his tartan rug. 13 wore his characteristically scandalized expression: evidence of yet another visit to Marylebone Magistrates'Court. They'd done him for breaching the peace. On Ladbroke Grove. On a Saturday night. And it was just a laugh: they were just having a laugh with all the milk bottles. Empty milk bottles. Could you believe it. Breaching the peace? On Ladbroke Grove? On a Saturday night? What rucking peace?
Shaking his head, 13 stared at the numbered door. Steve was within, sorting it with Darko, and with Belladonna.
The sentence, which, strangely and arrestingly, was non-value-free, said: And the good boy and the bad boy -went into the forest.
'Okay,' said Richard-dressing-gowned, breakfastless: a little heap of nuclear waste. It was eight in the morning. Gina and Marius were eating their rustic cereal, in the kitchen, across the passage. Richard felt like a coal miner coming off night shift, dully gray except where he sparkled with cold motes of sweat. 'Okay. Now what's the first word.'
Marco addressed his frown to the page.
'Okay. What's the first letter?'
'. .. A,' said Marco. A short a. As in cat.
'A…?'
'Muh.'
'Try again.'
'… Nuh.'
'Good.'
'. .. Buh.'
'Try again.'
'. . . Duh.'
'Good. Which spells . . .?' Richard waited. 'Which spells . . .?' Richard waited. And then he stopped waiting and said, 'And.'
They were now staring at the fortress of word number two.
'Tuh,' said Marco. Later, he said, 'Huh.' Later still he said, ' #201;.'
'Well, Marco?'
'Het,' said Marco.
'Jesus,' said Richard.
Actually, he was wondering how the little boy could bear being on his lap. Couldn't he hear the tuneless blues that was always playing in his father's head? As quite often happened Marco's pajamaed presence (his innocently silky writhings) had provided Richard with an erection. This used to cause him disquiet, and struck him as something he had better shut up about. But, again, he was enough of an artist to have faith in the universality of his own responses. He asked around among the dads and found that it was so. It was general-universal. It stillstruck him as essentially perverse. When you thought of all the other occasions which cried out for hard-ons that never came. And here you not only didn't need one. You didn't even want one.
So they somehow got through good (qood, yood, goob), and did and again, and the again, and bad (dad, dab, bab), and toiled their way (boy was all right, for some reason) past went and eventually into, and staggered towards the penultimate the. Marco stared at the the word for perhaps a minute and a half. At that point Richard got out from underneath him. That was it: you could forget forest. Forests .. . forests, which in Dante and Spenser and Virgil and Milton symbolize the temptations of life. Good boy and bad boy go there. Enchanted glades or drear woods, places of complication or places where complication falls away-but places where you will be tested. Richard wondered whether Gwyn, in the course of his experiments in childishness and childish amazement, ever read like Marco read: one letter every twenty seconds. How had Gwyn developed this habit? Perhaps it came on him automatically: say at maggot mealtimes. Or perhaps he just thought it was good for business. He did it for interviewers, who obediently and admiringly described the phenomenon. Gwyn falling silent midsentence and picking up an orange from the bowl and staring at it. Gwyn pausing in the street as he leaves the restaurant, transfixed by a toyshop window. And you especially can't do that any more, because the orange is designed by a spook in a labcoat, and the toyshop is no shrine of wonder but a synchronized thrash of tar-geters and marketers . . . Gwyn, incensingly, had gone off, still in one piece, on a ten-day promotional tour of Italy, where, he informed Richard, a relaunched Amelior was 'on fire.' The only real progress Richard could claim to have made was that he had successfully commissioned, received, subbed, and duly shepherded into print a favorable review of Double Dating by the Washington-based feminist critic Lucy Cabretti in The Little Magazine.
Marco slipped off his lap. and Richard tossed the kiddie book over his shoulder. For a moment his eye fell on the latest biography they'd sent at him: it was the size of a Harlem boombox. Richard rubbed his brow. The night before he had dreamed about some clubhouse in the Arctic, where women were eaten as if in a cafeteria, and where old Nazis hobnobbed with drugged monsters . . .
Heavily and dutifully, Richard moved up the stairs, to shower and dress-to put clothes on, to stand bent in the little cubicle while water fell. One glance in the mirror here, upon rising-the bruised scars beneath his eyes, his hair standing on end in terror-had caused him to scrap, or at least shelve, his immediate plan: seducing a lightly sun-kissedDemeter Barry. Had also caused him to think, to whisper: Where have I come from? Where have I been? Not in the land of sleep, not sleep as it used to be, but some other testing ground, some other forest. The forests of Comus and The Faerie Queened No. More like the forests that the wild boy must have known: the clearing, the picnic facility no sooner erected than rotten and ruined, the contemporary leavings and peelings, the rain, and all around the trees patiently dripping, in chemical lamentation. The bedcovers had as usual been pulled back, by Gina. Richard stood there naked, looking at the bared sheet, its crenellations, its damp glow. Every morning we leave more in the bed: certainty, vigor, past loves. And hair, and skin: dead cells. This ancient detritus was nonetheless one move ahead of you, making its own humorless arrangements to rejoin the cosmos.
Richard shaved. A fly, a London fly, was bumping and weakly buzzing around in the small and steamy cubicle; London flies are a definite type-they are fat, and slow, and, come October, they are the living dead. Richard shaved. He noticed that his bristles were getting bristlier, more ornery. But wait a minute, he thought: I am young. I still get spots, blackheads, whiteheads, and, yes, even the mirror-splatting bigboys of yore (often his face felt like one big bigboy). I still think about sex all the time, and beat off whenever I get the chance. I still stare at my own reflection. This is the journey we all make, from Narcissus to Philoctetes-Philoctetes, whose wound smelled so bad. Richard flinched, as if he'd cut himself. With Gina, he realized, he was now in the condition of sexual hiding. He couldn't even hug her anymore, because hugs led to kisses, and kisses led-kisses led to the little death. The poets were wrong when they said that sex was like dying. What he had, and kept on having, was the little death. How did Gina spend her Fridays? He had stopped snooping on her. He had lost the right to inquire. Christ, and there was that fat fuck of a fly, buzzing and weakly bumping around between his legs. Bristly and obese and hopeless, having outlived its season. When Gina watched frightening films she put her hands over her ears. Not over her eyes-over her ears. Richard didn't want to think about it. Where could he put his hands?
For the moment he fingered the lump on the back of his neck. Just a cyst, no doubt: he was a pretty cysty kind of guy. Telling himself not to worry about it, Richard decided that he had made tangible progress with
his hypochondria. He no longer suffered from the periodic panics of
early middle age, where a twinge here or a sting there made you suspect, for a while, that you had this or that fatal disease. Coping with his daily aches and pains, he no longer suspected that he had cancer or muscular
