Free Lionel Asbo: State of England by Martin Amis Page A

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,