Lionel Asbo

by Martin Amis

  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.

  … All the blinds were drawn at “Wormwood Scrubs,” and the flag of St. George was flying at half mast. “Threnody,” having miscarried, was under deep sedation. According to a statement issued by Megan Jones, the couple were completely devastated by this tragedy. And the security personnel at the house, together with other friends and advisers (Des read), had mounted a suicide watch on Lionel Asbo.

  She was finishing lunch when he returned with a laundry bag containing her nighties, bathrobe, and sponge bag, together with several sinister (and tasteless) items like her nursing pads and nipple cream …

  Dawn looked him up and down as he made for the bedside chair.

  “Don’t I get a kiss then?” She patted her mouth with a tissue. “Cilla’s sleeping. Why not go and have a look at her? They’ll show you where.”

  He said, “Cilla? Are we calling her Cilla?”

  “… I don’t understand you, Des Pepperdine. That was all you could say! Don’t you remember? Call her Cilla. Please call her Cilla. Call her Cilla, please call her Cilla. Don’t you remember? That was all you could say!”

  He stared at his shoes. “Cilla. Cilla Dawn Pepperdine. Nothing wrong with that.”

  “Nothing wrong with that. Go on then. Go and have a look at her.”

  “I’ll wait for you. Eat your afters.”

  She said, “Des, don’t worry. You’ll come to love her. I know you. You’ll learn … D’you think,” she said, reaching for her apple pie, “d’you think he’ll see me now?”

  “Who? Oh. Him.”

  And he slowly thought: Father Horace, Uncle Lionel, Grandmother Grace—these were the congenital attachments. You grew up into them, and didn’t have to learn how to do it, didn’t have to learn how to love. He said,

  “Take your time, Dawnie. I’ll wait.”

  18

  In philoprogenitive Diston the ice-cream vans (with their sliding service panels and their voluptuous illustrations of tubs and cones and multicoloured lollipops) played crackly recordings of standard nursery rhymes as they toured the summer streets. This motorised trade in frozen refreshments was known to be very lucrative, and was regularly and publicly and violently contested (with pool cues, golf clubs, and baseball bats). And yet the vans, additionally daubed though they were with trolls and dragons and goblins, looked and sounded arcadian: hear those streaming bell-like gradations—as the ice-cream vans came curling round corners and bobbled to a halt.

  This, for now, would be the music of their lives.

  Dawn and Cilla spent six nights in the Centre—one night for every week of the baby’s prematurity.

  “She takes a little more milk in her coffee than you do, doesn’t she Des.”

  “… Hard to tell. She’s all yellow. Takes after your dad. Sorry.”

  For a moment naked Cilla looked up blindly; then, once again, she drowsed.

  “Even her eyes are yellow. The white bits.” Des peered at her. His gaze slid up from the swollen vulva and its vertical smile—to the head: a dunce’s cap of flesh and blood and bone. “Her head. Looks like a Ku Klux Klan.”

  “I told you. They suctioned her. The ventouse. You weren’t there, Des.”

  “And there’s about a million other things that might go wrong with her.”

  “… Have you been at the books again? Don’t. Des, you can’t do it all with your mind. Just feel your way towards her.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Don’t try. Wait. She’ll be fine. Touch her. Go on. She won’t hurt you.”

  Why did he sense this—that the baby had the power to hurt him? He reached down and ran his fingertips over the moist, adhesive surface …

  Cilla was five pounds one.

  “Just wait,” said Dawn.

  So he waited.

  On the third day they were moved upstairs to a cubicle or ward-let intended for just two birthing mothers, and the second bed was empty. So they had the place to themselves. Which seemed to multiply Desmond’s difficulties … Horace Sheringham, himself just out of hospital, naturally stayed away, but Prunella was of course a good deal around; and Uncle Paul came, and John came, and George came, and even Stuart came; and Great-Aunt Mercy came. No one noticed that Des was not what he appeared to be—was not the euphoric firsttime father, speechless with pride. But then Lionel came.

  “Pointy-headed,” Dawn was saying as she positioned the wicker cradle by her side, “means clever.”

  “Don’t joke about it. When you do that you’re—”

  Des was cut short by the sound of an outlandishly brutal honk from the street below. At once he heard an answering shout of fright from the passage and the crash of a dropped tray. The honk was followed by more honks—as if a fleet of fire engines was barging its way up Slattery Road. Six or seven babies, from various directions, started crying; but Cilla lay still.

  “It’s the Venganza,” said Des in a stunned voice. “The Venganza … He gave me a demonstration. In his garage. The horn’s got a sliding gauge on it. It goes from quiet to normal to loud to that.”

  “I … We don’t want him in here, Desi.” She was leaning her body over the bassinet. “We’re too …”

  “What you mean?”

  “We’re too fragile. And he’s too bloody much!”

  Preceded by a cellophane-wrapped thicket of red roses (and wearing a suit and tie of the same gunpowder matt as his SUV), Lionel strolled in through the open door. He paused in silent assessment, and grinned.

  “Now that’s refreshing.” He tossed the crackling bouquet on to the spare cot, and stood there with his arms folded, taking it all in. “That’s very refreshing. To see some real misery for a change. Des, you look sick to you stomach, son. Coming home to you now, is it? Eh? Eh?” Lionel approached. “Let’s have a look then.”

  “She’s dozing,” said Dawn, and leaned back to let him see.

  “Jesus. Bit little isn’t it?”

  Des explained.

  “Gaa. What’s wrong with its bonce?”

  Des explained.

  “Well you made you bed now, son. You got to lie in it.” He glanced at his watch. “All right, Dawn? Listen I brought a visitor for yer.” He turned. “Come on, Des.”

  Out in the passage “Threnody” stepped forward, raising her black veil.

  “No more talk about babies,” said Lionel as he summoned the lift. “Now pay attention. I got a mixed report on you gran.” There was good news, Lionel explained, and there was bad news. “Which d’you want first? Here. After you.”

  They or their washy reflections entered the sheet-metal vault. Its doors gave a shudder, but Lionel reached for the button and kept his thumb on it. The surface beneath their feet swayed and settled, finding its balance.


  “Lungs. Heart. Call it old age. She’s got less than a year to live.” This was the good news. “Here, how long since you been up there?”

  Des told him three or four weeks. Now the lift started swaying earthward.

  “What was she on about? Daddy Dom still?”

  “No. She’s moved on to Lars. And a bit of Tolo.” Tolo, Bartolome—father of Paul. “And even a bit of Jonky.” Jonky, Jonker—father of George.

  “Was she still talking Greek? You know, still babbling?”

  “Yeah. More or less. You could work the odd thing out.”

  “Yeah well that’s what’s happening, Des. She’s started making sense!”

  This was the bad news.

  “Who visits her?” said Lionel as they crossed the entrance hall. “Apart from you.”

  “Well the uncles go up. Now and then.”

  “Who’s she phone?”

  “Mercy. Every Sunday.”

  “Mercy. Old Ma Mischief. You know what we’re in, Des? We’re in a countdown … Okay, now look a bit grim. Go on. It’ll suit you mood.”

  • • •

  They came out on to the front steps, and into the relief of the unsanitised open air. Down on the street a loose semicircle of photographers quickly readjusted itself, and three or four smart young ladies—analysts from the women’s pages (Des recognised the Mirror’s Carli Gray)—drew nearer. Des said quietly,

  “Sorry about your loss, Uncle Li.”

  “Yeah. Tragic.” He raised his voice. “Keep you distance now. Guess who the father was. Raoul. Or maybe Fernando. Hey, back off a bit. Or even Azwat! She give it four months, to get the bump. Then she had it out. All as planned. Show some respect there! Exit strategy, see. Ah. Here she is.”

  Veil up, sunglasses on, and with a black hankie pressed to the bridge of her nose, “Threnody” took some deep breaths for the cameras … But now the science-fictional Venganza surged inexorably into place; its driver plummeted to the ground and ran to the nearer of the two back-up BMs; and at length Lionel ascended, and the Asbo motorcade moved off. There was more full-blast honking at the first intersection, where Lionel found himself confronted by a slow red light.

  Lingering for a moment, Des heard the mechanical melody of an ice-cream van in the distance. He mumbled along with it (“Uncle Moon”), raising his face to the snowmen and snowwomen, the snow-girls and snowboys of the cooling blue sky, and then slipped back within.

  19

  So they stayed on at the Centre for nearly a week, and tiny Cilla had her jaundice bleached out of her (it was the colour of the undercoat of a healing bruise), and Dawn’s milk began to flow, and Des was regularly and wryly handed the fearful present of the nappy (which, with its settled dankness, seemed to be heavier than the baby), and together they gave her baths, or swims, in the square sink; and Cilla, for her part, marshalled her grip reflex, and coughed and burped, and on the fifth day produced a triumphant sneeze, and, on the sixth, managed to skid a lucky thumb into her sopping mouth …

  In late August, two Pepperdines left Avalon Tower; in early September, three came back. Almost immediately Cilla dipped beneath her birth weight, to a pitiable four pounds fifteen, and Des, watching her evaporate, felt himself again lose ground. He was like his Uncle Li. Not happy. Not sad. Numb. And he still couldn’t trust himself to hold her. No, he kept saying. I’ll drop her. I’ll smother her. I’ll crush her. No! But then this changed.

  The love bomb exploded on September 29, at 11:45 a.m. Des stood at ground zero.

  Their health visitor (an affectionate young widow called Margaret Gentleman) was just leaving, and Des was seeing her out. Bye-bye, Diddums, she said, and bowed to pass him the child. He turned his head, looking for Dawn. Go on, she said, I can’t take her with me! And he was left holding the baby—at arm’s length. So she’s all right then? he called out. And Margaret, hurrying, said, Cilla? Oh she’s gorgeous! … He inspected the warm weight in his arms. The full complement of limbs, the woozily slewing neck (steadied by his fingertips), the vestigially misangled face—whose inquisitive eyes now focused their stare. She was looking at him, or so he felt, in the way that Dawn looked at him when confronted by his frailties and confusions. Not uncritically, but tenderly, forgivingly, and above all knowingly.

  He went and entrusted his child to his wife, made some excuse, and bounded down the thirty-three floors. He walked out into Diston with all ten digits raised to his brow, saying to himself, It’s a girl, it’s a girl, it’s a girl …

  It’s a girl!

  He walked on, smiling, listing, dancing within himself. People looked his way wonderingly, as if for all the world he must be on something, and three different Distonites sidled up and asked him if he was selling any.

  “Have a girl,” he earnestly told them, as he swivelled and went home for more. “It isn’t difficult. Go on. Just have a girl.”

  • • •

  After a tasteful interlude (two and a half weeks), Lionel resumed his materialisations at Avalon Tower … It was different now. He entered, his keys gnashing at the locks, he drank a tin of Cobra, he changed his clothes, he slipped out. He returned, not at daybreak, but at two or three in the afternoon. He drank a cup of tea, changed his clothes, and slipped out again.

  And he didn’t seem to see Cilla. He stood there while being told about her latest stunts and accomplishments. And he always brought her something (his presents were notable for their bulk—a customised tricycle, a lifesize teddy bear). But he didn’t seem to see Cilla. And she didn’t seem to see him.

  On the other hand, Lionel spontaneously desisted from smoking his cigars and Marlboro Hundreds in the passage, the kitchen, and the bathroom. He repaired to the balcony for his smokes, leaning on the rail and gazing out over Diston. Lionel had a new quality: he could be ignored. His presence no longer filled the room, the flat, the floor, the tower … And his banker’s orders, now, covered all the rent.

  Still, there were times that stayed in Desmond’s mind. Like that Saturday morning, early on, when Lionel was accompanied by one of his dogs (Jak). He didn’t say hello. Man and animal went within, and the bedroom door remained quarter open for an utterly silent hour. Then the Pepperdines glimpsed the slab of his suit in the passage and the dog giving them a haunted glance over its shoulder.

  “She’s not normal, is she,” he said. “She never cries. And she sleeps through the night. They’re not meant to do that.”

  Cilla proudly slept through the night in what they called her perch: the hip-high trestle table with raised sides, like a clothes drawer on legs. In this flanked hollow her basket lay.

  “Well of course she’s not normal. She’s nearly two months behind. She’s a young baby. But you’re right.”

  “She’s not normal. Have you ever heard her cry?”

  Cilla’s first smile was scheduled for thirteen weeks—or so, at least, the baby books had warned. But Dawn imposed a ban on baby books (which her husband didn’t fully observe). They waited.

  And what was this? In the fourth week she straightened her neck, more or less, and began to take a shrewd interest in baby books of her own (principally Mr. Man); in the fifth, she made cooing sounds and, coached by Dawn, became near-fluent in motherese; in the sixth, she could brandish a rattle; and in the seventh …

  That was a smile, they were always saying. No it wasn’t. That was wind. A windy smile … That was a smile. No it wasn’t. That was a yawn. A yawny smile.

  And then, in the seventh week, she smiled—irrefutably. You suddenly knew what an extraordinary thing a smile was, how kaleidoscopically it transformed the eyes.

  “She wasn’t prem,” Dawn decided. “She was ready. Her body was little but her mind was ready. She was bored inside. That’s all.”

  And once she started smiling—she couldn’t stop.

  “It’s not normal,” he said.

  “She’s just pleased to be here.”

  “But she smiles at everyone.”

  This was true. On the street,
in the park—Diston seemed to be incapable of coming up with anyone that she didn’t immediately and passionately admire.

  “Des, she’s not normal.”

  “No.”

  “She’s fabulous.”

  “She is,” he said. “She’s magic … But it’s not normal for a baby to smile like that. All the time.”

  “There. Listen. She’s crying! You say she never cries—and she’s crying. Now are you happy?”

  “… She’s not crying. She’s singing!”

  But it is common, it is everyday, it is normal. Hear the vans? “Hush, Little Baby,” “Star Light, Star Bright,” “Golden Slumbers Kiss Your Eyes,” “Hark, Hark, the Dogs Do Bark,” “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” … If it’s true what they say, if it’s true that happiness writes white, then decency insists that we withdraw, passing over to the three of them a quire—no, a ream—of blank pages.

  XX

  Nothing really out of the ordinary happened between October 2012 and July 2013.

  Marlon’s brother Charlton was arrested after an altercation with his mother, Mercy Welkway (in the course of which she broke her hip). That same week Ringo was given another three months for Benefits Fraud. Horace Sheringham, these days, was in and out of various clinics and hospitals (and in and out of various pubs and bars and off-licences and supermarkets). Come the New Year, fate would install him at Diston General (where, ipso facto, he only had a seventy-eight per cent chance of getting out alive). According to Prunella, Horace had no intention whatsoever of reconsidering his stand on Dawn.

  Lionel Asbo, during this period, attracted the attention of the press on several counts—an intrusion at “Wormwood Scrubs,” for example, which gave rise to lively public debate. But it was the dullest and feeblest of these stories (the idlest, the tritest) that proved to be by far the most transformative …

  In early autumn Sebastian Drinker announced that Lionel was probably going to take a financial interest in West Ham United Football Club. The season was by then in its seventh week, and the Hammers had yet to win a point or even score a goal. From the directors’ box at Upton Park (unaccompanied by “Threnody,” who was still bedridden with grief) Lionel witnessed the monotonous calamities in east London; but he also witnessed the monotonous calamities in stadiums as far flung as Stoke, Bolton, Portsmouth, Sunderland … And the following morning you’d see, on the back page of your Sunday tabloid, a foggy photo of the dripping car park at, say, Wigan Athletic, with Lionel sorrowfully finishing his meat pie and his mug of Bovril before scaling the charcoal Venganza (or bending into his new Ferrari). By October, the credits of Match of the Day were closing with a clip of Lionel as he shuffled from the ground, in slow motion, to the strains of the lugubrious West Ham anthem, “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles”: I’m forever blowing bubbles, Pretty bubbles in the air, They fly so high, nearly reach the sky, Then like my dreams they fade and die … And so Lionel became a kind of national symbol of intransigence, of peculiarly English intransigence in the face of relentlessly blighted hopes.