by Martin Amis
"Sling your … Get your … Bung your finger in there. Your thumb. Now keep it there while I make the knot but take it out when I … Good."
"Helping Daddy, in whatever he does. Each day."
He laughed-a quieter version of his trapped, guttural, lockjawed laugh. "Go somewhere else now," he said. "Find Marius. I'll give you both a quid if you do."
It was seven o'clock in the evening. A space on his desk had not been cleared for the package containing the Los Angeles Times, but there it was anyway, reasonably symmetrical, massive, anomalous, like a UFO on a slum rooftop. Richard weakly supposed that he had better glance through its contents, prior to delivery. It would demand incredible deftness, true, but if he could urge the thing out while preserving at least the general shape of the wrapping . . . He picked at the master-knot (so recently and securely fastened, over Marco's crimson thumbtip); he worried the folds and flaps of the creased brown paper: and in the end he just wrenched it all apart. The boys in the next room-they heard his savage cries but hardly registered them, so familiar was their timbre. Perhaps Daddy had misplaced his pencil sharpener, or dropped a paper clip? Because Richard's relationship with the physical world of things, always very poor, had deteriorated sharply. Christ, the dumb insolence of inanimate objects! He could never understand what was in it for inanimate objects, behaving as they did. What was in it for the doorknob that hooked your jacket pocket as you passed? What was in it for the jacket pocket?
With care and dread, Richard inspected Book World (all the reviews, plus Briefly Noted, We're Talking About…, All Booked Up and Information Please), Arts and Entertainments (in case something of Gwyn's had been harrowingly translated to screen or stage), the main Magazine (including Fresh Faces and Bedside Reading) and the Week in Review(the Gwyn Barry phenomenon). In a more relaxed spirit he thoroughly skimmed the Style Section, the Update Section, the Flair Section, the Briefing Section, the Poise Section, the Now Section and the You Section. Next, feeling laughably rigorous and vastly vindicated, he checked the Op-Ed page of the News (I) section: multiculturalism? the redefined syllabus? whither publishing? The Business Section, the Personals Section and the Appointments Section: none detained him long. The Lawnmower pullout and the Curtain Rail supplement-these he scathingly ignored.
At midnight Richard was coming to the conclusion that the last five hours had been divertingly and rewardingly spent. He didn't doubt that Gwyn was nuts enough to read the whole thing at least twice, maybe three times, maybe four-maybe more. Maybe Gwyn would just go on reading it forever. Richard imagined his friend, a few years from now, mumbling his way through the recipes and the crossword clues and the golf results-his unwashed clothes, his mugs of instant coffee. There he was, rubbing his eyes as he reached yet again for the Deckchair Section … And here was another thing: if Gwyn Barry was such a big cheese, you wouldn't know it from the Sunday Los Angeles Times.
Using a kilometer of string and about four rolls of cellotape, Richard bandaged his package together. It was ready to go. Over a cognac he began to contemplate the fateful, the exalted challenge of delivery.
Every other day on the cover of my newspaper there is a photograph of a murdered child.
Murdered by a pale loner, murdered by sectarians or separatists, murdered by a burping businessman encased in a ton of metal, murdered by other children. Hard work, this last, for the watchful and uninnocent eye. Feel your unwelcome sweat as you move among them now, on traffic islands, in shop doorways-the new children.
Of the perpetrator or perpetrators the mother or the father of the dead will often say, / have no words for them. Something like, Words cannot express what I feel for them. Something like, As for those who did this, I have no words for them. Or, There are no words for them.
By which I take them to mean: words are inadequate and also inappropriate. You cannot find the right words-so don't look for them. Don't look.
And I agree. I am with the father, with the mother. As for those who did this, I have no words.
The information is telling me-the information is telling me to stop saying hi and to start saying bye.
Where I live there's a yellow dwarf I keep seeing, out on the streets with their shops and bus stops. She is young and yellow and less than four feet tall with characteristically compacted limbs (the arms tucked inwards as if in pugilistic readiness, the legs like castors), half-Asian, half-Caribbean, pale-eyebrowed, white-lashed; her hair is an animal orange, its filaments electrically charged. She is young. She will get older, but not taller … For the first instant, whenever we exchange glances, she looks up at me and her chin stiffens in defiance. Mistrust, and everything else, but above all defiance. More recently, as these glances now tend to prolong themselves, her face develops, away from defiance; defiance is discarded as unnecessary (though it has been necessary, so many times). Not quite smiling or nodding, we acknowledge one another.
A yellow dwarf is a terrible thing to be called, probably because- more pertinently-it is a terrible thing to be. A terrible thing. Poor, poor yellow dwarf. I would like her to know that yellow dwarves are good. I owe my life to a yellow dwarf, as do we all-the one up there: the sun.
The yellow dwarf is not exotic. Yellow dwarves are not exotic. They're among the most exemplary phenomena in the universe. A quasar, now-a galaxy the size of a solar system clustered round some quantum monstrosity or cryptogram and barreling out of observable space at a hundred thousand miles a second: that's exotic.
I will never be able to meet the eye of the yellow dwarf up there. Its stare will never soften; its defiance will always be absolute.
She is ordinary, in the big picture. Who will ever tell her? She is ordinary. Not like the other stars of the street. Not like the red giant flailing and falling under the overpass, not like the black hole behind the basement window, not like the pulsar on the roundabout in the deserted playground.
Richard Tull, with his own consignment of strictly local concerns, stood forty stories above the city. He had an authentically frightening hangover and he was in the offices of Gal Aplanalp. Not just above the city, but above the City, within hearing range of Bow Bells, perhaps (when will you pay me?). This was no cockneyland of barrowboys and winkles. Large-scale and cathartic construction work was taking place all around him: jumpsuits, hardhats, trenches, cranes, breeze-blocks in skip-sized packages. A hot-blue magnesium light shone upward through the morning haze. Richard thought of the backyard his study overlooked, where builders were always fucking around, year in year out. To him, builders meant destruction. Bumcrack cowboys, knee-deep in pointlessness and slime, and raising nothing but hell.
The walls of the offices of literary agents, in Richard's wide and unhappy experience, tended to be furnished with books. Here he was surrounded by posters-posters of authors whom Gal already represented. He was surrounded by well-known novelists; but they were novelists who were well known for something else. Well known for newscasting, cliff-scaling, acting, cooking, dress-designing, javelin-throwing, and being related to the Queen. None of them was well known for book reviewing. There was Gwyn, of course. Many of the authors Richard failed to recognize. He cross-checked with the brochures attractively fanned out on the coffee table. So this dope with the ponytail.. . wrote biographies of rock stars. His large corpus consisted entirely of rock-star surnames followed by exclamation marks. Each tide caused Richard's head to jolt in regrettable counterpoint to the pulse of his headache. He imagined , .. Davenant! Deeping! Bottrell! Myers!
Gal entered. Richard turned. He hadn't seen her for ten years. When Gal was seventeen and over here for a summer doing odd jobs for publishers, Richard and Gwyn had taken her up and shown her around: thebowling alley in Shaftesbury Avenue, the Irish pubs beneath Piccadilly Circus; once (yes) they had taken her boating, in Hyde Park. They liked her. She had a talent for warmth, he remembered; she kissed your cheek at odd moments. Who else does that? Oh yeah: Marco. A buxom tomboy, American, seventeen: it sounds like just what you want. But Richard wasn't up
for it. He seemed to want something more complicated: he liked-or kept going out with-dark and violent depressives who never ate anything and never got the curse. And Gwyn wasn't up for it: he had Gilda. And no doubt Gal wasn't up for it either. And anyway the young men had reached a silent understanding: they were young enough themselves to think that Gal Aplanalp was too young to be touched.
They shook hands, and embraced, which was her idea (Gal's lips went "mwa" into the whiskers of his right ear). Then she said the thing he least wanted to hear. She said,
"Well let's take a look at you."
Richard stood there at arm's length.
"Are you .. .? You look-you look rather, I don't know, you look a bit . . ."
"Old," said Richard. "The adjective-or is it the complement-you are searching for is old."
The numerous symptoms of his hangover included a strong reluctance to meet any human eye. But Richard told himself to be mad and proud (and what a wag his head gave on that complement): he went on standing there, proud and mad and unpublished, the palely bleeding ruin of Richard lull. It could be that his hangover wasn't really that bad, warranting no more, perhaps, than half a week of sepulchral suffering, in the fetal position, behind drawn blinds.
"Coffee? It's good. We send out for it."
"That would be very nice."
They talked for a while about the old days. Yes, how much better things had been, in the old days, when Gwyn was poor, his bedsit cramped, his girlfriend rough, his career quite prospectless. In the old days Gwyn was just a failed book reviewer (Richard's designation) and publisher's skivvy. During the summer of Gal's stay Gwyn had been preparing A-level guides to various sections of The Canterbury Tales. They weren't even books, or pamphlets. They were sold in packets … Now that Gal was out of his force field Richard was free to contemplate her. And he nodded his head; he conceded. Not just young, not just healthy and symmetrical. Somebody who worked in the marketing of face creams or bath oils would give Gal a high beauty rating. These were looks you could actually sell things with. These were looks that men andwomen alike admired. It had all come together, the skin, the bones, the coiled black hair. Also the body: that too. When she shifted in her chair the upper half of her torso rearranged itself a beat late, with a certain ordered heaviness. Richard supposed she was turned out in accordance with the cutting edge of female-professional thinking and praxis. She was pitilessly businesslike from head to foot; but the foot wore an ankle bracelet and a spikey heel. When they greeted one another, Richard would have liked to be able to say something like "I've been potholing for a month" or "I got shot in the head last week." Yet it was Gal who had spent the last two nights on the red-eye-over America, over the Atlantic. All Richard had done was sit at his desk.
The coffee came. They paused. They began.
First, the necessarily depressing issue of Richard's curriculum vitae. Attached to her clipboard she had a printout on him; she had information. Gal made notes and said "Mm-hm." Her manner suggested, encouragingly, that she was no stranger to the stalled career; Richard began to believe that she routinely dealt with greater prodigies of obscurity and pauperism-with seedier duds, with louder flops.
"What's this biography of Denton Welch?" she said, and frowned accusingly at her clipboard.
"I never did it. It fell through."
"AndofR. C. Squires?"
"R. C. Squires. A literary editor of The Little Magazine."
"Which little magazine?"
"The Little Magazine. The one I'm literary editor of. An interesting life. He was in Berlin in the thirties and in Spain during the Civil War." Respectively whoring in the Kurfiiirstendamm and playing ping-pong in Sitges, as Richard had learned, after a month of desultory research. "May I smoke?"
"What about this travel book? The Siberia trip."
"I'm not going."
"The Siberian lepers…"
"I'm not going."
"What's this? The History of Increasing Humiliation. Nonfiction, right?"
Richard crossed his legs and then recrossed them. This was a book he still wanted to write: one day. He said, as he had said before, "It would be a book accounting for the decline in the status and virtue of literary protagonists. First gods, then demigods, then kings, then great warriors, great lovers, then burghers and merchants and vicars and doctors and lawyers. Then social realism: you. Then irony: me. Then maniacs and murderers, tramps, mobs, rabble, flotsam, vermin.?
She was looking at him. "And what would account for it?"
He sighed. "The history of astronomy. The history of astronomy is the history of increasing humiliation. First the geocentric universe, then the heliocentric universe. Then the eccentric universe-the one we're living in. Every century we get smaller. Kant figured it all out, sitting in his armchair. What's the phrase? The principle of terrestrial mediocrity."
"…Big book."
"Big book. Small world. Big universe."
"What is the status of all these projects?"
"The status of all these projects," said Richard, "is that I've taken advances on them and not written them."
"Hell with that," she said, and now the exchange started speeding up. "They write it off."
"The new novel. What's it about."
"Modern consciousness."
"Is it as difficult as your other novels?"
"More difficult. Much more difficult."
"You didn't think you might change tack?"
"And write a Western?"
"What's it called?"
"Untitled. Its title is Untitled"
"We'll soon fix that."
"We will not fix that."
"I reread Dreams Are Hard to Find and I-"
"Dreams Don't Mean Anything."
"Don't say that. You're too easily discouraged."
"Point one," said Richard. He fell silent. He was applying the brake. In fact he had written a Western. He had tried to write a Western. His Western had petered out after a couple of pages of banging shutters, of hurrying tumbleweeds … "Point one. The title of my book is Dreams Don't Mean Anything. Point two. It-what I mean is dreams don't signify anything. Not exactly. Point three. I am not 'easily discouraged.' It has been difficult getting me discouraged. It has been arduous."
"Can I have a drag?"
He held the cigarette out to her butt-first. She met it not with her fingers-she met it with her lips. So Richard was mollified by a glimpse of star-bright brassiere, against Persian flesh. Gal inhaled expertly, and sat back. She liked to smoke; she used artificial sweeteners in her espresso.
Her hand, he noticed, was no less plump than it was ten years ago. A hand he had held, avuncularly, many times. Gal had a flaw. A predisposition. Weight wanted her. Fat wanted her. The desk she sat at wasorganized, but there was something in her that wasn't organized, not quite .. . Beyond was the window: in this frame of gray sky the cranes were like T-squares on a drawing board. The paper the architect was using was soiled and smudged. Too much rubbing out and starting again, with soiled eraser. Graphic cancellations, and the grains of the rubber shading the air, brushed and nudged by the hovering pinkie. A good idea, when imagining London, when imagining cities, to go back to the drawing board.
"I want to represent you," she said.
"Thank you," he said.
"Now. Writers need definition. The public can only keep in mind one thing per writer. Like a signature. Drunk, young, mad, fat, sick: you know. It's better if you pick it rather than letting them pick it. Ever thought about the young-fogey thing? The young fart. You wear a bow tie and a waistcoat. Would you smoke a pipe?"
"Well I would, probably," said Richard, stretching his neck, "if somebody offered me one. With tobacco in it and a match. Listen. I'm too old to be a young fart. I'm an old fart." Flatulence, as it happened, was on Richard's mind. That morning, while shaving, he had geared himself, expecting the usual pungent blare. And all he heard was a terrible little click. "Aren't we forgetting that I've got to get published first?"
; "Oh I think I can call in some favors. Then we'll get everything working together. Your fiction is your fiction. I won't fuck with you creatively but we've got to get something else to play it off against. Your journalism needs a gee-up. It's too bad you review all over the place. You should have a column. Think about it."
"Don't mind me asking this. I gather you're very good at what you do. Do you find your appearance helps?"
"Absolutely. How about … how about doing a long in-depth piece about what it's like to be a very successful novelist?"
Richard waited.
"You know: what's it really like. People are very interested in writers. Successful ones. More interested in the writers than the writing. In the writers' lives. For some reason. You and I both know they mainly sit at home all day."
Richard waited.
"So how about this piece. I'll sell it in America. Everywhere."
"The one about what it's like being an incredibly successful writer?"
"Day by day. What's it like. What's it really like."
Richard went back to waiting.
"… Gwyn's new novel is published in the States in March. Here it'llbe May. He's doing the eight-city tour. New York, Washington, Miami, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Boston, New York again. You go with him. I'll set it up."
"Whose idea is this?"
"Mine. I'm sure he'll be delighted to have you along. Those tours are a sentence. Go on. Do it. You're smiling. Do it. It'll show everybody how unenvious you are."
"Is that my signature? Unenvious?"
He said he would have to think about it (untrue: he was going), and they shook hands without the hug this time, like professionals. In the tube train to Soho and the offices of The Little Magazine Richard considered his signature: what marked him out. Because we all needed them now, signatures, signatures, even the guy sitting opposite: his was the pair of pink diaper pins he wore through his nose . .. Richard couldn't come up with anything good. Except-this. He had never been to America. And he would tell you that quite frankly, raising his pentimento eyebrows and tensing his upper lip with a certain laconic pride.
