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

What the hell was going on? Had Jefferson gone to fetch some friends so they could beat him up together, or was he simply being abandoned while Jefferson went to get stoned?

Yes, thought Patrick, shifting restlessly, he had hung out with nothing but failures. Living in Paris when he was nineteen, he had fallen in with Jim, an Australian heroin smuggler on the run, and Simon, a black American bank robber just out of prison. He could remember Jim saying, as he had searched for a vein among the thick orange hairs of his forearm, ‘Australia’s so beautiful in the spring, man. All the little lambs frisking about. You can tell they’re just so happy to be alive.’ He had pushed the plunger down with a whimsical expression on his face.

Simon had tried to rob a bank while he was withdrawing, but he had been forced to surrender to the police after they had fired several volleys at him. ‘I didn’t wanna look like no Swiss cheese,’ he explained.

Patrick heard the merciful sound of the locks opening again.

‘I got it,’ said Jefferson huskily. ‘Goody,’ said Patrick, sitting up.

Jefferson was happy and relaxed as he drove to the hotel. When he had snorted three of the bags Patrick could understand why. Here at last was a powder that contained a little heroin.

Jefferson and Patrick parted with the genuine warmth of people who had exploited each other successfully. Back in his hotel room, lying on the bed with his arms spread out, Patrick realized that if he took the other two bags and turned on the television he could probably fall asleep. Once he had taken heroin he could imagine being without it; when he was without it he could only imagine getting more. But just to see if all the evening’s trouble had been completely unnecessary, he decided to call Pierre’s number.

As the telephone rang he again wondered what kept him from suicide. Was it something as contemptible as sentimentality, or hope, or narcissism? No. It was really the desire to know what would happen next, despite the conviction that it was bound to be horrible: the narrative suspense of it all.

‘Hallo?’

‘Pierre!’

‘Who iz this?’

‘Patrick.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Can I come round?’

‘OK. How long?’

‘Twenty minutes.’

‘OK.’

Patrick raised his fist in triumph and sprinted from the room.

‘PIERRE!’

‘ Ça va? ’ said Pierre, getting up from his leather office chair. The parched yellow skin of his face was stretched more tautly than ever over the thin nose, high cheekbones, and prominent jaw. He shook hands with Patrick, fixing him with lantern eyes.

The fetid atmosphere of the apartment struck Patrick like the scent of a long-absent lover. The stains of overturned coffee mugs still tattooed the oatmeal carpet in the same places as before, and the familiar pictures of severed heads floating on pieces of jigsaw puzzle, lovingly executed by Pierre with a fine ink pen, made Patrick smile.

‘What a relief to see you again!’ he exclaimed. ‘I can’t tell you what a nightmare it is out there, scoring off the streets.’

‘You score off the street!’ barked Pierre disapprovingly. ‘You fucking crazy!’

‘But you were asleep.’

‘You shoot with tap water?’

‘Yes,’ admitted Patrick guiltily.

‘You crazy,’ glared Pierre. ‘Come in here, I show you.’

He walked through to his grimy and narrow kitchen. Opening the door of the big old-fashioned fridge, he took out a large jar of water.

‘This is tap water,’ said Pierre ominously, holding up the jar. ‘I leave it one month and look…’ He pointed to a diffuse brown sediment at the bottom of the jar. ‘Rust,’ he said, ‘it’s a fucking killer! I have one friend who shoot with tap water and the rust get in his bloodstream and his heart…’ Pierre chopped the air with his hand and said, ‘ Tak: it stop.’

‘That’s appalling,’ murmured Patrick, wondering when they were going to do business.

‘The water come from the mountains,’ said Pierre, sitting down in his swivel chair and sucking water from a glass into an enviably slim syringe, ‘but the pipes are full of rust.’

‘I’m lucky to be alive,’ said Patrick without conviction. ‘It’s nothing but mineral water from now on, I promise.’

‘It’s the City,’ said Pierre darkly; ‘they keep the money for new pipes. They kill my friend. What do you want?’ he added, opening a package and piling some white powder into a spoon with the corner of a razor blade.

‘Um … a gram of smack,’ said Patrick casually, ‘and seven grams of coke.’

‘The smack is six hundred. The coke I make you a price: one hundred a gram instead of one-twenty. Total: thirteen hundred dollar.’

Patrick slipped the orange envelope out of his pocket while Pierre piled another white powder into the spoon and stirred it, frowning like a child pretending to make cement.

Was that nine or ten? Patrick started counting again. When he reached thirteen he tapped the notes together like a shuffled deck of cards and tossed them over to Pierre’s side of the mirror where they fanned out extravagantly. Pierre wound a length of rubber around his bicep and gripped it in his teeth. Patrick was pleased to see that he still had the use of the volcano cone in the hollow of his arm.

Pierre’s pupils dilated for a moment and then contracted again, like the feeding mouth of a sea anemone.

‘OK,’ he croaked, trying to give the impression that nothing had happened, but sounding subdued by pleasure, ‘I give you what you want.’ He refilled the syringe and squirted the contents into a second pinkish glass of water.

Patrick wiped his clammy hands on his trousers. Only the need to make one more tricky negotiation contained his heart-exploding impatience.

‘Do you have any spare syringes?’ he asked. Pierre could be very awkward about syringes. Their value varied wildly according to how many he had left, and although he was generally helpful to Patrick when he had spent over a thousand dollars, there was always the danger that he would lapse into an indignant lecture on his presumption.

‘I give you two,’ said Pierre with delinquent generosity.

‘Two!’ exclaimed Patrick as if he had just witnessed a medieval relic waving from behind its glass case. Pierre took out a pair of pale green scales and measured the quantities Patrick had requested, giving him individual gram packets so that he could keep track of his coke consumption.

‘Ever thoughtful, ever kind,’ murmured Patrick. The two precious syringes followed across the dusty mirror.

‘I get you some water,’ said Pierre.

Perhaps he had put more heroin than usual in the speedball. How else could one explain this unaccustomed benevolence?

‘Thanks,’ said Patrick, slipping hastily out of his overcoat and jacket and rolling up his shirt sleeve. Jesus! There was a black bulge in his skin where he had missed the vein round at Chilly’s. He’d better not let Pierre see this sign of his incompetence and desperation. Pierre was such a moral man. Patrick let the sleeve flop down, undid the gold cufflink of his right sleeve, and rolled that up instead. Fixing was the one activity in which he had become truly ambidextrous. Pierre came back with one full and one empty glass, and a spoon.

Patrick unfolded one of the packets of coke. The shiny white paper was imprinted with a pale blue polar bear. Unlike Pierre he preferred to take coke on its own until the tension and fear were unbearable, then he would send in the Praetorian Guard of heroin to save the day from insanity and defeat. He held the packet in a funnel and tapped it gently. Small grains of powder slipped down the narrow valley of paper and tumbled into the spoon. Not too much for the first fix. Not too little either. Nothing was more intolerable than a dissipated, watery rush. He carried on tapping.