And Demeter was duly pressed back into her seat as Crash's slablike trainer hit the floor.

Twenty minutes later the Metro stood double-parked on the All Saints Road, parallel with Portobello, before the hulk of the old Adonis. Crash was explaining that the techniques he had just demonstrated, and other mysteries to which he might soon introduce her, lay in the realm of advanced motoring; of such skills, Crash gently hinted, Demi could only dream of one day becoming mistress.

"But the same principle always apply. You show who own the road."

With a nod or two and a quiet clearing of the throat Crash fell into a high-minded silence. His thoughts lay, perhaps, in that land where advanced motorists, with many a veer and screech and pile-up, deployed their expertise. Or maybe he was pondering his very recent misadventure: the smudged white van, it had transpired at the next traffic lights, contained three uniformed policemen.

"Probably get off," mused Crash, who ought to know, "with a DWD."

"I'm sorry?"

"Driving Without Due."

"Sorry?" said Demi. And she sounded it: sorry she asked.

"Driving Without Due Care and Attention," Crash elaborated. "But you weren't. I'll be your witness. You were driving with incredible care. Everything you did was—”

 

Crash waved a great hand: it was not given to all, this grasp of the higher motoring mysteries. It was definitely not given to the police ... His devout but wounded gaze turned to the fagade of the old Adonis. The All Saints Road, with its new poster galleries and tapas bars, had changed dramatically even in Crash's adult lifetime. But not so long ago (Crash nodded to himself) the old Adonis had loomed over perhaps the busiest and certainly the noisiest drug corner in West London: "a symbolic location," to quote Police Review. It was a drive-by, All Saints and Lancaster: the cars came and slowed, all night, and the shaved black heads bobbed up to the unwinding windows. The Adonis, the old super-pub with its sticky chandeliers and sodden carpet, its contrapuntal rock videos and the thick bank of dole-quaffing fruit machines, was the natural fulcrum of the play. And there you found the reverse apartheid of the drug economy, with the whites, in their frothing melee of malt beer, keeping the given distance from the sober but hot-faced brothers, who tended their Lucozades and Ribenas on the streetside bar. The Adonis. Its colonial symmetry and gaiety—where were they now? Effaced, abashed, behind planks and mesh wire. But if you (Crash grunted as he eased his neck round further), but if you... that bit there. A low door, to the side and down a step or two, and the guy within, watching and glinting. If you listened you could faintly hear the modest monotony of the music and—yeah—the sound of glasses clashing or cracking. So: the old Adonis refuse to die. It had found, in the eaves and runnels, a diminished and secondary existence: but continuation, all the same. Demi, who was watching Crash, saw a look of pleased indulgence show in his eyes. She didn't know, either, about the deep association between Adonis and rebirth, of his shared identity with Orpheus, and with Christ, who represented a power that could bring the dead souls back, as Orpheus had failed to do.

"Bastards," said Demi.

Crash smiled. She meant the police. "You don't want to go in there," he said.

"The Adonis?"

"That a bad pub."

He went on smiling; there was even a quiet complicit gurgle somewhere in the back of his throat. The light was failing but here were the bleach and ivory of his teeth. She laughed musically and said,

"I know all about the Adonis."

"You never!"

So. Then it comes out. Crash was mainly relieved, but he also felt promoted, and flattered, of course, in many tender points of head and heart. Up until now, with Demi, he could think of no investigative move to make, other than sexual harassment. Where you would find out something, whatever the downside: where you would get information. And he just couldn't do that. He just couldn't do that. Now, though, before he put the Metro into gear, he leaned over and into the costly universe of her blondness and Englishness and kissed the side of her pale mouth. No, this was all right. This was calm. This was good.

Later, back at his flat in Keith Grove, down Shepherd's Bush way, after the gym and his big debrief with fucking Adolf, Crash reclined on his futon in thong underpants with his hands clasped behind his head. Yat. On the raised screen: the football match he'd taped. He watched its progress with full terror and pity, and with extreme fluctuations of blink rate, reserving a specialist's compassion for the fates of both goalkeepers, for it was in this position that he himself turned out, twice a week, for the church and for the pub. "Early ball!" said Crash. "Ah, unlucky." The way her lips gave just enough to be more than very polite. No tongues or whatever. "Keeper's! Played, keeper." Would be treating her with respect, same as before. "Turn! Shielded." But that little suggestion of give: it made its own suggestion. Telling him something he wouldn't ever tell Scozz. "Man on! Good release." That here was another woman—oh, Jesus, there were so many—who was loved maybe. "Header. Shot! Saved, keeper." But not enough or not in the right way. "First time! Yes! Finishl"

The match ended with the right result, but Crash was feeling right no longer: upset in himself. Slowly and angrily he donned his black track suit and jogged down to Pressures. It was called Thresher's, but Crash called it Pressures. On the way back up Keith Grove he realized what it was: him, in the fruit-juice bar, saying to Scozzy, and laughing: "Oh yeah. She's definitely Experienced." 13: that bad kid.

He closed the door of his flat behind him and opened the bottle of scotch and threw away the top. He didn't give a fuck.

Before he delivered it, but after he had wrapped it, Richard was struck by an unpleasant thought: what if there was something to interest Gwyn Barry in this particular issue of the Sunday Los Angeles Times'? An eight-page symposium on his work, for example. Or a whole Gwyn Barry Section. As in the UK, Amelior had first been a flop, then a sleeper, and finally a smash in the United States. Brought to Richard's attention not by Gwyn but by a patriotic item in a London newspaper, this fact inflicted a wound that still out-throbbed all others: out-throbbed the gouges and gashes visited on him by the book's apparent popularity everywhere else on earth, which he got to hear about piecemeal, from Gwyn's offhand grumbles: this importunate Argentinian journalist or camera crew, that interminable questionnaire from Taiwan. But America. Come ob ... Richard lit a cigarette. Could it be that Gwyn had stumbled on the universal, that voice which speaks to and for the human soul? No. Gwyn had stumbled on the LCD.

Now Marco entered the room. As he faithfully took up position at his father's side, Richard dragged on his cigarette and then flicked it out of the window. "I like Daddy," sang Marco, his voice discreetly lowered, "he lives with me ..." Ever since that day when Richard hit Marco across the head because Amelior had entered the best-seller list at number nine (and that was just the beginning: in comparison, the chart-busters of Francophile fatsoes, of gimp cosmologists, it seemed to Richard, came and went like mayflies), the child had fallen in love with his father, helplessly, as if, that day, instead of hitting Marco across the ear Richard had poured something into it. "I love you," the child often said. There was also this song Marco had made up, remarkable, really, for how little information it got across (and for its dud rime riche):

I like Daddy. He lives with me. I like him. And he likes me.

Though perhaps, under the new demographics, this was all stunning news. In the cities of England the children were singing:

I don't like Daddy.

He doesn't live with me.

I don't like him.

And he doesn't like me.

Technically, too, Marco's song or poem would certainly be deemed to cut the mustard at the Tantalus Press, where Richard had spent a sorrowful afternoon. This song made up by Marco: his father had been very pleased to hear it, on the whole, the first couple of hundred times. Gina sang no such song. .. Richard didn't like to think that Marco's marathon display of emotion might have fear as its spur. He didn't like to think that Marco knew his father was losing his mind and was trying, through his presence and example, to help him tether it. He had apologized, for the blow, many times. The only thing Marco ever said in reply was that we all had our bad days.

 

Richard was having a relatively good day. He had called the offices of Gal Aplanalp and Gal Aplanalp had called him back within minutes— from the airplane that was taking her to Los Angeles. She was returning, however, frivolously soon. Or so it seemed to Richard. His passion was the American novel. He had never been to America. Which about summed him up. Probably as a result of his conversation with Gal, Unfitted was making a great leap forward. It had what its two immediate predecessors had not had: the sure prospect of a reader. Gina didn't read him. He didn't expect her to: fanatically difficult modern prose wasn't her thing. Even when she tried to read his published novels she always said that his stuff gave her a headache.

"Sling your ... Get your ... Bung your finger in there. Your thumb. Now keep it there while I make the knot but take it out when I ... Good."

"Helping Daddy, in whatever he does. Each day."

He laughed—a quieter version of his trapped, guttural, lockjawed laugh. "Go somewhere else now," he said. "Find Marius. I'll give you both a quid if you do."

It was seven o'clock in the evening. A space on his desk had not been cleared for the package containing the Los Angeles Times, but there it was anyway, reasonably symmetrical, massive, anomalous, like a UFO on a slum rooftop. Richard weakly supposed that he had better glance through its contents, prior to delivery. It would demand incredible deftness, true, but if he could urge the thing out while preserving at least the general shape of the wrapping . . . He picked at the master-knot (so recently and securely fastened, over Marco's crimson thumbtip); he worried the folds and flaps of the creased brown paper: and in the end he just wrenched it all apart. The boys in the next room—they heard his savage cries but hardly registered them, so familiar was their timbre. Perhaps Daddy had misplaced his pencil sharpener, or dropped a paper clip? Because Richard's relationship with the physical world of things, always very poor, had deteriorated sharply. Christ, the dumb insolence of inanimate objects! He could never understand what was in it for inanimate objects, behaving as they did. What was in it for the doorknob that hooked your jacket pocket as you passed? What was in it for the jacket pocket?

With care and dread, Richard inspected Book World (all the reviews, plus Briefly Noted, We're Talking About..., All Booked Up and Information Please), Arts and Entertainments (in case something of Gwyn's had been harrowingly translated to screen or stage), the main Magazine (including Fresh Faces and Bedside Reading) and the Week in Review (the Gwyn Barry phenomenon). In a more relaxed spirit he thoroughly skimmed the Style Section, the Update Section, the Flair Section, the Briefing Section, the Poise Section, the Now Section and the You Section. Next, feeling laughably rigorous and vastly vindicated, he checked the Op-Ed page of the News (I) section: multiculturalism? the redefined syllabus? whither publishing? The Business Section, the Personals Section and the Appointments Section: none detained him long. The Lawnmower pullout and the Curtain Rail supplement—these he scathingly ignored.

At midnight Richard was coming to the conclusion that the last five hours had been divertingly and rewardingly spent. He didn't doubt that Gwyn was nuts enough to read the whole thing at least twice, maybe three times, maybe four—maybe more. Maybe Gwyn would just go on reading it forever. Richard imagined his friend, a few years from now, mumbling his way through the recipes and the crossword clues and the golf results—his unwashed clothes, his mugs of instant coffee. There he was, rubbing his eyes as he reached yet again for the Deckchair Section ... And here was another thing: if Gwyn Barry was such a big cheese, you wouldn't know it from the Sunday Los Angeles Times.

Using a kilometer of string and about four rolls of cellotape, Richard bandaged his package together. It was ready to go. Over a cognac he began to contemplate the fateful, the exalted challenge of delivery.

Every other day on the cover of my newspaper there is a photograph of a murdered child.

Murdered by a pale loner, murdered by sectarians or separatists, murdered by a burping businessman encased in a ton of metal, murdered by other children. Hard work, this last, for the watchful and uninnocent eye. Feel your unwelcome sweat as you move among them now, on traffic islands, in shop doorways—the new children.

Of the perpetrator or perpetrators the mother or the father of the dead will often say, / have no words for them. Something like, Words cannot express what I feel for them. Something like, As for those who did this, I have no words for them. Or, There are no words for them.

By which I take them to mean: words are inadequate and also inappropriate. You cannot find the right words—so don't look for them. Don't look.

And I agree. I am with the father, with the mother. As for those who did this, I have no words.

The information is telling me—the information is telling me to stop saying hi and to start saying bye.

Where I live there's a yellow dwarf I keep seeing, out on the streets with their shops and bus stops. She is young and yellow and less than four feet tall with characteristically compacted limbs (the arms tucked inwards as if in pugilistic readiness, the legs like castors), half-Asian, half-Caribbean, pale-eyebrowed, white-lashed; her hair is an animal orange, its filaments electrically charged. She is young. She will get older, but not taller ... For the first instant, whenever we exchange glances, she looks up at me and her chin stiffens in defiance. Mistrust, and everything else, but above all defiance. More recently, as these glances now tend to prolong themselves, her face develops, away from defiance; defiance is discarded as unnecessary (though it has been necessary, so many times). Not quite smiling or nodding, we acknowledge one another.

A yellow dwarf is a terrible thing to be called, probably because— more pertinently—it is a terrible thing to be. A terrible thing. Poor, poor yellow dwarf. I would like her to know that yellow dwarves are good. I owe my life to a yellow dwarf, as do we all—the one up there: the sun.

The yellow dwarf is not exotic. Yellow dwarves are not exotic. They're among the most exemplary phenomena in the universe. A quasar, now— a galaxy the size of a solar system clustered round some quantum monstrosity or cryptogram and barreling out of observable space at a hundred thousand miles a second: that's exotic.

I will never be able to meet the eye of the yellow dwarf up there. Its stare will never soften; its defiance will always be absolute.

She is ordinary, in the big picture. Who will ever tell her? She is ordinary. Not like the other stars of the street. Not like the red giant flailing and falling under the overpass, not like the black hole behind the basement window, not like the pulsar on the roundabout in the deserted playground.

Richard Tull, with his own consignment of strictly local concerns, stood forty stories above the city. He had an authentically frightening hangover and he was in the offices of Gal Aplanalp. Not just above the city, but above the City, within hearing range of Bow Bells, perhaps (when will you pay me?). This was no cockneyland of barrowboys and winkles. Large-scale and cathartic construction work was taking place all around him: jumpsuits, hardhats, trenches, cranes, breeze-blocks in skip-sized packages. A hot-blue magnesium light shone upward through the morning haze. Richard thought of the backyard his study overlooked, where builders were always fucking around, year in year out. To him, builders meant destruction. Bumcrack cowboys, knee-deep in pointlessness and slime, and raising nothing but hell.

The walls of the offices of literary agents, in Richard's wide and unhappy experience, tended to be furnished with books. Here he was surrounded by posters—posters of authors whom Gal already represented. He was surrounded by well-known novelists; but they were novelists who were well known for something else. Well known for newscasting, cliff-scaling, acting, cooking, dress-designing, javelin-throwing, and being related to the Queen. None of them was well known for book reviewing. There was Gwyn, of course. Many of the authors Richard failed to recognize. He cross-checked with the brochures attractively fanned out on the coffee table. So this dope with the ponytail.. . wrote biographies of rock stars. His large corpus consisted entirely of rock-star surnames followed by exclamation marks. Each tide caused Richard's head to jolt in regrettable counterpoint to the pulse of his headache. He imagined , .. Davenant! Deeping! Bottrell! Myers!

Gal entered. Richard turned. He hadn't seen her for ten years. When Gal was seventeen and over here for a summer doing odd jobs for publishers, Richard and Gwyn had taken her up and shown her around: the bowling alley in Shaftesbury Avenue, the Irish pubs beneath Piccadilly Circus; once (yes) they had taken her boating, in Hyde Park. They liked her. She had a talent for warmth, he remembered; she kissed your cheek at odd moments. Who else does that? Oh yeah: Marco. A buxom tomboy, American, seventeen: it sounds like just what you want. But Richard wasn't up for it. He seemed to want something more complicated: he liked—or kept going out with—dark and violent depressives who never ate anything and never got the curse. And Gwyn wasn't up for it: he had Gilda. And no doubt Gal wasn't up for it either. And anyway the young men had reached a silent understanding: they were young enough themselves to think that Gal Aplanalp was too young to be touched.

They shook hands, and embraced, which was her idea (Gal's lips went "mwa" into the whiskers of his right ear). Then she said the thing he least wanted to hear. She said,

"Well let's take a look at you."

Richard stood there at arm's length.

"Are you .. .? You look—you look rather, I don't know, you look a bit . . ."

"Old," said Richard. "The adjective—or is it the complement—you are searching for is old."

The numerous symptoms of his hangover included a strong reluctance to meet any human eye. But Richard told himself to be mad and proud (and what a wag his head gave on that complement): he went on standing there, proud and mad and unpublished, the palely bleeding ruin of Richard lull. It could be that his hangover wasn't really that bad, warranting no more, perhaps, than half a week of sepulchral suffering, in the fetal position, behind drawn blinds.

"Coffee? It's good. We send out for it."

"That would be very nice."

They talked for a while about the old days. Yes, how much better things had been, in the old days, when Gwyn was poor, his bedsit cramped, his girlfriend rough, his career quite prospectless. In the old days Gwyn was just a failed book reviewer (Richard's designation) and publisher's skivvy. During the summer of Gal's stay Gwyn had been preparing A-level guides to various sections of The Canterbury Tales. They weren't even books, or pamphlets. They were sold in packets ... Now that Gal was out of his force field Richard was free to contemplate her. And he nodded his head; he conceded. Not just young, not just healthy and symmetrical. Somebody who worked in the marketing of face creams or bath oils would give Gal a high beauty rating. These were looks you could actually sell things with. These were looks that men and women alike admired. It had all come together, the skin, the bones, the coiled black hair. Also the body: that too. When she shifted in her chair the upper half of her torso rearranged itself a beat late, with a certain ordered heaviness. Richard supposed she was turned out in accordance with the cutting edge of female-professional thinking and praxis. She was pitilessly businesslike from head to foot; but the foot wore an ankle bracelet and a spikey heel. When they greeted one another, Richard would have liked to be able to say something like "I've been potholing for a month" or "I got shot in the head last week." Yet it was Gal who had spent the last two nights on the red-eye—over America, over the Atlantic. All Richard had done was sit at his desk.

The coffee came. They paused. They began.

First, the necessarily depressing issue of Richard's curriculum vitae. Attached to her clipboard she had a printout on him; she had information. Gal made notes and said "Mm-hm." Her manner suggested, encouragingly, that she was no stranger to the stalled career; Richard began to believe that she routinely dealt with greater prodigies of obscurity and pauperism—with seedier duds, with louder flops.

"What's this biography of Denton Welch?" she said, and frowned accusingly at her clipboard.

"I never did it. It fell through."

"AndofR. C. Squires?"

"R. C. Squires. A literary editor of The Little Magazine."

"Which little magazine?"

"The Little Magazine. The one I'm literary editor of. An interesting life. He was in Berlin in the thirties and in Spain during the Civil War." Respectively whoring in the Kurfiiirstendamm and playing ping-pong in Sitges, as Richard had learned, after a month of desultory research. "May I smoke?"

"What about this travel book? The Siberia trip."

"I'm not going."

"The Siberian lepers..."

"I'm not going."

"What's this? The History of Increasing Humiliation. Nonfiction, right?"

Richard crossed his legs and then recrossed them. This was a book he still wanted to write: one day. He said, as he had said before, "It would be a book accounting for the decline in the status and virtue of literary protagonists. First gods, then demigods, then kings, then great warriors, great lovers, then burghers and merchants and vicars and doctors and lawyers. Then social realism: you. Then irony: me. Then maniacs and murderers, tramps, mobs, rabble, flotsam, vermin.”

 

She was looking at him. "And what would account for it?"

He sighed. "The history of astronomy. The history of astronomy is the history of increasing humiliation. First the geocentric universe, then the heliocentric universe. Then the eccentric universe—the one we're living in. Every century we get smaller. Kant figured it all out, sitting in his armchair. What's the phrase? The principle of terrestrial mediocrity."

"...Big book."

"Big book. Small world. Big universe."

"What is the status of all these projects?"

"The status of all these projects," said Richard, "is that I've taken advances on them and not written them."

"Hell with that," she said, and now the exchange started speeding up. "They write it off."

"The new novel. What's it about."

"Modern consciousness."

"Is it as difficult as your other novels?"

"More difficult. Much more difficult."

"You didn't think you might change tack?"

"And write a Western?"

"What's it called?"

"Untitled. Its title is Untitled"

"We'll soon fix that."

"We will not fix that."

"I reread Dreams Are Hard to Find and I—"

"Dreams Don't Mean Anything."

"Don't say that. You're too easily discouraged."

"Point one," said Richard. He fell silent. He was applying the brake. In fact he had written a Western. He had tried to write a Western. His Western had petered out after a couple of pages of banging shutters, of hurrying tumbleweeds ... "Point one. The title of my book is Dreams Don't Mean Anything. Point two. It—what I mean is dreams don't signify anything. Not exactly. Point three. I am not 'easily discouraged.' It has been difficult getting me discouraged. It has been arduous."

"Can I have a drag?"

He held the cigarette out to her butt-first. She met it not with her fingers—she met it with her lips. So Richard was mollified by a glimpse of star-bright brassiere, against Persian flesh. Gal inhaled expertly, and sat

back. She liked to smoke; she used artificial sweeteners in her espresso.

Her hand, he noticed, was no less plump than it was ten years ago. A hand he had held, avuncularly, many times. Gal had a flaw. A predisposition. Weight wanted her. Fat wanted her. The desk she sat at was organized, but there was something in her that wasn't organized, not quite .. . Beyond was the window: in this frame of gray sky the cranes were like T-squares on a drawing board. The paper the architect was using was soiled and smudged. Too much rubbing out and starting again, with soiled eraser. Graphic cancellations, and the grains of the rubber shading the air, brushed and nudged by the hovering pinkie. A good idea, when imagining London, when imagining cities, to go back to the drawing board.

"I want to represent you," she said.

"Thank you," he said.

"Now. Writers need definition. The public can only keep in mind one thing per writer. Like a signature. Drunk, young, mad, fat, sick: you know. It's better if you pick it rather than letting them pick it. Ever thought about the young-fogey thing? The young fart. You wear a bow tie and a waistcoat. Would you smoke a pipe?"

"Well I would, probably," said Richard, stretching his neck, "if somebody offered me one. With tobacco in it and a match. Listen. I'm too old to be a young fart. I'm an old fart." Flatulence, as it happened, was on Richard's mind. That morning, while shaving, he had geared himself, expecting the usual pungent blare. And all he heard was a terrible little click. "Aren't we forgetting that I've got to get published first?"

"Oh I think I can call in some favors. Then we'll get everything working together. Your fiction is your fiction. I won't fuck with you creatively but we've got to get something else to play it off against. Your journalism needs a gee-up. It's too bad you review all over the place. You should have a column. Think about it."

"Don't mind me asking this. I gather you're very good at what you do. Do you find your appearance helps?"

"Absolutely. How about ... how about doing a long in-depth piece about what it's like to be a very successful novelist?"

Richard waited.

"You know: what's it really like. People are very interested in writers. Successful ones. More interested in the writers than the writing. In the writers' lives. For some reason. You and I both know they mainly sit at home all day."

Richard waited.

"So how about this piece. I'll sell it in America. Everywhere."

"The one about what it's like being an incredibly successful writer?"

"Day by day. What's it like. What's it really like."

Richard went back to waiting.

"... Gwyn's new novel is published in the States in March. Here it'll be May. He's doing the eight-city tour. New York, Washington, Miami, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Boston, New York again. You go with him. I'll set it up."

"Whose idea is this?"

"Mine. I'm sure he'll be delighted to have you along. Those tours are a sentence. Go on. Do it. You're smiling. Do it. It'll show everybody how unenvious you are."

"Is that my signature? Unenvious?"

He said he would have to think about it (untrue: he was going), and they shook hands without the hug this time, like professionals. In the tube train to Soho and the offices of The Little Magazine Richard considered his signature: what marked him out. Because we all needed them now, signatures, signatures, even the guy sitting opposite: his was the pair of pink diaper pins he wore through his nose . .. Richard couldn't come up with anything good. Except—this. He had never been to America. And he would tell you that quite frankly, raising his pentimento eyebrows and tensing his upper lip with a certain laconic pride.

I quite agree. What an asshole.

Gal's right. Nothing ever happens to novelists. Except—this.

They are born. They get sick, they get well, they hang around the inkwell. They leave home, with their stuff in a hired van. They learn to drive, unlike poets (poets don't drive. Never trust a poet who can drive. Never trust a poet at the wheel. If he can drive, distrust the poems). They get married in registry offices. They have children in hospitals—the ordinary miracle. Their parents die—the ordinary disaster. They get divorced or they don't. Their children leave home, learn to drive, get married, have children. They grow old. So nothing ever happens to them, except the universal.

With so many literary biographies down him, Richard knew this perfectly well. Confirmation came seasonally, every April and September, when he sneered his way through the color supplements and met the novelists' tremulous stares—sitting on their sofas or their garden benches. And doing fuck-all.

Although they don't or can't drive, poets get around more. William Davenant certainly took his chances: "He got a terrible clap of a black handsome wench that lay in Axe-yard . . . which cost him his nose." And Johnson's Life of Savage—bastardy, adultery, the fatal tavern brawl, the sentence of execution—describes a savage life: it reads like a revenger's tragedy that really happened. In mitigation, it should be said that an asshole is not the same thing as an arsehole. An Atlantic divides them. We are all assholes some of the time, but an arsehole is an arsehole all of the time. What was Richard? He was a revenger, in what was probably intended to be a comedy.

When Gwyn said, of the Profundity Requital, that the money was "ridiculous," Richard took him to mean that the money was derisory. But it wasn't derisory. It was ridiculous. And you got it every year.

Richard, unsurprisingly, was to be found at his desk, on which, along with pp. 1-432 of Untitledand many sloping stacks of assorted trex, three items were prominently displayed: a minutes-style letter from Gal Aplanalp; a bourgeois tabloid, staked open on the Rory Plantagenet page; and a third scrawled note from "Darko"—Belladonna's backer or abettor. Richard was making a connection.

He reread:

To recap: the itinerary is New York, Washington, Miami, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Boston, New York.

Denver. Why Denver? He reread:

. . . awarded annually, in perpetuity. The three judges are Lucy Cabretti, the Washington-based feminist critic, poet and novelist, Elsa Oughton, who lives and works in Boston, and Stanwyck Mills, author and Sue and Ron L. Summerdale Professor of Law at the University of Denver.

Richard sat back, nodding. He reread:

Whats the secret. Come on. Or is it all just the hipe. Belladonna is good at secrets. She can get any thing out of anyone, that one. Thats' why Gwyn Loves Belladonna. Its not too late for that "jar."

What interested Richard here, naturally, was the bit about Gwyn loving Belladonna. Even in Darko's world—with its sense of futile toil—love might mean something. It might mean vulnerability. Gwyn Loves Belladonna would look pretty interesting even if you saw it carved on the trunk of a lumpen evergreen in Dogshit Park or smeared in spray paint on the gray flank of the flyover. But given who Gwyn was and whoever the hell Belladonna might be: this was a matter of broad—of tabloid— interest. Gwyn Loves Belladonna would look even better as a headline, positioned directly beneath the compromised and epicene features of Rory Plantagenet. Undermining or destroying Gwyn's marriage seemed broadly attractive but also clumsily wide of the mark, just as a physical attack on his person would surely never rise above the gruesomely approximate. Richard didn't want to single out Gwyn's life, which came a poor second to what he really hated. Still, if he had to make do with Gwyn's marriage, he would make do with Gwyn's marriage. If he had to make do with Gwyn's life, he would make do with Gwyn's life.

"Hello. Is Darko there please? Sure. Yes, this is uh, Richard Tull." Richard was Richard's name and there was nothing you could do to it: Rich and Richie were out for obvious reasons, and he had never liked Rick, and bad things had happened to Dick. "No, I'll wait ... Darko? Hi. This is Richard Tull."

There was a silence. Then the voice said, "Who?"

"Richard Tull. The writer."

"... What's the name again?"

"Christ. You're Darko, right? You wrote to me. Three times. Richard Tall."

"Got it. Got it. Sorry uh, Richard. I'm half asleep."

"I know the feeling."

"Still in a daze. I got to get myself sorted out," said the voice, as if suddenly and worriedly considering something more long-term.

"Happens to the best of us."

"... Anyway: what you want?"

"What do / want? I want to hang up. But let's go another half-mile. I want to have a word with this girl you mentioned. Belladonna."

"She can't come to the phone."

"No, not now."

"Belladonna, she does what she fucking well likes. Yep. She pleases herself, I reckon."

"Why don't the three of us get together some time?"

"... Nothing simpler."

When that was over he rang Anstice and did his hour with her. When that was over, he went to the boys' room and fished Marco out from under his GI Joes and clothed him. Sitting on the twin bed, he looked out of the window and saw the lightest swirl of thinning cloud, way out there, like a wiped table in the last few seconds before it dries ...

The day was heating up and so in the end he took Marco out into it, into Dogshit and into park culture, which is something to see. Queueing at the snack stall with all the other weight problems and skin conditions, among the multiple single mothers in crayon-color beachwear, the splat and splotch of English skin, beneath treated hair, and all the sticky children each needing its tin of drink, Richard watched the joggers pounding the outer track in scissoring shellsuits of magenta, turquoise, of lime or sherwood green. Marco stood there with his upper teeth warily bared to the press of sense data.

With their papercupfuls of Slushpuppy, they walked past the flat-roofed park toilets where a boy younger than Marco had recently been raped while his mother tapped her foot on this same patch of asphalt. One man and his dog went by the other way, man as thin as a fuse, dog as cocked and spherical as a rocket. The sloping green was mud, churned and studded, beige and dun, half soil, half shit. On the bench, Marco faced the prospect with the candid bewilderment of his gaze, turning and lifting his head, every few seconds, to his father's stunned profile. The boy might have looked at the hospital smokestacks, and then at the loners, the ranters, the post-pub staggerers, all those born to be the haunters of parks, and then looked again at his father, with the six or seven immediate difficulties pulling on the skin around his eyes, each with its own nervous tic, and wondered what the difference was.

For Richard was thinking, if thinking is quite the word we want (and we now do the usual business of extracting those thoughts from the furious and unceasing babble that surrounds and drowns them): you cannot demonstrate, prove, establish—you cannot know if a book is good. A sentence, a line, a phrase: nobody knows. The literary philosophers of Cambridge spent a century saying otherwise, and said nothing. Is "When all at once I saw a crowd" worse than "Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears"? (Yes. But it was the better line that contained the identifiable flaw: that do, brought in to make up the numbers.) I. A. Richards reanatomized the human mind so that it might be capable of such divination. William Empson offered a quantity theory of value, of what was ambiguous, what was complex, and therefore good. Leavis said that while you can't judge literature, you can judge life, so for the purposes of judgment life and literature are the same! But life and literature were not the same. Ask Richard. Ask Demi or Gina. (Ask Scozzy, Crash, Link, 13.) Ask the man with the rocket dog. Ask the rocket dog . . . Gwyn was no good. Clearly, but not demonstrably. Richard's neck did an 8 of pain. So: a sandwich man on Oxford Street (GWYN BARRY IS NO GOOD), a tub-thumper under the arrow of Eros ("Gwyn Barry is no good!"), a frontier preacher in the wind and rain of Ongar, Upminster, Stanmore, Morden, spreading the word: that Gwyn was no good. Speakers' Corner (men on inverted milk crates, looking like schoolmasters but quietly madder than any rat)—Speakers' Corner was no longer to be found on the south side of Marble Arch. It was now to be found on all the other corners: every corner of London Town. Thus the voices raised and reedy, Natural Law, cosmopolitan finance, Moral Rearmament, an American angel called Moroni, the infernal nature of electricity; and Richard Tull, deploying apt quotation and close reading, proving beyond any reasonable doubt to his three or four strangely attentive listeners that Gwyn Barry was no good.

In the local sublunary sphere, your taste in literature was like your taste in sex: there was nothing you could do about it. Once, in bed, fifteen years ago, someone had asked him, "What's your favorite?" He told her. His favorite turned out to be her favorite too. So it all worked out. Gwyn, or Amelior, was everybody's favorite. Or nobody's aversion. Amelior was something like the missionary position plus simultaneous orgasm. Whereas Richard's stuff, Richard's prose, was clearly minority-interest to a disgusting degree: if the police ever found out about it, Richard's stuff would be instantly illegalized—if, that is, the police could bring themselves to believe there were people around who went in for anything so contorted and laborious . .. Richard had married his sexual obsession. His sexual obsession she had now ceased to be. Gina had been supplanted, as his sexual obsession, by every other woman on earth between the ages of twelve and sixty. The park—Dogshit Park— pullulated with his sexual obsessions. These hopeless clamorings, he knew (from books), were just the final or penultimate yodels of his DNA: of his selfish genes, craving propagation before they died. It was to do with getting old, he knew. But it made him feel like a prototypical adolescent: a reeking gloom of zits and tit mags. He wanted everyone. He wanted anyone. Richard wanted Gina but his body and his mind were not permitting it. How long could this go on? I will arise— I will arise . . .

Marco finished his Slushpuppy, and then finished Richard's (whose skull ached to the crushed ice). Hand in hand they did their tour of the urban pastoral, the sward beneath the heavenly luminary, its human figures brightly half-clad at rest and play. How did people ever get the idea that white skin was any good at all, let alone the best? White skin was so obviously the worst: carved from the purest trex. Walking here, he felt the pluralism and the pretty promiscuity and, for now, the freedom from group hostilities. If they were here, these hostilities, then Richard didn't smell their hormones; he was white and middle-class and Labour and he was growing old. It sometimes seemed that he had spent his whole life avoiding getting beaten up (teds, mods, rockers, skinheads, punks, blacks) but his land was gangland no longer: violence would come, if it came, from the individual, from left field, denuded of motive. The urban pastoral was all left field. There was no right field. And violence wouldn't come for Richard. It would come for Marco.

 

The northern gates were chained shut so Richard unsurely, quiver-ingly, scaled the spikes and then hoisted Marco over. To their left, to their left field, itself spike-cordoned, lay the cleanest patch of grass in all Dogshit, the showpiece of the park (staunch those tears of pride). This of course was the dog toilet, where the dogs were meant to shit, and never did.

There was much speculation about where Gwyn Barry would "go" after Amelior—in literary circles, anyway, wherever those may be. (In literary circles, which are, perhaps, themselves a polite fiction.) There was certainly much speculation at 49E Calchalk Street. In what "direction" would Gwyn now "turn"? Humbly local, abjectly autobiographical, Summertown was a prentice work. Amelior was a freak best-seller. Then what? The question was soon answered, at least to Richard's satisfaction: the day after he delivered the Los Angeles Times, Richard received, also by special messenger, a sample first chapter of novel number three. It came in a green pouch designed to resemble an expensive rucksack; in addition it featured a picture of Gwyn and some quotes, not from the critics but from the balance sheets. Richard tore the thing open and examined its contents with a spartan sigh. Jesus Christ. Gwyn's third novel was called Amelior Regained. Not Summertown Regained, you notice. Oh no. Amelior Regained. And why did they need to regain it? They never even lost it.

In Amelior itself twelve youngish human beings forgathered in an unnamed and perhaps imaginary but certainly very temperate hinterland some time in the near future. No holocaust or meteorite or convulsing dystopia brought them there. They just showed up. To find a better way . .. Every racial group was represented, the usual rainbow plus a couple of superexotic extras—an Eskimo, an Amerindian, even a taciturn Aborigine. Each of them boasted a serious but non-disfiguring affliction: Piotr had hemophilia, Conchita endometriosis, Sachine colitis, Eagle Woman diabetes. Of this twelve, naturally, six were men and six were women; but the sexual characteristics were deliberately hazed. The women were broad-shouldered and thin-hipped. The men tended to be comfortably plump. In the place called Amelior, where they had come to dwell, there was no beauty, no humor and no incident; there was no hate and there was no love.

And that was all. Richard would tell you that that was all: honestly. Apart from a very great deal of talk about agriculture, horticulture, jurisprudence, religion (not advised), astrology, hut-construction and diet. When he first read Amelior Richard kept forgetting what he was doing and kept turning abstractedly to the back flap and the biographical note, expecting to see something like Despite mutism and blindness, or Although diagnosed with Down's syndrome, or Shrugging off the effects of a full lobotomy .. . Amelior would only be remarkable if Gwyn had written it with his foot. Why was Amelior so popular? Who knew? Gwyn didn't do it. The world did it.

All that week, as he sat on the can each morning, Richard read a few more pages of Gwyn's teaser—accurately so called. The first chapter of Amelior Regained consisted of a discussion between one of the men and one of the women, in a forest, about social justice. In other words, here was some Narnian waterbaby or other and some titless Hobbit or other, with her foot on a log, talking freedom. The only real departure came in the prose. While it was pretty simple stuff, Amelior every now and then attempted a night-school literary cadence. Amelior Regained was barbari-cally plain. Richard kept looking at the back flap. It just said that Gwyn lived in London, not Borneo, and that his wife's dad was the Earl of Rie-veaulx.

It was Sunday afternoon, and Richard was going over there, as he sometimes did on Sunday afternoon.

Down on Calchalk Street he climbed into the Maestro with a sense of prospective novelty. Six nights earlier, at 3:30 A.M., as he drove back from Holland Park Avenue after delivering the Los Angeles Times to Gwyn's doorstep, Richard had been successfully charged with drunken driving. This was not a complicated case. He had in fact crashed the car into a police station. Others of us might find so thorough a solecism embarrassing, but Richard was pleased about that part of it because at least it speeded the whole thing up. No hanging around while they radioed in for the Breathalyzer. No being asked to accompany them to the police station . .. Nor for the moment did he particularly regret being so bounteously far over the limit. At least he couldn't remember anything— except the sudden contrast: there you are comfortably driving along, a little lost, perhaps, and with your left hand over your left eye; then the next thing you know you're bouncing up the steps to the police station. And smashing into its half-glass doors. As he drove, now, down Lad-broke Grove toward Holland Park, feeling self-consciously sober and clandestine, Richard remembered what he said, when the three rozzers came crunching out to greet him. No, this was not a complicated case. He rolled down the window and said, "I'm very sorry, Officer, but the thing is I'm incredibly drunk." That, too, got things moving. His appearance in court was scheduled for late November. And the car looked no worse (though it certainly smelled worse, for some reason). And at least it hadn't happened on the way there. "What were you doing, driving around at all hours?" said Gina. Richard gave her a three-quarters profile and said, "Oh. You know. Thinking about things. The new book. And what it might be like. Not being a writer ..." Yeah, it would be tough, not being a writer. He wouldn't be able to spin Gina any more lines like that one ...

In the octagonal library, seated on a French armchair, Gwyn Barry frowned down at the chessboard. Frowned down at it, as if some gangly photographer had just said, "Could you like frown down at it? Like you're really concentrating?" Actually there were no photographers present. Only Richard, who, seated opposite, and playing black, made a move, N(QB5)-K6 in the old notation, N(c4)-e5 in the new, and let his peripheral vision feast on the Sunday Los Angeles Times, which lay on a nearby sofa in encouraging disarray. The room was tall and narrow, something of a miniature folly; it felt like the chamber of a beautiful gun or antique missile—the six facets of inlaid bookcases, and then the two facing windows, like blanks. Now Richard gave Gwyn's hair an exasperated glance (so thick, so uniform, so accurately barbered—the hair of a video vicar) before his eyes returned, in brief innocence, to the board. He was a pawn up.

"Do you take the Los Angeles Times?" he said wonderingly.

Gwyn seemed to lose the tempo, or the opposition: he paused awkwardly before replying. Richard's last move was of the kind that presents the adversary with a strictly local, and eventually soluble, problem. An adequate—a more than adequate—response was available. Richard had seen it as his fingers retreated from the piece. Gwyn would see it, too, in time.

"No," said Gwyn. "Some stupid bugger sent it to me."

"Why?"

"With a note saying, 'Something here to interest you.' No page number, mind. No marks or anything. And look at it. It's like a bloody knapsack."

"How ridiculous. Who?"

"I don't know. Signed 'John.' Big help that is. I know loads of people called John."

"I always thought it must be quite handy being called John."

"Why?"

"You can tell when you're going nuts."

"Sorry? I don't follow.”

 

"I mean, a real sign of megalomania, when a John starts thinking that 'John' will do. 'Hi. It's John.' Or: 'Yours ever, John.' So what? Everybody's called John."

Gwyn found and made the best reply. The move was not just expedient; it had the accidental effect of clarifying White's position. Richard nodded and shuddered to himself. He had forced Gwyn into making a good move: this seemed to happen more and more frequently, as if Richard was somehow out of time, as if Gwyn was playing in the new notation while Richard toiled along in the old.

Richard said, "... Gwyn. That's Welsh for John, isn't it?"

"No. Euan. That's Welsh for John."

"Spelt?"

"E,u,a,n."

"How definitively base," said Richard.

He looked down at the sixty-four squares—at this playing field of free intelligence. Oh yeah? So the intelligence was free, then, was it? Well it didn't feel free. The chess set before them on the glass table happened to be the most beautiful that Richard had ever used, or ever seen. For some reason he had neglected to ask how Gwyn acquired it, and anxiously assumed it was an heirloom of Demi's. For surely Gwyn, left to his own devices (his taste, and many thousands of pounds) would have come up with something rather different, in which the pieces consisted of thirty-two more or less identical slabs of quartz/onyx/osmium; or else were wincingly florid and detailed—the Windsor castles, the knights with rearing forelegs and full horse-brass, the practically life-sized bishops with crooks and pointy hats and filigreed Bibles. No. The set was in the austere Staunton measure, the chessmen delightfully solid and firmly moored on their felt (even the pawns were as heavy as Derringers), and the board of such proportion that you did indeed feel like a warrior prince on a hilltop, dispatching your riders with their scrolled messages, and pointing through the morning mist, telescope raised. And not a drop of blood being shed. That's how the valley had looked two minutes ago: Field of the Cloth of Gold. Now it resembled some sanguinary disgrace from a disease-rich era, all pressed men, all rabble, the drunken cripples reeling, the lopped tramps twitching and retching in the ditch. Richard was now staring at what any reasonable player would recognize as a lost position. But he would not lose. He had never lost to Gwyn. It used to be that Richard was better at everything: chess, snooker, tennis, but also ait, love, even money. How casually Richard would pick up the check, sometimes, at Burger King. How thoroughly, and with how many spare magnitudes, did Gina outshine Gilda. How good Dreams Don't Mean Anything had looked, in hard covers, when placed beside the weakly glowing wallet of Gwyn's crib-notes to The Maunciple's Tale . . . They exchanged knights.

"So what did you do? I suppose you could have just chucked the whole thing out... The Los Angeles Times. What's the matter with you?"

In formulating this last question Richard had lightly stressed the personal pronoun. For Gwyn was doing something he did more and more often these days, something that brimmed Richard's neck with mumps of hatred. Gwyn was inspecting an object—in the present case, the black knight—as if he had never seen it before. With infant wonder in his widened eyes. Richard really couldn't sit there: opposite somebody pretending to be innocent. Maybe Gwyn had got hold of some novel, by a woman, about a poet, and thought that this was how dreamers and seekers were meant to behave. Another possible explanation was what Richard called the Maggot Theory. According to the Maggot Theory, Gwyn had a maggot in his brain, and every frown, every pout, every pose was directly attributable to the maggot's meanderings and its maulings and above all its meals. Watching Gwyn now, Richard felt the Maggot Theory gaining ground.

"It's a chessman," said Richard. "It's a knight. It's black. It's made of wood. It looks like a horse."

"No," said Gwyn dreamily, placing the piece with his other captures, "I found the thing in the end."

"Found what?"

Gwyn looked up. "The thing about me. The thing that was meant to interest me in the L.A. Times."

Richard ducked back to the board.

"My glance just fell on it. Luckily. Look at it. I could have been slaving through that thing all bloody week."

"Now this calls for some serious thought," said Richard in a higher and frailer register. "Around from the king side," he said. Behind him a door opened. "And see what we can find," he continued, "on the queen side."

Demi was entering, or crossing: the library lay between the two drawing rooms. She moved past them with reverent stealth, actually tiptoeing for the central few strides, with knees naively raised. Big, blond, unsatir-ical, but not quite the other thing either (unburnished, unrefined), Demi performed her tiptoe without ease and without talent. Like the not-so-natural parent, playing a children's game. Richard thought of the flash accountant he had unnecessarily and very temporarily hired, after the American sale of Aforethought: how, during the appointment at his place, he had made a show of jovially chasing his daughter from the room, with jangle of keys and coins, with knees raised, past the modern first editions and the texts of tax . . . Demi paused at the far door.

"Brrr," she said.

"Hi Demi."

"It's not very warm in here."

Gwyn turned her way, his eyes bulging uxoriously. To Richard he looked like a clairvoyant who, as a matter of policy, was keen to demystify his profession.

"Why not put a cardy on, love?"

"Brrr," said Demi.

Richard got his head down and, with infinite grief, started working to a different plan.

 

 

  PART  TWO   

 

There was the street, as midnight neared, after the rain, glossy, with a noirish wet-downed look. And there was the canal, sickly hued even in the dark, turbid, caustic, like a Chinese medicine of ferocious efficacy. The season was about to change.

Between road and water, Richard sat slumped over a Zombie in the Canal Creperie. He wore a deceptively cheerful red bow tie; he wore a deceptively opulent paisley waistcoat; he wore his hair long at the back to cover that strange and frightening lump on his neck; and he wore dark glasses, behind which the boiling beer-guts of his eye sacs now itched and seeped. Darko had said, on the telephone, that he and Belladonna would meet him here at eleven. It was 12:05. Now a young man sat down opposite in Richard's booth and flattened a book out on the table. His face was ectomorphic and asymmetrical and preoccupied. This wasn't Darko. This wasn't Belladonna.

Richard endeavored to persuade himself that he had good cause for celebration. That morning he had personally delivered the completed text of Unfilled to the offices of Gal Aplanalp. Over the last twelve days, applying himself with great clarity and focus, Richard had worked almost unprecedentedly hard: reading the Los Angeles Times. No, he didn't get Gwyn's copy off him ("Are you finished with that?"), nor did he crouch each midnight by the Barry dustbins waiting for the significantly bulky ten-gallon bag. He considered such stratagems. But instead he went and bought another one right away, incurring the familiar inconvenience and expense, down in Cheapside. This second copy of the Los Angeles Times he had just pummeled into a dustbin, en route to the Canal Creperie. He found what he was looking for.

 

Books, Arts, Entertainment, The Week in Review, Real Estate, Sports. It seemed that he knew the whole thing backwards anyway. Poise, Style, Flair. He read everything from the cookery column to the crossword clues. Could it be that there was a special way of preparing egg and chips in the mode of Gwyn Barry? Was it possible to contrive a crossword clue out of that vilely vowelless forename, that curt and surly surname (NY wry grab—wait—agitated by British novelist? 4,5)? When Richard walked the streets with all his fingertips on his forehead he was saying to himself, am I one? am I two? am I worse? am I better? At night, as he prepared to enter the forests of sleep and temptation, things looked like two things: the ironing board was a deck chair and the mirror was a standing pool. He was being informed—the information came at night, to inhume him. Jump-leads of agony: for all this time, jump-leads of agony went from Holland Park to Calchalk Street. What was it? A flux tube, an electric whip with scorpion sting. And now it seemed that the Grove itself was a league-long knout or sjambok, made of London, thoughtlessly wielded by Gwyn Barry and danced to, howling and sweating, by Richard Tull.

Thoughtlessly? It did of course occur to Richard, as he sat in his study scanning the college hockey results or the wheat futures, as he abandoned Barcaloungers, say, and started rereading the weather forecast, that he had been rumbled and finessed—that the Los Angeles Times was guilelessly and even winsomely Gwyn-free. But he was basically convinced that Gwyn wouldn't need to pull a flanker on him. The world would do it. Late in the evening of the tenth day he found it. Page eleven, column three: the personals page, in the Classified Section, under "Miscellaneous." It went like this:

"Stephanie." Pet Adoptions. Rottweiler 1 yr. Gentle girl. Plus free hamster given with purchase of cage. Summertown. Wanted. First ed. of novel by Gwyn Barry. Swap-Meet Garage Yard Sale. All welc.

He waved to the waitress. No, not another Zombie, thank you; he would try a Tarantula. The young man sitting opposite with his scalene face and his shoulders hunched over his book in the posture of a professional bicyclist—the young man took the opportunity to order a club soda. The waitress lingered, making notes.

The waitresses were less young and pretty than they used to be; but then the Canal Creperie was less young and pretty than it used to be— was now, in fact, the resort of insomniac boozers prepared to pay for, and sit quite near to, the platefuls of food which the law obliged them to order with their drinks. On the table, untouched, there stood a basket of sauce-glued nachos, and heavily cooling tortilla, as inert as an organ on a medical tray. Richard's waitress reappeared with his Tarantula. She looked right through him as he thanked her. Before, girls looked at him and showed interest or no interest. Then, for a while, they looked past him. Now they looked through him. Richard felt a generalized regret, mild, chronic, secretive—like, say, the pang of the domestic tutor with his chaste crush on the family four-year-old who, for once, says her good-nights without favoring him with the usual glance and smile, and he must sniff bravely, and tell himself that children ought to be allowed their childish concerns, and go on talking with the grownups about Aristophanes or Afghanistan .. . They used to look past him. Now they looked through him. Because he no longer snagged on their DNA. Because he was over on the other side, and partly invisible, like all the ghosts who walked there.

Suddenly the young man sank back; he raised his book to chin height and held it aloft like a hand of cards. Richard jolted. The book was Dreams Don't Mean Anything. Its author was Richard Tull. There, on the top corner of the back cover, above the bubbles and sequins of its artwork (the effect intended, and not achieved, was one of jazzy icono-clasm), perched a passport-size photograph: Richard Tull at twenty-eight. How clean he looked. How extraordinarily clean.

Richard blushed, and his eyes sought something else to stare at— other photographs, framed and hung, of grinning or glowering movie stars: examples, like the loaf-shaped paper-napkin dispensers and the fluted sugar-pours and the podgy old jukebox, of the eminently exportable culture to which the Canal Creperie had dedicated itself. There were even a couple of American writers up there on the wall, their faces scored by epic wryness, epic celebrity ... A week after Aforethought was published Richard had seen a beamingly intelligent youth frowning and smiling over a copy of the book—on the Underground, at Earl's Court, where Richard then lived. He'd considered saying something. A tap on the shoulder, maybe. A raised thumb. A wink. But he had thought: stay cool. It's my first book. This is obviously going to happen all the time. Get used to it... It never happened again, of course. Until now.

"Do you want me to sign that for you?"

The book was lowered. The face was hereby revealed. Its asymmetries resolved themselves into a smile. The smile was not, in Richard's opinion, a good smile, but it did disclose surprisingly and even sinisterly good teeth. The lower set, in particular, was almost feline in its acuity and depthlessness. Richard's lower teeth were like a rank of men in macks on a stadium terrace, tugged into this or that position by the groans of the crowd.

"Sorry?"

"Do you want me to sign that for you?" He leaned across and tapped the back cover. He removed his dark glasses, but not for long. He smiled

gauntly.

The young man did the thing of dividing his stare between photo and face until he said, "Who would have oddsed it? Small world. Steve Cousins."

Richard took the hand that was flexed out to him like a shot card. He felt the rare and uneasy luxury of letting his own name go unannounced. Also he asked himself, with what seemed to be abnormal pertinence, whether he was about to get beaten up. His nuts-and-violence radar used to be good, when he was soberer, and less nuts himself.

Steve said, "I think I saw you one time down the Warlock." "The Warlock: sure. Are you a player?"

"Not tennis. Not tennis. I always thought tennis was an effeminate game. No offense meant."

"None taken," said Richard sincerely. His impulse now was to flip his wallet onto the table and produce the photographs of his two boys.

"Squash is my game. Squash. But I don't play down there. I'm not even a Squash Member. I'm a Social Member."

Everybody knew about the Social Members of the Warlock. They didn't go down there for the tennis or the squash or the bowls. They went down there because they liked it.

"Well, I'm injured," said Richard. "Tennis elbow." This was true. Lift a racket? He could hardly lift a cigarette.

His interlocutor nodded: such was life. He was still holding the (closed) book out in front of him; it seemed inevitable, now, that he would have to say something about it. The anxiety this gave rise to led Steve Cousins to consider a rather serious change of plan: from plan A to plan B or plan V, plan O, plan X. To activate plan X he even reached into his pocket for the eyedrop bottle. This was plan X: lace his drink with lysergic acid and then, the minute he started looking nauseous or talking stupid about the funny lights, take him outside, for some air, down the walkway near the water, and kick his teeth out one by one. Scozz paused.

Plan A regained its substance. It was like the glow that came up on a

stage set. With a soft gulp of effort he said, "I'm an autodidact." Yes, listen, thought Richard: he can even say autodidact... He waved to the waitress. No, not another Tarantula, thank you: he would try a Rattlesnake. Actually Richard was undergoing a series of realizations. Which was just as well. He realized that the young man was not a type. Not an original, maybe; but not a type. He also realized (for the first time) that autodidacts are always in pain. The fear of ignorance is a violent fear; it is atavistic; fear of the unknown is the same as fear of the dark. And finally Richard thought: but, I'm nuts too! Don't be steamrollered: show your own quiddity in the field where the mad contend.

"I got a First at Oxford," said Richard. "Autodidact—that's a tough call. You're always playing catch-up, and it's never wholly that you love learning. It's always for yourself."

This turned out to be a good move of Richard's. It didn't calm the young man, but it made him more cautious. He weighed Dreams Don't Mean Anything in his hand and held it out at arm's length, to assess it, to see it in perspective, with parallax. "Interesting," he said.

"Interesting how?"

"You shouldn't smoke, you know."

"Oh really? Why ever not?"

"Toxins. Bad for your health."

Richard took the cigarette out of his mouth and said, "Christ, I know that about it. It says on the fucking packet that it kills you."

"You know what? I found it... very readable. It's a page-turner."

That proved it. It was clinically impossible that this guy was playing with a full deck. Richard knew very well that nobody found him readable. Everybody found him unreadable. And all agreed that Dreams Don't Mean Anything was even more unreadable than Aforethought.

"I read Aforethought too. Raced through that one as well."

It hadn't occurred to Richard that these admissions were bluff or hoax. Nor did it seriously occur to him now. And he was right: the young man was telling the truth. But he said because he wanted to cover himself,

"What big thing happens exactly halfway through Aforethought?"

"It goes into the—into italics."

"What happens just before the end?"

"It goes back again," said Steve, opening the book and gazing down "fondly," so to speak, at the copyright page (because the modern person isn't always well served by the old adverbs), which also bore, beneath a

thick film of polyethylene, the borrowing card of the hospital library he

had stolen it from. Not the hospital library from which he had stolen Aforethought: the library of the hospital to which Kirk had been transferred, after his second savaging by Beef. With tears in his eyes (and blood-soaked bandages all over his mouth) Kirk told Scozz that Lee was going to have Beef put down. Now Kirk wanted Scozz to go over and do Lee! Scozzy said, "Don't talk rucking stupid." Yet Kirk swore that Beefs death would not pass unavenged ... If literary courtesy compelled him to have the author sign his own book, then Scozzy had an answer ready. Dreams Don't Mean Anything was in very good condition: as new. The wonky-hipped old dears, the wraiths in towel robes awaiting the results of tests, the stoical criminals on the mend from line-of-work spankings and stripings—none of them, apparently had sought solace or diversion in the pages of Dreams Don't Mean Anything ...

"At the Warlock. You play with the other writer."

"Gwyn."

"Gwyn Barry. Best-seller."

"That's him."

"Numero uno. Beyond meteoric. Quite an achievement."

"Yes, it is. Quite an achievement. When what you write is unadulterated shit."

"Total crock."

"The purest trex."

"Complete crap."

Richard looked at him. The eyes lit but narrowed. The bent slot of the mouth. A violent maniac who hated Gwyn's stuff. Why weren't there any more where he came from?

"With the junkie wife."

"Demi? Demeter?"

"Who has a distinct liking for—for our colored brethren."

"Oh come on."

"Do you or do you not know how it goes? First off: she was a classic coke rat. In and out of those deluxe dryout joints. NA. All this. A big blond Lady who likes black stuff. You think that don't get around?"

"When was this? Why didn't it get around?"

"See, it's face. It's face. You're lying on a floor somewhere, right? All blissed out. The reason you're feeling so good is that Lance or whoever has just come in with the white bag and helped you pump it up your nose. And there's this great big solemn schwartzer staring down at you and holding out his hand the way they do." He held out his hand the way they do, with palm slowly upturned. "Everyone else, okay, they're half

out of it, but not Lance, who touches nothing stronger than Lilt. You

telling me she's going to say no to Lance? 'No thanks, mate'? With the political pressure on her? Half them pushers are only in it for the flip." "The what?”

 

"The skirt. The women."

Making it clear, making it entirely clear, how the young man felt about flip: how he felt about women. Often accused of this sin himself (though never by his wife), and largely innocent of it, in his view (in his view he was just candidly and averagely semi-fucked-up, along the usual male lines), Richard could spot genuine woman-hatred at twenty paces. It was something in the eyes or something in the mouth. The mouth, which would soon be thickly salivating as it began the joke about the skunk and the knickers. Again Richard cautioned himself. The young man contained sexual complication. But he wasn't a type. And his mouth wasn't going to start telling the joke.

"Her dad's the Earl of..."

"Rieveaulx," said Richard, supplying the simple duosyllable—and intercepting (he imagined) the young man's Polack tonguetwister.

"Big connections. With the so-called press barons. He kept it quiet. This was five years ago. Drug orgies with schwartzers. The Queen's twentieth cousin twice removed. You couldn't keep it quiet now."

"Fascinating," said Richard, who, at this stage, was sleepily considering the lunch he might soon arrange with Rory Plantagenet.

Steve had straightened up. He was looking shrewdly at the copyright page of Dreams Don't Mean Anything: there, opposite the pristine borrowing form. If Richard offered to sign it (which, as it happened, he never got round to) Steve would say that he'd fished it out of a cardboard box on the Portobello Road and paid thirty pee for it. He didn't know about literary pride, about literary face: not yet.

"I see—I see it was published . .. way back. What? You uh ..."

"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.

What he wanted to know was this. Why had he received no word from Gal Aplanalp? Why wasn't the telephone bouncing on its cradle? Where was the long, favorable and riveted critique of Untitled? And how high were Steve Cousins's rates? Richard wondered what was stopping him from just going ahead and ringing Gal Aplanalp. Pride, he sup- posed; and a sense of his own artistic worth. So he lit a cigarette and went ahead and called Gal Aplanalp.

"It's all going forward," she said. "In fact it's placed."

She was referring, of course, not to his novel but to his projected five thousand-word profile of Gwyn Barry, which had inspired broad and competitive interest. Gal named a sum of money which exactly corresponded to Richard's annual salary at The Little Magazine. After a silence he said,

"What about my book?"

"I know. I've cleared the weekend for it. I'm taking it home tonight. Gwyn says it's remarkable."

"Gwyn hasn't read it."

"Oh," said Gal Aplanalp.

Having said good-bye and hung up, Richard managed to apply himself to some constructive work. Ringing round various publishers, he identified and called in three books for review. One was by Lucy Cabretti. One was by Elsa Oughton. One was by Professor Stanwyck Mills. These authors, we might remember, were the judges of the Profundity Requital. Ringing round various contributors, Richard then entrained three favorable notices. We must trust him on this. He had his reasons. Richard was about to get up and go and find her when Anstice slowly put her head round the door. Her face blinked at him.

"Is there anything I should be worrying about, Anstice?"

"Oh no. I expect we shall soldier through."

"Cosmo seems much improved. So does Hugo."

"You know, I really respect Hugo for the way he's getting to grips with it. No, it's Theo."

"Oh?"

By a long-established anomaly, the last page of the books (it was the batched fiction review) was put to bed on the same day as the arts. Now you expected no trouble whatever on the batched fiction review. It was The Little Magazine's plum job, often squabbled and feebly brawled over: he who wrote the batched fiction review ended up with perhaps a dozen new hardbacks to sell to the man in Chancery Lane. Richard wanted to write the batched fiction review. Even the editor wanted to write it.

Anstice said, "He wants to know if he can fax it in."

"He hasn't got a fax. We haven't got a fax."

"That's what I told him."

"Well tell him to get out of bed and get dressed and get on the bus and bring it in. Like he always does."

"He sounded a bit...”

 

"No doubt he did." Richard told her that if she could bear it—and if indeed Theo had written it—she should simply phone him up and have him slur it in. Before she went he said, "How are you?"

"Pretty well, really. For a ruined woman. One roughly used and then cast aside. R. C. Squires was in here."

"How horrible. Is he coming back?"

"I don't know. Will I be seeing you later?"

"Of course, Anstice," he said.

She left. She left slowly, her presence reluctantly receding from him. When it was there no longer his head dropped suddenly like a weight. It hung, at right angles to the sheen of his paisley waistcoat. Having dropped about forty-five degrees ... Which is a lot, on some scales, by some reckonings. For example, Barnard's Star, as it is called, crosses 10.3 seconds of arc per year. This is a quarter of the Jupiter pinpoint—about a sixth of a degree: per year. Yet no other heavenly body shows so great a proper motion. This is why it is called the Runaway Star ... And just by dropping his head like that Richard was changing his temporal relationship with the quasars by thousands and thousands of years. He really was. Because the quasars are so far away and getting farther away so fast. This is to put Richard's difficulties in context. The context of the universe.

Eleven hours later he was emplaced with Anstice in the Book and Bible. The paper had been put to bed. To put to bed was what you did with children—whereas grownups took each other there.

Crooned at and lullabied, given snacks and glasses of water, its fears assuaged, The Little Magazine had been put to bed. Bruno, the theater critic, had finished his major piece on The Three Sisters. Unfortunately it proved to be only thirty words long. The opera critic, Hugo, had failed to write anything at all, despite spending the afternoon in a sinkful of iced water and despite engaging, with Anstice, in a program of deep-breathing exercises which reminded Richard of the classes he had attended with Gina: the adults sitting around on the floor and gazing up at teacher like the children they would shortly bear. Otto, the radio critic, finished his piece and then tore it up and threw it out the window. Several heads slewed round, at first in dismay and then in hard suspicion, when Inigo, the film critic, said through his tears that he was betraying his poetry by writing for money. You mean someone around here was getting money'? Towards dusk it looked for a while as though Richard and Anstice would be faced with another Black Friday. This was the occasion on which all seven arts writers—grouped about the place in varying postures of weary contemplation—had produced not a syllable between them. And Richard had hurled together a ragged quilt of house ads, overmatter, crosswords and killed chess columns.

"Inigo was amazing," said Anstice, finishing her white wine.

"Inigo was incredible," said Richard, finishing his scotch.

Inigo was also lying on the carpet at their feet. A man of great and curdled abilities, as they all were, kind of, Inigo had written 7,500 largely coherent words about a Bulgarian cartoon—the only thing he had seen, or remembered seeing, over the past two weeks.

Piously Anstice dipped her head. Richard stared, as he often stared, at the center-parting of her hair. Here, it seemed, two opposing forces met and with bristling difficulty contended. Oh dear, oh my: those people you see on streetcorners, when their hair is not just bad but wrong, too obviously comprising individual and uncoordinated strands, not just curled but bent, twisty, and propagating at all the wrong angles. Anstice's hair grew with futile force; here was the ponytail, as weighty as old navy rope, reaching to the gathered lap of her smock. Her hair looked never-washed, Rasta-like. She lifted her head and smiled at him slowly with that flicker of apologetic tenderness.

"Last one?" he said.

When he came back from the bar he thought Anstice might be turned to the wall and staring at the backs of her own eyes and singing scraps of songs—the crazed ditties, perhaps, of the ruined Ophelia. Not much less ominously, Anstice had her face over the table; her nose was perhaps an inch from its surface. Without stirring she said, as he sat,

"The time has come for us to tell Gina. Or else why go on? It's all right. We'll do it together. We'll tell Gina everything."

Richard thought he would probably end up with Anstice. He thought he would probably end up with Anstice. Would they marry? No. It was on his way out of her flat that morning, a year ago, that he had coined the word spinst. There was just no avoiding it. This is spinst, pal, he said to himself. We're talking spinst here. And I do mean spinst. He meant the blast-wave of spinst that he had walked into on arrival. He meant the mantle of spinst he had walked away with, as if he was wearing her clothes, her sheets, her towels, her hair. It was the smell of clothes not taken to the dry cleaners for many years; it was the smell of rain-damaged ceilings; but above all it was the smell of neglect. Richard knew about neglect and understood neglect. But neglect in the physical sense? These days he kept thinking he smelled of batch. Of old pajamas and slippers and cardigans and pipe cleaners. But I can't, he kept saying. I can't smell of batch. I'm married. In his study, with a biography on his lap, sniffing at his own shoulder, and then looking up suddenly, and frowning, and waving a hand to adduce his fastidious wife, his sweet-smelling children, whom he still had. And then it wasn't long before he saw himself alone, and with his single worn suitcase mounting the damp stairs to Anstice's. Spinst and Batch would come together, in eternal head-to-head. Batch and Spinst, in timeless morris.

"Bloody hell," said Gina. "Have you seen this?"

Richard looked up long enough to make sure that this wasn't a ten-page letter from Anstice and then looked down again at Love in a Maze: A Life of James Shirley. Gina was reading an extensive account, in her tabloid, of a series of murders, somewhere in America. Nearby on the passage floor the twins were playing quietly and even tenderly with their violent toys. Saturday morning, at the Tulls'.

The trouble with getting Gwyn beaten up ... Richard strove to be more specific. The trouble with getting Gwyn catapulted into his seventies was this: Gwyn would never know that it was Richard who had catapulted him there. Only a moron, true, would have failed to suspect (uneasily) that it was Richard who was responsible for the Los Angeles Times. But Gwyn was a moron: according to Richard. And you couldn't expect a moron—particularly a moron who was upside down in a dustbin or groping for consciousness in Intensive Care—to suspect that Richard was responsible for Steve Cousins. No, the whole thing lacked justice: artistic justice. Richard found himself increasingly drawn to another quest or project, something more classical, something simpler, something nobler. He was going to seduce Gwyn's wife.

"Why?" said Gina. "I just can't... Ooh."

His head, today, was full of women, as it always was, but not just the opposite sex. Genuine individuals—there was Gina, there was Anstice, there was Demeter. There was also Gal Aplanalp: lying on her bed and clad in her ankle bracelet, curled up with Untitled, and lightly frowning with amused admiration. There was also Gilda: Gilda Paul . .. When Gwyn took up with Demi, he ended it with Gilda, his teenhood sweetheart, and with some dispatch: he ended it the next morning. One moment Gilda was living with a little Welsh scrivener with two dud novels under his belt, plus a stack of A-Level Guides; the next, she was being helped on to a train by the cult author of a surprise best-seller, at Euston, with her cracked plastic suitcase and her podgy green overcoat, heading for Swansea and a full nervous breakdown. At that stage Richard was already in need of a good-looking reason for hating his oldest friend, and Gilda's collapse, at first, seemed like a breath of fresh air. To strengthen his case, morally, he even traveled, with the flat smile of the deeply inconvenienced, to the cliffside hospital in Mumbles and sat for an hour with Gilda's dank white hand in his, while one TV spoke English and another TV spoke Welsh, in a room whose light seemed to come from the brick-red tea and the orange-brown biscuits, and peopled by women, none of them old, whose favorite food (how did this notion come to him, over the fumes of the bloody tea?)—whose favorite food was brains. Richard still wrote to Gilda. His letters tended to coincide with some fresh coup of Gwyn's, or with some new gobbet of praise that made mention of his humanity or—better—his compassion. Rather regrettably, perhaps, Richard sent her a print interview in which Gwyn mentioned Gilda and characterized their parting as "amicable." Only occasionally did he suggest that the true story was something that the public—or Rory Plantagenet—deserved to learn. Richard was pleased that Gwyn had never been to see Gilda. Richard hoped he never would. Richard didn't really care about Gilda, of course. Richard really cared about Demi. "I mean ... why'?" said Gina. "Ooh, if I had my way." He looked up. Gina's hand was at her throat. An hour ago, his lips had been where that hand was now. And it hadn't worked out. .. Richard's stare returned to the index of Love in a Maze: A Life of James Shirley. The Maid's Revenge, The Traitor, Love's Cruelty, The Lady of Pleasure, The Imposture, Love in a Maze. While contemplating the seduction of Lady Demeter, Richard had no mustache he could twirl, no barrelly chortles he could summon: the Jacobean boudoir creeper had a big advantage over Richard. You couldn't imagine, say, Lovelace holding his shoes by their buckles as he limped from the bedroom in tears. You couldn't imagine Heathcliff propped up in the four-poster, with a forearm resting limply on his brow, telling Catherine how anxious and overworked he must be. Things seemed to start loosening up after 1850. Bounderby, in Hard Times: an obvious no-show merchant. And as for Casaubon, in Middlemarch, as for Casaubon and poor Dorothea: it must have been like trying to get a raw oyster into a parking meter. Acute and chronic impotence, Richard knew, was no kind of springboard for a seduction operation. But he had information on her now, which always meant the vulnerable, the hidden, the intimate, the shame-steeped. It panned out. And he couldn't be accused of trying to deceive Gwyn. Because there wasn't any point in it unless he got caught.

"Words," said Gina, "—words fail me. Why? Won't someone tell me."

Slowly sliding from his chair, Richard took up position behind her. The

center pages of Gina's tabloid described the trial, and conviction, of a child-murderer in Washington State. There was a photograph. You could see him. He stood there in his prison fatigues, his eyes introspectively recessed, his upper lip exaggeratedly cupid's bow, the shape of a gull coming right at you. "I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" shouted one of his victims, according to witnesses: a little boy, stabbed to death by an adult stranger in the neighborhood playground. The little boy's brother was also stabbed to death. He didn't say anything. There was also a third and much younger child whom the murderer kept for several days, beforehand.

Gina said, "Look at the face on that horrible queer."

Marius entered the kitchen and, without ceremony, presented his parents with the contention that he "looked like shit" in his school photograph. The school photograph was produced and exhibited. Marius didn't look like shit.

"You don't look like shit," said Richard authoritatively. He felt he knew all there was to know about looking like shit. "You look good."

"I think that's so awful," said Gina, "the little boy saying 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry' like that."

The young swear more now, and the old swear more now. This is perhaps the only area in which your parents can shock you as much as your children. The middle-aged swear more too, of course, in reflexive protest against their failing powers.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" cried the little boy to the adult stranger in the neighborhood playground. The little boy's brother was also stabbed to death. He didn't shout, "I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" He was older and maybe he knew something that his little brother didn't know.

Among its many recent demotions, motive has lost its place in the old law enforcement triumvirate: means, motive, opportunity. Means, motive, opportunity has been replaced by witnesses, confession, physical evidence. A contemporary investigator will tell you that he hardly ever thinks about motive. It's no help. He's sorry, but it's no help. Fuck the why, he'll say. Look at the how, which will give you the who. But fuck the why.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" cried the little boy. He thought he had offended and angered his murderer in some way, without meaning to. He thought that that was the why. The little boy was searching for motivation, in the contemporary playground. Don't look. You won't find it, because it's gone. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

A square of city rather than a city square, it branched out like an inbred

shim family whose common name was Wroxhall, Wroxhall Road, then

Wroxhall Street. Wroxhall Terrace, then Wroxhall Gardens. Then Court, Lane, Close, Place, Row, Way. Drive, then Park, then Walk. Richard locked the Maestro, whose days were numbered, and turned to confront a landscape out of one of his own novels—if you could speak of landscape, or of locus, or of anywhere at all, in a prose so diagonal and mood-warped. Actually this is as good a time as any to do what Gal Aplanalp is doing and take a quick look at Richard's stuff—while the author stumbles, swearing, from Avenue to Crescent to Mews, in search of Darko, and of Belladonna.

Essentially Richard was a marooned modernist. If prompted, Gwyn Barry would probably agree with Herman Melville: that the art lay in pleasing the readers. Modernism was a brief divagation into difficulty; but Richard was still out there, in difficulty. He didn't want to please the readers. He wanted to stretch them until they twanged. Aforethought was first person, Dreams Don't Mean Anything strictly localized third; both nameless, the I and the he were author surrogates and the novels comprised their more or less uninterrupted and indistinguishable monologues interieurs. Untitled, with its octuple time scheme and its rotating crew of sixteen unreliable narrators, sounded like a departure, but it wasn't. As before, all you had was a voice. This was the basket that contained all the eggs. And the voice was urban, erotic and erudite ... Although his prose was talented, he wasn't trying to write talent novels. He was trying to write genius novels, like Joyce. Joyce was the best yet at genius novels, and even he was a drag about half the time. Richard, arguably, was a drag all the time. If you had to settle on a one-word description of his stuff then you would almost certainly make do with unreadable. Unfitted, for now, remained unread, but no one had ever willingly finished its predecessors. Richard was too proud and too lazy and—-in a way—too clever and too nuts to write talent novels. For instance, the thought of getting a character out of the house and across town to somewhere else made him go vague with exhaustion ...

He reached a corner. Wroxhall Parade? Across the road was a wired children's playground populated not by children (note the silence) but by menacingly sober old drunks, behind seesaw, behind jungle-gym, between swings and roundabouts. Would New York be like this? On his way here Richard had noticed all the speed bumps. Sleeping policemen were the only kind of policemen you would find in such a land, a land of stay-away and no-go. Richard walked past yet another scorched mattress. Revelation would come, hereabouts, in the form of the mattress-fire . . . Richard continued to write about this world but he hadn't

actually walked around in it for six or seven years. All he did, nowadays,

with this world, was drive through it, in the vermilion Maestro.

As he made towards the given address, and identified it, he paused and turned and gave his surroundings one last dutiful sweep of the eyes. The pale wire, the brutalist hairdos of the lopped trees. Poverty said the same thing, century after century, but in different kinds of sentences. The sentences spoken by what confronted him here would be short sentences, rich in nothing but solecism and profanity. Now how did this tie in with the mangled syllogism, arrived at ten hours earlier over a cup of tea and a stupefied cigarette, following the usual failure with Gina. Going something like:

A. Gwyn's trex was loved by the world; his trex was universal.

B.  The world loved trex; the world was trex.

C. Better use the world, in that case; better have Gwyn picked on by
something his own size . ..

No need for Richard to knock himself out, humping the Los Angeles Times all over town. Or seeking the hospitality of the pages of The Little Magazine for that gory "middle" he was forever rehearsing in his mind. Literature couldn't do it. The world could fucking do it... As Richard climbed the steps, the supposedly superseded notion of paying money to get Gwyn beaten up returned to him with all the freshness of discovery.

As promised, the front door was unlatched ("I guarantee it," Darko had said). Steadying himself in the hall Richard heard the sound of a sander or a plane-saw: a plane-saw whining for its plane-saw mummy. It was the noise of dental pain: it was the noise of pain. The weak link is you, Steve Cousins had said, in the Canal Creperie. If we do this, he had said, the weak link is you. If someone leaned on you—you'd break. People don't know pain and fear, he had said, I know pain and fear. Pain and fear are my friends. I'm watertight. The weak link is you . . . Richard had always thought that he knew pain and fear; but he didn't—not yet. Pain and fear were waiting for him, as they waited for everyone. A whole hospice of pain and fear, patiently waiting.

He knocked on the first inner door he came to. Darko opened it. A Transylvanian confrontation, just for a second: Darko's eyes were redder than his red hair, redder than the Maestro. He looked Richard up and down, and said, as if identifying him by name, "Charisma bypass." Very soon they were standing in a room roughly the size of a tennis court and filled with furniture that might have come from anywhere or even everywhere: from the SCRs of provincial sociology departments, from business hotels, from schoolrooms, from barracks.

Turning, Richard said boldly, "Where are you from, Darko? Originally."

"From the place I still call Yugoslavia.”

 

Darko was standing in the middle of the room's kitchen district and staring down at some kind of foodstuff splayed on a plate. Now he looked up, and smiled. Long upper lip with a feathery mustache on it; long upper gum, also gingery in hue.

"Are you Serb or Croat? Out of interest."

"I don't accept that distinction."

"Yes. Well. There isn't any ethnic distinction, is there. Just religion. Nothing visible." On the mantelpiece Richard thought he saw a devotional knickknack or icon, lit from within by a bulb the shape of a closed tulip; it was the Virgin Mary (he sensed), but travestied, with joke breasts outthrust like the figure of a redoubtable maiden on a ship's prow. "Isn't there some big deal about the sequence of making the sign of the cross? In the war, in the world war, Croat soldiers rounded up children and got them to make the sign of the cross. To see which way they did it. To see if they lived or died."

This was obviously news to Darko: fresh information. Richard tried to relax himself with the following thought: that nowadays, in a sense, you could know more about a stranger than the stranger knew about himself. Recently he had involved himself in an argument on his doorstep with a proselytizing Mormon (soon to be sent on his way with a taunt) who had never heard of Moroni: Moroni, the nineteenth-century American angel, the Messiah of the wild-goose chase in whose name the bearded ranter trudged from house to house. Big clue, that: Moroni. Moron with an i on the end of it. Moronic without the c.

Darko said, "I believe that everyone is a human being."

"I buy that too. Belladonna, I take it, is a human being. I mean I assume she exists. Where is she?"

"Getting dressed. Getting undressed. What's the diff? Now what do I do with this cholesterol bomb?"

He gestured at the dish and what it contained. The dish glowed back up at him like the palette of a busy artist: some modern primitive who worked in pastels.

"Bung it in the fucking MW," Darko decided.

MW equaled microwave. That was good. The word had fewer syllables than its abbreviation. Especially good, especially self-defeating, because the microwave was a device intended to cheat time. Anyway Darko had already heated it, and was already eating it—his mango pizza or pomegranate rissole—with both hands... On a video he'd hired and admired, Richard remembered the motorist hero referring to his FWD, or four-wheel drive. One might add that there are certain frolicsome cosmologists who refer to "the WYSIWYG universe," or "What You See Is What You Get." To be fair, this isn't an abbreviation but an acronym. They don't actually stand there and say Double-U-Why-Ess-Eye-Double-U-Why-Gee. They stand there and say Wysiwig. Those assholes. Whom we ask to do the job of wondering how we're here. The wysiwyg universe is the one in which dark matter, the overarching shadow comprising perhaps 97 percent of universal mass, remains unexotic, the usual proton-neutron-electron arrangement, just planets, possibly, bigger than Jupiter but not big enough to shine, "massive compact halo objects," known (what is it with these guys?) as MACHOS. What is it with these guys? The "free lunch" universe. The "designer" universe. The "charisma bypass" universe? Sending their minds back eighteen billion years, they reach for catchphrases that were getting old eighteen months ago.

"Will Belladonna be joining us? And tell me more," said Richard, making sure there was plenty of amusement in his tone, "about her thing with Gwyn Barry."

Darko held up a ringer while he finished a demanding mouthful, one that involved much tongue work on all four sets of molars. At last he said, "Who?"

"Belladonna."

"You mean Diva. She's called Diva now. Now I don't know Diva mega-well."

"Is that right."

"With men, everywhere you look there's Divagate."

No, not divagate: Divagate. Like Watergate, etcetera.

"A lot going on," Richard suggested. "More than meets the eye."

"She gives good girlrock, I reckon. Yep."

Richard went on standing there.

"Oh yeh," said Darko with resignation. "Diva's wild for the wild thing."

"Have you known her mega-long? Where is she, for instance?"

Darko excused himself and left the room through a door beyond the kitchen. When he came back he looked at Richard suddenly and said, "Who are you?"

"Richard. Who are you?"

"Ranko."

"You mean Darko."

"Darko is my twin brother. He's Croat. I'm Serb. We look the same but we've got nothing in common."

"Well you both eat pizza. You've still got a bit of it hanging from your mustache."

The man stood there neutrally, continuing to clean his teeth with his tongue. "She's getting up," he said. "Me I'm off out.”

 

Richard was alone in the room he should never have entered for only five or six turbulent seconds, while one door closed and another opened. If you could have micro-monitored this time frame you would have found: fear of injury, disease and murder, fear of the dark that was now descending, fear of poverty, of poor rooms, fear of Gina and her swelling irises; despair for the stranded self and its timidly humming blood; and, among all these fears and hates, the sense of relief, of clarity and surety a man feels, at the prospect of temptation, when he knows he has washed his cock before leaving the house. He took one smeared glance at Diva as she came slanting into the room and thought: hopeless. He's safe. I'm safe. Not deadly nightshade. Just poison ivy. We're all safe.

"Hi."

"Hi."

"Richard," she said.

"Diva."