THE INFORMATION

cannot find the right words-so don't look for them. Don't look.

And I agree. I am with the father, with the mother. As for those who did this, I have no words.

The information is telling me-the information is telling me to stop saying hi and to start saying bye.

Where I live there's a yellow dwarf I keep seeing, out on the streets with their shops and bus stops. She is young and yellow and less than four feet tall with characteristically compacted limbs (the arms tucked inwards as if in pugilistic readiness, the legs like castors), half-Asian, half-Caribbean, pale- eyebrowed, white-lashed; her hair is an animal orange, its filaments electrically charged. She is young. She will get older, but not taller … For the first instant, whenever we exchange glances, she looks up at me and her chin stiffens in defiance. Mistrust, and everything else, but above all defiance. More recently, as these glances now tend to prolong themselves, her face develops, away from defiance; defiance is discarded as unnecessary (though it has been necessary, so many times). Not quite smiling or nodding, we acknowledge one another.

A yellow dwarf is a terrible thing to be called, probably because- more pertinently-it is a terrible thing to be. A terrible thing. Poor, poor yellow dwarf. I would like her to know that yellow dwarves are good. I owe my life to a yellow dwarf, as do we all-the one up there: the sun.

The yellow dwarf is not exotic. Yellow dwarves are not exotic. They're among the most exemplary phenomena in the universe. A quasar, now-a galaxy the size of a solar system clustered round some quantum monstrosity or cryptogram and barreling out of observable space at a hundred thousand miles a second: that's exotic.

I will never be able to meet the eye of the yellow dwarf up there. Its stare will never soften; its defiance will always be absolute.

She is ordinary, in the big picture. Who will ever tell her? She is ordinary. Not like the other stars of the street. Not like the red giant flailing and falling under the overpass, not like the black hole behind the basement window, not like the pulsar on the roundabout in the deserted playground.

Richard Tull, with his own consignment of strictly local concerns, stood forty stories above the city. He had an authentically frightening hangover and he was in the offices of Gal Aplanalp. Not just above the city, but above the City, within hearing range of Bow Bells, perhaps (when will you pay me?). This was no cockneyland of barrowboys and winkles. Large-scale and cathartic construction work was taking place all around him: jumpsuits, hardhats, trenches, cranes, breeze-blocks in skip-sized packages. A hot-blue magnesium light shone upward through the morning haze. Richard thought of the backyard his study overlooked, where builders were always fucking around, year in year out. To him, builders meant destruction. Bumcrack cowboys, knee-deep in pointlessness and slime, and raising nothing but hell.

The walls of the offices of literary agents, in Richard's wide and unhappy experience, tended to be furnished with books. Here he was surrounded by posters-posters of authors whom Gal already represented. He was surrounded by well-known novelists; but they were novelists who were well known for something else. Well known for newscasting, cliff-scaling, acting, cooking, dress-designing, javelin-throwing, and being related to the Queen. None of them was well known for book reviewing. There was Gwyn, of course. Many of the authors Richard failed to recognize. He cross-checked with the brochures attractively fanned out on the coffee table. So this dope with the ponytail.. . wrote biographies of rock stars. His large corpus consisted entirely of rock-star surnames followed by exclamation marks. Each tide caused Richard's head to jolt in regrettable counterpoint to the pulse of his headache. He imagined , .. Davenant! Deeping! Bottrell! Myers!

Gal entered. Richard turned. He hadn't seen her for ten years. When Gal was seventeen and over here for a summer doing odd jobs for publishers, Richard and Gwyn had taken her up and shown her around: thebowling alley in Shaftesbury Avenue, the Irish pubs beneath Piccadilly Circus; once (yes) they had taken her boating, in Hyde Park. They liked her. She had a talent for warmth, he remembered; she kissed your cheek at odd moments. Who else does that? Oh yeah: Marco. A buxom tomboy, American, seventeen: it sounds like just what you want. But Richard wasn't up for it. He seemed to want something more complicated: he liked-or kept going out with-dark and violent depressives who never ate anything and never got the curse. And Gwyn wasn't up for it: he had Gilda. And no doubt Gal wasn't up for it either. And anyway the young men had reached a silent understanding: they were young enough themselves to think that Gal Aplanalp was too young to be touched.

They shook hands, and embraced, which was her idea (Gal's lips went 'mwa' into the whiskers of his right ear). Then she said the thing he least wanted to hear. She said,

'Well let's take a look at you.'

Richard stood there at arm's length.

'Are you .. .? You look-you look rather, I don't know, you look a bit . . .'

'Old,' said Richard. 'The adjective-or is it the complement-you are searching for is old.'

The numerous symptoms of his hangover included a strong reluctance to meet any human eye. But Richard told himself to be mad and proud (and what a wag his head gave on that complement): he went on standing there, proud and mad and unpublished, the palely bleeding ruin of Richard lull. It could be that his hangover wasn't really that bad, warranting no more, perhaps, than half a week of sepulchral suffering, in the fetal position, behind drawn blinds.

'Coffee? It's good. We send out for it.'

'That would be very nice.'

They talked for a while about the old days. Yes, how much better things had been, in the old days, when Gwyn was poor, his bedsit cramped, his girlfriend rough, his career quite prospectless. In the old days Gwyn was just a failed book reviewer (Richard's designation) and publisher's skivvy. During the summer of Gal's stay Gwyn had been preparing A-level guides to various sections of The Canterbury Tales. They weren't even books, or pamphlets. They were sold in packets … Now that Gal was out of his force field Richard was free to contemplate her. And he nodded his head; he conceded. Not just young, not just healthy and symmetrical. Somebody who worked in the marketing of face creams or bath oils would give Gal a high beauty rating. These were looks you could actually sell things with. These were looks that men andwomen alike admired. It had all come together, the skin, the bones, the coiled black hair. Also the body: that too. When she shifted in her chair the upper half of her torso rearranged itself a beat late, with a certain ordered heaviness. Richard supposed she was turned out in accordance with the cutting edge of female-professional thinking and praxis. She was pitilessly businesslike from head to foot; but the foot wore an ankle bracelet and a spikey heel. When they greeted one another, Richard would have liked to be able to say something like 'I've been potholing for a month' or 'I got shot in the head last week.' Yet it was Gal who had spent the last two nights on the red-eye-over America, over the Atlantic. All Richard had done was sit at his desk.

The coffee came. They paused. They began.

First, the necessarily depressing issue of Richard's curriculum vitae. Attached to her clipboard she had a printout on him; she had information. Gal made notes and said 'Mm-hm.' Her manner suggested, encouragingly, that she was no stranger to the stalled career; Richard began to believe that she routinely dealt with greater prodigies of obscurity and pauperism-with seedier duds, with louder flops.

'What's this biography of Denton Welch?' she said, and frowned accusingly at her clipboard.

'I never did it. It fell through.'

'AndofR. C. Squires?'

'R. C. Squires. A literary editor of The Little Magazine.'

'Which little magazine?'

'The Little Magazine. The one I'm literary editor of. An