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To evoke the London borough of Diston, we turn to the poetry of Chaos:

Each thing hostile
To every other thing: at every point
Hot fought cold, moist dry, soft hard, and the weightless
Resisted weight.

So Des lived his life in tunnels. The tunnel from flat to school, the tunnel (not the same tunnel) from school to flat. And all the warrens that took him to Grace, and brought him back again. He lived his life in tunnels … And yet for the sensitive soul, in Diston Town, there was really only one place to look. Where did the eyes go? They went up, up.

School – Squeers Free, under a sky of white: the weakling headmaster, the demoralised chalkies in their rayon tracksuits, the ramshackle little gym with its tripwires and booby traps, the Lifestyle Consultants (Every Child Matters), and the Special Needs Coordinators (who dealt with all the ‘non-readers’). In addition, Squeers Free set the standard for the most police call-outs, the least GCSE passes, and the highest truancy rates. It also led the pack in suspensions, expulsions, and PRU ‘offrolls’; such an offroll – a transfer to a Pupil Referral Unit – was usually the doorway to a Youth Custody Centre and then a Young Offender Institution. Lionel, who had followed this route, always spoke of his five and a half years (on and off) in a Young Offender Institution (or Yoi, as he called it) with rueful fondness, like one recalling a rite of passage – inevitable, bittersweet. I was out for a month, he would typically reminisce. Then I was back up north. Doing me Yoi.

* * *
On the other hand, Squeers Free had in its staff room an exceptional Learning Mentor – a Mr Vincent Tigg.

What’s going on with you, Desmond? You were always an idle little sod. Now you can’t get enough of it. Well, what next?
I fancy modern languages, sir. And history. And sociology. And astronomy. And –
You can’t study everything, you know.
Yes I can. Renaissance boy, innit.
… You want to watch that smile, lad. All right. We’ll see about you. Now off you go.

And in the schoolyard? On the face of it, Des was a prime candidate for persecution. He seldom bunked off, he never slept in class, he didn’t assault the teachers or shoot up in the toilets – and he preferred the company of the gentler sex (the gentler sex, at Squeers Free, being quite rough enough). So in the normal course of things Des would have been savagely bullied, as all the other misfits (swats, wimps, four-eyes, sweating fatties) were savagely bullied – to the brink of suicide and beyond. They called him Skiprope and Hopscotch, but Des wasn’t bullied. How to explain this? To use Uncle Ringo’s favourite expression, it was a no-brainer. Desmond Pepperdine was inviolable. He was the nephew, and ward, of Lionel Asbo.

It was different on the street. Once a term, true, Lionel escorted him to Squeers Free, and escorted him back again the same day (restraining, with exaggerated difficulty, the two frothing pitbulls on their thick steel chains). But it would be foolish to suppose that each and every gangbanger and posse-artist (and every Yardie and jihadi) in the entire manor had heard tell of the great asocial. And it was different at night, because different people, different shapes, levered themselves upward after dark … Des was fleet of foot, but he was otherwise unsuited to life in Diston Town. Second or even first nature to Lionel (who was pronounced ‘uncontrollable’ at the age of eighteen months), violence was alien to Des, who always felt that violence – extreme and ubiquitous though it certainly seemed to be – came from another dimension.

So, this day, he went down the tunnel and attended school. But on his way home he feinted sideways and took a detour. With hesitation, and with deafening self-consciousness, he entered the Public Library on Blimber Road. Squeers Free had a library, of course, a distant Portakabin with a few primers and ripped paperbacks scattered across its floor … But this: rank upon rank of proud-chested bookcases, like lavishly decorated generals. By what right or title could you claim any share of it? He entered the Reading Room, where the newspapers, firmly clamped to long wooden struts, were apparently available for scrutiny. No one stopped him as he approached.

He had of course seen the dailies before, in the corner shop and so on, and there were Gran’s Telegraphs, but his experience of actual newsprint was confined to the Morning Larks that Lionel left around the flat, all scrumpled up, like origami tumbleweeds (there was also the occasional Diston Gazette). Respectfully averting his eyes from the Times, the Independent, and the Guardian, Des reached for the Sun, which at least looked like a Lark, with its crimson logo and the footballer’s fiancée on the cover staggering out of a nightclub with blood running down her neck. And, sure enough, on page three (News in Briefs) there was a hefty redhead wearing knickers and a sombrero.

But then all resemblances ceased. You got scandal and gossip, and more girls, but also international news, parliamentary reports, comment, analysis … Until now he had accepted the Morning Lark as an accurate reflection of reality. Indeed, he sometimes thought it was a local paper (a light-hearted adjunct to the Gazette), such was its fidelity to the customs and mores of his borough. Now, though, as he stood there with the Sun quivering in his hands, the Lark stood revealed for what it was – a daily lads’ mag, perfunctorily posing as a journal of record.

The Sun, additionally to recommend it, had an agony column presided over not by the feckless Jennaveieve, but by a wise-looking old dear called Daphne, who dealt sympathetically, that day, with a number of quite serious problems and dilemmas, and suggested leaflets and helplines, and seemed genuinely …