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

Patrick was startled. Where was the voice coming from? Was it shouting at him? He spun around and looked behind him. His heart was beating hard. He often overheard his father shouting at other people, especially his mother, and it terrified him and made him want to run away. But this time he had to stand still and listen because he wanted to understand what was wrong and whether he was to blame.

‘ Come up here immediately! ’

Now Patrick knew where the voice was coming from. He looked up and saw his father leaning over the balcony.

‘What have I done wrong?’ he asked, but too quietly to be heard. His father looked so furious that Patrick lost all conviction of his own innocence. With growing alarm he tried to work backward from his father’s rage to what his own crime might be.

By the time he had climbed the steep stairs to his father’s bedroom, Patrick was ready to apologize for anything, but still felt a lingering desire to know what he was apologizing for. In the doorway he stopped and asked again, audibly this time, ‘What have I done wrong?’

‘Close the door behind you,’ said his father. ‘And come over here.’ He sounded disgusted by the obligation the child had thrust upon him.

As Patrick slowly crossed the floor he tried to think of some way to placate his father. Maybe if he said something clever he’d be forgiven, but he felt extraordinarily stupid and could only think over and over: two times two equals four, two times two equals four. He tried to remember something he had noticed that morning, or anything, anything at all that might persuade his father that he had been ‘observing everything’. But his mind was eclipsed by the shadow of his father’s presence.

He stood by the bed and stared down at the green bedspread with the bonfire birds on it. His father sounded rather weary when he spoke.

‘I’m going to have to beat you.’

‘ But what have I done wrong? ’

‘You know perfectly well what you have done,’ his father said in a cold, annihilating voice that Patrick found overwhelmingly persuasive. He was suddenly ashamed of all the things he had done wrong. His whole existence seemed to be contaminated by failure.

Moving quickly, his father grabbed Patrick’s shirt collar. He sat down on the bed, hoisted Patrick over his right thigh, and removed the yellow slipper from his left foot. Such rapid manoeuvres would normally have made David wince with pain, but he was able to regain his youthful agility in the service of such a good cause. He pulled down Patrick’s trousers and underpants and raised the slipper surprisingly high for a man who had trouble with his right shoulder.

The first blow was astonishingly painful. Patrick tried to take the attitude of stoic misery admired by dentists. He tried to be brave but, during the beating, although he at last realized that his father wanted to hurt him as much as possible, he refused to believe it.

The harder he struggled, the harder he was hit. Longing to move but afraid to move, he was split in half by this incomprehensible violence. Horror closed in on him and crushed his body like the jaws of a dog. After the beating, his father dropped him like a dead thing onto the bed.

And he still could not get away. Pushing his palm against Patrick’s right shoulder blade, his father was holding him down. Patrick twisted his head around anxiously, but could only see the blue of his father’s dressing gown.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked, but his father did not answer and Patrick was too scared to repeat the question. His father’s hand was pushing down on him and, his face squashed into the folds of the bedspread, he could hardly breathe. He stared fixedly up at the curtain pole and the top of the open windows. He could not understand what form the punishment was now taking, but he knew that his father must be very angry with him to be hurting him so much. He could not stand the helplessness that washed over him. He could not stand the unfairness. He did not know who this man was, it could not be his father who was crushing him like this.

From the curtain pole, if he could get up on the curtain pole, he could have sat looking down on the whole scene, just as his father was looking down on him. For a moment, Patrick felt he was up there watching with detachment the punishment inflicted by a strange man on a small boy. As hard as he could Patrick concentrated on the curtain pole and this time it lasted longer, he was sitting up there, his arms folded, leaning back against the wall.

Then he was back down on the bed again feeling a kind of blankness and bearing the weight of not knowing what was happening. He could hear his father wheezing, and the bedhead bumping against the wall. From behind the curtains with the green birds, he saw a gecko emerge and cling motionlessly to the corner of the wall beside the open window. Patrick lanced himself towards it. Tightening his fists and concentrating until his concentration was like a telephone wire stretched between them, Patrick disappeared into the lizard’s body.

The gecko understood, because at that very instant it dashed round the corner of the window and out onto the wall. Below he could see the drop to the terrace and the leaves of the Virginia creeper, red and green and yellow, and from up there, close against the wall, he could hold on with suckered feet and hang upside down safely from the eaves of the roof. He scurried onto the old roof tiles which were covered in grey and orange lichen, and then into the trough between the tiles, all the way up to the ridge of the roof. He moved fast down the other slope, and was far away, and nobody would ever find him again, because they wouldn’t know where to look, and couldn’t know that he was coiled up in the body of a gecko.

‘Stay here,’ said David, standing up and adjusting his yellow and white pyjamas.

Patrick could not have done anything else. He recognized, dully at first and then more vividly, the humiliation of his position. Face down on the bed, with his trousers bunched around his knees and a strange, worrying wetness at the base of his spine. It made him think he was bleeding. That, somehow, his father had stabbed him in the back.

His father went to the bathroom and came back. With a handful of lavatory paper he wiped away the increasingly cold pool of slime that had started to trickle between Patrick’s buttocks.

‘You can get up now,’ he said.

Patrick could not in fact get up. The memory of voluntary action was too remote and complicated. Impatiently, his father pulled up Patrick’s trousers and lifted him off the bed. Patrick stood beside the bed while his father clasped his shoulders, ostensibly to straighten his stance, but it made Patrick think that his father was going to pin his shoulders back and force them together until he was turned inside out and his lungs and heart burst out of his chest.

Instead, David leaned over and said, ‘Don’t ever tell your mother or anyone else what happened today, or you’ll be very severely punished. Do you understand?’

Patrick nodded.

‘Are you hungry?’

Patrick shook his head.

‘Well, I’m starving,’ said David chattily. ‘You really should eat more, you know. Build up your strength.’

‘Can I go now?’

‘All right, if you don’t want any lunch, you can go.’ David was irritated again.

Patrick walked down the drive and as he stared at the toes of his scuffed sandals he saw, instead, the top of his head as if from ten or twelve feet in the air, and he felt an uncomfortable curiosity about the boy he was watching. It was not quite personal, like the accident they saw on the road last year and his mother said not to look.

Back down again, Patrick felt utter defeat. There was no flash of purple cloaks. No special soldiers. No gecko. Nothing. He tried to take to the air again, the way seabirds do when a wave breaks over the rock where they were standing. But he had lost the power to move and stayed behind, drowning.