Desmond’s frown asked the question.
“The mood to do a tart. Here. Up in me room.” Lionel’s features now came as close as they ever did to expressing apology or self-reproach. “See, Des, with me sexuality being what it is—there has to be pain … This is it. This is it. Don’t know why. But there has to be pain.” He said, “So the Gina relationship’s obviously ideal. For now. You know, I’m doing her in the normal way. And with every thrust,” every frust, “I’m causing pain … But you can’t say I’m hurting Gina, can you. She likes it rough in the first place. But you can’t say I’m hurting Gina.”
“… How’s Gina feel about it?”
“Ah, with her it’s all Marlon. Gaw, them two. Talk about love–hate—they like Kilkenny cats. With they tails tied together. Gina’s spiting him, see, because Marlon’s giving her kid sister one. Little Foozaloo. Well he’s got to do something, hasn’t he. Keep his end up. How much can he take? And it won’t end there. It won’t end there. He’ll do her. He’ll mark her. He’ll have to.”
Des swallowed and said, “What about with Cynthia? D’you hurt Cynthia?”
“Cynthia? How could you hurt Cynthia? I mean look at the state of her. Hurt what?” Lionel poured, Lionel drank. Suddenly but glazedly he said, “With them DILFs, Des. She goes, Come on then. Let’s have it you … unbelievable … fucking yoik. Let’s have it. And it’s got a lovely sneer on its face. And you think, Okay. Let’s deal with that lovely sneer. And believe me. When you giving her one, she ain’t sneering no more.”
Des swallowed again and said, “It’s important, is it? Dealing with the sneer?”
“Ooh yeah,” said Lionel. “Ooh yeah.”
As Lionel gazed at the rolling booze in his glass, Des realised that there’d been no mention whatever, in the erotic sphere, of “Threnody”—Lionel’s fiancée.
“Des. Be honest. Tell me straight. Have you ever thought that there was anything … not quite kosher in uh, my attitude to skirt?”
“Well we’re all different. I’m a bit puritanical. Dawn says. And too needy. We’re all different.”
“She made me go … ‘Threnody’ made me go and see a bloke about it. About me sexuality. Cavendish Square. In a flash old flat in Cavendish Square. And you’ll never guess what this geezer goes and tells me. Grace. Grace. He reckons it’s all down to Grace.”
“How’s he work that one out?”
“He says, Lionel, when you having intercourse, do you find there’s a rage … waiting for you? As if ready-made? I said, Yeah. Ready-made. You put you finger on it. We talk it over, and he says, Well it’s obvious. You got a fucking slag for a mum, mate. Well, not in them exact words. He says, And the evidence was there before you eyes! From when you was a baby!”
“Before your eyes, Uncle Li?”
“Before you eyes, Uncle Li? Use you head, Desmond Pepperdine. I’m an infant. And there’s all these fucking brothers! This fucking zoo of brothers!”
It wasn’t the first time Des had considered it from Lionel’s perspective—from the perspective of someone in a highchair with a pacifier in his mouth: John like a Norse albino, swarthy and piratical Paul, George with a face as flat and square as a tablemat (and sandblasted with freckles), thick-lidded, mandarinic Ringo—and of course the seedily Silesian Stuart. Des said,
“Well there was Cilla.”
“Yeah. Cilla. Me so-called twin … And five brothers—and a mum who’s barely eighteen years of age. It wasn’t right, Des. I mean, after that, after all that—how can a man trust minge?”
Five minutes passed in silence. Then Lionel looked at his watch and said, “Doing it with schoolboys …”
Schoolboys: it had the force of an ethnic or tribal anathema. Schoolboys, like Hutus or Uighurs.
“You okay, Desi? I’m off out.”
So Des readied himself—readied himself for the six-minute dash down Murdstone Road, through Jupes Lanes, across Carker Square, and beyond. But no. Lionel made a call, and Des went back to Avalon Tower by courtesy car.
“All right, son,” said Lionel on the forecourt. And they embraced.
Through the tinted windscreen you could see the purity of the lunar satellite, D-shaped in the royal-blue distance. The dark side was subtly visible—as if the Man in the Moon was wearing a watch cap of black felt.
Dawn came in at one.
“Did he see you?”
“No,” she said and switched off the light. “He didn’t see me …”
For a while he comforted her, and soon she sighed for the last time, and then she slept. But Des did not sleep. He was still awake when Lionel stomped in around seven (he could hear, over and above the hobnailed-boot effect, the subtle flinch of each and every floorboard). And the two men arose within a few minutes of each other at four o’clock on Sunday afternoon.
Dawn was back at the hospital, so uncle and nephew had a sentimental breakfast: Pop-Tarts (Des ran down).
… What was it that kept him awake?
During his night out with Lionel he was helplessly infused with somatic memories. His body kept remembering. The crown of his head and the tight curls of his hair remembered what it was like, as a boy of five, to feel the weight of that palm whenever his eleven-year-old uncle readied him to cross the road. His whole frame remembered what it was like, later, to walk the hissing streets of Diston with Lionel alongside him, the guarantee of his nearness, like a carapace. And as they parted at the Sleeping Beauty, and they embraced, Des’s body remembered itself at twelve, thirteen, fourteen, during the time of numbness and Cillalessness: once a month or so, Lionel would look at him with unusual candour, and there’d be an unimpatient lift of the chin, and he’d say, She’s gone, Desi, and she ain’t coming back, or, Okay, boy. I know. I know. But you can’t just sit there and pine; and he’d give him a hug (though not enough—never enough), murmuring, There there, son. There there … So, in the forecourt, as Lionel said, All right, son, and he felt the great arms and the engulfing torso, Des (as he thought about this, lying next to Dawn with his eyes open) found that love flared up in him.
Which was one half of it.
The other half, like the dark side of the half-moon, had to do with fear … Cilla went, Cilla was gone, excised, leaving a monstrous void behind her; and Des looked to Grace, and together they found the wrong kind of love. There it was. And there was nothing he could do about it, then or now. Unresisting, even so. Fifteen! … Over time the fear had become manageable—it was his default condition, roiling him when nothing else was roiling him; it no longer aspired to the paroxysms of 2006 (Dear Daphne, Gran’s groans, Ooh, they’ll love him inside, the youth in the Squeers blazer). Still, he soberly and of course ignobly reasoned that the fear wouldn’t die until Grace died—or until Lionel died.
It bestrode his sleep. And sometimes, when the nights were huge, he felt the rending need for confession—for capitulation, castigation, crucifixion … Then morning came, and the pieces of life once again coalesced.
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 straitjacketed 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 crush-crowd (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 p
repared.”
“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.