The Patrick Melrose Novels (24 page)

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.

The fetid atmosphere of the apartment struck Patrick like the scent of a long-absent lover. The stains of overturned coffee mugs still tattooed the oatmeal carpet in the same places as before, and the familiar pictures of severed heads floating on pieces of jigsaw puzzle, lovingly executed by Pierre with a fine ink pen, made Patrick smile.

‘What a relief to see you again!' he exclaimed. ‘I can't tell you what a nightmare it is out there, scoring off the streets.'

‘You score off the street!' barked Pierre disapprovingly. ‘You fucking crazy!'

‘But you were asleep.'

‘You shoot with tap water?'

‘Yes,' admitted Patrick guiltily.

‘You crazy,' glared Pierre. ‘Come in here, I show you.'

He walked through to his grimy and narrow kitchen. Opening the door of the big old-fashioned fridge, he took out a large jar of water.

‘This is tap water,' said Pierre ominously, holding up the jar. ‘I leave it one month and look…' He pointed to a diffuse brown sediment at the bottom of the jar. ‘Rust,' he said, ‘it's a fucking killer! I have one friend who shoot with tap water and the rust get in his bloodstream and his heart…' Pierre chopped the air with his hand and said, ‘
Tak:
it stop.'

‘That's appalling,' murmured Patrick, wondering when they were going to do business.

‘The water come from the mountains,' said Pierre, sitting down in his swivel chair and sucking water from a glass into an enviably slim syringe, ‘but the pipes are full of rust.'

‘I'm lucky to be alive,' said Patrick without conviction. ‘It's nothing but mineral water from now on, I promise.'

‘It's the City,' said Pierre darkly; ‘they keep the money for new pipes. They kill my friend. What do you want?' he added, opening a package and piling some white powder into a spoon with the corner of a razor blade.

‘Um … a gram of smack,' said Patrick casually, ‘and seven grams of coke.'

‘The smack is six hundred. The coke I make you a price: one hundred a gram instead of one-twenty. Total: thirteen hundred dollar.'

Patrick slipped the orange envelope out of his pocket while Pierre piled another white powder into the spoon and stirred it, frowning like a child pretending to make cement.

Was that nine or ten? Patrick started counting again. When he reached thirteen he tapped the notes together like a shuffled deck of cards and tossed them over to Pierre's side of the mirror where they fanned out extravagantly. Pierre wound a length of rubber around his bicep and gripped it in his teeth. Patrick was pleased to see that he still had the use of the volcano cone in the hollow of his arm.

Pierre's pupils dilated for a moment and then contracted again, like the feeding mouth of a sea anemone.

‘OK,' he croaked, trying to give the impression that nothing had happened, but sounding subdued by pleasure, ‘I give you what you want.' He refilled the syringe and squirted the contents into a second pinkish glass of water.

Patrick wiped his clammy hands on his trousers. Only the need to make one more tricky negotiation contained his heart-exploding impatience.

‘Do you have any spare syringes?' he asked. Pierre could be very awkward about syringes. Their value varied wildly according to how many he had left, and although he was generally helpful to Patrick when he had spent over a thousand dollars, there was always the danger that he would lapse into an indignant lecture on his presumption.

‘I give you two,' said Pierre with delinquent generosity.

‘Two!' exclaimed Patrick as if he had just witnessed a medieval relic waving from behind its glass case. Pierre took out a pair of pale green scales and measured the quantities Patrick had requested, giving him individual gram packets so that he could keep track of his coke consumption.

‘Ever thoughtful, ever kind,' murmured Patrick. The two precious syringes followed across the dusty mirror.

‘I get you some water,' said Pierre.

Perhaps he had put more heroin than usual in the speedball. How else could one explain this unaccustomed benevolence?

‘Thanks,' said Patrick, slipping hastily out of his overcoat and jacket and rolling up his shirt sleeve. Jesus! There was a black bulge in his skin where he had missed the vein round at Chilly's. He'd better not let Pierre see this sign of his incompetence and desperation. Pierre was such a moral man. Patrick let the sleeve flop down, undid the gold cufflink of his right sleeve, and rolled that up instead. Fixing was the one activity in which he had become truly ambidextrous. Pierre came back with one full and one empty glass, and a spoon.

Patrick unfolded one of the packets of coke. The shiny white paper was imprinted with a pale blue polar bear. Unlike Pierre he preferred to take coke on its own until the tension and fear were unbearable, then he would send in the Praetorian Guard of heroin to save the day from insanity and defeat. He held the packet in a funnel and tapped it gently. Small grains of powder slipped down the narrow valley of paper and tumbled into the spoon. Not too much for the first fix. Not too little either. Nothing was more intolerable than a dissipated, watery rush. He carried on tapping.

‘How are you?' asked Pierre, so rapidly that the question seemed like one word.

‘Well, my father died the other day and so…' Patrick was not sure what to say. He looked at the packet, gave it one more decisive tap, and another flurry of powder joined the small heap already in the spoon. ‘And so I'm a little confused at the moment,' he concluded.

‘How was he, your father?'

‘He was a kitten,' Patrick intoned rhapsodically. ‘And he had such artistic hands.' For a moment the water went syrupy and then it dissolved into a clear solution. ‘He could have been Prime Minister,' he added.

‘He was in politics?' asked Pierre, narrowing his eyes.

‘No, no,' Patrick replied, ‘it was a sort of joke. In his world – a world of pure imagination – it was better if a person “could have been” Prime Minister than if he
was
Prime Minister: that would have shown vulgar ambition.' There was a faint metallic ringing as he directed the jet of water from his syringe against the side of the spoon.

‘
Tu regrettes qu'il est mort?
' asked Pierre shrewdly.

‘
Non, absolument pas, je regrette qu'il ait vécu.
'

‘
Mais sans lui
, you would not exist.'

‘One shouldn't be egotistical about these things,' said Patrick with a smile.

His right arm was relatively unscathed. A few bruises the colour of tobacco stains yellowed his lower forearm, and faded pink puncture marks clustered around the bullseye of his principal vein. He raised the needle and allowed a couple of drops to dribble from its eye. His stomach made a rumbling sound and he felt as nervous and excited as a twelve-year-old in the back of a darkened cinema stretching his arm around a girl's shoulders for the first time.

He aimed the needle at the centre of the existing puncture marks and pushed it almost painlessly under his skin. A thread of blood burst into the barrel and curled around, a private mushroom cloud, luminously red in the clear bitter water. Thank God he had found a vein. His heart rate increased, like the drumbeat of a galley rowing into battle. Holding the barrel firmly between his fingers he pushed the plunger down slowly. Like a film in reverse the blood shot back through the needle towards its source.

Before he felt its effects he smelled the heartbreaking fragrance of the cocaine, and then a few seconds afterward, in a time-lapse frenzy, its cold geometric flowers broke out everywhere and carpeted the surface of his inner vision. Nothing could ever be as pleasurable as this. He clumsily drew back the plunger, filled the barrel with blood, and injected himself a second time. Drunk with pleasure, choking with love, he lurched forward and put the syringe down heavily on the mirror. He would have to flush it out before the blood coagulated, but he couldn't do it straight away. The sensation was too strong. Sound was twisted and amplified until it whistled like the engine of a landing jet.

Patrick sat back and closed his eyes, his lips thrust out like a child waiting for a kiss. Sweat had already broken out high on his forehead, and his armpits dripped every few seconds like defective taps.