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

He didn’t accept any of it: the reduced horizons, the fading faculties. He refused to buy the pebble spectacles his Magoo-standard eyesight pleaded for. He loathed the fungus which seemed to have invaded his bloodstream, blurring everything. The impression of sharpness which he still sometimes gave was a simulation. His speech was like a jigsaw puzzle he had done a hundred times, he was just remembering what he had done before. He didn’t make fresh connections any more. All that was over.

From down the corridor, he heard Thomas starting to cry. The sound sandpapered his nerves. He wanted to console Thomas. He wanted to be consoled by Julia. He wanted Mary to be consoled by consoling Thomas. He wanted everyone to be all right. He couldn’t bear it any longer. He threw the bedclothes aside and paced the room.

Thomas soon settled down, but his cries had set off a reaction which Patrick could no longer control. He was going to go to Julia’s room. He was going to turn the narrow allotment of his life into a field of blazing poppies. He opened the door slowly, lifting it on its hinges so that it didn’t whine. He pulled it closed again with the handle held down so that it didn’t click. He released the tongue slowly into the groove. The corridor was glowing with child-friendly light. It was as bright as a prison yard. He walked down it, heel-to-toe, all the way to the end, to Lucy’s partially open door. He wanted to check first that she was still in her room. Yes. Fine. He doubled back to Julia’s door. His heart was thumping. He felt terrifyingly alive. He leant close to the door and listened.

What was he going to do next? What would Julia do if he went into her room? Call the police? Pull him into bed whispering, ‘What took you so long?’ Perhaps it was a little tactless to wake her at four in the morning. Maybe he should make an appointment for the following evening. His feet were getting cold, standing on the hexagonal tiles.

‘Daddy.’

He turned around and saw Robert, pale and frowning in the doorway of his bedroom.

‘Hi,’ whispered Patrick.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Good question,’ said Patrick. ‘Well, I heard Thomas crying…’ That much was true. ‘And I wondered if he was all right.’

‘But why are you standing outside Julia’s room?’

‘I didn’t want to disturb Thomas if he had gone back to sleep,’ Patrick explained. Robert was too intelligent for this rubbish, but perhaps he was a shade too young to be told the truth. In a couple of years Patrick could offer him a cigar and say, ‘I’m having this rather awkward mezzo del camin thing, and I need a quick affair to buck me up.’ Robert would slap him on the back and say, ‘I completely understand, old man. Good luck and happy hunting.’ In the meantime, he was six years old and the truth had to be hidden from him.

As if to save Patrick from his predicament, Thomas let out another wail of pain.

‘I think I’d better go in,’ said Patrick. ‘Poor Mummy has been up all night.’

He smiled stoically at Robert. ‘You’d better get some sleep,’ he said, kissing him on the forehead.

Robert turned back into his room, unconvinced.

The safety plug in Thomas’s cluttered room cast a faint orange glow across the floor. Patrick picked his way towards the bed into which Mary carried Thomas every night out of his hated cot, and lowered himself onto the mattress, pushing half a dozen soft toys onto the floor. Thomas writhed and twisted, trying to find a comfortable position. Patrick lay on his side, teetering on the edge of the bed. He certainly wasn’t going to get any sleep in this precarious sardine tin, but if he could just let his mind glide along, he might get some rest; if he could go omnogogic, gaining the looseness of dreams without their tyranny, that would be something. He was just going to forget about the Julia incident. What Julia incident?

Perhaps Thomas wouldn’t be a wreck when he grew up. What more could one ask?

He was beginning to glide along in half-thoughts … quarter-thoughts, counting down … down.

Patrick felt a violent kick land on his face. The warm metallic rush of blood flooded his nose and the roof of his mouth.

‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘I think I’ve got a nosebleed.’

‘Poor you,’ mumbled Mary.

‘I’d better go back to my room,’ he whispered, rolling backwards onto the floor. He replaced Thomas’s velveteen bodyguards and clambered to his feet. His knees hurt. He probably had arthritis. He might as well move into his mother’s nursing home. Wouldn’t that be cosy?

He slouched back down the corridor, pressing his nostril with the knuckle of his index finger. There were spots of blood on his pyjamas: so much for the field of poppies. It was five in the morning now, too late for one half of life and too early for the other. No prospect of sleep. He might as well go downstairs, drink a gallon of healthy, organic coffee and pay some bills.

KETTLE, WEARING DARK GLASSES and an enormous straw hat, was already sitting at the stone table. Using her expired boarding pass as a bookmark, she closed her copy of James Pope-Hennessy’s biography of Queen Mary and put it down next to her plate.

‘It’s like a dream,’ said Patrick, easing his mother’s wheelchair into position, ‘having you both here at the same time.’

‘Like … a … dream,’ said Eleanor, generalizing.

‘How are you, my dear?’ asked Kettle, bristling with indifference.

‘Very…’

The effort that Eleanor put into producing, after some time, a high-pitched ‘well’ gave an impression of something quite different, as if she had seen herself heading towards ‘mad’ or ‘miserable’ and just managed to swerve at the last moment. Her radiant smile uncovered the dental bomb site Patrick had so often begged her to repair. It was no use: she was not about to waste money on herself while she could still draw a charitable breath. The tiny amount of spare income she had left was being saved up for Seamus’s sensory-deprivation tanks. In the meantime she was well on her way to depriving herself of the sensation of eating. Her tongue curled and twisted among shattered crags, searching forlornly for a whole tooth. There were several no-go areas too sensitive for food to enter.

‘I’m going to help with the lunch,’ said regretful, duty-bound Patrick, bolting across the lawn like a swimmer hurrying to the surface after too long a dive.

He knew that it was not really his mother he needed to escape but the poisonous combination of boredom and rage he felt whenever he thought about her. That, however, was a long-term project. ‘It may take more than one lifetime,’ he warned himself in a voice of simpering tenderness. Just looking at the next few minutes, he needed to put as many literal-minded yards between himself and his mother as he could manage. That morning, in the nursing home, he had found her sitting by the door with her bag on her knees, looking as if she had been ready for hours. She handed him a faint pencil-written note. It said that she wanted to transfer Saint-Nazaire to the Foundation straight away and not, as things stood, after her death. He had managed to postpone things last year, but could he manage it again? The note said she ‘needed closure’ and wanted his help and his ‘blessing’. Seamus’s rhetoric had left its fingerprints all over the prose. No doubt he had a closure ritual lined up, a Native American trance dance which would close its own closure with a macrocosmic and microcosmic, a father sky and mother earth, a symbolic and actual, an immediate and eternal booting out of Patrick and his family from Saint-Nazaire. At the centre of a dogfight of contradictory emotions, Patrick could sometimes glimpse his longing to get rid of the fucking place. At some point he was going to have to drop the whole thing, he was going to have to come back to Saint-Nazaire for a healing-drum weekend, to ask Seamus to help him let go of his childhood home, to put the ‘trans’ into what seemed so terribly personal.