THE INFORMATION

and indulgent and even quite genuine. 'Richard,' he said.

'Don't laugh like that. You'll pull a muscle. You'll break your neck. Forty years old. I saw your obit in The Times.'

'Listen, are you coming to this thing?'

'I am, but I don't think you'd better. Sit tight, by the fire. With a rug on your lap. And an old-boy pill with your hot drink.'

'Yes, all right. Enough,' said Gwyn. 'Are you coming to this thing?'

'Yeah, I suppose so. Why don't I come to you around twelve-thirty and we'll get a cab.'

'Twelve-thirty. Good.'

'You fucking old wreck.'

Richard sobbed briefly and then paid a long and consternated visit to the bathroom mirror. His mind was his own and he accepted full responsibility for it, whatever it did or might do. But his body. The rest of the morning he spent backing his way into the first sentence of a seven-hundred-word piece about a seven-hundred-page book about Warwick Deeping. Like the twins, Richard and Gwyn Barry were Only a day apart in time. Richard would be forty tomorrow. The information would not be carried by The Times: The Times, the newspaper of record. Only one celebrity lived at 49E Calchalk Street; and she wasn't famous. Gina was a genetic celebrity. She was beautiful, every inch, and she didn't change. She got older, but she didn't change. In the gallery of the old photographs she was always the same, staring out, while everyone else seemed disgracefully, protean, kaftaned Messiahs, sideburned Zapatas. He sometimes wished she wasn't: wasn't beautiful. In his present travail. Her brother and sister were ordinary. Her dead dad had been ordinary. Her mother was still around for the time being, fat and falling apart and still mountainously pretty somehow, in a bed somewhere.

We are agreed-come on: we are agreed-about beauty in the flesh. Consensus is possible here. And in the mathematics of the universe, beauty helps tell us whether things are false or true. We can quickly agree about beauty, in the heavens and in the flesh. But not everywhere. Not, for instance, on the page.

In the van, Scozzy looked at 13 and said,

'Morrie goes to the doctor, right?'

'Right,' said 13.

13 was eighteen and he was black. His real name was Bendy. Scozzy was thirty-one, and he was white. His real name was Steve Cousins.

Scozzy said, 'Morrie tells the doc, he says, 'I can't raise it with my wife. My wife Queenie. I can't raise it with Queenie.' '

Hearing this, 13 did something that white people have stopped really doing. He grinned. White people used to do it, years ago. 'Yeah,' said 13 expectantly. Morrie, Queenie, he thought: all Jews is it.

Scozzy said, 'The doc goes, 'Unlucky. Listen. We got these pills in from Sweden. The latest gear. Not cheap. Like a carpet a pill. Okay?' '

13 nodded. 'Or whatever,' he said.

They were sitting in the orange van, drinking cans of Ting: pineapple-grapefruit crush. 13's fat dog Giro sat erectly between them on the handbrake section, keeping still but panting as if in great lust.

' 'Take one of them and you'll have a stiffy for four hours. A bonk with a capital O.' Morrie goes home, right?' Scozzy paused and then said thoughtfully, 'Morrie rings up the doc and he's like, 'I just took one of them pills but guess what.' '

13 turned and frowned at Scozzy.

' 'Queenie's gone shopping! Won't be back for four hours!' The doc says, 'This is serious, mate. Is there anybody else indoors?' Morrie says,

'Yeah, The au pair,' The doc says, 'What she like?' 'Eighteen with big tits.' So the doc goes, 'Okay. Stay calm. You'll have to do it with the au pair. Tell her it's an emergency. Medical matter.' ' 'Medical matter whatever,' murmured 13.

' 'Ooh I don't know,' says Morrie. 'I mean a carpet a pill? Seems like an awful waste. I can get a stiffy with the au pair anyway.' '

There was silence.

Giro gulped and started panting again.

13 leaned back in his seat. Grin and frown now contested for the suzerainty of his face. The grin won. 'Yeah,' said 13. 'Do it on the carpet is it.'

'.. . What fucking carpet?'

'You said carpet.'

'When?'

'Pill on the carpet.'

'Jesus Christ,' said Scozzy. 'The pills cost a carpet. Each.'

13 looked mildly unhappy. A mere nothing. It would pass.

'A carpet. Jesus. You know: half a stretch.'

Nothing-a mere nothing.

'Fucking hell. A stretch is six months. A carpet is half a stretch. Three hundred quid.'

It had passed. 13 grinned weakly.

Scozzy said, 'You're the one who's always in fucking prison.'

With fright-movie suddenness (Giro stopped panting) Richard Tull appeared in the left foreground of the van's glass screen and fixed them with a wince before reeling on by. Giro gulped, and started panting again.

'Woe,' said Scozzy.

'The man,' 13 said simply.

'He's not the man. The man's the other one. He's his mate.' Scozzy nodded and smiled and shook his head with all these things coming together: he loved it. 'And Crash does his wife.'

'The man,' said 13. 'Of TV fame.' 13 frowned, and added, 'I never seen him on the telly.'

Steve Cousins said, 'You just watch fucking Sky.'

Richard rang the bell on Holland Park and, momentarily haggard in his bow tie, presented himself to the security camera-which jerked round affrontedly at him in its compact gantry above the door. He also made mental preparations. The state Richard sought was one of disparity readiness. And he never found it. Gwyn's setup always flattened him. He was like the chinless cadet in the nuclear submarine, small-talking with one of the guys as he untwirled the bolt (routine check) on the torpedo bay-and was instantly floored by a frothing phallus of seawater. Deep down out there, with many atmospheres. The pressure of all that Gwyn had.

To take a heftily looming instance, the house itself. Its mass and scope, its particular reach and sweep he knew well: for a year he had gone to school in an identical building across the street. The school, a cosmopolitan crammer, which was dead now, like Richard's father, who had scrimped to send him there, used to accommodate a staff of twenty-five and over two hundred pupils-an ecology of estrogen and testosterone, bumfluff, flares, fights, fancyings, first loves. That tiered rotating world was vanished. But now in a place of the same measurements, the same volume, lived Gwyn and Demeter Barry. Oh yeah. And the help .. . Richard moved his head around as if to relieve neck pain. The camera continued to stare at him incredulously. He tried to stare back at it, with mad pride. Richard wasn't guilty of covetousness, funnily enough. In the shops he seldom saw anything that looked much fan to buy. He liked the space but he didn't want