The Information

by Martin Amis

  "Enough poems," said Balfour. "And enough money."

  "You know, I think he's too good for us. I think he could walk into any list. Why don't we just publish him? Five hundred copies. It's only poetry. He'd only expect about seventy-five quid."

  Richard was reading Horridge's covering letter (and reminding himself to keep it somewhere safe). "How was America? Welcome back." Enclosed, wrote Horridge, were three "newborns": "Ever," "Disappointment," and "Woman." " 'Woman,' " Horridge went on, "is a departure for me, and possibly a breakthrough. Here for the first time I cast off all influences and speak in my own voice."

  And here it was-"Woman":

  Yesterday my woman, this girl I care about more

  Than anyone else on the face of this earth, said

  That

  She

  No

  Longer

  Wants

  To

  See

  Me

  Again.

  There was more. The lines got longer again, as Horridge licked his wounds, and then got shorter, as Horridge girded himself to "Try/To/Win/Her/Back/Once/More." Richard looked around for his wastepaper basket. But of course you didn't do that here. You didn't reject stuff-you didn't stomp it into the trash. What you did was publish it. You held it in front of you and with your red pen you wrote, center title and set as verse.

  "It's something to think about," said Balfour.

  "No it's not. Forget Horridge. Let's just take all his money and never talk about him again."

  If literature was the universal, then all you'd ever get in here was space trash. A slowly twirling door panel from some old Telstar. A scorched waste-chute from some old Sputnik. "Woman" was what Horridge sounded like when he cast off all influences and spoke in his own voice. And "Disappointment" was what he sounded like when he was fucking around with his thesaurus. And "Ever" … The authors published by the Tantalus Press were in the habit of giving themselves credit for things, but most people weren't, and Richard wasn't. Otherwise he might have been gratified by the way his memory now went to work-the way its tumblers swiftly recombinated. In the Gnostic cosmogonies the demi-urgi knead and mold a red Adam who cannot stand alone. To be immortal is commonplace, except for man. Jorge Luis Borges-and from something impregnably famous like "The Library of Babel" or "The Circular Ruins." He looked at Horridge's shining margins and saw all the thumb prints and palm sweat. And it came to him.

  It came to him. Obscenity, blasphemy: Gwyn Barry's novels had survived any such booby trap. But there was a third hazard, one that could sneak up on you, at whatever time. Richard reached for his desktop dictionary and read: "L. plagarius a kidnapper; a seducer; also, a literary thief." Plagiary: it was an ugly word.

  "Balfour. There's something I want you to help me with."

  Having heard him out, Balfour said, "You're not planning to do anything rash, I hope."

  "How long will it take? And how much will it cost?"

  He waited at the school gates for his sons in the rain.

  Thence to the video shop, whose windows were as thick with steam as the windows of Mick's Fish Bar across the street. The damp dogs had to wait outside in the wet but the damp dogs were what the video shop smelled of. At this hour the place was full of other adults and other children. Richard thought that the adults looked like child-murderers, and so did the children, with their hairdos and earrings and their shallow, violent eyes. Marius and Marco were crouched under HORROR, in pious supplication, but they would eventually have to settle for CHILDRENS with no apostrophe. Then he took them across the road (don't tell Mummy) to Mick's Fish Bar for their fries.

  When he got home he installed the boys in front of Tom and Jerry. Two or three years ago they used to watch Tom and Jerry with fullattention but with no amusement, as if it was a simplified and stylized but essentially truthful representation of how an average cat got on with an average mouse. Nowadays, though, they found it funny. And Richard found it funny. He found everything funny. Listening to their laughter, he sat at his desk, a room away. He wasn't writing. He was typing-typing Amelior. And not word for word. But making little changes (sometimes for the worse if he could contrive it, sometimes unavoidably for the better) as he went along.

  "Now, son," said the great O'Flaherty, "how old would you be?"

  "I'll be forty-one next month," said Gwyn, as if expecting this news to cause considerable surprise.

  "Now you won't be giving up your day job, I hope. I fear you'll starve!" O'Flaherty shrugged-so lightly, so gently. "You see, it's your cueing. And your eye, son. Your eye."

  For the second time O'Flaherty talked, at some length, about snooker being a game of visual imagination. Earlier, Gwyn had perked up, thinking he ought to be pretty good at that. But the experiments O'Flaherty had had him conduct (with an additional white ball placed against the object ball at various set angles and then removed) seemed to make the game no easier.

  Gwyn interrupted him, saying, "The thing is, there's only this one player I want to beat. And he's no good either."

  Soft-faced, still, at sixty, but with a protuberant ironic prow to his upper lip, the great O'Flaherty patiently inclined his head. "Now if I was to take your cueing apart," he said, "you'd lose for a long time before you won."

  "Yeah and I can't have that."

  "But think. In a while you'd be knocking in breaks of thirty. Thirty-five!"

  "No I want to beat this guy now. What I'm here for are some tips. About how to win."

  O'Flaherty inclined his head, not sadly, but with professional docility. To him, the game stood for temperance and fair dealing; it stood for civilization. He had twice been runner-up in the World Championship in the days when you got ten bob for winning it. And he'd got five bob for losing it. In contrast, though, to the great Buttruguena, who spent every waking moment wondering why he wasn't a resident of Monte Carlo, the great O'Flaherty did not mourn the Marbellan holiday home-did not mourn the personalized number plate.

  "If it was down to me I'd advise you not to bother. But I am in your employ…"

  "That's true," said Gwyn with emphasis.

  He straightened up. "Now you both have your own sticks?"

  "Yes. But mine's much more expensive.?

  "The purchase of a chamois cloth is usually worth a couple of blacks, initially. Then you could go further. The cue extensions, the half-butt, and so on. The little rest-extension gadget."

  "So you're saying that just getting more equipment helps?"

  O'Flaherty inclined his head. "Initially. For a little while."

  Gwyn offered a suggestion.

  With a twist of the wrists the great O'Flaherty sundered the two sections of his cue. "That probably ought to do it."

  It was not a snooker hall, nor a cave of pool, that Gwyn had now to take his leave of; and Gwyn was glad about that. Snooker halls, with their darkness, their pyramids of light over the green-decked slabs of lead-snooker halls were places where violence might traditionally lurk. But no. The lesson had taken place in one of the public rooms of the Gordon Hotel on Park Lane. It was here that O'Flaherty gave his trick-shot displays for the instruction and delight of corporate gatherings (it was Sebby, in fact, who had put Gwyn in touch with the Irish magician). Now he took out his wallet and asked what the damage was, but it had all been taken care of at the other end, and O'Flaherty didn't even want Gwyn's tip.

  The Boy from the Valleys: A Life of Gwyn Barry was no good because Barry chimed with Valley and he wanted to stop reminding people he came from Wales. Allegorist was quite nice and more modest than Visionary. Gwyn Barry: Troubled Utopian was far from ideal, and too gloomy, though he liked the notion that being Utopian wasn't as easy as it looked. A Better Way: Gwyn Barry and the Quest for . . . Really he would prefer plain old Gwyn Barry or even, simply, Barry. American writers had those good surnames-gruff, rasping, unassimilated. You didn't seem to get that here. Pym. Powell. Greene.

  Gwyn with his cue case strolled up from the depths of the Gordon Hotel, th
rough hallways, arcades-like a tube station that served an unknown plutopolis. At one point he paused and looked to his left over the gallery rail and saw a ballroom with a boxing-ring at its center with laid dining tables clustered around it. A placard on an easel told of the Amateur Finals: spectators were to wear black tie. Gwyn began noticing shell-suited youths here and there on the staircases and in the ground-floor reception zones. Dressed in shiny shorts they would perform, tonight, in a termitary of dinner jackets. He moved past them, tidily, meekly. The faces of these teenage fighters forbade inspection; these faces were warrior-caste, with everything unnecessary shorn away-just two dimensions of defiance and dawning brain damage. They had their names on their backs: Clint, Keith, Natwar, Godspower. Godspowermust have been teased about his name: but not recently. One of them swiveled in his direction and Gwyn almost fell over sideways-onto the lap of another boxer, who was just sitting there stupidly on a sofa, waiting for tonight, "Sorry," said Gwyn, into the depthless young face. He felt ashamed, not of his fear but of the dislike he seemed ready to inspire, almost universally. .. How would he break this to his biographer? Gwyn crept outside, through the swing doors, between the pillars. It was his intention to look in on the publicity department of his publishers' offices in Holborn. There was the ten-laned street, and Speakers' Corner, and the Park. Miles and miles of enemy lines.

  As it happened he had a great time in Publicity. It was as if, on his way up in the lift, he had dropped a tab of C: that drug called Condescension. People in publicity are committed to making you feel good about yourself, even or especially when you have no reason to feel good about yourself, and they are good at that, and Gwyn felt good about himself already, so it all worked out. He thought they thought he was wonderful because he was wonderful but also because he made their jobs seem wonderful. Forget the cookbooks and the diet plans, the decrepit poets, the Hebridean novelists. He did it all for them: a serious writer who could comb publicity out of his hair. Only once did he lose his temper, and that was enjoyable too, in its way (he increasingly found). The new girl, Marietta, started talking about the Profundity Requital-completely failing to realize that Gwyn didn't want to talk about the Profundity Requital. Such talk tempted fate. And made him nervous. Anyway, they got her out of the toilet in the end, with her red nose, and Gwyn produced his wallet with a humorous flourish and sent her out for champagne.

  Ninety minutes later he rode the elevator earthward, leaving the team working late. He said hi to the young black porter, thereby making his day. That was what Gwyn was doing all the hours there were: making people's days. Whew, that C was really good shit! In the early darkness Holborn was still yellowly illumined by its shop windows, and abandoned. That was the modern city: worked in, but not lived in. He was letting the door close behind him and buttoning his coat and had just started forward into the wind … It hit him like a solid tumbleweed of sweat and freckles and bare busy flesh: there was an instant of extreme facial proximity-yeast and loose saliva and ginger eyebrows-and then the two men were staggering quickly in each other's arms and Gwyn fell carefully, lumberingly, lowering himself on to the speckled sheen of the flagstones at no greater rate, really, than Richard had hit the car-parkdeck ten years ago in Nottingham, there to receive Lawrence's talentless and essentially unenthusiastic right boot.

  A young man stood over him, stripped to the waist-and giving off steam. Sticky, coppery, he appeared to be mantled in a galaxy of hormones and youth. And evening steam.

  "Sorry." This was Gwyn, offering it from the floor.

  Steadying himself, the young man said, "They sending me this now? Let me tell you something. I got a little …" But he was moved! He was desperately moved. And his voice cracked and deepened, saying, almost with tears of pride, "My mum's got a little son. He's only twelve years old. And he'd fucking murder you."

  Then the evening sky was empty and the street was as it had been before. Momentum reengaged the young man and he was gone, down the street and swiftly slantwise across it toward the stalled traffic of Kingsway. Gwyn was sitting there. Now he got up. He ran a damage check, first from the inside outward, then with his palms and his fingertips. For the moment he felt unnaturally healthy, and unnaturally safe, because that was that for today, and he need expect no further encounter.

  No encounter, for instance, with the young man's younger brother, or half-brother, or kid bastard. The twelve-year-old capable of murder. Whose acquaintance one was naturally impatient to make.

  Clearing out his desk at The Little Magazine, Richard found-to his alarm, but not to his surprise-a keepsake from Anstice. Upstairs his farewell party was already under way: a concentration of raised voices and blundering footsteps. He was working on his speech. They were going to present him with a bound set of The Little Magazine, sixty volumes, going back to 1935. Richard had asked Gina along to the party, and Gwyn, and Demi.

  Anstice's memento was a book, with an inscription. Love's Counterfeit, by someone called Eleanor Tregear. She used to read many such books, at least one a day, all the Dorothys and Susans, bought and sold by the boxful. Noncoincidentally, no doubt, Love's Counterfeit was the sample novel he had once borrowed from her (and read about half of), curious, as always, about any prose work that found a publisher. Richard remembered now. It was about a country girl who comes to London and falls in love with a great artist, an opera singer or somebody. No, a conductor. No: a composer. Anstice's inscription said:

  You were no counterfeit. That night we shared bore love's very imprimatur. Ah, but you were wed, with your two bonny boys!Now I venture into another night, alone, without your hugeness inside me. No regrets, my love. Adieu.

  Richard put his speech aside and looked at his watch and lit a cigarette. Upstairs the rumor of carousal was now diversified by sounds of breakage. Self-injury, dissolution, in the name of love: so innocent, so period. And literary, as opposed to televisual. TV trained women not to be victims. I mean (he thought), with Gilda you could kind of understand it: years of contiguity, in tiny beds, in tiny rooms. But Anstice. Anstice, who topped herself for a no-show… It took him ten minutes to speed-read the second half of Love's Counterfeit. Beautiful provincial (Meg) comes to London, to work as secretary to fiery composer (Karl). He smolders, and attempts to seduce. She smolders, and resists. For Karl is an emotional tyrant, devoted to his art; he also has a wife, a volcanic diva based in Salzburg. No kids. Smitten, desolate, Meg does a deal: one night of love. She would give Karl her body and then go back to Cumbria-to the hills, the valleys, the healing sheep-dips … Their big night got a chapter to itself and was rendered entirely in terms of metaphor- musical metaphor. Richard lit a cigarette. He was prepared for a muted performance. Say a scherzo for second piccolo. But this was a power symphony, with full jingoist hysterics from brass and strings and with buffalo stampedes from the kettledrums. On the last page Meg is standing in a puddle in Cumbria when Karl's cream sedan appears at the end of the lane. Happy ever after. The volcanic diva has killed herself-about something else.

  There was a knock at the door and R. C. Squires entered the room. For the second time in half an hour Richard felt alarm unqualified by surprise: one or two other distinguished ex-occupants of Richard's chair had already arrived. R. C. Squires entered his old office with a misleading swagger. He doffed his hunting hat with the tweed earflaps and brandished his stained umbrella and shouted,

  "Any advance on seventy thousand pounds?"

  People who made big entrances, Richard had decided (now that he sometimes thought of making them himself)-people who made big entrances did so as a diversionary measure: to distract you from how terrible they looked, how old, how ill. R. C. Squires: his shattered visage, the color of Parma ham, his hair as soft as winebar sawdust. For fifteen years, unbelievably, he had written judicious and elegant "middles," on Courtly Love, on Shakespeare's women, on Rosicrucianism and Panti-socracy, on Donne, on Keats, on Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It was possible, presumably, to think of looking to R. C. Squires for mentorship
.

  He showed Richard the future and the past: his own available future, and the marginal literary past. Something could presumably be learned, at the Hush-Puppied feet of R. C. Squires.

  "Seventy thousand pounds! Or do I hear eighty?"

  It turned out that he was referring to the debts bequeathed by Horace Manderville (another distinguished predecessor), whose liver had finally exploded that spring. Richard had seen the filler-sized obituaries.

  "How did he get people to lend him all that money?"

  "Banks! He had rich wives."

  R. C. Squires turned to the bookshelves. You could tell that he was translating their merchandise into gin-and-tonics. His eyes were gin-and-tonics, pleading for more gin-and-tonics. Earlier in the year Richard had come across R. C. Squires leaning on a broken jukebox in some barnsized pub loud with canned rock. Contemplating Richard with the stalest disgust, R. C. Squires inflated himself with several lungfuls of air, and began. The attempted denunciation sounded almost pre-verbal. Just a few glottal stops here and there.

  "Why don't you go on up? You can hear them up there. I'll be along in a minute."

  "Sorry about-Anstice. Anstice! Poor girl. Later we'll talk. I want a word with you."

  "What about?"

  "About your destiny."

  Left alone, Richard reread his farewell speech, which seemed much too long. It wasn't often he had an audience-one that couldn't get away. For the last time he left his chair, the chair that had cupped the buttocks of Horace Manderville, of John Beresford-Knox, of R. C. Squires . . .

  As he passed the outer office he saw a figure leaning over the book table (her hat, her scarf like a rope of hair, her angle of dutiful inquiry)- and death brushed past him. Death with its nostril hairs, its nicked and narrowed lips concealing a skeleton staff of teeth. But it wasn't Anstice. Anstice was dead.

  "Demi. How sweet of you to come. No Gwyn, I see."

  "No Gina?"

  "It's Friday. Gina likes to have Fridays to herself."