THE INFORMATION

following eighteen months in, which is probably why it was Link that stuck.

Who knew? Crash might have been called Crash because he was very big and made a lot of noise when he fell over. Crash might have been called Crash because of the predictable rhythm of his personal finances: the thing that always happened after the fortnightly boom of his paycheck. Most probably, though, Crash was called Crash because of his long-abandoned habit of sleeping in other people's houses: on couches, floorboards, in bathtubs … A relative newcomer to the scene might intelligibly suppose that Crash was called Crash because of what kept happening to him in the cars at the driving school. Close my eyes and I see Crash presiding with arms unhappily folded over a ten-acre breaker's yard of totaled Metros. Or, by modest extension, one might assume that Crash was called Crash because of what kept happening to his students in their cars within days of passing the test. And their cars were burnished and German, with cruise control and the digitalized speedo: for the school was a fashionable one, and all the women asked for Crash- though not by that name.

Among his students was Lady Demeter Barry.

So: Steve Cousins in the dark interior of the office at the end of the mews with a book on his lap (he always had a book with him: today it was On Aggression by Konrad Lorenz), looking out. And Crash on the cob-bles among the burning roofs of cars, looking in. Neither knew if their eyes had met through this fierce division of light. Steve put his book aside. Crash bade farewell to another student, a rich teenage boy with the good build and a space-ranger short back and sides and Mekon cranium of the future.

'Crash mate,' said Scozzy.

'Scozzy,' said Crash.

Crash went to get the coffees from the perc. Like many young men in the neighborhood, Crash had once worked for Scozzy, as a salesman of cocaine. This fact defined the current protocol. Black Crash now stood bunched over the coffee nook, big, not fat, just big, and not hopelessly enormous either, by no means, not like some with the same black magnitude, whose mothers must have watched them grow with steadily diminishing pride. Scozzy experienced regret. Crash could have been useful. It was a real pisser that he wasn't more like his little brother 13, who was basically very dishonest-who was effortlessly dishonest.

'Forgot how you like it,' he called.

And Steve told him: 'Black. Two sugars.'

The two men settled on the low sofa. The luminous track suit that Crash wore (none of that gear for Scozz: no warmup stuff, no fucking sweats) was well outshone by the heavy life that wavered from his face. Like 13 he talked London, but there were memories of Africa in him, like the great event of the nose, which resembled the back of a black bullfrog squatting on his face, and the token dreadlocks, done in little sprigs at right-angles from the head. Not real dreadlocks, of course; real dreadlocks remained religiously unwashed and ended up looking like a length of giant fag ash. His eyes were bright-even the blood in them was bright. Famously big on white flip, as if he was doing research: bedroom with a revolving door. Steve looked at Crash and thought there was no way in the world he was related to a trog like Link. And Steve knew, further, that in any evolutionary illustration charting the course from Link to Crash, he himself (Scozzy with his flared genes) would not be on Crash's right but somewhere in the middle.

'Tits?' began Crash when Scozz got the ball rolling. 'A man need a rope and a pickax. And better take you climbing boots.'

'She's racked,' said Steve, not without grimness.

'Like them fucking things in the-freak vegetables. Marrows or whatever, When they overdone it on the injections.'

Steve flexed his neck. 'Big tits is one thing,' he said. 'But you don't want them all over the gaff.'

'She hitch them up. I tell you, she leaning backward like .. . prop inthe tug-of-war.' Crash laughed quietly, in admiration. 'She don't want to fall over. All that lot come tumbling down on top of her.'

In different company, Crash might have spent a contented half hour in similar vein before changing the subject-before moving on, say, to how Lady Demeter Barry was built from the waist down. But now he was suddenly wondering what he was doing here-talking tits with Scozzy. You didn't want to be doing that, not with him, not with this fucking neuro. You definitely didn't want to be doing that… Crash saw that Steve's sloped chin was puckering as his mouth hardened into a beak; dissatisfaction was also expressing itself through heat in the eyes. Reflexively, and in the present case not even mildly indignantly, Crash checked the air for a white-black interaction-our women: all this. He came up with nothing in particular. Maybe Scozz was just getting to the point. At the end of the day, whatever happened, Crash was going to give 13 a smack. He waited. He was at a disadvantage, of course. Because nobody, but nobody, knew about Steve's strange taste in tits.

Now Steve told Crash what he wanted him to do, framed as a series of suggestions. Crash looked elsewhere. Fellow instructors, students (the office was filling up as the hour turned), those girls behind the desk to the side: they would have found it unbelievable, seeing the two men on the sofa, that the black man feared the white, that the big man feared the small. But he did fear him. Many times he had seen Scozzy go about his work, in pubs, in car parks. And Scozzy didn't stop. When he started, he didn't stop. In such contexts, too, the big man was traditionally wary of the small, because the small man always made the first move. And then there was Scozzy and words.

'She's a happily married woman,' Crash heard himself saying. 'On TV as such.'

'Listen. Driving instructors. Spend all day looking at parted legs. Seat belt on all right, darling? Allow me. And you. This is the brothers' time, son. You got latitude.' Steve's breath moved closer, its flavor incredibly man-made, like the new breath of a fleet car. 'Out there in the little Metro. Some rich flip sits herself down on your courting finger. And if she so much as blinks, you go: 'Raciss!' Don't bother you the other way though, does it.' The breath came nearer still. The breath was just another weapon. 'When they're down there, doing it for democracy. Or anthropology. Or some other reason. Enjoy it, mate. While it lasts.

Reparations-that's the ting. Yat. Slave trade is it.'

Crash turned away from this for a moment. As it happened he had his own image of the slave trade, which he carried around with him in his head. This image was of a contained volume of absolute darkness; itssound effects were dull human hooting and the creak of boards at sea. He turned back. He was going to smear 13. Crash didn't drink as a rule but sometimes, when the pressure built too big, he got a bottle of scotch-he didn't give a fuck-and drank the whole thing. Not often. But sometimes, to sort out the stress, he got a bottle of scotch and threw away the top. (He didn't give a fuck.) Now Crash swallowed and said musingly,

'Got to eat bland for a day or two. Gut's all sour.'

'You don't have to do nothing, Crash, mate. All I want's information. Advice: cut out the perfume. You reek of cheap ponce. You smell like a fucking minicab.'

Yeah that's right, thought Crash. Scozzy was bad news, all bad news, terrible information from start to finish, like a catastrophic telecast that kept going on for hour after hour.

'This is it.'

Demeter Barry was punctual: the stroke of noon. She came out of the sunshine and in through the glass door with her head lowered so that she seemed to be peeping upward and at an angle. The first thing you noticed about her from the waist up, actually, was the central line of her gray silk blouse: it was not quite sheer or true, wavering on the way down and missing her belt buckle, which was itself, perhaps, imperfectly justified.

'Hi Gary,' she said.

'And how are you this morning,' said Crash in the deeper and more priestly and African tones he used for the driving instruction of white women. He turned to Scozzy, who picked up his book, and nodded, and extended his hand and said: 'Steve Cousins.'

As he walked down the mews Steve realized that this was the closest he had ever come to saying something he often came very close to saying: 'Steve Cousins,' he had almost said: