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

‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,’ said Johnny, realizing that Patrick didn’t want to answer his question.

‘When’s that?’ said Patrick.

‘Before you light it – after that, it’s a symptom of unreconstructed orality.’

‘I wouldn’t be having this cigar unless I’d given up smoking,’ said Patrick. ‘I want to make that absolutely clear.’

‘I completely understand,’ said Johnny.

‘One of the burdens of being a child psychologist,’ said Patrick, ‘is that if you ask someone how they are, they tell you. Instead of saying that I feel fine, I have to give you the real answer: not fine.’

‘Not fine?’

‘Bad, chaotic, terrified. My emotional life seems to cascade into wordlessness in every direction, not only because Thomas hasn’t taken up words yet and Eleanor has already been abandoned by them, but also, internally, I feel the feebleness of everything I can control surrounded by the immensity of everything I can’t control. It’s very primitive and very strong. There’s no wood left for the fire that keeps the wild animals at bay, that sort of thing. But also something even more confusing – the wild animals are a part of me that’s winning. I can’t stop them from destroying me without destroying them, but I can’t destroy them without destroying myself. Even that makes it sound too organized. It’s really more like a cartoon of cats fighting: a spinning blackness with exclamation marks flying off it.’

‘You sound as if you have a good grasp of what’s going on,’ said Johnny.

‘That should be a strength, but since I’m trying to communicate how little grasp I have of what’s going on, it’s a hindrance.’

‘It’s not a hindrance to your telling me about the chaos. It’s only a hindrance if you’re trying to manifest it.’

‘Perhaps I do want to manifest it, so that it takes some concrete form, instead of it being this enormous state of mind.’

‘I’m sure it does take some concrete form.’

‘Hmm…’

Patrick scanned the concrete forms, the insomnia, the heavy drinking, the bouts of overeating, the constant longing for solitude which, if achieved, made him desperate for company, not to mention (or should he mention it? He felt the heavy gravitational field of confession surrounding Johnny) last night’s adulterous incident.

He could remember only a few hours ago concluding that it had been a mistake, and beginning to imagine the mature discussion he was going to have with Julia. Now that the tide of alcohol was rising again, he was becoming more and more convinced that he had simply gone to bed with the wrong attitude. He must do better. He would do better.

‘I must do better,’ said Patrick.

‘Do what better?’

‘Oh, everything,’ said Patrick vaguely.

He certainly wasn’t going to tell Johnny, and then have his inflamed appetites placed in some pathological context or, worse, in a therapeutic programme. On the other hand, what was the point of his friendship with Johnny if it wasn’t truthful? They had been friends for thirty years. Johnny’s parents had known his parents. They knew each other’s lives in depth. If Patrick had been wondering whether to commit suicide, he would have asked Johnny’s opinion. Maybe he could shift the conversation away from his own mental health and onto one of their favourite topics: the way that time was grinding down their generation. Their shorthand for this process was ‘the retreat from Moscow’, thanks to the vivid picture they both had of the straggling survivors of Napoleon’s army limping, bloodstained and bootless, through a landscape of frozen horses and dying men. Out of professional curiosity, Johnny had recently attended a reunion dinner of their year at school. He reported back to Patrick. The captain of the First XI was now a crack-head. The most brilliant student of their year was buried in the middle ranks of the civil service. Gareth Williams couldn’t come because he was in a mental hospital. Their most ‘successful’ contemporary was the head of a merchant bank who, according to Johnny, ‘failed to register on the authenticity graph’. That was the graph that Johnny cared about, the one that would determine whether, in his own eyes, he ended up in a roadside ditch or not.

‘I’m sorry to hear that you’ve been feeling bad,’ said Johnny, before Patrick could get him onto the safe ground of collective disappointment, sell-out and loss.

‘I slept with Julia last night,’ said Patrick.

‘Did that make you feel better?’

‘It made me wonder if I was feeling better. It was perhaps just a little bit too cerebral.’

‘That’s what you “must do better”.’

‘Exactly. I didn’t know whether to tell you. I thought I might have to stop if we worked out exactly what was going on.’

‘You’ve worked it out already.’

‘Up to a point. I know that Thomas is making me revisit my own infancy in a way that Robert never did. Maybe it’s the prominence of that old prop, a mother who needs mothering, which has lent so much authenticity to this revival. In any case, a deep sense of ancestral gloom stalks the night, and I would rather spend it with Julia who, instead of the primal chaos I feel on my own, offers the relatively innocuous death of youth.’

‘It all sounds very allegorical – Primal Chaos and the Death of Youth. Sometimes a woman is just a woman.’

‘Before you light her up?’

‘No, no, that’s a cigar,’ said Johnny.

‘Honestly, there are no easy answers. Just when you think you’ve worked something out…’

Patrick could hear the whining of a mosquito in his right ear. He turned his head and blew smoke in its direction. The sound stopped.

‘Obviously, I would love to have real, embodied, fully present experiences – especially of sex,’ Patrick went on, ‘but, as you’ve pointed out, I’m taking refuge in an allegorical realm where everything seems to represent a well-known syndrome or conflict. I remember complaining to my doctor about the side effects of the Ribavirin he prescribed for me. “Oh, yes, that’s known,” he said with a kind of tremendous, uninfectious calm. Mind you, when I told him about a side effect that wasn’t known, he dismissed it by saying, “I’ve never heard of that before.” I think I’m trying to be like him, to immunize myself against experience by concentrating on phenomena. I keep thinking, “That’s known,” when in fact I feel the opposite, that it’s alien and menacing and out of control.’

Patrick felt a sharp sting. ‘Fucking mosquitoes,’ he said, slapping the back of his neck rather too hard. ‘I’m being eaten alive.’

‘I’ve never heard of that before,’ said Johnny sceptically.

‘Oh, it’s known ,’ Patrick assured him. ‘It’s quite standard among the highlanders of Papua New Guinea. The only question is whether they make you eat yourself alive.’

Johnny let this prospect drown in silence.

‘Listen,’ said Patrick, leaning forward, and speaking more rapidly than before, ‘I’m not in any serious doubt that everything I’m going through at the moment corresponds with the texture of my infancy in some way. I’m sure that my midnight angst resembles some free fall I felt in my cot when, for my own good, and so as to save me from becoming a manipulative little monster, my parents did exactly what suited them and ignored me. As you know, my mother only paves the road to hell with the best intentions, so we can assume that my father was the advocate of the character-building advantages of a willbreaking upbringing. But how can I really know and what good would it do me to find out?’

‘Well, for a start, you’re not using your powers of persuasion to keep Mary away from Thomas. Without any sense of connection with your own infancy, you almost certainly would be. It’s true that the hardest maps to draw up are the very early ones, the first two years. We can only work with inferences. If, for example, someone had an acute intolerance of being kept waiting, felt a perpetual hunger which eating turned into a bloated despair, and was kept awake by hypervigilance…’