MARTIN AMIS - THE INFORMATION

"I haven't got an agent," he said.

"You know, Gal's a big fan of yours."

"You mean she has pleasant memories of me? Or that she liked my stuff."

"Both. She liked your stuff."

All the reds were gone. Only the eight balls remained on the table: the black and the brown, the pink and the blue, the green and the yellow; the lone red; and of course the white. Both of them were so lousy at snooker that it would be misleading to claim that Richard was better at it than Gwyn. But he always won. In this area, as in one or two others, he understood that there was a beginning, a middle and an end. He understood that there was an endgame. And it was in the endgame that Gwyn showed his only wisps of talent: a certain Celt-Iberian canniness, a certain sideburned cunning. Careful now.

"She told me to tell you to expect her call."

"It's a pretty cheesy list though isn't it-Gal's?" said Richard, who found that he was blushing and almost fainting as he lowered his head over the drinks table: blushing bloodier than the pink, bloodier than the red. "Isn't it all rock stars and cookbooks? And how-to?"

"She's taking it upmarket. More literary. She's got quite a few novelists."

"Yeah but they're all famous for being something else. Famous mountaineers. Comedians. Newscasters." Richard nodded to himself. The newscaster, he had read, was not only famous for being a newscaster and for being a novelist. He was also famous (at present) for something else: for getting fantastically beaten up, the other night, in a mews off Kensington High Street. "And politicians," he said.

"It's the right move, I think. She'll go in a bit harder for me. Because of her list. Because I'm prestigious."

"Because you're what?" But then Richard paused and just said, "Of course you wouldn't know what prestigious means. Or meant. Deceptive. As is prestidigitation. Conjuring."

"When was the last time you saw Gal? She was a nice-looking kid but now she's … she really. . . She's really…"

Richard looked on, not at all sympathetically, as Gwyn's mind blundered about, searching for a way of saying what he wanted to say. What he wanted to say, presumably (Richard had heard this from others, and believed it), was that Gal Aplanalp was mercilessly beautiful. Gwyn stood there with his concessionary shrugs and frowns, beset by reasons for not saying what he wanted to say. Which he couldn't do without seeming invidious or impolitic, disrespectful both to Gal and to those less well favored. And so on.

"I hear she's very lucky in her looks," Richard said. "Wait a minute. You're famous for being something else too."

"Am I? What?"

"Happily married. Uxorious."

"Oh that."

Gwyn sneaked home on the black, but it was a dead frame anyway, and Richard didn't hate that too much, having prevailed 3-1. On their way out, moving side by side down the passage with their slender cue cases, like musicians or executioners, they passed an exercise room where, by the way, Steve Cousins had given karate lessons for six months, six years ago, to the juveniles of West Ten. The arrangement ended because all the parents complained and because Steve couldn't bring himself to punctuate his discourse with enough religious shit about restraint and self-control and the empty hand.

"Have you ever come across a girl called Belladonna?"

"I don't think so," said Gwyn. "And I think I'd remember, with that name."

"Still. People are always changing their names, aren't they. These days."

They parted on Ladbroke Grove beneath the elevated underground: that patch of London owned by bums and drunks, exemplary in its way-the model anti-city; here the pavement, even the road, wore a coat of damp beer (in various manifestations) which sucked on your shoes as you hastened past. Crouching men with upturned fucked-up faces … It made Richard think of Pandaemonium and the convocation of rebel angels-hurled like lightning headlong over the crystal battlements of heaven, falling and falling into penal fire and the deep world of darkness. Then their defiant council. He liked Moloc best: My sentence is for open war. But he felt Beelzebub was more on the money: contrivance, slow revenge, seduction-the undermining of innocence and Eden.

My sentence is for open war . . . That sentence was awfully good. When writers hate, it all comes down to something very simple. His word against mine.

This whole thing is a crisis. The whole mess is a crisis of the middle years.

Every father knows the loathed park and playground in the unmoving air of Sunday morning (every mother knows it Friday evening, Tuesday afternoon-every other time), the slides and seesaws and climbing-frames like a pictogram of inanity. The fathers on the edges of benches, or strolling, or bending and peering: this is their watch. They exchange slow nods of resignation and hear the wall of childish sound from which no sense is detachable: its twangs and pops and whipcracks.

I was there in the fog. The fog was sorry about it-the fog was wretched about the whole thing. Like the fathers the fog had nowhere else to go. Ancient and stupid, but equipped with new chemical elements and contributions, the fog loomed and idled, hoping it wasn't in the way.

Here I found a reversal of the more familiar protocol: no adult was allowed into the playground unless accompanied by a child. The playground was therefore maniac-free, murderer-free. You were not a murderer. Your child was the living guarantee that you were not a murderer.

A little boy approached me-not one of my own. And he made a sign. Keeping a humorous distance, he made a sign: the two forefingers in the shape of a T. Deaf-and-dumb kid, I thought, and felt my face widen with the unsurprised tolerance I automatically wanted it to have. My look was so tolerant it didn't even look tolerant: just open. T. Wasn't that deaf-and-dumb for the'? Wait. He was doing another one now, and another. Wasn't the circle, the O, deaf-and-dumb for nothing? I found that my head was intensely inclined toward him, that I was suddenly braced for revelation, frowning, essaying, as if the boy could tell me something I really might need to know.

Because I know so little. Because I need information from any source.

"Tom," he said. "It's my name."

And I made the Sips-the M, the A-with my strange and" twisted fingers, thinking: how can I ever play the omniscient, the all-knowing, when I don't know anything? When I can't read childish capitals in the apologetic fog.

I wrote those words five years ago, when I was Richard's age. Even then I knew that Richard didn't look as bad as he thought he looked. Not yet. If he did, then someone, surely, a woman or a child-Gina, Demi, Anstice, Lizzete, Marius, Marco-would take his hand and lead him to somewhere nice and soft and white, kindly whispering to his gasps for breath. Intimations of monstrousness are common, are perhaps universal, in early middle age. But when Richard looked in the mirror he was looking for something that was no longer there.

It might help if we knew where we lived. Each of us, after all, has the same address. Every child has memorized it. It goes something like.

This or That Number, This or That Street, This or That Conurbation, This or That County, This or That Country, This or That Continent, This or That Hemisphere, The Earth, The Superior Planets, The Solar System, Nr. Alpha Centauri, The Orion Spur, The Milky Way, The Local Group, The Local Cluster, The Local Supercluster, The Universe,

This Universe. The One Containing: The Local Supercluster, The Local Cluster, And So On. All the Way Back To: This or That Street, And This or That Number.

It might help if we knew where we were going, and how fast.

The Earth revolves at half a kilometer per second. The Earth orbits the Sun at thirty kilometers per second. The Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way at 300 kilometers per second.