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

On the other side of the room, a pretty girl with the ever-popular poor look, a black sweater over a simple second-hand skirt, held hands with a man in a T-shirt and jeans. They stared obediently at one of the TV screens, two glasses of beer at their feet. Beyond them, a group of three people talked excitedly. One man in a cobalt-blue suit and thin tie, and another in a primary-red suit and thin tie, bracketed a hook-nosed girl with long black hair and a pair of leather jodhpurs. From the far reaches of the room, Patrick could make out the gleam of chains.

Hopeless, completely hopeless. The only remotely pretty girl in the room was physically linked to another man. They weren’t even having an argument. It was disgusting.

He checked his pockets again, crossing himself devoutly. The smack, the speed, the cash, and the Quaalude. One could never be too paranoid – or could one? The coke was back in the hotel with the credit cards. He ordered a bourbon on the rocks, fished out the Black Beauty, and swallowed it with the first gulp. Two hours ahead of schedule, but never mind. Rules were made to be broken. Which meant, if that was a rule, that sometimes they should be observed. Mind sputtering on. Circular thinking. So tired.

A shot of David Bowie sitting drunkenly in front of a serried bank of television screens flickered onto the club’s television screens, only to be replaced by the famous shot of Orson Welles walking through the hall of mirrors in Charles Foster Kane’s Floridian castle. Multiplying images of multiplication.

‘I suppose you think that’s clever,’ sighed Patrick, like a disappointed schoolmaster.

‘I’m sorry?’

Patrick turned around. It was the man with the curtain of long grey hair.

‘Just talking to myself,’ muttered Patrick. ‘I was thinking that the images on the screen were empty and out of control.’

‘Maybe they are intended to be images about emptiness,’ said the man solemnly. ‘I think that’s something the kids are very much in touch with right now.’

‘How can you be in touch with emptiness?’ asked Patrick.

‘By the way, my name’s Alan. Two Beck’s,’ he said to the waiter. ‘What’s yours?’

‘Bourbon.’

‘I mean your name.’

‘Oh, eh, Patrick.’

‘Hi.’ Alan extended his hand. Patrick shook it reluctantly. ‘What are headlights flaring on the road?’ asked Alan as if it were a riddle.

Patrick shrugged his shoulders.

‘Headlights flaring on the road,’ Alan replied with admirable calm.

‘That’s a relief,’ said Patrick.

‘Everything in life is a symbol of itself.’

‘That’s what I was afraid of,’ said Patrick, ‘but luckily words are too slippery to communicate that.’

‘They must communicate that,’ Alan affirmed. ‘It’s like when you’re screwing you gotta think of the person you’re with.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Patrick sceptically, ‘as long as you put them in a different situation.’

‘If the screens here show other ways of making images, other screens, mirrors, cameras, you can call that self-reflection emptiness or you can call it honesty. It announces that it can only announce itself.’

‘But what about Batman?’ said Patrick. ‘That’s not about the nature of the television medium.’

‘At some level it is.’

‘Somewhere below the Batcave.’

‘That’s right,’ said Alan encouragingly, ‘somewhere below the Batcave. That’s what a lot of the kids feel: the cultural emptiness.’

‘I’ll take your word for it,’ said Patrick.

‘ I happen to think that there’s still news of Being worth telling,’ said Alan, picking up the bottles of Beck’s. ‘Whitman’s love is more precious than money,’ he beamed.

Fucking hell, thought Patrick.

‘Do you want to join us?’

‘No, in fact I was just going,’ said Patrick. ‘Frightfully bad jet lag.’

‘OK,’ said Alan unperturbed.

‘So long.’

‘Bye now.’

Patrick drained his glass of bourbon to convince Alan that he was really leaving, and headed for the downstairs room.

He really wasn’t doing too well. Not only had he failed to pick up a chick, but he’d had to ward off this loony faggot. What a pickup line, ‘Whitman’s love is more precious than money.’ Patrick let out a short burst of laughter on the stairs. At least down here he might be able to track down that violet-eyed punk. He had to have her. She was definitely the lucky woman destined to share his hotel bed for the last few hours before he left the country.

The atmosphere downstairs was very different from the carpeted bar above. On the stage, musicians in black T-shirts and torn jeans produced a heavily strumming wall of sound which the lead singer’s voice tried unsuccessfully to scale. The long bare room, once a warehouse, had no decorations or fancy lights, only a heroic sense of its own rawness. In this loud darkness, Patrick made out blue and pink spiked hair, zebra, leopard and tiger prints, tight black trousers and pointy shoes, exotics and tramps leaning against the walls sniffing powders, solitary dancers with closed eyes and nodding heads, robotic couples, and small groups of jumping and crashing bodies nearer the stage.

Patrick stood on tiptoe trying to find the violet-eyed junkie doll. She was nowhere to be seen, but he soon became distracted by the back of a blonde girl in a homemade chiffon dress and a black leather jacket. Wandering casually past her he glanced around. ‘You must be fucking joking,’ he muttered vehemently. He felt angry and betrayed, as if her face were a broken promise.

How could he have been so disloyal? He was after the violet-eyed junkie doll. Debbie had once screamed at him in the middle of an argument, ‘Do you know what love is, Patrick? Do you have the faintest idea?’ And he’d said wearily, ‘How many guesses do I get?’

Patrick doubled back and, checking from side to side, weaved his way across the room, and took up a position against the wall.

There she was! With her back to a column and her hands behind her, as if she were tied to a stake, she looked up at the musicians with reverent curiosity. Patrick concentrated madly and imagined her sliding across the floor towards the magnetic field of his chest and stomach. Frowning ferociously, he cast a neurone net over her body and hauled her in like a heavy catch. He whipped mental lassoes around the column she stood beside, and brought her staggering across the floor like a bound slave. Finally, he closed his eyes, took flight, and projected his desire through the room, covering her neck and breasts with kisses.

When he opened his eyes she was gone. Maybe he should have tried conversation. He looked around him indignantly. Where the hell was she? His psychic powers were failing, even though the resurgence of the speed was giving his incompetence a renewed intensity.

He must have her. He must have her, or someone else. He needed contact, skin to skin, muscle to muscle. Above all, he needed the oblivious moment of penetration when, for a second, he could stop thinking about himself. Unless, as too often happened, the appearance of intimacy unleashed a further disembodiment and a deeper privacy. Never mind that. Even if sex sentenced him to an exile which, on top of the usual melancholy, contained the additional irritation of another person’s dumb reproach, the conquest was bound to be exhilarating. Or was it? Who was left to him? Beautiful women were always with someone, unless you happened to catch them in the split second between inconsolable loss and consolation, or in the taxi that was taking them from their principal lover to one of the secondary ones. And if you had a beautiful woman, they always kept you waiting, kept you doubting, because it was the only time they could be sure that you were thinking about them.