THE INFORMATION

Your room, ideally designed for comfort, offers a panoramic view of the ocean setting. In the restaurant you may sample typical local cuisine or delicacies from our international menu. Before your meal, why not enjoy a 'cocktail' in the 'Crow's Nest' bar?

In Denial, amenities abound. There is a wide variety of activities and the finest entertainment. Hunt for 'bargains' in the bustling market town. Or simply recline by the pool and 'relax.'

Whilst we reserve the right to increase our prices at any time, once you pay your deposit the price of your holiday as shown on your invoice will not be increased unless you amend your booking. No refunds will be made for cancellations, exchange rate movements, or cost adjustments that would otherwise decrease the holiday price.

So book now for the sun and fun of Denial. Denial: the true 'never never' land of all your dreams .. .

But the information comes at night. The communications technology it picks is not the phone or the fax or the E-mail. It is the telex-so its teeth can chatter in your head. The information makes sleep interdisciplinary, syllabus disciplines, and then disciplines unknown or not yet devised: eschatoscopy, synchrodesics, thermodonture.

The information is advertising a symposium of pain. Pains of all faiths and all denominations. These are your little ones, these are your pretty ones. Become accustomed to their voices. They will grow louder, and more persistent, and more persuasive, until they're all there is.

It is ordinary and everyday. On the beach the waves do it ceaselessly, gathering mass and body, climbing until they break and are then resum-moned into the generality with a sound like breath sucked in between the teeth.

Weakness will get you where you are weakest. Weakness will be strong and bold, and make for your weak spot. If in the head, then in the head. If in the heart, then in the heart. If in the loins, then in the loins. If in the eyes, then in the eyes. If in the mouth, then in the mouth.

The information is nothing. Nothing: the answer is so many of our questions. What will happen to me when I die? What is death anyway? Is there anything I can do about that? Of what does the universe primarily consist? What is the measure of our influence within it? What is our span, in cosmic time? What will our world eventually become? What mark will we leave-to remember us by?

'Door,' said Richard. 'The door. I-'

'What is it?'

'Just sad dreams. It isn't anything.'

'Hush now,' said Gina. 'Hush . ..'

It was seven o'clock and Gwyn Barry was driving westward into a low sun: into the bloodbath of sunset. The one-way street fled through the tunnel of his rearview mirror; and above his head a ragged and sclerotic cloud dangled from the sky, an outcast from a superior system: it looked like an unforgivable deepsea fish whose bad radar had taken it where it should not go-a disgrace to the bright-ringleted shallows. Thus the ambience was briefly painterly and Parisian: clarity on which a shadow is soon to fall. Had he been younger (say seventeen), or a different kind of person, he might have marked it, its queasy numinousness. But he was Gwyn Barry, and he was coming back from his hour with the pro at the Warlock, and he was having drinks and dinner with Mercedes Soroya, who had a proposal for him, and the Profundity thing would be announced that night at 2200 hours-and he was driving, in a city, which takes part of the mind and plugs it in somewhere else, into the city and the city's sticky streets.

Up ahead an orange van stood athwart the narrow entrance to Sutherland Avenue. Gwyn's car slowed and, at a respectful distance, rolled to a halt. He could see through the dusk-lit slot of the van's side windows: empty, like something brain-dead. He looked around, expecting to see the nearby berk who would shortly climb into it and drive it away or at least open its bonnet and stand there staring at it with his hands on his hips. There was hardly enough time for impatience to gather (he wasn't Richard after all, who would have been impatient already, whatever was happening), hardly enough time to give his horn a coaxing toot . . . When Gwyn felt the car jolt he was less surprised by the impact, whichwas not severe, than by the affront to his spatial awareness: a second ago the rearview mirror had been clear, the street bare, the evening light still and heavy. He turned. An old wood-ribbed Morris Minor occupied the breadth of his tinted back window. At its wheel, an old lady in a rimless fruitbowl hat and a white shawl, and also wearing the pleading look that old ladies wear. Sumptuously reassured, Gwyn felt love for the old lady, for the white shawl, for the wooden ribs of the innocuous Morris. Yes- wait-she was climbing out. Gwyn undipped his seatbelt. He would be wonderful about it. He didn't know the old lady's name. The old lady was called Agnes Trounce.

He stepped into the rosy light, under the gut-colored cloud. He veered round affrontedly as the orange van gave a neigh out of nowhere and reeled off at speed down the open avenue. He turned again: the old lady, her figure bent, was walking away too fast between the parked cars, and the second door of the ribbed Morris was opening. They came out low, and then they straightened. One had hair of pale ginger and invisible eyebrows. The other was thin, with black hat pulled down and black scarf pulled up and black glasses looping the central strip of his face. Gwyn was entirely ready. He was without reflexes, without gestures. All he felt was apology and panic and relief.

'What you call my mum?'

'What?'

'Nobody,' said Steve Cousins, coming forward and reaching under his coat for the car tool, 'and I mean nobody, calls my mother a cunt.'

The sun was looking down on this, but not quite sincerely. The sun is very old, but the sun has always lied about its age. The sun is older than it looks: eight minutes older. The sun, to us, is always as it was eight minutes ago, when its light began the journey across the eight light-minutes. As Steve Cousins and Paul Limb (backup) moved in on Gwyn Barry, the sun was really eight minutes older than it looked, eight minutes redder, eight minutes deeper in the sky. This opened up a gap in time.

Eight minutes ago Crash was behind the wheel of the blue Metro (under its roof rack of ads and L-signs), half a mile to the east, showing Demeter Barry how you negotiated speed bumps at fifty miles per hour.

Six minutes ago Crash was 400 yards to the northeast, showing Demi how you reversed over a mini-roundabout.

Four minutes ago Crash was 450 yards to the north-northeast, showing Demi how you did a hand-brake turn on a zebra crossing.

Two minutes ago Crash was 200 yards due north, showing Demi how you jumped a red light with your eyes shut.

No minutes ago, intending to show Demi how you careened in the wrong direction up a one-way street, Crash performed an emergency stop, smacked his palm on the horn, and slid with massive ease through the opening door (his belt lay in a coiled pool on the floor mat, despised, disdained, dull with disuse). By the time Demi climbed out and fixed her fragile vision on the scene, she saw the Morris Minor reversing at speed down the one-way street (she was momentarily impressed), and Crash standing by her husband's car with her husband.

The sun liked him. The universe still liked him. Either that, or the universe was through with Richard Tull.

Shortly after noon the next day Richard was to be found in the snug bar of the Warlock Sports Club. He was drinking brandy and smoking cigarettes and staring at his shoe. A broadsheet newspaper, uncomfortably perched on the round table nearby, carried a front-page photograph of Gwyn and his wife, and described him, in its caption, as the Inaugural Laureate of the Cairns-Du Plessis Profundity Requital. Richard went on drinking and smoking and staring, with some show of serenity, at his shoe. The snug bar was often called the squash bar, and it was certainly very cramped and airless, but it never contained any Squash Members, or Tennis Members, or any exponents of snooker, darts, or bowls. It contained Social Members. Who were all sociopaths. So around Richard were arrayed a few tattoo-bespattered warthogs and authentic thirty- year-old methuselahs fingering their earrings as they applied themselves to their tabloids, and the odd clutch of