia lepers will I dwell. He imagined he would cut quite a dash, there in the colony, and would be entitled and even expected to go around sneering at those less fortunate than himself, at least to start with, until he too succumbed.

Kirk was out of hospital and Steve went around to see him: as you do.

They sat together, watching a video, Steve in his mack, Kirk on the couch, with a blanket. His face still looking like a pizza: heavy on the pepperoni. Kirk: his lieutenant. Organized the muscle.

It was a normal video they sat staring at. Cops and robbers. Or FBI and serial murderers. Steve had watched so much pornography, and so little else, that he had some mental trouble, watching normal videos. Whenever you got a man and a woman alone in a room, or an elevator, or a police car-Steve couldn't understand why they didn't start ripping each other's clothes off. What was the matter with them? Steve's glazed eyes strayed. Up on the book nook, above the TV console, was Kirk's modest collection of erotica: megaboobs from the boondocks. Steve knew all about Kirk's visions of eros: 200 pounds of nude blonde-on a trampoline.

"This it?" said Steve, meaning Kirk's general condition and immediate career plans.

Kirk droopily waved a hand at him.

"Beef?" said Steve.

"Beef," said Kirk, dropping his quilted face-with its onion rings, its anchovies.

See? Still pining. Beef had been put down by Kirk's brother Lee- after its third attack on Lee's daughter. Next came Kirk's retaliatory attack on Lee. And Kirk's brief rehospitalization.

"Kirk mate. You ain't going anywhere, are you?" said Steve, getting to his feet. "Give my love to your mum."

No one had as yet written a novel called Quacko. And for good reason. This novel would have no beginning, no middle and no end-and no punctuation. This novel would be all over the fucking gaff.

There wasn't going to be a novel called Quacko and there wasn't going to be any drugs war-or drags whah (rhymes with ma), as Terryterry called it. Drugs war? Get real. "Get real," Steve Cousins would sometimes murmur, when he saw women, in pornography, who hadn't had their breasts surgically enhanced. "Get real. Get a life," he would mur-mur, seeing the unfixed tits, scarless on the underhang. "Jesus. Get a life." And now that was what he had to do. He had to get a life. Taking a life: he knew how you did that. Some old guy in some old hut somewhere, in the fucking rain . . . The planet definitely lacked a person, down to Scozz. Taking a life and getting one were very different activities. But they weren't opposites, Steve Cousins felt.

Like a musician who can jam all night the love-life with legs is constantly improvising on anything that comes its way. So the Tulls, Richard and Gina (those veterans of sexual make-do and catch-can), as they faced this new challenge, looked to their powers of extemporization. After each display, after each proof of his impotence, it was into his excuses that Richard poured his creative powers. Nor did Gina's talent for the humane go untested by all these let-outs and loopholes, because, after all, she had to lie there and listen to them, nudging him here, prompting him there (yes, there … Ouuu, yes there!).

In the early weeks-they were still all shy and green, finding their way-they explored the theme of tiredness; and then they reexplored it. As in "Just tired, I suppose" and "I suppose it's just tiredness" and "You're just tired" and "It must be tiredness" and "I suppose I'm very tired" and "You must be very tired" and "So tired." There they lay together, yawning and rubbing their eyes, night after night, working their way through the thesaurus of fatigue: bushed, whacked, shattered, knackered, zonked, zapped, pooped … As excuses went, tiredness was clearly a goer, amazingly versatile and athletic; but tiredness couldn't be expected to soldier on indefinitely. Before very long, tiredness made a natural transition to the sister theme of overwork, and then struck out for the light and space of pressure, stress and anxiety.

Of course they could now afford to look back on all this with a certain wry amusement. At their timorousness, their inhibition. That was in the past. These days, how boldly Richard reached, how broadly he roamed, for his excuses! Poor circulation, unhappy childhood, midlife crisis, ozone depletion, unpaid bills, overpopulation; how eloquent he was as he frowned his way through Marco's learning disability or the new damp patch on the sitting room ceiling. (Sometimes she liked it purely physical: upset stomach, bruised knee, tennis elbow, bad back.) There were disappointments, naturally. Book reviewing, for instance, never got off the ground, despite the clear appeal of stuff like deadlines and sub-editorial deletions and late payment. Richard didn't know why, but he couldn't quite bring himself to blame his plight on Fanny Burney or Thomas Chatter-ton or Leigh Hunt. On the other hand, artistic frustration, and more par-need a bag of in his kit, the pubic triangle, Richard judged, was quite tastefully rendered: an economic delta of dark brushstrokes. She was definitely younger than him. He was a modernist. She was the thing that came next.

"What favorite?"

"My favorite."

"Your favorite what?"

"You know. Like you were saying that time. The thing that tells you so much about someone. The thing that everyone has. A favorite."

She turned to him: a cartoon of nudity. There was no indignation in her voice-only puzzlement. "A favorite what?"

"Like you said. Do a little dance and-"

"I don't do that any more."

"Ah. What do you do?"

"I only do my favorite."

"Which is?"

"Everything."

"Everything?"

Belladonna stared into space and said zestlessly, "You do me and then I do you. Then straight, then cowgirl, then doggy. Then there's all the other stuff. How long have you got?"

Richard didn't look at his watch. And he didn't ask himself how old he was: because the answer was ninety-five. These rhythms, these rhythms of thought-he just didn't know these rhythms, and that was that. His voice cracked straight into near-senility as he said, "I ought to be home in half an hour."

"That's no good. I'd need that long just to get started." She reached down for her handbag. Another cigarette? No. She handed him a sheet of paper (a printout, a coded damage report: curlicues of computer graphics, marked here and there with a yellow highlighting pen), and said, "My blood test. You said you were going to take me round to Gwyn's."

All in good time, my dear. "And so I shall. And so I shall." He stood up. Richard used to think that young girls, these days, might like old men for reasons of hygiene. They could look at the old man's wife and think: Well, she's still walking. Well, he was still walking. But only just. He said, "I have to insist, I think, that you …" He swayed, and steadied himself on the sofa's arm. "I'll have to insist that you tell me all about it. And that you'll ask him about his favorite."

"Okay, Richard. I guarantee it."

He stood on the corner of Wroxhall Parade. Across the way in theOcularly the strains associated with Untitled, proved to be almost embarrassingly fruitful. Gina really bought that shit-or could sound as if she did. Best of all, unquestionably (no contest), was the death of the novel, not as a cause of general concern (Gina wouldn't mind if the novel died) but as it related to Richard personally. The End of Fiction, the foreclosure of Richard's art, the casting of his staff into the cold waters: because they couldn't afford it. That worked. Not for the first time, and not insincerely, Richard pitied life's straightmen, its civilians, its one-dimensioners, all non-artists everywhere, who couldn't use art as an excuse. In any event, all that was behind him now. He didn't need to make excuses anymore. Because he didn't go near her. And she didn't go near him.

So Richard was now where he imagined he very much wanted to be: on the sofa of the big front room near the corner of Wroxhall Parade, in illicit evening light. Not only that: Belladonna was at his side, and she was also, in a certain sense, already more than in the nude. When he went to bed with Anstice that time Richard somehow persuaded himself that he was doing it "for Gina"-for his marriage, for his rattled virility. And that turned out real good, didn't it? With Belladonna, the internal argument was considerably more challenging (and harder to follow). If Richard succeeded in sleeping with her, then many benefits would of course be passed on to Gina, who would reap them in the marital bed, at her sated leisure. Besides, it wasn't his fault-it was death's fault. Every sensitive man was allowed a midlife crisis: when you found out for sure that you were going to die, then you ought to have one. If you don't have a midlife crisis, then that's a midlife crisis. Finally, Richard's presence in this room was just one more move in the great game of Gwyn's ruin. He was here for the information. He had it all worked out.

Belladonna was at his side. Neither of them had spoken for three or four minutes. Richard told himself that this shared silence, maintained over a period of three or four minutes (that deracinating eternity), was clear proof of how relaxed they must be. Her face was half-averted. Soft-skinned and luminous, she smoked, with concentration, with self-communing ardor.

"I've been thinking," said Richard, with a faint and fussy smile, "about my 'favorite.'"

That wasn't really true. Richard's favorite, by now, would have taken eight hours to summarize, let alone perform. He was glad the room was getting darker, because that meant he could look at her without unavoidable and intrinsic lechery. For Belladonna wore a printed body-stocking which bodied forth-the body: the naked female body. Unlike the nipples, which were pink and rubbery, the kind of nipples a plumber might"Piece of shit," said Steve Cousins (to himself, and to the old man who was taking ten minutes to cross the road: the zebra stretched before him like a track event). He turned off Floral Grove and entered Newland Crescent. When they get like that they're better off dead. Number sixty-eight: he pulled up. This was Terry's house-the Quack. Scozzy wasn't looking for Terry himself. Home, out Wimbledon way, was clearly the last place you'd look for Terry. He'd be in a club somewhere, or fucking up some deal in some Quacko go-down, or under a jukebox of black flips in that flat he had above the casino in Queensway. See those blokes doing dope: ropes of smoke coming out of their noses like their skulls were on fire.

Two children, two little girls wearing flower dresses and kinky up-pointing braids were playing in the garden of the detached pebbledash: swing, climbing frame, slide. Under thrashing trees. Such a scene struck no chord in Steve's past. Watch out, girls: here comes mum. Cooking in a track suit, with her face in the steam. Now she's calling out the kitchen window. Be there in a minute … Steve was in his Cosworth with its low racing skirt. He swiveled his neck: 13, asleep on the back seat. What did he do last night? Stole a double-decker and went to Scotland and back. The triangles of Steve's face-the equilateral, the isosceles, the scalene- stirred and recomposed themselves.

"I deplore gratuitous violence," Steve used to say. Which was untrue, which was well known to be untrue. One of his nicknames was Gratuitous.

"Jesus," said 13.

Steve turned: gone back to sleep again … Richard Tull intelligent? Steve knew wholesalers who were just down from Oxbridge or wherever. Twenty-two, twenty-three, and they had a chain of command that covered five thousand miles, with Afghani army captains, Japanese diplomats, and British customs officers all on their payroll. That was intelligent. That was organized. With drugs, with supplying, you tended to go on and on until you exploded like a tick full of blood. And big time was just a big drag. Considering the business he was in, it was prudent to have your

midlife crisis at the age of twenty-nine. Now what? He had money. But

he couldn't see himself taking the usual route. Running a bar in Tenerife. Flogging San Migs and scotch eggs and screening FedExed videos of "Match of the Day." Probably that's all different now. They got Sky.

chained playground some large and muffled figure creaked alone and pleasurelessly on the pendulum of the swing; it stopped, and then started again, in a slower but no less desperate rhythm … The night before Richard had dreamed that he was having an unhappy love affair with his own son Marius. "Let's not do it any more," Marius had said. And Richard had said, "Yes-let's not." And Marius had said, "Because Daddy, if you do, it means you're inadequant." Inadequant. Ah, innit sweet.

Gal Aplanalp called.

She said at the outset that she had an unfortunate coincidence to report.

Richard sat there, waiting. He felt far from resilient. His right ear still throbbed from its recent hour with Anstice. And then Gwyn, newly returned, had phoned in a knuckle-whitening celebration of Italian warmth, generosity, erudition and discernment-and Italian willingness to buy a novel called Amelior in record numbers.

"Tell me about it," said Richard.

On Tuesday, Gal explained, her assistant, Cressida, had stayed at home to apply herself to Untitled. So Cressida didn't go to work on Tuesday. And Cressida didn't go to work on Wednesday either, or on Thursday. Why was this? Because halfway through Tuesday morning, and halfway through the anomalously brief first chapter of Untitled, Cressida had suffered an attack of diplopia or double vision-of sufficient severity for her GP to suspect a case of (you'll like this) "vascular embarrassment" or even, quite possibly, an organic lesion of the central nervous system. Cressida? Cressida was fine. On light duties, and taking plenty of rest.

"What I'm going to do now is fire off a copy to Toby Middlebrook at Quadrant. He has the right kind of taste and the right kind of list. Both Cressida and I-we agree that Untitled is obviously a challenging and highly ambitious novel."

"How far did she get? Cressida."

Gal always tried to be as straight as possible with her clients. She told him: page nine.

He said good-bye. He hung up. He cleared a space for his elbows and sat there for a while with his head in his hands.

Richard now knew just how violent that disagreement was. Demi was the exception in another way too, because Richard and Gwyn and Gina had spent at least a year, all told, in the Slug and Cabbage, with speechless Gilda making up the four. Nowadays the Tulls and the Banys were seldom to be seen as a foursome. Richard had had to promise to be good.

"What's happening with your novel?" asked Gwyn. "Are you all right, love?"

Demi looked all right. It seemed to Richard that she even managed to exude the pub placidity that pubs like to see in their women. Gina, of course, knew all about pubs-their comfort and their boredom. The doors were open to the evening traffic of Notting Hill Gate. Along with the seams of cigarette smoke, the pub vapors and pub humors, the pie waft and the yeasty burp of beer, there was also the breath of cars like a gray mesh at table height. Out on the pavement, only feebly stirred by the little cyclones of rubbish, the twisters of trex, lay several cartons of half-eaten food-meals abandoned in haste or disgust or outright vomi-tus. Above, the creases of the sky glimmered like cellulite. Richard sat out a wave of nausea and then said,

"It's with Toby Middlebrook, at Quadrant. Gal said she found it very ambitious. Rather discouragingly."

"But it is ambitious, isn't it?"

"Is it? I don't know."

"But it's what you intended, isn't it?"

"I don't-what you write shouldn't be exactly what you want to write. You should feel pressed. In some way."

"The whole process feels completely natural to me. As natural … as childbirth."

In any metaphor that linked writing with parturition, no, Richard wouldn't come out well. What were they, his novels? Not stillborn. More like those babies whom it was thought best to spirit away: a black bag in the loading dock. But this particular maternity hospital was primitive and remote, and superstitiously spurned its dead; and you yourself carried the dead thing home, swaddled in old newspapers. Richard sat out a second wave of nausea. The first had felt fragile, and tinselly; the second felt projectile in its tacit force. Was this excitement? Was this grief? He thought not-neither. It was simple proximity to violence.

"Have you plans?" said Gina. "Is there something you're not telling

us about?"

Richard (who had been staring at Gwyn's shoes) thought that Gina was talking to him. She wasn't. She was talking to Demi, who now shook her head with a flat brief smile.

Disobedient daughters, not obeying their mother. The little girl was showing the littler one a stunt on the slide. Jump off the top and land on your bum halfway down. Hasn't got the confidence. In Steve's head: concentration-loss followed by subject-change. He stopped thinking about hurting Terry and started thinking about hurting Gwyn.

Of course, Gwyn had off-street parking. It was hard to do much to a man in the bay of his own house, with all its windows standing above you and looking on. Off-street parking: vital in certain circumstances to the longevity of the urban male. Not to mention the ulcer or cancer you don't get, spending two hours a day looking for somewhere to put the fucking car. Get him at the exit to the Westway Health and Fitness Center. Send Wesley or D. Gwyn comes round the corner-and D runs right through him. That would be fifteen stone of bro coming at you at fifteen miles an hour. You're going to go down. All that coming at you, through you: you're going to go down. Then, well: whatever.

He picked up his mobile and called Clasford. He said, "Clasford? Tonight, mate." And then he added, after a pause, "No. You're going to the cinema."

"Yeah?" said Clasford cautiously.

"Starring Audra Christenberry. A touching tale about a group of children sent to the country during the Blitz. You do him in the toilet."

And Clasford just said, "Jesus."

The girls went inside for their tea. Behind him somewhere a police siren started up like a homosexual comedian: Ouuuu. Steve gave one of his agonized yawns. He started the engine and engaged first gear. Just then a nun stepped in front of the car and, while Scozzy sat there sighing and waiting, paused to examine some stain or discoloration on her shiny white bib. She looked up at him. For a moment the two virgins stared at one another, with virgin ferocity.

"Piece of shit," said Scozzy as he drove away.

"Audra Christenberry's in it. You like her, don't you?"

"Why's she in it? I thought it was set in England."

"She's an actress," said Richard. "They can put on voices. What do you want, the usual pint?"

Gwyn said, "I'll have a campari and soda."

"No. A pint of bitter for you. That's what they drink in Wales, isn't it?"

"Go on then. When's it start?"

They went with the drinks to their wives. A gin-and-tonic for Gina. A mineral water for Demi. She said that alcohol disagreed with her:being, like a mob. But the Coronet was quarter full, loosely dotted with heads on necks on shoulders, and the cinematography somber (bombed-out basements, moonless campsites), so that Richard kept thinking that everyone around him was black, or in negative; after a while he imagined that all the people in front were sitting facing him but with their heads turned half-circle like Caribbean demons; a little later it seemed to him that the backs of their heads were really their faces, hidden by hair.

Forty minutes in, and it happened. Richard experienced the complicated pleasure of standing up to allow Gwyn passage-famous Gwyn, uxorious Gwyn, his torso bent over his famously weak bladder. Down the aisle he trudged, turning right beneath the stage and following his shadow across a screen of green: curving field, rank of trees, evening sky. He went through the door marked EXIT and GENTS. No one followed. An old man followed. Richard stopped watching. He watched the film. He watched a five-minute scene about hot-pot preparation (a crofter's wife showing Audra Christenberry how you did it) with no interest whatever. But his body swarmed with affect, as if he was watching something else: the climax of a deathless tingler-Strangers on a Train, Vertigo, Psycho.

Time passed. There was a transitory period during which, no doubt, the women subliminally and approvingly assumed that Gwyn had set himself the stark and universal challenge of defecation. Riding on with this assumption-as it were in tandem with Demi and Gina-Richard imagined Gwyn's quest for full voidance steadily growing in complication and dolor; after fifteen minutes its dimensions approached the Augean. Next came an interlude of localized travail: Richard, having heartily matched Gwyn pint for pint, was in need of a bathroom himself. The need was sharp, sour-as sharp and sour as his curiosity.

"Excuse me," he said, and got to his feet.

It was one of those cinema toilets whose promise and scent lead you up ramps and stairways which then double back and deepen like the chutes of an ancient airport, or a city of myth-the twisted construct of embittered immortals. Richard walked on into the bowels of the building, past chained fire exits and beneath seeping ceilings, until the penultimate door, with a soft flap, like an internal valve, seemed to admit him and exclude all else, and there was the marked entrance-GENTS-at the bottom of the bending steps . .. He paused, listening. Only the eternal

toilet trickle, sharp and sour, like the rumors of its odors. Slowly he

leaned on the door. The room let him in and then closed again.

His first thought was that he, Richard, had disappeared. He faced an arrangement of toilet furniture (double rows of basins, double roller-Gwyn said, "Have you ever seen anything more beautiful?"

"Than what?"

"My lady…"

"Don't," said Demi.

"Ah, she's embarrassed! I love it when she blushes like that. Mmmm." He hummed it, thoughtfully. "Mmm. Let's not go to the pictures. Let's go home and make love. We go home. You go home. And make love."

Richard said, "It does you good-I already got the tickets-does you good every once in a while to come down from the palace and mingle with your people. As one of them. In disguise." This sounded like, and was, a routinely bitter reference to Gwyn's new outfit, which he had already itemized to his listeners: russety suede jacket (Milan), brown Borsalino (Florence), dove-gray brogues (Siena). "Get that down you. One more pint. Quick."

"I've hardly got going on this."

"Another half. Get it down you."

"I'll spend the whole film in the lav."

Yes. You might very well do that, thought Richard. As he helped Gina with her coat she whispered in his ear: "I hate him." And Richard frowned, and nodded and felt close to vindication . . .

During the first half hour in the dark, he found his mind very difficult to control. It didn't matter what the film was-who directed it, whether it was in Japanese or black and white. This had mattered earlier. The film needed to be the kind of film that Gwyn, ever obedient, if you remember, to the wanders and gambols of his maggot, was currently saying he liked. And it really was Gwyn's kind of thing: innocent, rural, questing. A sensitive historical piece about a group of intelligent and long-winded adolescents shifted out of London to Cumbria during the Blitz-it was almost a cinematic prequel to Amelior. Richard, if he had been watching it, would have found it excruciating. But he wasn't watching it. He wouldn't have been watching it even if it was the kind of film he liked: a billion-dollar bloodbath. He wasn't watching it. Seated between the two novelists, and without looking down ever, childishly, the women shared their popcorn.

Lone male figures seated in movie theaters have about them, Richard thought, a madman or mongoloid intensity of privacy. I mean what are they? Frowning cineasts? Tramps? Movie theaters were surely much too expensive, now, for tramps to come and stink up. Richard knew that when he was a tramp there would be a lot of things he needed a lot more than stinking up a movie theater. In a full house the identity of the audience would have undergone gravitational collapse, and become oneIt was Sunday and the boys boldly roamed the flat. Marius happened to be passing. He entered the room and came up close and carefully peered at his father's face.

"Ouch," he said.

"Yeah yeah."

Richard went next door and sat at the kitchen table with a half-thawed porkchop pressed to his right eye. By crossing this small distance he passed from the monitorship of Marius to that of Marco. Through two doorways and over the width of the thin passage Marco watched his father sitting there, in shirtsleeves and plum bow tie, but still wearing his fuzzy checked slippers. As so often Marco wanted to ask, in pleading wonderment, why Richard's slippers, unlike his own, spurned the opportunity of sporting an attractive likeness of some kiddie-book character or TV superhero-or just an animal. Nor was Daddy taking the obvious and rewarding course of reading the back of the cereal packet .. . Ember-lidded, his hair sparsely stirring and twitching in the cold breeze from the open window, Richard sat there in full realism: healing himself. But to Marco (gazing now, if you remember, with his one good eye) Richard seemed to resemble a figure in a cartoon: he had about him the faint deep buzz of electricity. If he walked off a ledge or a cliff he could get back again so long as he turned promptly and whirled his legs; if someone hit him on the head with a hammer he would grow a pointy red bump but it would soon go down again. Marco was of course wrong about all this: in both of his scenarios Daddy would have died instantly of shock. He was right, though, about the electricity. The time Richard struck Marco across the head with the flat of his hand, the time when it all started to happen-when Gwyn's book danced on the best-seller list (his career-speed reaching escape velocity), and Richard danced, and jolted-it was as if an electric cable ran from Holland Park to Calchalk Street, bringing electric pain from one man to the other.

Illness, summer days spent at home, younger-brotherdom and a consciousness that just by being who he was he caused anxiety and exasperation-and desperate fatigue-in his parents (he understood, even when times were very bad, that it was not him they hated but the things inside that made him cough and smolder and effloresce, and cry at night after dreams had left him inconsolable; he -was inconsolable; he could not be consoled): all this had made Marco more vigilant, more sensibly watchful, than a six-year-old would normally have need or reason to be. Adults

were not other to him. Not remote and massively autonomous and alive only insofar as they maintained his domes of pain and pleasure. He knew that adults, too, were small, and pushed and tugged by many forces.

towels on the walls, double striplights above) so symmetrical that intuition demanded that a mirror stood at its center. But there was no mirror: only two of everything, opposed to a counterpart. Richard squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. No mirror, so no reflection; and he was a vampire, momentarily, denied its natural simulacrum, and fearing death by running water. Palpably, the Coronet toilet was the scene of a very recent gastric catastrophe: but it was the scene of nothing else. He moved sideways and quickly bent to look under the saloon doors of the cubicles: no quivering flounce of brown corduroy, no tortured dove-gray brogues. Richard was disappointed and Richard was relieved. He moved toward the urinal and was bending forward and breathing in (searching for purchase on his zipper toggle) when a voice said, "Nice smell in here."

And Richard's mind, which was always looking for pain, had time to feel hurt at this, had time to take this personally, as a sarcastic reference to himself. To himself, and not to the incredible smell of shit everywhere. He turned.

"Wait," he said. "This isn't me."

"I just wandered out. Get some fresh air. I told Demi. Didn't you notice I was carrying my hat? Between you and I I went back to the Slug for a quiet pint."

"Between you and me. Not a quiet Campari and soda?"

"I had a pint."

"What was the matter with the film?"

"It was getting on my wick, all that stuff about the barn. And the cows. The way they all kept on banging on."

"You're supposed to like all that. Fields. No sex. Civic-minded discussion. Nothing happening."

Outside the study window the clematis was tinged with yellow and gold-autumn, and Richard's cigarettes. He often smoked with his head on the block of the windowsill, facing skyward, to spare Marco's lungs. Out there, birds still fluttered and agitated, and they sang. The uncoil-ings, the slipping twists of sound. Say birds were just parrots and learned their songs from what they heard: those trills and twitters were imitations of mountain rivulets, of dew simpering downwards through the trees. Now the parrot had left its jungle and stood on a hook in a pub shouting "Bullshit!" Now the singing thrushes and sparrows outside the window sounded like machines. Cold out there. Now that he was forty, he feared the cold. Now he was forty, something animal in him feared the winter.

righteousness. Today, it wouldn't have surprised Steve to learn that Gwyn-or, as it turned out, Richard-now faced major cranial surgery and would be eating through a straw for the next nine months. You give one smack: then you begin to think that you have been chiefed out. The blow that came before was there to justify the blow that will come after. The blow that comes after is there to justify the blow that came before. What held him back, Clasford, wasn't his strict instructions-but the city. Be quick: the lights, the footsteps. Suddenly Steve thought about the nun he had seen, out Wimbledon way. Nuns wore witchy booties and no cosmetic except the no-sex cosmetic.

Now Steve Cousins walked past security camera, past doorman, past security camera and security-camera monitor; he entered the lift and went up, high up, with the building's girders and cement blocks thrumming past him; then out past the security camera and down the tubular passageway. Excluding the two penthouses and the six maisonettes and the fourteen studios (and there were other hierarchical distinctions to do with elevation and vantage), Steve's flat was just like all the other flats in the complex. A squad of architects had been told to dream the dreams of the contemporary businessman, and to give that dream the weight of concrete and steel: economy of line, public space/private space, dynamism melding into hard-won repose. Then let the individual imprint his personality upon it-if he had one. But we all have one. Don't we? Scozzy's double reception room, the main living area where the expression of his personality was supposed to occur, had four corners: a fitness corner (weights, flexers, StairMaster), a computer corner (the usual information processors), a reading corner (cushions, a low glass table stacked with various nihilistic classics), and a video corner (a depthless window-sized TV, the numb sleek blackness of the VCRs, the heap of remotes, plus a Canaveral of decoders and unscramblers). Was there a truth to this room? In a sense it was all for show, like a stage set- despite the fact that nobody ever came here. Steve removed his clothes. At home, he went naked. At home, he sniffed his food before putting it in his mouth (his mouth: he knew that his jawbones, typically, projected at the dental arcades). At home, he stood and swayed with the wind, monotonously, unbearably, for hour after hour. At home, he often thought of renouncing all speech. Did he use to do these things when he was a wild boy? Or did he just do them now: now that he had read about wild boys? All he seemed to remember, from his wild-boy period, was lying under some fucking hedge. In the fucking rain.

Naked, he proceeded to the video corner. Then came a series of activations. He sank into the cold leather of the great swivel chair. On screenMarco knew grownups. Very often he hung out with them all day and all night long … Now Marco conceived the idea of giving his father pleasure, or comfort. A kiss, perhaps, on the temple? A few restorative pats on the shoulder? As he got to his feet he decided instead to regale Richard with a joke.

Sensing his approach, Richard looked up from The Proverbial Husbandman: A Life of Thomas Tusser. The child's uplifted face, one eye wide, the lips compressed, brewing amusement.

"Knock knock."

"Who's there?"

"I dunnop."

"I dunnop who?"

"Ooh you smelly phing!"

"… I don't happen to find that very funny, Marco."

"I phought it weren't him. He came on like he expected it. That was the phing."

"No, mate. You don't say it like that. Not with thing. You say ting."

"Yeah. That was the ting."

"What you give him?"

"Give him a smack. First I had to catch him."

"He scurried around, did he. Jesus. You say anything? Make it look…"

"Yeah. I said, 'You called me chief.' "

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. You know. 'You fucking chiefed me out.' "

"Anything else?"

"Yeah. After I give him the smack I said, 'Don't chief me out.' "

'"Don't chief me out.'"

"Yeah. 'Never chief me out.' You know. 'You don't never fucking chief me out.' "

Steve was trying to imagine Richard chiefing Clasford out. "Clasford. When was the last time somebody chiefed you out?"

"I don't know. When I was about phree."

"Yeah well take care, chief."

He pocketed the mobile and parked the Cosworth. It all proved that the town was safer than the country. The trees were more dangerous than the streets. The city was like world opinion-it held you back. The fields held no one back. Why do you think people get stabbed fifty-seven times? Why do you think people die from thirty-nine blows to the head? Given the leisure (the privacy, the seclusion), you don't stop. It's the … reversecard at the bottom of the deck; and then slid in the second and third, saying, "One jack goes in the first floor. And one on the next floor." He paused, thinking. "And the fourth jack goes on the roof to look out for police." Reasonably skillfully he placed the four jacks, held tightly, as one card, on the top of the pack. Marco watched with drugged interest. "Then the police came! Me-mao me-mao me-mao me-mao! So the jack on the roof called to the other jacks: 'Police are here!' And they all came running up. One jack, two jacks, three jacks, four jacks."

Marius's shoulders subsided; tension absented itself from him. "Brilliant," said Gina. Marius gave a modest smile and lifted his eyes toward Marco-and Marco's imploring stare.

Marco said: "Then what?"

Richard shifted his weight. He too was thinking about a story: "The Aleph," by Jorge Luis Borges. About a magical device, the aleph, that knew everything: like the Knowledge. About a terrible poet, who wins a big prize, a big requital, for his terrible poem. "Astonishingly," the narrator writes, "my own book, The Cards of the Cardsharp, received not a single vote." Richard listened to the tuneless blues that was playing in his head. None of this ever left him and everything always reminded him of it.

"Then what?" said Marius.

"Then what?" said Marco.

"… Nothing!"

"Did the police get them? What did they steal? Where did they go?"

"Marco."

Yes. Because Marco was always like this. Marco. So unlike Marius, who was so firmly placed in the world, who constantly sought and identified distinctions (that was a hem, that was a fringe; that was an eave, that was a ledge; that was a scratch, that was a scrape), who had already joined in the great human venture of classification. Richard, too, knew all about classification. That afternoon, hoping to begin a single-paragraph review of a seven hundred-page biography, L. H. Myers: The Forgotten, he had spent an hour with his ragged thesaurus, in search of a fancy word for big. Halfway through this search, Gal Aplanalp telephoned. "You're not going to believe this," she began . . . Whereas Marco would believe anything. He longed to believe everything. He never wanted any story to end. It had been tentatively suggested, by a young neurologist, that this was why Marco cried in the night; the broken narrative of dreams, or simply the fact that dreams ended.

"Marco," said Richard. "I want to see you in my study. Now."

The child got straight to his feet. This had never happened before butthere slowly formed the freeze-framed torso of a woman. Scozzy stared, with consent, with recognition: you could see the bruised scars on the undersides of her breasts, from the surgeon's work: seals of approval. The woman, like the man who watched her, was all alone. But he was the virgin. The wild boy had never done the wild thing (and had his theories about the jizm and the ism). When he watched pornography, he sometimes thought, he was trying to find out whom he wanted to hurt. Scozzy touched the Play. She wrenched off the remains of her muscle shirt and then reached down with inch-long fingernails and savagely juxtaposed her fixed tits.

Three days later, by which time Richard's eye had ceased its experiments with the visible spectrum, had stopped trying to be a yellow eye or a violet eye and became, unarguably, a black eye, something else resolved itself in his head: he got up from the kitchen table and crossed the passage. On the sitting room floor Marius was showing Marco a card trick, in the autumn dusk of Calchalk Street, with the furniture acquiring ghosts of poor definition and the sound of footsteps miraculously surviving their ascent from the street below . .. The card trick, Richard knew, had involved Marius in much preparation. With the deck in his hand he had disappeared into the bathroom for about fifteen minutes. But now he was ready. His aim was to tell a story. On the leading edge of card tricks, this activity being fanatically evolved, like all others, there were hour-long spectaculars with plots as complicated as Little Dorrit (which revolves, if you recall, on someone leaving money to his nephew's lover's guardian's brother's youngest daughter: Little Dorrit) and with interplay of theme and pattern aspiring to the architectonic, the Prousto-Joycean. Marius's card trick was old and crude and self-defeatingly famous. Marco didn't know it. It was called "The Four Jacks" and it told a simple tale of urban striving.

"There are four jacks. See?" said Marius, showing Marco the four jacks in a vertical strip-behind which the three decoy cards (a nine, a five, a three-mere commoners) despicably lurked. "And they decide to rob a house."

"Our house?"

The upper periphery of Marco's riveted vision told him that his father was in the room, standing near the door. Reassuringly and eternally, Gina sat knitting on the window seat, her legs crossed sharply in answer to the angles of the needles.

"No. This house," said Marius, indicating the remaining forty-five cards. "One jack goes in the basement." Marius placed the first decoy"It was a joke, Daddy." "What do I smell of?" "Nothing. You. It was a joke, Daddy."

"I'm sorry. Don't tell Mummy. Just say you wouldn't do your homework or something. Come and give me a kiss. Forgive me." And Marco did so.

At about eleven-fifteen that night the twins, in their twin beds, were winding up a long, whispered and untendentious discussion (tangerines, a new supervillain, water pistols) and had started to think about calling it a day. At any rate their silences were more extended, their yawns more musical and vacant. Marius, in particular (always the more likely to close things out), lay on his side with both hands thrust down the front of his pajama bottoms. He was indulging in his nightly fantasies of rescue. His father, at that age, taking what he needed from any genre available, was shepherding adult showgirls onto gondolas from the black gurgling rock-sides of island fortresses. Marius braved lasers and particle beams, interposing himself between their fire and a succession of alien maidens wearing catsuits and pastel tunics in video-puppet dreamscapes that rushed past or through him, as the lit runway is assimilated by the cockpit monitors of the landing plane. He rolled on to his back and said,

"Why did Daddy call you?"

Marco thought for a moment. He saw Richard's face and all the troubled calculation in it. He saw him on another day, head bent, sniffing his fingertips. And on another day (by general consensus a very bad day: the rooms were hushed), with him sitting at the kitchen table over an opened letter and smoking a concussed cigarette. Marco said, "He thinks he smells of shit."

Struck but broadly satisfied, Marius turned on to his side.

Time passed.

"He cried," said Marco, and nodded suddenly in the dark.

Marius was asleep. The words stayed in the air. Marco listened to them.

That morning with Anstice-oh, man-that morning when he woke up in Anstice's arms, or at her side, or in her bed, which was a small bed, he lay on his back and stared at the world of adultery. The ceiling was a

good enough figure for it, the way the stains massed and groped around

its edges (the pale orange of trapped water, of rot), moving stealthily in on the center, where the cropped lightcord hung. Plasterwork saturated in solitude enclosed him, on every side. He felt fear, and grief; he longedMarco seemed to know how you did it. Only as he left the room did he turn his head to look at his mother, his brother. His bare legs seemed to move rather faster than usual, too, not with purpose but as if he was being steadily pushed, or urged on, from behind.

I was once lying on a low bed in a room to which a child had been summoned-in which a small boy would be denounced and arraigned. So, I was on the same level as he was, down there, three feet from the ground. I have denounced children myself and seen the head of hair, both thick and fine, inclined in contrition. But when you're on their level you see that really they're staring sadly straight ahead, lifting their eyes only in dutiful reflex to confront the cathartic fire of the parent's wrath. The accusation is stated, the confession secured, the sentence imposed. Looking straight ahead, the child's teeth-milk teeth, perhaps, or hig-gledypiggledy, newfangled, as the big supplants the small-are bared in an undesigning sneer of misery. Children have usually done something. What had Marco done?

"Two days ago," Richard began, "the day before yesterday you said- you said something very hurtful to me. Marco?"

Marco looked up.

"And I want to know what you meant by it."

Richard was standing behind his desk. He raised his chin, and Marco could see the blotches and stipples of his throat, the misadventures with the razor, the mobile growth of the Adam's apple, the slanting sheen of his damaged eye.

"It was the most hurtful thing you've ever said to me. Ever."

Marco's ears now heard the quiet roar of shame and turpitude. He looked up, once, and then went on staring sadly straight ahead. The room was crepuscular anyway, but darker for the child, whose world was folding slowly inwards.

"You said," said Richard, inhaling, "that I was smelly."

Marco looked up, in hope. "I didn't," he said. For Daddy, in his view, ?wasn't smelly. Tobacco, seldom-laundered clothes, a certain mysterious difficulty of the body: but not smelly. "I didn't, Daddy."

"Oh but you did, Marco. Oh, you did. You said I smelled"-and here he raised his chin again, and the larynx squirmed-"of poo."

"I didn't."

" 'I dunnop who,' " Richard quoted. " 'Ooh you smelly thing.' "

". .. It was a. joke. It was a joke, Daddy." Marco didn't appeal to the word so much as throw himself at its feet. "It was a joke."

Richard waited. Then he said, "Do I or do I not? Smell of poo.?

again, fully mistaken the attempt for the deed. Could this be seen as an improvement-another way (better, gentler), for the years of one's maturity? Gina knew the difference between the word and the deed. And, yes, it would certainly be more relaxing if she didn't. Probably, toward the end of life, universally, there wasn't any difference.

And there wasn't any difference when it came to guilt, and culpability. If Gina found out about this, he knew what she'd do (she had warned him often enough): Gina would retaliate, in kind. Richard turned his head. On Anstice's bedside chair there was a stack of the novels she got through at a rate of two or three a day. Prewar, clothbound. Romantic, serious: written by women. Their names-all the Susans and Henriettas-never recurred. It was amateur fiction, for a vanished reading public. One novel each: the novel that everybody was supposed to have in them.

Now Anstice said, "Thank you, my darling. You've made me ready to die. Right," she added, with a responsible frown. "What's the best way to tell Gina?"

Richard sometimes tried to anthropomorphize the sun and the planets- or to solar-systematize his immediate circle. He never got very far with it.

Gina was the Earth: Mother Earth.

Venus was both Morning Star and Evening Star. The Evening Star was perhaps Belladonna. The Morning Star was Demi.

Halley's Comet you could pin on Anstice, except she made her loop at least once a day instead of once a lifetime, an apparition of soot and ice with her comet trail of madlady hair.

Was Gwyn Jupiter, the nearly star, too small to ignite in nuclear burning, or was he already the Sun?

Was Steve Cousins Mars, the planet of war, or was he simply Mercury, the messenger, bringing you information from the other side?

Try as he might, Richard could never find anything good for the boys to be. When they fought, as they often did, then the Martian satellites of Deimos and Phobos suited them fine: Fear and Dread. More usually, though, when they were being cooperative, or at least silent, and elsewhere, then they were just spots of light-the Heavenly Twins.

He knew who he was. He was Pluto; and Charon was his art.

Gina was Mother Earth. Bipolar, sublunar, circumsolar.for the status quo ante. Oh, the way things were … Richard had but one straw to clutch at-one crumb of comfort: his utter sexual failure the night before. That fiasco: how he would cling to it. Just wait until he got into the pub and told all the lads … Suddenly Anstice rose from the bed. Almost as suddenly as Gina did-when Marco cried. Adulterers sometimes leave beds suddenly. But nobody leaves a bed as suddenly as a mother. Richard closed his eyes. He could hear the knout of Anstice's ponytail as she crossed the room. When she returned she had a mug of tea for him, the mug murky and stippled like Cotswold stone, its crevices coated and recoated with the residue of a million lone mugfuls. One day this residue would reach to the brim, and the mug would be dead, solid with its own deposits, and Anstice would at last be ready.

Her tone, and choice of words, surprised him when she said, "You were a naughty boy last night."

"… What kind of a naughty boy?"

She was gazing at him in comfortable reproach. "Were you careful?"

"Oh yes," twinkled Richard, ever the gentleman, even when being a naughty boy.

"I love you," she said.

He felt the temptation to collapse into all this-to collapse into the vastness of his error. Her head dropped as it sought his chest. And there, tickling his nostrils, was her fierce thatch of ear-whisker and rogue eyebrow. Richard was moved, in his way. He stroked her neck; beneath the coarse dressing-gown his fingers found the shoulder strap of something softer and more slippery. He looked. It was pink. Richard understood rejection slips; he understood neglect; he understood people who had nobody to keep themselves clean for. And here was Anstice: in her rejection slip. In his hand he weighed the base of her ponytail, like the joint of a sinewy limb. Anstice's syrup, atop the pink slip. For a shampoo you would go to the carwash with such a head of hair. He closed his eyes and saw a dog in a bathtub, worriedly shivering, its body mass apparently halved by the hug of the wet coat.

And Richard was moved, in his way. He was so moved that he tried to be a naughty boy again. But that didn't work out either. He tried everything he knew that might delight a woman. He tried forcing it in with his thumb. He tried bending it double. But bending "what double? Nor was he remiss in the matter of gasping and coughing in her ear. Ten minutes of this and then he slid away and flopped on to his back. And Anstice whispered, "Everything they said about it is true."

For a moment he was surprised and even relieved by her heartless sarcasm. But as she rambled repletedly on it became clear that she had,thing with dogs in them, or more than one uniformed soldier. Steve had burgled richer places than this, places that were just bank vaults on silk carpets. What he was looking at here, though, was something he hadn't seen before: femininity on a grand scale. The feminine world was a puffy world, like the padded vest of a gold boiler. In the back room ("Den," he said) there was an archwayed nook with a television in it. He was pleased, even flattered and moved, to see the television-proof of a shared humanity. Every household, be it never so mean, shared this square of dead gray. There was a little bookcase for the videos, with a whole section devoted to the appearances of Gwyn Barry, labeled by hand. Things like "Better Read: Gwyn Barry." Or "The Seven Vital Virtues, 4: Uxoriousness." He felt a strong impulse to steal these videos-or even to watch them. They were a sham. The house was a sham. He extinguished the candle and came out into the hall and mounted the stairs in utterly silent bounds.

When he intruded, in this way, there was a thing he could do with his senses: he could send them out, over the house, and they would come back and tell him whether everyone was still sleeping. Just as all women, even little girls, even old ladies, even nuns, are said to have an interrupter in their heads which beeps or pages them every ninety seconds or so, making them listen for a baby's cry, so the senses of Steve Cousins, when he was working, submitted their punctual reports, ever ready for the blip of a conscious mind. On the first-floor landing he hesitated, with a sudden widening of his dark-adapted eyes. Up above him a sleeping mind was searching for a change of status; but then it settled or resigned itself, and dreamed on … He hefted the doorknob to accommodate the carpet's extravagant nap. His mouth formed a tight white O, like the ring of a contraceptive. And with a swivel of the body he was in their room.

Of course, Scozzy was humblingly good at being silent. When it came to keeping quiet, he was world class. Because if you'd learned your trade in campsites and trailer parks, in tramp-crammed caravans, in swaying, creaking prefabs, in a world where there was no padding and absolutely no space in between things, then noiselessness became your element and your medium. He had broken and entered the homes of the homeless: fishing a few bob out of an appliance carton while a family of four was dozing in it: you got to know about sleep and silence and all the things in between.

Demeter lay there, alone. Well Gwyn's upstairs with the maid",

thought Scozzy perfunctorily. He moved closer. She lay there, on her back, parted legs girlishly straight and hands raised on either side of her fold of fair hair, as if in surrender. Earrings on one side table, glassSteve Cousins strolled over to the refrigerator. It started gurgling capably at him as he swung the door open: a larder of light. He removed a plastic bottle of orange juice. Maybe he fancied a grape? No. He didn't like the look of the skin and its adhesive gloss: noir, viscid, like a stain from a sticky drink, like the night streets of London. Shrugging, he picked one from the bunch; he felt it and sniffed it; he ate it, and licked his fingers. And all this would have been fine if it had been his grape, his orange juice, his refrigerator-if it had been his kitchen. But it was Gwyn's kitchen. It was Demi's kitchen. He was in their house.

I said I wasn't going in there, not yet. But here I am. I can't control him. People have been trying to control him, all his life. They couldn't control him. And I can't control him. And Richard Tull won't be able to control him. Before he left the kitchen he glanced in the dustbin. Fish for dinner. Friday: Catholic.

Scozzy had entered by the front door. Ungratefully dependent, like all of us, on technologies he didn't understand, he deployed the thermal lance and then the omni-key. Hereafter the Barry security system would go next-generation: it was the same principle as the arms race. He wore a sports jacket and charcoal mohair slacks. Not a shell suit. Everyone worked in shell suits. Wearing a shell suit at three o'clock in the morning: you might as well have a swag bag over your shoulder and a stocking on your head. He left the kitchen. He sat at the foot of the main staircase and slipped off his jacket and his shoes. Get on with it. You didn't want the au pair coming down for a cocoa. Or (an increasingly likely inadvertency: it had happened to him twice) some other burglar crashing through a window in his shell suit. He left the discarded clothes in a neat pile, as if ready for school.

Out of nothing much more than a sense of professional duty he did a quick circuit of the ground floor. He never used a torch, relying, rather, on his night vision, a valued legacy from his wild-boy period. But after a while he had had enough of staggering around bumping into things, and availed himself of a candle, in its heavy holder, taken from the dining room sideboard. Like all modern burglars he knew something about antiques (13 said that at Wormword Scrubs you could hardly get into the TV room during "Curio" or "Collector's Item") and he even knew something about paintings. How to spot absolute crap, for instance: any-… As he left the house and walked across the street to the Cosworth, he kept hearing the word "Gwyn?" and the way she'd said it. Gwyn? She'd said it with surprise, with caution, with anxiety, with hope. With yearning, maybe. Certainly with fear.

He had been given a black eye by a black guy, but it was his nose he was going nuts in. This was the next thing.

Richard was going nuts in the nose. This was the next thing that was happening to him: nuts in the nose. He kept thinking he smelled of shit. He knew it wasn't the case-he knew he didn't smell of shit, or only very faintly-because no one had said anything about it yet (and by now he was persuaded that Marco's joke, seemingly an unanswerable coup de theatre at the time, was innocent or accidental), and anyway he had taken to spending up to an hour in the bath twice daily, with some dank biography, and smothered himself in baby powder and after-shave and anything else that smelled of anything: cigarette smoke, fried food, car exhausts. Richard knew that olfactory hallucination was a symptom- neither early nor minor-of schizophrenia. There were pills you could take for olfactory hallucinations. And where, he asked, would I put these pills? Up my nose? Up my ass? If we think about it, we all know the sneak preview of schizophrenia, with the toilet paper, those strange occasions when there seems to be no good reason to stop wiping: the thought-message (enough now-that'll do) loses its point, in a pall of inanition. The next move would be to start washing your hands all day and all night, as some do. Well, Richard, just now, was getting through a toilet roll each morning; and his flesh was numb and rubbery from the tub, like something they'd hauled out of the Thames and then hosed down with Right Guard.

Was it the blow to the head that had done this? Or was it the latest from Gal Aplanalp? "You're not going to believe this," she had said. But Richard believed it. Toby Middlebrook, of the Quadrant Press, having spent fifteen minutes with Untitled on his lap, was admitted the same day to St. Bartholomew's Hospital with a case of vasomotor rhinitis. At present, he was in between sinus operations. Gal Aplanalp, apparently undaunted, said she was going to "spray-fire" the publishing community with photocopies of the typescript. So publishing, as we knew it, would in any case soon come to an end.

Turning to knowledge, briefly, he tried to head-doctor himself. From

what he understood of these syndromes, the copro was closely aligned to the necro in its adoration of putrescence, waste and decay. Half the time, accordingly, in necromode, he thought he was smelling his own death,of water and book on the other, Demi was sleeping in the middle of the bed. Steve nodded to himself and went straight upstairs.

First he entered a pungent boxroom in whose far corner a hot sphere of black hair and brown skin lay spliced and swaddled in the linen. One word sufficed for her, the heavy dreamer he had sensed: Colombian. Next he entered a broad attic with high inward-leaning windows, decked out as a nursery or as a shrine to babyhood and infancy: crib, abacus, rocking horse. In a third room he found a young woman sleeping on a futon, naked, her face crushed into the pillow, a single white sheet bisecting her buttocks. Scornfully and cynically he loomed up on her. To him the scene looked like the aftermath of pornography. In his head he made a move for the remote, for the Rewind: have her turn over and reenact it all, backwards. Abruptly Scozzy's eyes jerked up to the ceiling and with a fierce roll he eased the tension in his neck.

Gwyn he found in a first-floor bedroom, opposite where Demeter now slept. He was familiar with the convention of the gentleman's sanctum-not from his reading but from his burgling. This would be where the gentleman normally slept, surrounded by cufflinks and hairbrushes: his launching pad for ceremonial visits to the marital couch. The room where Gwyn slept, in a twin bed, didn't feel like a dressing room. It felt like a guest room, gradually appropriated. He checked. Closets half full. Connecting bathroom scattered with male toiletries.

After a visit to Gwyn's study Scozzy looked in to say good night to Demeter. It was still sleeping on its back. A waft of hair had strayed on to its face, tickling its nose. The shoulder-puffs of the nightdress, he thought, made its arms look innocently plump. Maybe he'd reach down and straighten that strand of hair: you could do it with your breath. He moved closer. And Demi woke up. No subliminal tripwire, no burglar's bleeper was needed to tell him this. She sat up and thickly said, "Gwyn?"

But here's what you did. He'd done it a thousand times, in bum-strewn flops, in overpopulated portakabins. You closed your eyes. Demi's head and shoulders surged up toward him-"Gwyn?"-and Scozzy closed his eyes. You just wanted to stare back thinking Jesus! But you closed your eyes and listened to their gaze. Listened to your own blood, listened to your torched armpits. Waking, they were momentarily cleansed of experience, and open to the infantile illusion. You shut your eyes and they didn't see you. They saw you, but they didn't see you: your sculpted face, your saintly eyelids. They took you for another wanderer, another sufferer, a figure of sleep, like themselves.

He listened to her gaze, her swallow, her gaze again; then her fresh collapse on to the pillows; and then the recaptured rhythm of her breath"Guess what. We had an intruder last night."

"Really? Did she take anything?"

"We're not really sure."

"How did she get in? Was she armed, do you know?"

Gwyn closed his eyes and inclined his head, acknowledging the satire. He had a habit, in his prose, of following a neuter antecedent with a feminine pronoun. From Amelior: "While pruning roses, any gardener knows that if she …" Or, from the days when he still wrote book reviews: "No reader could finish this haunting scene without feeling the hairs on the back of her …" Richard clucked away to himself, but these days he often opted for an impersonal construction, or simply used the plural, seeking safety in numbers.

"Through the front door."

"She didn't turn violent, did she?"

"Come on, don't be a tit. It's very upsetting actually."

"I'm sorry. I'm sure it is. But nothing missing."

"All very odd. You know the sort of stuff the house is full of. Candlesticks, Cellini saltcellars. Fill a flight bag with that, and you're made."

Richard stopped listening. Maybe it was because he was a Londoner, but Richard didn't think that burglary was any big deal. Calchalk Street used to get itself trashed and ransacked as a matter of routine, particularly in the summer. It happened less often now. The Tulls never went away.

"Demi dreamt that he-she dreamt he was in our room. In the room where we sleep. In the room where we make love …"

It looked as though the maggot was about to get going on this, consigning Gwyn to many a scowl and glower; but as they passed the hedge at the corner of the bowling green a thick flock of London birds exploded out from behind or within it, sounding like an orchestra pit full of frenetic photographers-the pigeon paparazzi, snapping at them as they passed.

Entering the Warlock, the two novelists were immediately confronted by a large group of talkative but motionless figures all pointing the same way: gathered, in fact, before the Knowledge. A tremor went through them, as of wildebeest sensing rain, and they turned. Because Gwyn now mingled and bonded with the Warlock crowd, Richard had been forced to individualize their predatory presences. There was Hal and Mai, also Del, Pel, Bal, Gel, and Lol, also a younger contingent with names like

Tristan and Benedict when they weren't called Burt or Mel or Harrison,

and then some rather older guys with names like Clint and Yul and Marlon, and then some guys about Richard's age with names like Dave and Steve and Chris, and yet older guys (blemished, sidelined) with namesnosing it, getting wind of it. And the other half (this was copromode) he thought it all made perfect sense: that if you looked like shit, and felt like shit and behaved like shit, then pretty soon you were going to smell like shit. For Richard knew he was going to hell: it was just a question of which circle. Christ, he knew that. Just as he knew that smoking was bad for his health. Even the packet said that it killed you … Having gone nuts in the nose, he wondered what to do about it, but not for long. His doctor had died five years ago and Richard hadn't looked for a new one. He couldn't see himself sitting in Casualty with the Friday-night crowd, where, anyway, to gain admission, you needed an axe in your head. Nor did he expect to pay a visit to some suburban superclinic the size of a dormitory town or a major airport where you had to get into lane at least a mile or two back up the road: Richard, in the Maestro, flinching as the signs sliced by him, looking for the one that said NUTS IN THE NOSE. In the kitchen he sidled experimentally up to Gina, waiting for her to pull back with a "Yuck" or a "Phwaw." And nothing happened. The point was that he didn 't smell of shit. So who cared?

This Saturday morning, easing himself deeper into a bath almost Mediterranean in its oil-mantle and unguent prisms (and shit smells: would it soon aspire to the plastic 7-Up bottles, the belly-up jellyfish?), Richard thought briskly but proudly of all the bits of him that weren't nuts-or not nuts yet. People were nuts in the eyes and the ears. And Richard wasn't. People were nuts in the guts and the glands. Not Richard. The complacent roll call of organs that he was not yet nuts in might have continued-but then Marius knocked.

"Daddy. Quick."

"Jesus. Go upstairs."

"I'm desperate."

He rose, and turned the difficult doorknob. On the wall the mirror held him in its steam. After the usual pause Marius wandered inward. He lowered his track-suit bottoms and underpants a few inches but made no move for the bowl. As Richard dried himself his chest was suddenly remoistened by the thought that he was-and had long been-nuts in the Johnson. If going nuts was an internal treachery (all counter-suggestibility and finesse), then he had long been nuts in the Johnson. Oh yeah. And nuts in the brain.

Marius was now seated.

Just what I need, thought Richard: more shit.

The child's gaze was leveled at him. Marius said, declaratively, "You've got a big willy, Daddy."

"Well it's very nice of you to say so, Marius.?

this was how it went. This was what you did. What you did was: you took an individual and seized upon some obvious and invariably unfortunate characteristic-and talked about it the whole time, at every opportunity, all the hours there were, day in, day out. Whatever it might be: Bal was bald, Mai maladroit, Del delinquent, Gel gelatinous; Pel was plump; Hal sported an ill-advised and much-regretted tattoo on his throat (CUT HERE along the dotted line); Lol had had his right ear ripped off in an argument about zonal marking. With Richard, they really didn't know where to start or where to stop, so they called him Red Eye and Jethro and Scarecrow and Walking Dictionary and Mr. Pastry and Lord Byron . . . Often, in such quandaries, a TV tie-in can grant clarity; and usually, nowadays, they called him Cedric-after the affected old slob who presented an afternoon quiz show about words. Richard felt that he had a lot in common with the working classes (he understood hourly disaster), but he liked them better twenty years ago, when they looked worse. There was another nickname they had for him. He didn't know about it yet.

"All the way, Cedric. All the way."

And Richard was off. On the Knowledge, the questions recurred, so you needed memory. Richard had memory, a real memory, many magnitudes greater than what the million hobble by with, calling it their memory. It was open to doubt, at the Warlock, whether knowledge-the mind-counted for anything at all. But on the Knowledge, knowledge really seemed to matter, punctually rewarded by hot coins and an electric jingle. Sometimes, as now, the guys fell silent as Richard worked the machine, his face proud and nervous and aslant, giving glosses and derivations, sneering at the screen's bad grammar (for this oracle was only semi-literate, prone to danglers and pause-for-breath commas, confounded by all apostrophes) and smacking out the answers before anyone had time to read the questions. What is the collective noun given to crows? Set. Covey. Murder. "Yes, murder. They're weird, collective nouns. Always go-" What would an orologist study? Birds. Mountains. Metals. "Oros. Mountain. Always go for the really fanciful one. The precious one. An unkindness of ravens. A business of ferrets. "How many years ago was the last Ice Age? 10,000. 100,000. 1,000,000. "Not as long ago as you'd think. An exaltation of larks. They must have given collective nouns to some chick poet to do. Trecbeor: a cheat. Christ, look at that it's. 1968. Red shift.

One t, two /s. Don't ask me to spell. You can't spell. Randir. to gallop. Sk.

Mars. Jesus." And on he would go, 10p, 20p, 50p-until he was tripped up by some dead comic's catchphrase or rock star's cock size, and by thenlike Albert, Roger, and Bob. They turned, and greeted Gwyn, and Richard felt their humorous censure.

Pel said, "Quick. Here he is."

"Here he is," said Del. "Here's Cedric."

The Knowledge posed questions, offering multiple-choice answers (buttons A, B, and C), for modest cash prizes, depending on how far you traveled along learning's trail. To do well, to advance, you needed a good-sized crew round the Knowledge, all the smatterings you could get of history, geography, etymology, mythology, astronomy, chemistry, politics, popular music-and TV. Most crucially TV: TV down through the ages. It was in TV form that the other stuff was meant to be propagated anyway; and the newer knowledge machines, Richard had noticed, in the pubs he hung out in, actually were TVs: they fled the written, and embraced the audiovisual. The machine at the Warlock was trade-named Wise Money, and Richard, in his head, sometimes referred to it as the Profundity Requital, or the Aleph; but everyone else called it the Knowledge.

"Here, Cedric. What's . . . 'infra dig'?"

Richard squeezed up to the screen, which said:

Q. If a task was "infra dig," you would perform it

A. Quickly

B. Slowly

C. Unwillingly

"Complete non sequitur," brayed Richard, slapping the C. "You'd be just as likely to do it quickly or slowly. Beneath one's dignity. Infra dignitatem."

"That's Cedric," said Bal.

Now the screen said:

Q: D. H. Lawrence was a well-known writer. What does "D. H." stand for?

A. Donald Henley

B. David Herbert

C. Darren Henry

"Darren's good," said Richard. "Or what about Duane? Duane Lawrence."

"Do it, Cedric," said Lol. "Go for it, Cedric."

Cedric? When it came to interpersonal humor, here at the Warlock,true. He might have tried to laugh in your face. In any event he wouldn't have managed it. Out on court he felt he had forgotten how to play, but his body, with its sick nose, its damaged eye, seemed to remember the way it went. His body remembered. The low sun, the sun of winter, squinted into his face. When he threw the ball up to serve, an image scored itself onto the dark shutter of his eyelids; the ball burned in the bright orbit of his rackethead, like Saturn.

He had been a slave in his own life. Now he was a ghost in his own life.

How civilized, how spacious, how decent everything must have been, when his nose wasn't nuts, when his eye wasn't black. Everyone stared at him. No one sniffed at him, but everyone stared at him.

The only place he felt any good was in the Adam and Eve. No one stared at his black eye. No one noticed his black eye. This was because everyone else had a black eye. Even the men.

Gal Aplanalp didn't call.

At the Tantalus Press he continued to look kindly on the work of Keith Horridge. With poets, he realized, he was generally lenient. When in the year before he married her Gina started sleeping with writers, Richard found his jealousy reasonably easy to manage when she slept with poets- easier, much easier, than when she slept with novelists and (especially) dramatists. He liked poets because they had no power and no money. He wrote to Horridge, giving him advice on the stanza:

Spume retractile, the detritus of time. Stasis is epitaph- the syzygy of sand.

And Horridge reworked the stanza to make it more obscure. Maybe he should fuck up Keith Horridge. Maybe Keith Horridge was more his speed. But Richard wrote back, telling Horridge to justify the obscurity-telling Horridge that obscurity must be earned.

Horridge was twenty-nine. This sounded like a good age for a poet to be.

At The Little Magazine he secured favorable reviews for the paperback of

Saddle Leather, a collection of short stories by the Boston-based poet

and novelist Elsa Oughton, and for the out-of-print Jurisprudential by Stanwyck Mills, Sue and Ron L. Summerdale Professor of Law at the University of Denver.

Del and Pel and the others would be so lulled by his mastery, by his Knowledge know-how, that the clock would tick along its ratchet and hum warningly, and Richard would guess, furiously, and smack the wrong button, and the quest, the trail of gold, would evaporate and a new one would form. Because of course the quest for knowledge never really ended. Like the universe, it was a saga of augmentative abasement. Who was said to be the last man to have read everything? Coleridge. Hazlitt. Gibbon. Coleridge: it was Coleridge. Two hundred years on, nobody had read a millionth of everything, and the fraction was getting smaller every day. And every new book held less and less of the whole.

"Let's go," said Gwyn. "We're on."

Richard was staring at the screen-at the resumed quest. What is coprolite? Rock. Oil deposit. Fossil dung. Turning to leave, he thoughtlessly smacked A (thoughtlessly, because the opening question of any quest allowed two attempts, as was meet, as was only right). Then with impatience he smacked B. Also wrong. "Shit," he said.

"Fossil dung!" said Pel, with humorous authority, as the quest dissolved.

"Yeah, of course. Kopros: shit. You know, like coprophile."

"Most untypical," said Gwyn.

Richard looked at him.

"I thought you knew everything about shit."

The guys laughed, uncertainly. TV meant that everything Gwyn said was revised upwards in terms of sparkle and pertinence; but shit, the reality, the stuff itself-this was not happy ground.

"Homer nods," said Bal. "Cedric nods. 'Anosmia' nods."

Anosmia: loss of sense of smell. Although Richard had a great memory, he didn't remember that "anosmia" had once featured on the Knowledge. And he didn't know that they called him Anosmia not because he suffered from it but because he was capable of defining it. He dropped his head and ducked away from the crowd, following Gwyn on to Court One.

"Won't be able to concentrate today." Gwyn was shaking his wrists and bobbing around like a million-quid footballer arising ominously from the dugout. "I'll keep thinking about that maniac in my bedroom."

"What did she actually … How do you-"

"Oh our visitor left a calling card all right," said Gwyn with disgust.

"Christ, you don't mean she-"

"Enough. Please."

If, at seven in the morning, you had told Richard he was going to play tennis that same afternoon, he would have laughed in your face. No: notOver the chessboard, the following Sunday, Richard asked Gwyn what had happened with Belladonna.

"Nothing," he said. "What did you expect? I wanted to talk about oral sex but she just wanted to talk about Amelior. That book is her bible. A lot of kids seem to have taken it up. It's the message of hope, I suppose."

"J'adoube," said Richard, sniffing his fingertips.

"You know it's on the syllabus. Not just in America, where you'd kind of expect it. But here in stuffy old England!"

"Mate in three," said Richard. "No. Mate in two."

Gal Aplanalp didn't call.

Once a day that slobbering fuckpig of an Englishman hurled and bounced himself down Calchalk Street at sixty miles an hour in his German car. Like a low-flying aircraft-like a drug rush …

Richard couldn't believe this fucking guy. This fucking guy: what was his hurry? Who did he think could want him anywhere a second sooner than he was going to get there already?

Somehow it always happened that Richard was out on the street when the German car ripped past-frozen with loathing, his imprecations tousled and tossed aside by the barreling backdraft. The drooling brute in his capsule of humorlessness. White shirt, with loosened tie, and the navy suit-top on the hook behind him.

What is it with this fucking guy? he always said out loud-driving down my street at sixty miles an hour, coming to kill my kids.

He rang Demi. "Oh I'm okay," she said. "How are you?"

"Tolerably well," he said, for this was sometimes Richard's style. His black eye had stopped being a black eye. The lid was violet, the orbit a lively-even a cheerful-yellow. "Demi, you know I'm writing this big thing on Gwyn. This means we'll have to hang out together. Lunch, for instance. A brief sea cruise, perhaps."

"On me. What are you … What's your-"

"My angle? The usual, I should think. What made the princess fall for the grim little Taff."

"And what's the answer?"

"I don't know."

"So you want…?"

"Deep background."

Then she gave him a date in mid-January and said, "I'm going home that weekend. You could come down on the Friday or the Saturday. Spend the night. It'll be very informal. Just family."

He sat in the pub for three hours staring at the haywain of Anstke's dipped head while she explored what she considered to be her only alternative to suicide: moving into 49E Calchalk Street.

Early in December Richard had lunch with the Features Editor of the Sunday broadsheet which would be publishing his long profile of Gwyn Barry. "What we want to know," said the Features Editor, "is what every reader wants to know: what's he really like. You know him as well as anyone. You know: what's he really like."

They would run the piece after Gwyn's pub date: absorb the "impact." More generally, the Features Editor went on, Richard should examine the pressures facing the successful novelist in the late 1990s.

On the day before his trial for drunken driving Richard took a spin in the Maestro: to Wroxhall Parade. Belladonna answered the door in a black two-piece suit, a black hat and a black veil. The veil held dull gray sequins in its mesh; it resembled a spider's web complete with dead flies. In the Maestro they rode to Holland Park Avenue. He didn't feel like a pimp or a pander or an agent provocateur. He felt like a minicab driver.

Gwyn treated him as such. Unsmilingly he led Belladonna off to his study, and Richard poked around in the kitchen, failing to read a new biography but successfully drinking beer.

She was quiet, and maybe even quietly tearful behind her veil, when he drove her back to Wroxhall Parade. He asked her what had happened and she kept saying Nothing.

Richard went to court and was duly admonished and fined and banned- for a year.

Demi failed her driving test for the third time.

Crash couldn't understand it. "This is beyond my comprehension," he said, as he drove her woundedly back from Walthamstow. Not only did the driving instructor and the driving examiner originate from the West Indies. They originated from the same island.

As Crash approached central London he relented, and taught Demi something nice: the use of the hazard lights to express gratitude. Often, as you joined a queue of traffic from a side road, and a fellow motorist held back to admit you, there wasn't enough time to wave or flash your thanks. A brief application of the hazard lights, however, allowed you to salute the indulgence of the car behind.

One whose oldest son left home received instruction from Father Duryea at St. Anthony's.

One whose marriage ended traveled first to Israel, then to Africa.

They all suffered from pains. These pains were informers sent by death.

One who heard mechanical noises in his ears attached a mirror to his shoe and stood in crowds where women gathered.

One who wore his hair swiped upward from his right sideburn abjured the love of women and sought the love of men.

One who could still see the bus when the bus was nice and near started responding to the propositions written on cards and left in street-corner telephone booths.

They all kept comparing what had gone to what would come.

One abstained from meat and fish, and eggs, and fruit that failed to fall to the ground of its own accord.

One grew fat and had nightly dreams of lopping.

One bought an electric juicer and came to fear the force of electricity.

They all saw what lay behind. If they looked, they could see what lay ahead. They didn't choose to look. But at three in the morning something woke them with the fizzy rush of an old flash camera, and there they all were, staring down the sights of their lives and drawing a bead on the information.

"What does it mean anyway: 'chief me out'?"

"Like you called him chief. Your chiefed him out."

"What's wrong with chief? Cabbies call you chief. Chief doesn't sound too bad."

"I asked him. He couldn't remember. All he knew was if you get called chief then you've been chiefed out. And it can't get around that you stood there and got chiefed out."

" Why would I chief him out? Why would I chief him out? Why would I tell anyone I chiefed him out?"

"There you go. Such are the ways of our colored brethren."

"I'm assuming I got my black eye free."

"Yeah," said Steve Cousins, without any sign of amusement. "That one's definitely on the house."

"Now might be a good time to talk about money."

Richard had not been discouraged by his black-eye experience. Far from it. He felt he had traveled through the visible spectrum and had at last reached the end of the rainbow. His own life, on paper (and"And will Gwyn be there?"

"No. He's doing something with Sebby."

"Demi-this is good."

Gina, these days, no longer looked at Richard as if he was mad. These days Gina looked at Richard as if he was ill. And how did he look at her, these days? He watched Gina now, as she stood at the cooker, turning his chop beneath the grill. Her small shape, the curve of her bared neck … Someone who didn't know Gina well might assume that the tinge of burnt blood in her hair was enhanced by, if not actually derived from, the shoots and leaves of the tropical shrub we call henna. But Gina frowned on henna, and never used it. Richard could back her up: she didn't need to. How he used to sink his face into the evidence, into the information, and stare up like the sun-helmeted author of the most suicidal travel books (the slow waterfall, the dark and arching vines) and sight genuine auburn in the slobber of his jungle love. But that didn't happen anymore. And sex, to him, was everywhere and nowhere.

He told her about Demi's suggestion. She said,

"That's all right. I might go to my mother's. What will you say in your piece? How much you hate him?"

Richard looked up. No one was supposed to know about that. "I don't hate him."

"/ do. You just think his stuff is shit. Are you going to say that?"

"I don't see how I can, really. Everyone'll think it's just envy."

"Have you heard from Gal?"

"Nothing new."

"… We ought to talk."

"I know."

"Soon." Gina's elliptical face stayed low-over the bowl of bucolic cereal. From the country, where everything was good: the sack of wheat, the rubicund apple-rack. "How are we going to get through Christmas? I hope Lizzete can help out. Should be cheaper, because she won't be skipping school. A weekend in the country'll be nice for you. You need a rest."

"Not quite a rest. I'll be working."

"It's a break," said Gina. "And a break is as good as a rest."

You hear about a guy who buys a sports car on his forty-first birthday and comes roaring out of his midlife crisis behind the wheel of an MG Midget.

One whose mother died took to the cultivation of roses.

their heads. They're ready. It's the end of the story. They've felt it coming. They're ready. They just hang their heads."

"This is magical. This is poetry."

"Well then."

Suddenly Richard found himself distracted and oppressed: by matters of timing. If they went ahead now, then Gwyn, one trusted, would be in no kind of shape to tour America. Which was okay: it meant, at least, that Richard could go on saying he had never been there. But would the Sunday broadsheet still want the profile? Yes. The pressures facing the successful novelist? Absolutely. He could write about the pressures exerted by that hundred-pound pulley at the end of the hospital bed, the pressures exerted by this or that cumbrous prosthesis.

"Put it on hold for now. I'm going away for the weekend with his wife," said Richard, examining his fingernails and experiencing real surprise at how much dirt they stored.

"They had a break-in."

"So I heard."

"You know what he did, the bloke? Tore all his books up. His books. So-called Amelior."

"So. A disgruntled reader."

"Yeah, or a …"

Now came a moment of shared disquiet. It was clear that the young man was about to say, a "literary critic." He was sharp with words, in a way, as he was sharp with everything else; but his coin-slot mouth was not designed to say it. "A literary critic": his mouth was not designed to say it.

"A good critic," said Richard.

"I was talking to Mrs. Shields?"

"I know. Your brother's mum."

"She's not working there anymore, but she's a pal of that Colombian they got. And guess what. They sleep in separate rooms."

"Who do?"

"Gwyn. And Demeter. I got something for you." He took it from his pocket and passed it across the table under the shell of his palm. A section of glossy paper, tightly and elaborately folded, like origami. "That's in exchange," he said, "for the smack."

The possibility of additional or parallel universes, of which there may well be an infinity, presents the writer with something new to worry about. Shakespeare is the universal. That is to say, he plays well enough in this universe, with its sodium and cesium and helium. But how would he go down in all the others?much of it was on paper, written words, memos to the self, scrawled on the corners of envelopes and on the backs of credit-card slips franked by Pizza Express), seemed so hard to worsen; and yet a single blow from a muscular fist had shown it to be capable of dramatic and qualitative decline. The non-black-eye world that he was now reentering, for all its penury and hopelessness, felt like a banquet of immortality and joy. His cheekbone, this night, bore only an arid smear of yellow (not the cheerful, nursery yellow of days past but a different yellow, a dead yellow). The eye itself was no longer a tropical anemone. It had become an eye again. It had become Richard Tull again.

"Go on," he said, and sank back, and called with languor for another Zombie .. . This was the world where the body was money: the world of pornography and vassalage. Here were Gwyn Barry's organs and appendages, laid out on trays and studded with price pegs as on a butcher's shelf-or reeling and calibrating, items on the circular slide rule that an American doctor might carry in his top pocket, for instant estimates. Steve Cousins's terms, Richard thought, were staggeringly reasonable: by pledging half his fee for the Gwyn Barry profile, he could get its subject safely bedded down, in old age. Disillusionment with the literary world-that was what had brought Richard here. If Leavis had been right, if the whimpers of provincial neglect had had just cause, if the literary world was a Hong Kong of arbitrage, of graft and drink and sex: in such a world, with a ton of money and a cooling-tower of vitamin E, Richard could have attained his goal by conventional means. But the literary world wasn't like that. When it came to fucking people up, the literary world never got started. Sadness at this, and disillusionment, had brought Richard here, to the Canal Creperie, and to Steve Cousins, his familiar and his fan.

Who was telling him that he could get Gwyn killed for a thousand- for eight book reviews! Some trog from up north would do it. He comes down here with all the others, for a football match, completes his business, then digs his scarves and bobble hat out of his duffel bag and takes the train back to Worksop.

"Enchanting," said Richard. "This is pure witchcraft. But please. You were saying."

"What you do is-what you do is you turn their lives into fear. Everything they do. Everywhere they go. It's like the world has-"

"Turned against them."

"Like the world hates them."

"Go on," said Richard limply.

"So that by the time it happens, by then, they just-they just hangIt was not the black woman that stopped him, though: it was the white man. For 13 had long sensed, very accurately, that you didn't want to be around Scozzy with anything sexual. While to the white man the thought of the black man was some kind of antic aphrodisiac, the presence of Scozzy, with his sallow stare, in 13 's head definitely went the other way. You wouldn't ever want to present the man with it. Simple as.

"Tell you what," said 13. "What say we do 68."

"68?"

"68."

"What's 68?"

"You do me and I owe you 1."

"13!"

"Take it or leave it or whatever."

Lizette left it. She left altogether, after a while. Just as well, thought 13. With an unhappy expression he fussed and sighed and softly flinched over the paper tissues. Don't want to fuck that one off. Good business relationship. Adolf emerged at twelve-forty-five, with his book, silent, satisfied. Run the man home and go out looking for a laugh.

"Oi. What's this?"

Chewing gum on the speedo! 13 scraped it off and popped it between his lips. In his haste he immediately swallowed its cold gray hardness.

Maybe they all had what Richard didn't have.

13 had it. Walk down the street with him and you wouldn't be seeing any of the things he saw. He saw earners and turners and leavers and levers, he saw locks and catches, what was unguarded and what protruded, what was detachable, what was transferable. In any shop his eyes glittered with compound calculation.

Scozzy had it, though he had it the wrong way round. Animal ther-movision, in the city; the night-sight of the wild boy.

Belladonna had it. In the business of reinvention, the first act is that of renaming. The novelist does this all the time, on the page. On the street, the only thing you can rename is yourself, and everyone else you know, if you like, so that everyone has two names, just as everyone on television has two names.

Even Darko had it. When he came to London, with his bag of tools, the very air over Oxford Circus was rank with pornography, the shop windows were stills in duty-free brochures, and the cars bulged and shimmied like women, the clios, the starlets, the princesses of the street.

In truth (and we must face this), Lady Demeter Barry poses difficulties of representation. She poses difficulties of representation not justSuch questions were far from 13's thoughts. He was in the orange van with Lizzete. Engine on: for the warmth.

13 exhaled plangently. He was, as usual, nursing a sense of strictly local injustice. He'd had a call from the halfway house: the leader of his Probation Program, informing 13 that the Harrow Road police were going to charge him with 43 burglaries. 43! Harrow Road! The worst. They stitch you up. 43 burglaries. And he'd only done 29 of them.

Lizzete said, "We could go in the back."

He said, "Can't. Giro there. He's wrecked. Up all night driving."

She did something.

He said, "Leave it out is it."

Lizzete was 14, 13 knew. 14 at the oldest. As always when he was with her 1-on-l, 13 was struggling to keep his relationship with Lizzete on a professional footing. He still had his shirt and his sateen wind-cheater on-but his trousers were down there. Lizzete had taken her pants off. She had even taken her chewing gum out. And stuck it on the speedo . .. Professional footing. Pleasure doing business with her. For example, he set Lizzete to knock on doors. Anyone home at that number: "You have a girl called Mina living here? … Sorry to bother!" Worked well. Don't want to be going in there blind. Don't want to be doing a creeper. Tiptoe is it. Anything comes down and you have to give someone a tap: Aggravated. Statutory: you're 4-walling it for 3 years. End of story. 3 years: 24-7, 24-7. Jesus: 60-60, 24-7, 52, 52, 52. Time I come out, Lizzete be 17. No worries. Take her down the Paradox.

"Here you are," said Lizzete, though it sounded like "eeh-ah" or "E-R."

"Yat," said 13. "Ooh intense."

He had a white man in his head. At this sexual moment, his head had a white man in it: Scozzy. Who'd said he'd be out straightaway or might be some time. Covertly 13 peered over Lizzete's shoulder: Giro's body was gathered steeply in sleep, like an ancient hassock. (His other mode was all floppy and invertebrate, like a vast dog omelette or even a huntsman's rug made from his own coat.) So, yeah, they could slide in there easy, between the dog and the gardening tools, which 13 was selling on. Ten minutes. If Minder came out he could hide her behind Giro. Bung a blanket on her. Still, you didn't want to be taking it too far with a 14-year-old that wanted to get pregnant. 13 knew that Lizzete was jealous of her 15-year-old sister Patrice, who was pregnant and no mistake. Who was out here. They thought it got them council flats, having a youth, but it didn't, not anymore. They wouldn't listen. Tories or whatever. Her mum'd kill him.

ist, subliminally trained to reveal character through action, duly contorts his narrative to provide cute walk-ons for the next spoonerism, mala-propism, pleonasm. Better, in my view, just to make a list.

So Demi said "vicious snowball" and "quicksand wit" and "up gum street"; she said "worried stiff' and "beyond contempt" (though not "beneath belief); she said "on its death legs" and "hubbub of activity" and "what's with it with her?" and "tell him no flat out"; she said "none of my luck" and "when it comes down to the crunch"; she said "grease-boat" (as opposed, presumably, to "dreamball"); she said "he lost his top" and "she blew her rag"; she said "he coughed up" (he confessed) and "she fluffed it" (she killed herself). Once, just once, she murmured, "Sorry. I was talking aloud." Demi also pronounced her rs as ids, but I don't think I'm even going to begin to attempt that.

I said at the outset that Demeter, like Gina, had no connection with literature other than marriage to one of its supposed practitioners. This isn't quite true. This is never quite true. We all have our connections with literature, wittingly or not so wittingly. How else do we explain the intensity of Richard's interest? Everybody knew that he was going down to Byland Court to spend the weekend with Lady Demeter. His wife knew; her husband knew; the Features Editor of the Sunday broadsheet knew. But nobody knew how Demi filled his mind, sometimes-how he burned across town at her.

If you could gather together all a man's past lovers (the lovers of a modern midlifer, averagely promiscuous) and line them up in chronological order, as in a catalogue raisonne, as in the long passage of a gallery or museum: for the retrospective . . . You would begin with shocking diversity, with the wide-sweep eclectic. Moving along the line the viewer's eye would jump up, down, start back, all heights, all weights, all colorings. Then after a while a pattern would establish itself; the repetition of certain themes would eventually situate you in one genre or another, until you came to the last woman in the show, the crystallized: and that's your wife. So things had gone, more or less, with Richard. The arrow of obsession pointed to Gina. All the girls, all the women, got bendier and coilier and craftier-until you came to Gina. Her eyes, her mouth, the turn of her waist: these were his Collected Poems. Whereas members of the subgenre that Demi roamed, the big round baby-powder blondes, were never numerous and petered out a long way back down the line. Though he had been awfully pleased to see them at the time. Richard was forty. He paid many visits to this passage. His life was this passage. The world was this passage.

because she is a pretty blonde (with a full bosom) who is related to the Queen, nor yet because she kept various ponies and was addicted to cocaine and heroin and slept with one or two black men. In the Queen's extended family, being a junkie, like keeping a pony, is standard stuff: the landscaped grounds of the higher-priced detox clinics are like lawn parties at Sandringham. Sleeping with black men, on the other hand, shows us Demi's more adventurous side. Girls of every other class do that, perhaps because, among other less elusive attractions, it's the only thing left that their mothers haven't done. But girls of the nobility, with exceptions, don't sleep with black men. I can't think why not, if it's half as much fun as everyone says it is. We noted earlier that the black man, very commonly, serves as a sexual thought-experiment for his white counterpart: he is your gifted surrogate; he is your supersub. I myself have a bro in my head-Yo!-who, after much ritual handslapping, takes over when I'm tired or can't come, or on those nights when I've got a headache or I'm washing my hair. (The polite phrase for this habit is imaginative delegation: whoever he is-masterfully glistening, in the fantasy, over your wife or girlfriend or pin-up or pick-up-he isn't you.) . . . Otherness is exciting. Miscegenation is exciting. So, with all this going for it, why don't the girls of the nobility do it more? Racial guilt, egalitarian guilt, is exciting: it excites compassion in the female breast. But maybe this guilt only works when it's vague-a presentment, an unease. With the nobility, maybe, the guilt is all too palpable and proximate. The De Rouge-mounts were famous alike for their piety and rapacity. Demi's great-granddad, with his "extensive interests" in the West Indies. Demi's granddad, with his South African diamond mines. And then the polluting, scorching, forest-razing, rubble-bouncing speculations of Demi's father, thirteenth Earl of Rieveaulx. The guilt is still real. The spell is still fast and good.

Representationally, though, this isn't the difficulty. The representational difficulty posed by Demi has to do with the way she speaks: the way she puts sentences together. For some reason it is the destiny of Richard Tull to be surrounded by idioglots. Idioglots, with their idiolects.

Demi's linguistic quirk is essentially and definingly female. It just is. Drawing in breath to denounce this proposition, women will often come out with something like "Up you!" or "Ballshit!" For I am referring to Demi's use of the conflated or mangled catchphrase-Demi's speech-bargains: she wanted two for the price of one. The result was expressive, and you usually knew what she meant, given the context. But here's the difficulty. In fictional prose the idiolect spells trouble because the novel-They come at me. They come at me like information formed in the night. I don't make them. They're already there.

"Where you been then?"

"Party. Office party."

"Party? Time of year. Parties. It. You do."

"Yeah."

These minicab drivers who ferried Richard about, over Christmas, to and from the diaspora of old Fleet Street-these minicab drivers were every hue of Asian brown, but they all spoke the same language. Clearly they had learned their English from small-hour conversations with their customers, people like Richard or people in similar condition.

"Nice talking to you," slurred Richard, climbing out on Calchalk Street, under a slanting moonman and a city star or two. "What's that?"

"Uh, that's. Let's. It. Call it six-fifty," slurred the minicab driver.

"Take seven."

"… Phanks. Cunt.?

Still, aristocratic lineage, great wealth, comparative youth, an air of vulnerability, a full bosom: wouldn't that about cover it, universally? Did Demi need anything literary, to ignite Richard's passion?

Yes. First, the big parties she used to throw for writers. Deliriously, ravenously, Richard sent his mind back to the napkin-scarved bottles of old champagne tipped his way by tuxedoed athletes (even the help was hip, was hot) and bims in ra-ra skirts offering canapes made of dodo G-spots and hummingbird helmets, in the octagonal library, where he had mingled with the knowers and philosopher kings of the living word-while all the agents and editors and publishers cowered in their nimbus of pelf and preferment: men and women who shunned him; men and women whose secretaries hung up on him without blinking; men and women whose letters he opened like some Soviet janitor getting a personal summons from Stalin . . . Hoping to impress Gwyn Barry (or, more honestly, hoping to depress him), Richard had taken his friend to the salon of Lady Demeter de Rougemount. And look what happened.

Other than that, Richard had information on Demi now, and information always points to the vulnerable-the hidden. Secrets, female secrets, tend to the poetic, like the birthmark that her rumpled shirtcol-lar sometimes failed to conceal: Demi's port-wine stain, which rose and glowed when she was flustered or distressed. Really she was offering the world only an excerpt of the truth. Demi had gone from the grottolike chapel at Byland Court to the cash machine on the high street at midnight (making two withdrawals, at 11:59 and 12:01: this was drugs knowledge). The element that rescued her face from mere youth-dependant prettiness was the appetite, the taste for disobedience and dissolution. It put depth into her eyes and made them humorous and propitiatory; it complicated her mouth, her teeth; it meant that her hair couldn't quite conform to its sheen and bob. Her appetite was not vulpine; it was loose and shrugging. She was hurt, she was sorry. That was just how she was. Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get loved. We are not all of us going to get expanded. She and her husband slept in separate beds, in separate bedrooms. Richard understood. He and Gina still turned in together; but they were sleeping in separate beds. Richard understood. An I for an I.

The representational difficulty remains. My suspicion remains. Demeter's dimensions are one short of the three. It does happen. Gina, too, maybe. If writers drain life out of those around them, if writers are vampires, are nightmares … To be clear: I don't come at these people.

never have given you life. Rain came. Rain made the landscape heavier, and impeded it: the sopping trees, the steeped sheep. Richard looked up. A canal was unraveling parallel to the leaning, yawing train. There was a solitary barge, moored to the reeds, its chimney smoking; presumably a tramp sat within it, under this squall just made for him. It wouldn't be too bad, thought Richard. Our thick coats, our baked beans. Pleasantly drugged by the reek of paraffin .. .

It was over. It was getting nearer to being over. He looked for clues-in the daily crucifixion of the crossword. Ten years ago it used to take him ten minutes to finish the wide-grid Tiresias: he finished it on the can. Five years ago he was usually doing about half of it. Twelve months ago he was still doing about half of it; but all his answers (he would discover the next day) were wrong. They interlocked all right; but they were all wrong. Nowadays things had improved: he couldn't do any of it. This morning two clues in particular taunted and traduced him. One was:

Eggy? (16) The other was:

Going in at number eight for Zimbabwe, Gloucestershire opener joins tailender for Glamorgan (when Other unfit to play) to produce new ball with clear appeal for the philoprogenitive (3)

He pushed the thing aside and tried to sleep but just sat there with his head banging against the wall. Why trains? Why rails? Why tracks and smokestacks? Richard would go on asking himself these pointless questions for a while, presumably, as artists will. But these questions were now altogether pointless. He was leaving the reconstruction business. So he had no business asking them.

At his destination he was met, not by Demi, but by a plump youth in a bulbous washable jacket, son of gatekeeper or gamekeeper. No gate or game to keep, not anymore; so just this plump youth, at the wheel of his mobile gardener's hut, marooned for life among the lanes and hedges. Richard bounced along, up hill and down dale. The road might have been taking him back down his own central nervous system, to the past, to childhood and its green world, unfallen, where the lion lay down with the lamb and the rose grew without thorn. In the city you looked for this world, in Dogshit Park, in the Warlock AstroTurf, in the ravings of the wild boy, in the leaden pages of Amelior. The green world symbolized theThe railway station had changed since he had last had call to use it. In the meantime its soot-coated, rentboy-haunted vault of tarry girders and toilet glass had become a flowing atrium of boutiques and croissant stalls and limitless cappuccino. Trains no longer dominated it with their train culture of industrial burdens dumbly and filthily borne. Trains now crept in round the back, sorry they were so late, hoping they could still be of use to the proud, strolling, cappuccino-quaffing shoppers of the mall. There was even a brand-new Dickensian pub called the Olde Curiosity Shoppe whose set was dressed with thousands of books- written not by Dickens but by that timeless band of junkshop set-dresser nobodies … In other words, the station had gone up in the world. And Richard didn't like it. He wanted everything to stay down in the world-with him. Envy and schadenfreude and invidiousness: they arise from poor character, but also from a fear of desertion. The entrance to the platform he stood at called itself the Gateway to East Anglia. Monolithically overweight, like a prehistoric snake that had eaten not a mastodon or a mammoth but another snake of the same dimensions, the train moved toward him with its yellow eyes satedly averted. Asian and West Indian staff stood ready with their black ten-gallon rubbish bags. Richard stiffened in his soiled bow tie.

It was over. It was all pretty much over. That morning, in the post, he had received a lustrous envelope from the offices of Gal Aplanalp. On wrenching it open he found, not a book contract for Untitled, but an invoice for the many photocopies made of its typescript. The sum demanded was large enough to constitute a rumor of ruin for Richard; worse, it spelled good news for another of Gal's clients, Gwyn Barry, whose physical sufferings, in consequence, might have to be modified or abridged. In front of his assembled family Richard left the kitchen table and weaved his way toward the sitting-room chaise longue. He didn't collapse on top of it. He crawled in underneath it. One by one the boys came to peer at him with their upside-down faces. It was all pretty much over . . . Richard didn't look out at the day that was now moving past him. In prefiguration of its actual death, the sun or its nimbus hung vastly expanded above the milky medium of the troposphere. You could stare at it-a necessarily rare privilege. A deity you could stare at would not be a deity. A sun you could stare at would be no good to you: it wouldThough not warm or anything like that, the house they were in (itself boundless, but distinct from the stately home, which lay to their flank somewhere, like a regiment) had the internal feel of an oven or a furnace; everywhere you went you heard the parched lungs of ancient bellows, the gasp of pilot light. The floorboards hummed and tickled shod feet with the work of the hidden hypocaust. This senile apparatus was augmented, in the unheatably high-ceilinged hall, by an open log fire, before which, on the sofa, a gravid Labrador anxiously awaited the arrival of her puppies. Sour smoke hovered and idled, bringing tears to the eyes-to the eyes of the Labrador and to the eyes of the old woman who sat there stroking her . . . Damply melded heaps of wellies and anoraks, every toilet bowl gruffly splattered and tire-tracked, every surface padded with dust as thick as iron filings. In Demi's parents two Catholic dynasties had come together. It wasn't that the Earl and the Countess loved dirt and decay. They just didn't see it. When they used the barn-dark kitchen, if they ever did, piety and pride forbade awareness of the crisped gunge in the cooker and the smell of sweet damp cardboard that heaved from the opened fridge. They didn't see it or smell it-the merely worldly. But the daughters did, and laughed at it, and added to it all with their oozing young.

Unlike the nostrils of another visitor to another great Catholic seat, Richard's nostrils, sensitive though they were, luckily failed to flare at the sight of a "high, insolent dome." But he had had good times in big country houses, when he was younger, and more insolent. He was practiced at skulking around inside them, stealing drinks, and avoiding church; and he had crept down many a popping furlong of corridor with his shoes in his hands. Further, he had crouched in banks of reeds and blazed with shotguns at flocks of ducks (which, on undulating wings of gratitude and sincerity, were heading home to their rightful rest). He had sat crammed with huge brothers in huge cars on the way to horse-brassed pubs on Sunday mornings (Brother One, speaking of a married blonde: "I've slimed with her too." Second Brother: "Liar!" First Brother: "Test me!" Second Brother: "What color's her minge?" First Brother: "Black!"). He had quaffed sloe gin at six in the morning and engaged in bun fights and then climbed onto a horse and bobbed around in pursuit of some ferret or weasel until he fell off again. Most centrally, he had assumed the missionary position with several hefty daughters of the nobility and gentry,

and bounced around until everything smelled of come and they made a

joke, and told them who Chekhov was and why rain fell and how it turned out that airplanes could not stand stationary in the sky. Richard had wondered, throughout, when all this was going to end, but he wenttriumph of summer over winter; symbolizing that triumph, though, was all the green world could do, because here was winter and the cold he feared.

"Nearly there now."

Accurately, and with the caress of social unease, Richard felt that the land was being sculpted, was becoming, in fact, a garden, but on a sickening scale. Behold a sickening gardener, one thousand feet tall, with his sickening scythe, his huge harrow, his reaping hook, his mile-long trenchworks and earthworks, the terrible topiarist: those trees pre-gathered on the knoll, that planned plateau, those layered gouges to make the hillside frown or sneer.

The van dropped him off in a rear courtyard and he was directed toward the kitchen-where Demi was, and where all her sisters were: Lady Amaryllis, Lady Callisto, Lady Urania, Lady Persephone. With his small but respectably battered suitcase Richard entered a room where, against all expectation, he was greeted with mandatory informality: the four sisters, the four titled dairy maids each with a tided tit out and a baby at the end of it, and six or seven additional infants with their eternal cadences of weariness and demand, plus crunchy coughs, pi-dog sneezes, hiccup pulses, hold-everything retchings and of course the many scales of infant grief. These sounds were eternal, but louder here, and richer in eructation, because of the incredible squalor, as Demi explained.

"It's not just the babies," she said. "Everyone who comes here spends most of their time in the loo."

And you could hear it, you could hear it, the whoop and whoops of baby burp, fart and gag, continuous and cartoonish, like a baby one-man band, the perpetual motion of air.

"You'll be at it too. Can't you just smell all the dead mice?"

He drank his coffee, among the staring eyes and streaming noses and dangling, bootied feet. This was olfactory forgiveness-olfactory deliverance. Richard sat there, sniffing his fingertips; but his nose, he liked to believe, was finally on the mend. He seldom thought he smelled of shit. He seldom thought, even, that he smelled of batch. What he thought he smelled of now was spinst. And that just couldn't be right. Spinst, he said to himself (and it was quite a riff by now). Come on. Spinst. How obvious has it got to get that your nose is dicking you around? Spinst: what clearer proof could there be that your nose is absolutely full of it?

"Richard's writing a long piece about Gwyn."

The sisters turned to him with considered expressions.

"You're not going to get a tape recorder out or anything?"

"No no. You just do what you'd do anyway. And I'll observe. Sleepily. What I'm really here for," said Richard, "is to sleep.?

"I've always thought that was a strange response-to being worried about the state of the world." Richard had just woken up, so he spoke reasonably innocently. He did think it was a strange response. Signs of major ferment, down the road, in the human story-and the first thing you do is go and have your cock off. Or go and have it out: a slightly more complicated (and more expensive) operation, which he felt might be necessary in the unusual case of Richard Tull.

"That's not for your piece," she said.

"Of course not."

She felt for his hand. She said, "We ought to change."

Richard felt something stir within him. The seduction of Lady Deme-ter: how paltry, how mean, how puerile. He hereby assigned himself a higher goal. Seducing Demi would indeed be a hollow victory. The real clincher would be to get her pregnant.

A succession of headlights now poled and peered its way through the dark and dust of this room of books. Here came the husbands, arriving in four-Porsche formation, from the City. How had they spent their Saturday? Buying and selling, Richard assumed, and sleeping with women who hadn't had any children. Car doors slammed, seeming to entrain further illumination from the courtyard lamps and lanterns. He could see them through the window. He could even see their teeth, their slab-like teeth, dripping with avidity.

Dinner was unforgettable, and Richard would remember it for the rest of his life. At the table each place was furnished with a name tag and a silver salver and a drawerful of cutlery; also, in squat crystal (the size and shape of a diner ketchup-squirt), an individual carafe of red wine. Which were not to be replenished. Richard found this out early on, because he was wiggling his decanter over his glass well before the bruised avocados were served. Demi gave him hers, and that helped him through the next five minutes. Then, two hours later, after the women had left the room, he ground it out with the husbands in exchange for two thimbles of port . . . Beaming boys in beaming shirts, the husbands, so far as he could ascertain, were forthright, friendly, loudly clued-up about the workings of the world and by no means agonizingly stupid.

So: intensely sober, in a permanent panic attack of sobriety, Richard now sat on a bed with Demi, in a dark tower: a dark tower that wore a

witch's pointy hat. They had crossed two frosted lawns to get there, and

climbed a curling stone stairway, and had entered this spherical turret by means of a damp and heavy key. The kind of tower from which wronged princesses traditionally craved escape or rescue. One princess whomaway and then went back and it just kept staggering on. This particular dynasty, in any case, awaited cancellation. Although the Earl had sired five daughters, patiently crippling his wife in quest of an heir, and although those daughters had presented their husbands with many a Jeremy and Jasper and Joseph, the estate was of course patrilinear, and would veer off elsewhere soon.

The day cleared. Its roof of cloud began to leak, like a colander, and the poles of refracted fire looked splay-legged, as if their apex lay at airplane height-nineteen thousand yards, perhaps, and not ninety million miles. Without changing his clothes, and using a wooden racket, he played tennis with Demi, Urania, and Callisto on a court so rich in excrescences and asperities that his choice of groundstroke-forehand or backhand-necessarily depended on the ball's right-angled bounce. Then, with his hands on his hips, he admired the swimming pool. Ther-mals of yeasty activity rose from its mantle of peat-thick green. Richard didn't want to swim in it; he wouldn't have minded drinking it, but he didn't want to swim in it. Side by side he and Demi walked down freshly dripping avenues. They visited conservatories and hothouses, grottoes and gazebos, bowers and arbors, follies and wildernesses; Richard's notebook was in and out of his pocket, signaling his professional interest, as Demi told tales of lost kittens, beloved ponies, myxomatotic marmots, rabid rabbits, and so on, and apostasies and conflagrations and wartime commandeerings and royal visits . .. Listening is good, he thought; listening is always good. They approached the kitchen, through the kitchen garden. She lost her footing on the path and he reached out to steady her. Richard was biding his time.

He found a gym-sized library that contained not a single readable book, not even any Trollope. So he went to sleep in it. The room was dark when Demi woke him with a cup of tea, and a biscuit. She remained at his side, on the tasseled sofa, holding her teacup with both hands as if it contained something sacramental like incense or holy warmth; her blue-jeaned thighs were widely and rigidly parted, her feet erectly tensed on their toes. He watched her face in its offered profile, how it wavered and resolved itself-the bitten underlip, the tremors. Of course it seemed obvious enough what the immediate trouble was. Unborn babies were swirling round her head, like flocks of putti.

"You're the middle sister."

"I'm an aunt twelve times over. Gwyn is very worried about the state of the world."

"Well he could have fooled me."

"He's even talked about having that operation.?

They both swallowed. She said,

"Look."

He looked. He looked out through the arrow-slit and its web of churchy glass: the frosted field, the tall fir, the gibbous moon, the slice of cloud, the spire. The spire did indeed look like a thing that had some business pointing heavenward, unlike the berkish bulk of office block, of highrise. It pointed, with its tapered tentativeness .. .

"That's St. Bodolph's in Short Crendon. See? There's a cloud passing over it. I used to take my pony Hester there and back every evening. It was as far as they'd let me go. And I always used to think that if I got there and back before Nanny Smith laid the table for tea …"

"What?"

"Oh. You know. That I'd have a happy life."

This was romance but they were doing it in winter.

Richard said, "You want some coke?"

Just as there are genres of skies, and car alarms, and many other things, so there are genres of the hangover. Tragic treatments, enriched with various amounts and shades of irony. The epic frame, which finds the hero, toward evening on the second day, still sitting there wiping his eyebrows with his fingertips and still saying to himself things like dear oh dear. There are futuristic hangovers, there are chillers and tinglers, there are thrillers. There are bodice-rippers. Probably there are sex-and-shopping hangovers: there are hangovers made of junk and trash. There are hangovers as dull as rain .. . Not all genres, on the other hand, correspond to a hangover. For instance there are no Western hangovers. In life, hangovers usually cleave to a genre which literature finds hard to do and rarely attempts: tragicomedy. Murphys and Metamorphosises, Third Policemans, Handful of Dusts …

At first it seemed that Richard's hangover might find a relatively comfortable generic home: the country-house mystery. Every hangover, after all, is a mystery; every hangover is a whodunit. But as soon as he reared and swiveled from his bed, and placed a plumply quivering white sole on the lino, it was amply and dreadfully clear what genre he was in: horror. This horror was irresponsibly absolute, yet also low-budget: cheaply dubbed, ill-lit and hand-held. Outside, the courtyard, the cold stamp of the hooves' iron. A couple of centuries ago, Richard had raped the director's girlfriend. He was now the cursed painting of a staked viscount,

kept in a secret attic. Or else he was the ruined stableboy, all drained and scorched and peed-on, and left for dead in the owly hovel, under a heap of old straw. Something good had happened and something bad hadRichard had recently read about (sitting there with a twin on either side of him) had fled such a tower by climbing down her own hair: the big-hair princess. In his own fantasies of escape, he often saw himself clambering from that bedsit in Blackfriars-that eyrie of spinst-on the rope ladder of Anstice's crackling rug . .. For some mysterious or even magical reason, their little belfry, as Demi said, was "lovely and warm." It had served as the bedroom of one of the household's fabled nannies, long deceased. They sat side by side on her narrow cot, whose springs, presumably, had never creaked in passion.

"This thing Gwyn does," said Richard, adjusting his notebook, "when he stares at things in that rapt way, like an orange or a pencil. As a child might. When did he start doing that?"

"He used to get very fed up when people said how simple his writing was. He said it was as if he'd written a children's book. Anyway he started doing it around then."

"… This carpentry thing. He doesn't actually do carpentry, does he?"

"Never. Except he did a bit… He told somebody that writing was like carpentry so he thought he'd better get some carpentry stuff in case people asked if he did carpentry, and then he did a bit of carpentry just in case."

Women's foreheads, sometimes, provide the punctuation for their speech: underlinings, accents grave and aigu, the puzzled circumflex, sad umlauts, wistful cedillas.

"What made you fall for him?"

Unlike Richard, Demi had changed for dinner: a tight gray cardigan, a light gray skirt. Her shoes lay on the floor, still imitating her characteristic stance: heel-to-heel, obtuse-angled. Her legs were tucked up beneath her, but now she unfolded herself and slid up onto her knees, and turned, folding her arms on the narrow vent of the windowsill. Richard stared: the two lanes of Demi's thighs, entering the tunnel of her skirt. Where is the middle of women, he wondered; where is the center of their gravitational pull? In different places. In the color of the mouth's interior, in the breathy and gulpy laxity of the lungs. In the gap or wake between the thighs, where no flesh is, a flute of air the shape of a cocktail glass, where he sensed the invisible quicksilver of gin … He put down his pen and pad and moved up beside her. Their cheeks were almost touching as she said,

"I could always come up here and know everything would be just as it had always been. People think that people like me don't have to struggle. But I have struggled. Oh, I could tell you a couple of tales or two, don't you worry. I got… so lost for a while. I'm still lost. I still have to take it one day at a time. One day at a time.?

Parfait Amour. The evening had finally vanished down the long vistas of De Quinceyan visions: visions of the success that Untitled might yet enjoy (that coke, he now concluded, must have been some really good shit). Richard also remembered sitting in the dark dining room, his chin sticky with spiritous distillment, and listening to the Labrador as it whinnied in nightmare or labor, and hoping that no one would come down to tend her, and feeling the comfort of the community of pain . . . Richard twitched. So violently that one of his ears gulped open. He waited. He was feeling warmer and had even stopped shivering. The log fire fumed purposelessly, yet a gentle liquid heat seemed to be suffusing his nethers. Perhaps, if he sat there incredibly quietly, attempting in a while, say, a salubrious cigarette . . .

The great doors opened. Richard turned, with diffidence. And what did he see in the cold bright morning but life, the colors of health and youth that make the dying thing shrivel tighter in its lair. Horse haunch and hot horse breath, and the jodhpured brides and the grinning grooms and, ever onward, the caravan of prams. Demi was upon him. With the blue and white of her eyes and the white and pink of her mouth she made it clear that he had to hurry; Mr. Bowyer-Smith himself had agreed to give Richard the full forty-room tour. With a difficulty that knew no theoretical upper limit, he climbed to his feet. And now at last everyone-the world-was looking at him appropriately, with decorum, with pity, with terror. He followed their stares and looked down: at himself. From crotch to knee Richard's trousers were steeped in purple blood. But not to worry! No matter! It was just the Labrador's afterbirth he'd been sitting in! And so what if this was his only pair! Demeter led him to a side passage where she delved deep among gym shoe and windcheater until, half a minute later, he was shown into a room full of plastic tubs of laundry and quaking washing machines, there to slip into his oatmeal flares. The Labrador lay in the corner, on a raft of cardboard. She didn't notice him. She was busy with biology, licking her moley young.

He did the forty-room tour and came back and sat in the kitchen while all the children who could walk trooped past him and inspected his black eye like a file of little generals reviewing the lone squaddie- disgraced, and on kitchen patrol. And you know what the world did to him then? I can't believe they're doing this to me, he said to himself, in the van with Urania and Callisto and Persephone. He felt he was pleading-with whom? With the Labrador's puppies, blind, burrowing, and

wet with their newborn varnish. Oh, Christ, how can they do this? To me, me, so lost, so reduced, and sniveling for sustenance. A soul so sick of sin, so weary of the world's shadows and figments. Jesus, they're notreally going to do this, are they? They are. They're taking me to nicking church.

In the village square the van opened up, and let him out.

"A girl called Girl called."

Richard reared round. "A girl called Girl called?"

"Someone called Girl. She called."

"Could it be Gal?"

"Yes. Or Gal."

His interlocutor was Benjy-husband to Amaryllis. He held in his hand a scrap of paper ripped from an exercise book, and then scrawled on, with Darko-like difficulty. Richard snatched it from him and said,

"May I see?"

"The old man took the message. Rather to his irritation. Then of course they got cut off. The telephone never works here and we're not allowed to bring our mobiles. House rules. She said she had news. What was it?"

"What's that say. What's this word say?"

"Position?"

"No it's an adjective."

"Perverse? Uh-pervious?"

"Could it be positive?"

"Yes, that's it. I think that was it. Positive news."

It was Sunday evening, and everyone was drifting away into the perennial dreadfulness of Sunday night. Into the motorway, and Monday. Gal had positive news. What could that mean? Everyone was positive that they didn't want to publish Untitled? Gal was positive that Untitled was unpublishable? No. Positive was the opposite of negative. A positive was what two negatives made .. .

"Come on," said Demeter, and took his arm. "Time to meet the old man."

Men wear trousers all the time, even in bed, and women wear trousers about half the time they're up, but it's women who wear culottes and pantalettes and pantaloons and hot pants and knickerbockers and buckskins, and cycling pants when they aren't cycling and sweatpants when they aren't sweating and jodhpurs when they aren't riding and buckskins when they aren't rustling, while men just wear

trousers-strides, jekylls-and that's that. So Richard might have taken

some pleasure, really, in his oatmeal flares: rejoiced in the novelty of them. Their wrinkliness, for example. How they swung low on the hip and pranced high on the ankle. The playful way the seat kept gatheringand wedging itself in his bum crack. And they itched-these old jekylls tickled and prickled, all over, but most mortifyingly in the inner thigh, beginning at the knee and burning worse and worse until they went at his groin like a riot of crabs. And, yes, the hairy rope between his buttocks also crazingly bristled. So Richard hated his trousers. He had hated them all day because they made him old. An old man staring out from the doors of the snug of the Slug, the wrinkly in his wrinklies, in his charity flares.

"Demi," he said giddily, "I was looking in my notebook this morning. And I just want to check a quote with you." She was leading him through the dark across a courtyard to the nursery wing above the coach house where (she explained) the Earl and the Countess had sequestered themselves these last seven years. "You did say, didn't you, that Gwyn can't write for toffee?"

After a pause she said, "Yes. Well he can't, can he."

"No. He can't."

"It's as clear as a pikestaff, isn't it."

"Exactly," said Richard.

"Up we go."

He now stood, finally, in the presence of the Earl of Rieveaulx. The old bloodsucker sat upright in a functional armchair before a slit-faced paraffin stove. His surroundings were characterized by wipeable surfaces, lined bins, plastic tablecloths, and an undersmell of carbolic and Sunday-best batman BO; here, geriatric praxis was still in its infancy. So the old slavedriver was making his last preparations, was shedding worldliness . .. The Countess, his junior by a lustrum or two but also his senior in mortal time, seldom left her bedroom: had good days, had bad days. He addressed his daughter with a classicist's pedantry and relish: with the three long es. Richard sometimes managed Demeeter; but it fell to the old tariff-hiker to manage Deemeeteer.

Demeter addressed her father by a familial diminutive that Richard had never heard before. It began with p and rhymed with khazi. The other word it rhymed with was mhazi, whom Demi announced her intention of looking in on.

"This is Richard Tull," she repeated as she left the room. "He's a very good friend of Gwyn's."

The old sanctions-buster sat there, his skin bricklike in hue and

breadth of pore. He didn't extend a hand. There was intransigent vigor

in the way he wagged his crossed right leg.

"How do you do," said Richard, and sipped on the schooner of piercingly sweet sherry that Demi had given him. The stormlit valleys of hishangover were beginning to settle and heal. Mortal fear was general, now, rather than clinical.

"What are you?"

He means my profession, Richard decided, and thought of something like, I ply, sir, the scrivener's trade. What he said was, "I write. I'm a writer."

Writing, like dying, wasn't worldly, wasn't quite of the world. Would that be held in its favor? The old rent-gouger was perhaps considering this question, his narrow chin upraised, his smeared and bloody blue eyes loosening in their orbits. His head, which was idling like a spool on a spindle, now tightened into a steadier quiver.

"So! You grace us with a second visit. We thank you for your condescension. Tell me-what keeps you away? Is it that you are happier in the town? Is it the lack of 'hygienic facilities'? Is it all the children and babies, is it the progeny, you abhor?"

Richard was wondering how the old kaffir-flogger had had time to get to dislike him. But he remembered Demi saying that her father's eyesight and hearing were not of the keenest. He didn't dislike Richard, not personally. He just thought he was Gwyn.

"Well it's as you say," said Richard, glancing over his shoulder and stepping forward. Waste not want not. Cut your coat according to your cloth. "Partly it's the dirt. The filth everywhere. And the babies too. I can't bear babies. And I'm a writer, do you see. I have higher things on my mind."

Was that enough? Would that do? No. It was coming on him again- the desire for passionate speech. This could be the chance of a lifetime: God-given. He leaned into the rockpool gaze of the Earl of Rieveaulx, saying, "Writers are sensitive types. Me, I happen to be very worried about the state of the planet. Which is all the poorer, wouldn't you say, for your depradations. But you don't want to think about that now. It never happened. That-that Vatican of swag you've got next door. It never happened. It's just you and God now, right?" He moved yet closer. "Tell me something I've always wanted to know. Your God: how far does his influence stretch? All across the universe, or just around here? How big are his lands? About the same size as yours? Or do they go all the way to Short Crendon and the church spire? Let's make a deal. No more grandchildren from me. And no more gamekeeper God for you. No

more kids' stuff. Oh yeah. Don't you know who Persephone was the

daughter of? Deemeeteer. Look at you. You even fucked that up."

After an inhalation, a sigh, a few old beats of oldster time (themselves an adventure in hatred), the old man's gaze settled-on Richard'strousers … It then took about half a minute for his refreshed disgust to gather, to solidify, to come to a head. In minute detestation he ran his eye from Richard's doubled-over waistband, down the wizened shank to the bobbing hems. And Richard felt by now that the Earl-in conceit with these terrible jekylls-was finally winning. How the strides burned, and cringed, and miserably itched. Oh men, oh trousers, what they cover, what they hide, the tanned rump, the bush torched off behind the black bikesheds, the braggings and debaggings, the billion bullybags …

"Get them off."

Richard stopped breathing. He searched for sarcasm in that shattered visage and saw only woundedness and even the seep of bleeding tears. Was he wearing-was he stealing-the old man's old strides?

"Get them off," he said, on a rising scale, with that final whoof of dogged rage. "Get them off. Get them off."

Did he want them, did he covet them? Round about, all renounced, lay forty rooms and four hundred years of pocketed knickknacks, of trousered loot-yet did he pine for his oatmeal strides?

"Off! I said get them off."

Demeter reentered the room. She looked quickly around at the silence.

"I'm afraid your father," said Richard, "has been bearding me about these trousers."

She sauntered up to him, shaking her head in playful reproach, and put a hand on his shoulder. "He may be the oldest," she declared with a cock of the head, "but he's still the brightest."

"… What?"

"I said you may be the oldest but you're still the brightest."

"The what?"

"The brightest."

"What?"

"The brightest."

"The broadest?"

"The brightest!"

"The what?"

"I said you may be the oldest but you're still the brightest."

"The widest?"

"The brightest!"

"The lightest?"

"No, the brightest."

"The what?"

Richard had backed off with his glass. From the courtyard below hecould hear the van, revving-revving against the cold and damp. It was almost over.

He got back to Calchalk Street at six o'clock the next morning. Prominently displayed on the kitchen table was a couriered package from the offices of Gal Aplanalp. It contained a bottle of champagne and an envelope, which he opened in turn. The letter said:

Although there has as yet been no response here in England, we have positive news from America. Untitled has been accepted by Bold Agenda, Inc., of New York. This is a small imprint, recently launched; they are unable to offer an advance, but the royalty percentage will be correspondingly readjusted in your favor. Roy Biv, your editor there, is very enthusiastic and hopes that we can all get behind the book. They want Untitled in their spring list: of course, you will be there, with Gwyn, for publication. This could turn out well for you. I hope you're pleased.

Richard did what Gina did when he asked her to marry him: he assented with a sneeze of tears. An hour later he still had his face in his hands when his wife came lightly down the stairs, and carefully approached. He looked up. A weekend in the country had reduced him to the condition of a barely usable scarecrow. Black-eyed, flare-trousered, and rigid. All night he had juddered, as if in vibrant motion, on the ice-locked rails.

"Oh, what have you done to yourself?"

Behind her, across the passage, Marius and Marco were waking. You could hear them croak and stretch.

"No it's all right, it's all right. I don't know quite how it happened. But I think everything's going to be all right."

I saw the yellow dwarf today. Not the one up there (the weather has been bad). But the one down here (the weather has been bad). A single picture said it all.

The thing was, I think she had a date. Short skirt, high heels, new hairdo. Of course, any description of her appearance and get-up immediately involves you in niceties of scale. Any skirt, on the yellow dwarf, would have been short, and any heels would have been high. Nevertheless, short was her skirt and high were her heels. And her big-hair hairdo, similarly, seemed doubly big-prodigiously, recklessly big . ..

For a moment, for that flashbulb snapshot of time, before the pathetic sepia had a chance to form on the plate-I felt usurped. Me, myself: / was big enough to show the yellow dwarf a big time in, say, Big Top Pizza. Now wait. She stood in a doorway, with others, a hole in the wall between the enchained off-license and the appliance emporium to which, and from which, Richard Tull sometimes staggers, furled in the tartan coils of his vacuum cleaner. The yellow dwarf, with others, was sheltering from the rain; the crowded doorway dankly steamed-with cooling vapor, with the dark breath of traffic, and with the trailing edge of one of those London mists made entirely of respiratory betrayals and the gasps of asthmatics. She looked down: her puckered shirt, her ruined shoes. She looked up, with maximum defiance, through the gap in the sodden hedge of her hair.

It so happens that I know quite a lot about dating-down at that end of the scale. As a man who stands five-feet-six-inches tall (or five-feet-six-and-one-half-inches, according to a passport I once had), I know about dating and size. In my early teens I was at least a foot shorter. My mother kept telling me I would "shoot up." I was still asking her, at the age of twenty: "What's all this about me shooting up?" (It never happened; but I grew; and I have no complaints, anymore, about five-feet-six.) Thirty years ago my very slightly older but very much taller brother would sometimes arrange foursomes for my benefit: my brother's girlfriend would be asked to bring a girlfriend along-or a sister. And I would wait, in a doorway, while he made a rendezvous and then report back, saying, "Come on. She's tiny"-or else (shaking his head), "Sorry, Mart." In which case I would perhaps follow him at a distance and watch him rejoin the two sixty-inch giantesses at the entrance to the milk bar or under the lit portals of the Essoldo or the Odeon, and then numbly make my way home in the probable rain.

But this rain, probably, almost certainly, was just ordinary rain, and not the Old Testament deluge that had engulfed and ruined the yellow dwarf. She stood in the doorway, with all the other flashflood amphibians. The makeup, the get-up-the tide-marks round her ankles, like socks; and her face in full defiance under the flattened hedge of the big hair. And I had to think: this is awful. But you tried to make too little go too far. You tried to make so very little go so very far.

. . . The information is telling me to stop saying hi and to start

saying bye,