‘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.