MARTIN AMIS - THE INFORMATION

"Attractive?"

"Extraordinary mouth. She wants to ask you a question."

"What's my favorite color?"

"No. What's your favorite."

Richard then found himself giving Gwyn a gavel-to-gavel account of his experience with Belladonna. As he did so he thought: what was I playing at in there? Belladonna was barely seventeen, and out of her mind. Common sense demanded that he should have made her take her clothes off, at least, and do a little dance. Ever since that crepuscular encounter Richard had been adding to the large number of outrageous novelties that were, he discovered (now he came to think about it), his favorite. There was one favorite in particular: the kind of sexual intercourse that involved not an exchange of bodily fluids so much as a full transfer.

"Well," said Gwyn. "Send her over."

"What is your favorite??

"No, no. I just want to fill out the picture. Why knock yourself out for a hamburger when your wife serves Chateaubriand every night."

Yes, thought Richard, who had heard this line before: but a hamburger is sometimes just what you fancy. And do you really want chateaubriand every night?

"I would never-I mean, what I have with my lady is just…" Gwyn fell silent. The maggot kicked in for a while, as he shook his head with his eyes closed and then nodded his head with his eyes open. "We were making love this afternoon. No. It must have been last night. No. It was yesterday afternoon. Or this morning. Anyway. That's not important. We were making love and I was kidding her about one of her West Indian lovers. And she looked up at me and said, 'Darling. Believe-' Ah. Here she is!"

He broke off and greeted his wife as if-as if what? As if this was 1945, and he hadn't seen her since 1939. When that was over Demi regained her balance and stood there, with a change of clothes in her shopping bag, smiling weakly at Richard, who moved forward to kiss her, in his turn.

Gwyn said, "When are you two going to get together? For your in-depth chat about yours truly. It's the least I can do to fix you two up. In exchange for the 'sexy young fan' that Richard is bringing over for me. Come on, Demi-get up those stairs. We don't want any extra inches, do we love."

When Demi had gone on up for her class Gwyn spent the last few minutes filling Richard in on his European deals for Amelior Regained. While doing this he used several slang synonyms for the denomination of one thousand. Richard had noticed that as soon as any novelist clawed his way past three figures he immediately started trying out the word grand. He himself would never do this. He would never do this, even if he got the chance. It was a disgraceful capitulation to the here and now-to the secular, to the mortal. Why would you want to sound like a tycoon or a gangster? Whatever you were going to get, you weren't going to get it in your time. That was the gamble. That was the shot… Anyway, and more locally, Richard was feeling so poor these days that he switched off his windscreen wipers every time he drove under a bridge.

"So I said, 'Take the fifteen large from the Portuguese but subtract the dime on the audio deal. What's a K?' I said it," said Gwyn, steadying himself, "I said it just to get Gal out of my hair."

During the last couple of minutes of their wait, the maggot got itself stuck again, or ravenously burst into a whole new chamber, condemning Gwyn, in any case, to a series of imperious scowls and glares …

They went on up. Richard won 3-2 on the final black. His concentration was poor.

There are other ways of doing it, the young man had said. Botulism - in his sandwich. Or send a woman at him. Like an antibody. Work on him psychologically. Fear. Doesn't have to be straight physical damage.

Still, there's something about straight physical damage . . .

Same for everybody. Unlike the other stuff. It's simple.

Richard lay, with Marco, on the balding but still conspicuously elegant chaise longue; the child's cheek rested on his reverberating chest as he read aloud from the pages of The Jungle Book; he read uncommonly well… Damage is simple. As he read, Richard was discovering, rather to his surprise, just how much he admired simplicity. Not simplicity in fictional prose-but elsewhere. That which is universal is often simple. Scientific beauty (and beauty, here, was a sound indicator of truth) was often simple. He didn't want to hear any brusque or unfeeling remarks about simplicity.

So, talking hypothetically, Richard had said, if I wanted someone fucked up …

And the wild boy had said, You'd come to me.

He read on: the bit about Shere Khan's imminent approach and the wolfs affecting admonitions. He read on, until he noticed that Marco's immobility had long passed beyond raptness, noticed, too, the broad patch of drool on his shirt. Marco was asleep. Groaning at the use of many strange muscles, Richard slid out from underneath him and then stared down at his sleeping face: open-mouthed, sweat-slicked-the face of a desperate little doggy. A domestic doggy, one accustomed to being at home. Prodded awake, Marco mumbled of orangutans . .. Orangutan meant wild man. Mowgli was a wild boy, raised by wolves. Even Marco, to his pain, dreamed wildly, and went in his sleep to where the wild things were.

Another day. Another day off school. Having clothed him so heavily that the child could hardly move, let alone walk (he looked like a sports logo: a racetrack blimp), Richard took Marco to Dogshit, for some air. The green world, in autumn, in fall. So the wild boy, the young man, was the green man: in modern dress. You'd come to me. That was really the high point of the evening. Thereafter Richard had to sit there listening to literary criticism: Steve Cousins's assessment of Amelior.

Marco took his hand. As they walked, under a midterm daytime moon, like a mask flattened at the brow and sharpened at the chin, like a shield raised against arrows, Richard was remembering, how, in the Canal Creperie, between Rattlesnakes, he had reached for his food punnet and felt the lateness of the hour when the nacho clung to its sauce like a stirring-stick left too long in the paint, and the young man had said, "It's a sham, it's a sham. Sweetness and light? Out there? Jesus. Where's my violin. I know the wilds. I ran wild, mate. For years. Just me. Out there. For years." Steve Cousins: foundling of a new-age community? Or a borstal boy on the lam? It didn't become clear. What became clear was that Steve Cousins had read The Wild Boy of Aveyron (so indeed had Richard), and reread it, and misread it; and that he saw himself, somehow, as a contemporary update of that frazzled and swarthy mute-two centuries on. Richard sighed. He sighed then and he sighed now, with Marco's hand in his. Still, with his own confusions, Richard could certainly imagine disliking a book so much that you decided to do something, you decided to sort this shit out, by banning it or burning it or by getting hold of its author and beating him up. Not so strange, in a world where novelists needed bodyguards, hideouts, freedom railways. "When you feel you're ready," the young man said, out on the street, "activate me."

"Look!" said Marco.

Perhaps the urban pastoral was all left field. There was no right field. And now came a moment when London seemed to configure itself for the observing eye, and grossly, like a demonstration. Richard and his son were passing the toilets; again, one of its two pathways was cordoned off by orange crime-scene tape. How playfully the tape wriggled in the breeze: Marco yearned out towards it, the kiddie crime-scene tape! In attendance stood two police officers, protecting and preserving their crime scene. Richard moved through the loose talk of the loose clump of mums and heard their choric song: a little girl, this time; in the summer it had been a little boy, and the crime-scene tape had played on the other path. Heading west now, towards the exit, father and child passed a benchful of mid-teens snorting and giggling to something pornographic on their boombox. Not just a hot lyric either, but straight audio Adult: a man-woman duet, snarling-carnal. While snorting and giggling, one pale youth was also managing to taunt his dog and eat crisps, all at the same time. Congratulations: here was the culture, and he was living it, to the full. Ten feet away a boy and girl dressed in black were standing in a formal embrace like arrested dancers on the green floor. Richard recognized them, with a give in the back of the knees, as he ducked on by.