THE INFORMATION

taking his own pulse while continuing to bite his nails. His smaller son Marco, who had failed Gina's dawn fitness test and was taking another day off school, remained at his father's side, balancing a rubber troll or goblin on various roughly horizontal surfaces: Richard's forearm, Richard's shoulder, one or other of Richard's bald spots. And from outside through the shivery window came the sound of fiercely propelled metal as it ground against stone, shearing into the sore calcified struts and buttresses with sadistic persistence: the house, the street, the whole city, taking it deep in the root canal.

For instance, it had to be The New York Times. The Los Angeles Times was even bigger, Richard knew, but in his judgment Gwyn wasn't quite nuts enough for the Los Angeles Times. Still, he was surely nuts enough for The New York Times. Richard would have staked his sanity on it. If Gwyn wasn't nuts enough for The New York Times, then Richard was losing his grip. Now he reached for his jacket, hooked over the chair and dug out the bent checkbook on which he hoped he might have written a few words about The Soul's Dark Cottage: A Life of Edmund Waller. He had: shops his mates to avoid axe p. 536ff. The checkbook joined his other notes, loosely gathered on the heaped desk: a credit-card slip, a torn envelope, an empty matchbook. His desk was so horrendously burdened that his telephone often stopped ringing before he found it-or, quite possibly, before he even heard it.

The plan was this: Richard would send Gwyn Barry a copy of the Sunday New York Times, the whole thing, that forest-razing suitcase of smeared print, accompanied by a typed note that would read, in its entirety,

Dear Gwyn,

Something in here to interest you. The price of fame!

Yours ever, JohnThere would of course be no indication where this interesting something might be found. Sitting back, sitting back in the alphabet soup of his study, Richard imagined Gwyn opening the package, frowning at the note, looking first, with a slight smile, at the Book Review, then, rather less equably, at the Arts and Leisure, then . . .

'Marco, what's the point of doing that?'

Either Marco didn't hear or he didn't understand. He said: 'Wot?' There is of course this difficulty of rendering childish speech. But how do you get round it? Marco didn't say 'What?' He said 'Wot?'-definitely a humbler and shorter word, and entirely unaspirated.

'Balancing that toy on my arm,' said Richard. 'Why? What for?'

'Does it bolla you?'

'Yes.'

'Does that bolla you?' he asked, balancing the toy on Richard's head.

'Yes.'

'Does that bolla you?' he asked, balancing the toy on Richard's shoulder.

'They all bother me.' Edmund Waller bothers me. 'How'm I supposed to do this review?'

He wanted Marco elsewhere so that he could call Anstice and smoke a cigarette with his head out the window and generally get on with fucking Gwyn up. Edmund Waller was born in. Go, lovely Rose! Tell her, that wastes her time and me . . . Basically, now that the guilt had evaporated, the Anstice thing was just a bottomless drag. He spent all this time talking to her in case she killed herself. A consummate air-sniffer and seat-warmer (and mediocrity), Edmund. But he wanted her to kill herself. Conversely, killing yourself demanded energy, which Anstice didn't normally have. In an energetic state, she might do other things too, like ringing up Gina. A fairweather Royalist, an expedient Republican, and a mercenary bridegroom. Although he had gone to bed with Anstice, he hadn't made love to her-but she didn't seem to realize this. Waller's Plot was in itself a fiasco. Yet it provided him with the chance to betray all his. How bad would it be anyway, if Gina found out? As it happened, Richard assumed and even hoped that Gina was having an affair herself: for pressing reasons that will soon become clear. Small is the worth of beauty from the light retired. . . Writers don't lead shapely lives. Shape they give to the lives of others: accountants, maniacs. Whereas Edmund Waller. While Waller. Although. Despite the fact that. Whilst Waller . ..

What was it with -whilst} A scrupulous archaism-like the standard book review. Like the standard book. It was not the words themselves that were prim and sprightly polite, but their configurations, which answered to various old-time rhythms of thought. Where were the newrhythms-were there any out there yet? Richard sometimes fancied that his fiction was looking for the new rhythms. Gwyn sure as hell wasn't looking for them. Gwyn's style played a simple tune: the eyes that bulged over the pennywhistle were all bright and clear and artless. Richard pulled open the top drawer of his desk and consulted his recent fan letter: from Darko, confidant of the weird girl Belladonna. The worn page with its marked lines of swimming-pool blue, the fingerprints, the sweat, the epidermal avidity: here perhaps were the new rhythms.

Marco didn't want to be left alone so in the end Richard took him down to the stoop where he could at least get through some cigarettes in his company. The summer air of London was such that he might as well have blown the fagsmoke into Marco's face, or split the pack with him. Marco had asthma. He had another difficulty too. Richard didn't think about it that much. The five percent of his mind that was occupied by Marco (and this was capable of big expansions when Marco was sick or sad) had convinced itself that five percent would do: Marco was an okay little boy, with a quirk. It was called a learning disability and it had to do with repeated category mistakes. If you told Marco why the chicken crossed the road, Marco would ask you what the chicken did next. Where did it go? What was its name? Was it a boy or a girl? Did it have a husband-and, perhaps, a brood of chicks? How many?

Wait. Richard's face veered up with an animal snarl. Jesus: that fucking guy. Twice every weekday, at irregular hours, a big man in a big car drove down Calchalk Street at sixty miles an hour. What was his hurry? Who could want him anywhere sooner than he was going to get there already? He had his jacket on a hook. He had a wide-pored vest beneath his sleek white shirt. He had an outscrolled underlip and a fat nose and fair brows and lashes, like a cool new pig they'd knocked up in a lab somewhere. Richard got to his feet to watch the man rip by: an animal hating another animal. He comes here twice a day, thought Richard. He comes here twice a day, trying to kill my kids.

When the air settled again Richard sat down and lit another cigarette … If, in bringing about Gwyn's destruction-if there was time for art, then it would be much more satisfying to use contemporary forces, to awaken and array them, against his life. Ladbroke Grove and the Porto-bello Road and their daily flailing and groping and needing. If you could hydroelectrify the energies of the street and point them in the path you chose. A big project. Easier, and cheaper, just to find whoever did this kind of thing, and pay him money to knock Gwyn's block off. Meanwhile, there was Belladonna to be activated. Meanwhile, there was the Sunday New York Times.

By now Marco was stretched out on the stoop, his right ear on his right bicep, his free hand toying with troll, with goblin. Richard sat there, smoking. Nicotine is a relaxant. Cigarettes are for the unrelaxed.

We are the unrelaxed.

13 was in the van, waiting, which was how he spent much of his time. In one hand he held the scruff of Giro's coat; in the other, a consoling can of Ting.

13 ? 13 was in bits. The activities of the night before had involved him in a 120 -minute, 120-mile-an-hour Indianapolis down the wrong way of the M20 in a stolen GTi with five blue-and-whites up his pipe. So? Okay. When you're doing the driving yourself: you take what comes. But when the bloke behind the wheel is only twelve years old, and out of his bonce on Wite-Out solvent. . . Through the windscreen, on which