Lionel Asbo: State of England (15 page)

‘Well,’ came the whisper as Firth-Heatherington backed away. ‘Please ring me at any time, Lionel.’

‘Call me
sir
. Jack.’ He loosened his tie with a gasp and a violent hoist of the chin. ‘
You
can run along and all, Des. Oh and listen.’

‘Yes, Uncle Li.’

‘I’ll be round in a day or two. Uh, Desmond, I intend to relieve you financial situation. And that’s a promise. On me mother’s life.’ He smiled and said, ‘Oh yeah. How is the old …?’

‘Poorly, Uncle Li.’

‘Mm. Well. I’ll take care of Grace. Once and for all. On you way, boy.’

‘Uncle Li, seriously.
That
lot,’ he said, jerking a thumb towards the forecourt, ‘they want you back inside! It’s envy, Uncle Li, that’s what it is. Don’t let them work you up. All right?’

‘Ah, but you fears are unfounded. I’m in full control.’

And Des left him there on the other side of the glass at the Pantheon Grand. The shorn crown with its twinkling studs of sweat. The ripped suit, the bloodstained shirt, the thin blue tie. The new silence. The eyes.

‘Just out of interest. Has your dad got an actual grudge against black people? Or was he just born that way?’

‘Well,’ she said cautiously. ‘He does sometimes go on about how they ruined his profession.’

‘His profession? Ha – that’s a good one! Since when’s being a
parking
warden a … No. That’s unkind. Forget I ever said that, Dawnie.’

She was lying on the bed with Joel and Jon (while Des climbed into his minicabbing gear – old trainers and sweats). What she liked to do was – she’d slide the dogs’ ears between her toes. Said it felt like silk.
Mmm
. And whenever they got the chance Joel and Jon would give her feet a furtive, reverential lick.

‘I’m tense. About Uncle Li.’

‘I’m not. Not any more. If he does something for us, that’d be nice. If he doesn’t. Well.’

Dawn worked four nights a week – teaching English to foreign students. And the minicabbing? What Des minded, in the end, was the inanition. He kept asking himself: Is there
anything
stupider than sitting and staring at a red light?

‘When I was little,’ she said, ‘I wanted a pup so much. Or a kitten. I kept a pet
ant
. I had an ant bar on my windowsill. I fed it jam … And now I’ve got these two fine fellas. And I’ve got you. And we’ll have a whole new room. We’ll have twice the space, Des. Just think.’

He checked his keys and his money.

‘His eyes. His eyes’ve gone … I just hope there’s a copper watching. He won’t do anything if there’s a copper watching. I just hope there’s a copper watching.’

6

IN THE SILVER cube Lionel Asbo rode up to his suite on the eleventh floor. Bedroom, lounge, office area, bathroom with two sinks (and an extra shitter in a little closet of its own). The leading segment of the toilet roll was shaped in a V: a thoughtful touch. He stripped, and stood for ten minutes under a shower-head the size of an umbrella – sluicing off all that Stallwort. He shaved, wielding the heavy brush and the heavy razor. The heaviness of the brush, the heaviness of the razor: these weights had a meaning that Lionel could not yet parse.

Next door he climbed into the new clothes Firth-Heatherington had laid on for him: white shirt, dark slacks, tasselled loafers, sports jacket. But he’d put on a few, what with the stodge they give you inside, and he couldn’t quite get the trousers joined up at the waist. So he used the fluffy white belt off the complimentary robe. Looked a bit stupid but there it was. Half past one. Now what?

Having hosed himself down and all that, Lionel expected to feel twice the price. But he had to admit that he was still coming over slightly queer. Not himself. In fact, he was coming over very peculiar indeed. The air seemed glazed and two-dimensional: filmic. James Bond or what have you. Except James Bond never … There was a solid pressure in Lionel’s loins, like a stuck crank, and his left pillock ached. Once again he tried to move his bowels. With no joy. Come to think of it, he hadn’t had a proper stint since that day with the Governor. And usually he was as regular as time itself … Mind you, he was looking forward to his dinner. Seven-thirty, table for six: John, Paul, George, Ringo, and Stuart. Lionel gave a grin, with scrolled upper lip. It was going to be a good one, this. He had it all worked out.

Now Lionel betook himself to the Bolingbroke Bar on the ground floor. Straddling a tall stool, he had a couple of bottles of champagne and cleared a few trays of Bombay Mix. The
whole hotel
was non-smoking; but as against that, there was a garden beyond the open doors and he stepped outside, every fifteen or twenty minutes, for a quiet Hundred. Milk-white statues. And the drugging scents of roses and hyacinths. Also a fountain and the placid patter of its shimmering droplets. He believed for a moment (not a long moment) that he was feeling somewhat improved.

With a copy of
Country Life
on his lap, he sat by the dormant fireplace in the Lancaster Lounge. Two burnished old gents were chatting away on the adjacent settee. Lionel unthinkingly assumed they were in their late forties; but then he began to decode the static of their talk – and they were reminiscing about Normandy and D-Day! Now Lionel, as a boy, had been dead keen on the bloodbaths of World War II, so it only took him a minute. 1944 – that made them well over eighty! … Gazing ceilingward, Lionel had a little think about the vale of years. There was that doddering tycoon who married some tart a fifth his age, and there was the Queen, of course – but they were bound to keep
her
walking, weren’t they, what with the … Or could this mean that, among the rich, it was maybe even halfway
normal
to live that long? And then the two gents leapt to their feet and strode forward to hail and hug their wives!

After a little accident in the Lancaster Lounge, and after a lively exchange of views with certain fellow guests in the shopping arcade, Lionel found himself in the foyer. Looking out. He supposed that, if he’d been feeling better, he would’ve taken a stroll – buy a
Lark
, see how the local pubs compared … Nine or ten representatives of the Fourth Estate: still out there. He registered the urge to go and give them a piece of his mind; but an unfamiliar qualm restrained him (what? It was something like an unexamined fear of derision). He went on standing there, leaning against the pillar, looking out. Gilded cage, if you like. He went on standing there, leaning there, looking out.

Then it was three o’clock and he had the outfitters to deal with back upstairs. The couturier, the hatmaker, the bespoke cobbler, the hosier, the mercer, the jeweller, and the furrier. Bolts of cloth were glowingly unfurled. He stood there like a felon about to be frisked as the tailors whispered round him with their pins and tapes. In such circumstances, where was the mannequin’s mind supposed to go? He started the hour with his chin up but after twenty minutes it dropped and slewed. A beast at the altar – his martyred, his crucified form. When this lot pack up, he kept mechanically thinking, I’ll avail myself of the hotel facilities … Just then a whippet in a waistcoat with needles for teeth veered close and chalked a cross on the waxwork’s smarting breast.

First the gym: on the bench with the weights. He’d maintained his regime, as you always do inside, and his arms were soon shunting away like hairy pistons. Then something struck him.
What do I need me strength for?
he said out loud.
Now?
Still, he worked up a fair sweat and then went for a dip in the pool and a long rubdown (after a slight misunderstanding) from the Danish bird in the pink smock. Next he got his nails trimmed and glazed, and his prison toejam sorted out. As an afterthought he had his nut tightened in the barber’s.

Upstairs again he was surprised by a need for human company. He considered summoning Cynthia.
Cynthia?
he said out loud.
Cynthia in the Pantheon Grand? Nah. Cynthia in the Pantheon Grand? Nah. Gina, though. Gina wouldn’t give a toss. She’d love it. Walking around swinging her arse and …
He suddenly realised what he was doing: he was talking to himself.
Oy. Steady on, mate. You losing you …
The heavy furnishings, the heavy room, the heavy hotel on its unfathomable foundations, gripping it to the earth.

… So he watched some (crap) porn on the TV (get the computer back off Des), put on his new red tie (it was almost six-thirty), and spent the last hour in the business centre on the ground floor (causing a bit of bother). All day he’d been an astronaut, weightless, without connection, swimming in air …

But dinner, at least: this would be perfect Asbo.

‘How d’you get an upper-class cunt to burn his face?’

‘Go on then.’

‘Phone him when he’s doing the ironing! … An upper-class cunt goes into a pub with a –’

‘Excuse me, sir, are you ready to order?’ said the bearded waiter for the seventh or eighth time (and the bearded waiter, though young, was as Lionel saw it an upper-class cunt).

‘Hang
on
… An upper-class cunt goes into a pub with a heap of wet dogshit in his hand. He says to the barman,
Look what I nearly stepped in!
… How many upper-class cunts does it take to …? Wait up. Wait up. Uh, concentrate, lads.’

They were dining in the Grosvenor Grill. It was now just after ten.

‘Well, it stares you in the face, doesn’t it. Steak and chips.’

‘Plain as day,’ said John.

‘Open-and-shut,’ said Paul.

‘Common sense,’ said George.

‘No-brainer,’ said Ringo.

Stuart, on this occasion, was silent; but then Stuart (the seedy registrar) hardly ever said anything anyway.

‘That one’ll do,’ said Lionel, pointing to the filet mignon.

And did these young men – evenly spaced round the glistening ellipse of the white tabletop – did they resemble a band of brothers? No. They shared a mother, true, but Grace Pepperdine’s genetic footprint was vanishingly light, and the boys were all duplicates of their fathers. So John, twenty-nine, looked Nordic, Paul, twenty-eight, looked Hispanic, George, twenty-seven, looked Belgic (or Afrikaans), and Ringo, also twenty-seven, looked East Asiatic; only Stuart, twenty-six, and of course Lionel, looked English (though Stuart was in fact half-Silesian). John, Paul, George, and Ringo, at any rate, wore the same threadbare zootsuits and had the same hairstyle – slashbacks, with long sideburns that tapered to a point.

‘How would you like that cooked, sir?’

‘Cooked?’ said Lionel. ‘Just take its horns off, wipe its arse, and sling it on the plate. And bring all you jams and pickles and mustards … Us against the world, eh, lads?’

It did not escape Lionel’s notice that when he went out for his tri-hourly smokes he always returned to five strained faces and a sudden, stoppered hush. And he knew all about their difficulties, John, Paul, and George with their bad debts and cramped flats (their shattered wives, their rioting toddlers), Ringo with his decade on the dole, and Stuart (who alone could probably look forward to some kind of pension) sharing a bedsit with a bus conductor in SE24. Now Lionel invited the company to raise their glasses. He thought that everything was coming along quite nicely.

‘Why did the upper-class cunt cross the road?’ he resumed.

‘Go on then.’

The brothers had had, between them, forty-eight gin and tonics.

‘Lionel.’

‘Ring, mate.’

Ringo coughed. He wiped a hand across his mouth and lowered his head.

‘… I spent twelve grand today,’ said Lionel, ‘on guess what.’

‘What.’

‘Socks. Us against the world, eh lads?’

So after a bit John starts having a go at Ringo, and Ringo starts having a go at George, and George starts having a go at Paul, and Paul starts having a go at John, and Lionel, not to be left out, starts having a go at Stuart (for never saying anything). That bit soon quietened down.

‘Lionel.’

‘John, mate.’

John coughed. He wiped a hand across his mouth and lowered his head.

Then the food came, and all the beers, and all the wines.

‘See that?’ said Lionel, tapping the label of the Château Latour Pauillac. ‘That’s the vintage – the date. And guess what. Give or take a tenner, it’s the same as the price! We’ll have one each. Us against the world, eh lads?’

So John starts having a go at Paul, and Paul starts having a go at George, and George starts having a go at Ringo, and Ringo starts having a go at John (and Lionel starts having a go at Stuart). That bit took much longer to quieten down.

It was close to midnight when Lionel called for the bill.

‘There’s tension in the air, lads,’ he said as he followed the fairy lights up the garden path with his brandy balloon and his cigar. ‘Bound to be. I mean, look around. This ain’t Diston. This ain’t KFC. Everything’s different now.’