MARTIN AMIS - THE INFORMATION

"I think I've got an agent. Gwyn's agent. Gal Aplanalp."

Gina took this in. "Her," she said. "Have you signed up?"

"Not yet. Maybe soon."

"Hey this is really going to happen you know. You don't care about money and that's a nice quality but I do and life is going to change." "I know. I know.?

"… What's it called anyway? Your new one."

"Untitled."

"When will it be?"

"No it's called Untitled."

"You mean you can't even think what to call it?"

"No. It's called Untitled."

"How can it be called Untitled?"

"It just is. Because I say so."

"Well that's a bloody stupid name for it. You know, you might be a lot happier, without them. It might help with the other thing too. It might be a big relief. Gwyn and everything, that's a whole other story." Gina sighed, with distaste. She had never liked Gwyn much even in the old days, when he was with Gilda-and they were all poor. "Demi says it's frightening the way the money comes in. And she's rich! I don't know if you still really believe in it. Your novels. Because you never … Because what you … Ah I'm sorry, Richard. I'm so sorry."

Because you never found an audience-you never found the universal or anything like it. Because what you come up with in there, in your study, is of no general interest. End of story. Yes: this is the end of your story.

"Marry your sexual obsession," Richard had once been told. By a writer. Marry your sexual obsession: the one you kept going back to, the one you never quite got to the end of: marry her. Richard was interviewing, was profiling, this writer, so it more or less followed that he was neither famous nor popular. His obscurity, in fact, was the only celebrated thing about him (let's call him Mr. X): if everything went through okay, he had a chance of becoming a monument of neglect, like a Powys. How many Powyses were there? Two? Three? Nine? Your sexual obsession, he kept saying: marry her. Not the beauty, not the brains. Mr. X dwelt in a two-up-two-down back-to-back, in Portsmouth. The stuff he wrote was hieratic and recondite, but all he could talk about was sex. And sexual obsession. There they sat, at lunchtime, in the dockside pub, over their untouched seafood platters, with Mr. X sweating into his mack. Don't marry the droll brain surgeon. Don't marry the dreaming stunner who works in famine relief. Marry the town pump. Marry the one who does it for a drag on your cigarette. Richard felt his shoulders locking. By this point he had readied himself to face a full nervous breakdown of sexual hatred-a complete unraveling, an instantaneous putrefaction of bitterness and disgust. But it never quite happened. Marry the one who made you hardest. Marry her. She'll bore you blind, but so will the brain sur- geon, so will the dreaming stunner, in time .. . Dropping the writer off after lunch in the minicab, Richard hoped for a glimpse of his wife. Hoped for a chance to wonder what she was: rocket scientist? hysterical goer? The woman staring suspiciously down the damp dark passage, her small head half lost in the sprouty collar of her housecoat, didn't look like an hysterical goer. She looked more like a rocket scientist; and one whose best work was long behind her. And another thing: whatever life choice Mr. X had gone ahead and made, Mrs. X didn't strike you as too happy about it either, contemplating her husband's return, it seemed to Richard, with infinite weariness. He was forgotten now anyway, or reforgotten, silent, out of print. He never even made it into Neglect… Some of us, most of us, all of us, are staggering through our span with half a headful of tips and pointers we've listened to (or overheard). Use Cold Water To Soak The Pot After Making Scrambled Eggs. When Filling A Hot Water Bottle, Keep The Neck Of The Hot Water Bottle At Right Angles. Unless The Kettle Boiling Be, Filling The Teapot Spoils The Tea. Starve a cold, feed a fever. Banks do most of their business after three o'clock. Richard married his sexual obsession. He just did what he did.

Except in one important respect, the love life enjoyed by Richard and Gina, over the past year, remained as rich and full as it had ever been. There was still that sense of anticipation when nightdress and pajama conjoined, last thing, and, at weekends, when they stirred, and at other stolen moments, such as they were, with two little boys in the house. Gina was a healthy young woman. Richard was in the prime of life. After nine years together, their amorous dealings were, if anything, even more inflexibly committed to variety and innovation than at any point in their past. The only real difference, I suppose you'd have to concede, was that Richard, nowadays, was impotent. Chronically and acutely impotent. Apart from that, though, things were just as they were before.

He was impotent with her every other night and, at weekends, in the mornings too-when those boys of his gave him half a chance! (The patter of tiny feet; the stubborn and inexpert worrying of the doorknob; the hoarse command from the bedroom met by puzzled whispers, puzzled withdrawal; the mind-filling silence before the sickening impact or collision-the scream, the wail.) Sometimes, when the Tulls' schedules conspired, he would be lazily impotent with her in the afternoons. Nor did the bedroom mark the boundary of their erotic play. In the last month

alone, he had been impotent with her on the stairs, on the sofa in the sitting room and on the kitchen table. Once, after a party outside Oxford, he had been impotent with her right there on the backseat of the Maestro. Two nights later they got drunk, or rather Gina got drunk, because Richard was already drunk, and on their return from Pizza Express stole into the communal garden, using their key, and Richard was impotent with her in a sylvan setting. Impotent in a sylvan setting, under some dumb blonde of a willow, with Diana above them, her face half-averted, feeling wounded or betrayed, and higher, much higher, the winking starlets of the Milky Way.

It got so bad that Richard talked-and even thought-about giving up drinking: he even talked-but didn't think-about giving up smoking. He knew, though, that his troubles were dully and intricately and altogether essentially literary, and that nothing would ease them except readers or revenge. So he didn't do anything, apart from taking up Val-ium and cocaine.

"It's hard on you. It's like an ultimatum," said Gina in the dark.

Richard said nothing.

"You're tired. And you've got a lot on your mind."

Richard said nothing.

Gwyn's dove-gray house in the innocent morning; Demi's house at dawn. And our vigil, and an even more extraordinary one, in its way. That of Steve Cousins: Barnardo boy.

Scozz seeing it not from the van but through the treated glass of his Cosworth (tinted windows, whitewalls, low racing skirt). Seeing it not as an architectural or even a real-estate phenomenon but as a patchwork of weaknesses. Bits of it seemed to flash and beep at him in outline-to flash and beep in his robot vision. Security-wise the first-floor terrace was a fucking joke. But given his choice Scozzy would probably gain entry by the front door. Using the Sli-Mo. Not that he'd be wanting to bring anything out of there except the information.

Take the opposite vantage. There are the windows to the master bedroom. The glass trembles lightly. Who can go in there-the intruder, the informer, the private dick? Richard Tull wants to go in there. Not corporeally, not in person. He wants to do to Gwyn what Gwyn has done to him. He wants to assassinate his sleep. He wants to inform the sleeping man; an I for an I.

But I'm not going in there. I'm not going in there, not yet. I'm just not going.

It was quite clear to everyone that Gwyn and Demeter Barry had the perfect marriage. You only had to look at them to see that this was a match made in heaven.