Martin Amis - Lionel Asbo

Cilla awoke much refreshed. He washed her, changed her, and then served her puréed vegetables, with many delicate carving gestures round the mouth with the soft plastic spoon … She takes a little bit more milk in her coffee than you do, doesn’t she Des ? Dawn had said again at the end of the first month, when Cilla’s colour seemed to stabilise. He placed his forearm alongside the baby’s, and agreed. Well, you’re the milkmaid, Dawnie , he said. With your curds and whey …

Father and daughter now gorged themselves on Mr Man , plus Mr Messy, Mr Topsy-Turvy, Mr Grumpy, Mr Mean, Mr Wrong , plus Little Miss Giggles, Little Miss Star, Little Miss Lucky, Little Miss Curious, Little Miss Magic , until, almost with disgust, Cilla pushed Little Miss Late aside. Suddenly she laughed and pointed with a bent finger.

‘Dah,’ she said. ‘Doh.’

Through the hanging lace you could clearly see their wedge-like outlines, backlit by the brimming moon. He went and with impatient abruptness yanked back the curtain and shaped himself. The dogs didn’t blink. Tensely static, but forward-impending, they no longer looked like a pair or a couple — they looked like a team. And in their spiked collars almost laughably malign: two hothouse orchids cultured in hell. And (Christ) the face of a pitbull, a trap of jaws with two eyes tacked on to it, and then the skinhead ears. Just below knee height, four black nostrils with pink innards were steaming up the glass.

Des put Cilla in her wheelie, and reapproached the sliding door. He made shooing gestures with his arms. Nothing happened. They weren’t seeing him, he realised; they were seeing past him or through him, they were seeing the baby. He drew the curtain and left the room, and immediately returned with two pillow slips. He located a box of drawing pins and in a couple of minutes he rigged up a second screen over the lower half of the glass panel. While he did this, his daughter made sounds, undemonstratively, but sounds evoking disappointment (he thought) and perhaps even pity. He stepped back: the silhouettes were no longer visible through the layers of white cloth.

‘There,’ said Des soothingly as he reached for the child. ‘There.’

The phone sounded at ten-fifteen.

‘Nah, I’m still up here. Fogged up here. It’s all fogged up up here.’

There now came the foghorn’s authenticating groan or yawn. Des heard feminine laughter and, in the background, the grace notes of the the floppy-fingered pianist (who must have been doing the slow ones) as he finished ‘Yesterday’ and started ‘She’s Leaving Home’. He imagined the heartbeat of the encaged lighthouse.

‘So no flights?’

‘Yeah … That’s okay. Patch it up with me DILF. Silly bitch. Get no armament from her. Nice meal. We haggle am. Lamb. Bolla wino two. Silly bitch. Want a word?’

An educated but foolishly and formidably drunken voice was saying,

‘Hello. My name’s Maud. I’m Lionel’s DILF. Who are you then? One of his boyos?’

Des thought the foghorn was sounding again but it was just Lionel’s yawn or groan, topped up by two heaving inhalations.

‘Guiss it … Here, Des, do I sound a bit pissed?’

‘Yeah. You do a bit. Not like you, Uncle Li.’

‘… Well it isn’t every day you park you mum. This is a wake, Des. Mm. Down she went. With all her sins. Way of all flesh … You still here, woman?’ There was something like a scuffle, then with his voice again slewing (and again becoming equivocal, like Gran with her doubletalk), Lionel said, ‘Shut you mouth, you stewpy cow. Shunts another shiner, see. Cheers after the match and set. Goff with yer. So … ‘ There was a crash of tableware, and you could imagine Lionel rearing up from his seat. A pause — the ambient noise fading. ‘So, Des. They had they dinner then?’

‘Yeah, a while ago.’

‘Yeah, well they’ll calm down in a bit. Nigh-night.’ A silence — just the seething of the sea. ‘Seen the moon? Mind that door now. Seen the moon? Nigh-night.’

It was already late, far too late, and a manifest truth was asserting itself: it was going to be desperately hot. With Lionel’s room sealed off, all they had was the eight-inch gap above Desmond’s bed and the electric fan. He went down the passage, turned the three locks, and wagged the door back and forth for ten minutes. But the thermals of the Tower were dense and heavy, the used breath layered and thickened up over the thirty-two floors.

‘Are you all right, my darling? Who’s that mister? Why, it’s Mr Man!’

He checked the balcony door and raised a pinched hand to the curtain. And it struck him like an aesthetic evil — because the dogs were just as they were, like moulds of metal fixed to the floor. But now they tipped up their heads and moved back beyond the bowls and the tray and seemed to settle. On impulse he freed the latch and slid back the glass panel — just a finger’s breadth. In one scurrying propulsive instant Jak and Jek were there with their snouts in the crack; and when he gave the door a retaliatory shove they dug in deeper, as if ready to have their noses pulped or sheared clean off …

‘Silly doggies,’ he said, stepping back. ‘I think, I think the doggies want to cool down.’

Quickly and carefully he filled a tall glass with cold water. He watched the door give an inch, give an inch and a half. One long stride and the jerked splash gave him the moment he needed. He secured the latch and tested it with all his strength.

‘There. Good night , doggies,’ he said. ‘And now, miss. Now you go down.’

He changed Cilla for the last time. ‘You can sleep just like that.’ She lay in her basket on the trestle table — the plump brown figure in the plump white loincloth. He rinsed her drinking cup. ‘A little agua for you.’ He positioned the fan (it would sweep grandly past her every five seconds) and dimmed the lights. ‘Now you’re going to dreamland.’

It was nearly eleven and she wouldn’t go down, she couldn’t quite go down. She continued to smile, continued to gaze up at him with tender eyes — but all was not right in her baby cosmos, and she couldn’t quite go down.

‘Mummy’s coming back tomorrow. Your lovely mummy’ll be here in the morning.’

A subliminal memory told him that what sent small beings to sleep was the discreet assurance that larger beings were still awake (the complacent murmur of the grown-ups, even that rhombus of carlight as it went across the ceiling and slid down the wall). So, humming, he tidied up: he processed the dinner things, and wiped all the surfaces, and stacked the newspapers in the rubbish bag and dropped it in the tank.

‘I’ll be asleep before you are! If you’re not careful …’

He kept expecting her eyes to tire and dip, but they declared their helpless roundness. When he smoothed her forehead he found that his fingertips were moist with sweat. He applied a dampened cloth to her face, and slipped the thermometer into the crease of her armpit: ninety-nine point two. As midnight neared, and as he felt his own bearings start to loosen, he capitulated. The infant’s opiate — the syrupy suspension of the purple paracetamol. She took the spoonful willingly. In less than a minute her head rolled back, and she was gone.

And Des looked away with burning eyes. He felt that she had been wronged, somehow, had been gravely wronged. At the same time, as he presided over Cilla’s sudden sleep, he was presented with a tabulation of everything he loved in her. This had to be assimilated, all in an instant, and he did the work of it with burning eyes.

Friday was over. Des locked up. Seven times he tried the balcony door. He didn’t look out. He tried the balcony door for the eighth and last time.