As early as Wednesday morning Des passed the corner shop and saw a familiar face staring helplessly out at him through the sweating glass: Have You Seen This Boy? The same sign was tacked to the door of the sub-post office. At school, a greatcoated police officer stood at the gates and, within, there were eager rumours about the two plainclothesmen who were questioning everyone in year ten. Des sat bent at his desk beneath his personal thunderhead; but nothing happened, and Wednesday passed. On Thursday there were stickers gummed to every other lamp post in Carker Square—plus a filler in the Sun (Another Diston Lad Missing). And in Friday’s Gazette there was a report, on page twelve, entitled “We Are At Our Wits’ End.” Already on Tuesday morning, Joy Nightingale was quoted as saying, I knew something terrible had happened. I felt it here in my throat. Because he always calls in, without fail. No matter wherever he is, he always calls in. Two photographs: Rory between his parents on a park bench at Happy Valley, smiling over a cloud of candyfloss; and Joy and Ernest at home, on a low settee, and hand in hand. If anyone knows anything, then please, please, please …
“He’s standing there at the door. I hadn’t seen him in five years. Five years. Not since he smashed up poor Toby. And he says, Hello Mum. Here. Hold this. And he’s put this sticker on my face, this thing sticking to my face … And my knees went and I sank down. I sank down, dear.”
Entirely unadorned, entirely undisguised, Grace was sitting by the window in her usual chair. But no music played, no folded Telegraph rested on her lap, no teacup steamed on the little round table, no Silk Cut twined its spirals in the saucer ashtray.
“Look at me, Des.”
He looked. The fluffy pink slippers huddled together, the arms leanly and stiffly folded, the notched mouth, the sepia ringlets, the weak grey stare. And he imagined the blank grid of a crossword, with no answers and no clues.
“Oh, it’s all up with me now, love,” she said, and hugged herself tighter. “I can’t close my eyes. The boy. I can’t close my eyes for fear of what I’ll see.”
11
Lionel was on the balcony with Joe and Jeff. With Joe, Jeff, the break stick, the lunge pole, the plastic bucket, the twelve-pack of Special Brew, the sagging cardboard box. Beyond him, the usual London sky. The white-van sky of London.
Des dropped his satchel and went on out.
“Seize. And hold,” said Lionel. “Seize. And hold.”
“… You giving them a drink tonight?”
“Yeah. I’m doing a deep-eye in the morning. For Marlon. There’s a nasty nip in the air over in Rotherhithe. And I’m going to go and sort him out. See the new doll?”
Lionel’s sagging cardboard box contained half a dozen joke-shop rubber effigies, a black, a brown, a tan, a pale. The new doll was Fu Manchu-ish, with tendril moustache.
“Why?” said Des, with an edge in his voice. “What for?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.” He shrugged. “We cousins. We help each other out. You don’t ask what for.”
Des went back inside and sat down hard on a kitchen chair. He had just seen Joy Nightingale on Creakle Street—Mrs. Nightingale, alone. With his heart thudding in his ears he watched her plod by, eerily and wrongly alone; no Ernest matched her step, no Ernest held her hand … Clutch. And clench, said Lionel, wielding the lunge pole, with the drool-soaked Chinaman speared on its pointed end … Now Des closed his eyes—and what did he see? Rory. But Rory wasn’t dead; he was deathless; the immortal boy kept disappearing and reappearing—kept being plucked apart, and put together again, and plucked apart again … Straddle, grab, sunder, said Lionel, wielding the break stick. The break stick was a kind of hardwood chisel. In it went between the dog’s back teeth. Then came the vicious twist.
One by one the twelve tall cans of Special Brew were primed like grenades and upended over the plastic bucket.
“Here. Ringo won the Lottery again. Guess how much.”
“… How much?”
“A tenner. The Lottery’s a mug’s game if you ask me.” Lionel was leafing with quiet satisfaction through the Diston Gazette (the Diston Gazette had had time to fill up again, like a sump). Behind him, their tails high, Joe and Jeff licked and lapped with clopping sounds. “It’s funny. A missing girl—that’ll hold they attention for a bit. But a missing boy? It’s as if he’s never been … See this, Des? Jesus. That’s senseless, that is. That’s senseless.”
Des now had before him the front page and a headline saying THE LOOK OF GUILT and the dismally mesmerised faces of six young men, all of them black.
“Six of them. Gangers,” Lionel went on. “So six London Fields Boys come down here. They come down here to put theyselves about. And they go and top this fifteen-year-old. All six of them! That’s senseless, that is. And he wasn’t even white!”
On page four there was a photograph of the mother, Venus, and a photograph of the boy, Dashiel. A parent never expects their child to die before them, said Venus in her statement at the Old Bailey, especially when they are taken away so suddenly, the victim of the violent brutality of others. The mother, in the photograph, still young, elegantly ear-ringed, lawyerly in a woollen coat with what looked like a thick velvet ruff. And the boy, Dashiel, his skin the colour of rosewood …
“Now they going down for fifteen years. Six of them. That’s what? Ninety years for one little kid!”
All he would do was look at you with those big eyes and your heart just melted. Everyone loved his eyes. The boy, against a green setting, with his hair in tight rows, his spearmint teeth, his eyes, flirtatiously sunlit.
“That goes against all reason. Violates all reason.”
Dashiel was a “free spirit” who enjoyed the sun, the sea and Mother Nature on summer holidays in Jamaica with his grandmother …
“All right. Say uh, Dashiel was being a bit annoying. Needs to be taught a lesson. Fair enough. But you don’t all go and do it. You turn to you mates and say, Any volunteers? You say, Whose turn is it? But oh no. All six of them get life! That’s senseless, that is.”
“Did you kill him Uncle Li?”
“Come again?”
“Did you kill him?”
“Who? Rory? Now Desmond,” he said soberly. “Why would I do that? I mean he’s nothing to me is he.”
“Yeah. Nothing.”
“All he is is some little slag who goes to you school. What am I, a ganger? Out boying? Like a wild animal? … No, Des. I just fixed him up with a uh—with a circle of new friends. I didn’t kill him. I sold him.”
And Des had a vision of another grainy gallery, in the Gazette or the Sun or the Daily Telegraph, with six faces on it, all white this time, but not otherwise similar (a beard, a shining pate, a pair of rimless spectacles)—no, with nothing else in common except pallor, unreadable eyes, and a fixity of sullen purpose in the thinness of the lips. Lionel said,
“Reset. I didn’t kill him. I sold him. Ooh. Où—I gave him sexy.”
Left alone, Des gazed out at the pissed dogs. They reeled in circles, worrying one another’s tails, and listing sideways as if on sloping ground. Joe turned, and they both reared up in a ragged clinch, and then, with their claws scraping for purchase, collapsed in an entanglement of haunch and crotch and snout. Finding his feet, Jeff began to make moan, a song or dirge addressed to the evening gloom.
Now Lionel filled the doorway in shell top and baseball cap. “Off out,” he said. “And be reasonable, Des. What you expect? He gave my mum one. And if you fuck my mum, there’s going to be consequences. Obviously. Here. Catch.”
As he moved off Lionel lobbed something in the air. Des caught it: tiny, gluey, heavy. He straightened his fingers—and the trinket seemed to leap from his palm. Warily he crouched to pick it up. A metal loop smeared with dried blood and an additional gout of pink tissue. Rory’s lip ring.
For those who harmed him, one day they will understand the meaning of love and the pain that you feel when you lose a loved one.
A knot is in our hearts that will not undo. A light has
been dimmed and put out of our lives.
We never had a chance to say goodbye to Dashiel. We know he is resting, he is safe and he is at peace. I heard once that grief is the price we pay for love.
Desmond’s head wagged back … When Cilla fell that time—it was just a little slip, just a little slip on the supermarket floor. Down she went on her elbows and shoulder blades, and her head wagged back. But she was laughing when she got to her feet. And then the next day she wouldn’t wake up. He smoothed her, he pinched her, he shook her. He kissed her eyes. She was breathing, but she wouldn’t wake up.
… Minutes later, as he stood wiping his cheeks and chin and throat with a kitchen towel, he looked out through the glass of the sliding door. The dogs: their sloppy faces, their tongues hanging from the corners of their jaws like something half-eaten, their blind eyes and staring nostrils, their forelimbs planted stupidly far apart. They thickly barked. And they weren’t barking out—they were barking in.
Fuckoff, said Joe.
Fuckoff, said Jeff.
XII
Nothing really out of the ordinary happened between 2006 and 2009.
Lionel Asbo served five prison terms, two months for Receiving Stolen Property, two months for Extortion With Menaces, two months for Receiving Stolen Property, two months for Extortion With Menaces, and two months for Receiving Stolen Property. There was also, in the spring of 2009, his arrest and incarceration on the rare charge of Grievous Affray (plus Criminal Damage)—but that’s another story.
When Des turned seventeen (by that time he had found a way of coexisting with his conscience), Lionel gave him a course of driving lessons in the Ford Transit. Quietly discounting Lionel’s general advice (overtake whenever you can, use the horn as often as possible, never stop at zebra crossings, amber always means go), Des saved up for the Test, memorised the Highway Code, and conducted himself, on the day, with elderly sanctimony—and passed first time! … It was the way they’d always seemed to manage it. The anti-dad, the counterfather. Lionel spoke; Des listened, and did otherwise.
During these years Grace Pepperdine’s life became a monothematic saga of anxiety, weight loss, heart palpitations, insomnia, depression, chronic fatigue, and osteoporosis. In addition, she kept mislaying things. Her phone would find its way into her bathroom cabinet; her doorkeys would hide behind the frozen peas in her fridge. Someone went round there every day—almost invariably Des, but often Paul, and frequently John, George, and Stuart (though seldom Ringo, and never Lionel).
Joe was shot dead by an Armed Response marksman in the summer of 2008. Out for a stroll with Cynthia (Lionel was away), Joe attacked a police horse, with a policewoman on it, in Carker Square. He was under its clattering hooves for the entire length of Diston High Street and for seven and a half miles up on the London Orbital, with the heavy chain slithering and scintillating in his wake. With Joe gone, Jeff inconsolably pined and sickened. And when he was next out of prison Lionel decided to make a fresh start. He sold Jeff for a token sum to one of Marlon’s brothers (Troy), and purchased two pedigree pitbull pups—Joel and Jon.
There were no further developments in the Rory Nightingale case (which, all the same, was not yet officially closed) … Des started calling on Rory’s parents, Joy and Ernest; he drank a mug of tea with them every couple of weeks, and ran errands; they said they found comfort, and not anguish, in his youth, his purple blazer, the space he filled. During his visits he thought many things, most often this: what an hourly mockery and misery it could be—the name Joy.
Meanwhile, Des had set about astonishing Squeers Free. In 2006 he sat his GCSEs—and got eleven A’s! He was transferred, on the Gifted Programme, to Blifil Hall, where, in 2007, he sat his A-levels—and picked up four distinctions! He was sixteen. Next, he was offered a provisional place (he would have to survive the interview) at Queen Anne’s College! Queen Anne’s College—of the University of London … It took him a long time to break the news to Lionel. Lionel was bitterly opposed to higher education.
• • •
Des continued, off and on, to see a fair bit of Alektra, then a fair bit of Jade, then a fair bit of Chanel (who was Irish). Try being gentle, Chanel, he said to her late one night. All soft and romantic. Go on. You’re adventurous. Try being gentle. See what you think. A week later she said, I like it with you, Des. All romantic. All soft and dreamy. I don’t know why, but it’s just a better ride.
And then, in 2008, when he went for his interview at Queen Anne’s College, Des met Dawn Sheringham, and everything changed.
For a while it seemed that a similar transformation had already surprised Uncle Lionel. What happened was this. In the Indian summer of 2008, Gina Drago broke up with Marlon Welkway. The problem was as always Marlon’s gambling (and rumour spoke of a tooth-and-claw catfight between Gina and a croupier named Antoinette—one of Marlon’s exes—in a Jupes Lanes spieler). Anyway, the next thing everyone knew, Gina had homed in on Lionel Asbo!
Now what? A faithful reader of Dear Daphne and other forums, Des prepared himself for the expected benefits. How would Daphne put it? Although your uncle is obviously a late developer, there should presently be a steady easing of tension as he adopts a more … It wasn’t like that. No, Daphne, it isn’t like that, he muttered (Des often had these dialogues with Daphne, in the hours between waking and rising).
He’s more nerve-racking than ever! He comes on all cool and masterful, but his hands tremble and his eyes are all over the place. I don’t understand Gina either. Indoors, she treats him like he isn’t there, and they never touch or kiss or smile. But on the street she’s all over him. I saw them once on a bench outside the Hobgoblin. Gina was up on his lap, straddling his thighs in her catsuit and tutu! What’s her game? Personally speaking, mind, it has to be said that I …
It had to be said, personally speaking, that Des was riveted by Gina. Always in the highest good humour, she was a dark mass of roundnesses with vivid eyes and silky cheeks (her colouring further beautified, somehow, by the pale traces of adolescent acne on the hinges of her jaw). At any moment she’d jump to her feet and do a whole scene from (say) a Sicilian operetta, with all the choruses, the voices, the dances … Lionel watched these displays with an expression Des had never seen before. A false smile, and a remarkably talentless false smile: he simply hooked his upper lip over his front teeth, and that was that (Lionel’s front teeth were white and square, but so broadly spaced that you thought of a cut-out pumpkin on Halloween). She never spent the night. They went off to her maisonette in Doyce Grove. For Gina wasn’t just Miss Diston; she was also Lady Town—the favourite daughter of the controversial coin-op king and used-car czar, Jayden Drago.
Gina passed many an hour helping Des with his Italian, his Spanish, and his French (and she knew Basque too—and even Mallorquin!). So Daphne, what do you think? Why would a girl who can speak six languages go around with a bloke who can barely speak English? Plus she’s a famous sexpot—and he’s almost a virgin! What’s Jezebel doing with Joseph? What’s the princess see in the frog? What’s Gina’s game?
One half-term morning in the chill fall of 2008 he looked in on Gran and found her frowning over the Daily Telegraph with a biro in her hand. He said encouragingly, Back on the crosswords, are we?
There was a silence, and without looking up she said, One clue. For a week I’ve been staring at it. One clue.
… But Gran, some are more difficult than others. You always said. Depends on the setters. They vary.
She handed it over. And the crossword, it wasn’t the Cryptic—it was the Kwik! The single clue that Grace had solved, or at least filled in, was 22 down. It went, Garden of– – – –(4). And in the bottom right-hand corner of the grid she had written, ENED.
And even that’s not quite right, is it.
No, not quite.
… So I’m going daft now am I?
Their eyes met.
Des. What happens when I don’t know what I’m saying?
It’ll pass, Gran. br />
… I won’t be able to open my eyes. I won’t be able to close my mouth.
No, Gran. The other way round.
And he felt he was preparing for a long voyage on a dark sea where, one by one, all the stars would be going out.
Why was Gina Drago seeing Lionel Asbo? Because she wanted to spite and goad—and thus reactivate—Marlon Welkway. Des tried always to be elsewhere; but anyone could tell how it was shaping. Gina’s pink cellphone, with its lip-prints and snowdrop spangles, took on terrible powers: every chirrup had the rousting force of a siren. She would answer it, saying, Well you should’ve thought of that, or Eff off, or, simply, Fuera! But sometimes she would get to her feet and laughingly leave the room with the instrument nestling in the cusp of her throat. Des kept his eyes on the floor … Whether Lionel had words with Marlon was not known; but nothing changed, nothing happened, until November, when destiny ponderously intervened in the form of RSP: Lionel received some stolen property, and was arrested for it.
He got two months in Wormwood Scrubs in west London. Des went to visit him on Boxing Day. The interminable bus ride, the blasted heath. Lionel, in his wrinkly dark-blue overalls, stood at the counter of the commissary snackbar. They ordered, and went to the square table with their hot chocolates and their bags of Maltesers. Over the years Des had visited his uncle in a great variety of prisons (and borstals and Yois), and Lionel, even when settling in for a much longer stay, never seemed more than mildly inconvenienced (Prison’s not too bad, he often said. You know where you are in prison). But today he sat in a propulsive crouch on the very brink of the tin chair. RSP, he kept direly saying, and shaking his head. RSP! … Des couldn’t understand why this should seem so staggering in itself, because Lionel was arrested for RSP two or three times a year. But as dusk fell (and as the wardens wordlessly impended with their keys), Lionel said,