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

He had injected whisky, watching his burned vein turn black under the skin, just to satisfy the needle fever. He had dissolved cocaine in Perrier because the tap was too far away for his imperious desire. Brain like a bowl of Rice Krispies – snap! crackle! pop! – and a disturbing effervescence in the valves of his heart. He had woken up after passing out for thirty hours, the syringe, still half full of smack, hanging loosely from his arm, and started again, with that cold annihilating will, the ritual that had nearly killed him.

Patrick could not help wondering, after his failure to capture Marianne, if a syringe would not have been a better intermediary than his conversation. It made him sentimental to think of Natasha saying in her hoarse whisper, ‘Baby, you’re so good, you always hit the vein,’ a trickle of dark blood flowing from her pale arm as it dangled over the edge of the chair.

He’d shot her up the first time they’d met. She had sat on the sofa with her knees raised, and proffered her arm trustingly. He sat beside her on the floor, and when he gave her the fix, her knees fell open, gathering light in the heavy folds of her black silk trousers, and he was overwhelmed with tenderness as she fell back and sighed, her eyes closed and her face glowing, ‘Too much … pleasure … too much.’

What was sex next to this compassionate violence? Only this violence could break open a world constrained by the hidden cameras of conscience and vanity.

After that, their relationship had decayed from injection to intercourse, from dazzled recognition to chat. Still, thought Patrick, dazed by the solid-looking objects around him, as he got up from his chair and out of his trance, he had to believe that somewhere out there was a girl willing to trade her body for a couple of drinks and a Quaalude. And he was going to begin his search at the Mudd Club. After one more quick fix.

* * *

An hour later, Patrick managed with some difficulty to leave the hotel. He sprawled in the back of the cab as it rumbled downtown. Those pencils of steel, chrome fans, and crystal towers that seemed to burst like pure soprano notes from a prima donna’s hideous, pockmarked face, were muffled by darkness. Crossword puzzles of lit and unlit offices slipped by cluelessly. Two lit offices down – call it ‘no’ – and five across. Five-letter word beginning with ‘o’. Oran … one … order. Call it order. No order. The building disappeared in the back window. Did everyone play this game? The land of the free and the home of the brave, where people only did something if everyone else did too. Had he already thought that? Had he already said that?

As usual, there was a crowd outside the Mudd Club. Patrick slipped to the front where two black men and a fat, bearded white man stood behind a twisted red cord and decided who to let in. He greeted the bouncers in a tired drawl. They always let him in. Perhaps it was because he assumed that they would; or because he didn’t really care if they did; or, of course, because he looked rich and likely to order a lot of drinks.

Patrick went straight upstairs where, instead of the live music that was blaring from a small stage on the ground floor, tapes played continuously while videos of spectacular but familiar events – time-lapse flowers suddenly blossoming, Hitler thumping the podium at Nuremberg and then embracing himself in an ecstasy of approval, early attempts at human flight crashing, disintegrating and plummeting from bridges – radiated from a dozen television screens into every angle of the dark room. Just before he stepped inside, a slim sulky girl with short white hair and violet contact lenses slipped past him down the stairs. Dressed all in black, her white make-up and discontented but symmetrical features made her look like a junkie doll. She even had a black silk tourniquet around her thin bicep. Sweet! He watched her. She was not leaving, just switching rooms. He would check her out later.

The Talking Heads pulsed from every speaker. ‘The centre is missing,’ gasped David Byrne, and Patrick could not help agreeing with him. How did they know exactly what he was feeling? It was spooky.

A shot of a cheetah chasing an antelope through the African bush flickered onto all the screens at once. Patrick pressed himself against the wall as if he had been thrown back by the centrifugal force of a spinning room. He felt waves of weakness and exhaustion when the real state of his body broke through the guard of drugs. The last fix of coke had petered out on the journey down and he might have to take that Black Beauty sooner than scheduled.

The antelope was brought down in a cloud of dust. Its legs twitched for a while as the cheetah ate into its neck. At first the event seemed to shatter and dissipate among all the screens, and then, as the shot closed in, the kill multiplied and gathered force. The room still seemed to Patrick to be throwing him backward, as if rejection and exclusion, the companions of any social contact, had been turned into a physical force. Sometimes the startling contentment of a smack rush caused him to believe that the universe was indifferent rather than hostile, but such a touching faith was bound to be betrayed and seemed especially remote now, as he rested with flattened palms against the wall of the room.

Naturally, he still thought of himself in the third person, as a character in a book or a movie, but at least it was still the third person singular. ‘They’ hadn’t come to get him yet tonight, the bacteria of voices that had taken over the night before. In the presence of the absence, in the absence of the presence, Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Life imitating bad literary criticism. Dis/inte/gration. Exhausted and febrile. Business as usual. Funny business as usual.

Like a man in the spinning barrel of a funfair, Patrick unglued himself laboriously from the wall. Under the shimmering blue light of the televisions, cool customers sprawled uncomfortably on the bench of soft grey cushions that ran around the edge of the room. Patrick walked towards the bar with the care of a driver trying to convince a policeman that he is sober.

‘Doctor said his liver looked like a relief map of the Rockies,’ said a thick-necked, jocular man leaning on the bar.

Patrick winced and immediately felt a needle-sharp twinge in his side. Absurdly suggestible, must try to calm down. In a parody of detachment, he swivelled his eyes around the room with the small staccato movements of a predatory lizard.

Sprawling on the cushion nearest to the bar was a guy in a red and yellow kilt, a studded belt, army boots, a black leather jacket, and thunderbolt earrings. He looked as if he’d had too many Tuinals. Patrick thought of the black flash of the Tuinal rush, burning the arm like scouring powder; strictly an emergency measure. The look struck him as outmoded; after all, it was six years since the punk summer of ’76 when he’d sat on the fire escape at school in the sweltering heat, smoking joints, listening to ‘White Riot’, and shouting ‘destroy’ over the rooftops. Next to the kilted punk were two nervous New Jersey secretaries perched on the edge of their seats in tight trousers that cut into their soft bellies. They transferred red lipstick to their all-white cigarette butts with promising zeal, but were too hideous to be considered for the task of consoling him for Marianne’s indifference. With his back slightly turned to them, a commodity broker in a dark suit (or was he an art dealer?) was talking to a man who compensated for his near-baldness with a long wispy curtain of grey hair emerging from the last productive follicles at the back of his skull. They looked as if they were keeping in touch with the desperate state of youth, checking out the new-wave kids, spotting the latest inflections of rebellious fashion.