Martin Amis - Lionel Asbo

On page four there was a photograph of the mother, Venus, and a photograph of the boy, Dashiel. A parent never expects their child to die before them , said Venus in her statement at the Old Bailey, especially when they are taken away so suddenly, the victim of the violent brutality of others . The mother, in the photograph, still young, elegantly earringed, lawyerly in a woollen coat with what looked like a thick velvet ruff. And the boy, Dashiel, his skin the colour of rosewood …

‘Now they going down for fifteen years. Six of them. That’s what? Ninety years for one little kid!’

All he would do was look at you with those big eyes and your heart just melted. Everyone loved his eyes . The boy, against a green setting, with his hair in tight rows, his spearmint teeth, his eyes, flirtatiously sunlit.

‘That goes against all reason. Violates all reason.’

Dashiel was a ‘free spirit’ who enjoyed the sun, the sea and Mother Nature on summer holidays in Jamaica with his grandmother …

‘All right. Say uh, Dashiel was being a bit annoying. Needs to be taught a lesson. Fair enough. But you don’t all go and do it. You turn to you mates and say, Any volunteers? You say, Whose turn is it? But oh no. All six of them get life! That’s senseless , that is.’

‘Did you kill him Uncle Li?’

‘Come again?’

‘Did you kill him?’

‘Who? Rory ? Now Desmond,’ he said soberly. ‘Why would I do that? I mean he’s nothing to me is he.’

‘Yeah. Nothing.’

‘All he is is some little slag who goes to you school. What am I, a ganger? Out boying? Like a wild animal? … No, Des. I just fixed him up with a uh — with a circle of new friends. I didn’t kill him. I sold him.’

And Des had a vision of another grainy gallery, in the Gazette or the Sun or the Daily Telegraph , with six faces on it, all white this time, but not otherwise similar (a beard, a shining pate, a pair of rimless spectacles) — no, with nothing else in common except pallor, unreadable eyes, and a fixity of sullen purpose in the thinness of the lips. Lionel said,

‘Reset. I didn’t kill him. I sold him. Ooh. Où — I gave him sexy.’

Left alone, Des gazed out at the pissed dogs. They reeled in circles, worrying one another’s tails, and listing sideways as if on sloping ground. Joe turned, and they both reared up in a ragged clinch, and then, with their claws scraping for purchase, collapsed in an entanglement of haunch and crotch and snout. Finding his feet, Jeff began to make moan, a song or dirge addressed to the evening gloom.

Now Lionel filled the doorway in shell top and baseball cap. ‘Off out,’ he said. ‘And be reasonable, Des. What you expect? He gave my mum one. And if you fuck my mum , there’s going to be consequences. Obviously. Here. Catch.’

As he moved off Lionel lobbed something in the air. Des caught it: tiny, gluey, heavy. He straightened his fingers — and the trinket seemed to leap from his palm. Warily he crouched to pick it up. A metal loop smeared with dried blood and an additional gout of pink tissue. Rory’s lip ring.

For those who harmed him, one day they will understand the meaning of love and the pain that you feel when you lose a loved one .

A knot is in our hearts that will not undo. A light has been dimmed and put out of our lives .

We never had a chance to say goodbye to Dashiel. We know he is resting, he is safe and he is at peace. I heard once that grief is the price we pay for love .

Desmond’s head wagged back … When Cilla fell that time — it was just a little slip, just a little slip on the supermarket floor. Down she went on her elbows and shoulder blades, and her head wagged back. But she was laughing when she got to her feet. And then the next day she wouldn’t wake up. He smoothed her, he pinched her, he shook her. He kissed her eyes. She was breathing, but she wouldn’t wake up.

… Minutes later, as he stood wiping his cheeks and chin and throat with a kitchen towel, he looked out through the glass of the sliding door. The dogs: their sloppy faces, their tongues hanging from the corners of their jaws like something half-eaten, their blind eyes and staring nostrils, their forelimbs planted stupidly far apart. They thickly barked. And they weren’t barking out — they were barking in.

Fuckoff , said Joe.

Fuckoff , said Jeff.

* * *

NOTHING REALLY OUT of the ordinary happened between 2006 and 2009.

Lionel Asbo served five prison terms, two months for Receiving Stolen Property, two months for Extortion With Menaces, two months for Receiving Stolen Property, two months for Extortion With Menaces, and two months for Receiving Stolen Property. There was also, in the spring of 2009, his arrest and incarceration on the rare charge of Grievous Affray (plus Criminal Damage) — but that’s another story.

When Des turned seventeen (by that time he had found a way of coexisting with his conscience), Lionel gave him a course of driving lessons in the Ford Transit. Quietly discounting Lionel’s general advice (overtake whenever you can, use the horn as often as possible, never stop at zebra crossings, amber always means go), Des saved up for the Test, memorised the Highway Code, and conducted himself, on the day, with elderly sanctimony — and passed first time! … It was the way they’d always seemed to manage it. The anti-dad, the counterfather. Lionel spoke; Des listened, and did otherwise.

During these years Grace Pepperdine’s life became a monothematic saga of anxiety, weight loss, heart palpitations, insomnia, depression, chronic fatigue, and osteoporosis. In addition, she kept mislaying things. Her phone would find its way into her bathroom cabinet; her doorkeys would hide behind the frozen peas in her fridge. Someone went round there every day — almost invariably Des, but often Paul, and frequently John, George, and Stuart (though seldom Ringo, and never Lionel).

Joe was shot dead by an Armed Response marksman in the summer of 2008. Out for a stroll with Cynthia (Lionel was away), Joe attacked a police horse, with a policewoman on it, in Carker Square. He was under its clattering hooves for the entire length of Diston High Street and for seven and a half miles up on the London Orbital, with the heavy chain slithering and scintillating in his wake. With Joe gone, Jeff inconsolably pined and sickened. And when he was next out of prison Lionel decided to make a fresh start. He sold Jeff for a token sum to one of Marlon’s brothers (Troy), and purchased two pedigree pitbull pups — Joel and Jon.

There were no further developments in the Rory Nightingale case (which, all the same, was not yet officially closed) … Des started calling on Rory’s parents, Joy and Ernest; he drank a mug of tea with them every couple of weeks, and ran errands; they said they found comfort, and not anguish, in his youth, his purple blazer, the space he filled. During his visits he thought many things, most often this: what an hourly mockery and misery it could be — the name Joy.

Meanwhile, Des had set about astonishing Squeers Free. In 2006 he sat his GCSEs — and got eleven A’s! He was transferred, on the Gifted Programme, to Blifil Hall, where, in 2007, he sat his A-levels — and picked up four distinctions! He was sixteen. Next, he was offered a provisional place (he would have to survive the interview) at Queen Anne’s College! Queen Anne’s College — of the University of London … It took him a long time to break the news to Lionel. Lionel was bitterly opposed to higher education.

Des continued, off and on, to see a fair bit of Alektra, then a fair bit of Jade, then a fair bit of Chanel (who was Irish). Try being gentle, Chanel , he said to her late one night. All soft and romantic. Go on. You’re adventurous. Try being gentle. See what you think . A week later she said, I like it with you, Des. All romantic. All soft and dreamy. I don’t know why, but it’s just a better ride .