MARTIN AMIS - THE INFORMATION

"Rank beggar, ostir dregar," he incanted, "foule fleggar in the flet. Baird rehator, theif of natour, fals tratour, feyindis gett.. ."

Thief of nature. One of the birds lodging in the nicotined greenery outside his window seemed to have learned how to imitate a car alarm: a looping lasso of sound. Various car alarms belonged to various types, various genres: the nagging, the hysterical, the scandalized. There was even a postmodern car alarm, which trilled out a fruity compendium of all other car alarms. This was the car alarm that all the birds of London would eventually know how to do.

He had liked Steve Cousins because he was the hero of a novel from the future. In literature as in life everything would go on getting less and less innocent. The rapists of the eighteenth century were the romantic leads of the nineteenth; the anarchic Lucifers of the nineteenth were the existential Lancelots of the twentieth. And so it went on, until . . . Darko: famished poet. Belladonna: damaged waif. Cousins: free spirit and scourge of hubris. Richard Tull: the good guy, down on his luck, and misunderstood.

Demi was leaning on the sideboard with her arms straightened, her arms locked-near where the telephone was. She had her rounded back to the room but Gwyn could see her in the mirror as he approached: her head unemotionally bowed (over a desk diary), the skewed collar of her shirt, the inevitable glimpse of tinged brassiere. And she could see him, now: in yet another new track suit, black, hugging, frogmanlike.

"No lesson," she announced.

"What? Oh. No driving lesson."

"Crash has had an accident."

"A road accident by any chance?"

"He fell down. He had a fall. The reason he has accidents sometimes is he's always trying to do something really difficult in cars. Really challenging. I think it must be quite serious. They offered me Jeff. But I want Crash."

Gwyn surveyed her with marked indulgence. In fact he was yearning

to go into the kitchen and hobnob with his favorite bodyguard: Phil. But

he lingered, wonderfully, with his wife. Wonderfully, he was being wonderful to Demi. Watch. He even took her in his arms. Why? Because things were rather different now. But what had she done to deserve it? .

The night before, over dinner, here at home, Gwyn, at considerable cost to his own sensitivity, finally goaded Demi into saying, "You hate me. Why?"

"What is a man .. . How is a man meant to feel? When his wife, when his own wife . . . sneers at his very essence. At his lifeblood. At the thing that gives his life meaning. When she sneers at his soul."

"I honestly have no idea what you're talking about."

A moment ago, Gwyn had felt close to tears-close to bottomless self-pity. And it was a reasonably pleasurable state, he found: loose, sensual, oozily calorific. Now he leaned back, raised his chin, slowly closed his eyes, and said,

"You told Richard I couldn't write for toffee."

"Well you can't."

"Okay. That's it."

"Well you can't!"

"Okay. That's it."

"Well you can't."

"I suppose the next stage-is separation."

"But you can't. It just seemed so obvious."

"This now passes into the hands of my lawyers."

"If it was wrong to say it in public then I'm sorry."

"It'll take me a day or two to move out. I trust you will do me the common courtesy-"

"Wait. I honestly don't understand why you're so cross. Let me think." And again the commentary, the punctuation, provided by Demi's forehead: bracketings, underlinings. "We were talking about how much you got paid. Not just novels but magazine pieces. You know, so much a word. And Richard said it was a lot. And I said you couldn't write for toffee. Was that so wrong?"

"… Come and give me a kiss. Mwa. Mmm. You mean peanuts, love. Not toffee. Mwa. Peanuts."

Within seconds he was huskily promising that one day soon he would fill her with their sons. And he spent the night in the master bedroom, and might even have made love to her, tenderly, tearfully, absolvingly, if he hadn't been feeling so fucked out-and worried about getting her pregnant. Demi also told him something else about that weekend at Byland Court with Richard: something he was awfully pleased to hear. Like all writers, Barry was often at the mercy of his. Seeing that light in her husband's eyes, she would know that the. Hypersensitive, but quick to forgive, he could never . . .

Now Gwyn said, "Crash can't drive for toffee. Eh, love??

"Well his rates are quite high."

"Ah. Here he comes."

A minute later Richard was standing in the hall, in his shorts, in his mack, cruelly encumbered, with his racket, his cue case; he was carrying his street clothes in a cheap new sports bag which was clearly made out of plastic (if that). Demi kissed him. He looked lost.

"A lamb to the slaughter," said Gwyn.

"We're not going to do this, are we?"

Richard took his place in the back of Gwyn's Saab.

Up front, riding shotgun, was the bodyguard, Phil. It might have been pleasant, Richard supposed, to claim and savor responsibility for all this anxiety, expense, inconvenience, and preposterous exoticism. But the author of Amelior and Amelior Regained, dependably and adaptably insufferable, as ever, had too clearly thrown himself into bodyguard culture: here, in Phil, Gwyn had found another reality-softener-a publicity boy who pumped iron. It emerged that he even went to the gym and worked out with Phil's co-bodyguards: Simon, Jake. Gruffly, malely, Gwyn swore as he drove. He even wound his window down to holler at some affront to his territoriality. Another category mistake. Silence, please! We may think we are swearing at others, at traffic. But who is the traffic? The soliloquy is the appropriate form for such language, because what we are doing is swearing at ourselves. Richard didn't miss driving; he didn't miss being plugged into the city. But he missed swearing. He missed being yet another chump in yet another reeking ton of metal in yet another bronchitic defile, swearing at himself.

As they queued for Marble Arch, Gwyn jerked his head back and told Richard that Phil had been thrown out of the SAS for being too vicious. Phil grunted leniently. Phil? Lamp-tanned, rubbery, big-lipped, with capped teeth and clear eyes-their age. Phil's full name was Phil Smoker. Richard thought it might save a lot of trouble to be called Richard Smoker, particularly when you were in America. Or Richard Smoking. Phil smoked-so Richard smoked. Gwyn was now filling Phil in about their years of rivalry-on the tennis court, the snooker table, the chessboard.

"And today's the day I clean his clock."

"He's never beaten me at anything," said Richard.

"Sport," said Gwyn, "provides release. There aren't many areas of transcendence left to us now. Sports. Sex. Art.?

"You're forgetting the miseries of others," said Richard. "The languid contemplation of the miseries of others. Don't forget that."

Their destination was not the Warlock but the Oerlich. "I'm paying for all this," said Gwyn. "And I'll have to pay your guest fee. You can get the balls at least." Phil, who had done a lot of staring on their way in from the car park, now did some more staring before settling down with the newspaper. Staring, Richard decided, was what bodyguards were really good at. He bought the balls: they were Swedish, and internally pressurized, and cost a bewildering amount of money. On the way down the cold green tube to their court Gwyn came to a halt and said, "Look. I've arrived." There on the wall was a framed photograph of Gwyn in his whites (together with his semiliterate signature). Nearby there were framed photographs of a dress designer, a golfer, a boxer, and the great Buttruguena.

"How long have you been a member here? What's it cost?"