Lionel Asbo: State of England (38 page)

‘Let’s make a shopping trip out of it. Fancy going to the shops?’

Besides, he wanted to buy something: a surgical mask. He was once again infectious, and he was continually aware of it: when he held the baby he found he was always breathing over his shoulder. So out they went into Town, Cilla strapped into her pushchair, with both hands raised and active, greeting every face with her unqualified smile. Passers-by paused and wondered – wondered what they had done to earn such approval, such delight …

They tried three chemists, the household-goods emporium, and, hopelessly, a hardware store. Typical, that. You saw surgical masks, here and there, all over the great world city, but never in Diston. Diston showed no interest in prophylaxis, in preventive care. Diston, with its gravid primary-schoolers and toothless hoodies, its wheezing twenty-year-olds, arthritic thirty-year-olds, crippled forty-year-olds, demented fifty-year-olds, and non-existent sixty-year-olds.

All they bought in the end was a large packet of ibuprofen and a tin of peach mush for Cilla’s tea.

As he warmed her milk on the ring, Des flapped his way through the
Evening Standard
and came across a noticeably cordial item in the diary about ‘Threnody’ and her new book of verse.
These are the poems about my time with Lionel
, she said.
So the theme is grief. But loss and heartbreak are the very mainsprings of deep emotion. Look at Bishop King and Lord Tennyson. Poetry thrives on such –

The dogs were stirring. They awoke as one being; random limbs disentangled and strained outward; with a trembling yawn Jak rolled over; his tongue uncoiled as if from a spindle and writhed probingly over his brother’s snout … Des stepped forward and gave the lace curtain a tug. He looked round. Installed in her highchair, Cilla was rubbing her eyes with her knuckles – yes, the little creature, this limited operation, this small concern, after sampling its bottle, was breaking up, was closing down, as babies will, every few hours. He prepared a fortress of cushions on the couch, and within seconds she was asleep.

With reluctance Des twitched the curtain and took another look through the glass door. Jek stood in an expectant crouch as Jak climbed up on him with his back legs hideously taut and twanging.

‘
Fuckoff!
’ said Jak.

‘
Fuckoff!
’ said Jek.

At six-thirty Lionel made the first of his two calls.

‘I’ve got her down. Grace. She’s in bungalow number uh, forty-four aitch, Inver St Mary’s. I gave the vicar a few bob and we did it on the quiet. Packed her down this afternoon.’

‘Well, rest in peace, Uncle Li.’

‘… I’m in the car. Trying to get back. Don’t want to stay up here. I’ll get depressed. Wick’s shut.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. A mist come in off the sea. Visibility reduced to nil. Reckon we’ll drive to Inverness. Hundred and fifty miles. Good road though. Looking into an air taxi. You all right, boy?’

‘Yeah, Uncle Li. Dawn rang. Says it’s going to be a long night.’

‘Fed the dogs yet?’

‘Just about to, Uncle Li.’

‘Don’t forget they Tabasco. All of it.’

He laid out the dripping steaks on two tin dishes. And he readied the chilli-pepper sauce –
matured for several years in oak barrels to develop its unique aroma and flavour. A few drops will give your
… He took a driblet on his tongue, and could feel the fire and bite of it; but the aftertaste seemed pharmaceutical – evidence, he suspected, of microbial lingering in his craw. It took nearly five minutes, voiding the whole bottle on the bleeding meat. What were the dogs doing here anyway? Oh yeah. Lionel was taking them to Surrey when he got the call. Hare coursing. Plausible, Des supposed: hare coursing was violent and illegal, and you could gamble on it … Michael Gabriel – the Family Butcher. If Lionel got back tonight, would he come for Jak and Jek?

They were lying side by side with their chins on their paws when Des edged out and placed the bowls by the litter tray.

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.

Stripping to his undershorts, he sought out the bare sheet. From the kitchen, her cotside lamp cast a frilly yellow semicircle on Desmond’s wooden floor; and his daughter lay almost within his line of sight. His tiredness, he realised, had a smell: the thick-air smell of ozone and the warmed sea. No, not this wave, that one, yes, that one – that one will carry me ashore.

Saturday

IN THE DEAD of night he lay dreaming.

He lay dreaming, not of a ladder that rose up to heaven … He lay dreaming of a chamber of varnished pine and white marble and boiling mist where he sat with his mother’s brother and six or seven ginger dogs and piebald foxes, some of which were stuffed (by the taxidermist, Mr Man). He and his uncle were engaged in invisible and mysterious exertions, but there was nothing to breathe and nothing to breathe it with. So he awoke.

… ‘Ah. Here we are,’ he said, and moistened his tongue. His mouth was working (he could hear it click and scrape), and yet his eyes were gummed shut. He raised a reluctant hand and freed his dried lids. The air around him was as black as liquorice.

Someone or something had closed his bedroom door.

Through various thicknesses a muffled but complex sound now chose to present itself for his consideration. A solid thud, followed by two further and fainter impacts, the crackle of basketry and a pneumatic sigh, then the desperate snorting and scrambling of muscular beasts.