Martin Amis - Lionel Asbo

And he didn’t seem to see Cilla. He stood there while being told about her latest stunts and accomplishments. And he always brought her something (his presents were notable for their bulk — a customised tricycle, a lifesize teddy bear). But he didn’t seem to see Cilla. And she didn’t seem to see him.

On the other hand, Lionel spontaneously desisted from smoking his cigars and Marlboro Hundreds in the passage, the kitchen, and the bathroom. He repaired to the balcony for his smokes, leaning on the rail and gazing out over Diston. Lionel had a new quality: he could be ignored. His presence no longer filled the room, the flat, the floor, the tower … And his banker’s orders, now, covered all the rent.

Still, there were times that stayed in Desmond’s mind. Like that Saturday morning, early on, when Lionel was accompanied by one of his dogs (Jak). He didn’t say hello. Man and animal went within, and the bedroom door remained quarter open for an utterly silent hour. Then the Pepperdines glimpsed the slab of his suit in the passage and the dog giving them a haunted glance over its shoulder.

‘She’s not normal, is she,’ he said. ‘She never cries. And she sleeps through the night. They’re not meant to do that.’

Cilla proudly slept through the night in what they called her perch : the hip-high trestle table with raised sides, like a clothes drawer on legs. In this flanked hollow her basket lay.

‘Well of course she’s not normal. She’s nearly two months behind. She’s a young baby. But you’re right.’

‘She’s not normal. Have you ever heard her cry?’

Cilla’s first smile was scheduled for thirteen weeks — or so, at least, the baby books had warned. But Dawn imposed a ban on baby books (which her husband didn’t fully observe). They waited.

And what was this? In the fourth week she straightened her neck, more or less, and began to take a shrewd interest in baby books of her own (principally Mr Man ); in the fifth, she made cooing sounds and, coached by Dawn, became near-fluent in motherese; in the sixth, she could brandish a rattle; and in the seventh …

That was a smile , they were always saying. No it wasn’t. That was wind. A windy smile … That was a smile. No it wasn’t. That was a yawn. A yawny smile .

And then, in the seventh week, she smiled — irrefutably. You suddenly knew what an extraordinary thing a smile was, how kaleidoscopically it transformed the eyes.

‘She wasn’t prem,’ Dawn decided. ‘She was ready. Her body was little but her mind was ready. She was bored inside. That’s all.’

And once she started smiling — she couldn’t stop.

‘It’s not normal,’ he said.

‘She’s just pleased to be here.’

‘But she smiles at everyone .’

This was true. On the street, in the park — Diston seemed to be incapable of coming up with anyone that she didn’t immediately and passionately admire.

‘Des, she’s not normal.’

‘No.’

‘She’s fabulous.’

‘She is,’ he said. ‘She’s magic … But it’s not normal for a baby to smile like that. All the time.’

‘There. Listen. She’s crying! You say she never cries — and she’s crying. Now are you happy?’

‘… She’s not crying. She’s singing!’

But it is common, it is everyday, it is normal. Hear the vans? ‘Hush, Little Baby’, ‘Star Light, Star Bright’, ‘Golden Slumbers Kiss Your Eyes’, ‘Hark, Hark, the Dogs Do Bark’, ‘What Are Little Girls Made Of?’ … If it’s true what they say, if it’s true that happiness writes white, then decency insists that we withdraw, passing over to the three of them a quire — no, a ream — of blank pages.

NOTHING REALLY OUT of the ordinary happened between October 2012 and July 2013.

Marlon’s brother Charlton was arrested after an altercation with his mother, Mercy Welkway (in the course of which she broke her hip). That same week Ringo was given another three months for Benefits Fraud. Horace Sheringham, these days, was in and out of various clinics and hospitals (and in and out of various pubs and bars and off-licences and supermarkets). Come the New Year, fate would install him at Diston General (where, ipso facto, he only had a seventy-eight per cent chance of getting out alive). According to Prunella, Horace had no intention whatsoever of reconsidering his stand on Dawn.

Lionel Asbo, during this period, attracted the attention of the press on several counts — an intrusion at ‘Wormwood Scrubs’, for example, which gave rise to lively public debate. But it was the dullest and feeblest of these stories (the idlest, the tritest) that proved to be by far the most transformative …

In early autumn Sebastian Drinker announced that Lionel was probably going to take a financial interest in West Ham United Football Club. The season was by then in its seventh week, and the Hammers had yet to win a point or even score a goal. From the directors’ box at Upton Park (unaccompanied by ‘Threnody’, who was still bedridden with grief) Lionel witnessed the monotonous calamities in east London; but he also witnessed the monotonous calamities in stadiums as far flung as Stoke, Bolton, Portsmouth, Sunderland … And the following morning you’d see, on the back page of your Sunday tabloid, a foggy photo of the dripping car park at, say, Wigan Athletic, with Lionel sorrowfully finishing his meat pie and his mug of Bovril before scaling the charcoal Venganza (or bending into his new Ferrari). By October, the credits of Match of the Day were closing with a clip of Lionel as he shuffled from the ground, in slow motion, to the strains of the lugubrious West Ham anthem, ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’: I’m forever blowing bubbles, Pretty bubbles in the air, They fly so high, nearly reach the sky, Then like my dreams they fade and die … And so Lionel became a kind of national symbol of intransigence, of peculiarly English intransigence in the face of relentlessly blighted hopes.

Which was the more unexpected, because Lionel always insisted that he didn’t give a fuck about football. Basically , he often used to say, only cunts give a fuck about football . Maybe, Des thought, maybe Lionel supported West Ham just to get out of the house — or maybe he took a Lionel pleasure in drinking in the pain of thousands upon thousands … Anyway, the running story on Lionel Asbo and West Ham United was soon at least partly overshadowed by weightier concerns — not least the attempted burglary in Short Crendon, which became known, in the spring of 2013, as the Case of the Chav Chauffeur.

Cilla’s eyes turned from blue to brown. This they had been told to expect. But then she developed another abnormality … Her parents stared. Des said,

‘It’s like the way the royal family wave. During parades.’

‘Yeah. As if they’re unscrewing a lightbulb.’

‘But she’s doing it fast . With one in each hand!’

This was Cilla’s latest initiative: she’d raise her wrists to head height and wiggle them in swift rotations. She couldn’t stop doing that either — while of course still smiling. Dawn said,

‘Like that black-face singer. Al Jolson! … Oh, Des, what have we done to deserve this?’

‘You know, we’re duty-bound to have another. I mean not now, but … We’re duty-bound.’

‘We are. It might be another Cilla.’

She spent most weekdays in the vast crèche at St Swithin’s, where she hobnobbed with the innumerable babies of the schoolmarms and the schoolgirls.

And her eyes turned imperceptibly from blue to brown.

During the winter quarter Grace Pepperdine received three sets of visitors at Cape Wrath … Lionel and ‘Threnody’ went up there first, in late November, as was duly recorded in the Sun , the Star , the Mail , and the Daily Telegraph . Lionel’s physiognomy, it turned out, had a talent for the sombre. It was basically his West Ham face (post-match, soaked car park, nil — six), but in a more elevated style: the photographs showed someone taking his grief like a man while maintaining a kind of yokel hopefulness, with broadened jaw and crinkled orbits. ‘Threnody’, for her part, was unveiled but still in the strictest black. Out on the cliffs together, with the breakers exploding steeple-high, they were an arresting study, ‘Threnody’, a woman who knew how to suffer (and endure, and avenge), under the burly arm of a more optimistic presence, one that gazed out through the mist and the spume and trustfully awaited the white sails of the new ships.