THE INFORMATION

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Later, heading for his study, where he intended to drink scotch and smoke dope for a couple of hours, and examine his new destiny, he heard an italicized whisper through the half-open door of the boxroom that the boys shared (and were rapidly outgrowing): Daddy. He looked in. Marius.

'What do you want now?'

'Daddy? Daddy: what would you rather be? An Autobot or a Decep-ticon?'

Richard leaned his head against the doorjamb. The twins were being particularly knowing and apposite that night-the twins, with their subtle life, their weave of themes. Earlier in the bathroom Marco had raiseda characteristically crooked finger at a daddy-longlegs on the water pipe. A daddy-longlegs so long-legged that it was almost tripping over itself and made you think of some valiant and tragic sports day for the disabled, all the three-legged races, all the sacks, all the eggs and spoons, all the speeches so nervously prepared and kindly meant. 'Daddy? Is that Spiderman?' Daddy with his long legs bent over the bath had answered, 'It looks more to me like Spiderspider.' … Now Richard said to Marius,

'Autobot or Decepticon. A good question. Like many of your questions. And guess what. I think I've finally made up my mind.'

'Which?'

'No more Autobot. All Decepticon.'

'Me too.'

'Hush now.'

Richard sat at his desk in the dark. He rolled and lit; he poured and sipped. Richard was obliged to drink heavily when he smoked dope-to fight the paranoia. To combat the incredible paranoia. On dope he sometimes thought that all the televisions of Calchalk Street were softly crackling about Richard Tull: news flashes about his most recent failures; panel discussions about his obscurity, his neglect. Now he drank and smoked and he was neither happy nor sad.

The really good bit with Gwyn had happened afterwards, in the cab. Half past three, and the light outside, the sky, was the same as the driver's tinted windscreen, the upper half all charcoal and oil, the lower leadenly glowing. Richard pulled the side window down to validate this, and of course the glass surged slowly up again, interposing its own medium. Here perhaps was the only way to see London truly, winging low over it, in a cab, in darkness-at-noon July. London traffic lights are the brightest in the world, beneath their meshed glass: the anger of their red, the jaundice of their amber, the jealousy of their green.

The profile beside him was keeping quiet so Richard said boldly, 'Could you believe that woman? You know-she really thinks she's authentic. Whereas . . .' He paused. Whereas to him she had seemed horrifically otherwise. 'Unmarried, I assume. She reeked of spinst.'

Gwyn turned to him.

'Spinst. Spinst. Like unmarried men reek of batch.'

Gwyn turned away again. He shook his head-sadly. You can't say such things. And not just for public reasons. Richard deduced (perhaps wrongly, perhaps over-elaborately) that Gwyn meant something like: You can't say such things because the whole area has been seen to be contaminated-contaminated by men who really do hate women.

(Maybe he had come up with a bad example: with the spiders. People would assume he thought women were spiders. Or that he only hated ?women spiders.) Anyway Richard went ahead and said,

'Great gusts of spinst. A miasma of spinst.'

Gwyn waved a hand at him.

'I can describe it for you if you like. Imagine a Wembley of rain-damaged makeup. Or a-'

'Would you pull in at the corner here please?'

No, it was nothing. Gwyn was just buying an evening paper from the boy. Jesus, the light through the open door looked like the end of London, the end of everything; its guttering glow was livid now, and something you wouldn't want to touch, like the human-hued legs of pigeons beneath their dirty overcoats.

The cab resumed its endless journey, its journey of hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait. Gwyn opened his paper and turned to the Diary and eventually said,

'Well there's nothing about it here.'

Richard was staring at him. 'Nothing about what?'

'About the lunch. Your little outburst.'

Richard stared harder. 'Relieved about that, are you?'

Gwyn spoke with restraint. He said: 'It's quite a while since anybody talked to me like that.'

'Is it? Well this time you won't have so long to wait. Because somebody's going to talk to you like that again right away. That's the lunchtime edition. You think the guy just phones it on to the newsstands? It's lucky no one knows how fucking thick you really are. What a fucking dunce you really are. That would be a scoop.'

'Nothing about the job offer, either,' said Gwyn, his bright eyes still scanning the page.

'There wasn't any job offer.'

'Yes there was. While you were off on one of your visits to the toilet. I turned it down of course. I mean, as if I. . .'

The cab pulled up. As Richard hunched forward he said, 'One last thing. Why can't I talk about spinst?'

'Because people will start avoiding you.'

Now the first drop of rain grayly kissed him on one of his bald spots as he climbed out of the cab and into the shoplit dungeon of Marylebone High Street. Richard went on up to the offices of the Tantalus Press.

Round about here, in time, the emotions lose lucidity and definition, and become qualified by something bodily. Something coarse and coarse-haired in the fury, something rancid and pulmonary in the grief, something toxic and drop-toothed in the hate . . . Richard put his thoughts in delivery order, as a writer might: stuff to be got in. And at the same time he experienced one of those uncovenanted expansions that every artist knows, when, almost audibly to the inner ear, things swivel and realign (the cube comes good), and all is clear. You don't do this: your talent does it. He sat up. His state was one of equilibrium, neither pleasant nor unpleasant in itself, but steady. He gave a sudden nod. Then and there it crystallized: the task. A literary endeavor, a quest, an exaltation-one to which he could sternly commit all his passion and his power. He was going to fuck Gwyn up.

Outside there hung the crescent moon. It looked like Punch. But where was Judy?

Fly a mile east in our weep ship to the spires of Holland Park, the aerials, the house, the layered roof, the burglar alarms, the first-floor window, thick with reflections, looming over the still garden. This is the window to the master bedroom, where the master sleeps. I'm not going in there-not yet. So I don't know what his bed smells of, and I don't know if he cries in the night.

As Richard does.

Why do the men cry? Because of fights and feats and marathon preferment, because they want their mothers, because they are blind in time, because of all the hard-ons they have to whistle up out of the thin blue yonder, because of all that men have done. Because they can't be happy or sad anymore- only smashed or nuts. And because they don't know how to do it when they're awake.

And then there is the information, which comes at night.

The next day it was his turn: Richard turned forty. Turned is right. Like a half-cooked steak, like a wired cop, like an old leaf, like milk, Richard turned. And nothing