MARTIN AMIS - THE INFORMATION

Richard watched. Her pencil slid and softly scraped, then seemed to hover in thought, then softly scraped again.

"And you've been at it for how long?" she murmured to herself: good at sums. "Right. Your novels earn you about sixty pee an hour. A cleaning lady would expect to make seven or eight times that. From your novels you get a fiver a day. Or thirty quid a week. Or fifteen hundred a year. That means every time you buy a gram of coke-which is what?" He didn't know she knew about the coke. "Hardly ever." "How much is coke? Seventy? Every time you buy a gram of coke … that's more than a hundred man-hours. About six weeks' work."

While Gina gave him, in monotonous declarative sentences, a precis of their financial situation, like something offered to test his powers of mental arithmetic, Richard stared at the tabletop and thought of the first time he had seen her: behind a tabletop, counting money, in a literary setting.

"Now," she said. "When was the last time you received actual payment for your novels?"

"Eight years ago. So I give them up, right?" "Well it does look like the one to go.?

There followed a minute's silence-perhaps to mark the passing of Richard's fiction. Richard spent it exploring his own numbness, whose density impressed him. There were surf sounds in his ear. Emotion recollected in tranquillity, said Wordsworth, describing or defining the creative act. To Richard, as he wrote, it felt more like emotion invented in tranquillity. But here was emotion. In his room across the hall, Marco was pleading in his sleep. They could hear him-pleading with his nightmares.

She said, "You could review more books."

"I can't review more books." There on the table lay a slablike biography of Fanny Burney. Richard had to write two thousand words about it for a famously low-paying literary monthly, by next Friday. "I already review about a book a day. I can't review more. There aren't enough books. I do them all."

"What about all this wow-fiction you keep agreeing to write? What about that Siberia trip?"

"I'm not going."

"I don't like to say this, because at least it's regular, but you could give up The Little Magazine."

"It's only a day a week."

"But then you spend forever writing those 'middles.' For nothing."

"It's part of the job. The literary editor has always written the middles." And he thought of their names, in a wedge, like an honors board: Eric Henley, R. C. Squires, B. F. Mayhew, Roland Davenport. They all wrote the middles. Richard lull. Surely you remember R. C. Squires's controversial attack on the Movement poets? R. C. Squires was still alive, unbelievably. Richard kept seeing him, in Red Lion Street, in the callbox, staring with terrible and illegible purpose at the crowded entrance of the language school. Or flapping around on his hands and knees in the passage behind the Merry Old Soul.

"For nothing," said Gina.

"Yeah that's right."

"No one reads The Little Magazine."

"Yeah that's right."

One of Richard's recent "middles" was about writers' wives-a typology of writers' wives. The pin was a biography of Hemingway, who, Richard argued, had married one of each. (Stoutly or fogeyishly resistant to clever headlines, Richard in this case submitted to the inevitable "For

Whom the Bells Toll.") How did they go? The Muse, the Rival, the

Soulmate, the Drudge, the Judge .. . Of course there were many, many others, Peer Wives like Mary Shelley, and Victim Wives like Emily Tennyson, and Virgin Saints like Jane Carlyle, and a great multitude of Fat Nurses like Fanny Stevenson . . . What type was Demeter Barry? What type was Gina Tull? Transcendence-Supplier, Great Distractor, Mind-Emptier in the act of love. Anyway it didn't matter. Gina was deciding to absent herself from the company. She wasn't leaving Richard, not yet. But she was ceasing to be a writer's wife.

"You can't give up the Tantalus thing, which is pretty decent as well as regular. You tell me. You could give up smoking and drinking and drugs. And clothes. It's not that you spend. You don't earn."

"I can't give up novels."

"Why not?"

Because . . . because then he would be left with experience, with untranslated and unmediated experience. Because then he would be left with life.

"Because then I'd just have this." The kitchen-the blue plastic tub filled with the boys' white pants and vests, the stiff black handbag on the chair with its upturned mouth open wanting to be fed, the bowls and spoons and mats laid out on the table for the morning and the eight-pack of cereal boxes in its cellophane: all this became the figure for what he meant. "Days. Life," he added.

And this was a disastrous word to say to a woman-to women, who bear life, who bring it into the world, screaming, and so will never let it come second to anything.

Her eyes, her breasts, her throat, showing him his mistake, all became infused. "The possible alternative," said Gina, "is I go full time. Except Fridays of course." She told him what they would pay her: a chastening sum. "That'd mean you getting the twins up every morning and getting them down every night. The weekends we share. You shop. You clean. And you cook."

"I can't cook."

"I can't either … That way," she said, "you'll be getting plenty of life. And we'll see what you've got left for the other thing."

There was a third alternative, Richard reckoned. He could fuck her twice a night forever and take no more shit. And have no money. Oh sure: do it that way. He looked at her face, its flesh lightly glazed in preparation for sleep; and her throat, with its weathered complexities of raisin and rose. She was his sexual obsession. And he had married her.

"I tell you what," she said. "How close are you to finishing the one that's on the go now?"

Richard creased his face. One of the many troubles with his novels was that they didn't really get finished. They just stopped. Unfitted was already very long. "Hard to tell. Say a year.?

Her head went back. This was steep. But she took in breath and said,"Okay. You've got a year's grace. Finish that and we'll see if it makes any money. I think we can hold on. Financially I mean. I'll do what I have to do. I'll manage. You've got a year."

He nodded. He supposed it was just. He wanted to thank her. His mouth was dry.

"A year. I won't say a word."

"A year," Gina now resumed. "And I haven't said a word. Have I. I've been as good as my word. What about you?"

Nasty repetition that, he thought: word. But it remained true enough. She had kept her promise. And he had forgotten all about it. Or he'd tried. They had held on, financially, though even the most perfunctory calculation told Richard that they were falling short by two or three book reviews a week. Marco was still in his boxroom, and still remonstrating with his nightmares.

"What's your progress been? Is it finished?"

"Virtually," he said. This wasn't quite true. Untitled wasn't finished exactly, but it was certainly unbelievably long. "A week or two away."

"And what are your plans for it?"

"I was thinking," said Richard. "There are these minor earnings from my novels that we didn't include. It all adds up, you know."

"What all adds up?"

"Things like PLR." He checked. Gina was staring at him with a new order of incredulity. "Public Lending Right," he went on. "Money from libraries. It all adds up."

"I know PLR. With all the forms. How much did you get that time? The time you spent the whole weekend lying down behind the couch. What was it? Thirty-three pee?"

"Eighty-nine pee," said Richard sternly.

"…Well, that's a big help!"

There was a silence during which he steadily lowered his gaze to the floor. He thought of the time when his PLR check had burst into the three figures: #163;104.07. That was when he had two novels in print and it was still the case that nobody was sure they were shit.