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

The waiter returned with Patrick’s second Bullshot, and another large book under his arm.

‘Harry thought you might want this as well, Mr Morgan.’

‘Well, I’ll be darned,’ said Ballantine with a colloquial twang, craning back in his chair and beaming at the barman. ‘I mentioned the book and it falls in my lap. Now that’s what I call service!’

He opened the new volume with familiar relish. ‘Some of my friends have been kind enough to say that I have an excellent prose style,’ he explained in a voice that did not sound as puzzled as it was meant to. ‘I don’t see it myself, I just put it down as it was. The way I hunted in Africa is a way of life that doesn’t exist anymore, and I just told the truth about it, that’s all.’

‘Yes,’ drawled George. ‘Journalists and people of that sort write a lot of nonsense about what they call the “Happy Valley Set”. Well, I was there a good deal at the time, and I can tell you there was no more unhappiness than usual, no more drunkenness than usual, people behaved just as they did in London or New York.’

George leaned over and picked up an olive. ‘We did have dinner in our pyjamas,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘which I suppose was a little unusual. But not because we all wanted to jump into bed with one another, although obviously a good deal of that sort of thing went on, as it always does; it was simply that we had to get up the next day at dawn to go hunting. When we got back in the afternoon, we would have “toasty”, which would be a whisky and soda, or whatever you wanted. And then they would say, “Bathy, bwana, bathy time,” and run you a bath. After that more “toasty”, and then dinner in one’s pyjamas. People behaved just as they did anywhere else, although I must say, they did drink a great deal, really a great deal.’

‘It sounds like heaven,’ said Patrick.

‘Well, you know, George, the drinking went with the lifestyle. You just sweated it all out,’ said Ballantine.

‘Yes, quite,’ said George.

You don’t have to go to Africa to sweat too much, thought Patrick.

‘This is a photograph of me with a Tanganyikan mountain goat,’ said Ballantine, handing Patrick the second book. ‘I was told that it was the last potent male of the species, so I can’t help having mixed feelings about it.’

God, he’s sensitive too, thought Patrick, looking at the photograph of a younger Ballantine, in a khaki hat, kneeling beside the corpse of a goat.

‘I took the photographs myself,’ said Ballantine casually. ‘A number of professional photographers have begged me to tell them my “secret”, but I’ve had to disappoint them – the only secret is to get a fascinating subject and photograph it the best way you know how.’

‘Amazing,’ mumbled Patrick.

‘Sometimes, from a foolish impulse of pride,’ Ballantine continued, ‘I included myself in the shots and allowed one of the boys to press the trigger – they could do that well enough.’

‘Ah,’ said George with uncharacteristic verve, ‘here’s Tom.’

An exceptionally tall man in a blue seersucker suit worked his way through the tables. He had thin but rather chaotic grey hair, and drooping bloodhound eyes.

Ballantine closed the two books and rested them on his knees. The loop of his monstrous vanity was complete. He had been talking about a book in which he wrote about his photographs of the animals he had shot with guns from his own magnificent collection, a collection photographed (alas, not by him) in the second book.

‘Tom Charles,’ said George, ‘Patrick Melrose.’

‘I see you’ve been talking to the Renaissance Man,’ said Tom in a dry gravelly voice. ‘How are you, Ballantine? Been keeping Mr Melrose up to date on your achievements?’

‘Well, I thought he might be interested in the guns,’ said Ballantine peevishly.

‘The thought he never has, is that somebody might not be interested in the guns,’ Tom croaked. ‘I was sorry to hear about your father, I guess you must be feeling sick at heart.’

‘I suppose I am,’ said Patrick, caught off balance. ‘It’s a terrible time for anybody. Whatever you feel, you feel it strongly, and you feel just about everything.’

‘Do you want a drink, or do you want to go straight in to lunch?’ asked George.

‘Let’s eat,’ said Tom.

The four men got up. Patrick noticed that the two Bullshots had made him feel much more substantial. He could also detect the steady lucid throb of the speed. Perhaps he could allow himself a quick fix before lunch.

‘Where are the loos, George?’

‘Oh, just through that door in the corner,’ said George. ‘We’ll be in the dining room, up the stairs on the right.’

‘I’ll see you there.’

Patrick broke away from the group and headed for the door that George had pointed out. On the other side he found a large cool room of black and white marble, shiny chrome fittings, and mahogany doors. At one end of a row of basins was a pile of starched linen with ‘Key Club’ sewn into the corner in green cotton, and, beside it, a large wicker basket for discarding the used towels.

With sudden efficiency and stealth, he picked up a towel, filled a glass with water, and slipped into one of the mahogany cubicles.

There was no time to waste and Patrick seemed to put the glass down, drop the towel, and take off his jacket in one gesture.

He sat on the loo seat and put the syringe carefully on the towel in his lap. He rolled his sleeve up tightly on his bicep to act as a makeshift tourniquet and, while he frantically clenched and unclenched his fist, removed the cap of the syringe with the thumb of his other hand.

His veins were becoming quite shy, but a lucky stab in the bicep, just below his rolled-up sleeve, yielded the gratifying spectacle of a red mushroom cloud uncurling in the barrel of the syringe.

He pushed the plunger down hard and unrolled his shirt as fast as he could to allow the solution a free passage through his bloodstream.

Patrick wiped the trickle of blood from his arm and flushed out the syringe, also squirting its pinkish water into the towel.

The rush was disappointing. Although his hands were shaking and his heart was pounding, he had missed that blissful fainting sensation, that heartbreaking moment, as compressed as the autobiography of a drowning man, but as elusive and intimate as the smell of a flower.

What was the fucking point of shooting coke if he wasn’t going to get a proper rush? It was intolerable. Indignant and yet anxious about the consequences, Patrick took out the second syringe, sat down on the loo again, and rolled up his sleeve. The strange thing was that the rush seemed to be getting stronger, as if it had been dammed up against his shirt sleeve and had taken unusually long to reach his brain. In any case he was now committed to a second fix and, with a combination of bowel-loosening excitement and dread, he tried to put the spike back in exactly the same spot as before.

As he rolled down his sleeve this time, he realized that he had made a serious mistake. This was too much. Only far too much was enough. But this was more than enough.

Too overwhelmed to flush it out, he only managed to put the cap back on the precious new syringe and drop it on the floor. He slumped against the back wall of the cubicle, his head hanging to one side, gasping and wincing like an athlete who has just crossed the finishing line after losing a race, the prickle of fresh sweat breaking out all over the surface of his skin, and his eyes tightly closed while a rapid succession of scenes flashed across his inner vision: a bee crashing drunkenly into the pollen-laden pistils of a flower; fissures spreading over the concrete of a disintegrating dam; a long blade cutting strips of flesh from the body of a dead whale; a barrel of gouged-out eyes tumbling stickily between the cylinders of a wine press.