THE INFORMATION

thousand-yard hike through the human and mechanical effluvia of Ladbroke Grove, Richard, at least, felt intoxicated to a sordid degree. He paced up the three double flights of stairs, giving stertorous voice to his opinion that there was probably a sequel to Stumbling on Melons and Gwyn had got that off the back of Thad's lorry too .. . He fell sideways, and righted himself. The bikes on the walls, on the ceiling, seemed to strike up an assonance with the oil and metal at the back of his throat. Richard opened the clapboard door: more stairs.

'Everest,' said Rory.

Richard pressed on, bouncing from wall to wall with the Hoover tube tightening its grip round his neck; and he was already thinking that suicide had much to be said for it, because life was too much fucking fetching and carrying and too much scrabbling for keys in pockets and too much going from this place to that place and then to some other fucking place …

'It'll come out,' he said. 'It always comes out.'

And the shoe will squeak, and the door will creak.

Gwyn heard him. His body stiffened; but his body was stiffening anyway. And do you know what he did? He pressed his hands over Gina's bath-brightened ears. He pressed them good and tight.

What happens when galaxies collide? Most frequently, nothing. Stars are sparser than the conglomerations they form. Galaxy moves through galaxy. Anti-galaxy moves through anti-galaxy. There is plenty of room.

Richard is back on the street. And this story, his story, endeth here. On the street, with its opposed houses, its ranked cars-and the anti-comedy of the apple blossom loosening in the wind.

He turned. He knew that nothing in his past or his future could ever be as inimitably contemptible as the smile he had managed to rig up for Rory Plantagenet: to rig up, among the moonspots and boneshadows of his youthless face. The memory of this smile would be with him until he died; thirty years from now he would be standing there with his hands over his ears, raising his voice in a mortified yodel, trying to batten down the memory of this smile.

How much had Rory seen? He didn't know. How much had Richard seen? He didn't know. The gulping flurry of pink toweling. They had seen enough. Oh, basta . . .

'Well, as you've probably guessed,' he said, 'we've been leading you down the garden path.'

'I don't follow you.'

'Yes. Pulling the wool over your eyes.' Richard shrugged and opened his hands. A negative hilarity was possessing him. The English language offered him no help-offered him nothing. 'It was just a little stunt we hatched. The three of us, you see. To see how far it would go. We wasted your time. There's no story here. I'm sorry. Please forget it, Rory. Forget it. Please, Rory.'

Now Gwyn chose to make his exit from 49 Calchalk Street, drooping loosely down the steps with his hands in his pockets: the feminine colors of his clothes. To Richard's eyes he looked cynically and even satanically handsome. Unforgettable, again, was the complicit rictus that Richard now laid at his feet.

'Going my way?' said Gwyn.

And Rory fell into step beside him. And Richard was alone.

As he looked down the vista into which they would soon disappear, toward Ladbroke Grove and its circus horses of traffic, Richard saw his son Marco-Marco a long way away, and on the far side of the street, butwith Marco's unmistakably brittle and defeatist stride. There was something terribly wrong with Marco: there was nobody at his side. And yet the child's solitude, his isolation, unlike his father's, was due to an unforgivable error not his own. There was always somebody at Marco's side. In all his seven years there had always been somebody at his side.

A drama, thought Richard. And a diversion: at least this will get me up the goddamned stairs. He realized that he still had the vacuum cleaner: in his arms, across his body, round his neck. Richard was still Laocoon, engulfed in coils and loops. That too he would have to tote, all the way up to 49E. That too.

Father and son started hurrying toward each other. Marco wasn't crying, but Richard had never seen him looking so unhappy: the unhappi-ness that was always made for Marco; the unhappiness that was all his own. Richard knelt, like a knight, and held him.

'Who was with you?'

Marco told him: Lizzete.

'And you were lost?'

There was a man.

'Then what happened?'

He took me to a car: for kittens.

'Then what?'

Three men came. And took him away.

'Took him where? Were they police?'

Marco shrugged.

'Did he go willingly or unwillingly?'

Marco shrugged-with out-turned palms.

'What did they say? Did anyone say anything?'

Yes. The man said, 'I'm a child.'

'The man said you're a child?' And Richard went back four or five years, to the natural confusions of early speech. 'How are you?' he would ask him; and Marco would say, logically enough, 'You're fine.' And Marco would reach out to him with his arms and say, 'Carry you.' And Richard would pick him up and carry him . . .

No. He said I'm a child.

'But he wasn't a child.'

No. He was a man.

Richard stood up. A definitive misery, having to do with unintended consequences, moved past him, tousling his hair like the backdraft of a speeding car. He turned; and now Lizzete, too, was running down Calchalk Street toward them, running stockily with her waist held low. Jesus: and here came the swine in his German car, ripping down my roadat sixty miles an hour to kill my kids. What is this guy's hurry'? Who could want him anywhere sooner than he would get there already? The cone of air with the pig in its nose-it ripped past. A snapshot of profile: the thick skin (two- layered, like the vest beneath his shirt), the pale eyebrows, the plump slobber of the underlip. Richard stood wavering, his hair roughly tousled by the backdraft of the German car.

In its wake, also, crept the tublike orange van, with its limp cream curtains, and 13 slumped flaccid at its wheel. 'Yes' he managed to say (it was pure sibilant: Sssss) when he saw the three of them standing there. Relief and even rapture were shoving their way through a sepsis of distress. It had hit him as he stared through the gap in the back gate of the dead garage: Them was the same fucking blokes that did Crash. Telling little Marco to run along or piss off. And Adolf saying, What's this then? What's this then, lads? Adolf knew what it was: it was a lesson. Compared to you lot-compared to you, I'm a child. I'm a child … 13 was free. He crept past in the orange van. He didn't want them to see him. He never wanted their fire of eyes.

Marco wasn't crying. But Lizzete was. And so was Richard. In the peripheries of his mind he was already rewriting his Profile (It's not often. Clash the, roll out the, raise high the. Hats off to) and working on a way of forgiving Gina. A form of words. Because if he forgave her, she could never leave him now. Who was he? Who had he been throughout? Who would he always be? He was Abel Janszoon Tasman (1603-59): the Dutch explorer who discovered Tasmania without noticing Australia . . .

All the rumors of wind, which had until then been anarchic, like all the backdrafts