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

‘It’s amazing, isn’t it? She seems to think there are better things to do than going to parties.’

‘I always thought she was a little peculiar,’ said Nicholas wisely.

‘As far as I know she’s driving a consignment of ten thousand syringes to Poland. People say it’s marvellous of her, but I still think that charity begins at home. She could have saved herself the journey by bringing them round to my flat,’ said Patrick.

‘I thought you’d put all that behind you,’ said Nicholas.

‘Behind me, in front of me. It’s hard to tell, here in the Grey Zone.’

‘That’s rather a melodramatic way to talk at thirty.’

‘Well, you see,’ sighed Patrick, ‘I’ve given up everything, but taken nothing up instead.’

‘You could make a start by taking my daughter up to Cheatley.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t,’ lied Patrick, who couldn’t bear Amanda Pratt. ‘I’m getting a lift from someone else.’

‘Oh, well, you’ll see her at the Bossington-Lanes’,’ said Nicholas. ‘And we’ll see each other at the party.’

Patrick had been reluctant to accept his invitation to Cheatley for several reasons. One was that Debbie was going to be there. After years of trying to thrust her away, he was bewildered by his sudden success. She, on the other hand, seemed to enjoy falling out of love with him more than anything else about their long affair. How could he blame her? He ached with unspoken apologies.

In the eight years since his father’s death, Patrick’s youth had slipped away without being replaced by any signs of maturity, unless the tendency for sadness and exhaustion to eclipse hatred and insanity could be called ‘mature’. The sense of multiplying alternatives and bifurcating paths had been replaced by a quayside desolation, contemplating the long list of missed boats. He had been weaned from his drug addiction in several clinics, leaving promiscuity and party-going to soldier on uncertainly, like troops which have lost their commander. His money, eroded by extravagance and medical bills, kept him from poverty without enabling him to buy his way out of boredom. Quite recently, to his horror, he had realized he would have to get a job. He was therefore studying to become a barrister, in the hope that he would find some pleasure in keeping as many criminals as possible at large.

His decision to study the law had got him as far as hiring Twelve Angry Men from a video shop. He had spent several days pacing up and down, demolishing imaginary witnesses with withering remarks, or suddenly leaning on furniture and saying with mounting contempt, ‘I put it to you that on the night of…’ until he recoiled, and, turning into the victim of his own cross-examination, collapsed in a fit of histrionic sobs. He had also bought some books, like The Concept of Law, Street on Tort , and Charlesworth on Negligence , and this pile of law books now competed for his attention with old favourites like Twilight of the Idols and The Myth of Sisyphus.

As the drugs had worn off, a couple of years earlier, he had started to realize what it must be like to be lucid all the time, an unpunctuated stretch of consciousness, a white tunnel, hollow and dim, like a bone with the marrow sucked out. ‘I want to die, I want to die, I want to die,’ he found himself muttering in the middle of the most ordinary task, swept away by a landslide of regret as the kettle boiled or the toast popped up.

At the same time, his past lay before him like a corpse waiting to be embalmed. He was woken every night by savage nightmares; too frightened to sleep, he climbed out of his sweat-soaked sheets and smoked cigarettes until the dawn crept into the sky, pale and dirty as the gills of a poisonous mushroom. His flat in Ennismore Gardens was strewn with violent videos which were a shadowy expression of the endless reel of violence that played in his head. Constantly on the verge of hallucination, he walked on ground that undulated softly, like a swallowing throat.

Worst of all, as his struggle against drugs grew more successful, he saw how it had masked a struggle not to become like his father. The claim that every man kills the thing he loves seemed to him a wild guess compared with the near certainty of a man turning into the thing he hates. There were of course people who didn’t hate anything, but they were too remote from Patrick for him to imagine their fate. The memory of his father still hypnotized him and drew him like a sleepwalker towards a precipice of unwilling emulation. Sarcasm, snobbery, cruelty, and betrayal seemed less nauseating than the terrors that brought them into existence. What could he do but become a machine for turning terror into contempt? How could he relax his guard when beams of neurotic energy, like searchlights weaving about a prison compound, allowed no thought to escape, no remark to go unchecked.

The pursuit of sex, the fascination with one body or another, the little rush of an orgasm, so much feebler and more laborious than the rush of drugs, but like an injection, constantly repeated because its role was essentially palliative – all this was compulsive enough, but its social complications were paramount: the treachery, the danger of pregnancy, of infection, of discovery, the pleasures of theft, the tensions that arose in what might otherwise have been very tedious circumstances; and the way that sex merged with the penetration of ever more self-assured social circles where, perhaps, he would find a resting place, a living equivalent to the intimacy and reassurance offered by the octopus embrace of narcotics.

As Patrick reached for his cigarettes, the phone rang again.

‘So, how are you?’ said Johnny.

‘I’m stuck in one of those argumentative daydreams,’ said Patrick. ‘I don’t know why I think intelligence consists of proving that I can have a row all on my own, but it would be nice just to grasp something for a change.’

‘ Measure for Measure is a very argumentative play,’ said Johnny.

‘I know,’ said Patrick. ‘I ended up theoretically accepting that people have to forgive on a “judge not that ye be not judged” basis, but there isn’t any emotional authority for it, at least not in that play.’

‘Exactly,’ said Johnny. ‘If behaving badly was a good enough reason to forgive bad behaviour, we’d all be oozing with magnanimity.’

‘But what is a good enough reason?’ asked Patrick.

‘Search me. I’m more and more convinced that things just happen, or don’t just happen, and there’s not much you can do to hurry them along.’ Johnny had only just thought of this idea and was not convinced of it at all.

‘Ripeness is all,’ groaned Patrick.

‘Yes, exactly, another play altogether,’ said Johnny.

‘It’s important to decide which play you’re in before you get out of bed,’ said Patrick.

‘I don’t think anyone’s heard of the one we’re in tonight. Who are the Bossington-Lanes?’

‘Are they having you for dinner too?’ asked Patrick. ‘I think we’re going to have to break down on the motorway, don’t you? Have dinner in the hotel. It’s so hard facing strangers without drugs.’

Patrick and Johnny, although they now fed on grilled food and mineral water, had a well-established nostalgia for their former existence.

‘But when we took gear at parties, all we saw was the inside of the loos,’ Johnny pointed out.

‘I know,’ said Patrick. ‘Nowadays when I go into the loos I say to myself, “What are you doing here? You don’t take drugs anymore!” It’s only after I’ve stormed out that I realize I wanted to have a piss. By the way, shall we drive down to Cheatley together?’

‘Sure, but I have to go to an NA meeting at three o’clock.’