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

The park was bright and warm, crowded with sleeveless dresses and jackets hooked over shoulders. Robert felt the heightened alertness of arrival being eroded by exhaustion, and the novelty of New York overlaid by the sense that he had seen this new place a thousand times before. Whereas the London parks he knew seemed to insist on nature, Central Park insisted on recreation. Every inch was organized for pleasure. Cinder paths looped among the little hills and plains, past a zoo and a skating rink, quiet zones, sports fields and a plethora of playgrounds. Headphoned rollerbladers pursued a private music. Teenagers scaled small mounds of bronze-grey rocks. A flute player’s serpentine music echoed damply under the arch of a bridge. As it faded behind them, it was replaced by the shrill mechanical tooting of a carousel.

‘Look, Mama, a carousel!’ said Thomas. ‘I want to go on it. I can’t resist doing that, actually.’

‘OK,’ said Robert’s father with a tantrum-avoiding sigh.

Robert was delegated to take Thomas for a ride, sitting on the same horse as him and fastening a leather belt around his waist.

‘Is this a real horse?’ said Thomas.

‘Yes,’ said Robert. ‘It’s a huge wild American horse.’

‘You be Alabala and say it’s a wild American horse,’ said Thomas.

Robert obeyed his brother.

‘No, Alabala!’ said Thomas sharply, waving his index finger. ‘It’s a carousel horse.’

‘Whoops, sorry,’ said Robert as the carousel set in motion.

Soon it was going fast, almost too fast. Nothing about the carousel in Lacoste had prepared him for these rearing snorting horses, their nostrils painted red and their thick necks twisted out ambitiously towards the park. He was on a different continent now. The frighteningly loud music seemed to have driven all the clowns on the central barrel mad, and he could see that instead of being disguised by a painted sky studded with lights, heavily greased rods were revolving overhead. Along with the violence of the ride, this exposed machinery struck him as typically American. He didn’t really know why. Perhaps everything in America would show this genius for being instantly typical. Just as his body was being tricked by a second afternoon, every surprise was haunted by this sense of being exemplary.

Soon after they left the carousel, they came across a vibrant middle-aged woman bent over her lapdog.

‘Do you want a cappuccino?’ she asked, as if it must be a tremendous temptation. ‘Are you ready for a cappuccino? Come on! Come on!’ She clapped her hands together ecstatically.

But the dog strained backwards on his leash, as if to say, ‘I’m a Dandie Dinmont, I don’t drink cappuccino.’

‘I think that’s a clear “no”,’ said Robert’s father.

‘Shh…’ said Robert.

‘I mean,’ said Thomas, removing his thumb from his mouth as he reclined in his stroller, ‘I think that’s a clear no.’ He chuckled. ‘I mean, it’s incredible. The little doggie doesn’t want a cappuccino!’ He put his thumb back in his mouth and played with the smooth label of his raggie.

After another five minutes his parents were ready to head back to the hotel, but Robert caught a glimpse of some water and ran forward a little further.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘a lake.’

The landscaping created the impression that the far shore of the lake lapped against the base of a double-towered West Side skyscraper. Under the gaze of this perforated cliff, T-shirted men hauled metal boats past reedy islands, girlfriends photographed each other laughing among the oars, immobile children bulged in blue life jackets.

‘Look,’ said Robert, not quite able to express how astonishingly typical it all seemed.

‘I want to go on the lake,’ said Thomas.

‘Not today,’ said Robert’s father.

‘But I want to,’ he screamed, tears instantly beading his eyelids.

‘Let’s go for a run,’ said Robert’s father, grabbing the stroller and sprinting down an avenue of bronze statues, Thomas’s protests gradually replaced by cries of ‘Faster!’

By the time they caught up with him, Robert’s father was bent double over the handles of the stroller, getting his breath back.

‘The selection committee must have been based in Edinburgh,’ he gasped, nodding at the giant statues of Robert Burns and Walter Scott, stooped beneath the weight of their genius. A little further on a much smaller sprightly Shakespeare sported a period costume.

The Churchill Hotel where they were staying had no room service, and so Robert’s father went out to buy a kettle and some ‘basic provisions’. When he got back, Robert could smell the fresh whiskey on his breath.

‘Jesus,’ said his father, fishing a box out of his shopping bag, ‘you go out to buy a kettle and you come back with nothing less than a Travel Smart Hot Beverage Maker.’

Like Linda’s and Mom’s unconstrained tushes, phrases seemed to feel entitled to take up as much room as they could. Robert watched his father unloading tea and coffee and a bottle of whiskey from a brown-paper bag. The bottle had already been drunk from.

‘Look at these filthy curtains,’ said his father, seeing Robert calculating the proportion of the bottle that was already empty. ‘The reason why the rest of New York is breathing lovely clean air is that we’ve got these special pollution filters in our room sucking all the dirt out of the atmosphere. Sally said that the decoration in this place “grows on you” – that’s exactly what I’m worried about. Try not to touch any of the surfaces.’

Robert, who had been excited to be staying in any hotel at all, started to look sceptically at his surroundings. A Chinese carpet in mouse’s-underbelly pink, with a medal-lioned pictogram at the centre, gave way to the greasy French provincial upholstery of the sofa and armchair. Above the sofa, against the buttercup walls, an Indian tapestry of women dancing rigidly by a well, with some cows in the foreground, stood opposite a big painting of two ballerinas, one in a lemon-yellow and the other in a rose-pink tutu. The bath was as cratered as the moon. The chrome had greyed on the taps and the enamel was stained. If you didn’t really need a bath before getting in it, you certainly would afterwards. The view from his parents’ room, where Thomas was bouncing up and down on the bed shouting, ‘Look at me! I’m an astronaut!’, gave onto a rusty air-conditioning system that throbbed a few feet beneath the ill-fitting window. From the drawing room, where he was going to sleep on the sofa bed with Thomas (or, knowing Thomas, where his father was going to sleep after Thomas had taken over his mother’s bed), there was a perfect view of the sheet rock that covered the neighbouring skyscraper.

‘It’s like living in a quarry,’ said his father, splashing a couple of inches of whiskey into a glass. He strode over to the window and pulled down the grey plastic blind. The pole holding the blind crashed down onto the drawing room’s air-conditioning unit with a hollow clang.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said.

Robert’s mother burst out laughing. ‘It’s only for a few nights,’ she said. ‘Let’s go out to dinner. Thomas isn’t going to get back to sleep for ages. He had three hours on the plane. What about you, darling?’ she asked Robert.

‘I want to motor on. Can I have a Coca-Cola?’

‘No,’ said his mother, ‘you’re quite excited enough already.’

‘Apple and cinnamon flavour,’ muttered Robert’s father, as he continued to unpack the shopping. ‘I couldn’t find any oats that taste of oats or apples that taste of apples, only oats that taste of apples. And cinnamon, of course, to blend with the toothpaste. A less sober man might end up brushing his teeth with oats, or having a bowl of toothpaste for breakfast – without noticing. It’s enough to drive you mad. If there aren’t any additives they boast about that too. I saw a packet of camomile tea that said “Caffeine Free”. Why would camomile have any caffeine in it?’ He took out the last package.