THE INFORMATION

They went on up. Richard won 3-2 on the final black. His concentration was poor.

There are other ways of doing it, the young man had said. Botulism-in his sandwich. Or send a woman at him. Like an antibody. Work on him psychologically. Fear. Doesn't have to be straight physical damage.

Still, there's something about straight physical damage . . .

Same for everybody. Unlike the other stuff. It's simple.

Richard lay, with Marco, on the balding but still conspicuously elegant chaise longue; the child's cheek rested on his reverberating chest as he read aloud from the pages of The Jungle Book; he read uncommonly well… Damage is simple. As he read, Richard was discovering, rather to his surprise, just how much he admired simplicity. Not simplicity in fictional prose-but elsewhere. That which is universal is often simple. Scientific beauty (and beauty, here, was a sound indicator of truth) was often simple. He didn't want to hear any brusque or unfeeling remarks about simplicity.

So, talking hypothetically, Richard had said, if I wanted someone fucked up …

And the wild boy had said, You'd come to me.

He read on: the bit about Shere Khan's imminent approach and the wolfs affecting admonitions. He read on, until he noticed that Marco's immobility had long passed beyond raptness, noticed, too, the broad patch of drool on his shirt. Marco was asleep. Groaning at the use of many strange muscles, Richard slid out from underneath him and then stared down at his sleeping face: open-mouthed, sweat- slicked-the face of a desperate little doggy. A domestic doggy, one accustomed to being at home. Prodded awake, Marco mumbled of orangutans . .. Orangutan meant wild man. Mowgli was a wild boy, raised by wolves. Even Marco, to his pain, dreamed wildly, and went in his sleep to where the wild things were.

Another day. Another day off school. Having clothed him so heavily that the child could hardly move, let alone walk (he looked like a sports logo: a racetrack blimp), Richard took Marco to Dogshit, for some air. The green world, in autumn, in fall. So the wild boy, the young man, was the green man: in modern dress. You'd come to me. That was really the high point of the evening. Thereafter Richard had to sit there listening to literary criticism: Steve Cousins's assessment of Amelior.

Marco took his hand. As they walked, under a midterm daytime moon, like a mask flattened at the brow and sharpened at the chin, like a shield raised against arrows, Richard was remembering, how, in theCanal Creperie, between Rattlesnakes, he had reached for his food punnet and felt the lateness of the hour when the nacho clung to its sauce like a stirring-stick left too long in the paint, and the young man had said, 'It's a sham, it's a sham. Sweetness and light? Out there? Jesus. Where's my violin. I know the wilds. I ran wild, mate. For years. Just me. Out there. For years.' Steve Cousins: foundling of a new-age community? Or a borstal boy on the lam? It didn't become clear. What became clear was that Steve Cousins had read The Wild Boy of Aveyron (so indeed had Richard), and reread it, and misread it; and that he saw himself, somehow, as a contemporary update of that frazzled and swarthy mute-two centuries on. Richard sighed. He sighed then and he sighed now, with Marco's hand in his. Still, with his own confusions, Richard could certainly imagine disliking a book so much that you decided to do something, you decided to sort this shit out, by banning it or burning it or by getting hold of its author and beating him up. Not so strange, in a world where novelists needed bodyguards, hideouts, freedom railways. 'When you feel you're ready,' the young man said, out on the street, 'activate me.'

'Look!' said Marco.

Perhaps the urban pastoral was all left field. There was no right field. And now came a moment when London seemed to configure itself for the observing eye, and grossly, like a demonstration. Richard and his son were passing the toilets; again, one of its two pathways was cordoned off by orange crime- scene tape. How playfully the tape wriggled in the breeze: Marco yearned out towards it, the kiddie crime-scene tape! In attendance stood two police officers, protecting and preserving their crime scene. Richard moved through the loose talk of the loose clump of mums and heard their choric song: a little girl, this time; in the summer it had been a little boy, and the crime-scene tape had played on the other path. Heading west now, towards the exit, father and child passed a benchful of mid-teens snorting and giggling to something pornographic on their boombox. Not just a hot lyric either, but straight audio Adult: a man-woman duet, snarling-carnal. While snorting and giggling, one pale youth was also managing to taunt his dog and eat crisps, all at the same time. Congratulations: here was the culture, and he was living it, to the full. Ten feet away a boy and girl dressed in black were standing in a formal embrace like arrested dancers on the green floor. Richard recognized them, with a give in the back of the knees, as he ducked on by.

Darko, and Belladonna, They had about them an air of isolation that

made him think-that made him think of the Siberian lepers and also, unconnectedly, wildly, of the awfulness of unforeseen consequences … 'Look!' said Marco, as he rested on the bench by the gate.

High in the thin blue east, on an angled collision course, two airplanes climbed towards their shared apex-like needles, with the twin strands of white thread trailing from their eyes. They passed: no contact. Briefly, though (for the sky hates straight lines and soon destroys their definition), the two white slipstreams formed a leaning cross: leaning backward, away from the earth. Something was over, over on the other side.

'Terryterry,' said Terry. 'That what it all come down to. Every man want to be cock of the walk. All the Indians want to be chief. That what it all come down to: terryterry.'

'Yeah mate,' said Steve Cousins, and turned to his other guest- Richard.

'What I want,' said Richard, and it was all right to do this, because Scozzy was conducting two conversations at once, and could probably conduct many more, as many as necessary, like a chess master giving a simultaneous display, 'is a free sample. Well, not free. We could come to an agreement on that.'

'You want me to let him have a slap.'

'… Yeah,' said Richard. 'More than a slap. More like a-'

'Yeah well, that's what we call a slap. It's more than a slap.' Steve turned to Terry and said, 'Listen, I got my territory. And it ain't on the fucking street.' From under his hat he looked from Terry to Richard and back again, and back again, inviting the two men to contemplate each other. His sparse but uniform eyebrows were genially raised. And above the gray band the hat's slopes were indented in direct answer to the cheekbones beneath and their famished angularity. He turned to Terry and said, 'Ah. Star! See the way how me vex!'

Like most London faces, Steve could do a pretty good Yardie accent. He had even read the novel called Yardie-as had most Yardies. But Terry wasn't a Yardie. Terry, as Richard had been apprised beforehand, through the bleats and squawks of Steve's mobile phone, was a Quacko: the next lot. Richard was sitting in on this meet 'as an observer': good material. And that was exactly how he felt. He was an onlooker, but he was shorn of point of view.

Terry said, 'Some of my boys-they totally rootless. Debt mean nutting to them. Normal to them. Debt is they way of life.'

'Jesus, I spend my life with all these speech impediments. The schwartzers I know all say roofless and def and nuffing.' Like when we were going to do Nigel, thought Steve. I tell Clasford, He's a