The Patrick Melrose Novels (58 page)

‘Hi, there!' she said, unhooking her headphones. ‘I'm sorry, I was in a world of my own.'

She got up to greet her guests, but was soon staggering backwards, staring at Thomas, a hand sprawled over her heart.

‘Oh, my God,' she gasped, ‘your new one is beautiful. I'm sorry, Robert,' she dug her long shiny nails into his shoulders to help steady him, ‘I don't want to fan the flames of sibling rivalry, but your little brother is something really special. Aren't you a special one?' she said, swooping down towards Thomas. ‘He's going to make you dead jealous,' she warned his mother, ‘with all the girls throwing themselves at his feet. Look at those eyelashes! Are you going to have another one? If mine looked like that, I'd have at least six. I sound greedy, don't I? But I can't help it, he's so love-ly. He's made me forget myself, I haven't introduced you to Christine and Roger yet. As if they cared. Look at them, they're in a world of their own. Go on, wake up!' She pretended to kick Roger. ‘Roger's a business partner of Jim's,' she filled them in, ‘and Christine's from Australia. She's four months pregnant.'

She shook Christine awake.

‘Oh, hi,' said Christine, ‘have they arrived?'

Jilly introduced everybody.

‘I was just telling them about the pregnancy,' she explained to Christine.

‘Oh, yeah. Actually, I think we're in major denial about it,' said Christine. ‘I just feel a little heavier, that's all, as if I'd drunk four litres of Evian, or something. I mean, I don't even feel sick in the mornings. The other day Roger said, “Do you wanna go skiing in January? I've got to be in Switzerland on business anyway,” and I said, “Sure, why not?” We'd both forgotten that that's the week I'm supposed to be giving birth!'

Jilly hooted with laughter and rolled her eyes skywards.

‘I mean, is that absent-minded, or what?' said Christine. ‘Mind you, pregnancy really does your brain in.'

‘Look at them,' said Jilly, pointing to Robert's mother and father, ‘they're absolutely gobsmacked – they're loving parents.'

‘So are we,' protested Christine. ‘You know how we are with Megan. Megan's our two-year-old,' she explained to the guests. ‘We've left her with Roger's mother. She's just discovered rage – you know the way they discover emotions and then work them for all they're worth, until they get on to the next one.'

‘How interesting,' said Robert's father, ‘so you don't think emotions have anything to do with how a child is feeling – they're just layers in an archaeological dig. When do they discover joy?'

‘When you take them to Legoland,' said Christine.

Roger woke up groggily, clasping his earpiece.

‘Oh, hi. Sorry, I've got a call.'

He got up and started to pace the lawn.

‘Have you brought your nanny?' asked Jilly.

‘We haven't got one,' said Robert's mother.

‘That's brave,' said Jilly. ‘I don't know what I'd do without Jo. She's only been with us a week and she's already part of the family. You can dump your lot on her, she's marvellous.'

‘We quite like looking after them ourselves,' said his mother.

‘Jo!' shouted Jilly. ‘Jo-o-euh!'

‘Tell them it's a mixed leisure portfolio,' said Roger. ‘Don't give them any more details at this stage.'

‘Jo!' Jilly called again. ‘Lazy bitch. She spends the whole day gawping at
Hello!
magazine and eating Ben & Jerry's ice cream. A bit like her employer, you might say, hem-hem, but it's costing me a fortune, whereas
she's
getting paid.'

‘I don't care what they told Nigel,' said Roger, ‘it's none of their bloody business. They can keep their noses out of it.'

Jim came striding down the lawn, glowing with successful shopping. Tubby Josh followed behind, a tangle of dragging feet. Jim got out a foot-pump and unfolded the plastic skin of another inflatable on the flagstones next to the pool.

‘What did you get him?' asked Jilly, staring furiously at the house.

‘You know he had his heart set on the ice-cream cone,' said Jim, pumping up a strawberry Cornetto. ‘And I got him the Lion King.'

‘And the machine gun,' said Josh pedantically.

‘Inland Revenue,' said Jim to Robert's father, jerking his chin towards Roger, ‘breathing down his neck. He may want some legal advice over lunch.'

‘I don't work when I'm on holiday,' said his father.

‘You don't work much when you're not on holiday,' said Robert's mother.

‘Oh dear, do I detect marital conflict?' said Jim, filming the strawberry Cornetto as it unwrinkled on the ground.

‘Jo!' screamed Jilly.

‘I'm here,' called a big freckly girl in khaki shorts emerging from the house. The words ‘Up For It' danced on the front of her T-shirt as she bobbed down the lawn.

Thomas woke up screaming. Who could blame him? The last thing he knew he had been in the car with his lovely family, and now he was surrounded by shouting strangers with blacked-out eyes; a nervous herd of monsters jostling brightly in the chlorinated air, another one swelling at his feet. Robert couldn't stand it either.

‘Who's a hungry young man?' said Jo, leaning in on Thomas. ‘Oh, he's beautiful, isn't he?' she said to Robert's mother. ‘He's an old soul, you can tell.'

‘Get these two parked in front of a video,' said Jilly, ‘so we can have a bit of peace and quiet. And send Gaston down with a bottle of rosé. You'll love Gaston,' she told Robert's mother. ‘He's a genius. A real old-fashioned French chef. I've put on about three stone since we arrived, and that was only a week ago. Never mind. We've got Heinrich coming to the rescue this afternoon – he's the personal trainer, great big German hunk, gives you a proper old workout. You should join me, help to get your figure back after the pregnancy. Not that you don't look great.'

‘Is that what you want,' his mother asked Robert, ‘to watch a video?'

‘Yeah, sure,' he said, desperate to get away.

‘It's difficult to see how he could swim,' admitted his father, ‘with all the inflatable food in the pool.'

‘Come on!' said Jo, sticking a hand out on each side. She seemed to think that Josh and Robert were going to take a hand each and skip up the hill with her.

‘Isn't anybody going to hold my hand?' howled Jo, in a fit of mock blubbing.

Josh joined his pudgy palm with hers, but Robert managed to stay free, following at a little distance, fascinated by Jo's pouting khaki bottom.

‘We're entering the video cave,' said Jo, making spooky noises. ‘Right! What are you two going to watch? And I don't want any fighting.'

‘
The Adventures of Sinbad
,' shouted Josh.

‘Again! Crikey!' said Jo, and Robert couldn't help agreeing with her. He liked to watch a good video five or six times, but when he knew all the dialogue by heart and each shot was like a drawer full of identical socks, he started to feel a twinge of reluctance. Josh was different. He started out with a sort of sullen greed for a new video and only developed real enthusiasm somewhere around the twentieth viewing. Love, an emotion he didn't throw around lightly, was reserved for
The Adventures of Sinbad
, now seen over a hundred times, far too many of them with Robert. Videos were Josh's daydreams, Robert's daydream was solitude. How could he escape from the video cave? When you're a child nobody leaves you alone. If he ran away now, they would send out a search party, round him up and entertain him to death. Maybe he could just lie there and think while Josh's borrowed imagination flickered on the wall. The whine of the rewind was slowing down and Josh had collapsed back into the dent already made by his breakfast viewing and resumed munching the bright orange cheese puffs scattered on the table next to him. Jo started the tape, switched off the light and left discreetly. Josh was no fast-forward vandal: the warning about video piracy, the previews of films he had already seen, the plugs for merchandised toys he had already discarded and the message from the Video Standards Authority were not allowed to rush past like so many ugly suburbs before a train breaks out into the bovine melancholy of true countryside; they were appreciated in their own right, granted their own dignity, which suited Robert fine, since the rubbish now pouring from the screen was too familiar to make any impact on his attention at all.

He closed his eyes and let the pool-side inferno dissipate. After a few hours of other people, he had to get the pile-up of impressions out of him one way or another; by doing impersonations, or working out how things worked, or just trying to empty his mind. Otherwise the impressions built up to a critical density and he felt as if he was going to explode.

Sometimes, when he was lying in bed, a single word like ‘fear' or ‘infinity' flicked the roof off the house and sucked him into the night, past the stars that had been bent into bears and ploughs, and into a pure darkness where everything was annihilated except the feeling of annihilation. As the little capsule of his intelligence disintegrated, he went on feeling its burning edges, its fragmenting hull, and when the capsule flew apart he was the bits flying apart, and when the bits turned into atoms he was the flying apart itself, growing stronger instead of fading, like an evil energy defying the running out of everything and feeding on waste, and soon enough the whole of space was a waste-fuelled rush and there was no place in it for a human mind; but there he was, still feeling.

He would reel down the corridor to his parents' bedroom, choking. He would do anything to make it stop, sign any contract, take any vow, but he knew it was useless, he knew that he had seen something true, that he couldn't change it, only ignore it for a while, cry in his mother's arms, and let her put the roof back on and introduce him to some kinder words.

It was not that he was unhappy. It was just that he had seen something and sometimes it was truer than anything else. He first saw it when his grandmother had a stroke. He hadn't wanted to abandon her but she could hardly speak and so he had spent a lot of time imagining what she was feeling. Everybody said you had to be loyal, so he stuck at it. He held her hand for a long time and she gripped his. He didn't like it but he didn't let go. He could tell that she was frightened. Her eyes were dimmed. Part of her was relieved: she had always had trouble communicating, now nobody expected her to make the effort. Part of her was already gone, back to the source, perhaps, or at least far from the material plane about which she had such chronic doubts. What he could get close to was the part of her that was left behind wondering, now that she couldn't help keeping them, if she wanted all those secrets after all. Illness had blown her apart like a dandelion clock. He had wondered if he would end up like that, a few seeds sticking to a broken stem.

‘This is my favourite bit,' said Josh, love-struck. Pirates were boarding Sinbad's ship. The ship's parrot flew in the face of the meanest-looking pirate. He staggered around disoriented and was effortlessly tipped overboard by Sinbad's men. Shot of pleased parrot squawking.

‘Hmm,' said Robert. ‘Listen, I'll be back in a minute.'

Josh paid no attention to his departure. Robert scanned the corridor for Jo, but she was not there. He retraced the route they had come in by, and when he got to the garden door, saw that the grown-ups were no longer around the pool. He slipped outside and hooked round to the back of the house. The tailored lawn petered out to a carpet of pine needles and a couple of big dustbins. He sat down and leant back against the ridged bark of the pine, unsupervised.

He wondered who was wasting the most time by spending a day with the Packers, not counting the Packers themselves who were always wasting more time than anybody, and usually had a film to prove it. Thomas was only sixty days old, so it was the biggest waste of time for him, because one day was one-sixtieth of his life, whereas his father, who was forty, was wasting the smallest proportion of his life. Robert tried to work out what proportion of their lives a day was for each of them. The calculations were hard to hold in his mind, so he imagined different sizes of wheels in a clock. Then he wondered how to include the opposite facts: that Thomas had his whole life ahead of him, whereas his parents had quite a lot of theirs behind them, so that one day was less wasteful for Thomas because he had more days left. That created a new set of wheels – red instead of silver – his father's spinning round and Thomas's turning with a stately infrequent click. He still had to include the different qualities of suffering and the different benefits for each of them, but that made his machine fantastically complicated and so, in one salutary sweep, he decided that they were all suffering equally, and that none of them had got anything out of it at all, making the value of the day a nice fat zero. Hugely relieved, he got back to visualizing the rods connecting the two sets of wheels. It all looked quite like the big steam engine in the Science Museum, except that paper came out at one end with a figure for the units of waste. It turned out, when he read the figures, that he was wasting more time than anyone else. He was horrified by this result, but at the same time quite pleased. Then he heard Jo's dreadful voice calling his name.

For a moment he froze with indecision. The trouble was that hiding only made the search party more frantic and furious. He decided to act casual and amble round the corner just in time to hear Jo bawling his name for the second time.

‘Hi,' he said.

‘Where have you been? I've been looking for you everywhere.'

‘You can't have been, or you would have found me,' he said.

‘Don't get smart with me, young man,' said Jo. ‘Have you been fighting with Josh?'

‘No,' he said. ‘How could anyone fight with Josh? He's just a blob.'