The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (34 page)

Patrick doubled back and, checking from side to side, weaved his way across the room, and took up a position against the wall.

There she was! With her back to a column and her hands behind her, as if she were tied to a stake, she looked up at the musicians with reverent curiosity. Patrick concentrated madly and imagined her sliding across the floor towards the magnetic field of his chest and stomach. Frowning ferociously, he cast a neurone net over her body and hauled her in like a heavy catch. He whipped mental lassoes around the column she stood beside, and brought her staggering across the floor like a bound slave. Finally, he closed his eyes, took flight, and projected his desire through the room, covering her neck and breasts with kisses.

When he opened his eyes she was gone. Maybe he should have tried conversation. He looked around him indignantly. Where the hell was she? His psychic powers were failing, even though the resurgence of the speed was giving his incompetence a renewed intensity.

He must have her. He must have her, or someone else. He needed contact, skin to skin, muscle to muscle. Above all, he needed the oblivious moment of penetration when, for a second, he could stop thinking about himself. Unless, as too often happened, the appearance of intimacy unleashed a further disembodiment and a deeper privacy. Never mind that. Even if sex sentenced him to an exile which, on top of the usual melancholy, contained the additional irritation of another person’s dumb reproach, the conquest was bound to be exhilarating. Or was it? Who was left to him? Beautiful women were always with someone, unless you happened to catch them in the split second between inconsolable loss and consolation, or in the taxi that was taking them from their principal lover to one of the secondary ones. And if you had a beautiful woman, they always kept you waiting, kept you doubting, because it was the only time they could be sure that you were thinking about them.

Having worked himself up into a state of some bitterness, Patrick strode over to the bar.

‘Jack Daniel’s on the rocks,’ he said to the barman. As he drew back, Patrick checked the girl to his left. She was slightly plump, dark-haired, and marginally pretty. She looked back at him steadily, a good sign.

‘Aren’t you hot in that coat?’ she asked. ‘It is May, you know.’

‘Incredibly hot,’ Patrick admitted with a half-smile, ‘but I’d feel flayed without it.’

‘It’s like a defence mechanism,’ said the girl.

‘Yes,’ drawled Patrick, feeling that she had not captured the full subtlety and poignancy of his overcoat. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked as casually as possible.

‘Rachel.’

‘Mine’s Patrick. Can I offer you a drink?’ Christ, he sounded like a parody of someone making conversation. Everything had taken on a threatening or facetious aspect that made it harder than ever to climb down from the position of an observer. Perhaps she would experience the crushing dullness as a reassuring ritual.

‘Sure. I’d like a beer. A Dos Equis.’

‘Fine,’ said Patrick, catching the barman’s attention. ‘So what kind of work do you do?’ he went on, practically vomiting at the effort of making ordinary conversation and feigning an interest in somebody else.

‘I work in a gallery.’

‘Really?’ said Patrick, hoping he sounded impressed. He seemed to have lost all control over his voice.

‘Yeah, but I really wanna start a gallery of my own.’

Here we go again, thought Patrick. The waiter who thinks he’s an actor, the actor who thinks he’s a director, the taxi driver who thinks he’s a philosopher. All the signs are good at this point, the deal is about to happen, there’s a lot of interest from the record companies … a city full of phoney aggressive fantasists and, of course, a few genuinely unpleasant people with power.

‘Only, I need the financial backing,’ she sighed.

‘Why do you want to start out on your own?’ he asked, concerned and yet encouraging.

‘I don’t know if you’re familiar with Neo-Objective art, but I think it’s going to be really major,’ said Rachel. ‘I know a lot of the artists and I’d like to get their careers started while everybody else is still ignoring them.’

‘I’m sure that won’t be for long.’

‘That’s why I gotta move quickly.’

‘I’d love to see some Neo-Objective art,’ said Patrick earnestly.

‘I could arrange that,’ said Rachel, looking at him in a new light. Was this the financial backing she had been waiting for? His overcoat might be weird, but it looked expensive. It might be kinda cool to have an eccentric English backer who wasn’t going to breathe down her neck.

‘I do a little collecting,’ Patrick lied. ‘By the way, would you like a Quaalude?’

‘I don’t really do drugs,’ said Rachel, wrinkling her nose.

‘Neither do I,’ said Patrick. ‘I just happen to have one floating around. Somebody gave it to me ages ago.’

‘I don’t need to get high to have fun,’ said Rachel coolly.

She’s on for it, she’s definitely on for it, thought Patrick. ‘You’re so right,’ he said, ‘it spoils the magic – makes people unreal.’ His heartbeat accelerated; he’d better clinch the deal. ‘Do you want to come back to my hotel? I’m staying at the Pierre.’

The Pierre, thought Rachel; all the signs were good. ‘Sure,’ she smiled.

14

TWO THIRTY ACCORDING TO
the clock next to the St Christopher medallion. That gave him about five hours. More than enough, more than a lifetime’s worth of conversation with Rachel. He smiled at her vaguely. What could he tell her? That his father had just died? That he was a drug addict? That he was leaving for the airport in five hours? That his girlfriend really wouldn’t mind? He certainly didn’t want to ask her any more questions about herself. Nor did he want to hear her views on Nicaragua.

‘I’m feeling kinda hungry,’ said Rachel uneasily.

‘Hungry?’

‘Yeah, I got this craving for chilli.’

‘Well, I’m sure we can get you some on room service,’ said Patrick, who knew perfectly well that there was no chilli on the Pierre’s all-night menu and would have disapproved if there had been.

‘But there’s this diner where they make like the greatest chilli in the entire world,’ said Rachel, sitting up eagerly. ‘I
really
wanna go there.’

‘Right,’ said Patrick patiently. ‘What’s the address?’

‘Eleventh Avenue and Thirty-eighth.’

‘I’m sorry about this,’ said Patrick to the driver, ‘we’ve changed our minds. Could we go to Eleventh Avenue and Thirty-eighth Street instead?’

‘Eleventh and Thirty-eighth?’ repeated the driver.

‘Yup.’

The diner was a ribbed silver caravan with
TRY OUR FAMOUS CHILI AND TACOS
in red neon outside. It was an offer that Rachel could not resist. A green neon chilli flashed cutely next to a yellow sombrero.

When the giant oval plate arrived loaded with chilli-flavoured minced meat, refried beans, guacamole, and sour cream, topped with bright orange Cheddar and accompanied by speckled ochre tortilla shells, Patrick lit a cigarette in the hope of drawing a veil of thin blue smoke over the pungent heap of spicy food. He took another sip of insipid coffee and sat back as far as possible in the corner of the red plastic bench. Rachel was clearly a nervous overeater, stuffing herself before he stuffed her, or perhaps, very persuasively, trying to put him off sex altogether by wreaking havoc on her digestive system, and saturating her breath with the torrid stench of cheese and chilli.

‘Uh-hum,’ said Rachel appreciatively, ‘I love this food.’

Patrick raised an eyebrow slightly but made no comment.

She piled the chilli into the tortilla, smeared some guacamole on top, and patted down the sour cream with the back of her fork. Finally, she took a pinch of Cheddar between her fingers and sprinkled it on top.

The tortilla flopped open and chilli flooded onto her chin. Giggling, she lifted it with her index finger and forced it back into her mouth.

‘Delicioso,’ she commented.

‘It looks disgusting,’ said Patrick sullenly.

‘You should try some.’

She stooped over the plate and found ingenious angles from which to snap at the collapsing tortilla. Patrick rubbed his eye. It was itching wildly again. He stared out of the window but was drawn back into the arena of its reflections. The tulip-red bar stools on their chrome stems, the hatch into the kitchen, the old man hunched over a cup of coffee and, of course, Rachel like a pig in a trough. It reminded him of the famous painting by whatshisname. Memory getting burned out. The terror of forgetting everything. Hooper … Hopper. Got it. Life in the old dog.

‘Finished?’ asked Patrick.

‘They make a great banana split here,’ said Rachel saucily, still chomping her last mouthful of chilli.

‘Well, don’t restrain yourself,’ said Patrick. ‘Will one be enough?’

‘Don’t you want one too?’

‘No, I do not,’ said Patrick pompously.

Soon a long glass dish arrived on which scoops of chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry ice cream were bracketed by the two halves of a banana, buried under rippling waves of whipped cream and decorated with beads of pink and green candy. Red maraschino cherries ran down the centre like a row of clown’s buttons.

Patrick’s leg twitched up and down involuntarily as he watched Rachel exhume bits of banana from the mound of brightly coloured creams.

‘I’ve given up dairy products,’ she said, ‘but I allow myself these binges sometimes.’

‘So it seems,’ said Patrick stiffly.

He was overcome with loathing and contempt. The girl was completely out of control. Whereas drugs were at least amenable to advertising: life on the edge, exploring the inner Congo, the heart of darkness, outstaring death, returning with the scars and medals of a haunting knowledge, Coleridge, Baudelaire, Leary…; and even if this advertising seemed horribly false to anyone who had taken drugs at all seriously, it wasn’t possible even to pretend that there was anything heroic about an eating problem. And yet there was something unsettlingly familiar about Rachel’s obsessive greed and ridiculous dishonesty.

‘Can we go now?’ snapped Patrick.

‘Yeah, OK,’ said Rachel timidly.

He ordered the check, threw down a twenty-dollar bill before it arrived, and wriggled out of the booth. Another fucking taxi drive, he thought.

*   *   *

‘I feel kinda nau-tious,’ complained Rachel, as they went up in the hotel elevator.

‘I’m not surprised,’ said Patrick severely, ‘I feel nauseous and I was only watching.’

‘Hey, you’re pretty hos-tel.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Patrick, ‘I’m awfully tired.’ Better not lose her now.

‘Me too,’ said Rachel.

Patrick unlocked the door, and switched on the lights.

‘Sorry about the mess.’

‘You should see my apartment.’

‘Maybe I will,’ said Patrick, ‘and all that Neo-Objective art.’

‘Definitely,’ said Rachel. ‘Can I use the bathroom?’

‘Of course.’

Time to mix a quick fix, thought Patrick, as he heard the lock slide closed on the bathroom door. He fished the coke from his suitcase and the smack from his inner left pocket, took the spoon from the back of the bottom drawer, and retrieved the half-bottle of Evian he had hidden, with unnecessary caution, behind the curtain. There might not be many more opportunities, and he’d better make a strong speedball to reduce the number of fixes to a minimum. He mixed the smack and coke together, dissolved them and drew the solution into the syringe.

He was ready, but how long did he have before Rachel emerged from the bathroom? With his hearing strained, like a man listening to his footsteps on a creaking staircase, he concentrated on the sounds coming from the bathroom. The muffled noise of vomiting, followed by a little rasping cough, reassured him that there would be time for a fix.

Taking no risks, he stuck the spike into a thick vein in the back of his hand. The smell of cocaine assailed him and he felt his nerves stretching like piano wires. The heroin followed in a soft rain of felt hammers playing up his spine and rumbling into his skull.

He groaned contentedly and scratched his nose. It was so pleasurable, so fucking pleasurable. How could he ever give up? It was love. It was coming home. It was Ithaca, the end of all his storm-tossed wanderings. He dropped the syringe into the top drawer, staggered across the room, and sprawled on the bed.

Peace at last. The mingling lashes of half-closed eyes, the slow reluctant flutter of folding wings; his body pounded by felt hammers, pulses dancing like sand on a drum; love and poison evacuating his breath in a long slow exhalation, fading into a privacy he could never quite remember, nor for a moment forget. His thoughts shimmered like a hesitating stream, gathering into pools of discrete and vivid imagery.

He pictured his feet walking through a damp London square, his shoes sealing wet leaves darkly to the pavement. In the square, the heat from a heap of smouldering leaves syruped the air, and billows of yellow smoke skewed the sunlight like a broken wheel, its spokes scattered among the balding plane trees. The lawn was littered with dead branches, and from the railings he watched the sad and acrid ceremony, his eyes irritated by the smoke.

Patrick blinked back into the present, scratching his eye. He focused on the painting of a Normandy beach that hung above his desk. Why didn’t the women in long dresses and the straw-hatted men walk into the sea? Was it the sheer gaiety of the parasols that detained them on the beach, or a sentence they must complete before disrobing their flesh in the indifferent water?

Everything was dying, every lifted stone revealed its bed of blind white maggots. He must leave the dank rotting earth and the all-consuming sea, and head for the mountains. ‘I hail you, great mountains!’ he chanted under his breath. ‘Lofty! Alone! Serene! Good for jumping off!’

Patrick giggled feebly. The coke had already sputtered out. He was really beginning to feel rather ghastly. There was only enough for two more good fixes of coke and then he would be condemned to an accelerating agony of disappointment. The speed was perhaps only temporarily eclipsed by the heroin, but even so its performance was bound to be enormously reduced after he’d been awake for so long. The sensible thing to do in a situation like this, when one’s body was a battleground strewn with the carnage of internarcotic wars, was to take the last Quaalude that Rachel had so high-mindedly refused, and try to have a nap on the plane. There was definitely an argument for getting some sleep; namely, that when he woke up the impact of the drugs would be stronger.