The Patrick Melrose Novels (34 page)

The Talking Heads pulsed from every speaker. ‘The centre is missing,' gasped David Byrne, and Patrick could not help agreeing with him. How did they know exactly what he was feeling? It was spooky.

A shot of a cheetah chasing an antelope through the African bush flickered onto all the screens at once. Patrick pressed himself against the wall as if he had been thrown back by the centrifugal force of a spinning room. He felt waves of weakness and exhaustion when the real state of his body broke through the guard of drugs. The last fix of coke had petered out on the journey down and he might have to take that Black Beauty sooner than scheduled.

The antelope was brought down in a cloud of dust. Its legs twitched for a while as the cheetah ate into its neck. At first the event seemed to shatter and dissipate among all the screens, and then, as the shot closed in, the kill multiplied and gathered force. The room still seemed to Patrick to be throwing him backward, as if rejection and exclusion, the companions of any social contact, had been turned into a physical force. Sometimes the startling contentment of a smack rush caused him to believe that the universe was indifferent rather than hostile, but such a touching faith was bound to be betrayed and seemed especially remote now, as he rested with flattened palms against the wall of the room.

Naturally, he still thought of himself in the third person, as a character in a book or a movie, but at least it was still the third person singular. ‘They' hadn't come to get him yet tonight, the bacteria of voices that had taken over the night before. In the presence of the absence, in the absence of the presence, Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Life imitating bad literary criticism. Dis/inte/gration. Exhausted and febrile. Business as usual. Funny business as usual.

Like a man in the spinning barrel of a funfair, Patrick unglued himself laboriously from the wall. Under the shimmering blue light of the televisions, cool customers sprawled uncomfortably on the bench of soft grey cushions that ran around the edge of the room. Patrick walked towards the bar with the care of a driver trying to convince a policeman that he is sober.

‘Doctor said his liver looked like a relief map of the Rockies,' said a thick-necked, jocular man leaning on the bar.

Patrick winced and immediately felt a needle-sharp twinge in his side. Absurdly suggestible, must try to calm down. In a parody of detachment, he swivelled his eyes around the room with the small staccato movements of a predatory lizard.

Sprawling on the cushion nearest to the bar was a guy in a red and yellow kilt, a studded belt, army boots, a black leather jacket, and thunderbolt earrings. He looked as if he'd had too many Tuinals. Patrick thought of the black flash of the Tuinal rush, burning the arm like scouring powder; strictly an emergency measure. The look struck him as outmoded; after all, it was six years since the punk summer of '76 when he'd sat on the fire escape at school in the sweltering heat, smoking joints, listening to ‘White Riot', and shouting ‘destroy' over the rooftops. Next to the kilted punk were two nervous New Jersey secretaries perched on the edge of their seats in tight trousers that cut into their soft bellies. They transferred red lipstick to their all-white cigarette butts with promising zeal, but were too hideous to be considered for the task of consoling him for Marianne's indifference. With his back slightly turned to them, a commodity broker in a dark suit (or was he an art dealer?) was talking to a man who compensated for his near-baldness with a long wispy curtain of grey hair emerging from the last productive follicles at the back of his skull. They looked as if they were keeping in touch with the desperate state of youth, checking out the new-wave kids, spotting the latest inflections of rebellious fashion.

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.

Having worked himself up into a state of some bitterness, Patrick strode over to the bar.

‘Jack Daniel's on the rocks,' he said to the barman. As he drew back, Patrick checked the girl to his left. She was slightly plump, dark-haired, and marginally pretty. She looked back at him steadily, a good sign.

‘Aren't you hot in that coat?' she asked. ‘It is May, you know.'

‘Incredibly hot,' Patrick admitted with a half-smile, ‘but I'd feel flayed without it.'

‘It's like a defence mechanism,' said the girl.

‘Yes,' drawled Patrick, feeling that she had not captured the full subtlety and poignancy of his overcoat. ‘What's your name?' he asked as casually as possible.

‘Rachel.'

‘Mine's Patrick. Can I offer you a drink?' Christ, he sounded like a parody of someone making conversation. Everything had taken on a threatening or facetious aspect that made it harder than ever to climb down from the position of an observer. Perhaps she would experience the crushing dullness as a reassuring ritual.

‘Sure. I'd like a beer. A Dos Equis.'

‘Fine,' said Patrick, catching the barman's attention. ‘So what kind of work do you do?' he went on, practically vomiting at the effort of making ordinary conversation and feigning an interest in somebody else.

‘I work in a gallery.'

‘Really?' said Patrick, hoping he sounded impressed. He seemed to have lost all control over his voice.

‘Yeah, but I really wanna start a gallery of my own.'

Here we go again, thought Patrick. The waiter who thinks he's an actor, the actor who thinks he's a director, the taxi driver who thinks he's a philosopher. All the signs are good at this point, the deal is about to happen, there's a lot of interest from the record companies … a city full of phoney aggressive fantasists and, of course, a few genuinely unpleasant people with power.

‘Only, I need the financial backing,' she sighed.

‘Why do you want to start out on your own?' he asked, concerned and yet encouraging.

‘I don't know if you're familiar with Neo-Objective art, but I think it's going to be really major,' said Rachel. ‘I know a lot of the artists and I'd like to get their careers started while everybody else is still ignoring them.'

‘I'm sure that won't be for long.'

‘That's why I gotta move quickly.'

‘I'd love to see some Neo-Objective art,' said Patrick earnestly.

‘I could arrange that,' said Rachel, looking at him in a new light. Was this the financial backing she had been waiting for? His overcoat might be weird, but it looked expensive. It might be kinda cool to have an eccentric English backer who wasn't going to breathe down her neck.