Two children, two little girls wearing flower dresses and kinky up-pointing braids were playing in the garden of the detached pebbledash: swing, climbing frame, slide. Under thrashing trees. Such a scene struck no chord in Steve's past. Watch out, girls: here comes mum. Cooking in a track suit, with her face in the steam. Now she's calling out the kitchen window. Be there in a minute … Steve was in his Cosworth with its low racing skirt. He swiveled his neck: 13, asleep on the back seat. What did he do last night? Stole a double-decker and went to Scotland and back. The triangles of Steve's face-the equilateral, the isosceles, the scalene- stirred and recomposed themselves.
"I deplore gratuitous violence," Steve used to say. Which was untrue, which was well known to be untrue. One of his nicknames was Gratuitous.
"Jesus," said 13.
Steve turned: gone back to sleep again … Richard Tull intelligent? Steve knew wholesalers who were just down from Oxbridge or wherever. Twenty-two, twenty-three, and they had a chain of command that covered five thousand miles, with Afghani army captains, Japanese diplomats, and British customs officers all on their payroll. That was intelligent. That was organized. With drugs, with supplying, you tended to go on and on until you exploded like a tick full of blood. And big time was just a big drag. Considering the business he was in, it was prudent to have your
midlife crisis at the age of twenty-nine. Now what? He had money. But
he couldn't see himself taking the usual route. Running a bar in Tenerife. Flogging San Migs and scotch eggs and screening FedExed videos of "Match of the Day." Probably that's all different now. They got Sky.
chained playground some large and muffled figure creaked alone and pleasurelessly on the pendulum of the swing; it stopped, and then started again, in a slower but no less desperate rhythm … The night before Richard had dreamed that he was having an unhappy love affair with his own son Marius. "Let's not do it any more," Marius had said. And Richard had said, "Yes-let's not." And Marius had said, "Because Daddy, if you do, it means you're inadequant." Inadequant. Ah, innit sweet.
Gal Aplanalp called.
She said at the outset that she had an unfortunate coincidence to report.
Richard sat there, waiting. He felt far from resilient. His right ear still throbbed from its recent hour with Anstice. And then Gwyn, newly returned, had phoned in a knuckle-whitening celebration of Italian warmth, generosity, erudition and discernment-and Italian willingness to buy a novel called Amelior in record numbers.
"Tell me about it," said Richard.
On Tuesday, Gal explained, her assistant, Cressida, had stayed at home to apply herself to Untitled. So Cressida didn't go to work on Tuesday. And Cressida didn't go to work on Wednesday either, or on Thursday. Why was this? Because halfway through Tuesday morning, and halfway through the anomalously brief first chapter of Untitled, Cressida had suffered an attack of diplopia or double vision-of sufficient severity for her GP to suspect a case of (you'll like this) "vascular embarrassment" or even, quite possibly, an organic lesion of the central nervous system. Cressida? Cressida was fine. On light duties, and taking plenty of rest.
"What I'm going to do now is fire off a copy to Toby Middlebrook at Quadrant. He has the right kind of taste and the right kind of list. Both Cressida and I-we agree that Untitled is obviously a challenging and highly ambitious novel."
"How far did she get? Cressida."
Gal always tried to be as straight as possible with her clients. She told him: page nine.
He said good-bye. He hung up. He cleared a space for his elbows and sat there for a while with his head in his hands.
Richard now knew just how violent that disagreement was. Demi was the exception in another way too, because Richard and Gwyn and Gina had spent at least a year, all told, in the Slug and Cabbage, with speechless Gilda making up the four. Nowadays the Tulls and the Banys were seldom to be seen as a foursome. Richard had had to promise to be good.
"What's happening with your novel?" asked Gwyn. "Are you all right, love?"
Demi looked all right. It seemed to Richard that she even managed to exude the pub placidity that pubs like to see in their women. Gina, of course, knew all about pubs-their comfort and their boredom. The doors were open to the evening traffic of Notting Hill Gate. Along with the seams of cigarette smoke, the pub vapors and pub humors, the pie waft and the yeasty burp of beer, there was also the breath of cars like a gray mesh at table height. Out on the pavement, only feebly stirred by the little cyclones of rubbish, the twisters of trex, lay several cartons of half-eaten food-meals abandoned in haste or disgust or outright vomi-tus. Above, the creases of the sky glimmered like cellulite. Richard sat out a wave of nausea and then said,
"It's with Toby Middlebrook, at Quadrant. Gal said she found it very ambitious. Rather discouragingly."
"But it is ambitious, isn't it?"
"Is it? I don't know."
"But it's what you intended, isn't it?"
"I don't-what you write shouldn't be exactly what you want to write. You should feel pressed. In some way."
"The whole process feels completely natural to me. As natural … as childbirth."
In any metaphor that linked writing with parturition, no, Richard wouldn't come out well. What were they, his novels? Not stillborn. More like those babies whom it was thought best to spirit away: a black bag in the loading dock. But this particular maternity hospital was primitive and remote, and superstitiously spurned its dead; and you yourself carried the dead thing home, swaddled in old newspapers. Richard sat out a second wave of nausea. The first had felt fragile, and tinselly; the second felt projectile in its tacit force. Was this excitement? Was this grief? He thought not-neither. It was simple proximity to violence.
"Have you plans?" said Gina. "Is there something you're not telling
us about?"
Richard (who had been staring at Gwyn's shoes) thought that Gina was talking to him. She wasn't. She was talking to Demi, who now shook her head with a flat brief smile.
Disobedient daughters, not obeying their mother. The little girl was showing the littler one a stunt on the slide. Jump off the top and land on your bum halfway down. Hasn't got the confidence. In Steve's head: concentration-loss followed by subject-change. He stopped thinking about hurting Terry and started thinking about hurting Gwyn.
Of course, Gwyn had off-street parking. It was hard to do much to a man in the bay of his own house, with all its windows standing above you and looking on. Off-street parking: vital in certain circumstances to the longevity of the urban male. Not to mention the ulcer or cancer you don't get, spending two hours a day looking for somewhere to put the fucking car. Get him at the exit to the Westway Health and Fitness Center. Send Wesley or D. Gwyn comes round the corner-and D runs right through him. That would be fifteen stone of bro coming at you at fifteen miles an hour. You're going to go down. All that coming at you, through you: you're going to go down. Then, welclass="underline" whatever.