THE INFORMATION

cried in the night; the broken narrative of dreams, or simply the fact that dreams ended.

'Marco,' said Richard. 'I want to see you in my study. Now.'

The child got straight to his feet. This had never happened before butthere slowly formed the freeze-framed torso of a woman. Scozzy stared, with consent, with recognition: you could see the bruised scars on the undersides of her breasts, from the surgeon's work: seals of approval. The woman, like the man who watched her, was all alone. But he was the virgin. The wild boy had never done the wild thing (and had his theories about the jizm and the ism). When he watched pornography, he sometimes thought, he was trying to find out whom he wanted to hurt. Scozzy touched the Play. She wrenched off the remains of her muscle shirt and then reached down with inch-long fingernails and savagely juxtaposed her fixed tits.

Three days later, by which time Richard's eye had ceased its experiments with the visible spectrum, had stopped trying to be a yellow eye or a violet eye and became, unarguably, a black eye, something else resolved itself in his head: he got up from the kitchen table and crossed the passage. On the sitting room floor Marius was showing Marco a card trick, in the autumn dusk of Calchalk Street, with the furniture acquiring ghosts of poor definition and the sound of footsteps miraculously surviving their ascent from the street below . .. The card trick, Richard knew, had involved Marius in much preparation. With the deck in his hand he had disappeared into the bathroom for about fifteen minutes. But now he was ready. His aim was to tell a story. On the leading edge of card tricks, this activity being fanatically evolved, like all others, there were hour-long spectaculars with plots as complicated as Little Dorrit (which revolves, if you recall, on someone leaving money to his nephew's lover's guardian's brother's youngest daughter: Little Dorrit) and with interplay of theme and pattern aspiring to the architectonic, the Prousto-Joycean. Marius's card trick was old and crude and self-defeatingly famous. Marco didn't know it. It was called 'The Four Jacks' and it told a simple tale of urban striving.

'There are four jacks. See?' said Marius, showing Marco the four jacks in a vertical strip-behind which the three decoy cards (a nine, a five, a three-mere commoners) despicably lurked. 'And they decide to rob a house.'

'Our house?'

The upper periphery of Marco's riveted vision told him that his father was in the room, standing near the door. Reassuringly and eternally, Gina sat knitting on the window seat, her legs crossed sharply in answer to the angles of the needles.

'No. This house,' said Marius, indicating the remaining forty-five cards. 'One jack goes in the basement.' Marius placed the first decoy'It was a joke, Daddy.' 'What do I smell of?' 'Nothing. You. It was a joke, Daddy.'

'I'm sorry. Don't tell Mummy. Just say you wouldn't do your homework or something. Come and give me a kiss. Forgive me.' And Marco did so.

At about eleven-fifteen that night the twins, in their twin beds, were winding up a long, whispered and untendentious discussion (tangerines, a new supervillain, water pistols) and had started to think about calling it a day. At any rate their silences were more extended, their yawns more musical and vacant. Marius, in particular (always the more likely to close things out), lay on his side with both hands thrust down the front of his pajama bottoms. He was indulging in his nightly fantasies of rescue. His father, at that age, taking what he needed from any genre available, was shepherding adult showgirls onto gondolas from the black gurgling rock-sides of island fortresses. Marius braved lasers and particle beams, interposing himself between their fire and a succession of alien maidens wearing catsuits and pastel tunics in video-puppet dreamscapes that rushed past or through him, as the lit runway is assimilated by the cockpit monitors of the landing plane. He rolled on to his back and said,

'Why did Daddy call you?'

Marco thought for a moment. He saw Richard's face and all the troubled calculation in it. He saw him on another day, head bent, sniffing his fingertips. And on another day (by general consensus a very bad day: the rooms were hushed), with him sitting at the kitchen table over an opened letter and smoking a concussed cigarette. Marco said, 'He thinks he smells of shit.'

Struck but broadly satisfied, Marius turned on to his side.

Time passed.

'He cried,' said Marco, and nodded suddenly in the dark.

Marius was asleep. The words stayed in the air. Marco listened to them.

That morning with Anstice-oh, man-that morning when he woke up in Anstice's arms, or at her side, or in her bed, which was a small bed, he lay on his back and stared at the world of adultery. The ceiling was a

good enough figure for it, the way the stains massed and groped around

its edges (the pale orange of trapped water, of rot), moving stealthily in on the center, where the cropped lightcord hung. Plasterwork saturated in solitude enclosed him, on every side. He felt fear, and grief; he longedMarco seemed to know how you did it. Only as he left the room did he turn his head to look at his mother, his brother. His bare legs seemed to move rather faster than usual, too, not with purpose but as if he was being steadily pushed, or urged on, from behind.

I was once lying on a low bed in a room to which a child had been summoned-in which a small boy would be denounced and arraigned. So, I was on the same level as he was, down there, three feet from the ground. I have denounced children myself and seen the head of hair, both thick and fine, inclined in contrition. But when you're on their level you see that really they're staring sadly straight ahead, lifting their eyes only in dutiful reflex to confront the cathartic fire of the parent's wrath. The accusation is stated, the confession secured, the sentence imposed. Looking straight ahead, the child's teeth-milk teeth, perhaps, or hig-gledypiggledy, newfangled, as the big supplants the small-are bared in an undesigning sneer of misery. Children have usually done something. What had Marco done?

'Two days ago,' Richard began, 'the day before yesterday you said- you said something very hurtful to me. Marco?'

Marco looked up.

'And I want to know what you meant by it.'

Richard was standing behind his desk. He raised his chin, and Marco could see the blotches and stipples of his throat, the misadventures with the razor, the mobile growth of the Adam's apple, the slanting sheen of his damaged eye.

'It was the most hurtful thing you've ever said to me. Ever.'

Marco's ears now heard the quiet roar of shame and turpitude. He looked up, once, and then went on staring sadly straight ahead. The room was crepuscular anyway, but darker for the child, whose world was folding slowly inwards.

'You said,' said Richard, inhaling, 'that I was smelly.'

Marco looked up, in hope. 'I didn't,' he said. For Daddy, in his view, ?wasn't smelly. Tobacco, seldom-laundered clothes, a certain mysterious difficulty of the body: but not smelly. 'I didn't, Daddy.'

'Oh but you did, Marco. Oh, you did. You said I smelled'-and here he raised his chin again, and the larynx squirmed-'of poo.'

'I didn't.'

' 'I dunnop who,' ' Richard quoted. ' 'Ooh you smelly thing.' '

'. .. It was a. joke. It was a joke, Daddy.' Marco didn't appeal to the word so much as throw himself at its feet. 'It was a joke.'

Richard waited. Then he said, 'Do I or do I not? Smell of poo.?

again, fully mistaken the attempt for the deed. Could this be seen as an improvement-another way (better, gentler), for the years of one's maturity? Gina knew the difference between the word and the deed. And, yes, it would certainly be more relaxing if she didn't. Probably, toward the end of life,