The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (20 page)

‘Have you been to see your father yet?’ she asked outright.

‘I did see him,’ said Patrick without hesitation. ‘I thought he was at his best in a coffin – so much less difficult than usual.’ He grinned at her disarmingly.

Anne smiled at him faintly, but Patrick needed no encouragement.

‘When I was young,’ he said, ‘my father used to take us to restaurants. I say “restaurants” in the plural, because we never stormed in and out of less than three. Either the menu took too long to arrive, or a waiter struck my father as intolerably stupid, or the wine list disappointed him. I remember he once held a bottle of red wine upside down while the contents gurgled out onto the carpet. “How dare you bring me this filth?” he shouted. The waiter was so frightened that instead of throwing him out, he brought more wine.’

‘So you liked being with him in a place he didn’t complain about.’

‘Exactly,’ said Patrick. ‘I couldn’t believe my luck, and for a while I expected him to sit up in his coffin, like a vampire at sunset, and say, “The service here is intolerable.” Then we would have had to go to three or four other funeral parlours. Mind you, the service
was
intolerable. They sent me to the wrong corpse.’

‘The wrong corpse!’ exclaimed Anne.

‘Yes, I wound up at a jaunty Jewish cocktail party given for a Mr Hermann Newton. I wish I could have stayed; they seemed to be having such fun…’

‘What an appalling story,’ said Anne, lighting a cigarette. ‘I’ll bet they give courses in Bereavement Counselling.’

‘Of course,’ said Patrick, letting out another quick hollow laugh and sinking back into his armchair. He could definitely feel the influence of the Quaaludes now. The alcohol had brought out the best in them, like the sun coaxing open the petals of a flower, he reflected tenderly.

‘I’m sorry?’ he said. He had not heard Anne’s last question.

‘Is he being cremated?’ she repeated.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Patrick. ‘I gather that when people are cremated one never really gets their ashes, just some communal rakings from the bottom of the oven. As you can imagine, I regard that as good news. Ideally,
all
the ashes would belong to somebody else, but we don’t live in a perfect world.’

Anne had given up wondering whether he was sorry about his father’s death, and had started wishing he was a little sorrier. His venomous remarks, although they could not affect David, made Patrick look so ill he might have been waiting to die from a snakebite.

Patrick closed his eyes slowly and, after a very long time, slowly opened them again. The whole operation took about half an hour. Another half an hour elapsed while he licked his dry and fascinatingly sore lips. He was really getting something off that last Quaalude. His blood was hissing like a television screen after closedown. His hands were like dumbbells, like dumbbells in his hands. Everything folding inward and growing heavier.

‘Hello there!’ Anne called.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Patrick, leaning forward with what he imagined was a charming smile. ‘I’m awfully tired.’

‘Maybe you ought to go to bed.’

‘No, no, no. Let’s not exaggerate.’

‘You could lie down for a few hours,’ Anne suggested, ‘and then have dinner with Victor and me. We’re going to a party afterward, given by some ghastly Long Island Anglophiles. Just your kind of thing.’

‘It’s sweet of you, but I really can’t face too many strangers at the moment,’ said Patrick, playing his bereavement card a little too late to convince Anne.

‘You should come along,’ she coaxed. ‘I’m sure it will be an example of “unashamed luxury”.’

‘I can’t imagine what that means,’ said Patrick sleepily.

‘Let me give you the address anyhow,’ Anne insisted. ‘I don’t like the idea of your being alone too much.’

‘Fine. Write it down for me before I go.’

He knew he had to take some speed soon or involuntarily take up Anne’s offer to ‘lie down for a few hours’. He did not want to swallow a whole Beauty, because it would take him on a fifteen-hour megalomaniac odyssey, and he didn’t want to be that conscious. On the other hand, he had to get rid of the feeling that he had been dropped into a pool of slowly drying concrete.

‘Where’s the loo?’

Anne told him how to get there, and Patrick waded across the carpet in the direction she had indicated. Once he had locked the bathroom door Patrick felt a familiar sense of security. Inside a bathroom he could give in to the obsession with his own physical and mental state which was so often compromised by the presence of other people or the absence of a well-lit mirror. Most of the ‘quality time’ in his life had been spent in a bathroom. Injecting, snorting, swallowing, stealing, overdosing; examining his pupils, his arms, his tongue, his stash.

‘O bathrooms!’ he intoned, spreading out his arms in front of the mirror. ‘Thy medicine cabinets pleaseth me mightily! Thy towels moppeth up the rivers of my blood…’ He petered out as he took the Black Beauty from his pocket. He was just going to take enough to function, just enough to … what had he been about to say? He couldn’t remember. My God, it was short-term memory loss again, the Professor Moriarty of drug abuse, interrupting and then obliterating the precious sensations one went to such trouble to secure.

‘Inhuman fiend,’ he muttered.

The black capsule eventually came apart and he emptied half the contents onto one of the Portuguese tiles around the basin. Taking out one of his new hundred-dollar notes, he rolled it into a tight tube and sniffed up the small heap of white powder from the tile.

His nose stung and his eyes watered slightly but, refusing to be distracted, Patrick resealed the capsule, wrapped it in a Kleenex, put it back in his pocket and then, for no reason he could identify, almost against his will, he took it out again, emptied the rest of the powder onto a tile and sniffed it up as well. The effects wouldn’t last so long this way, he argued, inhaling deeply through his nose. It was too sordid to take half of anything. Anyhow, his father had just died and he was entitled to be confused. The main thing, the heroic feat, the proof of his seriousness and his samurai status in the war against drugs, was that he hadn’t taken any heroin.

Patrick leaned forward and checked his pupils in the mirror. They had definitely dilated. His heartbeat had accelerated. He felt invigorated, he felt refreshed, in fact he felt rather aggressive. It was as if he had never taken a drink or a drug, he was back in complete control, the lighthouse beams of speed cutting through the thick night of the Quaaludes and the alcohol and the jet lag.

‘And,’ he said, clasping his lapels with mayoral solemnity, ‘last but not least, through the dark shadow, if I might put it thus, of our grief for the passing away of David Melrose.’

How long had he been in the bathroom? It seemed like a lifetime. The fire brigade would probably be forcing the door down soon. Patrick started to clear up hastily. He didn’t want to put the shell of the Black Beauty into the waste-paper basket (paranoia!) and so he forced the two halves of the empty capsule down the basin plughole. How was he going to explain his reanimated state to Anne? He splashed some cold water on his face and left it ostentatiously dripping. There was only one thing left to do: that authentic-sounding flush with which every junkie leaves a bathroom, hoping to deceive the audience that crowds his imagination.

‘For God’s sake,’ said Anne when he got back to the drawing room, ‘why don’t you dry your face?’

‘I was just reviving myself with a little cold water.’

‘Oh yeah?’ said Anne. ‘What kind of water was that?’

‘Very refreshing water,’ he said, wiping his sweaty palms on his trousers as he sat down. ‘Which reminds me,’ he said, getting up immediately, ‘I’d love another drink if I may.’

‘Sure,’ said Anne resignedly. ‘By the way, I forgot to ask, how is Debbie?’

The question filled Patrick with the horror which assailed him when he was asked to consider another person’s feelings. How was Debbie? How the fuck should he know? It was hard enough to rescue himself from the avalanche of his own feelings, without allowing the gloomy St Bernard of his attention to wander into other fields. On the other hand the amphetamines had given him an urgent desire to talk and he couldn’t ignore the question entirely.

‘Well,’ he said from the other side of the room, ‘she’s following in her mother’s footsteps, and writing an article about great hostesses. Teresa Hickmann’s footsteps, invisible to most people, glow in the dark for her dutiful daughter. Still, we should be grateful that she hasn’t modelled her conversational style on her father’s.’

Patrick was momentarily lost again in the contemplation of his psychological state. He felt lucid, but not about anything, except his own lucidity. His thoughts, anticipating themselves hopelessly, stuttered in the starting blocks, and brought his feeling of fluency dangerously close to silence. ‘But you haven’t told me,’ he said, tearing himself away from this intriguing mental stammer and at the same time taking his revenge on Anne for asking him about Debbie, ‘how is Victor?’

‘Oh, fine. He’s a grand old man now, a role he’s been training for all his life. He gets a lot of attention and he’s lecturing on Identity, which, as he says, he can do with his eyes closed. Did you ever read
Being, Knowing, and Judging
?’

‘No,’ said Patrick.

‘Well, I must give you a copy, then,’ said Anne, getting up and going to the bookshelves. She took out what looked to Patrick like a tiresomely thick volume from among half a dozen copies of the same book. He liked slim books which he could slip into his overcoat pocket and leave there unread for months. What was the point of a book if you couldn’t carry it around with you as a theoretical defence against boredom?

‘It’s about identity, is it?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘All you’ve ever wanted to know but never dared to formulate precisely,’ said Anne.

‘Goody,’ said Patrick, getting up restlessly. He had to pace, he had to move through space, otherwise the world had a dangerous tendency to flatten itself and he felt like a fly crawling up a windowpane looking for a way out of its translucent prison. Anne, thinking he had come to fetch it, handed him the book.

‘Oh, eh, thank you,’ he said, leaning over to kiss her quickly, ‘I’ll read it very soon.’

He tried to stuff the book into his overcoat pocket. He had
known
it wasn’t going to fit. It was completely fucking useless. Now he had to carry this stupid fat book round with him everywhere. He felt a wave of violent rage. He stared intensely at a waste-paper basket (once a Somalian water jug) and imagined the book spinning towards it like a Frisbee.

‘I really ought to be going now,’ he said curtly.

‘Really? Won’t you stay to say hello to Victor?’

‘No, I must go,’ he said impatiently.

‘OK, but let me give you Samantha’s address.’

‘What?’

‘The party.’

‘Oh, yes. I doubt I’ll come,’ said Patrick.

Anne wrote down the address on a piece of paper and handed it to Patrick. ‘There you are.’

‘Thank you,’ said Patrick abruptly, flicking up the collar of his overcoat. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’

‘Or see you tonight.’

‘Maybe.’

He turned around and hurried towards the door. He had to get outside. His heart seemed to be about to leap out of his chest, like a jack-in-the-box, and he felt that he could only force the lid down for a few seconds more.

‘Goodbye,’ he called from the door.

‘Goodbye,’ said Anne.

Down in the sluggish airless lift, past the fat moronic doorman, and into the street. The shock of standing again under the wide pale sky, completely exposed. This must be what the oyster feels when the lemon juice falls.

Why had he left the shelter of Anne’s flat? And so rudely. Now she would hate him forever. Everything he did was wrong.

Patrick looked down the avenue. It was like the opening shot of a documentary on overpopulation. He walked down the street, imagining the severed heads of passers-by rolling into the gutter in his wake.

4

HOW COULD HE THINK
his way out of the problem when the problem was the way he thought, Patrick wondered, not for the first time, as he slipped reluctantly out of his overcoat and handed it to a brilliantined red-jacketed waiter.

Eating was only a temporary solution. But then all solutions were temporary, even death, and nothing gave him more faith in the existence of an afterlife than the inexorable sarcasm of Fate. No doubt suicide would turn out to be the violent preface to yet another span of nauseating consciousness, of diminishing spirals and tightening nooses, and memories like shrapnel tearing all day long through his flesh. Who could guess what exquisite torments lay ahead in the holiday camps of eternity? It almost made one grateful to be alive.

Only behind a waterfall of brutal and pleasurable sensations, thought Patrick, accepting the leather-clad menu without bothering to glance up, could he hide from the bloodhounds of his conscience. There, in the cool recess of the rock, behind that heavy white veil, he would hear them yelping and snarling confusedly on the river bank, but at least they couldn’t tear out his throat with the fury of their reproach. After all, the trail he’d left was not hard to follow. It was littered with the evidence of wasted time and hopeless longing, not to mention those bloodstained shirts, and the syringes whose spikes he had bent in a fit of disgust and then unbent again for one last fix. Patrick drew in his breath sharply and folded his arms over his chest.

‘A dry martini. Straight up, with a twist,’ he drawled. ‘And I’m ready to order.’

A waiter was coming right on over to take his order. Everything was under control.

Most people who were withdrawing and speeding, jet-lagged and cudgelled by Quaaludes, might have lost their interest in food, but Patrick found that all his appetites were operational at all times, even when his loathing of being touched gave his desire for sex a theoretical complexion.

He could remember Johnny Hall saying indignantly of a girlfriend he had recently thrown out, ‘She was the kind of girl who came over and ruffled your hair when you’d just had a fix of coke.’ Patrick had howled at the horror of such a tactless act. When a man is feeling as empty and fragile as a pane of glass, he does not want to have his hair ruffled. There could be no negotiation between people who thought that cocaine was a vaguely naughty and salacious drug and the intravenous addict who knew that it was an opportunity to experience the arctic landscape of pure terror.