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 hospitaclass="underline" 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 biographies 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,