The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (23 page)

‘I did,’ Patrick lied, ‘but of course he said you weren’t around. I guess he wanted a free hand to stab me.’

‘Yeah, he’s a bad man,’ repeated Chilly.

The two men turned the corner of Sixth Street and Chilly almost immediately led Patrick down a short flight of steps into the basement of a dilapidated brownstone building. Patrick was quietly pleased that Chilly was taking him to Loretta’s, instead of leaving him to wait on a street corner.

There was only one door in the basement, reinforced with steel and equipped with a brass flap and a small spyglass. Chilly rang the bell and soon after a voice called out suspiciously, ‘Who’s that?’

‘It’s Chilly.’

‘How much you want?’

Patrick handed Chilly fifty dollars. Chilly counted the money, opened the brass flap and stuffed it inside. The flap retracted quickly and remained closed for what seemed like a long time.

‘You got a bag for me?’ asked Chilly, shifting from leg to leg.

‘Of course,’ replied Patrick magnificently, taking a ten-dollar bill out of his trouser pocket.

‘Thanks, man.’

The flap reopened and Patrick clawed out the five little bags. Chilly got one for himself, and the two men left the building with a sense of achievement, counterbalanced by desire.

‘Have you got any clean works?’ asked Patrick.

‘My ole lady got some. You wanna come back to my place?’

‘Thanks,’ said Patrick, flattered by these multiplying signs of trust and intimacy.

Chilly’s place was a room on the second floor of a fire-gutted building. Its walls were blackened by smoke, and the unreliable staircase littered with empty matchbooks, liquor bottles, brown-paper bags, heaps of cornered dust, and balls of old hair. The room itself, only contained one piece of furniture, a mustard-coloured armchair covered in burns, with a spring bursting from the centre of the seat, like an obscene tongue.

Mrs Chilly Willy – if that was her correct title, mused Patrick – was sitting on the arm of this chair when the two men came in. She was a large woman, more masculine in build than her skeletal husband.

‘Hi, Chilly,’ she said dozily, obviously further from withdrawal than he was.

‘Hi,’ he said, ‘you know my man.’

‘Hi, honey.’

‘Hello,’ beamed Patrick charmingly. ‘Chilly said you might have a spare syringe.’

‘I might,’ she said playfully.

‘Is it new?’

‘Well, it ain’t exactly noo, but I boiled it and everythin’.’

Patrick raised one eyebrow with deadly scepticism. ‘Is it
very
blunt?’ he asked.

She fished a bundle of loo paper out of her voluminous bra and carefully unwrapped the precious package. At its centre was a threateningly large syringe which a zookeeper would have hesitated to use on a sick elephant.

‘That’s not a needle, it’s a bicycle pump,’ Patrick protested, holding out his hand.

Intended for intramuscular use, the spike was worryingly thick, and when Patrick detached the green plastic head that held it he could not help noticing a ring of old blood inside. ‘Oh, all right,’ he said. ‘How much do you want for it?’

‘Gimme two bags,’ urged Mrs Chilly, wrinkling up her nose endearingly.

It was an absurd price, but Patrick never argued about prices. He tossed two bags into her lap. If the stuff was any good he could always get more. Right now he had to shoot up. He asked Chilly to lend him a spoon and a cigarette filter. Since the light in the main room had failed, Chilly offered him the bathroom, a room without a bath in it, but with a black mark on the floor where there might once have been one. A naked bulb cast a dim yellow light on the insanely cracked basin and the seatless old loo.

Patrick trickled some water into the spoon and rested it at the back of the basin. Tearing open the three remaining packages, he wondered what sort of gear it was. Nobody could claim that Chilly looked well on a diet of Loretta’s smack, but at least he wasn’t dead. If Mr and Mrs Chilly were planning to shoot it up, there was no reason why he shouldn’t. He could hear them whispering next door. Chilly was saying something about ‘hurting’ and was obviously trying to get the second bag out of his wife. Patrick emptied the three packets into the spoon and heated the solution, the flame from his lighter licking the already blackened underside of the spoon. As soon as it started to bubble, he cut off the heat and put the steaming liquid down again. He tore a thin strip off the cigarette filter, dropped it in the spoon, removed the spike from the syringe, and sucked the liquid up through the filter. The barrel was so thick that the solution barely rose a quarter of an inch.

Dropping his overcoat and jacket on the floor, Patrick rolled up his sleeve and tried to make out his veins in the faint light which gave a hepatic glow to every object that was not already black. Luckily, his track marks formed brown and purple threads, as if his veins were gunpowder trails burned along his arm.

Patrick rolled the sleeve of his shirt tight around his bicep and pumped his forearm up and down several times, clenching and unclenching his fist at the same time. He had good veins and, despite a certain shyness that resulted from his savage treatment of them, he was in a better position than many people whose daily search for a vein sometimes took up to an hour of exploratory digging.

He picked up the syringe and rested its point on the widest section of his track marks, slightly sideways to the scar. With such a long spike there was always a danger that it would go through the vein altogether and into the muscle on the other side, a painful experience, and so he approached the arm at a fairly low angle. At this crucial moment the syringe slipped from his hand and landed on a wet patch of the floor beside the loo. He could hardly believe what had happened. He felt vertiginous with horror and disappointment. There was a conspiracy against his having any fun today. He leaned over, desperate with longing, and picked up the works from the damp patch. The spike wasn’t bent. Thank God for that. Everything was all right. He quickly wiped the syringe on his trousers.

By now his heart was beating fast and he felt that visceral excitement, a combination of dread and desire, which always preceded a fix. He pushed the painfully blunt tip of the needle under his skin and thought he saw, miracle of miracles, a globule of blood shoot into the barrel. Not wanting to waste any time with such an unwieldy instrument, he put his thumb on the plunger and pushed it straight down.

He felt a violent and alarming swelling in his arm and recognized immediately that the spike had slipped out of his vein and he had squirted the solution under his skin.

‘Shit,’ he shouted.

Chilly came shuffling through. ‘What’s happening, man?’

‘I missed,’ said Patrick through clenched teeth, pushing the hand of his wounded arm up against his shoulder.

‘Oh, man,’ croaked Chilly sympathetically.

‘Can I suggest you invest in a stronger light bulb?’ said Patrick pompously, holding his arm as if it had been broken.

‘You shoulda used the flashlight,’ said Chilly, scratching himself.

‘Oh, thanks for telling me about it,’ snapped Patrick.

‘You wanna go back and score some more?’ asked Chilly.

‘No,’ said Patrick curtly, putting his coat back on. ‘I’m leaving.’

By the time he hit the street Patrick was wondering why he hadn’t taken up Chilly’s offer. ‘Temper, temper,’ he muttered sarcastically. He felt weary, but too frustrated to sleep. It was eleven thirty; perhaps Pierre had woken up by now. He had better go back to the hotel.

Patrick hailed a cab.

‘You live around here?’ asked the driver.

‘No, I was just trying to score,’ Patrick sighed, posting the bags of Vim and barbs out of the window.

‘You wanna score?’

‘That’s right,’ sighed Patrick.

‘Shee-eet, I know a better place than this.’

‘Really?’ said Patrick, all ears.

‘Yeah, in the South Bronx.’

‘Well, let’s go.’

‘All right,’ laughed the driver.

At last a cab driver who was helpful. An experience like this might put him in a good mood. Perhaps he should write a letter to the Yellow Cab Company. ‘Dear sir,’ murmured Patrick under his breath, ‘I wish to commend in the highest possible terms the initiative and courtesy of your splendid young driver, Jefferson E. Parker. After a fruitless and, to be perfectly frank, infuriating expedition to Alphabet City, this knight errant, this, if I may put it thus, Jefferson Nightingale, rescued me from a very tiresome predicament, and took me to score in the South Bronx. If only more of your drivers displayed the same old-fashioned desire to serve. Yours, et cetera, Colonel Melrose.’

Patrick smiled. Everything was under control. He felt elated, almost frivolous. The Bronx was a bit of a worry for someone who had seen
Bronx Warriors
– a film of unremitting nastiness, not to be confused with the beautifully choreographed violence of the more simply, and more generically named
The Warriors
– but he felt invulnerable. People drew knives on him, but they could not touch him, and if they did he would not be there.

As the cab sped over a bridge Patrick had never crossed before, Jefferson turned his head slightly and said, ‘We’re gonna be in the Bronx soon.’

‘I’ll wait in the cab, shall I?’ asked Patrick.

‘You better lie on the floor,’ laughed Jefferson, ‘they don’t like white people here.’

‘On the floor?’

‘Yeah, outta sight. If they see you, they gonna smash the windows. Shee-eet, I don’t want my windows smashed.’

Jefferson stopped the taxi a few blocks beyond the bridge and Patrick sat down on the rubber floor mat with his back against the door.

‘How much you want?’ asked Jefferson, leaning over the driver’s seat.

‘Oh, five bags. And get a couple for yourself,’ said Patrick, handing over seventy dollars.

‘Thanks,’ said Jefferson. ‘I’m gonna lock the doors now. You stay outta sight, right?’

‘Right,’ said Patrick, sliding down further and stretching out on the floor. The bolts of all the doors slithered into place. Patrick wriggled around for some time before curling up in a foetal position with his head on the central hump. After a few moments his hip bone was persecuting his liver and he felt hopelessly tangled up in the folds of his overcoat. He twisted around onto his front, rested his head in his hands, and stared at the grooves in the floor mat. There was quite a strong smell of oil down at this level. ‘It gives you a whole new perspective on life,’ said Patrick, in the voice of a television housewife.

It was intolerable. Everything was intolerable. He was always getting into these
situations
, always ending up with the losers, the dregs, the Chilly Willys of life. Even at school he had been sent every Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, when the other boys joined their teams and played their matches, to remote playing fields with every variety of sporting misfit: the pale and sensitive musicians, the hopelessly fat Greek boys, and the disaffected cigarette-smoking protesters who regarded physical exertion as hopelessly uncool. As a punishment for their unsporting natures, these boys were forced to make their way round an assault course. Mr Pitch, the overwrought pederast in charge of this unwholesome squad, quivered with excitement and malice as each boy crashed myopically, waddled feebly, or tried to beat the system by running around the wall at the beginning of the course. While the Greeks splattered into the mud, and the music scholars lost their spectacles, and the conscientious objectors made their cynical remarks, Mr Pitch rushed about screaming abuse at them about their ‘privileged’ lives and, if the opportunity arose, kicking them in the bottom.

What the hell was going on? Had Jefferson gone to fetch some friends so they could beat him up together, or was he simply being abandoned while Jefferson went to get stoned?

Yes, thought Patrick, shifting restlessly, he had hung out with nothing but failures. Living in Paris when he was nineteen, he had fallen in with Jim, an Australian heroin smuggler on the run, and Simon, a black American bank robber just out of prison. He could remember Jim saying, as he had searched for a vein among the thick orange hairs of his forearm, ‘Australia’s so beautiful in the spring, man. All the little lambs frisking about. You can tell they’re just so happy to be alive.’ He had pushed the plunger down with a whimsical expression on his face.

Simon had tried to rob a bank while he was withdrawing, but he had been forced to surrender to the police after they had fired several volleys at him. ‘I didn’t wanna look like no Swiss cheese,’ he explained.

Patrick heard the merciful sound of the locks opening again.

‘I got it,’ said Jefferson huskily. ‘Goody,’ said Patrick, sitting up.

Jefferson was happy and relaxed as he drove to the hotel. When he had snorted three of the bags Patrick could understand why. Here at last was a powder that contained a little heroin.

Jefferson and Patrick parted with the genuine warmth of people who had exploited each other successfully. Back in his hotel room, lying on the bed with his arms spread out, Patrick realized that if he took the other two bags and turned on the television he could probably fall asleep. Once he had taken heroin he could imagine being without it; when he was without it he could only imagine getting more. But just to see if all the evening’s trouble had been completely unnecessary, he decided to call Pierre’s number.

As the telephone rang he again wondered what kept him from suicide. Was it something as contemptible as sentimentality, or hope, or narcissism? No. It was really the desire to know what would happen next, despite the conviction that it was bound to be horrible: the narrative suspense of it all.

‘Hallo?’

‘Pierre!’

‘Who iz this?’

‘Patrick.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Can I come round?’

‘OK. How long?’

‘Twenty minutes.’

‘OK.’

Patrick raised his fist in triumph and sprinted from the room.

6

‘
PIERRE!
’

‘
Ça va?
’ said Pierre, getting up from his leather office chair. The parched yellow skin of his face was stretched more tautly than ever over the thin nose, high cheekbones, and prominent jaw. He shook hands with Patrick, fixing him with lantern eyes.