Martin Amis - Lionel Asbo

‘… Why, thank you very much indeed, sir.’

He swung himself down the steps and out into the alley, his tie half off, his jacket, shirt, and waistcoat colourfully impasted with butter and blood. He felt very hungry.

‘The bingo get a bit rough, Lionel?’ said the man from the Sun .

‘Just stand there a minute, Lionel,’ said the man from the Lark as he raised his camera. ‘Ooh, this is priceless, this is.’

‘The old ladies take their revenge on you, Lionel?’ said the man from the Daily Telegraph .

Lionel glanced right. At the far end of the alley there was a policeman, standing stock still, and staring his way.

‘Copper watching. That settles the matter,’ said Lionel Asbo succinctly.

He moved to his left.

‘Come on then,’ he said wearily. ‘Gaa, Christ, let’s have it. Go on — get you laughing done with. Yeah, I will. I will. I’ll do five years for the fucking three of yer.’

NOTHING REALLY OUT of the ordinary happened between 2009 and 2012.

‘He’ll get ten, they reckon, and do five. And serve him bloody well right.’

‘Come on, Dawn. Think. He won’t be out till 2014!’

It was Sunday. They were having what they called breakfast on bed (it was a single bed), and rereading Saturday’s Mirror (their new tabloid of choice).

‘He fancied prison,’ said Des dazedly. ‘He did. He fancied prison.’

‘Three counts of GBH. Plus Assaulting a Police Officer.’

On their laps (and on facing pages) were the iconic Before and After shots from the dead-ended alley off Brompton Road. Before: Lionel posing on the steps of the restaurant, Pickwickian, vaudevillian, aglow with combustible bonhomie. The After photograph (not taken immediately after, because the journalists’ cameras had all been smashed): this was more interestingly composed. The malefactor, like a city scarecrow, his lolling head, his arms up around the shoulders of the two policemen, with all the stuffing coming out of him (the ripped and twisted suit, the frothy white shirt); and then, to the right, just behind and beyond, the wheeled ambulance trolley with its own fixed light and the lumpy body lying on it (this was the man from the Daily Telegraph ).

‘Tsuh-tsuh,’ said Dawn. ‘Tsuh-tsuh.’ She was addressing the cat. ‘Here, Goldie. Here, love … The restaurant bloke says he had a fight to the death with his lobster.’

‘Mm. The QC’s preparing his defence. Lord Barcleigh.’

‘The fat one … Diminished responsibility . Oh yeah. It was the lobster, your honour.’

‘I can’t understand him, Dawnie. He did it when a copper was watching!’

‘Mm. And not even nutters do that. Here, Goldie. Here, girl.’

In early 2010, incidentally, they traded in their single bed — not for a double bed (because the room itself was the size of a double bed), but for what was called a Bachelor’s Occasional.

Minicabbing, clambering over speed bumps, forever staring into the unlanced boil of the red light (and then the lurid matter of the amber). Diston traffic was obedient to the hierarchy of size: the Smart car feared the Mini, the Mini feared the Golf, the Golf feared the Jeep, the Jeep feared the … Des, driving, impatiently aware of the frail flustered presence of the bicycle on his inner flank, but himself obedient to the great swung mass of the bus.

Here’s a tale of the unexpected , said Lionel in August, 2009, on his first day back in Stallwort (awaiting trial). I had a shit this morning. Hey. Go up and see you gran .

I am, Uncle Li .

I want a report. And oy. While I’m away — don’t you dare go near me stuff .

The first-class train fare to the North West Highlands and back, by sleeper, ran well into four figures. But Des went on the Cloud and got a bargain-berth ‘apex’ split-ticket — for eighteen quid! … You rose before first light (Inverness, then motorcoach via Lairg), and you returned in the next day’s early darkness: the grey hours. Des did his Christian duty, and his Christian penance, about every six weeks, and sometimes Dawn came too.

The home was a townhouse, five floors high and unusually deep, with a great many internal partitions of hardboard (and cardboard). The atmosphere of the place frightened Des right from the start, and every time he went up there it seemed measurably slacker, shabbier, more demoralised. Souness itself (fifteen miles east of Cape Wrath): there were prettier enclaves further back and up on the cliffs, but the township, the port, where Grace dwelt, was a maze of dark flint, populated by taupe genies of sopping mist. It was never not raining. A spittling, hair-frizzing drizzle was your absolute basic — what the locals called smirr ; and it was smirr that kept guard between downpours.

Grace was in a conical attic — the hospital bed, the chair beside it, and a cavernous sink with thick rubber tubing attached to the spouts. Des, dear , she said, clearly enough. But thereafter she spoke in random clauses that made no sense. Some stuck in his mind for a moment, and he thought he’d remember them later, but he never did. So he started writing them down.

Nine owls out where it’s high and cold : that was one

Partial to gains I stake claim : that was another.

No-no disturbs sin, et cetera : that was yet another.

The chief physician, furtive Dr Ardagh in his shaggy marmalade suit, used the phrase early onset degenerative brain disease . He mumbled something Des didn’t quite catch.

Sorry? A few more good years?

Uh, no. A good few more years. Is what I said .

He returned to the conical attic.

Unresisting, even so , moaned Gran as he eventually kissed her goodbye. Fifteen!

Des remembered that one. Was it a reference to the things that took place between them in 2006 — when he was fifteen, and hadn’t resisted? Neither Des nor Grace had said a word about it all since the disappearance of Rory Nightingale.

At his trial at the Old Bailey, Lionel, for the first time in his life, pleaded guilty.

Diminished responsibility was Lord Barcleigh’s theme: he asked the jury to consider the massive senselessness of the offence, committed, after all, in plain view of an officer of the law. Medical science calls it an ictus — a spasm of the brain .

Lionel himself, dressed for the occasion in the pathetic shreds of his shahtoosh dinner jacket (woven from the wool of the chiru, an endangered Tibetan antelope), was archaically humble: I deeply regret all distress caused , he said. I’m just a boy from Diston who got out of his depth … I’ll do me time with no complaints, and I swear I’ll never again be a threat to uh, to society like. I’ve done it the hard way, You Honour, but I’ve come to see the error of me ways .

One character witness turned out to be disproportionately influential: Fiona King, the co-manager of the South Central Hotel. He was a model guest. If all our clients comported themselves like Mr Asbo, I can assure you that my life would be very much simpler. Ask anybody. Lionel Asbo behaved like a true English gentleman .

Even more tellingly, Police Constable George Hands ( Yeah , Lionel would later admit, he was dearer than Lord Barcleigh ) informed the court (through splintered teeth) that Lionel’s conduct, in the Knightsbridge alleyway, had in fact been more consistent with the lesser charge of Resisting Arrest.

He got six years — a light sentence, many felt (and wrote). Five months were already served, and Lord Barcleigh, making due allowance for Lionel’s good behaviour, predicted that he would be a free man by the spring or early summer of 2012.