Martin Amis - Lionel Asbo

Des swallowed and said, ‘What about with Cynthia? D’you hurt Cynthia?’

‘Cynthia? How could you hurt Cynthia? I mean look at the state of her. Hurt what?’ Lionel poured, Lionel drank. Suddenly but glazedly he said, ‘With them DILFs, Des. She goes, Come on then. Let’s have it you … unbelievable … fucking yoik. Let’s have it . And it’s got a lovely sneer on its face. And you think, Okay. Let’s deal with that lovely sneer. And believe me. When you giving her one, she ain’t sneering no more.’

Des swallowed again and said, ‘It’s important, is it? Dealing with the sneer?’

‘Ooh yeah ,’ said Lionel. ‘ Ooh yeah.’

As Lionel gazed at the rolling booze in his glass, Des realised that there’d been no mention whatever, in the erotic sphere, of ‘Threnody’ — Lionel’s fiancée.

‘Des. Be honest. Tell me straight. Have you ever thought that there was anything … not quite kosher in uh, my attitude to skirt?’

‘Well we’re all different. I’m a bit puritanical. Dawn says. And too needy. We’re all different.’

‘She made me go … “Threnody” made me go and see a bloke about it. About me sexuality. Cavendish Square. In a flash old flat in Cavendish Square. And you’ll never guess what this geezer goes and tells me. Grace. Grace. He reckons it’s all down to Grace.’

‘How’s he work that one out?’

‘He says, Lionel, when you having intercourse, do you find there’s a rage … waiting for you? As if ready-made? I said, Yeah. Ready-made. You put you finger on it . We talk it over, and he says, Well it’s obvious. You got a fucking slag for a mum, mate . Well, not in them exact words. He says, And the evidence was there before you eyes! From when you was a baby! ’

‘Before your eyes, Uncle Li?’

‘Before you eyes, Uncle Li? Use you head, Desmond Pepperdine. I’m an infant. And there’s all these fucking brothers! This fucking zoo of brothers!’

It wasn’t the first time Des had considered it from Lionel’s perspective — from the perspective of someone in a highchair with a pacifier in his mouth: John like a Norse albino, swarthy and piratical Paul, George with a face as flat and square as a tablemat (and sandblasted with freckles), thick-lidded, mandarinic Ringo — and of course the seedily Silesian Stuart. Des said,

‘Well there was Cilla.’

‘Yeah. Cilla. Me so-called twin … And five brothers — and a mum who’s barely eighteen years of age. It wasn’t right, Des. I mean, after that, after all that — how can a man trust minge?’

Five minutes passed in silence. Then Lionel looked at his watch and said, ‘Doing it with schoolboys …’

Schoolboys : it had the force of an ethnic or tribal anathema. Schoolboys, like Hutus or Uighurs.

‘You okay, Desi? I’m off out.’

So Des readied himself — readied himself for the six-minute dash down Murdstone Road, through Jupes Lanes, across Carker Square, and beyond. But no. Lionel made a call, and Des went back to Avalon Tower by courtesy car.

‘All right, son,’ said Lionel on the forecourt. And they embraced.

Through the tinted windscreen you could see the purity of the lunar satellite, D-shaped in the royal-blue distance. The dark side was subtly visible — as if the Man in the Moon was wearing a watch cap of black felt.

Dawn came in at one.

‘Did he see you?’

‘No,’ she said and switched off the light. ‘He didn’t see me …’

For a while he comforted her, and soon she sighed for the last time, and then she slept. But Des did not sleep. He was still awake when Lionel stomped in around seven (he could hear, over and above the hobnailed-boot effect, the subtle flinch of each and every floorboard). And the two men arose within a few minutes of each other at four o’clock on Sunday afternoon.

Dawn was back at the hospital, so uncle and nephew had a sentimental breakfast: Pop-Tarts (Des ran down).

… What was it that kept him awake?

During his night out with Lionel he was helplessly infused with somatic memories. His body kept remembering. The crown of his head and the tight curls of his hair remembered what it was like, as a boy of five, to feel the weight of that palm whenever his eleven-year-old uncle readied him to cross the road. His whole frame remembered what it was like, later, to walk the hissing streets of Diston with Lionel alongside him, the guarantee of his nearness, like a carapace. And as they parted at the Sleeping Beauty, and they embraced, Des’s body remembered itself at twelve, thirteen, fourteen, during the time of numbness and Cillalessness: once a month or so, Lionel would look at him with unusual candour, and there’d be an unimpatient lift of the chin, and he’d say, She’s gone, Desi, and she ain’t coming back , or, Okay, boy. I know. I know. But you can’t just sit there and pine ; and he’d give him a hug (though not enough — never enough), murmuring, There there, son. There there … So, in the forecourt, as Lionel said, All right, son , and he felt the great arms and the engulfing torso, Des (as he thought about this, lying next to Dawn with his eyes open) found that love flared up in him.

Which was one half of it.

The other half, like the dark side of the half-moon, had to do with fear … Cilla went, Cilla was gone, excised, leaving a monstrous void behind her; and Des looked to Grace, and together they found the wrong kind of love. There it was. And there was nothing he could do about it, then or now. Unresisting, even so. Fifteen! … Over time the fear had become manageable — it was his default condition, roiling him when nothing else was roiling him; it no longer aspired to the paroxysms of 2006 ( Dear Daphne , Gran’s groans, Ooh, they’ll love him inside , the youth in the Squeers blazer). Still, he soberly and of course ignobly reasoned that the fear wouldn’t die until Grace died — or until Lionel died.

It bestrode his sleep. And sometimes, when the nights were huge, he felt the rending need for confession — for capitulation, castigation, crucifixion … Then morning came, and the pieces of life once again coalesced.

Grace? When they get like that , said Lionel (and he’d been saying it for years), they better off dead.

Des had never wished her dead. But he had often wished her dumb.

Over the rooftops of Diston the sky lightened. Getting up for more water, around five, Des found himself becalmed in the passage; the door to Lionel’s bedroom was open, as usual (for the air), and he looked within. The shadow of the window frame on the carpet made him involuntarily think of a guillotine; and — Christ — there was the moon, looking on, white as death in its executioner’s hood … Dawn turned over in her sleep. He quietly fitted himself in beside the bend of her shape.

THE PHONE MESSAGE was ominously curt.

Brace youself for tragedy, Desmond Pepperdine …

He had just got back (with a hot chocolate and a salami hero) to the open-plan fluorescence of the Daily Mirror . It was early afternoon and the rhythm of the office was speeding up, as deadlines neared. He made the call (one among many), and casually asked,

‘It’s not Gran, is it, Uncle Li?’

‘What? Nah. No such luck. Hang on.’

Des could hear scuffling, snarling, clinking — echoic, subterranean.

‘No. It’s me betrothed. I’m uh, sworn to silence. But as I said. Prepare youself for news of a uh, of a tragic complexion. Now, Des. Did I leave a scarf — West Ham colours but cashmere — somewhere in me room?’