Martin Amis - Lionel Asbo

Des switched subjects: from Modern Languages to Sociology, with a special emphasis on crime and punishment. Lionel, when told of this, simply shrugged and turned away. As usual he had his cellphone on loudspeaker — a conference call with his investment team. This was in the prison outside Exeter: its name was Silent Green.

You can’t go far wrong in prison , Lionel might say, between calls … And Des came to a tentative conclusion: the career criminal didn’t really mind being in prison. Being in prison didn’t ceaselessly strike him as an unendurable outrage on his dignity. Des resolved to ask Lionel why this was — but not today.

Prison , said Lionel. Good place to get you head sorted out. You know where you are in prison .

Well yeah, thought Des. You’re in prison.

Go on then. Off you hop , said Lionel as he leaned into another call.

And Des would eat a cheese roll at the station, and head back to London on his day return.

The next time he went down there Lionel was busy buying half a dozen forests’ worth of Uruguayan timber.

The next time he went down there Lionel was busy attacking the yen.

A word, therefore, about Lionel’s finances.

In his three weeks of freedom Lionel Asbo spent nine million pounds, nearly all of it on craps, blackjack, and roulette (there was also the unused Bentley ‘Aurora’, and a seven-figure clothes bill). But his investments prospered almost uncontrollably right from the start. He instructed his young squad of free-market idealists to be as aggressive as possible. Don’t fuck about on five per cent , he told them. Go for it .

Right , said Lionel, as he sauntered round the exercise yard. Take sixty out of the one - thirty and have a punt .

Depressed bank stock? he said, while watching TV in the rec room. Yeah, give it a crack. Fifty. No. Sixty .

Vend , he said, activating the flush toilet in the privacy of his cell. Now take ninety and have another punt. I fancy oil. And get me eight per cent on the principal .

Good effort, boys and girls , he said as he ate chocolates in the commissary (Quality Street and Black Magic). Me gains’ll be reflected in you bonuses .

On August 2, 2011, Des and Dawn were informed that they’d both got Two Ones!

‘Well, after all that graft, we’d’ve looked like bloody fools if we’d got Thirds.’

‘Yeah, or even Desmonds ,’ said Desmond (a Desmond was a Two Two — after Desmond Tutu). ‘Complete bloody fools.’

‘And you’d’ve got a First if you’d had the three years. Easy.’

Dawn took a teaching job at an enormous girls’ school in Pentonville called St Swithin’s.

Des wrote to every newspaper in London, enclosing a sample of his work (it was an eyewitness description of two simultaneous but unrelated inicidents — a non-fatal stabbing and an acid-attack blinding — in a local takeout). And he was summoned to two interviews, one at the Diston Gazette — and one at the Daily Mirror !

Grace Pepperdine had a minor stroke on Guy Fawkes Night of that year. Her mouth seemed to be torqued round on its axis — and yet she was now lucid. That is to say, she could explore little air pockets of her very distant past. Her childhood — before the days of Cilla, and John and Paul and George …

‘She can’t stay in this place, Des,’ said Dawn (who hadn’t been up there for over a year). They were taking a breather in the street. ‘Look at it. Smell it.’

He looked at it. The home had let itself go — it was like a tea trolley rattling down a hillside. And he smelled it. In 2009 it smelled of deodorant and cabbage; by 2011 it smelled of urine and mice.

As dusk was falling, in the early afternoon, Grace took Des’s hand and met his eye and whispered: I smell something … I scent tangled crime. Six, six, six .

Lionel was whiling away the last months of his sentence at Wormwood Scrubs — the desolate rain-steeped stronghold that presided over a huge stretch of common land (brush and stunted forest growth) in Hammersmith, west London. It was his first prison and, as he sometimes said, probably his favourite.

When Des next went to see him (in January, 2012), he was led not to the commissary but to an administrative office evidently dedicated to Lionel’s use (there were warm beers, damp sandwiches, and silent pretzels). Pale Cynthia sat at his side. Dressed in the usual navy overalls, Lionel was reviewing country properties — properties thought worthy of a whole brochure each.

An extensive paddock? he was saying (with the full plosive on the terminal k ). Why would I want a fucking paddock?

… Uncle Li. Gran’s home. She can’t —

Jesus .

It’s you I’m thinking of. Partly. What if the —

Oy! Des, give you face a rest, all right? You depressing me … Here, Cynth, look at this one. A bit over the top? Des — what’s a ha-ha?

In January Dawn Sheringham fell pregnant! … Fell pregnant : how awful and beautiful that phrase sounded: fell pregnant . Beautiful, but full of awe. Over and above everything else, though, it meant that Des would now have to tell Dawn about Grace.

He sat her down in the kitchen, and began. Ten minutes later he was saying,

‘I can’t excuse it, I can’t even explain it.’ He sniffed and wiped his cheeks. ‘… Will you still have me, Dawnie?’

Slowly her eyes narrowed and her mouth broadened, and she said, ‘But nothing actually happened. All right, you got dependent on the cuddles. You might’ve … But nothing actually happened .’

He sank back in his chair. It was, at least, immediately clear that this avenue would remain forever closed. ‘Don’t be silly,’ he said. ‘Course not. Nothing happened . Just got dependent on the cuddles. That’s all.’ There was a silence, a silence that only he had the power to break. ‘Knock knock,’ he heard himself say.

‘Who’s there?’

‘Little old lady.’

‘Little old lady who?’

‘Didn’t know you could yodel!’

And somehow that got them to the other side.

Later he went out and walked as far as the canal … Was this a version of what they called cognitive dissonance ? Because Dawn had only ever known Grace as a thoroughgoing little old lady (a viejita , as the Spanish so economically put it). And today, almost six years on, he himself found it close to inconceivable that he had ever kissed those eyes, those lips. That mouth, which now looked as though there was a toy boomerang wedged into it … Des turned on his heel and started back. And imagine! He had planned to tell Dawn about Rory Nightingale too, and about what Lionel did to him. No. His head shuddered in negation as he walked. All that — the whole bad dream. All that was his to hold.

With Vincent Tigg as best man, and with Prunella Sheringham in proud attendance, Des and Dawn were married on Valentine’s Day in Carker Square Registry Office. And then Uncle John, Uncle George, and Uncle Stuart whisked them off for a surprise slap-up Chinese — hosted and paid for by Uncle Paul!

The baby, at this stage, was a fifth the size of a full stop.

‘Now the blastocyst’, said Des the next morning (he was reading a huge baby book in the Bachelor’s Occasional), ‘has completed its journey from Fallopian tube to uterus.’

‘Don’t call it that! … I don’t feel pregnant. And anyway. Who wants a blastocyst?’

That same day he was hired as a trainee reporter on the Diston Gazette !

De-leverage , said Lionel into his phone, and snapped it shut. No, tell them this , he went on coldly. Tell them I’ll be on the same money as me namesake, Lionel Messi. European Footballer of the Year. Tell them that .