Lionel Asbo: State of England (3 page)

‘… You’re back early, Uncle Li,’ he repeated as airily as he could. ‘Where you been?’

‘Cynthia. I don’t know why I bestir meself. Gaa, the
state
of that Cynthia.’

The spectral blonde called Cynthia, or
Cymfia
, as he pronounced it, was the nearest thing Lionel had to a childhood sweetheart, in that he started sleeping with her when she was ten (and Lionel was nine). She was also the nearest thing he had to a regular girlfriend, in that he saw her regularly – once every four or five months. Of women in general, Lionel sometimes had this to say:
More trouble than they worth, if you ask me. Women? I’m not bothered. I’m not bothered about women
. Des thought that this was probably just as well: women, in general, should be very pleased that Lionel wasn’t bothered about them. One woman bothered him – yes, but she bothered everyone. She was a promiscuous beauty named Gina Drago …

‘Des. That Cynthia,’ said Lionel with a surfeited leer. ‘Christ. Even uh, during the uh, you know, during the other, I was thinking, Lionel, you wasting you youth. Lionel, go home. Go home, boy. Go home and watch some decent porn.’

Des picked up the Mac and got smartly to his feet. ‘Here. I’m off out anyway.’

‘Yeah? Where? Seeing that Alektra?’

‘Nah. Meet up with me mates.’

‘Well do something useful. Steal a car. Eh, guess what. You Uncle Ringo won the Lottery.’

‘He never. How much?’

‘Twelve pounds fifty. It’s a mug’s game, the Lottery, if you ask me. Oy. I’ve been meaning to ask you something. When you creep off at night …’

Des was standing there holding the Mac in both hands, like a waiter with a tray. Lionel was standing there with the Cobras in both hands, like a drayman with a load.

‘When you creep off at night, you carry a blade?’

‘Uncle Li! You know me.’

‘Well you should. For you own security. And you peace of mind. You going to get youself striped. Or worse. There’s no fistfights any more, not in Diston. There’s only knife fights. To the death. Or guns. Well,’ he relented, ‘I suppose they can’t see you in the fucking dark.’

And Des just smiled with his clean white teeth.

‘Take a knife from the drawer on you way out. One of them black ones.’

Des didn’t meet up with his mates. (He didn’t have any mates. And he didn’t want any mates.) He crept off to his gran’s.

As we know, Desmond Pepperdine was fifteen. Grace Pepperdine, who had led a very demanding life and borne many, many children, was a reasonably presentable thirty-nine. Lionel Asbo was a heavily weathered twenty-one.

… In dusty Diston (also known as Diston Town or, more simply, Town), nothing – and no one – was over sixty years old. On an international chart for life expectancy, Diston would appear between Benin and Djibouti (fifty-four for men and fifty-seven for women). And that wasn’t all. On an international chart for fertility rates, Diston would appear between Malawi and Yemen (six children per couple – or per single mother). Thus the age structure in Diston was strangely shaped. But still: Town would not be thinning out.

Des was fifteen. Lionel was twenty-one. Grace was thirty-nine …

He bent to unlatch the gate, he skipped down the seven stone steps, he knocked the knocker. He listened. Here came the shuffle of her fluffy slippers, and in the background (as ever) the melodic purity of a Beatles song. Her all-time favourite: ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’.

3

DAWN SIMMERED OVER the incredible edifice – the stacked immensity of Avalon Tower.

On the curtained balcony (the size of a tight parking space), Joe lay dreaming of other dogs, enemy dogs, jewel-eyed hellhounds. He barked in his sleep. Jeff rolled over with a blissful sigh.

In bedroom number one (the size of a low-ceilinged squash court, with considerable distances between things, between the door and the bed, between the bed and the wardrobe, between the wardrobe and the free-standing swing mirror), Lionel lay dreaming of prison and his five brothers. They were all in the commissary, queuing for Mars Bars.

And in bedroom number two (the size of a generous four-poster), Des lay dreaming of a ladder that rose up to heaven.

Day came. Lionel left early with Joe and Jeff (business). Des dreamed on.

For six or seven months now he had been sensing it: the pangs and quickenings of intelligence within his being. Cilla, Des’s mother, died when he was twelve, and for three years he entered a kind of trance, a leaden sleep; all was numb and Mumless … Then he woke up.

He started keeping a diary – and a notebook. There was a voice in his head, and he listened to it and he talked to it. No, he communed with it, he communed with the whispers of his intelligence. Did everybody have one, an inner voice? An inner voice that was cleverer than they were? He thought probably not. Then where did it come from?

Des looked to his family tree – to his personal Tree of Knowledge.

Well, Grace Pepperdine, Granny Grace, had not attended all that closely to her education, for obvious reasons: she was the mother of seven children by the age of nineteen. Cilla came first. All the rest were boys: John (now a plasterer), Paul (a foreman), George (a plumber), Ringo (unemployed), and Stuart (a seedy registrar). Having run out of Beatles (including the ‘forgotten’ Beatle, Stuart Sutcliffe), Grace exasperatedly christened her seventh child Lionel (after a much lesser hero, the choreographer Lionel Blair). Lionel Asbo, as he would later become, was the youngest of a very large family superintended by a single parent who was barely old enough to vote.

Although she did the
Telegraph
crossword (not the Kwik but the Cryptic – she had a weird knack for it), Grace wasn’t otherwise a sharp thinker. Cilla, on the other hand,
was as bright as a barrelful of monkeys
, according to Lionel
. ‘Gifted,’ they said. Top of her class without even trying. Then she got knocked up with you. She was six months gone when she sat her Eleven Plus. Still passed. But after that, after you come, Des, it was all off
. Cilla Pepperdine didn’t bear any more children, but she went on to have as riotous a youth as was humanly possible with a baby in the house – a baby, then a toddler, and then a little boy.

What did he know about his dad? Very little. And it was an ignorance that Cilla largely shared. But everyone knew this about him: he was black. Hence Desmond’s resinous colour,
café crème
, with the shadow of something darker in it. Rosewood, perhaps: close-grained, and giving off a distinctive fragrance. He was a sweet-smelling youth, and delicately put together, with regular mint-white teeth and mournful eyes. When he smiled in the mirror, he smiled sadly at the ghost of his father – at the ghost of the lost begetter. But in the waking world he only saw him once.

They were walking up Steep Slope, hand in hand, Des (seven) and Cilla (nineteen), after a spree at the funfair in Happy Valley, when she said suddenly,

‘It’s
him
!’

‘Who?’

‘Your father! … Look. He’s you! … Mouth. Nose. Christ!’

Very poorly dressed, and shockingly shod, Des’s father was on a metal bench, sitting between a soiled yellow rucksack and five empty flagons of Strongbow. For several minutes Cilla tried to rouse him, with violent shakes and nails-only pinches and, towards the end, alarmingly loud wallops delivered with the flat of her hand.

‘D’you think he’s
dead
?’ Cilla leaned down and put an ear to his chest. ‘This sometimes works,’ she said – and intently, lingeringly, kissed his eyes … ‘Hopeless.’ She straightened up and gave Des’s father one last deafening clout. ‘Oh well. Come on, darling.’

She took his hand and walked off fast and Des stumbled along beside her with his head still veering wildly round.

‘You sure it’s him, Mum?’

‘Course I’m sure. Don’t be cheeky!’

‘Mum, stop! He’s waking up. Go and kiss his eyes again. He’s stirring.’

‘No. It’s just the wind, love. And I wanted to ask him something. I wanted to ask him his name.’

‘You said his name was Edwin!’

‘That was a guess. You know me. I can remember a face – but I can’t remember a name. Ah, Crybaby. Don’t …’ She crouched down beside him. ‘Listen. I’m sorry, sweetheart. But what can I say? He came and went in an afternoon!’

‘You said it lasted a whole week!’

‘Ah, don’t. Don’t, darling. It breaks my heart … Listen. He was nice. He was gentle. That’s where you get your religion from.’

‘I’m not religious,’ he said, and blew into the tissue she was pressing to his nose. ‘I hate church. I just like the stories. The miracles.’

‘Well it’s where you get your gentleness from, my love. You don’t get it from me.’

So Des only saw him once (and Cilla, apparently, only saw him twice). And neither of them could possibly know how excruciating this encounter would become in Desmond’s memory. For he too, in five years’ time, would try very hard to wake someone up – to wake someone up, to bring someone back …

It was just a slip, it was just a little slip, just a little slip on the supermarket floor.

So Des (now rising from his bed, in the great citadel) – Des thought it would be rash to attribute any great acuity, any great nous, to his father. Who, then, was the source of these rustlings, these delightful expansions, like solar flares, that were going about their work in his mind? Dominic Oldman – that’s who.

Grandpa Dom was barely out of primary school when he knocked up Granny Grace with Cilla. But by the time he returned (and stuck around long enough to knock her up with Lionel), he was at the University of Manchester, studying Economics.
University
: it would be hard to exaggerate the reverence and the frequency with which Des murmured this word. His personal translation of it was
the one poem
. For him it meant something like the harmony of the cosmos … And he wanted it. He wanted
university
– he wanted the one poem.

And here was the funny thing. Cilla and Lionel were known in the family as ‘the twins’, because they were the only children who had the same father. And Des believed that Lionel (despite his dreadful CV) secretly partook of the Oldman acumen. The difference, it seemed, was one of attitude. Des loved it, his intelligence; and Lionel hated it. Hated it? Well, it was plain as day that he had always fought it, and took pride in being stupid on purpose.

When Des went to his gran’s, was he being stupid on purpose? And was she doing it too – when she let him in? After the fateful night came the fateful morning …

Got you some milk
, he said at the door.

She turned. He followed. Grace took up position on the armchair by the window, in her granny glasses (the circular metal rims), with her powderless face bent penitently over the
Telegraph
crossword. After a while she said,

Frequently arrested, I’m heading east at the last minute. Two, three, four, two, four
… In the nick of time.

In the nick of time.
How d’you work that one out?

Frequently arrested – in the nick oft. I’m – i, m. Heading east – e. At the last minute
. In the nick of time
. Des. You and I. We’re going to go to Hell
.

Ten minutes later, on the low divan, she said,
As long as no one knows. Ever. Where’s the harm?

Yeah. And round here, I mean, it’s not considered that bad
.

No, it’s not. Uncles and nieces. Fathers and daughters all over the place
.

And at the Tower there’s that pair of twins living in sin … But you and me. Gran, d’you think it’s legal?

Don’t call me Gran! … Maybe a misdemeanour. Because you’re not sixteen
.

What, like a fine? Yeah, you’re probably right. Grace. Still
.

Still. Try and stay away, Des. Even if I ask … Try and stay away
.

And he did try. But when she asked, he went, as if magnetised. He went back – back to the free-fall pantomime of doom.

‘The main role of the semicolon’, he read in his
Concise Oxford Dictionary
, ‘is to mark a grammatical separation that is stronger in effect than a comma but less strong than a full stop.’

Des had the weight of the book on his lap. It was his prize possession. Its paper jacket was
royal
blue (‘deep, vivid’).

‘You can also use a semicolon as a stronger division in a sentence that already contains commas:

What has crippled me? Was it my grandmother, frowning on my childish affection and turning it to formality and cold courtesy; or was it my pious mother, with her pathological caution; or was it my spineless uncle, who, despite numerous affronts and wrongs, proved incapable of even …’