Martin Amis - Lionel Asbo

‘… All right. All right, I’ll have it taken care of. Well. I can’t be angry today, Des. No I can’t be angry today.’

‘And why’s that?’

‘It’s not often, Des, it’s not often you get you chance to right a wrong. To strike a blow for justice. And to do it nice , Des. With a bit of style.’

‘… Uncle Li, is that dogs I can hear?’

‘In the cellar. Jak and Jek. They good boys, but they pining for me now.’ From deep in its alcove a grandfather clock struck four. ‘Okay. Off with yer. Back to you crime desk. On you cheap return.’

‘Got some news for you. From the crime desk,’ he said boldly as they headed off towards the vestibule. ‘About Rory Nightingale.’

‘Oh yeah?’ said Lionel, his breeziness in no way compromised by this turn. ‘What about him?’

‘They found a body in an allotment in Southend. Uncovered by the rains. It wasn’t Rory. It was another kid. But he had Rory’s school ID on him. And his gold toothpick. They did the DNA. Guess what else was in there. Wigs.’

‘Wigs … You know, Des, I haven’t forgotten. Rory — he said something.’ And here Lionel produced his rictal false smile. ‘ Des did it and all , he said. What he mean by that?’

But Desmond was more or less ready for this. Careful to keep a faint smile on his lips, he said, ‘Probably just meant I set him up. Don’t you remember? You had me finger him. Had me fink him. Remember?’

There was a moment of stillness. Then Lionel violently applied himself to all the locks and bolts, all the chains and ratchets that shackled the front doors.

‘Rory Nightingale got off light. He gave my mum one. Take care, boy.’

Des went forth.

‘Uh, hang on.’ Lionel was looking at his watch. ‘Quick. Show you me cars.’

IN DISTON — IN Diston, everything hated everything else, and everything else, in return, hated everything back. Everything soft hated everything hard, and vice versa, cold fought heat, heat fought cold, everything honked and yelled and swore at everything, and all was weightless, and all hated weight.

In Short Crendon, on the other hand, everything contemplated everything else with unqualified satisfaction. As if the whole village was leaning back, hands on hips, and lightly rocking on its heels. Or so it seemed to Des Pepperdine as he made his way to the train station, feeling exotic and conspicuous among the whites and greys, the farm voices, the bicycles and hatchbacks — tea shop, greengrocer, family butcher. Two illustrated road signs caught his eye. One showed a pair of stick figures edging along, with infinite difficulty, all jagged and aquiver, as if in mid-electrocution (ELDERLY PEDESTRIANS). The other was an uncaptioned mugshot of a cow.

The idiocy of rural life . Who said that? Lenin? And is it idiocy, he asked himself (in his new editorial voice), or is it just innocence? What he sensed, in any case, was a bewildering deficit of urgency, of haste and purpose. And, somehow, a deficit of intelligence. For it was his obstinate belief that Town contained hidden force of mind — nearly all of it trapped or cross-purposed. And how will it go, he often wondered, when all the brain-dead awaken? When all the Lionels decide to be intelligent? … Meanwhile, here was Short Crendon and its pottering and pootering. I suppose I’m just a creature of the world city, he thought, and walked on.

Up ahead a battered blue Mini rounded the corner, shuddered and veered, and rolled to a halt with brown smoke funnelling from its hood. Traffic — and there was at least no shortage of traffic — started to accumulate in the blocked lane, and a horn or two tentatively sounded. As he passed by, Des took a look at the young couple in the front seats: they were yelling inaudibly at each other while trying to nudge the car forward with spasmodic jerks of their loins. And it was Marlon and Gina Welkway! Gina all in white, with those slender ribbons in her hair, as she was on the day of her wedding. And the little Mini (extracted, perhaps, from the forecourts of the late Jayden Drago) did in fact jolt gamely forward, and the traffic duly stirred and oozed free and eventually caught up with itself.

As he approached, and as he took in the childish scale of the station (he was used to the termini that you shared with millions upon millions), Des was struck by an unpleasant thought. A tedious thought: he had left without his bathers (now he remembered the bench by the plunge pool and the parallelogram of sunlight where he had laid them out to dry). Habits of thrift and good order made him at once turn on his heel. He now faced the minor idiocy of retracing his steps, steps that would then need to be re-retraced, for the five thirty-five.

On the way he diverted himself by going over his uncle’s deeply conflicted response to the news about the Daily Mirror . Writing about law and order for the Daily Mirror was in a way much worse than writing about law and order for the Diston Gazette , because of the greater reach ( You be doing you narking on a national scale! ); as against that, though, Lionel argued, the Mirror was a traditional friend of the working class, and was therefore comparatively soft on crime.

Are you telling me the Mirror’ s pro- crime, Uncle Li?

Don’t talk stupid. They not pro-crime as such. But they not going to make a to-do about a little bit of theft. It serves equality, Des. The uh, the redistribution of wealth .

And how pro-theft are you? With your guards and your razor wire?

Ah, but that’s on me own initiative , he said. They were in the echoing entrance hall, and Lionel was standing in one of the pools of three-petalled sunlight. That’s different. See, I don’t use the law, Des. And I get threats all the time! They say , Guiss ten million quid or we’ll fucking kill yer. I say , Come and get it. You welcome to try. And if some bleeding thrusters fancy they chances, then we’ll take it from there. See, Des, this is it. You don’t let money change yer. You don’t let money change you deepest convictions. And I never use the law. This is it. This is it .

No, it couldn’t have been a coincidence. The old Mini, which now had a flat back tyre, was cravenly slumped alongside the imperial contours of the ‘Aurora’ … Des was silently admitted by Carmody (who soon withdrew). He advanced to the library and was halfway across the darkened room before he noticed Marlon, on a low settee, with a glass in one hand and a decanter of brown liquor in the other.

‘Marlon.’

‘Ah. Little Des,’ said Marlon thickly.

And the air itself was thick. Thick and weak, as if the room was about to faint. Des recognised this atmosphere — its wrongness, its deafened, bad-dream feel.

‘I, I left something next door. I’ll just pop through and …’

‘No. Don’t do that, mate. Don’t do that.’

Marlon dragged a hand across his forehead, which was frosted in sweat, and grey-pale against the damp black blade of his widow’s peak. With a heavy tongue he said,

‘You, you’re like a canary. A little yellow canary. You fucked me in court.’

‘Well so did Yul and Troy.’

‘Yeah, and look what happened to them.’

With his adapted vision Des now saw that there were items of white clothing strewn across the black carpet, white ribbons, a brassiere, a pair of knickers, a slip, a stained trousseau …

‘Little yellow canary.’

Marlon was making an attempt to suffuse his smile with menace. But then came Lionel’s reverberating bawl from beyond ( Get you fat prat in that sauna! ), followed by the blast of a whistle and Gina’s scandalised screech.