THE INFORMATION

like Sebby were molding it into.

At last Sebby entered. Rubbing his hands together, he offered apologies and then congratulations.

'Thanks,' said Gwyn. 'Listen.'

He said he wanted to present Sebby with a hypothetical situation. Sebby was used to being presented with hypothetical situations. Beginning every sentence with the word supposing, Gwyn gave Sebby a digest of recent events and an account of the incident the previous evening.

'Supposing all this happened,' he said. 'I mean, I know when you get well- known-things like this are going to happen. But I've talked to a couple of people who are on TV more than I am, and they say these things happen to them about once a year. Not once a day. So. Suppose it isn't random. Suppose all this. What would I do?'

And Sebby said, 'You'd come to me.'

At once Gwyn felt a part of his mind freeing up: 'I'm a writer, not a literary critic' sounded too dry and lordly. One should be humble, but also secretive: twinkly. Why do I write? Why does the spider spin its web? Why does the bee store its honey? That sounded a bit-

Sebby wanted something from him.

'Oh, right,' said Gwyn. He searched his wallet for the piece of paper with the registration number of the Morris Minor written on it. No: itwas in his diaiy. Another jacket. 'It's in another jacket,' he said. 'You might start with the driving instructor. He denied it to me, but Demi says he knows one of the men in the car. They call him Crash but his real name's Gary.'

Sebby wanted something else from him. But there was a problem here because Gwyn would be a Labour man until the day he died.

'Let me think about it. On this other matter, what exactly are you going to do?'

'You don't want to know.'

And they went through to lunch.

On the whole, Richard was delighted with Stumbling on Melons-the feel of it, the heft of it. He compared it to Love's Counterfeit and it looked just as antique and marginal and forgotten-though much newer, of course. He booted it round his study for a few hours, and wet it, and used it as an ashtray, and scrabbled at it with his chewed nails. The main difference between Stumbling on Melons and Love's Counterfeit was that Love's Counterfeit looked read. So he put in a lot of time, not exactly reading it (he did read it, twice, savoring his own interpolations), but skimming it. With unwashed hands. With city fingers. Balfour had been quiet and tactful, and hadn't asked any more questions. He seemed to know. He certainly knew about the Profundity Requital, and offered his commiserations. He more or less came out and said that he wouldn't be expecting too much from Richard over the next few weeks. In effect he was giving him a Profundity Sabbatical from the Tantalus Press.

Richard called Rory Plantagenet and arranged to meet him that Friday.

'No,' he said. 'It's too sensitive to discuss on the phone. I want to do some checking first. It could be a hoax. Or it could be a big, big story.'

Annoyingly, there were now three Barry Profiles under construction on Richard's desk. Three Profiles: the original, the original alternative, and the alternative alternative. The original was, in Richard's estimation, a work of the flintiest integrity, a noble example of that ancient literary genre called 'flyting.' Flyting stood at the polar opposite of panegyric, which is to say that it consisted of personal abuse. Freakishly well written, and fantastically hostile, the original could take its shameless place alongside certain passages of Swift, of Jonson, of William Dunbar. But nearly all of it would have to go. The original alternative and the alternative alternative, by comparison, were just workmanlike character assassinations of the kind you might see pretty often, he imagined, in the newspapers of certain totalitarian states, when a pressured editor was

softening up some internal enemy for obliteration. Still, Richard believed that the alternative alternative needn't be as namby-pamby as the original alternative, which would have appeared when Gwyn (his condition, like Richard's prose, serious but stable) was deep in Intensive Care. And of course all that would have to go too.

Okay, he thought. Plagiarism was better. With plagiarism, decorum would be observed. Those who live by the pen must die by the- etcetera. Richard still felt that violence was a better and simpler way (give him the sword every time) but violence was an alien from another genre. Look how it inhibited his prose .. . Perhaps that was what violence, all violence, really was: a category mistake. Violence was both fabulous and banal. Anyway, it would have to go. It was gone. He knew that Gwyn had finally put one and one together and was now taking the appropriate precautions. And Cousins was gone. Steve Cousins had what it took to get through Untitled without his head falling off, but that was the extent of his merits. Cousins: his reader. Richard's readership.

The alternative alternative. Richard would of course begin with the scandal he was about to create, saying at once, with a disingenuousness as pure and rarefied as celestial music, that he had 'no wish to add to' the tumult surrounding 'this unfortunate affair.' He would then go on to talk generally about plagiarism and the self, how its roots lay in masochism and despair, in dreams of self-injury and self-defeat; and how, uniquely, it seemed to linger as a smear, infecting both the raptor and the raped. Next, if he could summon the gall for it, he would demand the reader's sympathy for Thad Green, that tender and neglected seeker who lived and died without knowing that his work, his vision, albeit in the form of a mercenary travesty, would eventually bring (false and transient) consolation to an entire hemisphere .. .

Plagiary meant kidnapper, seducer-which meant he could get the girls back in. Gilda, Audra Christenberry, maybe Belladonna. It was a shame that Audra wasn't married and that Belladonna was presumably over sixteen. Richard needed to keep telling himself that there was another test the Profile had to pass (one that the original, he now saw, would certainly have failed): it had to be publishable. No kill-fee, thank you: he was already a kill-fee down on the deal . . . Demi could stay, and the shape of the piece seemed to demand that she be treated gently. Richard had never been completely happy with the extended digression about her sleeping with black guys for free cocaine, but he was definitely going to keep, and enlarge, the passage where she said that Gwyn's stuff-or Thad's stuff-was shit.

With his thumb and forefinger Richard massaged his right elbow, inthe joint there: pestle and mortar. Belladonna: what did one believe? A thin sweat of confusion formed a join-the-dots puzzle on his unreliable upper lip. His plan, he knew, had certain flaws.

'Rank beggar, ostir dregar,' he incanted, 'foule fleggar in the flet. Baird rehator, theif of natour, fals tratour, feyindis gett.. .'

Thief of nature. One of the birds lodging in the nicotined greenery outside his window seemed to have learned how to imitate a car alarm: a looping lasso of sound. Various car alarms belonged to various types, various genres: the nagging, the hysterical, the scandalized. There was even a postmodern car alarm, which trilled out a fruity compendium of all other car alarms. This was the car alarm that all the birds of London would eventually know how to do.

He had liked Steve Cousins because he was the hero of a novel from the future. In literature as in life everything would go on getting less and less innocent. The rapists of the eighteenth century were the romantic leads of the nineteenth; the anarchic Lucifers of the nineteenth were the existential Lancelots of the twentieth. And so it went on, until . . . Darko: famished poet. Belladonna: damaged waif. Cousins: free spirit and scourge of hubris. Richard Tull: the good guy, down on his luck, and misunderstood.

Demi was leaning on the sideboard with her arms straightened, her arms locked-near where the telephone was. She had her rounded back to the room but Gwyn could see her in the mirror as he approached: her head unemotionally bowed (over a desk diary), the skewed collar of her shirt, the inevitable glimpse of tinged brassiere. And she could see him, now: in yet another new track suit, black, hugging, frogmanlike.