The Patrick Melrose Novels (21 page)

‘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.

That terror was the price he had to pay for the first heartbreaking wave of pleasure when consciousness seemed to burst out, like white blossoms, along the branches of every nerve. And all his scattered thoughts came rushing together, like loose iron filings as a magnet is held over them and draws them into the shape of a rose. Or – he must stop thinking about it – or like a solution of saturated copper sulphate under the microscope, when it suddenly transforms and crystals break out everywhere on its surface.

He must stop thinking about it – and do it. No! And think about something else. His father's corpse, for instance. Would that be an improvement? It would get rid of the problem of desire, but hatred could be compulsive too.

Ah, here was the dry martini. If not the cavalry, at least some more ammunition. Patrick drained the cold unctuous liquid in one gulp.

‘Would you care for another one, sir?'

‘Yes,' said Patrick brusquely.

A more senior waiter in a dinner jacket came over to take Patrick's order.

‘Tartare de Saumon Cru, followed by the Steak Tartare,' said Patrick, taking an innocent pleasure in saying ‘tartare' twice and pleased to be ordering two adult forms of baby food, already cut up and squished together for him.

A third waiter, with a golden bunch of grapes in his lapel, and a large golden wine-tasting cup dangling from a chain around his neck, was only too ready to bring Patrick a bottle of Corton Charlemagne straight away and to open a bottle of Ducru-Beaucaillou for later on. Everything was under control.

No, he mustn't think about it, or indeed about anything, and especially not about heroin, because heroin was the only thing that really worked, the only thing that stopped him scampering around in a hamster's wheel of unanswerable questions. Heroin was the cavalry. Heroin was the missing chair leg, made with such precision that it matched every splinter of the break. Heroin landed purring at the base of his skull, and wrapped itself darkly around his nervous system, like a black cat curling up on its favourite cushion. It was as soft and rich as the throat of a wood pigeon, or the splash of sealing wax onto a page, or a handful of gems slipping from palm to palm.

The way other people felt about love, he felt about heroin, and he felt about love the way other people felt about heroin: that it was a dangerous and incomprehensible waste of time. What could he say to Debbie? ‘Although you know that my hatred for my father, and my love for drugs, are the most important relationships in my life, I want you to know that you come in third.' What woman would not be proud to be ‘among the medals' in such a contest?

‘Oh, for fuck's sake shut up,' mumbled Patrick out loud, drinking his second dry martini with as little restraint as the first. If things went on this way he would have to call Pierre, his truly wonderful New York dealer. No! He wasn't going to do it, he had sworn that he wasn't going to do it. 555–1726. The number might as well have been tattooed on his wrist. He hadn't rung it since September, eight months ago, but he would never forget the bowel-loosening excitement of those seven digits.

Golden Grapes was back, peeling the heavy yellow lead from the neck of the Corton Charlemagne, and cradling the bottle of claret, while Patrick studied the picture of a white chateau under a flat gold sky. Perhaps with these consolations he would not have to score after dinner, thought Patrick sceptically, sucking a sample of Corton Charlemagne into his mouth.

The first taste made him break into a grin of recognition, like a man who has sighted his lover at the end of a crowded platform. Raising the glass again, he took a large gulp of the pale yellow wine, held it in his mouth for a few seconds, and then let it slide down his throat. Yes, it worked, it still worked. Some things never let him down.

He closed his eyes and the taste rippled over him like an hallucination. Cheaper wine would have buried him in fruit, but the grapes he imagined now were mercifully artificial, like earrings of swollen yellow pearls. He pictured the long sinewy shoots of the vine, dragging him down into the heavy reddish soil. Traces of iron and stone and earth and rain flashed across his palate and tantalized him like shooting stars. Sensations long wrapped in a bottle now unfurled like a stolen canvas.

Some things never let him down. It made him want to cry.

‘Would you care to taste the Do-crew Bo-ca-u?'

‘Yes,' said Patrick.

Golden Grapes poured the red wine into a ludicrously large glass. Even the smell of it made Patrick see things. Glistening granite. Cobwebs. Gothic cellars.

‘That's fine,' he said, without bothering to taste it. ‘Pour some now, I'll drink it later.'

Patrick sank back in his chair. Now that the wine distraction was over, the same question returned: would he go to his dealer after dinner, or to his hotel? Perhaps he could go to see Pierre socially. Patrick yelped with laughter at the absurdity of this pretext, but at the same time he felt a tremendous sentimental desire to see the demented Frenchman again. In many ways Pierre was the person Patrick felt closest to.

Pierre had spent eight years in a lunatic asylum under the misapprehension that he was an egg. ‘For eight fucking years, man,' he would say, speaking very rapidly in a strong French accent, ‘I thought I was an egg.
Je croyais que j'étais un œuf
– it's no fucking joke.' During this time his deserted body was fed, moved, washed, and clothed by nurses who had no idea that they were ministering to an egg. Pierre was let free to shoot about the world on unfettered voyages, in a state of enlightenment which did not require the crass mediation of words and senses. ‘I understood everything,' he would say, glaring at Patrick defiantly. ‘
J'avais une conscience totale.
'

On these voyages, Pierre would occasionally stop by his hospital room and hover with pity and contempt over the as yet unhatched egg of his body. However, after eight years he realized that his body was dying of neglect.

‘I had to force myself back into my fucking body; it was horrible.
J'avais un dégoût total.
'

Patrick was fascinated. It reminded him of Lucifer's disgust when he had to squeeze himself into the clammy and confining rings of the serpent's body.

One day the nurses came in with their sponges and their baby food, and found Pierre weak but impatient, sitting on the edge of his bed after almost a decade of inertia and silence.

‘OK, I go now,' he snapped.

Tests showed that he was perfectly lucid, perhaps too lucid, and so they discharged him from the hospital with relief.

Only a perpetual flow of heroin and cocaine could now sustain a coarse version of his former glorious insanity. He hovered, but not as lightly as before, on the margins between his body and his fatal nostalgia for disembodiment. In his arm a wound like a volcano cone, a scabrous mound of dried blood and scar tissue, rose up from the soft hollow opposite his elbow. It enabled him to drop the thin spike of his insulin syringes vertically into the vein, never digging for a hit, but leaving open this access to his bloodstream, like an emergency runway, always ready for another speedball to relieve the horror of his incarceration in a jaundiced and inhospitable body he could hardly call his own.

Pierre's routine was perfectly regular. He stayed awake for two and a half days and then, after a big shot of heroin, slept or at least rested for eighteen hours. During his waking periods he sold drugs curtly and efficiently, allowing most of his customers no more than ten minutes in his black-and-white apartment. He also saved himself the inconvenience of people dying in his bathroom by banning injections, a prohibition he soon lifted for Patrick. Throughout the last summer Patrick had tried to keep to the same sleep patterns as Pierre. They often stayed up all night, sitting either side of the horizontal mirror Pierre used as a table, stripped to the waist to save themselves the trouble of rolling their sleeves up and down, shooting up every quarter of an hour and, as they poured with chemical-smelling sweat, talking about their favourite subjects: how to achieve perfect disembodiment; how to witness their own deaths; how to stay in the borderlands, undefined by the identities which their histories tried to thrust upon them; how dishonest and shallow all the straight people were; and, of course, how they could give up drugs if they really wanted to, a condition that had not so far afflicted either of them for very long. Fucking hell, thought Patrick, draining his third glass of white wine and immediately reloading it from the dripping bottle. He
must
stop thinking about it.

With a father like his (sob, sob), Authority Figures and Role Models had always been a problem, but in Pierre he had at last found someone whose example he could follow with unqualified enthusiasm, and whose advice he could bear to take. At least until Pierre had tried to limit him to two grams of coke a day instead of the seven Patrick regarded as indispensable.