MARTIN AMIS - THE INFORMATION

"Go on then. When's it start?"

They went with the drinks to their wives. A gin-and-tonic for Gina. A mineral water for Demi. She said that alcohol disagreed with her: being, like a mob. But the Coronet was quarter full, loosely dotted with heads on necks on shoulders, and the cinematography somber (bombed-out basements, moonless campsites), so that Richard kept thinking that everyone around him was black, or in negative; after a while he imagined that all the people in front were sitting facing him but with their heads turned half-circle like Caribbean demons; a little later it seemed to him that the backs of their heads were really their faces, hidden by hair.

Forty minutes in, and it happened. Richard experienced the complicated pleasure of standing up to allow Gwyn passage-famous Gwyn, uxorious Gwyn, his torso bent over his famously weak bladder. Down the aisle he trudged, turning right beneath the stage and following his shadow across a screen of green: curving field, rank of trees, evening sky. He went through the door marked EXIT and GENTS. No one followed. An old man followed. Richard stopped watching. He watched the film. He watched a five-minute scene about hot-pot preparation (a crofter's wife showing Audra Christenberry how you did it) with no interest whatever. But his body swarmed with affect, as if he was watching something else: the climax of a deathless tingler- Strangers on a Train, Vertigo, Psycho.

Time passed. There was a transitory period during which, no doubt, the women subliminally and approvingly assumed that Gwyn had set himself the stark and universal challenge of defecation. Riding on with this assumption-as it were in tandem with Demi and Gina-Richard imagined Gwyn's quest for full voidance steadily growing in complication and dolor; after fifteen minutes its dimensions approached the Augean. Next came an interlude of localized travail: Richard, having heartily matched Gwyn pint for pint, was in need of a bathroom himself. The need was sharp, sour-as sharp and sour as his curiosity.

"Excuse me," he said, and got to his feet.

It was one of those cinema toilets whose promise and scent lead you up ramps and stairways which then double back and deepen like the chutes of an ancient airport, or a city of myth-the twisted construct of embittered immortals. Richard walked on into the bowels of the building, past chained fire exits and beneath seeping ceilings, until the penultimate door, with a soft flap, like an internal valve, seemed to admit him and exclude all else, and there was the marked entrance-GENTS-at the bottom of the bending steps . .. He paused, listening. Only the eternal

toilet trickle, sharp and sour, like the rumors of its odors. Slowly he

leaned on the door. The room let him in and then closed again.

His first thought was that he, Richard, had disappeared. He faced an arrangement of toilet furniture (double rows of basins, double roller- Gwyn said, "Have you ever seen anything more beautiful?"

"Than what?"

"My lady…"

"Don't," said Demi.

"Ah, she's embarrassed! I love it when she blushes like that. Mmmm." He hummed it, thoughtfully. "Mmm. Let's not go to the pictures. Let's go home and make love. We go home. You go home. And make love."

Richard said, "It does you good-I already got the tickets-does you good every once in a while to come down from the palace and mingle with your people. As one of them. In disguise." This sounded like, and was, a routinely bitter reference to Gwyn's new outfit, which he had already itemized to his listeners: russety suede jacket (Milan), brown Borsalino (Florence), dove-gray brogues (Siena). "Get that down you. One more pint. Quick."

"I've hardly got going on this."

"Another half. Get it down you."

"I'll spend the whole film in the lav."

Yes. You might very well do that, thought Richard. As he helped Gina with her coat she whispered in his ear: "I hate him." And Richard frowned, and nodded and felt close to vindication . . .

During the first half hour in the dark, he found his mind very difficult to control. It didn't matter what the film was-who directed it, whether it was in Japanese or black and white. This had mattered earlier. The film needed to be the kind of film that Gwyn, ever obedient, if you remember, to the wanders and gambols of his maggot, was currently saying he liked. And it really was Gwyn's kind of thing: innocent, rural, questing. A sensitive historical piece about a group of intelligent and long-winded adolescents shifted out of London to Cumbria during the Blitz-it was almost a cinematic prequel to Amelior. Richard, if he had been watching it, would have found it excruciating. But he wasn't watching it. He wouldn't have been watching it even if it was the kind of film he liked: a billion-dollar bloodbath. He wasn't watching it. Seated between the two novelists, and without looking down ever, childishly, the women shared their popcorn.

Lone male figures seated in movie theaters have about them, Richard thought, a madman or mongoloid intensity of privacy. I mean what are they? Frowning cineasts? Tramps? Movie theaters were surely much too expensive, now, for tramps to come and stink up. Richard knew that when he was a tramp there would be a lot of things he needed a lot more than stinking up a movie theater. In a full house the identity of the audience would have undergone gravitational collapse, and become one It was Sunday and the boys boldly roamed the flat. Marius happened to be passing. He entered the room and came up close and carefully peered at his father's face.

"Ouch," he said.

"Yeah yeah."

Richard went next door and sat at the kitchen table with a half-thawed porkchop pressed to his right eye. By crossing this small distance he passed from the monitorship of Marius to that of Marco. Through two doorways and over the width of the thin passage Marco watched his father sitting there, in shirtsleeves and plum bow tie, but still wearing his fuzzy checked slippers. As so often Marco wanted to ask, in pleading wonderment, why Richard's slippers, unlike his own, spurned the opportunity of sporting an attractive likeness of some kiddie-book character or TV superhero-or just an animal. Nor was Daddy taking the obvious and rewarding course of reading the back of the cereal packet .. . Ember-lidded, his hair sparsely stirring and twitching in the cold breeze from the open window, Richard sat there in full realism: healing himself. But to Marco (gazing now, if you remember, with his one good eye) Richard seemed to resemble a figure in a cartoon: he had about him the faint deep buzz of electricity. If he walked off a ledge or a cliff he could get back again so long as he turned promptly and whirled his legs; if someone hit him on the head with a hammer he would grow a pointy red bump but it would soon go down again. Marco was of course wrong about all this: in both of his scenarios Daddy would have died instantly of shock. He was right, though, about the electricity. The time Richard struck Marco across the head with the flat of his hand, the time when it all started to happen-when Gwyn's book danced on the best-seller list (his career-speed reaching escape velocity), and Richard danced, and jolted-it was as if an electric cable ran from Holland Park to Calchalk Street, bringing electric pain from one man to the other.

Illness, summer days spent at home, younger-brotherdom and a consciousness that just by being who he was he caused anxiety and exasperation-and desperate fatigue-in his parents (he understood, even when times were very bad, that it was not him they hated but the things inside that made him cough and smolder and effloresce, and cry at night after dreams had left him inconsolable; he -was inconsolable; he could not be consoled): all this had made Marco more vigilant, more sensibly watchful, than a six-year-old would normally have need or reason to be. Adults