The Patrick Melrose Novels (31 page)

As his heart rate increased again and a new wave of sweat prickled his skin, Patrick realized that he was going to be sick.

‘Excuse me,' he said, getting up abruptly.

‘Are you all right, my dear?' said George.

‘I feel rather sick.'

‘Perhaps we should get you a doctor.'

‘I have the best doctor in New York,' said Ballantine. ‘Just mention my name and…'

Patrick tasted a bitter surge of bile from his stomach. He swallowed stubbornly and, without time to thank Ballantine for his kind offer, hurried out of the dining room.

On the stairs Patrick forced down a second mouthful of vomit, more solid than the first. Time was running out. Wave after wave of nausea heaved the contents of his stomach into his mouth with increasing velocity. Feeling dizzy, his vision blurred by watering eyes, he fumbled down the corridor, knocking one of the hunting prints askew with his shoulder. By the time he reached the cool marble sanctuary of the lavatories, his cheeks were as swollen as a trumpeter's. A member of the club, admiring himself with that earnestness reserved for mirrors, found that the ordinary annoyance of being interrupted was soon replaced by alarm at being so close to a man who was obviously about to vomit.

Patrick, despairing of reaching the loo, threw up in the basin next to him, turning the taps on at the same time.

‘Jesus,' said the member, ‘you could have done that in the john.'

‘Too far,' said Patrick, throwing up a second time. ‘Jesus,' repeated the man, leaving hastily.

Patrick recognized traces of last night's dinner and, with his stomach already empty, knew that he would soon be bringing up that sour yellow bile which gives vomiting its bad name.

To encourage the faster disappearance of the vomit he twirled his finger in the plughole and increased the flow of water with his other hand. He longed to gain the privacy of one of the cubicles before he was sick again. Feeling queasy and hot, he abandoned the not yet entirely clean basin and staggered over to one of the mahogany cubicles. He hardly had time to slide the brass lock closed before he was stooped over the bowl of the loo convulsing fruitlessly. Unable to breathe or to swallow, he found himself trying to vomit with even more conviction than he had tried to avoid vomiting a few minutes earlier.

Just when he was about to faint from lack of air he managed to bring up a globule of that yellow bile he had been anticipating with such dread.

‘Fucking hell,' he cursed, sliding down the wall. However often he did it, being sick never lost its power to surprise him.

Shaken by coming so close to choking, he lit a cigarette and smoked it through the bitter slime that coated his mouth. The question now, of course, was whether to take some heroin to help him calm down.

The risk was that it would make him feel even more nauseous.

Wiping the sweat from his hands, he gingerly opened the packet of heroin over his lap, dipped his little finger into it, and sniffed through both nostrils. Not feeling any immediate ill effects, he repeated the dose.

Peace at last. He closed his eyes and sighed. The others could just fuck off. He wasn't going back. He was going to fold his wings and (he took another sniff) relax. Where he took his smack was his home, and more often than not that was in some stranger's bog.

He was so tired; he really must get some sleep. Get some sleep. Fold his wings. But what if George and the others sent somebody to look for him and they found the sick-spattered basin and hammered on the door of the cubicle? Was there no peace, no resting place? Of course there wasn't. What an absurd question.

 

11

‘I'
M HERE TO COLLECT
the remains of David Melrose,' said Patrick to the grinning young man with the big jaw and the mop of shiny chestnut hair.

‘Mr … David … Melrose,' he mused, as he turned the pages of a large leather register.

Patrick leaned over the edge of the counter, more like a grounded pulpit than a desk, and saw, next to the register, a cheap exercise book marked ‘Almost Dead'. That was the file to get on; might as well apply straight away.

Escaping from the Key Club had left him strangely elated. After passing out for an hour in the loo, he had woken refreshed but unable to face the others. Bolting past the doorman like a criminal, he had dashed round the corner to a bar, and then walked on to the funeral parlour. Later he would have to apologize to George. Lie and apologize as he always did or wanted to do after any contact with another human being.

‘Yes, sir,' said the receptionist brightly, finding the page. ‘Mr David Melrose.'

‘I have come not to praise him, but to bury him,' Patrick declared, thumping the table theatrically.

‘Bu-ry him?' stammered the receptionist. ‘We under-stood that party was to be cre-mated.'

‘I was speaking metaphorically.'

‘Metaphorically,' repeated the young man, not quite reassured. Did that mean the customer was going to sue or not?

‘Where are the ashes?' asked Patrick.

‘I'll go fetch them for you, sir,' said the receptionist. ‘We have you down for a box,' he added, no longer as confident as he'd sounded at first.

‘That's right,' said Patrick. ‘No point in wasting money on an urn. The ashes are going to be scattered anyway.'

‘Right,' said the receptionist with uncertain cheerfulness.

Glancing sideways he quickly rectified his tone. ‘I'll attend to that right away, sir,' he said in an unctuous and artificially loud singsong, setting off promptly towards a door concealed in the panelling.

Patrick looked over his shoulder to find out what had provoked this new eagerness. He saw a tall figure he recognized without immediately being able to place him.

‘We're in an industry where the supply and the demand are
bound
to be identical,' quipped this half-familiar man.

Behind him stood the bald, moustachioed director who had led Patrick to his father's corpse the previous afternoon. He seemed to wince and smile at the same time.

‘We've got the one resource that's never going to run out,' said the tall man, obviously enjoying himself.

The director raised his eyebrows and flickered his eyes in Patrick's direction.

Of course, thought Patrick, it was that ghastly man he'd met on the plane.

‘Goddamn,' whispered Earl Hammer, ‘I guess I still got something to learn about PR.' Recognizing Patrick, he shouted ‘Bobby!' across the chequered marble hall.

‘Patrick,' said Patrick.

‘Paddy! Of course. That eyepatch was unfamiliar to me. What happened to you anyway? Some lady give you a black eye?' Earl guffawed, pounding over to Patrick's side.

‘Just a little inflammation,' said Patrick. ‘Can't see properly out of that eye.'

‘That's too bad,' said Earl. ‘What are you doing here anyhow? When I told you on the plane that I had been diversifying my business interests, I bet you never guessed that I was in the process of acquiring New York's premier funeral parlour.'

‘I hadn't guessed that,' confessed Patrick. ‘And I don't suppose you guessed that I was coming to collect my father's remains from New York's premier funeral parlour.'

‘Hell,' said Earl, ‘I'm sorry to hear that. I'll bet he was a fine man.'

‘He was perfect in his way,' said Patrick.

‘My condolences,' said Earl, with that abrupt solemnity that Patrick recognized from the discussion about Miss Hammer's volleyball prospects.

The receptionist returned with a simple wooden box about a foot long and eight inches high.

‘It's so much more compact than a coffin, don't you think?' commented Patrick.

‘There's no way of denying that,' Earl replied.

‘Do you have a bag?' Patrick asked the receptionist.

‘A bag?'

‘Yes, a carrier bag, a brown-paper bag, that sort of thing.'

‘I'll go check that, sir.'

‘Paddy,' said Earl, as if he had been giving the matter some thought, ‘I want you to have a ten per cent discount.'

‘Thank you,' said Patrick, genuinely pleased.

‘Don't mention it,' said Earl.

The receptionist returned with a brown-paper bag that was already a little crumpled, and Patrick imagined that he'd had to empty out his groceries hastily in order not to fail in front of his employer.

‘Perfect,' said Patrick.

‘Do we charge for these bags?' asked Earl, and then, before the receptionist could answer, he added, ‘Because this one's on me.'

‘Earl, I don't know what to say.'

‘It's nothing,' said Earl. ‘I have a meeting right now, but I would be honoured if you would have a drink with me later.'

‘Can I bring my father?' asked Patrick, raising the bag.

‘Hell, yes,' said Earl, laughing.

‘Seriously, though, I'm afraid I can't. I'm going out to dinner tonight and I have to fly back to England tomorrow.'

‘That's too bad.'

‘Well, it's a great regret to me,' said Patrick with a wan smile, as he headed quickly for the door.

‘Goodbye, old friend,' said Earl, with a big wave.

‘Bye now,' said Patrick, flicking up the collar of his overcoat before he ventured into the rush hour street.

*   *   *

In the black-lacquered hall, opposite the opening doors of the elevator, an African mask gawked from a marble-topped console table. The gilded aviary of a Chippendale mirror gave Patrick a last chance to glance with horror at his fabulously ill-looking face before turning to Mrs Banks, Marianne's emaciated mother, who stood vampirishly in the elegant gloom.

Opening her arms so that her black silk dress stretched from her wrists to her knees, like bat's wings, she cocked her head a little to one side, and exclaimed with excrutiated sympathy, ‘Oh, Patrick, we were so sorry to hear your news.'

‘Well,' said Patrick, tapping the casket he held under his arm, ‘you know how it is: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. What the Lord giveth he taketh away. After what I regard, in this case, as an unnaturally long delay.'

‘Is that…?' asked Mrs Banks, staring round-eyed at the brown-paper bag.

‘My father,' confirmed Patrick.

‘I must tell Ogilvy we'll be one more for dinner,' she said with peals of chic laughter. That was Nancy Banks all over, as magazines often pointed out after photographing her drawing room, so daring but so
right.

‘Banquo doesn't eat meat,' said Patrick, putting the box down firmly on the hall table.

Why had he said Banquo? Nancy wondered, in her husky inner voice which, even in the deepest intimacy of her own thoughts, was turned to address a large and fascinated audience. Could he, in some crazy way, feel responsible for his father's death? Because he had wished for it so often in fantasy? God, she had become good at this after seventeen years of analysis. After all, as Dr Morris had said when they were talking through their affair, what was an analyst but a former patient who couldn't think of anything better to do? Sometimes she missed Jeffrey. He had let her call him Jeffrey during the ‘letting-go process' that had been brought to such an abrupt close by his suicide. Without even a note! Was she really meeting the challenges of life, as Jeffrey had promised? Maybe she was ‘incompletely analysed'. It was too dreadful to contemplate.

‘Marianne's dying to see you,' she murmured consolingly as she led Patrick into the empty drawing room. He stared at a baroque escritoire cascading with crapulous putti.

‘She got a phone call the moment you arrived and couldn't get out of answering it,' she added.

‘We have the whole evening…' said Patrick. And the whole night, he thought optimistically. The drawing room was a sea of pink lilies, their shining pistils accusing him of lust. He was dangerously obsessed, dangerously obsessed. And his thoughts, like a bobsleigh walled with ice, would not change their course until he had crashed or achieved his end. He wiped his hands sweatily on his trousers, amazed to have found a preoccupation stronger than drugs. ‘Ah, there's Eddy,' exclaimed Nancy.

Mr Banks strode into the room in a chequered lumberjack shirt and a pair of baggy trousers. ‘Hello,' he said with his rapid little blur, ‘I was tho thorry to hear about your fawther. Marianne says that he was a wemarkable man.'

‘You should have heard the remarks,' said Patrick.

‘Did you have a very difficult relationship with him?' asked Nancy encouragingly.

‘Yup,' Patrick replied.

‘When did the twouble stawt?' asked Eddy, settling down on the faded orange velvet of a bow-legged marquise.

‘Oh, June the ninth, nineteen-o-six, the day he was born.'

‘That early?' smiled Nancy.

‘Well, we're not going to resolve the question of whether his problems were congenital or not, at least not before dinner; but even if they weren't, he didn't delay in acquiring them. By all accounts, the moment he could speak he dedicated his new skill to hurting people. By the age of ten he was banned from his grandfather's house because he used to set everyone against each other, cause accidents, force people to do things they didn't want to.'

‘You make him sound evil in a rather old-fashioned way. The satanic child,' said Nancy sceptically.

‘It's a point of view,' said Patrick. ‘When he was around, people were always falling off rocks, or nearly drowning, or bursting into tears. His life consisted of acquiring more and more victims for his malevolence and then losing them again.'

‘He must have been charming as well,' said Nancy.

‘He was a kitten,' said Patrick.

‘But wouldn't we now say that he was just wery disturbed?' asked Eddy.

‘So what if we did? When the effect somebody has is destructive enough the cause becomes a theoretical curiosity. There are some very nasty people in the world and it is a pity if one of them is your father.'