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

He was overcome with loathing and contempt. The girl was completely out of control. Whereas drugs were at least amenable to advertising: life on the edge, exploring the inner Congo, the heart of darkness, outstaring death, returning with the scars and medals of a haunting knowledge, Coleridge, Baudelaire, Leary…; and even if this advertising seemed horribly false to anyone who had taken drugs at all seriously, it wasn’t possible even to pretend that there was anything heroic about an eating problem. And yet there was something unsettlingly familiar about Rachel’s obsessive greed and ridiculous dishonesty.

‘Can we go now?’ snapped Patrick.

‘Yeah, OK,’ said Rachel timidly.

He ordered the check, threw down a twenty-dollar bill before it arrived, and wriggled out of the booth. Another fucking taxi drive, he thought.

* * *

‘I feel kinda nau-tious,’ complained Rachel, as they went up in the hotel elevator.

‘I’m not surprised,’ said Patrick severely, ‘I feel nauseous and I was only watching.’

‘Hey, you’re pretty hos-tel.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Patrick, ‘I’m awfully tired.’ Better not lose her now.

‘Me too,’ said Rachel.

Patrick unlocked the door, and switched on the lights.

‘Sorry about the mess.’

‘You should see my apartment.’

‘Maybe I will,’ said Patrick, ‘and all that Neo-Objective art.’

‘Definitely,’ said Rachel. ‘Can I use the bathroom?’

‘Of course.’

Time to mix a quick fix, thought Patrick, as he heard the lock slide closed on the bathroom door. He fished the coke from his suitcase and the smack from his inner left pocket, took the spoon from the back of the bottom drawer, and retrieved the half-bottle of Evian he had hidden, with unnecessary caution, behind the curtain. There might not be many more opportunities, and he’d better make a strong speedball to reduce the number of fixes to a minimum. He mixed the smack and coke together, dissolved them and drew the solution into the syringe.

He was ready, but how long did he have before Rachel emerged from the bathroom? With his hearing strained, like a man listening to his footsteps on a creaking staircase, he concentrated on the sounds coming from the bathroom. The muffled noise of vomiting, followed by a little rasping cough, reassured him that there would be time for a fix.

Taking no risks, he stuck the spike into a thick vein in the back of his hand. The smell of cocaine assailed him and he felt his nerves stretching like piano wires. The heroin followed in a soft rain of felt hammers playing up his spine and rumbling into his skull.

He groaned contentedly and scratched his nose. It was so pleasurable, so fucking pleasurable. How could he ever give up? It was love. It was coming home. It was Ithaca, the end of all his storm-tossed wanderings. He dropped the syringe into the top drawer, staggered across the room, and sprawled on the bed.

Peace at last. The mingling lashes of half-closed eyes, the slow reluctant flutter of folding wings; his body pounded by felt hammers, pulses dancing like sand on a drum; love and poison evacuating his breath in a long slow exhalation, fading into a privacy he could never quite remember, nor for a moment forget. His thoughts shimmered like a hesitating stream, gathering into pools of discrete and vivid imagery.

He pictured his feet walking through a damp London square, his shoes sealing wet leaves darkly to the pavement. In the square, the heat from a heap of smouldering leaves syruped the air, and billows of yellow smoke skewed the sunlight like a broken wheel, its spokes scattered among the balding plane trees. The lawn was littered with dead branches, and from the railings he watched the sad and acrid ceremony, his eyes irritated by the smoke.

Patrick blinked back into the present, scratching his eye. He focused on the painting of a Normandy beach that hung above his desk. Why didn’t the women in long dresses and the straw-hatted men walk into the sea? Was it the sheer gaiety of the parasols that detained them on the beach, or a sentence they must complete before disrobing their flesh in the indifferent water?

Everything was dying, every lifted stone revealed its bed of blind white maggots. He must leave the dank rotting earth and the all-consuming sea, and head for the mountains. ‘I hail you, great mountains!’ he chanted under his breath. ‘Lofty! Alone! Serene! Good for jumping off!’

Patrick giggled feebly. The coke had already sputtered out. He was really beginning to feel rather ghastly. There was only enough for two more good fixes of coke and then he would be condemned to an accelerating agony of disappointment. The speed was perhaps only temporarily eclipsed by the heroin, but even so its performance was bound to be enormously reduced after he’d been awake for so long. The sensible thing to do in a situation like this, when one’s body was a battleground strewn with the carnage of internarcotic wars, was to take the last Quaalude that Rachel had so high-mindedly refused, and try to have a nap on the plane. There was definitely an argument for getting some sleep; namely, that when he woke up the impact of the drugs would be stronger.

As usual, his liver ached as if he’d had a rugby ball kicked under his ribcage. His desire for drugs, like the fox hidden under the Spartan’s tunic, gnawed at his entrails. The double vision which afflicted him if he didn’t blink constantly had grown worse, and the two images of each object were drifting further apart.

These complaints and the general feeling that his body was held together with paper clips and safety pins and would tear apart at the slightest strain, filled him with remorse and terror. It was always now, on the dawn of the third day, that he was filled with a disgusted desire to stop taking drugs, but he knew that the first hints of lucidity and withdrawal would bring an even greater horror of their absence.

Patrick was surprised to see Rachel standing miserably at the end of his bed. She had faded quickly from his memory while she threw up in the bathroom, losing her individuality and simply becoming Other People, someone who might interrupt his fix, or his contemplation of the rush.

‘I feel so bloated,’ she complained, clasping her stomach.

‘Why don’t you lie down?’ croaked Patrick.

Rachel sank onto the bed and crawled to the far end, groaning as she collapsed on the pillows.

‘Come here,’ said Patrick in what he hoped was a tender voice.

Rachel rolled over slightly and lay sideways. He leaned towards her, hoping she had brushed her teeth and wondering when he had last brushed his own, and kissed her. The difficult angle meant that their noses clashed and then, in their haste to overcome this awkwardness, their teeth clashed too.

‘Jesus, it’s like being twelve years old,’ said Patrick.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Rachel.

He sat back with his head in one hand and ran the other hand over Rachel’s knitted white dress. She looked drained and nervous. There was a bulge in her lower abdomen which had not been visible when she was standing up. Patrick skirted the bulge and brushed the back of his fingers gently over her hip and thigh.

‘I’m sorry,’ Rachel repeated, ‘I can’t go through with this, I’m too nervous. Maybe we can spend some time together, get to know each other.’

Patrick disengaged his hand and flopped back onto the bed.

‘Of course,’ he said flatly, glancing at the bedside clock. Four fifty. They had about two hours and forty minutes to ‘get to know each other’.

‘When I was younger I used to fall into bed with anyone,’ Rachel whined, ‘but it always left me feeling empty.’

‘Even after a plate of chilli and a banana split?’ said Patrick. If he wasn’t going to fuck her, he might as well torment her.