The Information

by Martin Amis

  Marco backed off as Lizzete flusteredly shifted her weight: Angela was her oldest sister. She transferred the shopping bag from her right hand and reached out for Marco.

  "You can't take a kid in a pub. We'll wait here."

  Lizzete looked hard at 13.

  13 said, "Give us him."

  "Now here, Gina, we encounter an ambiguity. You being from Nottingham. Am I going to stop. I love it when you say that. Am I going to stay? Or am I going to desist?"

  "Well which?"

  "Both. I'll stay this time, if I may. And then I'll desist. So I'll stop- and then I'll stop."

  "You say that but you keep coming back. Please-desist, and don't stay. Go."

  Gwyn sighed. He said, "Fine. So you don't mind me telling Richard. I wonder how I'll break it to him. Will it make it easier or harder for him, do you think, that you did it for the money??

  "I didn't do it for money. I did it for revenge."

  "Oh yes. Poor Anstice. I met her once. Unbelievable."

  "I'm surprised he hasn't guessed already. I always told him I'd do the worst thing."

  "Ah but he thinks you don't like me."

  "I don't."

  He turned his head away. And he actually said it. He said: "Women!" He sighed again. Then he reached for his wallet and produced four notes of high denomination. "Nevertheless money was involved. I like to think of myself as Richard's patron. Keeping his family struggling along while he completed his last and, some say, his greatest novel. What was it called?"

  "Enough. Stop. Desist."

  "Why do you stop? Meaning stay. I must say, these days I find his presence . . . entirely soiling. But of course you have this wonderful love life, don't you. This raging sea of hysterical sex. Why don't you just chuck him out? He'd go."

  And he would go. With a suitcase, to the callbox.. . He would go quietly. One thing about Richard. She sensed all the violence, all the verbal violence, he contained. But he had never turned it on her. And she knew he never would.

  "One last time," said Gwyn. "And just beauty and the beast."

  It was naturally the phenomena of his own eye-level that claimed the lion's share of Marco's attention. For example, the cavernous murk beneath the stalls where an apple or a turnip might have rolled: between the gutter and the shadow-edge. The inner glisten of things under there, where he could easily go, bending in under there, where the small was better than the tall.

  He looked up. He turned a full circle. 13 was gone. Immediately Marco's ears started humming at him. He wheeled and his vision wheeled, wheeled for a face to form out of the swings and roundabouts, the costumed impostors, the taffetaed dissemblers-the kings and the queens and the jacks.

  A bus stood at the crossroads. Behind it, Marco's father, accompanied by his friend, walked past, continuing down Westbourne Park Road to Ladbroke Grove.

  "There was this novelist," Richard was saying, "who taught a creative-writing course at Brixton Prison. He went away for six months and when he came back all the lags had written a novel each. Or transcribed a novel each. But there were only about five novels in the prison library for themto plagiarize. Three of them had done The Cruel Sea."

  Rory frowned. They walked on.

  "Jesus. I'd better pick up the vacuum cleaner. Do you mind? It's been there for weeks and I get hell at home."

  Three days of weather were stacked in the sky. Here was today. And there was tomorrow. And over there, the day after.

  "Beauty and the beast," said Gina. "And that's it. For ever."

  "Amazing that women find that less intimate. Particularly when they're swallowers, like you. It always seems more intimate to me."

  "Except it's got nothing to do with babies. Why don't you and Demi have a baby? It would suit you. It would shut her up."

  "But it wouldn't shut the baby up."

  "But it might shut you up. You need a change."

  "Well I might get one whether I want it or not. Demi's changed since her dad popped off. She's chucking Pamela out. She's talking of chucking me out. She's really changed. She's dead flash. Take your dressing gown off at least."

  "Quick now. I don't want you running into Lizzete on the stairs."

  Gwyn stood up and took his jacket off and said, not altogether truthfully, that he would be as quick as he possibly could.

  A figure stepped out between the market stalls-instantly dismissed by Marco as playing no part in Marco's world. But then Marco's world was already falling away, falling, falling through the curved heavens. That was what he could hear in his ears: the friction of the falling world.

  Persisting in their address, the face and the figure came nearer.

  "Marco. It's Steve, remember? I know your dad."

  The face held out its hand toward him. Marco declined it. But he went on standing there, abjectly, with his neck bent. A modern child, he knew the kinds of things the world could contain: local-personal-disasters. It was like a shadow falling, but a shadow made of uneasy light. Storm light, and summer thunder.

  "Marius is waiting round the corner. I want to tell you a story. Come on, I got some kittens in the back of the van."

  A hand was offered again, and declined again. They started off. To keep up with his minder, and his minder's brisk stride, Marco didn't jog or trot but walked and ran, walked and ran.

  "Need any help with that?"

  "It's easier if one person carries it. Funnily enough."

  They had drunk more wine than they were young enough to drink; and then there was the large brandy that Richard had successfully consumed while Rory settled the bill. After the thousand-yard hike through the human and mechanical effluvia of Ladbroke Grove, Richard, at least, felt intoxicated to a sordid degree. He paced up the three double flights of stairs, giving stertorous voice to his opinion that there was probably a sequel to Stumbling on Melons and Gwyn had got that off the back of Thad's lorry too .. . He fell sideways, and righted himself. The bikes on the walls, on the ceiling, seemed to strike up an assonance with the oil and metal at the back of his throat. Richard opened the clapboard door: more stairs.

  "Everest," said Rory.

  Richard pressed on, bouncing from wall to wall with the Hoover tube tightening its grip round his neck; and he was already thinking that suicide had much to be said for it, because life was too much fucking fetching and carrying and too much scrabbling for keys in pockets and too much going from this place to that place and then to some other fucking place …

  "It'll come out," he said. "It always comes out."

  And the shoe will squeak, and the door will creak.

  Gwyn heard him. His body stiffened; but his body was stiffening anyway. And do you know what he did? He pressed his hands over Gina's bath-brightened ears. He pressed them good and tight.

  What happens when galaxies collide? Most frequently, nothing. Stars are sparser than the conglomerations they form. Galaxy moves through galaxy. Anti-galaxy moves through anti-galaxy. There is plenty of room.

  Richard is back on the street. And this story, his story, endeth here. On the street, with its opposed houses, its ranked cars-and the anti-comedy of the apple blossom loosening in the wind.

  He turned. He knew that nothing in his past or his future could ever be as inimitably contemptible as the smile he had managed to rig up for Rory Plantagenet: to rig up, among the moonspots and boneshadows of his youthless face. The memory of this smile would be with him until he died; thirty years from now he would be standing there with his hands over his ears, raising his voice in a mortified yodel, trying to batten down the memory of this smile.

  How much had Rory seen? He didn't know. How much had Richard seen? He didn't know. The gulping flurry of pink toweling. They had seen enough. Oh, basta . . .

  "Well, as you've probably guessed," he said, "we've been leading you down the garden path."

  "I don't follow you."

  "Yes. Pulling the wool over your eyes." Richard shrugged and opened his hands. A negative hilarity was possessing him. The English l
anguage offered him no help-offered him nothing. "It was just a little stunt we hatched. The three of us, you see. To see how far it would go. We wasted your time. There's no story here. I'm sorry. Please forget it, Rory. Forget it. Please, Rory."

  Now Gwyn chose to make his exit from 49 Calchalk Street, drooping loosely down the steps with his hands in his pockets: the feminine colors of his clothes. To Richard's eyes he looked cynically and even satanically handsome. Unforgettable, again, was the complicit rictus that Richard now laid at his feet.

  "Going my way?" said Gwyn.

  And Rory fell into step beside him. And Richard was alone.

  As he looked down the vista into which they would soon disappear, toward Ladbroke Grove and its circus horses of traffic, Richard saw his son Marco-Marco a long way away, and on the far side of the street, butwith Marco's unmistakably brittle and defeatist stride. There was something terribly wrong with Marco: there was nobody at his side. And yet the child's solitude, his isolation, unlike his father's, was due to an unforgivable error not his own. There was always somebody at Marco's side. In all his seven years there had always been somebody at his side.

  A drama, thought Richard. And a diversion: at least this will get me up the goddamned stairs. He realized that he still had the vacuum cleaner: in his arms, across his body, round his neck. Richard was still Laocoon, engulfed in coils and loops. That too he would have to tote, all the way up to 49E. That too.

  Father and son started hurrying toward each other. Marco wasn't crying, but Richard had never seen him looking so unhappy: the unhappi-ness that was always made for Marco; the unhappiness that was all his own. Richard knelt, like a knight, and held him.

  "Who was with you?"

  Marco told him: Lizzete.

  "And you were lost?"

  There was a man.

  "Then what happened?"

  He took me to a car: for kittens.

  "Then what?"

  Three men came. And took him away.

  "Took him where? Were they police?"

  Marco shrugged.

  "Did he go willingly or unwillingly?"

  Marco shrugged-with out-turned palms.

  "What did they say? Did anyone say anything?"

  Yes. The man said, "I'm a child."

  "The man said you're a child?" And Richard went back four or five years, to the natural confusions of early speech. "How are you?" he would ask him; and Marco would say, logically enough, "You're fine." And Marco would reach out to him with his arms and say, "Carry you." And Richard would pick him up and carry him . . .

  No. He said I'm a child.

  "But he wasn't a child."

  No. He was a man.

  Richard stood up. A definitive misery, having to do with unintended consequences, moved past him, tousling his hair like the backdraft of a speeding car. He turned; and now Lizzete, too, was running down Calchalk Street toward them, running stockily with her waist held low. Jesus: and here came the swine in his German car, ripping down my roadat sixty miles an hour to kill my kids. What is this guy's hurry'? Who could want him anywhere sooner than he would get there already? The cone of air with the pig in its nose-it ripped past. A snapshot of profile: the thick skin (two-layered, like the vest beneath his shirt), the pale eyebrows, the plump slobber of the underlip. Richard stood wavering, his hair roughly tousled by the backdraft of the German car.

  In its wake, also, crept the tublike orange van, with its limp cream curtains, and 13 slumped flaccid at its wheel. "Yes" he managed to say (it was pure sibilant: Sssss) when he saw the three of them standing there. Relief and even rapture were shoving their way through a sepsis of distress. It had hit him as he stared through the gap in the back gate of the dead garage: Them was the same fucking blokes that did Crash. Telling little Marco to run along or piss off. And Adolf saying, What's this then? What's this then, lads? Adolf knew what it was: it was a lesson. Compared to you lot-compared to you, I'm a child. I'm a child … 13 was free. He crept past in the orange van. He didn't want them to see him. He never wanted their fire of eyes.

  Marco wasn't crying. But Lizzete was. And so was Richard. In the peripheries of his mind he was already rewriting his Profile (It's not often. Clash the, roll out the, raise high the. Hats off to) and working on a way of forgiving Gina. A form of words. Because if he forgave her, she could never leave him now. Who was he? Who had he been throughout? Who would he always be? He was Abel Janszoon Tasman (1603-59): the Dutch explorer who discovered Tasmania without noticing Australia . . .

  All the rumors of wind, which had until then been anarchic, like all the backdrafts of London come together, like all the car alarms of London (the Blitz which each of us suffers alone)-all the rumors of wind now gathered themselves, in riptide. More a breath sucked in than a breath expelled, up the street it hastened, shaking the trees until their teeth rattled and their pretty hair fell out. Soon the apple blossoms were everywhere, as an element.

  And that was the blossoms gone for another year. But for a little while longer they flew in festive and hysterical profusion, as if all the trees were suddenly getting married.

  The Man in the Moon is getting younger every year. Your watch knows

  exactly what time is doing to you: tsk, tsk, it says, every second of every day. Every morning we leave more in the bed, more of ourselves, as our bodies make their own preparations for reunion with the cosmos.

  Beware the aged critic with his hair of winebar sawdust. Beware the nun and the witchy buckles of her shoes. Beware the man at the callbox, with the suitcase: this man is you. The planesaw whines, whining for its planesaw mummy. And then there is the information, which is nothing, and comes at night.

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