The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (63 page)

A scene was unfolding around him, no doubt, but his attention was so submerged that he could hardly make out what was going on. If he clawed his way up the slippery well shaft, what would he find anyway, except Kettle extolling Queen Mary’s child-rearing methods, or Seamus radiating Celtic charisma? Patrick looked over the valley, a gauntlet of memory and association. In the middle of the view was the Mauduits’ ugly farmhouse, its two big acacia trees still growing in the front yard. When he was a child he had often played with the oafish Marcel Mauduit. They used to fashion spears out of the pale green bamboos that flanked the stream at the bottom of the valley. They flung them at little birds which managed to leave several minutes before the bamboo clattered onto the abandoned branch. When Patrick was six years old Marcel invited him to watch his father beheading a chicken. There was nothing more curious and amusing than watching a chicken run around in silly circles looking for its head, Marcel explained. You really had to see it for yourself. The boys waited in the shade of the acacia trees. An old hatchet was stuck at a handy angle among the crisscross cuts on the surface of a brownish plane tree stump. Marcel danced around like an Indian with a tomahawk, pretending to decapitate his enemies. In the distance, Patrick could hear the panic in the chicken coop. By the time Marcel’s father arrived, gripping a hen by the neck, her wings beating uselessly against his vast belly, Patrick was beginning to side with her. He wanted this one to get away. He could see that she knew what was going on. She was held down sideways, her neck stuck over the edge of the stump. Monsieur Mauduit brought the hatchet down so that her head flopped neatly at his feet. Then he put the rest of her quickly on the ground and, with an encouraging pat, set her off on a frantic dash for freedom, while Marcel jeered and laughed and pointed. Elsewhere, the hen’s eyes stared at the sky and Patrick stared at her eyes.

With his fourth glass of wine, Patrick found his imagination tilting towards Victorian melodrama. Dark scenes formed of their own accord, but he did nothing to stop them. He saw the bloated figure of a drowned Seamus floating in the Thames. His mother’s wheelchair seemed to have lost control and was bouncing down the coastal path towards a Dorset cliff. Patrick noted the magnificent National Trust backdrop as she pitched forwards over the edge. One day he really must drop the whole thing, get real, get contemporary, accept the facts, but just for the moment he would go on imagining himself putting the last touches to a forged will, while Julia, seated on the edge of his desk, bemused him with the complexity of her undergarments. Just for now, he would have another little splash of wine.

Thomas leant forward in Mary’s lap, and with her usual perfect intuition, she immediately handed him a biscuit. He sank back on her chest convinced, as he was hundreds of times a day, that he would never need something without being given it. Patrick scanned himself for jealousy, but it wasn’t there. There was plenty of dark emotion but no rivalry with his infant son. The trick was to keep up a high level of loathing for his own mother, leaving no room to feel jealous of Thomas getting the solid foundations his father so obviously lacked. Thomas leant forwards a second time and, with an enquiring murmur, held out his biscuit to Julia, offering her a bite. Julia looked at the wet and blunted biscuit, made a face and said, ‘Yuk. No thank you very much.’

Patrick suddenly realized that he couldn’t make love to someone who missed the point of Thomas’s generosity so completely. Or could he? Despite his revulsion, he felt his lust running on, not unlike a beheaded chicken. He had now achieved the pseudo-detachment of drunkenness, the little hillock before the swamps of self-pity and memory loss. He saw that he really must get well, he couldn’t go on this way. One day he was going to drop the whole thing, but he couldn’t do that until he was ready, and he couldn’t control when he would be ready. He could, however, get ready to be ready. He sank back in his chair and agreed at least to that: his business for the rest of the month was to get ready to be ready to be well.

8

‘
HOW ARE YOU?
’
ASKED
Johnny, lighting a cheap cigar.

The flaring match brought a patch of colour into the black and white landscape cast by the moonlight. The two men had come outside after dinner to talk and smoke. Patrick looked at the grey grass and then up at a sky bleached of stars by the violence of the moon. He didn’t know where to begin. The previous evening he had somehow managed to transcend the ‘Yuk’ incident, stealing into Julia’s bed after midnight and staying there until five in the morning. He had slept with Julia in a speculative haze which his impulsiveness and greed failed to abolish. Too busy asking himself what adultery felt like, he had almost forgotten to notice what Julia felt like. He wondered what it meant to be back inside a woman who, apart from the relatively faint reality of her limbs and skin, was above all a site of nostalgia. What it certainly did not mean was Time Regained. Being a pig in the trough of a disreputable emotion turned out to fall short of the spontaneous timelessness of involuntary memory and associative thinking. Where were the uneven cobblestones and silver spoons and silver doorbells of his own life? If he stumbled across them, would floating bridges spring into being, with their own strange sovereignty, belonging to neither the original nor the repeated, the past nor the fugitive present, but to some kind of enriched present capable of englobing the linearity of time? He had no reason to think so. He felt deprived not only of the ordinary magic of intensified imagination, but of the even more ordinary magic of immersion in his own physical sensations. He wasn’t going to scold himself for a lack of particularity in experiencing his sexual pleasure. All sex was prostitution for both participants, not always in the commercial sense, but in the deeper etymological sense that they stood in for something else. The fact that this was sometimes done so effectively that there were weeks or months in which the object of desire and the person one happened to be in bed with seemed identical could not prevent the underlying model of desire from beginning to drift away, sooner or later, from its illusory home. The strangeness of Julia’s case was that she stood in for herself, as she had been twenty years ago, a pre-drift lover.

‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,’ said Johnny, realizing that Patrick didn’t want to answer his question.

‘When’s that?’ said Patrick.

‘Before you light it – after that, it’s a symptom of unreconstructed orality.’

‘I wouldn’t be having this cigar unless I’d given up smoking,’ said Patrick. ‘I want to make that absolutely clear.’

‘I completely understand,’ said Johnny.

‘One of the burdens of being a child psychologist,’ said Patrick, ‘is that if you ask someone how they are, they tell you. Instead of saying that I feel fine, I have to give you the real answer:
not
fine.’

‘Not fine?’

‘Bad, chaotic, terrified. My emotional life seems to cascade into wordlessness in every direction, not only because Thomas hasn’t taken up words yet and Eleanor has already been abandoned by them, but also, internally, I feel the feebleness of everything I can control surrounded by the immensity of everything I can’t control. It’s very primitive and very strong. There’s no wood left for the fire that keeps the wild animals at bay, that sort of thing. But also something even more confusing – the wild animals are a part of me that’s winning. I can’t stop them from destroying me without destroying them, but I can’t destroy them without destroying myself. Even that makes it sound too organized. It’s really more like a cartoon of cats fighting: a spinning blackness with exclamation marks flying off it.’

‘You sound as if you have a good grasp of what’s going on,’ said Johnny.

‘That should be a strength, but since I’m trying to communicate how little grasp I have of what’s going on, it’s a hindrance.’

‘It’s not a hindrance to your telling me about the chaos. It’s only a hindrance if you’re trying to manifest it.’

‘Perhaps I do want to manifest it, so that it takes some concrete form, instead of it being this enormous state of mind.’

‘I’m sure it does take some concrete form.’

‘Hmm…’

Patrick scanned the concrete forms, the insomnia, the heavy drinking, the bouts of overeating, the constant longing for solitude which, if achieved, made him desperate for company, not to mention (or should he mention it? He felt the heavy gravitational field of confession surrounding Johnny) last night’s adulterous incident.

He could remember only a few hours ago concluding that it had been a mistake, and beginning to imagine the mature discussion he was going to have with Julia. Now that the tide of alcohol was rising again, he was becoming more and more convinced that he had simply gone to bed with the wrong attitude. He must do better. He would do better.

‘I must do better,’ said Patrick.

‘Do what better?’

‘Oh, everything,’ said Patrick vaguely.

He certainly wasn’t going to tell Johnny, and then have his inflamed appetites placed in some pathological context or, worse, in a therapeutic programme. On the other hand, what was the point of his friendship with Johnny if it wasn’t truthful? They had been friends for thirty years. Johnny’s parents had known his parents. They knew each other’s lives in depth. If Patrick had been wondering whether to commit suicide, he would have asked Johnny’s opinion. Maybe he could shift the conversation away from his own mental health and onto one of their favourite topics: the way that time was grinding down their generation. Their shorthand for this process was ‘the retreat from Moscow’, thanks to the vivid picture they both had of the straggling survivors of Napoleon’s army limping, bloodstained and bootless, through a landscape of frozen horses and dying men. Out of professional curiosity, Johnny had recently attended a reunion dinner of their year at school. He reported back to Patrick. The captain of the First XI was now a crack-head. The most brilliant student of their year was buried in the middle ranks of the civil service. Gareth Williams couldn’t come because he was in a mental hospital. Their most ‘successful’ contemporary was the head of a merchant bank who, according to Johnny, ‘failed to register on the authenticity graph’. That was the graph that Johnny cared about, the one that would determine whether, in his own eyes, he ended up in a roadside ditch or not.

‘I’m sorry to hear that you’ve been feeling bad,’ said Johnny, before Patrick could get him onto the safe ground of collective disappointment, sell-out and loss.

‘I slept with Julia last night,’ said Patrick.

‘Did that make you feel better?’

‘It made me wonder if I was feeling better. It was perhaps just a little bit too cerebral.’

‘That’s what you “must do better”.’

‘Exactly. I didn’t know whether to tell you. I thought I might have to stop if we worked out exactly what was going on.’

‘You’ve worked it out already.’

‘Up to a point. I know that Thomas is making me revisit my own infancy in a way that Robert never did. Maybe it’s the prominence of that old prop, a mother who needs mothering, which has lent so much authenticity to this revival. In any case, a deep sense of ancestral gloom stalks the night, and I would rather spend it with Julia who, instead of the primal chaos I feel on my own, offers the relatively innocuous death of youth.’

‘It all sounds very allegorical – Primal Chaos and the Death of Youth. Sometimes a woman is just a woman.’

‘Before you light her up?’

‘No, no, that’s a cigar,’ said Johnny.

‘Honestly, there are no easy answers. Just when you think you’ve worked something out…’

Patrick could hear the whining of a mosquito in his right ear. He turned his head and blew smoke in its direction. The sound stopped.

‘Obviously, I would love to have real, embodied, fully present experiences – especially of sex,’ Patrick went on, ‘but, as you’ve pointed out, I’m taking refuge in an allegorical realm where everything seems to represent a well-known syndrome or conflict. I remember complaining to my doctor about the side effects of the Ribavirin he prescribed for me. “Oh, yes, that’s known,” he said with a kind of tremendous, uninfectious calm. Mind you, when I told him about a side effect that wasn’t known, he dismissed it by saying, “I’ve never heard of that before.” I think I’m trying to be like him, to immunize myself against experience by concentrating on phenomena. I keep thinking, “That’s known,” when in fact I feel the opposite, that it’s alien and menacing and out of control.’

Patrick felt a sharp sting. ‘Fucking mosquitoes,’ he said, slapping the back of his neck rather too hard. ‘I’m being eaten alive.’

‘I’ve never heard of that before,’ said Johnny sceptically.

‘Oh, it’s
known
,’ Patrick assured him. ‘It’s quite standard among the highlanders of Papua New Guinea. The only question is whether they make you eat yourself alive.’

Johnny let this prospect drown in silence.

‘Listen,’ said Patrick, leaning forward, and speaking more rapidly than before, ‘I’m not in any serious doubt that everything I’m going through at the moment corresponds with the texture of my infancy in some way. I’m sure that my midnight angst resembles some free fall I felt in my cot when, for my own good, and so as to save me from becoming a manipulative little monster, my parents did exactly what suited them and ignored me. As you know, my mother only paves the road to hell with the best intentions, so we can assume that my father was the advocate of the character-building advantages of a willbreaking upbringing. But how can I really know and what good would it do me to find out?’

‘Well, for a start, you’re not using your powers of persuasion to keep Mary away from Thomas. Without any sense of connection with your own infancy, you almost certainly would be. It’s true that the hardest maps to draw up are the very early ones, the first two years. We can only work with inferences. If, for example, someone had an acute intolerance of being kept waiting, felt a perpetual hunger which eating turned into a bloated despair, and was kept awake by hypervigilance…’