THE INFORMATION

Editor, 'is what every reader wants to know: what's he really like. You know him as well as anyone. You know: what's he really like.'

They would run the piece after Gwyn's pub date: absorb the 'impact.' More generally, the Features Editor went on, Richard should examine the pressures facing the successful novelist in the late 1990s.

On the day before his trial for drunken driving Richard took a spin in the Maestro: to Wroxhall Parade. Belladonna answered the door in a black two-piece suit, a black hat and a black veil. The veil held dull gray sequins in its mesh; it resembled a spider's web complete with dead flies. In the Maestro they rode to Holland Park Avenue. He didn't feel like a pimp or a pander or an agent provocateur. He felt like a minicab driver.

Gwyn treated him as such. Unsmilingly he led Belladonna off to his study, and Richard poked around in the kitchen, failing to read a new biography but successfully drinking beer.

She was quiet, and maybe even quietly tearful behind her veil, when he drove her back to Wroxhall Parade. He asked her what had happened and she kept saying Nothing.

Richard went to court and was duly admonished and fined and banned- for a year.

Demi failed her driving test for the third time.

Crash couldn't understand it. 'This is beyond my comprehension,' he said, as he drove her woundedly back from Walthamstow. Not only did the driving instructor and the driving examiner originate from the West Indies. They originated from the same island.

As Crash approached central London he relented, and taught Demi something nice: the use of the hazard lights to express gratitude. Often, as you joined a queue of traffic from a side road, and a fellow motorist held back to admit you, there wasn't enough time to wave or flash your thanks. A brief application of the hazard lights, however, allowed you to salute the indulgence of the car behind.

One whose oldest son left home received instruction from Father Duryea at St. Anthony's.

One whose marriage ended traveled first to Israel, then to Africa.

They all suffered from pains. These pains were informers sent by death.

One who heard mechanical noises in his ears attached a mirror to his shoe and stood in crowds where women gathered.

One who wore his hair swiped upward from his right sideburn abjured the love of women and sought the love of men.

One who could still see the bus when the bus was nice and near started responding to the propositions written on cards and left in street-corner telephone booths.

They all kept comparing what had gone to what would come.

One abstained from meat and fish, and eggs, and fruit that failed to fall to the ground of its own accord.

One grew fat and had nightly dreams of lopping.

One bought an electric juicer and came to fear the force of electricity.

They all saw what lay behind. If they looked, they could see what lay ahead. They didn't choose to look. But at three in the morning something woke them with the fizzy rush of an old flash camera, and there they all were, staring down the sights of their lives and drawing a bead on the information.

'What does it mean anyway: 'chief me out'?'

'Like you called him chief. Your chiefed him out.'

'What's wrong with chief? Cabbies call you chief. Chief doesn't sound too bad.'

'I asked him. He couldn't remember. All he knew was if you get called chief then you've been chiefed out. And it can't get around that you stood there and got chiefed out.'

' Why would I chief him out? Why would I chief him out? Why would I tell anyone I chiefed him out?'

'There you go. Such are the ways of our colored brethren.'

'I'm assuming I got my black eye free.'

'Yeah,' said Steve Cousins, without any sign of amusement. 'That one's definitely on the house.'

'Now might be a good time to talk about money.'

Richard had not been discouraged by his black-eye experience. Far from it. He felt he had traveled through the visible spectrum and had at last reached the end of the rainbow. His own life, on paper (and'And will Gwyn be there?'

'No. He's doing something with Sebby.'

'Demi-this is good.'

Gina, these days, no longer looked at Richard as if he was mad. These days Gina looked at Richard as if he was ill. And how did he look at her, these days? He watched Gina now, as she stood at the cooker, turning his chop beneath the grill. Her small shape, the curve of her bared neck … Someone who didn't know Gina well might assume that the tinge of burnt blood in her hair was enhanced by, if not actually derived from, the shoots and leaves of the tropical shrub we call henna. But Gina frowned on henna, and never used it. Richard could back her up: she didn't need to. How he used to sink his face into the evidence, into the information, and stare up like the sun-helmeted author of the most suicidal travel books (the slow waterfall, the dark and arching vines) and sight genuine auburn in the slobber of his jungle love. But that didn't happen anymore. And sex, to him, was everywhere and nowhere.

He told her about Demi's suggestion. She said,

'That's all right. I might go to my mother's. What will you say in your piece? How much you hate him?'

Richard looked up. No one was supposed to know about that. 'I don't hate him.'

'/ do. You just think his stuff is shit. Are you going to say that?'

'I don't see how I can, really. Everyone'll think it's just envy.'

'Have you heard from Gal?'

'Nothing new.'

'… We ought to talk.'

'I know.'

'Soon.' Gina's elliptical face stayed low-over the bowl of bucolic cereal. From the country, where everything was good: the sack of wheat, the rubicund apple-rack. 'How are we going to get through Christmas? I hope Lizzete can help out. Should be cheaper, because she won't be skipping school. A weekend in the country'll be nice for you. You need a rest.'

'Not quite a rest. I'll be working.'

'It's a break,' said Gina. 'And a break is as good as a rest.'

You hear about a guy who buys a sports car on his forty-first birthday and comes roaring out of his midlife crisis behind the wheel of an MG Midget.

One whose mother died took to the cultivation of roses.

their heads. They're ready. It's the end of the story. They've felt it coming. They're ready. They just hang their heads.'

'This is magical. This is poetry.'

'Well then.'

Suddenly Richard found himself distracted and oppressed: by matters of timing. If they went ahead now, then Gwyn, one trusted, would be in no kind of shape to tour America. Which was okay: it meant, at least, that Richard could go on saying he had never been there. But would the Sunday broadsheet still want the profile? Yes. The pressures facing the successful novelist? Absolutely. He could write about the pressures