MARTIN AMIS - THE INFORMATION

The Milky Way is traveling in the general direction of Virgo at 300 kilometers per second.

Astronomically, everything is always getting further away from everything else.

It might help if we knew what we were made of, how we keep going and what we will return to.

Everything before your eyes-the paper and the ink, these words, and your eyes themselves-was made in stars: in stars that explode when they die.

More proximately we are warmed and hatched and raised by a steady-state H-bomb, our yellow dwarf: a second-generation star on the main sequence.

When we die, our bodies will eventually go back where they came from: to a dying star, our own, five billion years from now, some time around the year 5,000,001,995.

It might help if we knew all this. It might help if we felt all this.

Absolutely unquestionably, the universe is high style.

And what are we? Flat-earthers. Richard's opening move, in his plan to ruin Gwyn's life, was not calculated to be in itself decisive, or even dramatic. On the other hand it did demand from Richard a great deal of trouble and expense-and internal wear. All these phone calls and stunned crosstown journeys and talentless grapplings with brown paper and string. Whether Richard had any talent for fictional prose remained arguable, perhaps; but he was definitely no good at all with brown paper and string. Nonetheless, he was decided. He even raised his chin for a moment in simple heroism. His nostrils widened. Richard Tull had resolved to send Gwyn Barry a copy of the Sunday New York Times. With a note. And that was all.

He was quite clear about it in his own mind …

"Daddy? Are you bold?"

"I sometimes like to think so, yes, Marco."

"Will you always be bold?"

"Despite the ills that await life's balm, Marco, though made weak by time and fate, but strong in will, to strive, to seek-"

"Have you always been bold? How did you get bold?"

Richard closed his eyes. He dropped his pen on to the desktop and said, "You mean bald. Go elsewhere, Marco."

The child remained. He went on gazing at his father's hair. "Have you got male-pattern boldness?"

"I suppose so. I suppose that's the kind I've got."

"When did you start to be bold?"

"Go elsewhere, Marco. Go and play in the traffic. I'm trying to work."

He was quite clear about it in his own mind . . . Richard sat at his desk; he had just put Unfitted away for the morning, after completing an hysterically fluent passage of tautly leashed prose, and was now assembling his notes (which were widely dispersed) for a review of The Soul's Dark Cottage: A Life of Edmund Waller. Even Richard's book-reviewing career, unusually, described a tidy downward curve, like the bedside graph of an open-and-shut moribund. He had started off with fiction

and poetry; then fiction; then American fiction (his specialty and passion). Things began going wrong when they steered him on to South American fiction: an interminable succession, it seemed, of flowery thousand-pagers about sheep-dips or coconut shies. Then biographies.

Then more biographies. Like most young reviewers, Richard had come in hard. But instead of getting softer, more catholic, more forgiving (heading toward elderly impartiality and, beyond that, journey's end: a gurgling stupor of satisfaction with everything written), Richard had just got harder. There were personal reasons for this, of course, which everyone eventually sensed. As a reviewer he wrote forcefully-he had an individual voice and an individual memory. But he subscribed to the view of the Critic as Bouncer. Only geniuses were allowed in Richard's speakeasy. And the real trouble with all those novels he was sent was that they were published. And his weren't. . . Richard leaned back: he was achieving the difficult feat of taking his own pulse while continuing to bite his nails. His smaller son Marco, who had failed Gina's dawn fitness test and was taking another day off school, remained at his father's side, balancing a rubber troll or goblin on various roughly horizontal surfaces: Richard's forearm, Richard's shoulder, one or other of Richard's bald spots. And from outside through the shivery window came the sound of fiercely propelled metal as it ground against stone, shearing into the sore calcified struts and buttresses with sadistic persistence: the house, the street, the whole city, taking it deep in the root canal.

For instance, it had to be The New York Times. The Los Angeles Times was even bigger, Richard knew, but in his judgment Gwyn wasn't quite nuts enough for the Los Angeles Times. Still, he was surely nuts enough for The New York Times. Richard would have staked his sanity on it. If Gwyn wasn't nuts enough for The New York Times, then Richard was losing his grip. Now he reached for his jacket, hooked over the chair and dug out the bent checkbook on which he hoped he might have written a few words about The Soul's Dark Cottage: A Life of Edmund Waller. He had: shops his mates to avoid axe p. 536ff. The checkbook joined his other notes, loosely gathered on the heaped desk: a credit-card slip, a torn envelope, an empty matchbook. His desk was so horrendously burdened that his telephone often stopped ringing before he found it-or, quite possibly, before he even heard it.

The plan was this: Richard would send Gwyn Barry a copy of the Sunday New York Times, the whole thing, that forest-razing suitcase of smeared print, accompanied by a typed note that would read, in its entirety,

Dear Gwyn,

Something in here to interest you. The price of fame!

Yours ever, John There would of course be no indication where this interesting something might be found. Sitting back, sitting back in the alphabet soup of his study, Richard imagined Gwyn opening the package, frowning at the note, looking first, with a slight smile, at the Book Review, then, rather less equably, at the Arts and Leisure, then . . .

"Marco, what's the point of doing that?"

Either Marco didn't hear or he didn't understand. He said: "Wot?" There is of course this difficulty of rendering childish speech. But how do you get round it? Marco didn't say "What?" He said "Wot?"-definitely a humbler and shorter word, and entirely unaspirated.

"Balancing that toy on my arm," said Richard. "Why? What for?"

"Does it bolla you?"

"Yes."

"Does that bolla you?" he asked, balancing the toy on Richard's head.

"Yes."

"Does that bolla you?" he asked, balancing the toy on Richard's shoulder.

"They all bother me." Edmund Waller bothers me. "How'm I supposed to do this review?"

He wanted Marco elsewhere so that he could call Anstice and smoke a cigarette with his head out the window and generally get on with fucking Gwyn up. Edmund Waller was born in. Go, lovely Rose! Tell her, that wastes her time and me . . . Basically, now that the guilt had evaporated, the Anstice thing was just a bottomless drag. He spent all this time talking to her in case she killed herself. A consummate air-sniffer and seat-warmer (and mediocrity), Edmund. But he wanted her to kill herself. Conversely, killing yourself demanded energy, which Anstice didn't normally have. In an energetic state, she might do other things too, like ringing up Gina. A fairweather Royalist, an expedient Republican, and a mercenary bridegroom. Although he had gone to bed with Anstice, he hadn't made love to her-but she didn't seem to realize this. Waller's Plot was in itself a fiasco. Yet it provided him with the chance to betray all his. How bad would it be anyway, if Gina found out? As it happened, Richard assumed and even hoped that Gina was having an affair herself: for pressing reasons that will soon become clear. Small is the worth of beauty from the light retired. . . Writers don't lead shapely lives. Shape they give to the lives of others: accountants, maniacs. Whereas Edmund Waller. While Waller. Although. Despite the fact that. Whilst Waller . ..