The Patrick Melrose Novels (30 page)

‘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.

He forced his eyes open. His inner life was definitely
in decline
and it would be more cautious to go upstairs and face the confusing effects of other people than sink any further into this pool of discrete and violent imagery.

The aural hallucinations that afflicted Patrick as he groped his way along the wall towards the line of basins were not yet organized into words, but consisted of twisting strands of sound and an eerie sense of space, like amplified breathing.

He mopped his face and emptied the glass of bloody water down the drain. Remembering the second syringe, he quickly tried to clean it out, watching the reflection of the door in the mirror in case somebody came in. His hands shook so badly it was hard to hold the needle under the tap.

It must have been ages since he left the others. They were probably ordering the bill by now. Short of breath, but with insane urgency, he stuffed the wet syringe back into his breast pocket and hurried back through the bar, into the hall, and up the main staircase.'

In the dining room he saw George, Tom, and Ballantine still reading the menu. How long had he kept them waiting, politely postponing their lunch? He moved clumsily towards the table, the strands of curving, twisting sound bending the space around him.

George looked up.

‘Ziouuu … Ziouuu … Ziouuu…' he asked. ‘Chok-chok-chok-chok,' said Ballantine, like a helicopter.

‘Aioua. Aioua,' Tom suggested.

What the fuck were they trying to tell him? Patrick sat down and mopped his face with the pale pink napkin.

‘Sot,' he said in a long elastic whisper. ‘Chok-chok-chok,' Ballantine replied.

George was smiling, but Patrick listened helplessly as the sounds streamed past him like a photograph of brake lights on a wet street.

‘Ziou … Ziou … Ziou … Aiou. Aiou. Chokchok-chok.'

He sat astonished in front of the menu, as if he had never seen one before. There were pages of dead things – cows, shrimps, pigs, oysters, lambs – stretched out like a casualty list, accompanied by a brief description of how they had been treated since they died – skewered, grilled, smoked, and boiled. Christ, if they thought he was going to eat these things they must be mad.

He had seen the dark blood from the neck of a sheep gushing into the dry grass. The busy flies. The stench of offal. He had heard the roots tearing as he eased a carrot out of the ground. Any living man squatted on a mound of corruption, cruelty, filth, and blood.

If only his body would turn into a pane of glass, the fleshless interval between two spaces, knowing both but belonging to neither, then he would be set free from the gross and savage debt he owed to the rest of nature.

‘Ziou … Ziou … wan?' asked George.

‘Um … I'll … um, eh just,' Patrick felt remote from his own voice, as if it was coming out of his feet. ‘I'll … um, eh, have … another … Bullshot … late breakfast … eh … not really hungry.'

The effort of saying these few words left him breathless.

‘Chok-chok-chok-chok,' objected Ballantine. ‘Aioua sure. Aioua ziou?' asked Tom.

What was he saying ‘Ziou' for? The fugue was growing more complicated. Before long George would be saying ‘Chok' or ‘Aioua', and then where would he stand? Where would any of them stand?

‘Justanothershot,' gasped Patrick, ‘really.' Mopping his brow again, he stared fixedly at the stem of his wineglass which, caught by the sun, cast a fractured bone of light onto the white tablecloth, like an X-ray of a broken finger. The twisting echoing sounds around him had started to die down to the faint hiss of an untuned television. It was no longer incomprehension but a kind of sadness, like an enormously amplified postcoital gloom, that cut him off from what was happening around him. ‘Martha Boeing,' Ballantine was saying, ‘told me that she was experiencing dizzy spells on the drive up to Newport and that her doctor told her to take along these small French cheeses to eat on the journey – evidently it was some kind of protein deprivation.'

‘I can't imagine that Martha's malnutrition is too severe,' said Tom.

‘Well,' remarked George diplomatically, ‘not everybody has to be driven to Newport as often as she does.'

‘I mention it because I,' said Ballantine with some pride, ‘was getting the same symptoms.'

‘On the same journey?' asked Tom.

‘The exact same journey,' Ballantine confirmed.

‘Well, that's Newport for you,' said Tom; ‘sucks the protein right out of you. Only sporting types can make it there without medical assistance.'

‘But
my
doctor,' said Ballantine patiently, ‘recommended peanut butter. Martha was sorta doubtful about it, and said that these French cheeses were so great because you could just peel them off and pop them in your mouth. She wanted to know how you were supposed to eat the peanut butter. “With a spoon,” I said, “like caviar.”' Ballantine chuckled. ‘Well, she had no answer to that,' he concluded triumphantly, ‘and I believe she's going to be switching to peanut butter.'

‘Somebody ought to warn Sun-Pat,' said Tom.

‘Yes, you must be careful,' drawled George, ‘or you'll start a run on this butter of yours. Once these Newport people take to something, there's really no stopping them. I remember Brooke Rivers asking me where I had my shirts made, and the next time I ordered some they told me there was a two-year waiting list. They told me there had been a perfectly extraordinary surge in American orders. Well, of course, I knew who that was.'

A waiter came to take the orders and George asked Patrick if he was absolutely sure that he didn't want ‘something solid'.

‘Absolutely. Nothing solid,' Patrick replied.

‘I never knew your father to lose his appetite,' said George.

‘No, it was the one thing about him that was reliable.'

‘Oh, I wouldn't go that far,' protested George. ‘He was an awfully good pianist. Used to keep one up all night,' he explained to the others, ‘playing the most spellbinding music'

Pastiche and parody and hands twisted like old vine stumps, thought Patrick.

‘Yes, he could be very impressive at the piano,' he said out loud.

‘And in conversation,' George added.

‘Mm…' said Patrick. ‘It depends what you find impressive. Some people don't like uninterrupted rudeness, or so I'm told.'

‘Who
are
these people?' asked Tom, looking around the room with mock alarm.

‘It is true,' said George, ‘that I once or twice had to tell him to stop being quite so argumentative.'

‘And what did he do?' asked Ballantine, thrusting his chin forward to get more of his neck out of its tight collar.

‘Told me to bugger off,' replied George tersely.

‘Hell,' said Ballantine, seeing an opportunity for wisdom and diplomacy. ‘You know, people argue about the darnedest things. Why, I spent an entire weekend trying to persuade my wife to dine in Mortimer's the evening we got back to New York. “I'm all Mortimered out,” she kept saying, “can't we go someplace else?” Of course she couldn't say where.'

‘Of course she couldn't,' said Tom, ‘she hasn't seen the inside of another restaurant in fifteen years.'

‘All Mortimered out,' repeated Ballantine, his indignation tinged with a certain pride at having married such an original woman.

A lobster, some smoked salmon, a crab salad, and a Bullshot arrived. Patrick lifted the drink greedily to his lips and then froze, hearing the hysterical bellowing of a cow, loud as an abattoir in the muddy liquid of his glass.

‘Fuck it,' he murmured, taking a large gulp.

His defiance was soon rewarded with the vivid fantasy that a hoof was trying to kick its way out of his stomach. He remembered, when he was eighteen, writing to his father from a psychiatric ward, trying to explain his reasons for being there, and receiving a short note in reply. Written in Italian, which his father knew he could not understand, it turned out, after some research, to be a quotation from Dante's
Inferno
: ‘Consider your descent / You were not made to live among beasts / But to pursue virtue and knowledge.' What had seemed a frustratingly sublime response at the time, struck him with a fresh sense of relevance now that he was listening to the sound of howling, snuffling cattle and felt, or thought he felt, another blow on the inner wall of his stomach.