The Information

by Martin Amis

  Marco looked up.

  "And I want to know what you meant by it."

  Richard was standing behind his desk. He raised his chin, and Marco could see the blotches and stipples of his throat, the misadventures with the razor, the mobile growth of the Adam's apple, the slanting sheen of his damaged eye.

  "It was the most hurtful thing you've ever said to me. Ever."

  Marco's ears now heard the quiet roar of shame and turpitude. He looked up, once, and then went on staring sadly straight ahead. The room was crepuscular anyway, but darker for the child, whose world was folding slowly inwards.

  "You said," said Richard, inhaling, "that I was smelly."

  Marco looked up, in hope. "I didn't," he said. For Daddy, in his view, ?wasn't smelly. Tobacco, seldom-laundered clothes, a certain mysterious difficulty of the body: but not smelly. "I didn't, Daddy."

  "Oh but you did, Marco. Oh, you did. You said I smelled"-and here he raised his chin again, and the larynx squirmed-"of poo."

  "I didn't."

  " 'I dunnop who,' " Richard quoted. " 'Ooh you smelly thing.' "

  ". .. It was a. joke. It was a joke, Daddy." Marco didn't appeal to the word so much as throw himself at its feet. "It was a joke."

  Richard waited. Then he said, "Do I or do I not? Smell of poo.?

  again, fully mistaken the attempt for the deed. Could this be seen as an improvement-another way (better, gentler), for the years of one's maturity? Gina knew the difference between the word and the deed. And, yes, it would certainly be more relaxing if she didn't. Probably, toward the end of life, universally, there wasn't any difference.

  And there wasn't any difference when it came to guilt, and culpability. If Gina found out about this, he knew what she'd do (she had warned him often enough): Gina would retaliate, in kind. Richard turned his head. On Anstice's bedside chair there was a stack of the novels she got through at a rate of two or three a day. Prewar, clothbound. Romantic, serious: written by women. Their names-all the Susans and Henriettas-never recurred. It was amateur fiction, for a vanished reading public. One novel each: the novel that everybody was supposed to have in them.

  Now Anstice said, "Thank you, my darling. You've made me ready to die. Right," she added, with a responsible frown. "What's the best way to tell Gina?"

  Richard sometimes tried to anthropomorphize the sun and the planets- or to solar-systematize his immediate circle. He never got very far with it.

  Gina was the Earth: Mother Earth.

  Venus was both Morning Star and Evening Star. The Evening Star was perhaps Belladonna. The Morning Star was Demi.

  Halley's Comet you could pin on Anstice, except she made her loop at least once a day instead of once a lifetime, an apparition of soot and ice with her comet trail of madlady hair.

  Was Gwyn Jupiter, the nearly star, too small to ignite in nuclear burning, or was he already the Sun?

  Was Steve Cousins Mars, the planet of war, or was he simply Mercury, the messenger, bringing you information from the other side?

  Try as he might, Richard could never find anything good for the boys to be. When they fought, as they often did, then the Martian satellites of Deimos and Phobos suited them fine: Fear and Dread. More usually, though, when they were being cooperative, or at least silent, and elsewhere, then they were just spots of light-the Heavenly Twins.

  He knew who he was. He was Pluto; and Charon was his art.

  Gina was Mother Earth. Bipolar, sublunar, circumsolar.for the status quo ante. Oh, the way things were … Richard had but one straw to clutch at-one crumb of comfort: his utter sexual failure the night before. That fiasco: how he would cling to it. Just wait until he got into the pub and told all the lads … Suddenly Anstice rose from the bed. Almost as suddenly as Gina did-when Marco cried. Adulterers sometimes leave beds suddenly. But nobody leaves a bed as suddenly as a mother. Richard closed his eyes. He could hear the knout of Anstice's ponytail as she crossed the room. When she returned she had a mug of tea for him, the mug murky and stippled like Cotswold stone, its crevices coated and recoated with the residue of a million lone mugfuls. One day this residue would reach to the brim, and the mug would be dead, solid with its own deposits, and Anstice would at last be ready.

  Her tone, and choice of words, surprised him when she said, "You were a naughty boy last night."

  "… What kind of a naughty boy?"

  She was gazing at him in comfortable reproach. "Were you careful?"

  "Oh yes," twinkled Richard, ever the gentleman, even when being a naughty boy.

  "I love you," she said.

  He felt the temptation to collapse into all this-to collapse into the vastness of his error. Her head dropped as it sought his chest. And there, tickling his nostrils, was her fierce thatch of ear-whisker and rogue eyebrow. Richard was moved, in his way. He stroked her neck; beneath the coarse dressing-gown his fingers found the shoulder strap of something softer and more slippery. He looked. It was pink. Richard understood rejection slips; he understood neglect; he understood people who had nobody to keep themselves clean for. And here was Anstice: in her rejection slip. In his hand he weighed the base of her ponytail, like the joint of a sinewy limb. Anstice's syrup, atop the pink slip. For a shampoo you would go to the carwash with such a head of hair. He closed his eyes and saw a dog in a bathtub, worriedly shivering, its body mass apparently halved by the hug of the wet coat.

  And Richard was moved, in his way. He was so moved that he tried to be a naughty boy again. But that didn't work out either. He tried everything he knew that might delight a woman. He tried forcing it in with his thumb. He tried bending it double. But bending "what double? Nor was he remiss in the matter of gasping and coughing in her ear. Ten minutes of this and then he slid away and flopped on to his back. And Anstice whispered, "Everything they said about it is true."

  For a moment he was surprised and even relieved by her heartless sarcasm. But as she rambled repletedly on it became clear that she had,thing with dogs in them, or more than one uniformed soldier. Steve had burgled richer places than this, places that were just bank vaults on silk carpets. What he was looking at here, though, was something he hadn't seen before: femininity on a grand scale. The feminine world was a puffy world, like the padded vest of a gold boiler. In the back room ("Den," he said) there was an archwayed nook with a television in it. He was pleased, even flattered and moved, to see the television-proof of a shared humanity. Every household, be it never so mean, shared this square of dead gray. There was a little bookcase for the videos, with a whole section devoted to the appearances of Gwyn Barry, labeled by hand. Things like "Better Read: Gwyn Barry." Or "The Seven Vital Virtues, 4: Uxoriousness." He felt a strong impulse to steal these videos-or even to watch them. They were a sham. The house was a sham. He extinguished the candle and came out into the hall and mounted the stairs in utterly silent bounds.

  When he intruded, in this way, there was a thing he could do with his senses: he could send them out, over the house, and they would come back and tell him whether everyone was still sleeping. Just as all women, even little girls, even old ladies, even nuns, are said to have an interrupter in their heads which beeps or pages them every ninety seconds or so, making them listen for a baby's cry, so the senses of Steve Cousins, when he was working, submitted their punctual reports, ever ready for the blip of a conscious mind. On the first-floor landing he hesitated, with a sudden widening of his dark-adapted eyes. Up above him a sleeping mind was searching for a change of status; but then it settled or resigned itself, and dreamed on … He hefted the doorknob to accommodate the carpet's extravagant nap. His mouth formed a tight white O, like the ring of a contraceptive. And with a swivel of the body he was in their room.

  Of course, Scozzy was humblingly good at being silent. When it came to keeping quiet, he was world class. Because if you'd learned your trade in campsites and trailer parks, in tramp-crammed caravans, in swaying, creaking prefabs, in a world where there was no padding and absolutely no space in between th
ings, then noiselessness became your element and your medium. He had broken and entered the homes of the homeless: fishing a few bob out of an appliance carton while a family of four was dozing in it: you got to know about sleep and silence and all the things in between.

  Demeter lay there, alone. Well Gwyn's upstairs with the maid",

  thought Scozzy perfunctorily. He moved closer. She lay there, on her back, parted legs girlishly straight and hands raised on either side of her fold of fair hair, as if in surrender. Earrings on one side table, glassSteve Cousins strolled over to the refrigerator. It started gurgling capably at him as he swung the door open: a larder of light. He removed a plastic bottle of orange juice. Maybe he fancied a grape? No. He didn't like the look of the skin and its adhesive gloss: noir, viscid, like a stain from a sticky drink, like the night streets of London. Shrugging, he picked one from the bunch; he felt it and sniffed it; he ate it, and licked his fingers. And all this would have been fine if it had been his grape, his orange juice, his refrigerator-if it had been his kitchen. But it was Gwyn's kitchen. It was Demi's kitchen. He was in their house.

  I said I wasn't going in there, not yet. But here I am. I can't control him. People have been trying to control him, all his life. They couldn't control him. And I can't control him. And Richard Tull won't be able to control him. Before he left the kitchen he glanced in the dustbin. Fish for dinner. Friday: Catholic.

  Scozzy had entered by the front door. Ungratefully dependent, like all of us, on technologies he didn't understand, he deployed the thermal lance and then the omni-key. Hereafter the Barry security system would go next-generation: it was the same principle as the arms race. He wore a sports jacket and charcoal mohair slacks. Not a shell suit. Everyone worked in shell suits. Wearing a shell suit at three o'clock in the morning: you might as well have a swag bag over your shoulder and a stocking on your head. He left the kitchen. He sat at the foot of the main staircase and slipped off his jacket and his shoes. Get on with it. You didn't want the au pair coming down for a cocoa. Or (an increasingly likely inadvertency: it had happened to him twice) some other burglar crashing through a window in his shell suit. He left the discarded clothes in a neat pile, as if ready for school.

  Out of nothing much more than a sense of professional duty he did a quick circuit of the ground floor. He never used a torch, relying, rather, on his night vision, a valued legacy from his wild-boy period. But after a while he had had enough of staggering around bumping into things, and availed himself of a candle, in its heavy holder, taken from the dining room sideboard. Like all modern burglars he knew something about antiques (13 said that at Wormword Scrubs you could hardly get into the TV room during "Curio" or "Collector's Item") and he even knew something about paintings. How to spot absolute crap, for instance: any-… As he left the house and walked across the street to the Cosworth, he kept hearing the word "Gwyn?" and the way she'd said it. Gwyn? She'd said it with surprise, with caution, with anxiety, with hope. With yearning, maybe. Certainly with fear.

  He had been given a black eye by a black guy, but it was his nose he was going nuts in. This was the next thing.

  Richard was going nuts in the nose. This was the next thing that was happening to him: nuts in the nose. He kept thinking he smelled of shit. He knew it wasn't the case-he knew he didn't smell of shit, or only very faintly-because no one had said anything about it yet (and by now he was persuaded that Marco's joke, seemingly an unanswerable coup de theatre at the time, was innocent or accidental), and anyway he had taken to spending up to an hour in the bath twice daily, with some dank biography, and smothered himself in baby powder and after-shave and anything else that smelled of anything: cigarette smoke, fried food, car exhausts. Richard knew that olfactory hallucination was a symptom- neither early nor minor-of schizophrenia. There were pills you could take for olfactory hallucinations. And where, he asked, would I put these pills? Up my nose? Up my ass? If we think about it, we all know the sneak preview of schizophrenia, with the toilet paper, those strange occasions when there seems to be no good reason to stop wiping: the thought-message (enough now-that'll do) loses its point, in a pall of inanition. The next move would be to start washing your hands all day and all night, as some do. Well, Richard, just now, was getting through a toilet roll each morning; and his flesh was numb and rubbery from the tub, like something they'd hauled out of the Thames and then hosed down with Right Guard.

  Was it the blow to the head that had done this? Or was it the latest from Gal Aplanalp? "You're not going to believe this," she had said. But Richard believed it. Toby Middlebrook, of the Quadrant Press, having spent fifteen minutes with Untitled on his lap, was admitted the same day to St. Bartholomew's Hospital with a case of vasomotor rhinitis. At present, he was in between sinus operations. Gal Aplanalp, apparently undaunted, said she was going to "spray-fire" the publishing community with photocopies of the typescript. So publishing, as we knew it, would in any case soon come to an end.

  Turning to knowledge, briefly, he tried to head-doctor himself. From

  what he understood of these syndromes, the copro was closely aligned to the necro in its adoration of putrescence, waste and decay. Half the time, accordingly, in necromode, he thought he was smelling his own death,of water and book on the other, Demi was sleeping in the middle of the bed. Steve nodded to himself and went straight upstairs.

  First he entered a pungent boxroom in whose far corner a hot sphere of black hair and brown skin lay spliced and swaddled in the linen. One word sufficed for her, the heavy dreamer he had sensed: Colombian. Next he entered a broad attic with high inward-leaning windows, decked out as a nursery or as a shrine to babyhood and infancy: crib, abacus, rocking horse. In a third room he found a young woman sleeping on a futon, naked, her face crushed into the pillow, a single white sheet bisecting her buttocks. Scornfully and cynically he loomed up on her. To him the scene looked like the aftermath of pornography. In his head he made a move for the remote, for the Rewind: have her turn over and reenact it all, backwards. Abruptly Scozzy's eyes jerked up to the ceiling and with a fierce roll he eased the tension in his neck.

  Gwyn he found in a first-floor bedroom, opposite where Demeter now slept. He was familiar with the convention of the gentleman's sanctum-not from his reading but from his burgling. This would be where the gentleman normally slept, surrounded by cufflinks and hairbrushes: his launching pad for ceremonial visits to the marital couch. The room where Gwyn slept, in a twin bed, didn't feel like a dressing room. It felt like a guest room, gradually appropriated. He checked. Closets half full. Connecting bathroom scattered with male toiletries.

  After a visit to Gwyn's study Scozzy looked in to say good night to Demeter. It was still sleeping on its back. A waft of hair had strayed on to its face, tickling its nose. The shoulder-puffs of the nightdress, he thought, made its arms look innocently plump. Maybe he'd reach down and straighten that strand of hair: you could do it with your breath. He moved closer. And Demi woke up. No subliminal tripwire, no burglar's bleeper was needed to tell him this. She sat up and thickly said, "Gwyn?"

  But here's what you did. He'd done it a thousand times, in bum-strewn flops, in overpopulated portakabins. You closed your eyes. Demi's head and shoulders surged up toward him-"Gwyn?"-and Scozzy closed his eyes. You just wanted to stare back thinking Jesus! But you closed your eyes and listened to their gaze. Listened to your own blood, listened to your torched armpits. Waking, they were momentarily cleansed of experience, and open to the infantile illusion. You shut your eyes and they didn't see you. They saw you, but they didn't see you: your sculpted face, your saintly eyelids. They took you for another wanderer, another sufferer, a figure of sleep, like themselves.

  He listened to her gaze, her swallow, her gaze again; then her fresh collapse on to the pillows; and then the recaptured rhythm of her breath"Guess what. We had an intruder last night."

  "Really? Did she take anything?"

  "We're not really sure."

  "How did she get in? Was she ar
med, do you know?"

  Gwyn closed his eyes and inclined his head, acknowledging the satire. He had a habit, in his prose, of following a neuter antecedent with a feminine pronoun. From Amelior: "While pruning roses, any gardener knows that if she …" Or, from the days when he still wrote book reviews: "No reader could finish this haunting scene without feeling the hairs on the back of her …" Richard clucked away to himself, but these days he often opted for an impersonal construction, or simply used the plural, seeking safety in numbers.

  "Through the front door."

  "She didn't turn violent, did she?"

  "Come on, don't be a tit. It's very upsetting actually."

  "I'm sorry. I'm sure it is. But nothing missing."

  "All very odd. You know the sort of stuff the house is full of. Candlesticks, Cellini saltcellars. Fill a flight bag with that, and you're made."

  Richard stopped listening. Maybe it was because he was a Londoner, but Richard didn't think that burglary was any big deal. Calchalk Street used to get itself trashed and ransacked as a matter of routine, particularly in the summer. It happened less often now. The Tulls never went away.

  "Demi dreamt that he-she dreamt he was in our room. In the room where we sleep. In the room where we make love …"

  It looked as though the maggot was about to get going on this, consigning Gwyn to many a scowl and glower; but as they passed the hedge at the corner of the bowling green a thick flock of London birds exploded out from behind or within it, sounding like an orchestra pit full of frenetic photographers-the pigeon paparazzi, snapping at them as they passed.

  Entering the Warlock, the two novelists were immediately confronted by a large group of talkative but motionless figures all pointing the same way: gathered, in fact, before the Knowledge. A tremor went through them, as of wildebeest sensing rain, and they turned. Because Gwyn now mingled and bonded with the Warlock crowd, Richard had been forced to individualize their predatory presences. There was Hal and Mai, also Del, Pel, Bal, Gel, and Lol, also a younger contingent with names like