Struck but broadly satisfied, Marius turned on to his side.
Time passed.
"He cried," said Marco, and nodded suddenly in the dark.
Marius was asleep. The words stayed in the air. Marco listened to them.
That morning with Anstice—oh, man—that morning when he woke up in Anstice's arms, or at her side, or in her bed, which was a small bed, he lay on his back and stared at the world of adultery. The ceiling was a
good enough figure for it, the way the stains massed and groped around
its edges (the pale orange of trapped water, of rot), moving stealthily in on the center, where the cropped lightcord hung. Plasterwork saturated in solitude enclosed him, on every side. He felt fear, and grief; he longed Marco seemed to know how you did it. Only as he left the room did he turn his head to look at his mother, his brother. His bare legs seemed to move rather faster than usual, too, not with purpose but as if he was being steadily pushed, or urged on, from behind.
I was once lying on a low bed in a room to which a child had been summoned—in which a small boy would be denounced and arraigned. So, I was on the same level as he was, down there, three feet from the ground. I have denounced children myself and seen the head of hair, both thick and fine, inclined in contrition. But when you're on their level you see that really they're staring sadly straight ahead, lifting their eyes only in dutiful reflex to confront the cathartic fire of the parent's wrath. The accusation is stated, the confession secured, the sentence imposed. Looking straight ahead, the child's teeth—milk teeth, perhaps, or hig-gledypiggledy, newfangled, as the big supplants the small—are bared in an undesigning sneer of misery. Children have usually done something. What had Marco done?
"Two days ago," Richard began, "the day before yesterday you said— you said something very hurtful to me. Marco?"
Marco looked up.
"And I want to know what you meant by it."
Richard was standing behind his desk. He raised his chin, and Marco could see the blotches and stipples of his throat, the misadventures with the razor, the mobile growth of the Adam's apple, the slanting sheen of his damaged eye.
"It was the most hurtful thing you've ever said to me. Ever."
Marco's ears now heard the quiet roar of shame and turpitude. He looked up, once, and then went on staring sadly straight ahead. The room was crepuscular anyway, but darker for the child, whose world was folding slowly inwards.
"You said," said Richard, inhaling, "that I was smelly."
Marco looked up, in hope. "I didn't," he said. For Daddy, in his view, •wasn't smelly. Tobacco, seldom-laundered clothes, a certain mysterious difficulty of the body: but not smelly. "I didn't, Daddy."
"Oh but you did, Marco. Oh, you did. You said I smelled"—and here he raised his chin again, and the larynx squirmed—"of poo."
"I didn't."
" 'I dunnop who,' " Richard quoted. " 'Ooh you smelly thing.' "
". .. It
Martin Amis, The Information
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