Lionel Asbo: State of England Read Free Page B

Did everybody have one, an inner voice? An inner voice that was cleverer than they were? He thought probably not. Then where did it come from?
    Des looked to his family tree – to his personal Tree of Knowledge.
    Well, Grace Pepperdine, Granny Grace, had not attended all that closely to her education, for obvious reasons: she was the mother of seven children by the age of nineteen. Cilla came first. All the rest were boys: John (now a plasterer), Paul (a foreman), George (a plumber), Ringo (unemployed), and Stuart (a seedy registrar). Having run out of Beatles (including the ‘forgotten’ Beatle, Stuart Sutcliffe), Grace exasperatedly christened her seventh child Lionel (after a much lesser hero, the choreographer Lionel Blair). Lionel Asbo, as he would later become, was the youngest of a very large family superintended by a single parent who was barely old enough to vote.
    Although she did the Telegraph crossword (not the Kwik but the Cryptic – she had a weird knack for it), Grace wasn’t otherwise a sharp thinker. Cilla, on the other hand, was as bright as a barrelful of monkeys , according to Lionel . ‘Gifted,’ they said. Top of her class without even trying. Then she got knocked up with you. She was six months gone when she sat her Eleven Plus. Still passed. But after that, after you come, Des, it was all off . Cilla Pepperdine didn’t bear any more children, but she went on to have as riotous a youth as was humanly possible with a baby in the house – a baby, then a toddler, and then a little boy.
    What did he know about his dad? Very little. And it was an ignorance that Cilla largely shared. But everyone knew this about him: he was black. Hence Desmond’s resinous colour, café crème , with the shadow of something darker in it. Rosewood, perhaps: close-grained, and giving off a distinctive fragrance. He was a sweet-smelling youth, and delicately put together, with regular mint-white teeth and mournful eyes. When he smiled in the mirror, he smiled sadly at the ghost of his father – at the ghost of the lost begetter. But in the waking world he only saw him once.
    They were walking up Steep Slope, hand in hand, Des (seven) and Cilla (nineteen), after a spree at the funfair in Happy Valley, when she said suddenly,
    ‘It’s him !’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Your father! … Look. He’s you! … Mouth. Nose. Christ!’
    Very poorly dressed, and shockingly shod, Des’s father was on a metal bench, sitting between a soiled yellow rucksack and five empty flagons of Strongbow. For several minutes Cilla tried to rouse him, with violent shakes and nails-only pinches and, towards the end, alarmingly loud wallops delivered with the flat of her hand.
    ‘D’you think he’s dead ?’ Cilla leaned down and put an ear to his chest. ‘This sometimes works,’ she said – and intently, lingeringly, kissed his eyes … ‘Hopeless.’ She straightened up and gave Des’s father one last deafening clout. ‘Oh well. Come on, darling.’
    She took his hand and walked off fast and Des stumbled along beside her with his head still veering wildly round.
    ‘You sure it’s him, Mum?’
    ‘Course I’m sure. Don’t be cheeky!’
    ‘Mum, stop! He’s waking up. Go and kiss his eyes again. He’s stirring.’
    ‘No. It’s just the wind, love. And I wanted to ask him something. I wanted to ask him his name.’
    ‘You said his name was Edwin!’
    ‘That was a guess. You know me. I can remember a face – but I can’t remember a name. Ah, Crybaby. Don’t …’ She crouched down beside him. ‘Listen. I’m sorry, sweetheart. But what can I say? He came and went in an afternoon!’
    ‘You said it lasted a whole week!’
    ‘Ah, don’t. Don’t, darling. It breaks my heart … Listen. He was nice. He was gentle. That’s where you get your religion from.’
    ‘I’m not religious,’ he said, and blew into the tissue she was pressing to his nose. ‘I hate church. I just like the stories. The miracles.’
    ‘Well it’s where