MARTIN AMIS - THE INFORMATION

"One or two." Richard named the financier-Sebby.

"That one's connected," said Steve. "He's the fucking army.'"

"Yeah, but Gwyn's a moron. He'll never work anything out."

Now Steve said, "None of my business. You got your reasons. Nothing to do with me. I respect that. None of my business.?

Richard thought he saw where all these disclaimers were leading. He could open up a little now, or he could consign Steve Cousins to the merely menial.

"It's to do with your uh, literary …"

"No no." He hadn't thought of anything to say but it came out awful quick: "Son of a bitch fucked my wife."

"Piece of shit," said Scozzy.

Gal Aplanalp called.

"I'm sorry about the delay," she said. She was sitting at her desk.

"That's all right," said Richard. He, too, was sitting at his desk.

Gal always tried to be as straight as possible with her clients. She told Richard the plain truth. The weekend before last she had taken Untitled home with her, as promised. Like an old-style literary agent she had a light supper and settled down on the chaise longue, wearing a dressing gown and reading glasses. Halfway through page four, an acute migraine-and she never suffered from migraines, or even headaches- sent her crashing into the bathroom pill shelves. She still had a bruise where she'd barked her forehead against the mirror. She slept well enough that night, and got up early. On page seven the migraine returned.

"How unfortunate," said Richard.

"I'm afraid it's kind of missed its slot with me now." Gal had a seven-hundred-page family-saga novel written by a slimming expert to read and place by the end of the week. "I'm giving it to Cressida, my assistant. She's damn smart-don't worry. I'll have a report for you in the next four or five days."

Among the tacks and paper clips and unpublished novels on Richard's desk stood a jug of tapwater-tapwater boiled and then chilled (Gina showed him how). This was his new health kick: drinking water all the time, not instead of but on top of the usual quarts of coffee, the wriggling jolts of scotch, the cleansing beers. Drinking water all the time assisted him in the massive task of daily rehydration. Drinking water all the time didn't cost anything. And it didn't actually hurt.

Richard pushed the jug aside and sat there with his hand on his brow.

Midnight, and the orange van was parked on the corner of Wroxhall Parade.

13 sat at the wheel. He was alone-alone but for Giro, twitching in nightmare on his tartan rug. 13 wore his characteristically scandalized expression: evidence of yet another visit to Marylebone Magistrates' Court. They'd done him for breaching the peace. On Ladbroke Grove. On a Saturday night. And it was just a laugh: they were just having a laugh with all the milk bottles. Empty milk bottles. Could you believe it. Breaching the peace? On Ladbroke Grove? On a Saturday night? What rucking peace?

Shaking his head, 13 stared at the numbered door. Steve was within, sorting it with Darko, and with Belladonna.

The sentence, which, strangely and arrestingly, was non-value-free, said: And the good boy and the bad boy -went into the forest.

"Okay," said Richard-dressing-gowned, breakfastless: a little heap of nuclear waste. It was eight in the morning. Gina and Marius were eating their rustic cereal, in the kitchen, across the passage. Richard felt like a coal miner coming off night shift, dully gray except where he sparkled with cold motes of sweat. "Okay. Now what's the first word."

Marco addressed his frown to the page.

"Okay. What's the first letter?"

". .. A," said Marco. A short a. As in cat.

"A…?"

"Muh."

"Try again."

"… Nuh."

"Good."

". .. Buh."

"Try again."

". . . Duh."

"Good. Which spells . . .?" Richard waited. "Which spells . . .?" Richard waited. And then he stopped waiting and said, "And."

They were now staring at the fortress of word number two.

"Tuh," said Marco. Later, he said, "Huh." Later still he said, " #201;."

"Well, Marco?"

"Het," said Marco.

"Jesus," said Richard.

Actually, he was wondering how the little boy could bear being on his lap. Couldn't he hear the tuneless blues that was always playing in his father's head? As quite often happened Marco's pajamaed presence (his innocently silky writhings) had provided Richard with an erection. This used to cause him disquiet, and struck him as something he had better shut up about. But, again, he was enough of an artist to have faith in the universality of his own responses. He asked around among the dads and found that it was so. It was general-universal. It still struck him as essentially perverse. When you thought of all the other occasions which cried out for hard-ons that never came. And here you not only didn't need one. You didn't even want one.

So they somehow got through good (qood, yood, goob), and did and again, and the again, and bad (dad, dab, bab), and toiled their way (boy was all right, for some reason) past went and eventually into, and staggered towards the penultimate the. Marco stared at the the word for perhaps a minute and a half. At that point Richard got out from underneath him. That was it: you could forget forest. Forests .. . forests, which in Dante and Spenser and Virgil and Milton symbolize the temptations of life. Good boy and bad boy go there. Enchanted glades or drear woods, places of complication or places where complication falls away-but places where you will be tested. Richard wondered whether Gwyn, in the course of his experiments in childishness and childish amazement, ever read like Marco read: one letter every twenty seconds. How had Gwyn developed this habit? Perhaps it came on him automatically: say at maggot mealtimes. Or perhaps he just thought it was good for business. He did it for interviewers, who obediently and admiringly described the phenomenon. Gwyn falling silent midsentence and picking up an orange from the bowl and staring at it. Gwyn pausing in the street as he leaves the restaurant, transfixed by a toyshop window. And you especially can't do that any more, because the orange is designed by a spook in a labcoat, and the toyshop is no shrine of wonder but a synchronized thrash of tar-geters and marketers . . . Gwyn, incensingly, had gone off, still in one piece, on a ten-day promotional tour of Italy, where, he informed Richard, a relaunched Amelior was "on fire." The only real progress Richard could claim to have made was that he had successfully commissioned, received, subbed, and duly shepherded into print a favorable review of Double Dating by the Washington-based feminist critic Lucy Cabretti in The Little Magazine.

Marco slipped off his lap. and Richard tossed the kiddie book over his shoulder. For a moment his eye fell on the latest biography they'd sent at him: it was the size of a Harlem boombox. Richard rubbed his brow. The night before he had dreamed about some clubhouse in the Arctic, where women were eaten as if in a cafeteria, and where old Nazis hobnobbed with drugged monsters . . .

Heavily and dutifully, Richard moved up the stairs, to shower and dress-to put clothes on, to stand bent in the little cubicle while water fell. One glance in the mirror here, upon rising-the bruised scars beneath his eyes, his hair standing on end in terror-had caused him to scrap, or at least shelve, his immediate plan: seducing a lightly sun-kissed Demeter Barry. Had also caused him to think, to whisper: Where have I come from? Where have I been? Not in the land of sleep, not sleep as it used to be, but some other testing ground, some other forest. The forests of Comus and The Faerie Queened No. More like the forests that the wild boy must have known: the clearing, the picnic facility no sooner erected than rotten and ruined, the contemporary leavings and peelings, the rain, and all around the trees patiently dripping, in chemical lamentation. The bedcovers had as usual been pulled back, by Gina. Richard stood there naked, looking at the bared sheet, its crenellations, its damp glow. Every morning we leave more in the bed: certainty, vigor, past loves. And hair, and skin: dead cells. This ancient detritus was nonetheless one move ahead of you, making its own humorless arrangements to rejoin the cosmos.