The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (30 page)

He had seen the dark blood from the neck of a sheep gushing into the dry grass. The busy flies. The stench of offal. He had heard the roots tearing as he eased a carrot out of the ground. Any living man squatted on a mound of corruption, cruelty, filth, and blood.

If only his body would turn into a pane of glass, the fleshless interval between two spaces, knowing both but belonging to neither, then he would be set free from the gross and savage debt he owed to the rest of nature.

‘Ziou … Ziou … wan?’ asked George.

‘Um … I’ll … um, eh just,’ Patrick felt remote from his own voice, as if it was coming out of his feet. ‘I’ll … um, eh, have … another … Bullshot … late breakfast … eh … not really hungry.’

The effort of saying these few words left him breathless.

‘Chok-chok-chok-chok,’ objected Ballantine. ‘Aioua sure. Aioua ziou?’ asked Tom.

What was he saying ‘Ziou’ for? The fugue was growing more complicated. Before long George would be saying ‘Chok’ or ‘Aioua’, and then where would he stand? Where would any of them stand?

‘Justanothershot,’ gasped Patrick, ‘really.’ Mopping his brow again, he stared fixedly at the stem of his wineglass which, caught by the sun, cast a fractured bone of light onto the white tablecloth, like an X-ray of a broken finger. The twisting echoing sounds around him had started to die down to the faint hiss of an untuned television. It was no longer incomprehension but a kind of sadness, like an enormously amplified postcoital gloom, that cut him off from what was happening around him. ‘Martha Boeing,’ Ballantine was saying, ‘told me that she was experiencing dizzy spells on the drive up to Newport and that her doctor told her to take along these small French cheeses to eat on the journey – evidently it was some kind of protein deprivation.’

‘I can’t imagine that Martha’s malnutrition is too severe,’ said Tom.

‘Well,’ remarked George diplomatically, ‘not everybody has to be driven to Newport as often as she does.’

‘I mention it because I,’ said Ballantine with some pride, ‘was getting the same symptoms.’

‘On the same journey?’ asked Tom.

‘The exact same journey,’ Ballantine confirmed.

‘Well, that’s Newport for you,’ said Tom; ‘sucks the protein right out of you. Only sporting types can make it there without medical assistance.’

‘But
my
doctor,’ said Ballantine patiently, ‘recommended peanut butter. Martha was sorta doubtful about it, and said that these French cheeses were so great because you could just peel them off and pop them in your mouth. She wanted to know how you were supposed to eat the peanut butter. “With a spoon,” I said, “like caviar.”’ Ballantine chuckled. ‘Well, she had no answer to that,’ he concluded triumphantly, ‘and I believe she’s going to be switching to peanut butter.’

‘Somebody ought to warn Sun-Pat,’ said Tom.

‘Yes, you must be careful,’ drawled George, ‘or you’ll start a run on this butter of yours. Once these Newport people take to something, there’s really no stopping them. I remember Brooke Rivers asking me where I had my shirts made, and the next time I ordered some they told me there was a two-year waiting list. They told me there had been a perfectly extraordinary surge in American orders. Well, of course, I knew who that was.’

A waiter came to take the orders and George asked Patrick if he was absolutely sure that he didn’t want ‘something solid’.

‘Absolutely. Nothing solid,’ Patrick replied.

‘I never knew your father to lose his appetite,’ said George.

‘No, it was the one thing about him that was reliable.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t go that far,’ protested George. ‘He was an awfully good pianist. Used to keep one up all night,’ he explained to the others, ‘playing the most spellbinding music’

Pastiche and parody and hands twisted like old vine stumps, thought Patrick.

‘Yes, he could be very impressive at the piano,’ he said out loud.

‘And in conversation,’ George added.

‘Mm…’ said Patrick. ‘It depends what you find impressive. Some people don’t like uninterrupted rudeness, or so I’m told.’

‘Who
are
these people?’ asked Tom, looking around the room with mock alarm.

‘It is true,’ said George, ‘that I once or twice had to tell him to stop being quite so argumentative.’

‘And what did he do?’ asked Ballantine, thrusting his chin forward to get more of his neck out of its tight collar.

‘Told me to bugger off,’ replied George tersely.

‘Hell,’ said Ballantine, seeing an opportunity for wisdom and diplomacy. ‘You know, people argue about the darnedest things. Why, I spent an entire weekend trying to persuade my wife to dine in Mortimer’s the evening we got back to New York. “I’m all Mortimered out,” she kept saying, “can’t we go someplace else?” Of course she couldn’t say where.’

‘Of course she couldn’t,’ said Tom, ‘she hasn’t seen the inside of another restaurant in fifteen years.’

‘All Mortimered out,’ repeated Ballantine, his indignation tinged with a certain pride at having married such an original woman.

A lobster, some smoked salmon, a crab salad, and a Bullshot arrived. Patrick lifted the drink greedily to his lips and then froze, hearing the hysterical bellowing of a cow, loud as an abattoir in the muddy liquid of his glass.

‘Fuck it,’ he murmured, taking a large gulp.

His defiance was soon rewarded with the vivid fantasy that a hoof was trying to kick its way out of his stomach. He remembered, when he was eighteen, writing to his father from a psychiatric ward, trying to explain his reasons for being there, and receiving a short note in reply. Written in Italian, which his father knew he could not understand, it turned out, after some research, to be a quotation from Dante’s
Inferno
: ‘Consider your descent / You were not made to live among beasts / But to pursue virtue and knowledge.’ What had seemed a frustratingly sublime response at the time, struck him with a fresh sense of relevance now that he was listening to the sound of howling, snuffling cattle and felt, or thought he felt, another blow on the inner wall of his stomach.

As his heart rate increased again and a new wave of sweat prickled his skin, Patrick realized that he was going to be sick.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, getting up abruptly.

‘Are you all right, my dear?’ said George.

‘I feel rather sick.’

‘Perhaps we should get you a doctor.’

‘I have the best doctor in New York,’ said Ballantine. ‘Just mention my name and…’

Patrick tasted a bitter surge of bile from his stomach. He swallowed stubbornly and, without time to thank Ballantine for his kind offer, hurried out of the dining room.

On the stairs Patrick forced down a second mouthful of vomit, more solid than the first. Time was running out. Wave after wave of nausea heaved the contents of his stomach into his mouth with increasing velocity. Feeling dizzy, his vision blurred by watering eyes, he fumbled down the corridor, knocking one of the hunting prints askew with his shoulder. By the time he reached the cool marble sanctuary of the lavatories, his cheeks were as swollen as a trumpeter’s. A member of the club, admiring himself with that earnestness reserved for mirrors, found that the ordinary annoyance of being interrupted was soon replaced by alarm at being so close to a man who was obviously about to vomit.

Patrick, despairing of reaching the loo, threw up in the basin next to him, turning the taps on at the same time.

‘Jesus,’ said the member, ‘you could have done that in the john.’

‘Too far,’ said Patrick, throwing up a second time. ‘Jesus,’ repeated the man, leaving hastily.

Patrick recognized traces of last night’s dinner and, with his stomach already empty, knew that he would soon be bringing up that sour yellow bile which gives vomiting its bad name.

To encourage the faster disappearance of the vomit he twirled his finger in the plughole and increased the flow of water with his other hand. He longed to gain the privacy of one of the cubicles before he was sick again. Feeling queasy and hot, he abandoned the not yet entirely clean basin and staggered over to one of the mahogany cubicles. He hardly had time to slide the brass lock closed before he was stooped over the bowl of the loo convulsing fruitlessly. Unable to breathe or to swallow, he found himself trying to vomit with even more conviction than he had tried to avoid vomiting a few minutes earlier.

Just when he was about to faint from lack of air he managed to bring up a globule of that yellow bile he had been anticipating with such dread.

‘Fucking hell,’ he cursed, sliding down the wall. However often he did it, being sick never lost its power to surprise him.

Shaken by coming so close to choking, he lit a cigarette and smoked it through the bitter slime that coated his mouth. The question now, of course, was whether to take some heroin to help him calm down.

The risk was that it would make him feel even more nauseous.

Wiping the sweat from his hands, he gingerly opened the packet of heroin over his lap, dipped his little finger into it, and sniffed through both nostrils. Not feeling any immediate ill effects, he repeated the dose.

Peace at last. He closed his eyes and sighed. The others could just fuck off. He wasn’t going back. He was going to fold his wings and (he took another sniff) relax. Where he took his smack was his home, and more often than not that was in some stranger’s bog.

He was so tired; he really must get some sleep. Get some sleep. Fold his wings. But what if George and the others sent somebody to look for him and they found the sick-spattered basin and hammered on the door of the cubicle? Was there no peace, no resting place? Of course there wasn’t. What an absurd question.

11

‘I’
M HERE TO COLLECT
the remains of David Melrose,’ said Patrick to the grinning young man with the big jaw and the mop of shiny chestnut hair.

‘Mr … David … Melrose,’ he mused, as he turned the pages of a large leather register.

Patrick leaned over the edge of the counter, more like a grounded pulpit than a desk, and saw, next to the register, a cheap exercise book marked ‘Almost Dead’. That was the file to get on; might as well apply straight away.

Escaping from the Key Club had left him strangely elated. After passing out for an hour in the loo, he had woken refreshed but unable to face the others. Bolting past the doorman like a criminal, he had dashed round the corner to a bar, and then walked on to the funeral parlour. Later he would have to apologize to George. Lie and apologize as he always did or wanted to do after any contact with another human being.

‘Yes, sir,’ said the receptionist brightly, finding the page. ‘Mr David Melrose.’

‘I have come not to praise him, but to bury him,’ Patrick declared, thumping the table theatrically.

‘Bu-ry him?’ stammered the receptionist. ‘We under-stood that party was to be cre-mated.’

‘I was speaking metaphorically.’

‘Metaphorically,’ repeated the young man, not quite reassured. Did that mean the customer was going to sue or not?

‘Where are the ashes?’ asked Patrick.

‘I’ll go fetch them for you, sir,’ said the receptionist. ‘We have you down for a box,’ he added, no longer as confident as he’d sounded at first.

‘That’s right,’ said Patrick. ‘No point in wasting money on an urn. The ashes are going to be scattered anyway.’

‘Right,’ said the receptionist with uncertain cheerfulness.

Glancing sideways he quickly rectified his tone. ‘I’ll attend to that right away, sir,’ he said in an unctuous and artificially loud singsong, setting off promptly towards a door concealed in the panelling.

Patrick looked over his shoulder to find out what had provoked this new eagerness. He saw a tall figure he recognized without immediately being able to place him.

‘We’re in an industry where the supply and the demand are
bound
to be identical,’ quipped this half-familiar man.

Behind him stood the bald, moustachioed director who had led Patrick to his father’s corpse the previous afternoon. He seemed to wince and smile at the same time.

‘We’ve got the one resource that’s never going to run out,’ said the tall man, obviously enjoying himself.

The director raised his eyebrows and flickered his eyes in Patrick’s direction.

Of course, thought Patrick, it was that ghastly man he’d met on the plane.

‘Goddamn,’ whispered Earl Hammer, ‘I guess I still got something to learn about PR.’ Recognizing Patrick, he shouted ‘Bobby!’ across the chequered marble hall.

‘Patrick,’ said Patrick.

‘Paddy! Of course. That eyepatch was unfamiliar to me. What happened to you anyway? Some lady give you a black eye?’ Earl guffawed, pounding over to Patrick’s side.

‘Just a little inflammation,’ said Patrick. ‘Can’t see properly out of that eye.’

‘That’s too bad,’ said Earl. ‘What are you doing here anyhow? When I told you on the plane that I had been diversifying my business interests, I bet you never guessed that I was in the process of acquiring New York’s premier funeral parlour.’

‘I hadn’t guessed that,’ confessed Patrick. ‘And I don’t suppose you guessed that I was coming to collect my father’s remains from New York’s premier funeral parlour.’

‘Hell,’ said Earl, ‘I’m sorry to hear that. I’ll bet he was a fine man.’

‘He was perfect in his way,’ said Patrick.

‘My condolences,’ said Earl, with that abrupt solemnity that Patrick recognized from the discussion about Miss Hammer’s volleyball prospects.

The receptionist returned with a simple wooden box about a foot long and eight inches high.

‘It’s so much more compact than a coffin, don’t you think?’ commented Patrick.

‘There’s no way of denying that,’ Earl replied.

‘Do you have a bag?’ Patrick asked the receptionist.

‘A bag?’

‘Yes, a carrier bag, a brown-paper bag, that sort of thing.’

‘I’ll go check that, sir.’

‘Paddy,’ said Earl, as if he had been giving the matter some thought, ‘I want you to have a ten per cent discount.’

‘Thank you,’ said Patrick, genuinely pleased.