Edward Aubyn - At Last

His month in the Priory had been a crucial period of his life, transforming the crisis that had led to the breakdown of his marriage and the escalation of his drinking. It was disquieting to think how close he had come to running away after only three days, lured by Becky’s departure. Before leaving, she had found him in the lounge of the Depression Wing.

‘I was looking for you. I’m not meant to speak to anyone,’ she said in a mock whisper, ‘because I’m a bad influence.’

She gave him a little folded note and a light kiss on the lips before hurrying out of the room.

This is my sister’s address. She’s away in the States, so I’ll be there alone, if you feel like running away from this fucking place and doing something CRAZY. Love Becks.

The note reminded him of the jagged CRAZYs he used to doodle in the margins of his O-level chemistry notes after smoking a joint during the morning break at school. It was out of the question to visit her, he told himself, as he called a minicab service listed in the payphone booth under the back stairs. Was this what they meant by powerless?

‘Just don’t!’ he muttered, closing the door of his minicab firmly to show how determined he was not to pursue a bloodstained festival of dysfunction. He gave the driver the address on Becky’s note.

‘Well, you must be all right if they let you out,’ said the jaunty driver.

‘I let myself out. I couldn’t afford it.’

‘Bit pricey, is it?’

Patrick didn’t answer, glazed over with desire and conflict.

‘Have you heard the one about the man who goes into the psychiatrist’s office?’ asked the driver, setting off down the drive and smiling in the rear-view mirror. ‘He says, “It’s been terrible, Doctor, for three years I thought I was a butterfly, and that’s not all, it gets worse: for the last three months I thought I was a moth.” “Good God,” says the psychiatrist, “what a difficult time you’ve been having. So, what made you come here today and ask for help?” “Well,” says the man, “I saw the light in the window and I felt drawn to it, so I just flew in.”’

‘That’s a good one,’ said Patrick, sinking deeper into Becky’s imagined nakedness, while wondering how long his latest dose of oxazepam would last. ‘Do you specialize in Priory patients because of your sunny temperament?’

‘You say that,’ said the driver, ‘but last year for about four months I literally couldn’t get out of bed, literally couldn’t see the point in anything.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Patrick.

From Hammersmith Broadway to the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, they talked about the causeless weeping, the suicidal daydreams, the excruciating slowness, the sleepless nights and the listless days. By the time they reached Bayswater, they were best friends and the driver turned round to Patrick and said with the full blast of his restored cheerfulness, ‘In a few months you’ll be looking back on what you’ve just been through and saying, “ What was all that about? What was all that fuss and aggravation about?” That’s what happened to me.’

Patrick looked back down at Becky’s note. She had signed herself with the name of a beer. Becks. He started to whisper hoarsely under his breath, in a Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone voice, ‘The one who comes to you and asks for a meeting, and has the same name as a well-known brand of beer — she’s the one that wants you to have a relapse…’

Not the voices, he mustn’t let them kick off. ‘It starts off with a little Marlon Brando impersonation,’ sighed Mrs Mop, ‘and the next thing you know…’

‘Shut up!’ Patrick interrupted.

‘What?’

‘Oh, not you. I’m sorry.’

They turned into a big square with a central garden. The driver drew up to a white stucco building. Patrick leant sideways and looked out of the window. Becky was on the third floor, beautiful, available and mentally ill.

To think of the things he’d done for a little intimacy; earth flying over his shoulder as he dug his own grave. There were the good women who gave him the care he had never had. They had to be tortured into letting him down, to show that they couldn’t really be trusted. And then there were the bad women who saved time by being untrustworthy straight away. He generally alternated between these two broad categories, enchanted by some variant which briefly masked the futility of defending the decaying fortress of his personality, while hoping that it would obligingly rearrange itself into a temple of peace and fulfilment. Hoping and moping, moping and hoping. With only a little detachment, his love life looked like a child’s wind-up toy made to march again and again over the precipice of a kitchen table. Romance was where love was most under threat, not where it was likely to achieve its highest expression. If a candidate was sufficiently hopeless, like Becky, she took on the magnetism of the obviously doomed. It was embarrassing to be so deluded, and even more embarrassing to react to the delusion, like a man running away from his own looming shadow.

‘I know this sounds a little bit crazy , for want of a better word,’ said Patrick with a snort of laughter, ‘but do you think you could drive me back? I’m not ready yet.’

‘Back to the Priory?’ said the driver, no longer quite as sympathetic to his passenger.

He doesn’t want to know about those of us who have to go back, thought Patrick. He closed his eyes and stretched out in the back seat. ‘Talk would talk and go so far askance…something, something…You don’t want madhouse and the whole thing there.’ The whole thing there. The wonderful inarticulacy of it, expanding with threat and contracting with ostensive urgency.

On the drive back, Patrick started to feel chest pains which even the violence of his longing for pathological romance could no longer explain. His hands were shaking and he could feel the sweat breaking out on his forehead. By the time he reached Dr Pagazzi’s office, he was hallucinating mildly and apparently trapped in a two-dimensional space with no depth, like an insect crawling around a window pane, looking for a way out. Dr Pagazzi scolded him for missing his four o’clock dose of oxazepam, saying that he might have a heart attack if he withdrew too fast. Patrick lifted the dull plastic tub in his shaking hand and knocked back three oxazepam.

The next day he ‘shared’ his near escape with the Depression Group. It turned out that all of them had nearly run away, or had run away and come back, or thought about running away much of the time. Some, on the other hand, dreaded leaving, but they only seemed superficially opposite to the ones who wanted to run away: everyone was obsessed with how much therapy they needed before they could begin a ‘normal life’. Patrick was surprised by how grateful he felt for the sense of solidarity with the other patients. A lifelong habit of being set apart was briefly overturned by a wave of goodwill towards everyone in the group.

Johnny Hall had taken an unassuming seat near the back of the room. Patrick worked his way round the far end of the pew to join his old friend.

‘How are you bearing up?’ said Johnny.

‘Pretty well,’ said Patrick, sitting down next to him. ‘I have a strange feeling of excitement which I wouldn’t admit to anyone except you and Mary. I felt rather knocked out for the first few days, but then I had what I think your profession would call an “insight”. I went to the funeral parlour yesterday evening and sat with Eleanor’s body. I connected…I’ll tell you later.’

Johnny smiled encouragingly. ‘Christ,’ he said, after a pause, ‘Nicholas Pratt. I didn’t expect to see him.’

‘Neither did I. You’re so lucky to have an ethical reason not to talk to him.’