The Patrick Melrose Novels (59 page)

‘He's not a blob, he's your best friend,' said Jo.

‘No he isn't,' he said.

‘You
have
been fighting,' said Jo.

‘We haven't,' he insisted.

‘Well, anyway, you can't just go off like that.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because we all worry about you.'

‘I worry about my parents when they go away, but that doesn't stop them,' he remarked. ‘Nor should it.'

He was definitely winning this argument. In an emergency, his father could send Robert to court on his behalf. He imagined himself in a wig, bringing the jury round to his way of seeing things, but then Jo squatted down in front of him and looked searchingly into his eyes.

‘Do your parents go away a lot?' she asked.

‘Not really,' he said, but before he could tell her that they had never both been out of the house for more than about three hours, he found himself swept into her arms and crushed against the words ‘Up For It', without fully understanding what they meant. He had to tuck his shirt in again after she had pulled it out of his trousers with her consoling back rub.

‘What does “Up For It” mean?' he asked when he got his breath back.

‘Never you mind,' she said, round-eyed. ‘Come on! Lunch time!'

She marched him into the house. He couldn't exactly refuse to hold her hand now that they were practically lovers.

A man in an apron was standing beside the lunch table.

‘Gaston, you're spoiling us rotten,' said Jilly reproachfully. ‘I'm putting on a stone just looking at these tarts. You should have your own television programme. Vous sur le television, Gaston, make you beaucoup de monnaie. Fantastique!'

The table was crowded with bottles of pink wine, two of them empty, and a variety of custard tarts: a custard tart with bits of ham in it, a custard tart with bits of onion in it, a custard tart with curled-up tomatoes on it and a custard tart with curled-up courgettes on it.

Only Thomas was safe, breast-feeding.

‘So you've rounded up the stray,' said Jilly. She whipped her hand in the air and burst into song. ‘Round 'em up! Bring 'em in! Raw-w h-ide!'

Robert felt prickles of embarrassment breaking out all over his body. It must be desperate being Jilly.

‘He's used to being alone a lot, is he?' said Jo, challenging his mother.

‘Yes, when he wants to be,' said his mother, not realizing that Jo thought he might as well be living in an orphanage.

‘I was just telling your parents they ought to take you to see the real Father Christmas,' said Jilly, dishing out the food. ‘Concorde from Gatwick in the morning, up to Lapland, snowmobiles waiting, and whoosh, you're in Father Christmas's cave twenty minutes later. He gives the children a present, then back on Concorde and home in time for dinner. It's in the Arctic Circle, you see, which makes it more real than mucking about in Harrods.'

‘It sounds very educational,' said his father, ‘but I think the school fees will have to take priority.'

‘Josh would murder us if we didn't take him,' said Jim.

‘I'm not surprised,' said his father.

Josh made the sound of a massive explosion and punched the air.

‘Smashing through the sound barrier,' he shouted.

‘Which one of these tarts do you fancy?' Jilly asked Robert.

They all looked equally disgusting.

He glanced at his mother with her copper hair spiralling down towards the suckling Thomas, and he could feel the two of them blending together like wet clay.

‘I want what Thomas is having,' he said. He hadn't meant to say it out loud, it just slipped out.

Jim, Jilly, Roger, Christine, Jo and Josh brayed like a herd of donkeys. Roger looked even angrier when he was laughing.

‘Mine's a breast-milk,' said Jilly, raising her glass drunkenly.

His parents smiled at him sympathetically.

‘I'm afraid you're on solids now, old man,' said his father. ‘I've got used to wishing I was younger, but I didn't expect you to start quite yet. You're still supposed to be wishing you were older.'

His mother let him sit on the edge of her chair and kissed him on the forehead.

‘It's perfectly normal,' Jo reassured his parents, who she knew had hardly ever seen a child. ‘They're not usually that direct about it, that's all.' She allowed herself a last hiccup of laughter.

Robert tuned out of the babble around him and gazed at his brother. Thomas's mouth was busy and then quiet and then busy, massaging the milk from their mother's breast. Robert wanted to be there, curled up in the hub of his senses, before he knew about things he had never seen – the length of the Nile, the size of the moon, what they wore at the Boston Tea Party – before he was bombarded by adult propaganda, and measured his experience against it. He wanted to be there too, but he wanted to take his sense of self with him, the sneaky witness of the very thing that had no witnesses. Thomas was not witnessing himself doing things, he was just doing them. It was an impossible task to join him there as Robert was now, like somersaulting and standing still at the same time. He had often brooded on that idea and although he didn't end up thinking he could do it, he felt the impossibility receding as the muscles of his imagination grew more tense, like a diver standing on the very edge of the board before he springs. That was all he could do: drop into the atmosphere around Thomas, letting his desire for observation peel away as he got closer to the ground where Thomas lived, and where he had once lived as well. It was hard to do it now, though, because Jilly was on to him again.

‘Why don't you stay here with us, Robert?' she suggested. ‘Jo could drive you back tomorrow. You'd have more fun playing with Josh than going home and being dead jealous of your baby brother.'

He squeezed his mother's leg desperately.

Eventually Gaston returned, distracting Jilly with the dessert, a slimy mound of custard in a puddle of caramel.

‘Gaston, you're ruining us,' wailed Jilly, slapping his incorrigible, egg-beating wrist.

Robert leant in close to his mother. ‘
Please
can we go now,' he whispered in her ear.

‘Right after lunch,' she whispered back.

‘Is he pleading with you?' said Jilly, wrinkling her nose.

‘As a matter of fact he is,' said his mother.

‘Go on, let him have a sleep-over,' insisted Jilly.

‘He'll be well looked after,' said Jo, as if this was some kind of novelty.

‘I'm afraid we can't. We have to go and see his grandmother in her nursing home,' said his mother, not mentioning that they were going there in three days' time.

‘It's funny,' said Christine, ‘Megan doesn't seem to feel any jealousy yet.'

‘Give her a chance,' said his father, ‘she's only just discovered rage.'

‘Yeah,' laughed Christine. ‘Maybe it's because I'm not really owning my pregnancy.'

‘That must help,' sighed his father. Robert could tell that his father was now viciously bored. Immediately after lunch, they left the Packers with an urgency rarely seen outside a fire brigade.

‘I'm starving,' he said, as their car climbed up the driveway.

They all burst out laughing.

‘I wouldn't dream of criticizing your choice of friend,' said his father, ‘but couldn't we just get the video instead.'

‘I didn't choose him,' Robert protested, ‘he just … stuck to me.'

He spotted a restaurant by the roadside where they had a late lunch of extremely excellent pizzas and salad and orange juice. Poor Thomas had to have milk again. That was all he ever got, milk, milk, milk.

‘My favourite was the London house speech,' said Robert's father. He put on a very silly voice, not particularly like Jilly's but like her attitude. ‘“It looked huge when we bought it, but by the time we put in the guest suite and the exercise room and the sauna and the home office and the cinema, you know, there really wasn't that much room.”

‘Room for what?' asked his father, amazed. ‘Room for room. This is the room room, for having room in. Next time we climb onto our coat hangers in London to sleep like a family of bats, let's appreciate that we're not just a few bedrooms away from real civilization, but a room room away.

‘“I said to Jim,”' his father continued imitating Jilly, ‘“I hope we can afford this, because I like the lifestyle – the restaurants, the holidays, the shopping – and I'm not going to give them up. Jim assures me that we can afford both.”

‘And this was the killer,' said his father – ‘“He knows that if we can't afford it, I'll divorce him.” She's unfucking-believable. She isn't even attractive.'

‘She is amazing,' said his mother. ‘But I felt in their own quiet way that Christine and Roger had a lot to offer too. When I said that I used to talk to my children when I was pregnant, she said' – his mother put on a shrill Australian accent – ‘“Hang on! A baby is after the birth. I'm not going to talk to my pregnancy. Roger would have me committed.”'

Robert imagined his mother talking to him when he had been sealed up in her womb. Of course he wouldn't have known what her blunted syllables were meant to mean, but he was sure he would have felt a current flowing between them, the contraction of a fear, the stretch of an intention. Thomas was still close to those transfusions of feeling; Robert was getting explanations instead. Thomas still knew how to understand the silent language which Robert had almost lost as the wild margins of his mind fell under the sway of the verbal empire. He was standing on a ridge, about to surge downhill, getting faster, getting taller, getting more words, getting bigger and bigger explanations, cheering all the way. Now Thomas had made him glance backwards and lower his sword for a moment while he noticed everything that he had lost as well. He had become so caught up in building sentences that he had almost forgotten the barbaric days when thinking was like a splash of colour landing on a page. Looking back, he could still see it: living in what would now feel like pauses: when you first open the curtains and see the whole landscape covered in snow and you catch your breath and pause before breathing out again. He couldn't get the whole thing back, but maybe he wouldn't rush down the slope quite yet, maybe he would sit down and look at the view.

‘Let's get out of this sorry town,' said his father, chucking back his small cup of coffee.

‘I've just got to change him first,' said his mother, gathering up a bulging bag covered in sky-blue rabbits.

Robert looked down at Thomas, slumped in his chair, staring at a picture of a sailing boat, not knowing what a picture was and not knowing what a sailing boat was, and he could feel the drama of being a giant trapped in a small incompetent body.

 

5

WALKING DOWN THE LONG
, easily washed corridors of his grandmother's nursing home, the squeak of the nurse's rubber soles made his family's silence seem more hysterical than it was. They passed the open door of a common room where a roaring television masked another kind of silence. The crumpled, paper-white residents sat in rows. What could be making death take so long? Some looked more frightened than bored, some more bored than frightened. Robert could still remember from his first visit the bright geometry decorating the walls. He remembered imagining the apex of a long yellow triangle stabbing him in the chest, and the sharp edge of that red semicircle slicing through his neck.

This year they were taking Thomas to see his grandmother for the first time. She wouldn't be able to say much, but then neither would Thomas. They might get on really well.

When they went into the room, his grandmother was sitting in an armchair by the window. Outside, too close to the window, was the thick trunk of a slightly yellowing poplar tree and beyond it, the bluish cypress hedge that hid part of the car park. Noticing the arrival of her family, his grandmother organized her face into a smile, but her eyes remained detached from the process, frozen in bewilderment and pain. As her lips broke open he saw her blackened and broken teeth. They didn't look as if they could manage anything solid. Perhaps that was why her body seemed so much more wasted than when he had last seen her.

They all kissed his grandmother's soft, rather hairy face. Then his mother held Thomas close to his grandmother and said, ‘This is Thomas.'

His grandmother's expression wavered as she tried to negotiate between the strangeness and the intimacy of his presence. Her eyes made Robert feel as if she was scudding through an overcast sky, breaking briefly into clear space and then rushing back through thickening veils into the milky blindness of a cloud. She didn't know Thomas and he didn't know her, but she seemed to have a sense of her connection with him. It kept disappearing, though, and she had to fight to get it back. When she was about to speak, the effort of working out what to say in these particular circumstances wiped her out. She couldn't remember who she was in relation to all the people in the room. Tenacity didn't work any more; the harder she grasped at an idea, the faster it shot away.

Finally, uncertainly, she wrapped her fingers around something, looked up at his father and said, ‘Does … he … like me?'

‘Yes,' said Robert's mother instantly, as if this was the most natural question in the world.

‘Yes,' said his grandmother, the pool of despair in her eyes flooding back into the rest of her face. It wasn't what she had meant to ask, but a question which had broken through. She sank back into her chair.

After what he had heard that morning Robert was struck by her question, and by the fact that it seemed to be addressed to his father. On the other hand, he was not surprised that his mother had answered it instead of him.

That morning he had been playing in the kitchen while his mother was upstairs packing a bag for Thomas. He hadn't noticed that the monitor was still on, until he heard Thomas waking up with a few short cries, and his mother going into Thomas's bedroom and talking to him soothingly. Before he could gauge whether she was even sweeter to Thomas when he was not around, his father's voice came blasting over the receiver.