"Fossil dung!" said Pel, with humorous authority, as the quest dissolved.
"Yeah, of course. Kopros: shit. You know, like coprophile."
"Most untypical," said Gwyn.
Richard looked at him.
"I thought you knew everything about shit."
The guys laughed, uncertainly. TV meant that everything Gwyn said was revised upwards in terms of sparkle and pertinence; but shit, the reality, the stuff itself-this was not happy ground.
"Homer nods," said Bal. "Cedric nods. 'Anosmia' nods."
Anosmia: loss of sense of smell. Although Richard had a great memory, he didn't remember that "anosmia" had once featured on the Knowledge. And he didn't know that they called him Anosmia not because he suffered from it but because he was capable of defining it. He dropped his head and ducked away from the crowd, following Gwyn on to Court One.
"Won't be able to concentrate today." Gwyn was shaking his wrists and bobbing around like a million-quid footballer arising ominously from the dugout. "I'll keep thinking about that maniac in my bedroom."
"What did she actually … How do you-"
"Oh our visitor left a calling card all right," said Gwyn with disgust.
"Christ, you don't mean she-"
"Enough. Please."
If, at seven in the morning, you had told Richard he was going to play tennis that same afternoon, he would have laughed in your face. No: notOver the chessboard, the following Sunday, Richard asked Gwyn what had happened with Belladonna.
"Nothing," he said. "What did you expect? I wanted to talk about oral sex but she just wanted to talk about Amelior. That book is her bible. A lot of kids seem to have taken it up. It's the message of hope, I suppose."
"J'adoube," said Richard, sniffing his fingertips.
"You know it's on the syllabus. Not just in America, where you'd kind of expect it. But here in stuffy old England!"
"Mate in three," said Richard. "No. Mate in two."
Gal Aplanalp didn't call.
Once a day that slobbering fuckpig of an Englishman hurled and bounced himself down Calchalk Street at sixty miles an hour in his German car. Like a low-flying aircraft-like a drug rush …
Richard couldn't believe this fucking guy. This fucking guy: what was his hurry? Who did he think could want him anywhere a second sooner than he was going to get there already?
Somehow it always happened that Richard was out on the street when the German car ripped past-frozen with loathing, his imprecations tousled and tossed aside by the barreling backdraft. The drooling brute in his capsule of humorlessness. White shirt, with loosened tie, and the navy suit-top on the hook behind him.
What is it with this fucking guy? he always said out loud-driving down my street at sixty miles an hour, coming to kill my kids.
He rang Demi. "Oh I'm okay," she said. "How are you?"
"Tolerably well," he said, for this was sometimes Richard's style. His black eye had stopped being a black eye. The lid was violet, the orbit a lively-even a cheerful-yellow. "Demi, you know I'm writing this big thing on Gwyn. This means we'll have to hang out together. Lunch, for instance. A brief sea cruise, perhaps."
"On me. What are you … What's your-"
"My angle? The usual, I should think. What made the princess fall for the grim little Taff."
"And what's the answer?"
"I don't know."
"So you want…?"
"Deep background."
Then she gave him a date in mid-January and said, "I'm going home that weekend. You could come down on the Friday or the Saturday. Spend the night. It'll be very informal. Just family."
He sat in the pub for three hours staring at the haywain of Anstke's dipped head while she explored what she considered to be her only alternative to suicide: moving into 49E Calchalk Street.
Early in December Richard had lunch with the Features Editor of the Sunday broadsheet which would be publishing his long profile of Gwyn Barry. "What we want to know," said the Features Editor, "is what every reader wants to know: what's he really like. You know him as well as anyone. You know: what's he really like."
They would run the piece after Gwyn's pub date: absorb the "impact." More generally, the Features Editor went on, Richard should examine the pressures facing the successful novelist in the late 1990s.
On the day before his trial for drunken driving Richard took a spin in the Maestro: to Wroxhall Parade. Belladonna answered the door in a black two-piece suit, a black hat and a black veil. The veil held dull gray sequins in its mesh; it resembled a spider's web complete with dead flies. In the Maestro they rode to Holland Park Avenue. He didn't feel like a pimp or a pander or an agent provocateur. He felt like a minicab driver.
Gwyn treated him as such. Unsmilingly he led Belladonna off to his study, and Richard poked around in the kitchen, failing to read a new biography but successfully drinking beer.
She was quiet, and maybe even quietly tearful behind her veil, when he drove her back to Wroxhall Parade. He asked her what had happened and she kept saying Nothing.
Richard went to court and was duly admonished and fined and banned- for a year.
Demi failed her driving test for the third time.
Crash couldn't understand it. "This is beyond my comprehension," he said, as he drove her woundedly back from Walthamstow. Not only did the driving instructor and the driving examiner originate from the West Indies. They originated from the same island.
As Crash approached central London he relented, and taught Demi something nice: the use of the hazard lights to express gratitude. Often, as you joined a queue of traffic from a side road, and a fellow motorist held back to admit you, there wasn't enough time to wave or flash your thanks. A brief application of the hazard lights, however, allowed you to salute the indulgence of the car behind.
One whose oldest son left home received instruction from Father Duryea at St. Anthony's.
One whose marriage ended traveled first to Israel, then to Africa.
They all suffered from pains. These pains were informers sent by death.
One who heard mechanical noises in his ears attached a mirror to his shoe and stood in crowds where women gathered.
One who wore his hair swiped upward from his right sideburn abjured the love of women and sought the love of men.
One who could still see the bus when the bus was nice and near started responding to the propositions written on cards and left in street-corner telephone booths.
They all kept comparing what had gone to what would come.
One abstained from meat and fish, and eggs, and fruit that failed to fall to the ground of its own accord.
One grew fat and had nightly dreams of lopping.
One bought an electric juicer and came to fear the force of electricity.
They all saw what lay behind. If they looked, they could see what lay ahead. They didn't choose to look. But at three in the morning something woke them with the fizzy rush of an old flash camera, and there they all were, staring down the sights of their lives and drawing a bead on the information.
"What does it mean anyway: 'chief me out'?"
"Like you called him chief. Your chiefed him out."
"What's wrong with chief? Cabbies call you chief. Chief doesn't sound too bad."
"I asked him. He couldn't remember. All he knew was if you get called chief then you've been chiefed out. And it can't get around that you stood there and got chiefed out."