THE INFORMATION

exerted by that hundred-pound pulley at the end of the hospital bed, the pressures exerted by this or that cumbrous prosthesis.

'Put it on hold for now. I'm going away for the weekend with his wife,' said Richard, examining his fingernails and experiencing real surprise at how much dirt they stored.

'They had a break-in.'

'So I heard.'

'You know what he did, the bloke? Tore all his books up. His books. So-called Amelior.'

'So. A disgruntled reader.'

'Yeah, or a …'

Now came a moment of shared disquiet. It was clear that the young man was about to say, a 'literary critic.' He was sharp with words, in a way, as he was sharp with everything else; but his coin-slot mouth was not designed to say it. 'A literary critic': his mouth was not designed to say it.

'A good critic,' said Richard.

'I was talking to Mrs. Shields?'

'I know. Your brother's mum.'

'She's not working there anymore, but she's a pal of that Colombian they got. And guess what. They sleep in separate rooms.'

'Who do?'

'Gwyn. And Demeter. I got something for you.' He took it from his pocket and passed it across the table under the shell of his palm. A section of glossy paper, tightly and elaborately folded, like origami. 'That's in exchange,' he said, 'for the smack.'

The possibility of additional or parallel universes, of which there may well be an infinity, presents the writer with something new to worry about. Shakespeare is the universal. That is to say, he plays well enough in this universe, with its sodium and cesium and helium. But how would he go down in all the others?much of it was on paper, written words, memos to the self, scrawled on the corners of envelopes and on the backs of credit-card slips franked by Pizza Express), seemed so hard to worsen; and yet a single blow from a muscular fist had shown it to be capable of dramatic and qualitative decline. The non-black-eye world that he was now reentering, for all its penury and hopelessness, felt like a banquet of immortality and joy. His cheekbone, this night, bore only an arid smear of yellow (not the cheerful, nursery yellow of days past but a different yellow, a dead yellow). The eye itself was no longer a tropical anemone. It had become an eye again. It had become Richard Tull again.

'Go on,' he said, and sank back, and called with languor for another Zombie .. . This was the world where the body was money: the world of pornography and vassalage. Here were Gwyn Barry's organs and appendages, laid out on trays and studded with price pegs as on a butcher's shelf-or reeling and calibrating, items on the circular slide rule that an American doctor might carry in his top pocket, for instant estimates. Steve Cousins's terms, Richard thought, were staggeringly reasonable: by pledging half his fee for the Gwyn Barry profile, he could get its subject safely bedded down, in old age. Disillusionment with the literary world-that was what had brought Richard here. If Leavis had been right, if the whimpers of provincial neglect had had just cause, if the literary world was a Hong Kong of arbitrage, of graft and drink and sex: in such a world, with a ton of money and a cooling-tower of vitamin E, Richard could have attained his goal by conventional means. But the literary world wasn't like that. When it came to fucking people up, the literary world never got started. Sadness at this, and disillusionment, had brought Richard here, to the Canal Creperie, and to Steve Cousins, his familiar and his fan.

Who was telling him that he could get Gwyn killed for a thousand- for eight book reviews! Some trog from up north would do it. He comes down here with all the others, for a football match, completes his business, then digs his scarves and bobble hat out of his duffel bag and takes the train back to Worksop.

'Enchanting,' said Richard. 'This is pure witchcraft. But please. You were saying.'

'What you do is-what you do is you turn their lives into fear. Everything they do. Everywhere they go. It's like the world has-'

'Turned against them.'

'Like the world hates them.'

'Go on,' said Richard limply.

'So that by the time it happens, by then, they just-they just hangIt was not the black woman that stopped him, though: it was the white man. For 13 had long sensed, very accurately, that you didn't want to be around Scozzy with anything sexual. While to the white man the thought of the black man was some kind of antic aphrodisiac, the presence of Scozzy, with his sallow stare, in 13 's head definitely went the other way. You wouldn't ever want to present the man with it. Simple as.

'Tell you what,' said 13. 'What say we do 68.'

'68?'

'68.'

'What's 68?'

'You do me and I owe you 1.'

'13!'

'Take it or leave it or whatever.'

Lizette left it. She left altogether, after a while. Just as well, thought 13. With an unhappy expression he fussed and sighed and softly flinched over the paper tissues. Don't want to fuck that one off. Good business relationship. Adolf emerged at twelve-forty-five, with his book, silent, satisfied. Run the man home and go out looking for a laugh.

'Oi. What's this?'

Chewing gum on the speedo! 13 scraped it off and popped it between his lips. In his haste he immediately swallowed its cold gray hardness.

Maybe they all had what Richard didn't have.

13 had it. Walk down the street with him and you wouldn't be seeing any of the things he saw. He saw earners and turners and leavers and levers, he saw locks and catches, what was unguarded and what protruded, what was detachable, what was transferable. In any shop his eyes glittered with compound calculation.

Scozzy had it, though he had it the wrong way round. Animal ther-movision, in the city; the night-sight of the wild boy.

Belladonna had it. In the business of reinvention, the first act is that of renaming. The novelist does this all the time, on the page. On the street, the only thing you can rename is yourself, and everyone else you know, if you like, so that everyone has two names, just as everyone on television has two names.

Even Darko had it. When he came to London, with his bag of tools, the very air over Oxford Circus was rank with pornography, the shop windows were stills in duty-free brochures, and the cars bulged and shimmied like women, the clios, the starlets, the princesses of the street.

In truth (and we must face this), Lady Demeter Barry poses difficulties of representation. She poses difficulties of representation not justSuch questions were far from 13's thoughts. He was in the orange van with Lizzete. Engine on: for the warmth.

13 exhaled plangently. He was, as usual, nursing a sense of strictly local injustice. He'd had a call from the halfway house: the leader of his Probation Program, informing 13 that the Harrow Road police were going to charge him with 43 burglaries. 43! Harrow Road! The worst. They stitch you up. 43 burglaries. And he'd only done 29 of them.

Lizzete said, 'We could go in the back.'

He said, 'Can't. Giro there. He's wrecked. Up all night driving.'

She did something.