by Martin Amis
Marco didn't want to be left alone so in the end Richard took him down to the stoop where he could at least get through some cigarettes in his company. The summer air of London was such that he might as well have blown the fagsmoke into Marco's face, or split the pack with him. Marco had asthma. He had another difficulty too. Richard didn't think about it that much. The five percent of his mind that was occupied by Marco (and this was capable of big expansions when Marco was sick or sad) had convinced itself that five percent would do: Marco was an okay little boy, with a quirk. It was called a learning disability and it had to do with repeated category mistakes. If you told Marco why the chicken crossed the road, Marco would ask you what the chicken did next. Where did it go? What was its name? Was it a boy or a girl? Did it have a husband-and, perhaps, a brood of chicks? How many?
Wait. Richard's face veered up with an animal snarl. Jesus: that fucking guy. Twice every weekday, at irregular hours, a big man in a big car drove down Calchalk Street at sixty miles an hour. What was his hurry? Who could want him anywhere sooner than he was going to get there already? He had his jacket on a hook. He had a wide-pored vest beneath his sleek white shirt. He had an outscrolled underlip and a fat nose and fair brows and lashes, like a cool new pig they'd knocked up in a lab somewhere. Richard got to his feet to watch the man rip by: an animal hating another animal. He comes here twice a day, thought Richard. He comes here twice a day, trying to kill my kids.
When the air settled again Richard sat down and lit another cigarette … If, in bringing about Gwyn's destruction-if there was time for art, then it would be much more satisfying to use contemporary forces, to awaken and array them, against his life. Ladbroke Grove and the Porto-bello Road and their daily flailing and groping and needing. If you could hydroelectrify the energies of the street and point them in the path you chose. A big project. Easier, and cheaper, just to find whoever did this kind of thing, and pay him money to knock Gwyn's block off. Meanwhile, there was Belladonna to be activated. Meanwhile, there was the Sunday New York Times.
By now Marco was stretched out on the stoop, his right ear on his right bicep, his free hand toying with troll, with goblin. Richard sat there, smoking. Nicotine is a relaxant. Cigarettes are for the unrelaxed.
We are the unrelaxed.
13 was in the van, waiting, which was how he spent much of his time. In one hand he held the scruff of Giro's coat; in the other, a consoling can of Ting.
13 ? 13 was in bits. The activities of the night before had involved him in a 120-minute, 120-mile-an-hour Indianapolis down the wrong way of the M20 in a stolen GTi with five blue-and-whites up his pipe. So? Okay. When you're doing the driving yourself: you take what comes. But when the bloke behind the wheel is only twelve years old, and out of his bonce on Wite-Out solvent. . . Through the windscreen, on which an ultra-light rain had left a kind of fur or plush or bumfluff, 13 's stare addressed the city hospital library: St. Something's. He saw himself mummified in bandages with just his hair spike sticking out. Sad!
Steve Cousins was within. He walked fast, his mack-tails and belt-ends whipping up the air in his wake. The bends of his hat's brim answered to his rostral face and the slant of its asymmetries. A traffic light of blood marked the trailing mack. On the ground floor now, heading for the hospital: there was a book he expected to find and intended to steal.
He had just been to visit Kirk, upstairs. There Scozzy sat, after passing on the propitiatory speedway mags, and there Kirk lay, in the little room to himself, his face a Scalextric of stitches, when the door opens. It's Kirk's brother: Lee. With a big crackling hamper in his arms. Lee goes, "Fortnum's and Mason's," parks the hamper on the end of the bed-and unclasps it. And this horrible head pops up. Beef the pit bull! Kirk spreads out his arms with tears in his eyes: "Beef boy. He's smiling! See that? He's that pleased to see me!"
Jesus. That fucking dog was all over him like a video nasty. And you can't call them off. You can't call them off. Like me in that respect. Call me off? You can't call me off. The owner, the trainer, he can't call them off: that's what's meant to be so good about them: you can't call them off. Kirk can't call Beef off: it's got his mouth between its teeth. Anyway, Lee pounds it on the neck about fifteen times with a full Lucozade bottle, and the drip-stand comes crashing down, and by the time they drag Beef off and kick the shit out of it and cram it back in the hamper, there's five nurses in there saying what's this little lot. Scozzy and Lee were sitting on the hamper lid-Beef beneath, going out of its nut. "Nothing!" said Kirk. "Me stitches come undone!" They were talking about calling thepolice or whatever and Steve didn't rucking need that. Slipped away. With Kirk still slobbering something to Lee about putting English mustard in its grub, mornings and last thing, to keep Beef tasty.
13 saw him coming and climbed out of the van: oof. When you spent half your life waiting, when you spent half your life lurking and loitering, you got this stiffness sometimes and your limbs went dead.
"What's that you got?" said 13.
Scozzy held it up for him.
"Afterthought," said 13.
"Aforethought" said Scozzy.
"By the man."
"No. Not by the man. By his mate."
"Or whatever."
Steve was still in a lenient mood, after his recent success. He had beaten up the man from the Ten O'clock News: and, the next night, it was on the Ten O'clock News! You do a newscaster, and they do you a newscast about it. Now that's the way the world's supposed to be run.
"Holland Park," announced Scozzy.
"Can't."
"Why?"
"Due in court is it."
"Jesus," said Scozzy.
The heat was stiffling, read Richard. He sighed, and lit a cigarette.
The heat was stiffling. Moodly he looked out of his bedroom window. Yes, the day was far too hot to be sleepy. The time had come. He had to chose.
Richard wasn't reading this in a speculative spirit. He was marking it up for the printer. He said,
"Now there's a first sentence that seizes you by the lapels. The heat was stiffling."
Balfour Cohen came and looked over Richard's shoulder. He smiled understandingly and said, "Ah yes. That's his second novel."
"Did we publish his first?"
"We did."
"How did that start? Let's think. It was biterly cold."
Balfour smiled understandingly. "It's probably a pretty good yarn."
Richard read on:
He had to chose. To win, to suceed, would be incredulous. But to fail, to loose, would be contemptuous!"What I don't understand," said Richard, "is what these people have against dictionaries. Maybe they don't even know they can't spell."
As he said this he found he was sweating, and even crying. Another thing he didn't understand was why he had to correct the spelling. I mean, why bother? Who cared? No one was ever going to read this stuff, except the author, and the author's mum.
"I'm amazed he spelt the tide right."
"What is the title?" asked Balfour.
"Another Gift from Genius. By Alexander P. O'Boye. That's assuming he spelt his name right. What was his first one called?"
"One moment." Balfour tapped his keys. "A Gift from Genius," he said.
"Jesus. How old is he?" "Guess," said Balfour. "Nine," said Richard. "Actually he's in his late sixties."
"Pitiful, isn't it? What's the matter with him? I mean is he insane? "Many of our authors are retired. This is one of the services we perform. They have to have something to do."
Or something to be, thought Richard. Sitting in the pub all day with a dog on your lap would be more creative, and more dignified, than nine-to-fiving it on the illiterate delusion. He glanced sideways. It was possible that Balfour regarded Alexander P. O'Boye as one of th? flowers of his list. He was always more hushed and pious when it came to the fiction and the poetry. In any case it was Richard who was now Fiction and Poetry Editor at the Tantalus Press. He didn't have to do what Balfour did, which was mark up the biographi
es of pet goldfish and prize gherkins, the thousand-page treatises that supposedly whipped the carpet out from under Freud and Marx and Einstein, the revisionist histories of disbanded regiments and twilit trade-union outposts, the nonfictional explorations of remote planets, and all the other screams for help.
"One should remind oneself," said Balfour, as he said every week, "that James Joyce initially favored private publication." Then he added: "Proust, too, by the way."
"But that was … Wasn't that just a maneuver? To avoid a homosexuality scandal," said Richard carefully. "Advice from Gide. Before Proust went to Gallimard."
"Nabokov," suggested Balfour.
"Yeah but that was just a book of love poems. When he was a schoolboy.?
"Nevertheless. Philip Larkin. And of course James Joyce."
Balfour was always doing this. Richard expected to learn that Shakespeare got his big break with a vanity publisher; that Homer responded to some ad whining for fresh trex. The Tantalus Press, it went without saying, was not a springboard to literary eminence. The Tantalus Press was a springboard to more of the same: to Another Gift from Genius. "Private" publishing was not organized crime exactly, but it had close links with prostitution. The Tantalus Press was the brothel. Balfour was the madam. Richard helped the madam out. Their writers paid them .. . And a writer ought to be able to claim that he had never paid for it-never in his life.
"What have you got?" said Richard.
"Second World War. It looks rather controversial."
"The myth of the six million?"
"He goes further. He argues that the concentration camps were run by Jews and that the prisoners were all Aryan Germans."
"Come on, Balfour. You're not taking that."
Had he been around for the Holocaust in which all four of his grandparents were enslaved and then murdered, Balfour would have been dead half a dozen times over. Pink triangle, yellow star: it would have been a complicated badge he wore, in his last days. Racially subhuman (Jewish), sexually perverted (homosexual), mentally unsound (schizophrenic), physically deformed (clubfooted) and politically deviant (Communist). He was also a vanity publisher; he was also entirely uncynical. Furthermore-and as it were disinterestedly-Cohen was a serious collector of anti-Semitic propaganda. Look at him. There never was a gentler face, Richard thought: the bald brown head, the seashell undulations of his temples, the all-forgiving orbits of his hot brown eyes. Balfour was an erratically generous Jew who also got into weird states about money. When they all ate lunch together, in some caff, or sandwich nook, Balfour would either quietly pick up the bill or ask for exactly calibrated contributions-and then grab everyone's money and seem about to bolt for the door. He would talk in a loud and irrelevant voice, and then simmer down, slowly. It was atavistic, Richard felt: Balfour had been on the road for two thousand years. Curiously, Richard also felt that Balfour loved him but wanted to destroy him … He had another hobby which Richard suspected was also a sideline: faking modern first editions. In his casual employ were several little hermits and other little maniacs who,
overnight, could knock up astounding facsimiles of a Sons and Lovers, a Brighton Rock, a Handful of Dust.
"It's not my business to question an author's views or his findings.?
"Findings? They're not findings. He didn't find them. They found him. Go on, Balfour. Destroy it unread."
The downstairs office of the Tantalus Press was communal: eleven people worked there, arranging things like translations. Richard wasn't yet clear how it went. Translations of this crap, into French, say? Or translations of French crap, into more of this crap? Anyway Richard sat ensconced upstairs, with the boss. Their office was comfortable, even tasteful, but diligently unluxurious (Balfour enjoyed saying, as an ordinary publisher would not enjoy saying, that his operation was nonprofit-making), and you were allowed to smoke in it. A Communist could hardly forbid smoking. As well as Communists, sick people, the racially inferior-the unnecessary mouths, the life unworthy of life-the German state killed malingerers, troublemakers, shirkers and grumblers. But not smokers. Richard might have faced the ultimate penalty for grumbling (and for much else), but not for smoking. Hitler disapproved of smoking. Stalin didn't, apparently. When the Russians were repatriating the wanderers of Europe, when the war was over, every itinerant under their care was granted an astonishingly-almost an unsmokably- generous allowance of tobacco: even children, even babies. Balfour paid Richard very generously for his one day a week.
"I think we might have found a rather promising poet. Rather strik ing, for a first collection." ?;
"Sling it over . . . Good name. Keith Horridge. Very good name, said
Richard.
Who was aware that if he worked here two days a week instead ot one he would be finished, humanly, within a year. Richard's novels might have been unreadable, but they were novels. Braced at first by the Saharas and Gobis of talentlessness which hourly confronted him, he now knew this stuff for what it was. It wasn't bad literature. It was anti-literature. Propaganda, aimed at the self. Richard's novels might have been unreadable, but they were novels. Whereas the finished typescripts, printouts and flabby exercise books that lay around him here just hadn't made it out of some more primitive form: diary, dreamjournal, dialectic. As in a ward for the half-born, Richard heard these creatures' cries, and felt their unview-able spasms, convulsed in an earlier version of being. They were like tragic babies; they were like pornography. They shouldn't be looked at. They really shouldn't be looked at. Balfour said with infinite circumspection, "And how is your-how is your latest?"
"Nearly done." And he didn't go on to add-because he couldn t see that far ahead, because men can't see further than the next fight orfuck-that his latest might be his last. Not just couldn't see: couldn't look. That couldn't be looked at either.
"If for any reason you don't find a home for it, I would of course be proud to publish it under the Tantalus imprint."
Richard could see himself ending his days with Balfour. This presentiment was becoming more and more common-habitual, reflexive. Ending his days with Balfour, with Anstice, with R. C. Squires, that bus conductress, that postman, that meter maid. Richard the haggard and neurotic ex-prettyboy, in an airless pool of batch or spinst, sparing and unpredictable with his sexual favors, vain, hideous and sullen, and a miserable pedant about his China tea.
"I know you would, Balfour."
"We could do it on subscription. Make a list. Starting with your friends."
"Thanks. Thanks. But it's got to take its chances. It's got to sink or swim."
Sink or swim in what? In the universal.
The ancients used to think that the stars-all of them-lay just beyond Saturn. Go beyond Saturn, and you would encounter the slipstream of the Milky Way. And that would be that. It isn't the case. Go beyond Saturn, a long way beyond Saturn (more than doubling the distance of your journey from the Earth), and you will encounter Uranus. Go another thousand million miles and you will encounter Neptune, the last of the gas giants. Keep going and what do you get? You get Pluto.
Unlike the other gas giants, unlike the failed sun of Jupiter, Uranus has no internal heat source; it is tilted at a right angle-eight degrees more than a right angle, in fact, so its rotation is retrograde; it has black rings, and fifteen known satellites.
Neptune boasts its Great Dark Spot, its 700-mph winds, and, among its eight satellites, glamourous Triton: moon-sized, with geysers of nitrogen, and pink snow. Neptune has rings. One of its minor satellites, Galatea, is a ring-stabilizer-or a "ring-shepherd," as they are called.
Now Pluto. One must never mock the afflicted, of course, but Pluto really is an awful little piece of shit. Jupiter didn't make it as a star; Pluto didn't even make it as a planet. Tenuous atmosphere, a crust of ice (300 miles deep), and then rock. Pluto's mass is about a fifth of the mass of our moon, and its moon, Charon (another toilet), is half as small again.
There are no rings, so Charon is no shepherd: he is a ferryman, ferrying the
dead to Pluto's underworld. The orbit of Charon matches the rotation of Pluto, so this terrible little pair, this terrible little pair of two-bobplanetesimals are "locked." Depending on which hemisphere of Pluto you were on, Charon would either be permanently immobile or permanently invisible. Wherever you were on Pluto, you could stare at the sun. It would sometimes seem cruciform, like the brandished sword of god. But it wouldn't warm you and it wouldn't give you life.
The ancients also used to think of the stars as fixed: eternal and immutable. Human beings found such a notion hard to abandon, and it persisted well beyond Copernicus and Galileo. This is why they had so much difficulty with novas (what we would now think of as supernovas). This is why they had so much difficulty with "new stars."
Take this thing about Gwyn and carpentry. If you really want a terrible time (thought Richard, who was having a terrible time-that night, in his study), take this thing about Gwyn and carpentry.
In an interview Gwyn said, or was quoted as saying, that he always likened the craft of fiction to the craft of carpentry.
"You are chipping away, planing, sanding, until everything is smooth and everything fits. Above all, the construction has to work. The carpenter knows that what he makes has to be functional. It has to be honest." Q: "Do you actually do any carpentry or work with your hands?" "Yes. I have a kind of workshop area where I potter about. I find it very therapeutic."
The next time Richard saw him (this was some months ago), Richard said, "What's all this bullshit about you and carpentry? Do you do any carpentry?"
"No," said Gwyn.
"It's a worthless metaphor for writing anyway. They have nothing in common."