THE INFORMATION

'Barnardo Boy.'

As one might say 'Sound Recordist' or 'Political Analyst' or 'Poet and Essayist.'

Of course, he could have said 'wild boy,' which was also true.

'What's your agent scene at the moment?' asked Gwyn Barry. 'Have you got one?'

Gwyn and Richard were at the Westway Health and Fitness Center, surrounded by thirty or forty etiolated drunks: playing snooker. In the ferrety light of pool halls everywhere. Gwyn himself had had several beers, and Richard, naturally, was completely smashed. Eighteen tables, all in use, eighteen lucent pyramids over the green troughs and thebright bone balls; and then the multicolored competitors, Spanish, West Indian, South American, Pacific Rim-and the no-color Brits, indistinguishable, it seemed, from the great genies of cigarette smoke that moved between the tables like the ghosts of referees . .. England was changing. Twenty years ago Richard and Gwyn or their equivalents could never have gone to a snooker hall-Gwyn in his chinos and cashmere turtleneck, Richard in his (accidentally appropriate) waistcoat and lopsided bow tie. They would have stood outside, blowing into cupped hands, smelling the bacon grease, and scanned the stubbornly just-literate lettering on the basement placard, and moved aside for the donkey-jacketed and zoot-suited cueists weaving through the dead and wounded on their way down the crackling stone steps. Gwyn and Richard might have got in. But they wouldn't have got out. In those days the Englishmen all had names like Cooper and Baker and Weaver, and they beat you up. Now they all had names like Shop and Shirt and Car, and you could go anywhere you liked. 'Why do you ask?'

'The thing is I've moved. I'm with Gal now.' 'So I've read.' 'You remember Gal.' 'Of course I remember Gal.'

Richard reassumed his cueing posture, chin at table height, upper body bent or slumped over the side cushion. You were not supposed to talk while playing snooker-except about snooker. Richard had had to insist on this. Too many times, or so Richard felt, he would be lining up a frame-clinching sitter, and Gwyn would start telling him about the Italian TV crew he was expecting the next morning or the surprising figure offered for his Saudi translation rights, and Richard would find that he had somehow shoveled the cue ball onto the adjacent table . . . Two weeks after the event, he was still reading Rory Plantagenet's diary columns, hoping for a long piece about how Richard Tull had humiliated Gwyn Barry in front of the Shadow Minister for the Arts. Instead, that morning, he had found a long piece about how Gwyn Barry had switched agents, controversially taking his custom from Harley, Dexter, Fielding to Gal Aplanalp.

'She's already got me a huge deal on my next one.' 'You haven't finished your next one.'

'Yeah, but they like to do these things earlier now. It's a campaip. It's like a war out there. World rights.' 'Get more drinks.' 'So who are you with now? What's your position with agents??

'More drinks,' said Richard, whose position with agents went like this. He had started out under the wing of Harley, Dexter, Fielding, who had signed him up as a twenty-five-year-old, pre-Aforethought, on the strength of his eye-catchingly vicious reviews of new fiction and poetry. Richard stayed with Harley, Dexter, Fielding for his first two novels and then fired them after his third was rejected by every publisher in the land, including John Bernard Flaherty Dunbar Ltd., Hocus Pocus Books, and the Carrion Press. He then transferred his talents to Dermott, Jenkins, Wyatt, who fired him after his fourth novel met an identical fate. Next, Richard went solo, and dealt personally with all submissions and negotiations on novel number five: that is to say, he photocopied and packaged it so many times that he felt like a publisher himself-or a printer, printing samizdat in a free country. As yet he had no plans for his sixth novel: Untitled. And he needed plans. He badly needed plans.

'I haven't got an agent,' he said.

'You know, Gal's a big fan of yours.'

'You mean she has pleasant memories of me? Or that she liked my stuff.'

'Both. She liked your stuff.'

All the reds were gone. Only the eight balls remained on the table: the black and the brown, the pink and the blue, the green and the yellow; the lone red; and of course the white. Both of them were so lousy at snooker that it would be misleading to claim that Richard was better at it than Gwyn. But he always won. In this area, as in one or two others, he understood that there was a beginning, a middle and an end. He understood that there was an endgame. And it was in the endgame that Gwyn showed his only wisps of talent: a certain Celt-Iberian canniness, a certain sideburned cunning. Careful now.

'She told me to tell you to expect her call.'

'It's a pretty cheesy list though isn't it-Gal's?' said Richard, who found that he was blushing and almost fainting as he lowered his head over the drinks table: blushing bloodier than the pink, bloodier than the red. 'Isn't it all rock stars and cookbooks? And how-to?'

'She's taking it upmarket. More literary. She's got quite a few novelists.'

'Yeah but they're all famous for being something else. Famous mountaineers. Comedians. Newscasters.' Richard nodded to himself. The newscaster, he had read, was not only famous for being a newscaster and for being a novelist. He was also famous (at present) for something else: for getting fantastically beaten up, the other night, in a mews off Kensington High Street. 'And politicians,' he said.

'It's the right move, I think. She'll go in a bit harder for me. Because of her list. Because I'm prestigious.'

'Because you're what?' But then Richard paused and just said, 'Of course you wouldn't know what prestigious means. Or meant. Deceptive. As is prestidigitation. Conjuring.'

'When was the last time you saw Gal? She was a nice-looking kid but now she's … she really. . . She's really…'

Richard looked on, not at all sympathetically, as Gwyn's mind blundered about, searching for a way of saying what he wanted to say. What he wanted to say, presumably (Richard had heard this from others, and believed it), was that Gal Aplanalp was mercilessly beautiful. Gwyn stood there with his concessionary shrugs and frowns, beset by reasons for not saying what he wanted to say. Which he couldn't do without seeming invidious or impolitic, disrespectful both to Gal and to those less well favored. And so on.

'I hear she's very lucky in her looks,' Richard said. 'Wait a minute. You're famous for being something else too.'

'Am I? What?'

'Happily married. Uxorious.'

'Oh that.'

Gwyn sneaked home on the black, but it was a dead frame anyway, and Richard didn't hate that too much, having prevailed 3-1. On their way out, moving side by side down the passage with their slender cue cases, like musicians or executioners, they passed an exercise room where, by the way, Steve Cousins had given karate lessons for six months, six years ago, to the juveniles of West Ten. The arrangement ended because all the parents complained and because Steve couldn't bring himself to punctuate his discourse with enough religious shit about restraint and self-control and the empty hand.

'Have you ever come across a girl called Belladonna?'

'I don't think so,' said Gwyn. 'And I think I'd remember, with that name.'

'Still. People are always changing their names, aren't they. These days.'

They parted on Ladbroke Grove beneath the elevated underground: that patch of London owned by bums and drunks, exemplary in its way-the model anti-city; here the pavement, even the road, wore a coat of damp beer (in various manifestations) which sucked on your shoes as you hastened past. Crouching men with upturned fucked-up faces … It made Richard think of Pandaemonium and the convocation of rebel angels-hurled like lightning headlong over the crystal battlements ofheaven, falling and falling into penal fire and the deep world of darkness. Then their defiant council. He liked Moloc best: My sentence is for open war. But he felt Beelzebub was more