Edward Aubyn - The Patrick Melrose Novels - Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk

‘This is my favourite bit,’ said Josh, love-struck. Pirates were boarding Sinbad’s ship. The ship’s parrot flew in the face of the meanest-looking pirate. He staggered around disoriented and was effortlessly tipped overboard by Sinbad’s men. Shot of pleased parrot squawking.

‘Hmm,’ said Robert. ‘Listen, I’ll be back in a minute.’

Josh paid no attention to his departure. Robert scanned the corridor for Jo, but she was not there. He retraced the route they had come in by, and when he got to the garden door, saw that the grown-ups were no longer around the pool. He slipped outside and hooked round to the back of the house. The tailored lawn petered out to a carpet of pine needles and a couple of big dustbins. He sat down and leant back against the ridged bark of the pine, unsupervised.

He wondered who was wasting the most time by spending a day with the Packers, not counting the Packers themselves who were always wasting more time than anybody, and usually had a film to prove it. Thomas was only sixty days old, so it was the biggest waste of time for him, because one day was one-sixtieth of his life, whereas his father, who was forty, was wasting the smallest proportion of his life. Robert tried to work out what proportion of their lives a day was for each of them. The calculations were hard to hold in his mind, so he imagined different sizes of wheels in a clock. Then he wondered how to include the opposite facts: that Thomas had his whole life ahead of him, whereas his parents had quite a lot of theirs behind them, so that one day was less wasteful for Thomas because he had more days left. That created a new set of wheels – red instead of silver – his father’s spinning round and Thomas’s turning with a stately infrequent click. He still had to include the different qualities of suffering and the different benefits for each of them, but that made his machine fantastically complicated and so, in one salutary sweep, he decided that they were all suffering equally, and that none of them had got anything out of it at all, making the value of the day a nice fat zero. Hugely relieved, he got back to visualizing the rods connecting the two sets of wheels. It all looked quite like the big steam engine in the Science Museum, except that paper came out at one end with a figure for the units of waste. It turned out, when he read the figures, that he was wasting more time than anyone else. He was horrified by this result, but at the same time quite pleased. Then he heard Jo’s dreadful voice calling his name.

For a moment he froze with indecision. The trouble was that hiding only made the search party more frantic and furious. He decided to act casual and amble round the corner just in time to hear Jo bawling his name for the second time.

‘Hi,’ he said.

‘Where have you been? I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’

‘You can’t have been, or you would have found me,’ he said.

‘Don’t get smart with me, young man,’ said Jo. ‘Have you been fighting with Josh?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘How could anyone fight with Josh? He’s just a blob.’

‘He’s not a blob, he’s your best friend,’ said Jo.

‘No he isn’t,’ he said.

‘You have been fighting,’ said Jo.

‘We haven’t,’ he insisted.

‘Well, anyway, you can’t just go off like that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because we all worry about you.’

‘I worry about my parents when they go away, but that doesn’t stop them,’ he remarked. ‘Nor should it.’

He was definitely winning this argument. In an emergency, his father could send Robert to court on his behalf. He imagined himself in a wig, bringing the jury round to his way of seeing things, but then Jo squatted down in front of him and looked searchingly into his eyes.

‘Do your parents go away a lot?’ she asked.

‘Not really,’ he said, but before he could tell her that they had never both been out of the house for more than about three hours, he found himself swept into her arms and crushed against the words ‘Up For It’, without fully understanding what they meant. He had to tuck his shirt in again after she had pulled it out of his trousers with her consoling back rub.

‘What does “Up For It” mean?’ he asked when he got his breath back.

‘Never you mind,’ she said, round-eyed. ‘Come on! Lunch time!’

She marched him into the house. He couldn’t exactly refuse to hold her hand now that they were practically lovers.

A man in an apron was standing beside the lunch table.

‘Gaston, you’re spoiling us rotten,’ said Jilly reproachfully. ‘I’m putting on a stone just looking at these tarts. You should have your own television programme. Vous sur le television, Gaston, make you beaucoup de monnaie. Fantastique!’

The table was crowded with bottles of pink wine, two of them empty, and a variety of custard tarts: a custard tart with bits of ham in it, a custard tart with bits of onion in it, a custard tart with curled-up tomatoes on it and a custard tart with curled-up courgettes on it.

Only Thomas was safe, breast-feeding.

‘So you’ve rounded up the stray,’ said Jilly. She whipped her hand in the air and burst into song. ‘Round ’em up! Bring ’em in! Raw-w h-ide!’

Robert felt prickles of embarrassment breaking out all over his body. It must be desperate being Jilly.

‘He’s used to being alone a lot, is he?’ said Jo, challenging his mother.

‘Yes, when he wants to be,’ said his mother, not realizing that Jo thought he might as well be living in an orphanage.

‘I was just telling your parents they ought to take you to see the real Father Christmas,’ said Jilly, dishing out the food. ‘Concorde from Gatwick in the morning, up to Lapland, snowmobiles waiting, and whoosh, you’re in Father Christmas’s cave twenty minutes later. He gives the children a present, then back on Concorde and home in time for dinner. It’s in the Arctic Circle, you see, which makes it more real than mucking about in Harrods.’

‘It sounds very educational,’ said his father, ‘but I think the school fees will have to take priority.’

‘Josh would murder us if we didn’t take him,’ said Jim.

‘I’m not surprised,’ said his father.

Josh made the sound of a massive explosion and punched the air.

‘Smashing through the sound barrier,’ he shouted.

‘Which one of these tarts do you fancy?’ Jilly asked Robert.

They all looked equally disgusting.

He glanced at his mother with her copper hair spiralling down towards the suckling Thomas, and he could feel the two of them blending together like wet clay.

‘I want what Thomas is having,’ he said. He hadn’t meant to say it out loud, it just slipped out.

Jim, Jilly, Roger, Christine, Jo and Josh brayed like a herd of donkeys. Roger looked even angrier when he was laughing.

‘Mine’s a breast-milk,’ said Jilly, raising her glass drunkenly.

His parents smiled at him sympathetically.

‘I’m afraid you’re on solids now, old man,’ said his father. ‘I’ve got used to wishing I was younger, but I didn’t expect you to start quite yet. You’re still supposed to be wishing you were older.’

His mother let him sit on the edge of her chair and kissed him on the forehead.

‘It’s perfectly normal,’ Jo reassured his parents, who she knew had hardly ever seen a child. ‘They’re not usually that direct about it, that’s all.’ She allowed herself a last hiccup of laughter.

Robert tuned out of the babble around him and gazed at his brother. Thomas’s mouth was busy and then quiet and then busy, massaging the milk from their mother’s breast. Robert wanted to be there, curled up in the hub of his senses, before he knew about things he had never seen – the length of the Nile, the size of the moon, what they wore at the Boston Tea Party – before he was bombarded by adult propaganda, and measured his experience against it. He wanted to be there too, but he wanted to take his sense of self with him, the sneaky witness of the very thing that had no witnesses. Thomas was not witnessing himself doing things, he was just doing them. It was an impossible task to join him there as Robert was now, like somersaulting and standing still at the same time. He had often brooded on that idea and although he didn’t end up thinking he could do it, he felt the impossibility receding as the muscles of his imagination grew more tense, like a diver standing on the very edge of the board before he springs. That was all he could do: drop into the atmosphere around Thomas, letting his desire for observation peel away as he got closer to the ground where Thomas lived, and where he had once lived as well. It was hard to do it now, though, because Jilly was on to him again.