Page 11 of The Information

  "You bastard," said Richard. "I thought we were in this together."

  "Three days ago. Hark at you gasping away. Couple of years I'll be having you six-love, six-love."

  "What's it like?"

  Richard had imagined giving up smoking; and he naturally assumed that man knew no hotter hell. Nowadays he had long quit thinking about quitting. Before the children were born he sometimes thought that he might very well give up smoking when he became a father. But the boys seemed to have immortalized his bond with cigarettes. This bond with cigarettes—this living relationship with death. Paradoxically, he no longer wanted to give up smoking: what he wanted to do was take up smoking. Not so much to fill the little gaps between cigarettes with cig­arettes (there wouldn't be time, anyway) or to smoke two cigarettes at once. It was more that he felt the desire to smoke a cigarette even when he was smoking a cigarette. The need was and wasn't being met.

  "Actually it's a funny thing," said Gwyn. "I gave up three days ago, right? And guess what?"

  Richard said long-sufferingly, "You haven't wanted one since."

  "Exactly. Well, you know. Time. The future."

  "You've thought about it, and you'd rather live for ever."

  "Isn't that what we scribble away for, Richard? Immortality? Anyway, I think my duty to literature is plain."

  One more male ordeal awaited them: the changing room. The chang­ing room had the usual hooks and benches and too few coat hangers, and steamy mirrors for men to lean backwards and comb their hair at, if they had any, and much effortfully evaporating male sweat (stalled in this process, and forming a furtive mist which slowed the air) together with competing colognes and scalp gels and armpit honeyers. There was also a shower stall full of pulsating backsides and soused and swinging Johnsons which of course forbade inspection: you don't look. Gwyn's new affecta­tion of staring at things with childlike wonder remained unexercised in the changing room. You don't look, but as a man you mentally register your­self, with inevitable and ageless regret (it would have been so nice, presum­ably, to have had a big one) ... Naked, Richard watched Gwyn, naked, and vigorously toweling his humid bush. Richard was excited: Gwyn was unquestionably nuts enough for the Sunday Los Angeles Times.

  They walked back through the bar, which gave them time to start sweating again, and out into the late afternoon. Richard said carefully,

  "You were saying? About immortality?"

  "Well, I don't want to sound pretentious .. ."

  "Speak as your heart tells you."

  "Milton called it the last infirmity of noble minds. And—and some­one said of Donne when he was dying that immortality, the desire for immortality, was rooted in the very nature of man."

  "Walton," said Richard. He was doubly impressed: Gwyn had even been reading about immortality.

  "So you know. You're bound to have such thoughts. To flesh out the skeleton of time."

  "I have been looking again," said Richard, even more carefully, "at Amelior..."

  The unspoken wisdom between them was as follows. The unspoken wisdom was that Richard, while taking a hearty and uncomplicated plea­sure in Gwyn's success, reserved the right to keep it clear that he thought Gwyn's stuff was shit (more particularly, Summertown, the first novel, was forgivable shit, whereas Amelior was unforgivable shit). Oh yeah: and that Gwyn's success was rather amusingly—no, in fact completely hilari­ously—accidental. And transitory. Above all transitory. If not in real time then, failing that, certainly in literary time. Enthusiasm for Gwyn's work, Richard felt sure, would cool quicker than his corpse. Or else the uni­verse was a joke. And a contemptible joke. So, yes, Gwyn knew that Richard entertained certain doubts about his work.

  "First time through," he went on, "as you know, I didn't really think it came off. Something bland and wishful. Even ingratiating. And pro­grammatic. An insufficient density of elements. But . . ." Richard glanced up (they had reached their cars). No question that Gwyn had been patiently waiting for that but. "But second time through it all came together. What threw me was its sheer originality. When we started out I think we both hoped to take the novel somewhere new. I thought the way forward was with style. And complexity. But you saw that it was all to do with subject." He glanced up again. Gwyn's expression—briefly interrupted to acknowledge the greeting of a passerby, then stolidly reas-sumed—was one of dignified unsurprise. Richard felt all his caution dis­appear with a shriek. "A new world," he went on, "mapped out and reified. Not the city but the garden. Not more neurosis but fresh clarity. That took its own kind of courage," he said, still weirdly capable of meeting Gwyn's eye, "—to forge a new art of the brave."

  Slowly Gwyn held out his hand. "Thanks, man."

  Jesus, thought Richard. Which of us is going nuts faster? "No," he said. "Thankyou."

  "Before I forget, Gal Aplanalp is off to L.A. any minute, so you'd bet­ter give her a call. Tomorrow. Morning."

  And then they parted in the car park, under the afternoon moon.

  Out there, in the universe, the kilometer definitely has it over the mile. If the universe likes roundness, which it seems to do.

  The speed of light is 186,282 mps, but it is very close to 300,000 kps. One light-hour is 670,000,000 miles, but it is very close to 1,000,000,000 kilometers.

  Similarly, one Astronomical Unit, or the average distance between the earth and the sun, center to center, is 92,950,000 miles, but it is very close to 15,000,000 kilometers.

  Is this arbitrary anyway? Is this anthropic? In a million millennia, the sun will be bigger. It will feel nearer. In a million millennia, if you are still reading me, you can check these words against personal experience, because the polar ice caps have melted and Norway enjoys the climate of North Africa.

  Later still, the oceans will be boiling. The human story, or at any rate the terrestrial story, will be coming to an end. I don't honestly expect you to be reading me then.

  In the meantime, though, the kilometer definitely has it over the mile.

  "When entering a main road from a side road, you come to a halt, look left and right," said Crash in his deepest and stateliest tones, "and wait until you see a car coming."

  "Really?" said Demeter Barry.

  "You engage first gear. When the car come good and close—you pull out in front of it.”

  "I see."

  "And then you slow down to a crawl. And stick you elbow out the window."

  "Really."

  "Unless of course he try to overtake."

  "Then what?"

  "Then of course you speed up."

  The thrashed Metro lurked in a dead-ended sidestreet off Golbourne Road. Beneath its roof rack of ads and L-signs Demeter sat strapped into the front passenger seat, while Crash was wedged behind the wheel. As he spoke he made intently carving gestures with his hands.

  "Allow me to demonstrate. Here, let's—seatbelt on okay? There we

  go."

  It was true—what Steve Cousins said. Driving instruction was sus­tained by a deep scholarship of lechery, in common with many other callings in which men were obliged to serve unattended women: plumb­ing, policing, clothes vending (particularly shoes). Consider the milk­man, and milkman lore. How Eros must have wept at his disappearance from the English streets . .. Take it from Crash: contrary pulses to do with male-female authority—plus this cool new fear rich chicks had about seeming racist or snobbish—bred a helpful confusion. Even the window-cleaner, a door-to-door artist with his tramplike rags and plastic pail, his dramatic windowsill clearances, his perched and watchful form on the other side of the glass, the new light he let flow into the living space: even the window-cleaner was the cause of rearrangements, of domestic reconsiderations .. . Probably a pamphlet as long as the High­way Code could be written on, say, the Use of the Seatbelt in the Promo­tion of Instructor-Student Bodily Contact; also Seat-Elevation Adjustment, the Pardonability of Tactile Reassurance During and After the Emergency Stop, the Gearstick as Symbol or Totem.

  "And the bottom
line being?" said Crash invitingly.

  "What?" asked Demeter.

  "I'm asking you."

  "Urn. I don't know."

  "To impress your personality on the road. I say it again. Your purpose when driving is not to arrive at your destination safely or quickly. Your purpose when driving is . .. ?"

  "To impress your personality on the road."

  "Exactly. To show who own the road."

  Boldly Crash fired the Metro and approached the junction, indicating left. The street was clear, and uncannily remained so, for twenty sec- onds, for forty, for sixty, for more. And this was London, where there was no shortage of cars. This was a modern city, where cars were in end­less supply, where there were cars, cars, cars, as far as the eye could see. They went on waiting. Crash craned his neck. A sizable segment of Demi's allotted hour had already been consumed by their vigil.

  "Neutron bomb is it."

  They went on waiting. At last a smudged white van appeared, from the right. You could always eventually rely, in London, on a smudged white van: it looked as though it had been scrabbled at by the sooty fingers of huge children. Here it came, over the bridge beneath the bristling coun­cil block, and advancing with steady purpose. The van was upon them— the van was practically past them—when Crash pounced out in front of it.

  First, the great sinus effort of the brakes; then brutal honk of horn and (Demi half-turned) the incensed strobe of headlights. Crash now sat back, humming, and steadily quenched the Metro's speed, the van whin­nying and jostling in its wake, trying to pass, to climb on top of, to leapfrog over. Glancing at Demeter, Crash lowered the side window and stuck an exaggerated length of elbow out of it.

  "Now," he instructed, "for the irrational burst of speed."

  And Demeter was duly pressed back into her seat as Crash's slablike trainer hit the floor.

  Twenty minutes later the Metro stood double-parked on the All Saints Road, parallel with Portobello, before the hulk of the old Adonis. Crash was explaining that the techniques he had just demonstrated, and other mysteries to which he might soon introduce her, lay in the realm of advanced motoring; of such skills, Crash gently hinted, Demi could only dream of one day becoming mistress.

  "But the same principle always apply. You show who own the road."

  With a nod or two and a quiet clearing of the throat Crash fell into a high-minded silence. His thoughts lay, perhaps, in that land where advanced motorists, with many a veer and screech and pile-up, deployed their expertise. Or maybe he was pondering his very recent misadven­ture: the smudged white van, it had transpired at the next traffic lights, contained three uniformed policemen.

  "Probably get off," mused Crash, who ought to know, "with a DWD."

  "I'm sorry?"

  "Driving Without Due."

  "Sorry?" said Demi. And she sounded it: sorry she asked.

  "Driving Without Due Care and Attention," Crash elaborated. "But you weren't. I'll be your witness. You were driving with incredible care. Everything you did was—”

  Crash waved a great hand: it was not given to all, this grasp of the higher motoring mysteries. It was definitely not given to the police ... His devout but wounded gaze turned to the fagade of the old Adonis. The All Saints Road, with its new poster galleries and tapas bars, had changed dramatically even in Crash's adult lifetime. But not so long ago (Crash nodded to himself) the old Adonis had loomed over perhaps the busiest and certainly the noisiest drug corner in West London: "a sym­bolic location," to quote Police Review. It was a drive-by, All Saints and Lancaster: the cars came and slowed, all night, and the shaved black heads bobbed up to the unwinding windows. The Adonis, the old super-pub with its sticky chandeliers and sodden carpet, its contrapuntal rock videos and the thick bank of dole-quaffing fruit machines, was the nat­ural fulcrum of the play. And there you found the reverse apartheid of the drug economy, with the whites, in their frothing melee of malt beer, keeping the given distance from the sober but hot-faced brothers, who tended their Lucozades and Ribenas on the streetside bar. The Adonis. Its colonial symmetry and gaiety—where were they now? Effaced, abashed, behind planks and mesh wire. But if you (Crash grunted as he eased his neck round further), but if you... that bit there. A low door, to the side and down a step or two, and the guy within, watching and glint­ing. If you listened you could faintly hear the modest monotony of the music and—yeah—the sound of glasses clashing or cracking. So: the old Adonis refuse to die. It had found, in the eaves and runnels, a diminished and secondary existence: but continuation, all the same. Demi, who was watching Crash, saw a look of pleased indulgence show in his eyes. She didn't know, either, about the deep association between Adonis and rebirth, of his shared identity with Orpheus, and with Christ, who repre­sented a power that could bring the dead souls back, as Orpheus had failed to do.

  "Bastards," said Demi.

  Crash smiled. She meant the police. "You don't want to go in there," he said.

  "The Adonis?"

  "That a bad pub."

  He went on smiling; there was even a quiet complicit gurgle some­where in the back of his throat. The light was failing but here were the bleach and ivory of his teeth. She laughed musically and said,

  "I know all about the Adonis."

  "You never!"

  So. Then it comes out. Crash was mainly relieved, but he also felt promoted, and flattered, of course, in many tender points of head and heart. Up until now, with Demi, he could think of no investigative move to make, other than sexual harassment. Where you would find out some­thing, whatever the downside: where you would get information. And he just couldn't do that. He just couldn't do that. Now, though, before he put the Metro into gear, he leaned over and into the costly universe of her blondness and Englishness and kissed the side of her pale mouth. No, this was all right. This was calm. This was good.

  Later, back at his flat in Keith Grove, down Shepherd's Bush way, after the gym and his big debrief with fucking Adolf, Crash reclined on his futon in thong underpants with his hands clasped behind his head. Yat. On the raised screen: the football match he'd taped. He watched its progress with full terror and pity, and with extreme fluctuations of blink rate, reserving a specialist's compassion for the fates of both goalkeepers, for it was in this position that he himself turned out, twice a week, for the church and for the pub. "Early ball!" said Crash. "Ah, unlucky." The way her lips gave just enough to be more than very polite. No tongues or whatever. "Keeper's! Played, keeper." Would be treating her with respect, same as before. "Turn! Shielded." But that little suggestion of give: it made its own suggestion. Telling him something he wouldn't ever tell Scozz. "Man on! Good release." That here was another woman—oh, Jesus, there were so many—who was loved maybe. "Header. Shot! Saved, keeper." But not enough or not in the right way. "First time! Yes! Finishl"

  The match ended with the right result, but Crash was feeling right no longer: upset in himself. Slowly and angrily he donned his black track suit and jogged down to Pressures. It was called Thresher's, but Crash called it Pressures. On the way back up Keith Grove he realized what it was: him, in the fruit-juice bar, saying to Scozzy, and laughing: "Oh yeah. She's definitely Experienced." 13: that bad kid.

  He closed the door of his flat behind him and opened the bottle of scotch and threw away the top. He didn't give a fuck.

  Before he delivered it, but after he had wrapped it, Richard was struck by an unpleasant thought: what if there was something to interest Gwyn Barry in this particular issue of the Sunday Los Angeles Times'? An eight-page symposium on his work, for example. Or a whole Gwyn Barry Sec­tion. As in the UK, Amelior had first been a flop, then a sleeper, and finally a smash in the United States. Brought to Richard's attention not by Gwyn but by a patriotic item in a London newspaper, this fact inflicted a wound that still out-throbbed all others: out-throbbed the gouges and gashes visited on him by the book's apparent popularity everywhere else on earth, which he got to hear about piecemeal, from Gwyn's offhand grumbles: this importun
ate Argentinian journalist or camera crew, that interminable questionnaire from Taiwan. But America. Come ob ... Richard lit a cigarette. Could it be that Gwyn had stumbled on the universal, that voice which speaks to and for the human soul? No. Gwyn had stumbled on the LCD.

  Now Marco entered the room. As he faithfully took up position at his father's side, Richard dragged on his cigarette and then flicked it out of the window. "I like Daddy," sang Marco, his voice discreetly lowered, "he lives with me ..." Ever since that day when Richard hit Marco across the head because Amelior had entered the best-seller list at num­ber nine (and that was just the beginning: in comparison, the chart-busters of Francophile fatsoes, of gimp cosmologists, it seemed to Richard, came and went like mayflies), the child had fallen in love with his father, helplessly, as if, that day, instead of hitting Marco across the ear Richard had poured something into it. "I love you," the child often said. There was also this song Marco had made up, remarkable, really, for how little information it got across (and for its dud rime riche):

  I like Daddy. He lives with me. I like him. And he likes me.

  Though perhaps, under the new demographics, this was all stunning news. In the cities of England the children were singing:

  I don't like Daddy.

  He doesn't live with me.

  I don't like him.

  And he doesn't like me.

  Technically, too, Marco's song or poem would certainly be deemed to cut the mustard at the Tantalus Press, where Richard had spent a sor­rowful afternoon. This song made up by Marco: his father had been very pleased to hear it, on the whole, the first couple of hundred times. Gina sang no such song. .. Richard didn't like to think that Marco's marathon display of emotion might have fear as its spur. He didn't like to think that Marco knew his father was losing his mind and was trying, through his presence and example, to help him tether it. He had apologized, for the blow, many times. The only thing Marco ever said in reply was that we all had our bad days.