MARTIN AMIS - THE INFORMATION

"This very morning I delivered the new one. Breaking a long silence, as they say."

"Yeah? What's it called?"

Richard readied himself. "Untitled."

"Nice. Here's to it. Cheers."

"Cheers. All this with Demi." He was thinking: Demi doesn't drink. He was thinking of Demi at dinner, covering her empty wineglass with her hand. "That's all over now. I mean look. There she is. Happily married."

"My arse. Public relations that is. Don't want to believe everything you see on TV"

"How do you know all this?"

"You remember a Mrs. Shields? Cooks for them. Or did."

"Yeah," said Richard, with slow emphasis but without commitment. "That's my brother's mum." "… Your mum."

"Half brother."

"Same dad," said Richard, who unfortunately chose this moment to look at his watch. If he had gone on looking across the table he would have known for sure that the young man didn't have a half brother. Or a mum. Or a dad.

"She said she'd never seen a newlywed cry so much."

"And why would that be?"

"She wants kids: Catholic. And he won't have them."

Richard sipped his Rattlesnake with some wariness. He was wondering how good at walking he was going to turn out to be, when the time came. There was still a pretty good guy in here, he reckoned. But his voice was slipping from baritone to bass; and he knew the signs. He said,

"What do you do?"

"You've forgotten my name, haven't you? You've forgotten it."

"Yes. Come to think of it. I've completely forgotten it."

Again the hand was flexed out towards him, tense, vertical-the shot card.

"Steve Cousins. What do I do? Well I could say 'this and that.' As some do. 'Me? Ah you know. This and that.' You know. 'Bit of this. Bit of that.' Thing is I'm in a more fluid thing now. I don't need to interact now, financially. Semiretired if you like. My main activities now are what you'd call recreational."

For a moment they studied each other: quid pro quo. To Richard (who was "pixelated," and thoroughly, in the old sense), Steve looked like a white-and-gray chessboard: like a forensic suspect on TV, his face smeared into squares. To Steve (who was Sunday-best sober, as always), Richard looked like an artistic two-dimensionalization of himself, hollow, wavery, approximate and rendered with minimum talent: the work of a court portraitist. Richard was a witness. Richard was a character witness.

"So?" said Richard. He sipped and waited.

And Scozzy shrugged and said, "I fuck people up."

Richard turned in his seat. He felt that this called for another Rattlesnake.

The Little Magazine now lived in Soho, where it had only recently arrived and would not long remain. The Little Magazine had seen better days. The offices of The Little Magazine were little offices, and the rent was overdue.

The Little Magazine was born and raised in a five-story Georgian town house next to the Soane Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields (1935-1961). Dusty decanters, hammocklike sofas, broad dining tables strewn with books and learned journals: here a handsome philanderer in canvas trousers bashing out an attack on Heinrich Schliemann ("The Iliad as war reportage? The Odyssey as ordnance survey cum captain's log? Balderdash!"); there a trembling scholar with his eleven thousand words on Housman's prosody ("and the triumphant rehabilitation of the trochee"). From the swards of Lincoln's Inn The Little Magazine -increasingly nomadic and downwardly mobile-had made its way to Fenchurch Street, to Holborn, to Pimlico, to Islington, to King's Cross (1961-1979). It slept in attics, in spare rooms, it dossed down on the floors of friends; it was always seeking cheaper lodgings. There used to be something reassuringly Edwardian, something defiantly scapegrace, in these compulsive changes of address (1979-1983). No longer.

The Little Magazine, for many years now, had lurked and lurched across town with the ruddily averted face of bum or bag lady. Evicted often and forcibly from this or that blighted flatlet, it sometimes lingered in the dark behind the beaten door like a reeking squatter in his vest. The money was running out. The money was always running out. Its identity-the only thing it had plenty of-was patrician; its owner and editor, despite the desperate squalor of his surroundings, always wore a monocle and took frequent pinches of snuff. Prodigiously inefficient and self-pitying, The Little Magazine drained money from anyone who went anywhere near it. Push your way past its hardboard door, in your silk hat and cashmere overcoat, and after a couple of weeks you too would be sleeping rough. On the other hand The Little Magazine really did stand for something. It really did stand for something, in this briskly materialistic age. It stood for not paying people. And when it did pay people, it paid them little and it paid them late. Printers, landlords, tax-men, milkmen, contributors, staff: it paid them next to nothing and always at the very end of the eleventh hour. No one knew what happened to the "contributions"-the minor loans, the royal ransoms-which The Little Magazine impartially processed: the dole-checks and dowries, the nest-eggs, the five-generation brewing fortunes. Some magazines were success stories, but this magazine was a sob story: even Richard Tull, after a year of unremunerated labor in its offices, found himself writing out a check for a thousand pounds, made payable to the monocled thren-odist in the editor's chair … Richard edited the back half. He often edited the front half too. Every other Monday he went in and did the books. Every other Friday he went in and did the arts. All the rest of the time, it seemed, he spent writing the "middles"-unpaid, of course, and also unsigned, although "everybody" (in fact a select company) was supposed to know he had written them.

Today was Friday. Here came Richard. Umbrella, bow tie, portly biography wedged into the armpit, cigarette. He paused, on Frith Street, as he approached the triptych of doorways which The Little Magazine shared with a travel agent and a shop that sold clothes to the very tall and the very fat-he paused, and looked down. He looked down because the tramp he was stepping over (who intently ate dog food from the can with a plastic spoon) bore a close resemblance to his opera critic. So close that Richard even said, "Hugo?" But the tramp wasn't Hugo. Or Hugo wasn't the tramp. Not yet: not this week. Richard went inside and was relieved to see Hugo lying facedown on the stairs to the first-floor office. He stepped over Hugo and paused again in a marveling attempt to identify the source of the seal-house or dolphinarium sound effects (the hooting and squealing, the egregious belly-flops) which issued from the half-landing toilet. It was his ballet critic: Cosmo. Then he entered the literary department. His secretary came forward and helped him off with his mack.

"Thank you. Well, Anstice?"

Anstice, with her head dipped, told him what he needed to be told. He didn't need to be told about the opera critic or the ballet critic-or the radio critic, who stood nearby with his head out the window, rubbing his eyes and panting rhythmically, or the art critic who sat at the books table weeping into his drenched hands. Richard asked about the film critic, who, very ominously, had slipped out some hours ago for a packet of cigarettes. But he was pleased to hear that the theater critic, who was writing the lead review that fortnight, was emplaced in his usual nook farther up the stairs. Very shortly Richard went to see how he was doing. There Bruno sat at his little table, his bearded face immersed, as usual, in his typewriter keys. Richard reached out for a firm handful of his crackling hair, and tugged: thus he saw that Bruno, before losing consciousness, had very nearly completed the first word of his piece. What he had written, so far, was "Chehko." And Richard happened to know that Bruno's subject that fortnight was a new production of The Three Sisters. He regained the literary department in time to see the film critic mount the stairs in such a fury of dissimulated torpor that he would surely have hurled himself into the far wall beyond Anstice's desk. But the kneeling figure of the ballet critic was there to check his stride. Richard stepped over them and went to the editor's office on the floor above, which he always hid in when the editor wasn't hiding in it.