THE INFORMATION

'I told you. My editor moved on, They've given me some other

Chuck or Chip.' And it was true. Roy Biv, Richard's editor-so full of enthusiasm and ideas-had moved on from Bold Agenda, and every time Richard called he got shuffled around from Chip to Chuck, from Chuckto Chip. 'Is Chuck there?' You mean Chip. 'Then give me Chip.' You ?want Chuck. And they were never there. Richard couldn't decide whether Chuck and Chip were the same person (like Darko and Ranko), who was permanently absent, or whether both Chip and Chuck were the inventions of a third person called something like Chup or Chick. The only editor he ever got through to, these days, was an inoffensive-sounding guy who went by the name of Leslie Evry.

Gwyn said, 'So what have they got lined up?'

'I said. I won't know till I get there.'

'But this is America, man! You got to get out there. You got to go for it.'

Richard waited.

'You got to come on strong. Talk big and kick ass.'

'Let's get this straight. Are you trying to be funny, or is it your intention to pretend to be American while we're there?'

Gwyn sank back, and gave his schedule a careless brandish. 'You know, you're lucky. This is just show business. While I'm scurrying around out there, you'll have time to absorb everything. Time to think. To ponder. Time to dream. Are you all right, mate? You look a bit pale. But it could be the light.'

And the light was coming in sideways, and everything looked combustible or already white-hot, close to burnout or heat-death.

'I had a nosebleed. I haven't seen so much blood since the twins were born. I used up two whole cans' worth of tissues and towels.'

'Beautiful flying weather.'

'It's always sunny, you know. Above the clouds.'

'I got you up here, and it took some doing, so you could see what it's like. For your piece.'

Then, for Richard's further benefit, Gwyn cast his gaze round the cabin with an expression that judiciously combined embarrassment and mischief. 'Who would have thought it? A boy from the valleys. Flying to America first class.'

'Do you mind if I use that line?'

'It's nice, though, isn't it? Dead comfy.'

'The sickbags,' Richard said dully, 'look no better or bigger than the ones in Coach. And they still have turbulence here. And it still takes seven hours. I'll see you on the ground.'

He made his way back, past Magenta Rhapsody and Of Kingly Blood, past Cartel and Avarice and The Usurers, and into the multitudinousness of Hard Times, La Peste, Amerika, Despair, The Moonstone, Labyrinths … Two people-a man in Business and some dope in Coach-were reading Amelior: the paperback.

But as Richard shackled himself back into his seat (which itself bore the heavy indentation of The Wouldbegood: A Life of Edith Nesbit), he had other information to process. Gwyn, Gwyn's schedule, Amelior, the unfortunate defection of Roy Biv from Bold Agenda: these swayed like loose harpoons from the nucleus of his soul. But he had other information to process, the kind that only comes when life is turning, the kind you have to be there to get, because no one will ever tell you about it. And if they did-you'd never listen.

On his way back through the plane Richard had seen women crying- three women, four women. And he realized that there always were these women on planes, crying, with makeup in meltdown, folded over in the window seat or candidly hideous in the aisle, clutching Kleenex. Before, if he assumed anything, he assumed they were crying about boyfriends or husbands (partings or sunderings), or crying (who cared?) from toothache or curse pains or fear of flying. But now he was forty, and he knew.

Women on planes are crying because someone they love or loved is dead or dying. Every plane has them. The talent on the short hops, the broads on the wide-bodies, with their clutched hankies. Death can do this; death has the power to do this. Death, which sends women hurrying to the end of the street, to bus stops, which makes them run under the clocks of railway stations, which lifts them five miles high and fires them weeping through the air at the speed of death, all over the world.

While it would always be true and fair to say that Richard felt like a cigarette, it would now be doubly true and fair to say it. He felt like a cigarette. And he felt like a cigarette. His mouth was plugged with a gum called Nicoteen. And he wore circular nicotine patches, from the same product stable, on his left forearm and right bicep. Richard's blood brownly brewed, like something left overnight in the teapot. He was a cigarette; and he felt like one. And he still felt like a cigarette . .. What he was doing was practicing non-smoking. He knew how Americans treated smokers, people of smoke, people of fire and ash, with their handfuls of dust. He knew he would be asked to do an awful lot of it: non-smoking. So he felt like a cigarette, and he felt like a drink-he felt like a lot of drinks. But he didn't drink and he didn't smoke. All he had was the plastic bottle of mineral water that Gina had made him bring.

He spent his first two hours in New York wearing an expression of riveted horror. This expression of riveted horror was not a response to American violence or vulgarity, to the disposition of American wealth, the quality of American politicians, the condition of American schooling or the standard of American book reviewing (hopelessly variable but often chasteningly high, he would later conclude). No. This expression of riveted horror Richard came to know well. He looked horrified and riveted, and he knew he looked horrified and riveted, because he was staring into the riveted horror of his own face.

In the bathroom, at the hotel. It was a shaving mirror, on a retractable arm, supplementing the broad background of the regular mirror (itself implacable enough). The shaving mirror had a light above it; it also had a light inside it. He thought there must be a lot of people who imagined they looked okay, who fancied they could pass for normal, until they met a shaving mirror in an American hotel. Then the jig was up. Presumably, with the human face, the worst possible representation will always be the truest. This was the best mirror, and it was the worst mirror. All other mirrors were in public relations. After an audience with such a mirror, only two places to go (and maybe the hotel took its cut): the cosmetic surgery, or the church. Richard tried to tell himself that he had looked terrible in London too. And memorably terrible. A week before departure he found that his passport, disused for some while, had quietly gone out of print, or been remaindered. So he breezed along to Woolworth's in Portobello Road and slipped into the booth, expeditiously, without even pausing to arrange his hair. Three minutes later he was shredding the strip of photographs with his fingernails-photographs in which he looked, at once, incredibly old, incredibly mad and incredibly ill. He returned to the beauty parlor of Calchalk Street, and then tried again; and he spent another six quid before he came up with anything he could seriously present at Petty France . . . The mirror had the power to hold him in position, like a vise. His face, it was nothing. It was scorched earth.

Next door on the bed there lay a bundle of early reviews and a copy of the schedule and some bright new hardbacks and even a spray of flowers, all sent by the publisher. By Gwyn's publisher, that is to say: to help him with his piece-his piece about Gwyn. There was nothing from BoldAgenda, no message, no word and no meaningful reply to the calls he kept making from the bathroom telephone, with his nose an inch from the glass. Richard's requests to speak to Leslie Eviy got bounced round the office until they seemed to evaporate or else were pounded into submission and silence by a background cacophony of impulsive home improvement, complete with pummeled nailheads and creaking bucket handles and one-liners tossed back and forth by guys with names like Tug and Tiff and Heft. In twenty minutes he was due upstairs: to listen in on Gwyn being interviewed. Then, when that was over, he was going to arrange to interview the interviewer about what Gwyn was like to interview. Richard left the bathroom and went and sat on the bed and calmly smoked his way through a panic attack. He wanted his boys with him, Marius on this side, Marco on that side. Marius here, Marco there. The mirror was telling him that his body was close to death but his