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

‘Does he have a cloak?’

‘God, no. He wears the same old jeans and T-shirt year in year out.’

‘And this fantasy is all in the service of not admitting that you were wrong to tell Johnny.’

‘It was wrong if it upset you,’ said Patrick. ‘But when my oldest friend asked me what was going on, it would have been glib to leave out the most important fact.’

‘Poor darling, you’re just too—’

‘Authentic,’ Patrick interrupted. ‘That’s always been my trouble.’

‘Why don’t you bring some of that authenticity upstairs?’ asked Julia, leaning forwards and giving Patrick a long slow kiss.

He was grateful that she made it impossible for him to answer her question. He wouldn’t have known what to say. Was she mocking his shallow disembodied presence the night before? Or hadn’t she noticed? The problem of other minds. Christ, he was at it again. They were kissing. Get into it. Picture of himself getting into it. No, not the picture, the thing in itself. Whatever that was. Who was to say that authenticity lay in being oblivious to the reflective aspect of the mind? He was speculative. Why suppress that in favour of what was, in the end, just a picture of authenticity, a cliché of into-it-ness?

Julia broke off the kiss.

‘Where have you gone?’ she asked.

‘I was lost in my head,’ he admitted. ‘I think I was thrown by your request for me to bring my authenticity upstairs – there’s just so much of it, I’m not sure I can manage.’

‘I’ll help,’ said Julia.

They untangled themselves and walked back into the house, holding hands, like a couple of moon-struck teenagers.

When they reached the landing and were about to slip into Julia’s bedroom, they heard stifled giggling from Lucy’s bedroom, followed by a crescendo of hushing. Transformed from furtive lovers into concerned parents, they walked down the corridor with a new authority. Julia tapped gently on the door and immediately pushed it open. The room was dark, but light from the corridor fell across a crowded bed. All of Lucy’s indispensable soft toys, her white rabbit and her blue-eyed dog and, incredibly, the chipmunk she had chewed religiously since her third birthday, were scattered in various buckled postures across the bedspread, and replaced, inside the bed, by a live boy.

‘Darling?’ said Julia.

The children made no sound.

‘It’s no use pretending to be asleep. We heard you down the corridor.’

‘Well,’ said Lucy, sitting up suddenly, ‘we’re not doing anything wrong.’

‘We didn’t say you were,’ said Julia.

‘This is the most outrageous subplot,’ said Patrick. ‘Still, I don’t see why they shouldn’t sleep together if they want to.’

‘What’s a subplot?’ asked Robert.

‘Another part of the main story,’ said Patrick, ‘reflecting it in some more or less flagrant way.’

‘Why are we a subplot?’ asked Robert.

‘You’re not,’ said Patrick. ‘You’re a plot in your own right.’

‘We’ve got so much to talk about,’ said Lucy, ‘we just couldn’t wait until tomorrow.’

‘Is that why you two are still up?’ asked Robert. ‘Because you’ve got so much to talk about. Is that why you said we were a subplot?’

‘Listen, forget I ever said it,’ said Patrick. ‘We’re all each other’s subplots,’ he added, trying to confuse Robert as much as possible.

‘Like the moon going round the earth,’ said Robert.

‘Exactly. Everyone thinks they’re on the earth, even when they’re on somebody else’s moon.’

‘But the earth goes round the sun,’ said Robert. ‘Who’s on the sun?’

‘The sun is uninhabitable,’ said Patrick, relieved that they had travelled so far from the original motive of his comment. ‘Its only plot is to keep us going round and round.’

Robert looked troubled and was about to ask another question when Julia interrupted him.

‘Can we return to our own planet for a second?’ she asked. ‘I suppose I don’t mind you sharing a bed, but remember we’re going to Aqualand tomorrow, so you must go straight to sleep.’

‘What else would we do?’ said Lucy, starting to giggle. ‘Smudging?’

She and Robert made sounds of extravagant revulsion and collapsed in a heap of limbs and laughter.

PATRICK ORDERED ANOTHER DOUBLE espresso and watched the waitress weave her way back to the bar, only momentarily transfixed by a vision of her sprawled across one of the tables, gripping its sides while he fucked her from behind. He was too loyal to linger over the waitress when he was already involved in a fantasy about the girl in the black bikini on the other side of the cafe, her eyes closed and her legs slightly parted, absorbing the beams of the morning sun, still as a lizard. He might never recover from the look of intense seriousness with which she had examined her bikini line. An ordinary woman would have reserved that expression for a bathroom mirror, but she was a paragon of self-absorption, running her finger along the inside edge of her bikini, lifting it and realigning it still closer to the centre, so that it interfered as little as possible with the total nudity which was her real object. The mass of holiday-makers on the Promenade Rose, shuffling forward to claim their coffin-sized plot of beach, might as well not have existed; she was too fascinated by the state of her tan, her wax job, her waistline, too in love with herself to notice them. He was in love with her too. He was going to die if he didn’t have her. If he was going to be lost, and it looked as if he was, he wanted to be lost inside her, to drown in the little pool of her self-love – if there was room.

Oh, no, not that. Please. A piece of animated sports equipment had just walked up to her table, put his pack of red Marlboros and his mobile phone next to her mobile phone and pack of Marlboro Lights, kissed her on the lips and sat down, if that was the right term for the muscle-bound bouncing with which he eventually settled into the chair next to hers. Heartbreak. Disgust. Fury. Patrick skimmed over the ground of his immediate emotions and then forced himself upwards into the melancholy sky of resignation. Of course she was spoken for a million times over. In the end it was a good thing. There could be no real dialogue between those who still thought that time was on their side and those who realized that they were dangling from its jaws, like Saturn’s children, already half-devoured. Devoured. He could feel it: the dull efficiency of a praying mantis tearing arcs of flesh from the still living aphid it has clamped between its forelegs; the circular hobbling of a wildebeest, reluctant to lie down with the lion who hangs confidently from his neck. The fall, the dust, the last twitch.

Yes, in the end it was a good thing that Bikini Girl was spoken for. He lacked the pedagogic patience and the particular kind of vanity which would have enabled him to opt for the cheap solution of being a youth vampire. It was Julia who had got him used to sex during her fortnight’s stay, and it was among the time refugees of her blighted generation that he must look for lovers. With the possible exception, of course, of the waitress who was now weaving her way back towards him. There was something about the shop-worn sincerity of her smile which suited his mood. Or was it the stubborn pout of the labial mould formed by her jeans? Should he get a shot of brandy to tip into his espresso? It was only ten thirty in the morning, but there were already several misty-cold glasses of beer blazing among the round tables. He only had two days of holiday left. They might as well be debauched. He ordered the brandy. At least that way she would be back soon. That’s how he liked to think of her, weaving back and forth on his behalf, tirelessly attending to his clumsy search for relief.