" Why would I chief him out? Why would I chief him out? Why would I tell anyone I chiefed him out?"
"There you go. Such are the ways of our colored brethren."
"I'm assuming I got my black eye free."
"Yeah," said Steve Cousins, without any sign of amusement. "That one's definitely on the house."
"Now might be a good time to talk about money."
Richard had not been discouraged by his black-eye experience. Far from it. He felt he had traveled through the visible spectrum and had at last reached the end of the rainbow. His own life, on paper (and"And will Gwyn be there?"
"No. He's doing something with Sebby."
"Demi-this is good."
Gina, these days, no longer looked at Richard as if he was mad. These days Gina looked at Richard as if he was ill. And how did he look at her, these days? He watched Gina now, as she stood at the cooker, turning his chop beneath the grill. Her small shape, the curve of her bared neck … Someone who didn't know Gina well might assume that the tinge of burnt blood in her hair was enhanced by, if not actually derived from, the shoots and leaves of the tropical shrub we call henna. But Gina frowned on henna, and never used it. Richard could back her up: she didn't need to. How he used to sink his face into the evidence, into the information, and stare up like the sun-helmeted author of the most suicidal travel books (the slow waterfall, the dark and arching vines) and sight genuine auburn in the slobber of his jungle love. But that didn't happen anymore. And sex, to him, was everywhere and nowhere.
He told her about Demi's suggestion. She said,
"That's all right. I might go to my mother's. What will you say in your piece? How much you hate him?"
Richard looked up. No one was supposed to know about that. "I don't hate him."
"/ do. You just think his stuff is shit. Are you going to say that?"
"I don't see how I can, really. Everyone'll think it's just envy."
"Have you heard from Gal?"
"Nothing new."
"… We ought to talk."
"I know."
"Soon." Gina's elliptical face stayed low-over the bowl of bucolic cereal. From the country, where everything was good: the sack of wheat, the rubicund apple-rack. "How are we going to get through Christmas? I hope Lizzete can help out. Should be cheaper, because she won't be skipping school. A weekend in the country'll be nice for you. You need a rest."
"Not quite a rest. I'll be working."
"It's a break," said Gina. "And a break is as good as a rest."
You hear about a guy who buys a sports car on his forty-first birthday and comes roaring out of his midlife crisis behind the wheel of an MG Midget.
One whose mother died took to the cultivation of roses.
their heads. They're ready. It's the end of the story. They've felt it coming. They're ready. They just hang their heads."
"This is magical. This is poetry."
"Well then."
Suddenly Richard found himself distracted and oppressed: by matters of timing. If they went ahead now, then Gwyn, one trusted, would be in no kind of shape to tour America. Which was okay: it meant, at least, that Richard could go on saying he had never been there. But would the Sunday broadsheet still want the profile? Yes. The pressures facing the successful novelist? Absolutely. He could write about the pressures exerted by that hundred-pound pulley at the end of the hospital bed, the pressures exerted by this or that cumbrous prosthesis.
"Put it on hold for now. I'm going away for the weekend with his wife," said Richard, examining his fingernails and experiencing real surprise at how much dirt they stored.
"They had a break-in."
"So I heard."
"You know what he did, the bloke? Tore all his books up. His books. So-called Amelior."
"So. A disgruntled reader."
"Yeah, or a …"
Now came a moment of shared disquiet. It was clear that the young man was about to say, a "literary critic." He was sharp with words, in a way, as he was sharp with everything else; but his coin-slot mouth was not designed to say it. "A literary critic": his mouth was not designed to say it.
"A good critic," said Richard.
"I was talking to Mrs. Shields?"
"I know. Your brother's mum."
"She's not working there anymore, but she's a pal of that Colombian they got. And guess what. They sleep in separate rooms."
"Who do?"
"Gwyn. And Demeter. I got something for you." He took it from his pocket and passed it across the table under the shell of his palm. A section of glossy paper, tightly and elaborately folded, like origami. "That's in exchange," he said, "for the smack."
The possibility of additional or parallel universes, of which there may well be an infinity, presents the writer with something new to worry about. Shakespeare is the universal. That is to say, he plays well enough in this universe, with its sodium and cesium and helium. But how would he go down in all the others?much of it was on paper, written words, memos to the self, scrawled on the corners of envelopes and on the backs of credit-card slips franked by Pizza Express), seemed so hard to worsen; and yet a single blow from a muscular fist had shown it to be capable of dramatic and qualitative decline. The non-black-eye world that he was now reentering, for all its penury and hopelessness, felt like a banquet of immortality and joy. His cheekbone, this night, bore only an arid smear of yellow (not the cheerful, nursery yellow of days past but a different yellow, a dead yellow). The eye itself was no longer a tropical anemone. It had become an eye again. It had become Richard Tull again.
"Go on," he said, and sank back, and called with languor for another Zombie .. . This was the world where the body was money: the world of pornography and vassalage. Here were Gwyn Barry's organs and appendages, laid out on trays and studded with price pegs as on a butcher's shelf-or reeling and calibrating, items on the circular slide rule that an American doctor might carry in his top pocket, for instant estimates. Steve Cousins's terms, Richard thought, were staggeringly reasonable: by pledging half his fee for the Gwyn Barry profile, he could get its subject safely bedded down, in old age. Disillusionment with the literary world-that was what had brought Richard here. If Leavis had been right, if the whimpers of provincial neglect had had just cause, if the literary world was a Hong Kong of arbitrage, of graft and drink and sex: in such a world, with a ton of money and a cooling-tower of vitamin E, Richard could have attained his goal by conventional means. But the literary world wasn't like that. When it came to fucking people up, the literary world never got started. Sadness at this, and disillusionment, had brought Richard here, to the Canal Creperie, and to Steve Cousins, his familiar and his fan.
Who was telling him that he could get Gwyn killed for a thousand- for eight book reviews! Some trog from up north would do it. He comes down here with all the others, for a football match, completes his business, then digs his scarves and bobble hat out of his duffel bag and takes the train back to Worksop.
"Enchanting," said Richard. "This is pure witchcraft. But please. You were saying."
"What you do is-what you do is you turn their lives into fear. Everything they do. Everywhere they go. It's like the world has-"
"Turned against them."
"Like the world hates them."
"Go on," said Richard limply.
"So that by the time it happens, by then, they just-they just hangIt was not the black woman that stopped him, though: it was the white man. For 13 had long sensed, very accurately, that you didn't want to be around Scozzy with anything sexual. While to the white man the thought of the black man was some kind of antic aphrodisiac, the presence of Scozzy, with his sallow stare, in 13 's head definitely went the other way. You wouldn't ever want to present the man with it. Simple as.