by Martin Amis
Eight minutes ago Crash was behind the wheel of the blue Metro (under its roof rack of ads and L-signs), half a mile to the east, showing Demeter Barry how you negotiated speed bumps at fifty miles per hour.
Six minutes ago Crash was 400 yards to the northeast, showing Demi how you reversed over a mini-roundabout.
Four minutes ago Crash was 450 yards to the north-northeast, showing Demi how you did a hand-brake turn on a zebra crossing.
Two minutes ago Crash was 200 yards due north, showing Demi how you jumped a red light with your eyes shut.
No minutes ago, intending to show Demi how you careened in the wrong direction up a one-way street, Crash performed an emergency stop, smacked his palm on the horn, and slid with massive ease through the opening door (his belt lay in a coiled pool on the floor mat, despised, disdained, dull with disuse). By the time Demi climbed out and fixed her fragile vision on the scene, she saw the Morris Minor reversing at speed down the one-way street (she was momentarily impressed), and Crash standing by her husband's car with her husband.
The sun liked him. The universe still liked him. Either that, or the universe was through with Richard Tull.
Shortly after noon the next day Richard was to be found in the snug bar of the Warlock Sports Club. He was drinking brandy and smoking cigarettes and staring at his shoe. A broadsheet newspaper, uncomfortably perched on the round table nearby, carried a front-page photograph of Gwyn and his wife, and described him, in its caption, as the Inaugural Laureate of the Cairns-Du Plessis Profundity Requital. Richard went on drinking and smoking and staring, with some show of serenity, at his shoe. The snug bar was often called the squash bar, and it was certainly very cramped and airless, but it never contained any Squash Members, or Tennis Members, or any exponents of snooker, darts, or bowls. It contained Social Members. Who were all sociopaths. So around Richard were arrayed a few tattoo-bespattered warthogs and authentic thirty-year-old methuselahs fingering their earrings as they applied themselves to their tabloids, and the odd clutch of regulars whispering into the foam of their pints, shrugging, and warily rolling their necks, and marked by that air of watchful cruelty which traditionally attends the criminal twilight. The barmaid, She, moved from table to table noisily collecting empties. Richard was still recovering from another bad moment, on the Knowledge. Having taken the trouble to stagger over to put a quid in it, he was almost at once confronted with:
Who wrote the novel Dedmator, on which the film was based?
A. Chuck Pfister
B. Gwyn Barry
C. Dermott Blake
Dermott Blake was the fiery playwright whom Gina used to go to bed with-and continued to go to bed with (in Richard's view), every Friday. Paralyzed, and soon in time trouble, Richard distractedly and ridiculously punched the C. Whereas Dedmator, of course, was the handiwork of Chuck Pfister … He staggered back to his newspaper and reread Stanwyck Mills's Profundity address: "Initially we felt that the optimism of the Amelior novels was altogether too frictionless. We had to ask ourselves whether that optimism was the result of struggle-whether it was earned. We decided it was. And we chose to honor that struggle." Richard drank brandy and stared at his shoe.
Something happened to the snug when Steve Cousins walked into it. An outsider might have identified him as a force for good, for order- the relay of minute straightenings and self-corrections that his presence entrained. Here, the graffitied young reined in the sprawl and slobber of their sports pages, their TV pullouts; there, the cardiganed elderly sniffed briskly and lifted their chins: everyone seemed to grow an inch or two in their chairs.
"Ah. Mr. Cousins," said a swampy old voice.
Richard looked up. His eyes and Scozzy's eyes dully encountered each other. Richard said, "You're late."
"Mr. Cousins, sir. The very man."
Now Richard looked sideways. At a nearby table sat two speckle-faced and ash-haired gents whom he had come across pretty often. They weren't like the other older guys, the arthritic artists of the bowling green who, as they aged still further, appeared to be fading into sweet-jar colors of caramel and nougat, into drip-dry and ready-to-wear. No, they retained a halo of dwindled charisma, of robberies and readies-these old thrusters, with the complexions of crumpled tenners. Laconic and discreet inquiry would have revealed that they were long-retired target burglars whose deeds had made a few headlines in past decades: the round-eyed actress relieved of her jewelry box while she slept in the West End hotel; the emptied stockroom of the Mayfair furrier; the rueful viscount pointing to the yawing drainpipe, the scrabbled-at first-floor window frame …
"Mr. Cousins, we desire your assistance. The very man we need. A man of parts."
"Ben," said Scozzy, with formality. And then: "Den."
"Vermin," said Den.
Slowly twisting in his seat, Richard absorbed the fact that Ben and Den were poring over something that both gripped and galled them. It was a newspaper, folded a good sixteen times, almost to the density of a pack of cards. They were doing the crossword.
"We're almost there," said Ben. "It's the top right-hand corner. Just can't get it."
"Vermin," said Den. "Four letters."
This wasn't the kind of crossword that Richard used to complete. This wasn't a grid of winsome quibbles, of little winks at Restoration drama, at Greek mythology, at Cartesian philosophy, where the poet, Noyes, can never make up his mind.
"Vermin," said Ben. "Blank, blank, C. Blank."
This was a crossword of bald synonyms, where neat equaled tidy and tidy equaled neat, where big meant large and not small meant big.
Scozzy faced the old men, in his tan leather mack. Once again his glance moved past Richard's eyes. After a long interval of subjective time he said, "Mice."
Den said, "That's what Ben said. But then you got… 7 across."
Ben said, "Messenger. Six. Say it is mice. Then you got… M, blank, G, blank, T, blank."
"Maggot," said Den.
"Midget," said Ben.
Even the fucking tabloids had run the Gwyn Barry story: the guru from Gower, married to Lady Demeter, and his mini-Nobel: the romping zeros of the annuity, granted for life, forever and ever and ever …
"Messenger," said Scozzy.
"Jesus," said Richard. He climbed to his feet. And he did mean climbed. It took him up the rungs of all his years. "Legate," he said.
Den said, "Legit?"
"Legate" he repeated. "L-e-g-a-t-e. Christ, well what can you expect around here, where all Aristotle is is slang for arse. Legate. It's not maggot. It's not midget. And it's not mice. It's legate. Messenger. Jesus." Scozzy had turned to him and Richard stood there, resolutely swaying, and saying, "You think you're a frightener. Yeah, you're really terrifying. All you've got to do is fuck someone up. And you even fuck that up. You think you're a frightener and you don't even frighten me. And what do I do? I review books."
The room was attentive to him and his voice. His voice was right out there on its own. The voice of half a ton of opera singer, abysmally deep-the voice of Baron Ochs.
"You think you're some kind of wild boy. Some kind of wolf child. Instead," said Richard, "instead of a fucking dog who, for a while, stopped being a tramp in the city and started being a tramp in the country. Yeah, The Wild Boy ofAveyron. I've read it, mate. I reviewed it! They thought he was going to tell them everything they didn't know. Nature and nurture. Civilization. Nobody calls your mum a cunt? Everybody calls your mum a cunt, I call your mum a cunt."
"Leave it, he's pissed," said Ben. Or Den. Because there was no way, no day, that Scozzy was going to speak. Not now or here.
"But he couldn't talk. The poor boy couldn't talk. Wild boys never can. And what have you got to say? What have you got to tell us. Give me my money back. Give me my money back."
"Oi," said Den. Or Ben.
Richard turned to them with a leaning flourish. As he moved pastScozzy's face he said, "And it's not mice. It's lice. You got that, you dumb shit? It's lice."
G
wyn was in the financial district, in the City, in a skyscraper, in a bucket chair, thinking about certain changes it might be good to make to his being-interviewed style now that the Profundity thing had gone his way. When they asked him difficult questions, perhaps expecting him to be Profound, he would in future say something like, "I just write what comes to me" or "It is for others to draw conclusions" or "I'm a writer, not a literary critic."
His friend Sebby would be there in a minute. Then, after their chat, they would go through to lunch. Once every couple of months he came in to lunch here anyway. Sometimes he would make a little speech. Gwyn often said that Sebby knew some very interesting people. He got up and walked to the window: this was one of Sebby's many chambers of the upper air. It was like Gal's old office in Cheapside, only higher and better. You could look down past the birds over many miles of the sweated city and see what new shapes people like Sebby were molding it into.
At last Sebby entered. Rubbing his hands together, he offered apologies and then congratulations.
"Thanks," said Gwyn. "Listen."
He said he wanted to present Sebby with a hypothetical situation. Sebby was used to being presented with hypothetical situations. Beginning every sentence with the word supposing, Gwyn gave Sebby a digest of recent events and an account of the incident the previous evening.
"Supposing all this happened," he said. "I mean, I know when you get well-known-things like this are going to happen. But I've talked to a couple of people who are on TV more than I am, and they say these things happen to them about once a year. Not once a day. So. Suppose it isn't random. Suppose all this. What would I do?"
And Sebby said, "You'd come to me."
At once Gwyn felt a part of his mind freeing up: "I'm a writer, not a literary critic" sounded too dry and lordly. One should be humble, but also secretive: twinkly. Why do I write? Why does the spider spin its web? Why does the bee store its honey? That sounded a bit-
Sebby wanted something from him.
"Oh, right," said Gwyn. He searched his wallet for the piece of paper with the registration number of the Morris Minor written on it. No: itwas in his diaiy. Another jacket. "It's in another jacket," he said. "You might start with the driving instructor. He denied it to me, but Demi says he knows one of the men in the car. They call him Crash but his real name's Gary."
Sebby wanted something else from him. But there was a problem here because Gwyn would be a Labour man until the day he died.
"Let me think about it. On this other matter, what exactly are you going to do?"
"You don't want to know."
And they went through to lunch.
On the whole, Richard was delighted with Stumbling on Melons-the feel of it, the heft of it. He compared it to Love's Counterfeit and it looked just as antique and marginal and forgotten-though much newer, of course. He booted it round his study for a few hours, and wet it, and used it as an ashtray, and scrabbled at it with his chewed nails. The main difference between Stumbling on Melons and Love's Counterfeit was that Love's Counterfeit looked read. So he put in a lot of time, not exactly reading it (he did read it, twice, savoring his own interpolations), but skimming it. With unwashed hands. With city fingers. Balfour had been quiet and tactful, and hadn't asked any more questions. He seemed to know. He certainly knew about the Profundity Requital, and offered his commiserations. He more or less came out and said that he wouldn't be expecting too much from Richard over the next few weeks. In effect he was giving him a Profundity Sabbatical from the Tantalus Press.
Richard called Rory Plantagenet and arranged to meet him that Friday.
"No," he said. "It's too sensitive to discuss on the phone. I want to do some checking first. It could be a hoax. Or it could be a big, big story."
Annoyingly, there were now three Barry Profiles under construction on Richard's desk. Three Profiles: the original, the original alternative, and the alternative alternative. The original was, in Richard's estimation, a work of the flintiest integrity, a noble example of that ancient literary genre called "flyting." Flyting stood at the polar opposite of panegyric, which is to say that it consisted of personal abuse. Freakishly well written, and fantastically hostile, the original could take its shameless place alongside certain passages of Swift, of Jonson, of William Dunbar. But nearly all of it would have to go. The original alternative and the alternative alternative, by comparison, were just workmanlike character assassinations of the kind you might see pretty often, he imagined, in the newspapers of certain totalitarian states, when a pressured editor was
softening up some internal enemy for obliteration. Still, Richard believed that the alternative alternative needn't be as namby-pamby as the original alternative, which would have appeared when Gwyn (his condition, like Richard's prose, serious but stable) was deep in Intensive Care. And of course all that would have to go too.
Okay, he thought. Plagiarism was better. With plagiarism, decorum would be observed. Those who live by the pen must die by the- etcetera. Richard still felt that violence was a better and simpler way (give him the sword every time) but violence was an alien from another genre. Look how it inhibited his prose .. . Perhaps that was what violence, all violence, really was: a category mistake. Violence was both fabulous and banal. Anyway, it would have to go. It was gone. He knew that Gwyn had finally put one and one together and was now taking the appropriate precautions. And Cousins was gone. Steve Cousins had what it took to get through Untitled without his head falling off, but that was the extent of his merits. Cousins: his reader. Richard's readership.
The alternative alternative. Richard would of course begin with the scandal he was about to create, saying at once, with a disingenuousness as pure and rarefied as celestial music, that he had "no wish to add to" the tumult surrounding "this unfortunate affair." He would then go on to talk generally about plagiarism and the self, how its roots lay in masochism and despair, in dreams of self-injury and self-defeat; and how, uniquely, it seemed to linger as a smear, infecting both the raptor and the raped. Next, if he could summon the gall for it, he would demand the reader's sympathy for Thad Green, that tender and neglected seeker who lived and died without knowing that his work, his vision, albeit in the form of a mercenary travesty, would eventually bring (false and transient) consolation to an entire hemisphere .. .
Plagiary meant kidnapper, seducer-which meant he could get the girls back in. Gilda, Audra Christenberry, maybe Belladonna. It was a shame that Audra wasn't married and that Belladonna was presumably over sixteen. Richard needed to keep telling himself that there was another test the Profile had to pass (one that the original, he now saw, would certainly have failed): it had to be publishable. No kill-fee, thank you: he was already a kill-fee down on the deal . . . Demi could stay, and the shape of the piece seemed to demand that she be treated gently. Richard had never been completely happy with the extended digression about her sleeping with black guys for free cocaine, but he was definitely going to keep, and enlarge, the passage where she said that Gwyn's stuff-or Thad's stuff-was shit.
With his thumb and forefinger Richard massaged his right elbow, inthe joint there: pestle and mortar. Belladonna: what did one believe? A thin sweat of confusion formed a join-the-dots puzzle on his unreliable upper lip. His plan, he knew, had certain flaws.
"Rank beggar, ostir dregar," he incanted, "foule fleggar in the flet. Baird rehator, theif of natour, fals tratour, feyindis gett.. ."
Thief of nature. One of the birds lodging in the nicotined greenery outside his window seemed to have learned how to imitate a car alarm: a looping lasso of sound. Various car alarms belonged to various types, various genres: the nagging, the hysterical, the scandalized. There was even a postmodern car alarm, which trilled out a fruity compendium of all other car alarms. This was the car alarm that all the birds of London would eventually know how to do.
He had liked Steve Cousins because he was the hero of a novel from the future. In literature as in life everything would go on getting less and less i
nnocent. The rapists of the eighteenth century were the romantic leads of the nineteenth; the anarchic Lucifers of the nineteenth were the existential Lancelots of the twentieth. And so it went on, until . . . Darko: famished poet. Belladonna: damaged waif. Cousins: free spirit and scourge of hubris. Richard Tull: the good guy, down on his luck, and misunderstood.
Demi was leaning on the sideboard with her arms straightened, her arms locked-near where the telephone was. She had her rounded back to the room but Gwyn could see her in the mirror as he approached: her head unemotionally bowed (over a desk diary), the skewed collar of her shirt, the inevitable glimpse of tinged brassiere. And she could see him, now: in yet another new track suit, black, hugging, frogmanlike.
"No lesson," she announced.
"What? Oh. No driving lesson."
"Crash has had an accident."
"A road accident by any chance?"
"He fell down. He had a fall. The reason he has accidents sometimes is he's always trying to do something really difficult in cars. Really challenging. I think it must be quite serious. They offered me Jeff. But I want Crash."
Gwyn surveyed her with marked indulgence. In fact he was yearning
to go into the kitchen and hobnob with his favorite bodyguard: Phil. But
he lingered, wonderfully, with his wife. Wonderfully, he was being wonderful to Demi. Watch. He even took her in his arms. Why? Because things were rather different now. But what had she done to deserve it?.
The night before, over dinner, here at home, Gwyn, at considerable cost to his own sensitivity, finally goaded Demi into saying, "You hate me. Why?"
"What is a man .. . How is a man meant to feel? When his wife, when his own wife . . . sneers at his very essence. At his lifeblood. At the thing that gives his life meaning. When she sneers at his soul."
"I honestly have no idea what you're talking about."
A moment ago, Gwyn had felt close to tears-close to bottomless self-pity. And it was a reasonably pleasurable state, he found: loose, sensual, oozily calorific. Now he leaned back, raised his chin, slowly closed his eyes, and said,
