"Do you take the Los Angeles Times?" he said wonderingly.
Gwyn seemed to lose the tempo, or the opposition: he paused awkwardly before replying. Richard's last move was of the kind that presents the adversary with a strictly local, and eventually soluble, problem. An adequate—a more than adequate—response was available. Richard had seen it as his fingers retreated from the piece. Gwyn would see it, too, in time.
"No," said Gwyn. "Some stupid bugger sent it to me."
"Why?"
"With a note saying, 'Something here to interest you.' No page number, mind. No marks or anything. And look at it. It's like a bloody knapsack."
"How ridiculous. Who?"
"I don't know. Signed 'John.' Big help that is. I know loads of people called John."
"I always thought it must be quite handy being called John."
"Why?"
"You can tell when you're going nuts."
"Sorry? I don't follow.”
"I mean, a real sign of megalomania, when a John starts thinking that 'John' will do. 'Hi. It's John.' Or: 'Yours ever, John.' So what? Everybody's called John."
Gwyn found and made the best reply. The move was not just expedient; it had the accidental effect of clarifying White's position. Richard nodded and shuddered to himself. He had forced Gwyn into making a good move: this seemed to happen more and more frequently, as if Richard was somehow out of time, as if Gwyn was playing in the new notation while Richard toiled along in the old.
Richard said, "... Gwyn. That's Welsh for John, isn't it?"
"No. Euan. That's Welsh for John."
"Spelt?"
"E,u,a,n."
"How definitively base," said Richard.
He looked down at the sixty-four squares—at this playing field of free intelligence. Oh yeah? So the intelligence was free, then, was it? Well it didn't feel free. The chess set before them on the glass table happened to be the most beautiful that Richard had ever used, or ever seen. For some reason he had neglected to ask how Gwyn acquired it, and anxiously assumed it was an heirloom of Demi's. For surely Gwyn, left to his own devices (his taste, and many thousands of pounds) would have come up with something rather different, in which the pieces consisted of thirty-two more or less identical slabs of quartz/onyx/osmium; or else were wincingly florid and detailed—the Windsor castles, the knights with rearing forelegs and full horse-brass, the practically life-sized bishops with crooks and pointy hats and filigreed Bibles. No. The set was in the austere Staunton measure, the chessmen delightfully solid and firmly moored on their felt (even the pawns were as heavy as Derringers), and the board of such proportion that you did indeed feel like a warrior prince on a hilltop, dispatching your riders with their scrolled messages, and pointing through the morning mist, telescope raised. And not a drop of blood being shed. That's how the valley had looked two minutes ago: Field of the Cloth of Gold. Now it resembled some sanguinary disgrace from a disease-rich era, all pressed men, all rabble, the drunken cripples reeling, the lopped tramps twitching and retching in the ditch. Richard was now staring at what any reasonable player would recognize as a lost position. But he would not lose. He had never lost to Gwyn. It used to be that Richard was better at everything: chess, snooker, tennis, but also ait, love, even money. How casually Richard would pick up the check, sometimes, at Burger King. How thoroughly, and with how many spare magnitudes, did Gina outshine Gilda. How good Dreams Don't Mean Anything had looked, in hard covers, when placed beside the weakly glowing wallet of Gwyn's crib-notes to The Maunciple's Tale . . . They exchanged knights.
"So what did you do? I suppose you could have just chucked the whole thing out... The Los Angeles Times. What's the matter with you?"
In formulating this last question Richard had lightly stressed the personal pronoun. For Gwyn was doing something he did more and more often these days, something that brimmed Richard's neck with mumps of hatred. Gwyn was inspecting an object—in the present case, the black knight—as if he had never seen it before. With infant wonder in his widened eyes. Richard really couldn't sit there: opposite somebody pretending to be innocent. Maybe Gwyn had got hold of some novel, by a woman, about a poet, and thought that this was how dreamers and seekers were meant to behave. Another possible explanation was what Richard called the Maggot Theory. According to the Maggot Theory, Gwyn had a maggot in his brain, and every frown, every pout, every pose was directly attributable to the maggot's meanderings and its maulings and above all its meals. Watching Gwyn now, Richard felt the Maggot Theory gaining ground.
"It's a chessman," said Richard. "It's a knight. It's black. It's made of wood. It looks like a horse."
"No," said Gwyn dreamily, placing the piece with his other captures, "I found the thing in the end."
"Found what?"
Gwyn looked up. "The thing about me. The thing that was meant to interest me in the L.A. Times."
Richard ducked back to the board.
"My glance just fell on it. Luckily. Look at it. I could have been slaving through that thing all bloody week."
"Now this calls for some serious thought," said Richard in a higher and frailer register. "Around from the king side," he said. Behind him a door opened. "And see what we can find," he continued, "on the queen side."
Demi was entering, or crossing: the library lay between the two drawing rooms. She moved past them with reverent stealth, actually tiptoeing for the central few strides, with knees naively raised. Big, blond, unsatir-ical, but not quite the other thing either (unburnished, unrefined), Demi performed her tiptoe without ease and without talent. Like the not-so-natural parent, playing a children's game. Richard thought of the flash accountant he had unnecessarily and very temporarily hired, after the American sale of Aforethought: how, during the appointment at his place, he had made a show of jovially chasing his daughter from the room, with jangle of keys and coins, with knees raised, past the modern first editions and the texts of tax . . . Demi paused at the far door.
"Brrr," she said.
"Hi Demi."
"It's not very warm in here."
Gwyn turned her way, his eyes bulging uxoriously. To Richard he looked like a clairvoyant who, as a matter of policy, was keen to demystify his profession.
"Why not put a cardy on, love?"
"Brrr," said Demi.
Richard got his head down and, with infinite grief, started working to a different plan.
PART TWO
There was the street, as midnight neared, after the rain, glossy, with a noirish wet-downed look. And there was the canal, sickly hued even in the dark, turbid, caustic, like a Chinese medicine of ferocious efficacy. The season was about to change.
Between road and water, Richard sat slumped over a Zombie in the Canal Creperie. He wore a deceptively cheerful red bow tie; he wore a deceptively opulent paisley waistcoat; he wore his hair long at the back to cover that strange and frightening lump on his neck; and he wore dark glasses, behind which the boiling beer-guts of his eye sacs now itched and seeped. Darko had said, on the telephone, that he and Belladonna would meet him here at eleven. It was 12:05. Now a young man sat down opposite in Richard's booth and flattened a book out on the table. His face was ectomorphic and asymmetrical and preoccupied. This wasn't Darko. This wasn't Belladonna.
Richard endeavored to persuade himself that he had good cause for celebration. That morning he had personally delivered the completed text of Unfilled to the offices of Gal Aplanalp. Over the last twelve days, applying himself with great clarity and focus, Richard had worked almost unprecedentedly hard: reading the Los Angeles Times. No, he didn't get Gwyn's copy off him ("Are you finished with that?"), nor did he crouch each midnight by the Barry dustbins waiting for the significantly bulky ten-gallon bag. He considered such stratagems. But instead he went and bought another one right away, incurring the familiar inconvenience and expense, down in Cheapside. This second copy of the Los Angeles Times he had just pummeled into a dustbin, en route to the Canal Creperie. He fo
und what he was looking for.
Books, Arts, Entertainment, The Week in Review, Real Estate, Sports. It seemed that he knew the whole thing backwards anyway. Poise, Style, Flair. He read everything from the cookery column to the crossword clues. Could it be that there was a special way of preparing egg and chips in the mode of Gwyn Barry? Was it possible to contrive a crossword clue out of that vilely vowelless forename, that curt and surly surname (NY wry grab—wait—agitated by British novelist? 4,5)? When Richard walked the streets with all his fingertips on his forehead he was saying to himself, am I one? am I two? am I worse? am I better? At night, as he prepared to enter the forests of sleep and temptation, things looked like two things: the ironing board was a deck chair and the mirror was a standing pool. He was being informed—the information came at night, to inhume him. Jump-leads of agony: for all this time, jump-leads of agony went from Holland Park to Calchalk Street. What was it? A flux tube, an electric whip with scorpion sting. And now it seemed that the Grove itself was a league-long knout or sjambok, made of London, thoughtlessly wielded by Gwyn Barry and danced to, howling and sweating, by Richard Tull.
Thoughtlessly? It did of course occur to Richard, as he sat in his study scanning the college hockey results or the wheat futures, as he abandoned Barcaloungers, say, and started rereading the weather forecast, that he had been rumbled and finessed—that the Los Angeles Times was guilelessly and even winsomely Gwyn-free. But he was basically convinced that Gwyn wouldn't need to pull a flanker on him. The world would do it. Late in the evening of the tenth day he found it. Page eleven, column three: the personals page, in the Classified Section, under "Miscellaneous." It went like this:
"Stephanie." Pet Adoptions. Rottweiler 1 yr. Gentle girl. Plus free hamster given with purchase of cage. Summertown. Wanted. First ed. of novel by Gwyn Barry. Swap-Meet Garage Yard Sale. All welc.
He waved to the waitress. No, not another Zombie, thank you; he would try a Tarantula. The young man sitting opposite with his scalene face and his shoulders hunched over his book in the posture of a professional bicyclist—the young man took the opportunity to order a club soda. The waitress lingered, making notes.
The waitresses were less young and pretty than they used to be; but then the Canal Creperie was less young and pretty than it used to be— was now, in fact, the resort of insomniac boozers prepared to pay for, and sit quite near to, the platefuls of food which the law obliged them to order with their drinks. On the table, untouched, there stood a basket of sauce-glued nachos, and heavily cooling tortilla, as inert as an organ on a medical tray. Richard's waitress reappeared with his Tarantula. She looked right through him as he thanked her. Before, girls looked at him and showed interest or no interest. Then, for a while, they looked past him. Now they looked through him. Richard felt a generalized regret, mild, chronic, secretive—like, say, the pang of the domestic tutor with his chaste crush on the family four-year-old who, for once, says her good-nights without favoring him with the usual glance and smile, and he must sniff bravely, and tell himself that children ought to be allowed their childish concerns, and go on talking with the grownups about Aristophanes or Afghanistan .. . They used to look past him. Now they looked through him. Because he no longer snagged on their DNA. Because he was over on the other side, and partly invisible, like all the ghosts who walked there.
Suddenly the young man sank back; he raised his book to chin height and held it aloft like a hand of cards. Richard jolted. The book was Dreams Don't Mean Anything. Its author was Richard Tull. There, on the top corner of the back cover, above the bubbles and sequins of its artwork (the effect intended, and not achieved, was one of jazzy icono-clasm), perched a passport-size photograph: Richard Tull at twenty-eight. How clean he looked. How extraordinarily clean.
Richard blushed, and his eyes sought something else to stare at— other photographs, framed and hung, of grinning or glowering movie stars: examples, like the loaf-shaped paper-napkin dispensers and the fluted sugar-pours and the podgy old jukebox, of the eminently exportable culture to which the Canal Creperie had dedicated itself. There were even a couple of American writers up there on the wall, their faces scored by epic wryness, epic celebrity ... A week after Aforethought was published Richard had seen a beamingly intelligent youth frowning and smiling over a copy of the book—on the Underground, at Earl's Court, where Richard then lived. He'd considered saying something. A tap on the shoulder, maybe. A raised thumb. A wink. But he had thought: stay cool. It's my first book. This is obviously going to happen all the time. Get used to it... It never happened again, of course. Until now.
"Do you want me to sign that for you?"
The book was lowered. The face was hereby revealed. Its asymmetries resolved themselves into a smile. The smile was not, in Richard's opinion, a good smile, but it did disclose surprisingly and even sinisterly good teeth. The lower set, in particular, was almost feline in its acuity and depthlessness. Richard's lower teeth were like a rank of men in macks on a stadium terrace, tugged into this or that position by the groans of the crowd.
"Sorry?"
"Do you want me to sign that for you?" He leaned across and tapped the back cover. He removed his dark glasses, but not for long. He smiled
gauntly.
The young man did the thing of dividing his stare between photo and face until he said, "Who would have oddsed it? Small world. Steve Cousins."
Richard took the hand that was flexed out to him like a shot card. He felt the rare and uneasy luxury of letting his own name go unannounced. Also he asked himself, with what seemed to be abnormal pertinence, whether he was about to get beaten up. His nuts-and-violence radar used to be good, when he was soberer, and less nuts himself.
Steve said, "I think I saw you one time down the Warlock." "The Warlock: sure. Are you a player?"
"Not tennis. Not tennis. I always thought tennis was an effeminate game. No offense meant."
"None taken," said Richard sincerely. His impulse now was to flip his wallet onto the table and produce the photographs of his two boys.
"Squash is my game. Squash. But I don't play down there. I'm not even a Squash Member. I'm a Social Member."
Everybody knew about the Social Members of the Warlock. They didn't go down there for the tennis or the squash or the bowls. They went down there because they liked it.
"Well, I'm injured," said Richard. "Tennis elbow." This was true. Lift a racket? He could hardly lift a cigarette.
His interlocutor nodded: such was life. He was still holding the (closed) book out in front of him; it seemed inevitable, now, that he would have to say something about it. The anxiety this gave rise to led Steve Cousins to consider a rather serious change of plan: from plan A to plan B or plan V, plan O, plan X. To activate plan X he even reached into his pocket for the eyedrop bottle. This was plan X: lace his drink with lysergic acid and then, the minute he started looking nauseous or talking stupid about the funny lights, take him outside, for some air, down the walkway near the water, and kick his teeth out one by one. Scozz paused.
Plan A regained its substance. It was like the glow that came up on a
stage set. With a soft gulp of effort he said, "I'm an autodidact." Yes, listen, thought Richard: he can even say autodidact... He waved to the waitress. No, not another Tarantula, thank you: he would try a Rattlesnake. Actually Richard was undergoing a series of realizations. Which was just as well. He realized that the young man was not a type. Not an original, maybe; but not a type. He also realized (for the first time) that autodidacts are always in pain. The fear of ignorance is a violent fear; it is atavistic; fear of the unknown is the same as fear of the dark. And finally Richard thought: but, I'm nuts too! Don't be steamrollered: show your own quiddity in the field where the mad contend.
"I got a First at Oxford," said Richard. "Autodidact—that's a tough call. You're always playing catch-up, and it's never wholly that you love learning. It's always for yourself."
This turned out to be a good move of Ri
chard's. It didn't calm the young man, but it made him more cautious. He weighed Dreams Don't Mean Anything in his hand and held it out at arm's length, to assess it, to see it in perspective, with parallax. "Interesting," he said.
"Interesting how?"
"You shouldn't smoke, you know."
"Oh really? Why ever not?"
"Toxins. Bad for your health."
Richard took the cigarette out of his mouth and said, "Christ, I know that about it. It says on the fucking packet that it kills you."
"You know what? I found it... very readable. It's a page-turner."
That proved it. It was clinically impossible that this guy was playing with a full deck. Richard knew very well that nobody found him readable. Everybody found him unreadable. And all agreed that Dreams Don't Mean Anything was even more unreadable than Aforethought.
"I read Aforethought too. Raced through that one as well."
It hadn't occurred to Richard that these admissions were bluff or hoax. Nor did it seriously occur to him now. And he was right: the young man was telling the truth. But he said because he wanted to cover himself,
"What big thing happens exactly halfway through Aforethought?"
"It goes into the—into italics."
"What happens just before the end?"
"It goes back again," said Steve, opening the book and gazing down "fondly," so to speak, at the copyright page (because the modern person isn't always well served by the old adverbs), which also bore, beneath a
thick film of polyethylene, the borrowing card of the hospital library he
had stolen it from. Not the hospital library from which he had stolen Aforethought: the library of the hospital to which Kirk had been transferred, after his second savaging by Beef. With tears in his eyes (and blood-soaked bandages all over his mouth) Kirk told Scozz that Lee was going to have Beef put down. Now Kirk wanted Scozz to go over and do Lee! Scozzy said, "Don't talk rucking stupid." Yet Kirk swore that Beefs death would not pass unavenged ... If literary courtesy compelled him to have the author sign his own book, then Scozzy had an answer ready. Dreams Don't Mean Anything was in very good condition: as new. The wonky-hipped old dears, the wraiths in towel robes awaiting the results of tests, the stoical criminals on the mend from line-of-work spankings and stripings—none of them, apparently had sought solace or diversion in the pages of Dreams Don't Mean Anything ...