The Information

by Martin Amis

  Richard went downstairs in his shorts. He felt cold and it looked like rain. "Go for it Daddy," said Marius. "Just do it."

  He stood outside waiting for the biker sent to collect his review. Who was prompt. Here he came, complacently speeding through the torment of his brutish raspberry, his black body cocked with the biker's spurious urgency, as if what he was doing was so clearly more important than what you were doing. Was it his crash helmet that went on fizzing and squawking at him, like a fat old earphone? Biker and book reviewer bawled "Cheers" at each other and did the thing with the clipboard and the ballpoint, these two eyesore deviants, the biker in his city scuba gear, thebook reviewer with bare legs beneath the cold skirt of his raincoat. Book reviewers would be around for a while, but bikers would soon be gone, or would all switch to pizzas and baked potatoes-casualties of the fax.

  At the Warlock Sports Center he parked the dusty Maestro next to Gwyn's new Swedish sedan, which was still gulping and chirruping, Richard noticed, as its computer ticked off the final security checks. Then, abruptly without intelligence, the car seemed to settle back into its silent, sullen crouch, and its sullen vigil. Leaving the Maestro unlocked (it contained nothing but banana skins and the fading carbons of dead novels), Richard strode through the car park and its exemplary diversity of stilled traffic, like an illustration of all you might meet on the contemporary road with its contraflow and intercool: hearse, heap, dragster, dump truck, duchess-wagon, cripple-bubble. He duly sighted Gwyn, strolling, with slowly swinging sports bag, along the brink of the bowling green, where sainted figures in white shirts and white hair archaically bent and straightened on the shallow yellow lawn. The protective affection that a nice person is expected to feel when observing another nice person who is innocent of this scrutiny-such affection, Richard found, was not absent in the present case so much as inverted or curdled: his face was all glints and snickers, and he felt briefly godlike, and exhaustingly ever-hostile. Just then, over the black slope of the tudoresque clubhouse, a loose flock of city birds reared up like a join-the-dots puzzle of a human face or fist . . . The gap between the two men closed. Richard broke into an ankle-lancing trot and was no more than a racket's reach from Gwyn's shoulders when, with a blat of the side door, they exchanged the late-summer air for the dense breath of the clubhouse.

  All men are faced with this. But wait… First we have to get past the hatch of the booking office and the sexual indifference of the pretty girl who worked there, then the notice boards with their leagues and ladders (dotted with multicolored drawing-pins and one dying, throbbing wasp), then the aggressive levity of the Warlock manager, John Punt. "Gwyn," said Richard, as they stepped on into the clubhouse proper and the greater bar. And? There it lay: the pub of life. Eighty or ninety souls, in knots and echelons; and here came the familiar moment, a dip in the sound, a gulp, a swallow and a selection of profiles turning full face, as if on a rap sheet. All men are eternally confronted by this: other men, in blocs and sets. Equipped with an act, all men are confronted by an audience which might cheer or jeer or stay silent or yawn rancorously or just walk out-their verdict on your life performance. As Richard remembered, he and Gwyn used to be equally unpopular here at the Warlock,never directly addressed, quietly sneered at. As Gwyn, with his pewtery hair, his body as tall as his sports bag was long, moved past the low tables to the tag board there were cries and croaks of greeting, of "Still scribbling?" and "Sold a million yet?" The acceptance world. As if Gwyn was suddenly visible now, adjudged not to have been wasting his time; TV had democratized him, and made him available for transference to the masses; the life performance was seen to be worthy of sagacious applause. Whereas Richard, as a figure, was still entirely alien. For one thing, nobody could bear his habit, while on court, of shouting shit in French.

  "I won't be much good to you today," said Gwyn (they had ten minutes to kill). "What with this Profundity thing."

  "What with this what?"

  "Profundity thing. Haven't you heard about it? It's a literary stipend, awarded every year. Administered out of Boston. Called a Profundity Requital."

  "Don't tell me," said Richard cautiously. "Some loo-paper heiress. Looking for a tony way of dodging tax."

  "Far from it. They're already calling it the mini-Nobel. The money's ridiculous. And you get it every year. For life."

  "And?"

  "I'm told I'm on the shortlist."

  John Punt, his face scalded and broad-pored from the sun-ray lamp, often referred to the Warlock as a dinosaur. By which he meant: no Jacuzzis, no parasols, no quiche counter, no broccoli juice. Instead: unhealthy fare served all day long, smoking allowed and even encouraged, continuous and competitive drinking and strict non-exclusivity. Anyone could join the Warlock, cheaply and right away. Within the outer bar was an inner bar, an antiworld where many men and few women sat in arcs staring at hands of cards or kwik crosswords or architect's drawings or lawyers' briefs or escape routes, where bankruptcies and bereavements were entrained by a twingeing shake or nod of some great ruined head, and where, at this moment, behind a mephitic banquette of cigarette smoke, his back turned, Steve Cousins sat talking the higher shop with three bronzed pocked mug shots: the most exalted vil-lainspeak (no detail, just first principles) about getting back what you put in and this being life and this being it . . . Gwyn and Richard stood between the two arenas, in a latticed passage that was also an amusement arcade: golf video, Bingomatic, Poker Draw, and, of course, the Knowledge Machine. Instead of a jukebox there stood a black upright piano on which, after lunch, drowsy criminals would occasionally interpret sometremulous ballad. The clubhouse acoustics had a funny tilt to them; voices sounded warped or one-way, as many mouths nuzzled the necks of cellular telephones; many an ear was plugged with Walkman or hearing aid, nursing its individual tinnitus.

  "A Profundity Requital," said Richard pensively. "Well. We know one thing."

  "What's that?"

  "You're not going to get it."

  Gwyn, who was wrong, flexed his forehead and said, "A million people can't be wrong."

  Richard, who was also wrong, said, "A million people are always wrong. Let's play."

  Anyone who shared the common belief that the decline of British tennis was a result of the game's bourgeois, garden-party associations would have felt generally braced and corrected, at the Warlock Sports Center, to hear the ragged snarls and howls, the piercing obscenities and barbaric phonemes which made the wired courts seem like cages housing slaves or articulate animals in permanent mutiny against their confinement, their lash-counts, their lousy food. On the other hand, anyone watching Gwyn and Richard as they prepared to play would at once agree that Richard's clear superiority owed everything to being middle class. Gwyn was encased in a new track suit that looked as though it had been designed and marketed that morning; its salient feature was a steadily contoured bagginess, a spacesuit or wind-bubble effect, reminding Richard of the twins' salopetts and the padded boiler beneath the stairs. Richard himself, more subtly, and more horribly, for once, in a way, was dressed in wrinkly khaki shorts and, crucially, an off-white top-which was old, which wasn't modern, which glowed with its prewar sour-milk light (numb and humble now, against the burnished ease of the T-shirt), the light of longjohn seams, old surgical tape, old field hospitals, old triage. Even his shoes were intolerably antique: beige, canvas, intended to enfold the thoughtless trudge of explorer or humorless imperialist. You expected him to carry a wooden racket in a wooden press and a plastic shagbag full of bald balls pried free from the under-gardener's lawnmower.

  Through the window of one of the Warlock's games rooms (not in use at present: after six it became a grot of darts) Steve Cousins watched the two novelists begin their game and wondered what they'd be like at his sport. In other words he was wondering what they'd be like at fighting- or, even more simply, what they'd be like to beat up. This involved him in pseudo-sexual considerations, because, yes, the truism is true, andfighting is like fucking (proximity alone
sees to that, plus various texture tests and heft assessments you wouldn't otherwise be making); and, while we're at it, the truism is true, and the criminal is like an artist (though not for the reasons usually given, which merely depend on immaturity and the condition of self-employment): the criminal resembles the artist in his pretension, his incompetence, and his self-pity. So, for a moment, Scozzy watched Gwyn and Richard like an animal-an articulate animal. The wild were humans who were animals while still being human. So their minds contained a meteorology of good/bad, warm/cold, tastes fresh/tastes old, and, concerning humans, he is kind/he is cruel, he is familiar/he is new, he is controllable/he is uncontrollable. He is strong/he is weak. Looking at Richard and Gwyn, Steve couldn't honestly say that either of them would give him any bother.

  The match began. He watched. And not with an untutored eye. Like many faces he had spent a significant fraction of his life in sports clubs and leisure centers; such people had a lot of leisure, a lot of time to kill, this being the polar opposite, in their universe, to time, as served, in an institution. Steve could see the hateful remains of Richard's antique technique, its middle-class severity: the shoveled forehand, the backhand with its heavily lingering slice. Look: you could see his socks had a pink tinge to them. The dull blush of the family wash. Two kids: twins. He could play a bit, Richard. Though the love-handled midriff was well prolapsed, it did turn to shape the shot; though the legs were hairless and meatless, they did bend. As for Twinkletoes on the other side of the net, in his designer rainbow gear: as for Tinkerbell there, flitting around with her wand … What you had here was one man playing all the tennis, up against a maneuverable little hacker taking the pace off everything, always obvious, never contrary, with no instinct to second-guess or wrong-foot. Steve was scandalized by Gwyn's lack of guile.

  So why all the temper-from Richard's end? No way in the fucking world was he going to lose to this guy. Dear oh dear: the swearing, the racket abuse. The way he wiped visible deposits of tea or nicotine from the corners of his scum-storing mouth. Hang on. Some old bat from the mansion flats was sticking its head out of the window:

  "Less of that language, Richard!"

  "Sorry!"

  Must do it a lot: she even knew his name! He must be famous for it, his language. Round these parts anyway. Round Court 4 anyway. Now here's something interesting. Nice angle on his approach shot (Richard), taking Twinkletoes way out of court-crashing, indeed, into the sidewire. Oof. But he managed to get it back somehow: an apologetic plop over the net. And as Gwyn comes haring back for this lost cause, instead of just smacking the ball into the wide-open spaces Richard tries to slide it in behind him, down the line. And puts it out.

  What was that Richard said, bent over the net post? "Oh Jesus. Nda! Piece of shit."

  What was that Gwyn said, standing in the tram lines? "Richard, you're a gilder of lilies."

  Gilda, thought Steve. Lily. Lil: means tit. But he understood. Like over-egging the pudding. Gilders of lilies. Now. Steve's intention … In common with all the very worst elements at the club, Steve wasn't a Tennis Member of the Warlock, nor was he a Squash Member or a Bowls Member: he was a Social Member of the Warlock. So it was with quiet confidence that he strolled upstairs with his glass of Isotonic, to the darts room, which was empty and stood tensed in its unnatural shadows, the windows all smeared with light-excluding cream paint or paste. This gloom and silence and sudden solitude made him momentarily uncertain about who he was or might be. Low-level unreality attacks didn't necessarily disquiet him-because they didn't feel unreal. They felt appropriate. Steve expected them, saying to himself, after all, there's no one quite like me. Yet. And it wasn't a delusion of uniqueness, not quite. He just believed he was the first of many. Many Scozzys were out there waiting to happen. I am a time traveler. I come from the future.

  Steve's intention was to be unforgettable. Gwyn, or Richard, or maybe both, would not forget him. And that was a promise. Gilders of lilies. You don't get too many of them, he said to himself as he silently closed the window: not in my line of work. I'm the only one.

  "Played," said Gwyn.

  "Thanks," said Richard. "Tough."

  They shook hands at the net. Tennis was the only time they ever touched. Games were the only reason they ever met. It had become clear about six months ago that Richard was no longer capable of getting through a dinner in Gwyn's company without disgracing himself. Though Gina and Demi still met up sometimes.

  "I'm improving," said Gwyn.

  "No you're not."

  "I'll get there."

  "No you won't."

  Using the net as a guide rail or a walking-frame, Richard reached his chair. He sat down suddenly and at once assumed a posture of tranced or drunken meditation. Gwyn remained standing-under the shadow ofthe mansion flats, from which the detailed noises of DIY scraped and whined against the air: drill, plane, sander.

  "I don't know what it was today," said Gwyn. "Couldn't get my head right. Couldn't find the desire. It's this Profundity thing. Ridiculous really," said Gwyn, who still pronounced "really" reefy. "It's not even announced till the spring."

  "Oh I get it. Nothing to do with technique or talent or timing or anything. You just couldn't be fucked."

  "Yes, well I was all over the bloody shop today. Couldn't get my backhand working."

  Richard was enjoying his breather-and breather was definitely the word he wanted. "You haven't got a backhand. It's just a wound in your side. It's just an absence. Like an amputee's memory of a vanished limb. You haven't got a forehand either. Or a volley. Or an overhead. That's the trouble with your game. You haven't got any shots. You're a dog on the court. Yeah. A little Welsh retriever."

  He put a cigarette in his mouth and, as a matter of silent routine, offered one to Gwyn, who said,

  "Just couldn't concentrate. No thanks." Richard looked at him. "I packed it in." "You what?"

  "I stopped. Three days ago. Cold. That's it. You just make the life choice."

  Richard lit up and inhaled needfully. He gazed at his cigarette. He didn't really want to smoke it. He wanted to eat it. This move of Gwyn's was a heavy blow. Almost the only thing he still liked about Gwyn was that Gwyn still smoked. Of course, Gwyn had never smoked seriously. Just a pack a day. Not like Richard with his carton-eons, his suede lungs, his kippered wisteria . . . Richard was reminded of another inexpiable exchange he'd had with Gwyn, on the same court, on the same green chair, under the same gut-colored sky and the same summer moon. A year ago, when Amelior was taking off and all the other stuff was coming down, Gwyn turned to him, courtside, and said abruptly: "I'm getting married." Richard replied, at once, "Good. About time." And he meant it. He was as they say "genuinely pleased." Pleasure came to him in the form of voluptuous relief. Yes, good. About time Gwyn shackled himself for ever to that speechless pit-pony, Gilda; his teenhood sweetheart,

  invisible Gilda. Even now Richard could close his eyes and see her small shape in a dozen different bedsits and flatlets, her averted face damp with steam as she served up yet another bowl of spaghetti, her pale hair andsore and coldly upper lip, her (or maybe his) functional underwear on a curved string above the fibrous white tubes of the gas fire, her phobic humility, her unpoetic sadness, her lumpy, childish emerald-green overcoat that came from another time and another place. "Great. I bet Gilda's thrilled. Is Gilda thrilled?" Gilda was good. Richard didn't fancy her. He didn't even want to fuck her once. So we must imagine his moodswing when Gwyn paused and said, "No. Not so's you'd notice. No, I think we can say that Gilda is definitely not overly chuffed. Because I'm not marrying her." Gwyn wasn't marrying Gilda Paul. He was marrying Lady Demeter de Rougemount, a celebrated knockout of limitless fortune and imperial blood whom Richard knew and admired and had recently taken to thinking about every time he came. "There it is," said Gwyn. Richard failed to offer his congratulations. He stalked off, ostensibly to locate and solace Gilda. In fact he just drove away in his Maestro and parked it somewhere and sat in it sobbing and
swearing and smoking cigarettes.

  "You bastard," said Richard. "I thought we were in this together."

  "Three days ago. Hark at you gasping away. Couple of years I'll be having you six-love, six-love."

  "What's it like?"

  Richard had imagined giving up smoking; and he naturally assumed that man knew no hotter hell. Nowadays he had long quit thinking about quitting. Before the children were born he sometimes thought that he might very well give up smoking when he became a father. But the boys seemed to have immortalized his bond with cigarettes. This bond with cigarettes-this living relationship with death. Paradoxically, he no longer wanted to give up smoking: what he wanted to do was take up smoking. Not so much to fill the little gaps between cigarettes with cigarettes (there wouldn't be time, anyway) or to smoke two cigarettes at once. It was more that he felt the desire to smoke a cigarette even when he was smoking a cigarette. The need was and wasn't being met.