Lionel Asbo: State of England (32 page)

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.

16

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?’

At five o’clock it came through on AP. A matter of hours after granting her first photo opportunity for two and a half months, and revealing her ‘bump’ in a ‘Self Esteem’ ensemble at ‘Wormwood Scrubs’, ‘Threnody’ had been helicoptered to a private clinic in Southend.

Meanwhile, at Avalon Tower, everything was as it should be. Everything was embarrassingly normal. Wise nature wisely steered her course; Baby (they called the creature Baby now, because names meant nothing to them) – Baby ably and promptly and almost contemptuously prevailed in every test, its heart throbbed, its limbs flailed; Mother remained watchful but confident, while Father presided over an epic calm. There they sat, with their paperbacks, in idling Saturday light. A month and a half to go. Baby was the background radiation – the surrounding static – of their lives.

Every few minutes one of them said something or other without looking up.

‘Maybe her tits exploded.’

‘Dawnie.’

‘Well they do explode … On aeroplanes. Maybe her arse exploded.’

‘Dawnie. But you couldn’t call that
tragic
, could you. Something like your arse exploding.’

‘Yeah. Your fake arse exploding.’

‘… Hear it on the news.
”Threnody” had barely completed her photo op when her fake arse tragically exploded
…’

‘Mm.
After the tragic explosion of her fake arse, “Threnody” was rushed to
…’

‘Has Danube been rushed to hospital recently? … Thought she might be doing another Danube.’

‘… Well Lionel doesn’t seem too bothered.’

‘Mm. To put it mildly.’

‘Maybe her bump’s fake too. Just a sandwich baggie full of silicone. Maybe her fake
bump
exploded …
Oof
.’

‘Not again? Not still?’

‘… Yeah,’ said Dawn tightly.

‘Have you been suffering in silence?’

Because – because there was this one little thing. Towards the end of her seventh month, Dawn started suffering from twinges in the base of her spine. They went to the Centre and consulted Mrs Treacher – and, anyway, it was all in the books. ‘
During the seventh month
, Dawnie
, the usually stable joints of the pelvis begin to loosen up to allow easier passage for the baby at delivery
,’ Des read out loud to her. ‘
This, along with your oversize abdomen, throws your body off balance
. See?
To compensate, you tend to bring your shoulders back and arch your neck
. That’s you, that is, Dawnie.
The result: a deeply curved lower back, strained muscles, and pain
. See?’ And they followed instructions: straight-back chair, footrest, two-inch heels, nocturnal heatpad, and no leg-crossing. And at first all this seemed to work.

Des said, ‘Let’s go and look in at the Centre. See Mrs Treacher. Come on.’

‘No, Des. They’ll just say the same thing.’

Raising his book to chest height and gazing past it, he monitored his wife. Once a minute or so an alien presence would concentrate itself in the centre of her brow, and the blue eyes defiantly hardened. Then her chest rose and fell, and she sighed.

‘Okay, Dawnie, that’s it. It must be something like a trapped nerve. Come on. We’ll be there and back by seven.’

‘Leave me alone. I’m tired.’

‘Listen, I’d like nothing better than to do it all for you,’ he said. ‘But I can’t.’

‘Must I? All right. No rush.’

‘No rush.’

At six o’clock he called Goodcars.

An hour later they were still sitting side by side, in a strait-jacketed madness of traffic. Dawn was sighing, now, not in pain but in solemn exasperation. All four minicab windows were open to the shiftless air of early evening. Minicabs, minicabbing: the infinity of red lights … Raising his voice above the horns, the revved engines, the encaged CDs and radios, and the slammed doors (people were climbing out of their cars to stare indignantly into the overheated distance), Des passed the time in lively disparagement of Diston General – whose premises lay clustered to their left, like the low-rise terminals of an ancient airport.

‘It said in the
Gazette
they found
pigeon
feathers in the salad! In A & E on a Saturday night, it’s a five-hour wait. And if you’ve only got a machete in your head, they send you to the back of the queue! … We’re all right, Dawnie, where we are. We’re all right.’

‘I want to go home. It’s stopped hurting. I’m fine.’

Denied linear progress, the jammed metal, like a human crushcrowd (with all life hating all other life), now sought lateral motion, twisting into three-point turns and climbing the curb and the central divide; and Des felt so surfeited with his own strength that he wanted to step out into the road and call order – and then clear a path for them with his bare hands …

‘I was fine when we got in the car.’ And she dug her small head into his side. ‘Sitting here in all this has brought it back. I was fine.’

‘It’s a slipped disc, Dawnie. That’s all. Maybe Braxton Hicks. Or sciatica. They said you might need a bit of therapy. A few back rubs. That’s all.’

Far ahead there was a sudden easing. The column started to move, like a loose-coupled train slowly picking up speed.

He said authoritatively, ‘Baby can blink now. And she can dream. Just imagine. What can unborn babies dream of?’

‘Hush,’ she said. ‘Hush.’

Dawn found it quite difficult to straighten up as they climbed from the cab and entered the odourless whiteness of the Maternity Centre.

Mrs Treacher, paged by the front desk, immediately, voluminously, and all-solvingly appeared. And Des started thinking about the dinner he would eventually be having with Dawn in front of
Match of the Day
.

17

SHE LED THEM down a series of corridors and through a series of flabby fire doors with graph-lined portholes and past a series of water fountains of pearly enamelware. They reached a glass partition, and here Mrs Treacher turned and said with her ogreish smile,

‘I’ll just take a quick look at you, my love, while we park young Des in here.’

He was shown into a trim little office – evidently Mrs Treacher’s own, with its computer screen, its single shelf of textbooks, and the flat tins of paperclips and thumbtacks. Des noticed a small gilt-framed photograph (taken some time ago): Mrs Treacher, with husband, son, daughter, and a swaddled babe in arms. He found it strange to think that the midwife (always so hungrily available) had children of her own. But nearly everyone had children. It was normal: the most normal thing in the world.

So Des paced the floor, not with anxiety, not at all; he paced the floor with a sense of unbounded restlessness – he wanted tasks, challenges, tests of strength … The office window looked out on a lot-sized municipal garden, and after a while he rested his forearms flat on the ledge, and slowly surrendered himself to the dusk – the line of trees, the birdflight. With regret, he thought how little he knew about nature … The trees: were they, perhaps, ‘poplars’? The birds: were they, perhaps, ‘wrens’? Small, short-winged, proud-breasted, they climbed above the treeline in trembling, almost visibly pulsating surges, with such ardent, such ecstatic aspiration …
That
wren was a girl, Des decided, as he heard the sound of his own name.

Opening the door with a flourish he almost fell over a smocked patient in a wheelchair. It was Dawn – and Mrs Treacher was talking rapidly to a man dressed in green.

‘This is the waterfall,’ said Dawn. ‘It isn’t a trapped nerve, Des. It’s labour. The baby’s coming.’

‘Not possible,’ he said, raising his chin. ‘Not grown enough.’ He raised his chin yet further, and shrugged. ‘Not possible. Not prepared.’

‘It’s coming. It’s coming tonight.’

He drew in breath to speak but what came out was something like a sneeze of dissolution. He groped sideways for the hard bench and toppled back on to it. Then he raised his hands to his face and lost himself in the messiest and snottiest tears he had ever shed – within a moment they were everywhere, in his mouth, up his nose, in his ears, dripping down his throat …

And he was no use at all in the delivery room. ‘Tell her to breathe!’ he kept trying to say as they forcefully steered him towards the door. ‘Make her breathe!’

‘
Desmond
,’ said his wife. ‘Go and lie down somewhere. And wait for us. Wait! … I can do it. I can do it all.’

Dawn woke him – no, not his wife. Eos – Eos woke him: daylight woke him. When he tried to lift his head he found that his cheek was gummed to the vinyl seatcover, and he freed it with a terrifying rasp. He raised his head and saw that he was in a broad passage where others, too, waited and dozed … It took a while, but he eventually worked it out: no disaster could befall him, he decided, as long as he stayed perfectly still. But when he saw Mrs Treacher in the distance walking busily in his direction, he felt his head jerk away before there was any danger of reading the expression on her face.

‘Desmond?’

He swallowed chinlessly and said, ‘She all right? Dawn all right?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Baby all right?’

‘They’re both all right. And it’s a girl.’

Her last words bewildered him.
It’s a girl
: he couldn’t understand why anyone would think that this was something he needed or wanted to know. Not boy, not girl, not boy. Merely baby, baby, baby …

‘Baby all right?’

‘Well she’s little. But she’ll get bigger.’ Mrs Treacher greedily added, ‘Same as all the others. That’s what they do.’

He let himself be guided into a place called the Recovery Room, and moved down a production line of triumphant feminine flesh (white nightdresses, warm limbs, white sheets); and there was his wife, sitting up in bed with her back arched and vigorously brushing her hair.

‘Oh, my poor love,’ she said, and smiled with a hand raised to her mouth. ‘Whatever’s gone and happened to you?’

And again he was led, or was rolled (his feet felt like castors), to an inner sanctum, or laboratory, and he gazed down with horror at the thing-alive beneath its dome of deep glass (like an inverted fishbowl), pinkish, brownish, yellowish, its limbs waving as mindlessly as the limbs of a beetle flipped on to its back. Now Desmond again deliquesced. He kept saying something, and he didn’t know what it was he was saying, but he kept on saying it, as if convinced that no one could hear.

The morning air enveloped him in a rough caress. For a while he just hung there limply. And so, it seemed, he might have indefinitely remained – but some large and complicated insect came and joyfully menaced him, and after a series of gasps and whimpers he set off. It was half past nine. His mission was to go home and fetch Dawn’s things. Could he accomplish that at least? Bus, tube train. He would have to move among the strong of the city.

But before he tried anything like that he entered a tea shop on the main road and ordered mushrooms on toast. He imagined himself to be bottomlessly hungry; and yet the black fungi felt quite alien to his tongue … There was a discarded tabloid on the chair beside him. He picked it up and spread it out. As if over a great divide, as if through the lens of a heaven-scanning telescope, he read about his astronomical uncle in the
Sunday Mirror
.