The Patrick Melrose Novels (36 page)

‘Your father's ashes.' She gulped, retracting her hand. ‘That makes me feel weird.'

‘I wouldn't worry about it,' said Patrick. ‘I think it counts as hand luggage, don't you?'

‘I guess,' said Rachel, puzzled by this line of argument. ‘God, I mean, I really feel weird about this. Your father is in the room with us. Maybe I sensed that before.'

‘Who knows? Anyway, he can keep you company while I'm in the bathroom. I may be some time.'

‘This is heavy,' said Rachel, round-eyed.

‘Don't be alarmed. He was a charming man, everybody said so.'

Patrick left Rachel in the bedroom and locked the bathroom door behind him. She sat on the edge of the bed, looking anxiously at the casket, as if she expected it to move. She took this golden opportunity to use the breathing exercises she dimly remembered from her two yoga classes, but after a couple of minutes she grew bored and still wanted to leave. The trouble was that she lived way over in Brooklyn. The cab ride was going to be ten–twelve dollars, and she would only arrive a couple of hours before she had to struggle to the gallery on the subway. If she stayed here she might get some sleep and some breakfast. She snuggled up with the breakfast menu and, after the initial excitement and guilt of seeing how many wonderful things there were to eat, she was overcome by tiredness.

Patrick lay in the bathtub, one leg dangling over the edge of the bath, blood trickling from his arm. He'd put all the coke in one last fix and, blasted by the rush, had fallen off the edge of the bath. Now he stared at the chrome shower rail and the glossy white ceiling, drawing shallow breaths through his gritted teeth, as if a girder had collapsed on his chest. Dark patches of sweat stained his shirt, and his nostrils were powdered with heroin. He had pressed the packet straight to his nose, and now it lay crumpled and empty on his neck.

With his left hand he ground the spike of the syringe against the side of the bath. He had to stop shooting up – especially now that he had run out of gear.

All the harm he'd done crowded in on him at once, like a troupe of fallen angels in a medieval painting, goading him towards hell with red-hot pitchforks, their sniggering and malicious faces surrounding him with ugliness and despair. He felt the irresistible desire to make an eternal resolution, to make the devout and impossible promise never to take a drug again. If he survived now, if he was allowed to survive, he would never shoot up again.

In this grave predicament, his fervour outweighed the knowledge of his dishonesty, even though he already detected, like distant gunfire, the disturbing feeling that something was missing. He had run out of gear. One syringe was destroyed and the other blocked with blood. It was just as well, but it was infinitely sad. Soon enough, his synapses would be screaming like starving children, and every cell in his body tugging pathetically at his sleeve.

Patrick moved his leg down tentatively and hoisted himself upright. Nearly died again. Always a shock to the system. Better take that Quaalude. He heaved himself up, nearly fainted and, leaning heavily on the wall like an old man, stepped carefully out of the bath. His coat was lying on the floor (he'd often thought of asking his tailor to put flaps in the sleeves) and he very slowly picked it up, very slowly took out the Quaalude, put it in his mouth, and washed it down with a little water.

Dazed, Patrick sat down on the loo and unhooked the phone. 555–1726.

‘I cannot come to the phone right now, but if you leave…' Fuck, he wasn't in.

‘Pierre, it's Patrick. I just rang to say goodbye,' he lied. ‘I'll be in touch the
moment
I get back to New York. Bye now.'

Next, he rang Johnny Hall in London to make sure there would at least be something waiting for him when he arrived. The phone rang a few times. Maybe Johnny could meet him at the airport. It rang a few more times. Jesus Christ, he wasn't in either. It was intolerable.

Patrick tried to hook the phone back, missing several times before he got it on the receiver. He was as weak as a child. Noticing that the syringe was still in the bath he picked it up wearily, wrapped it in loo paper and threw it in the waste-paper basket under the basin.

In the bedroom, Patrick found Rachel stranded on the bed, snoring erratically. If he were in love, he thought. But couldn't finish. The flame play of disturbed water under a bridge's arch, a muffled echo, a kiss. Snow sliding from his boots in front of the stove, blood swelling back into his fingertips. If he were in love.

As it was, white-bellied and heavy breathing, she looked to Patrick like a beached whale.

Packing was easy if you rolled everything into one ball, stuffed it in the suitcase, sat on it, and did up the zip. He had to undo the zip again to squeeze Victor's book in. ‘I think I'm an egg, therefore I am an egg,' he squealed in Pierre's French accent. Putting on his last clean shirt, he went back into the bathroom to call the reception.

‘Hello?' he drawled.

‘Yes, sir, how may I help you?'

‘I'd like a limo at seven thirty, please. A big one with black windows,' he added childishly.

‘I'll arrange that for you, sir.'

‘And prepare my bill, will you?'

‘Yes, sir. Shall I send a bellboy to collect your baggage?'

‘In about quarter of an hour, thank you.' Everything was under control. He finished dressing, put on his eyepatch, and sat in the armchair waiting for the man to collect his bag. Should he leave a note for Rachel? ‘I do not think I shall ever forget our evening together', or ‘Let's do this again sometime soon'. Sometimes silence was more eloquent.

There was a faint knock on the door. The bellboy was about sixty, small, bald, and dressed in the hotel's plainest grey uniform.

‘There's only one bag.'

‘Roight, sir,' he said in an Irish accent.

They walked down the corridor, Patrick a little stooped to protect his liver, and lopsided from the pain in his back.

‘Life's not just a bag of shit,' said Patrick conversationally, ‘but a leaky one. You can't help being touched by it, don't you find?'

‘I believe dat's what a lot of people feel about it,' the other man replied in a lilting and agreeable tone. And then he came to a halt and put Patrick's bag down.

‘And there will be rivers of blood. And de wicked shall be drowned,' he intoned. ‘Nor shall de high places be spared.'

‘One of your own prophecies?' asked Patrick suavely.

‘It's in de Boible,' said the bellboy. ‘And de bridges shall be swept away,' he promised, pointing to the ceiling and then swatting an invisible fly. ‘And men shall say that de end of de world cometh upon them.'

‘And they shall have a point,' said Patrick, ‘but I really must be going.'

‘Roight you are,' said the bellboy, still excited. ‘I'll be meeting you at the reception.' He scuttled off towards the service elevator. Try as one might to live on the edge, thought Patrick, getting into the other lift, there was no point in competing with people who believed what they saw on television.

The bill for two thousand one hundred and fifty-three dollars was larger than even Patrick had expected. He was secretly pleased. Capital erosion was another way to waste his substance, to become as thin and hollow as he felt, to lighten the burden of undeserved good fortune, and commit a symbolic suicide while he still dithered about the real one. He also nursed the opposite fantasy that when he became penniless he would discover some incandescent purpose born of his need to make money. On top of the hotel bill, he must have spent another two or two and a half thousand on taxis, drugs, and restaurants, plus six thousand for the air tickets. That brought the total to over ten thousand dollars, and the funeral expenses were on their way. He felt like a gameshow winner. How irritating if it had been eight and a half or nine. Ten thousand in two days. Nobody could say he didn't know how to have fun.

Patrick tossed his American Express card onto the counter without bothering to verify the bill.

‘Oh, by the way,' he yawned, ‘I'll sign the form, but could you leave the total open? A friend of mine is still in the room. She may want breakfast; in fact, I'm sure she will. She can order anything she likes,' he added munificently.

‘O-kay.' The receptionist hesitated, wondering whether to make an issue of the double occupancy. ‘She'll be leaving the room by noon, will she?'

‘I suppose so. She works, you see,' said Patrick as if this were rather exceptional. He signed the credit-card form.

‘We'll send a copy of the total to your home address.'

‘Oh, I wouldn't bother to do that,' said Patrick, yawning again. He noticed the bellboy standing nearby with his bag. ‘Hello,' he smiled. ‘Rivers of blood, eh?'

The bellboy looked at him with servile incomprehension. Maybe he'd imagined the whole thing. Might be a good idea to get some sleep.

‘I hope you enjoyed your stay with us,' said the receptionist, handing Patrick a copy of the bill in an envelope.

‘Enjoyed isn't the word,' said Patrick with his most charming smile, ‘I loved it.' He refused the envelope with a little frown. ‘Oh my God,' he suddenly exclaimed, ‘I've forgotten something in the room.' He turned to the bellboy. ‘There's a wooden box on top of the television; you couldn't go and fetch it for me, could you? And the brown-paper bag would be very useful too.'

How could he have forgotten the box? No need to call Vienna for an interpretation. What would they have done on the bleak Cornish estuary where his father had asked to have his ashes scattered? He would have had to bribe a local crematorium to give him some of their spare sweepings.

The bellboy returned ten minutes later. Patrick stubbed out his cigarette and took the brown-paper bag from him. The two of them walked together towards the revolving doors.

‘The young lady was wondering where you were going,' said the bellboy.

‘What did you say?'

‘I said I thought it was de airport.'

‘And what did she say?'

‘I wouldn't loik to repeat it, sir,' said the bellboy respectfully.

So much for that, thought Patrick, spinning through the doors. Slash. Burn. Move on. Out into the scintillating light, under a paler wider sky, his eyeballs drilled like a Roman statue.

Across the street he saw a man, his left arm severed at the wrist, a slight rawness where the bone was most prominent, a four days' unshaven, bitter face, yellow lenses, curling lip, lank hair, stained raincoat. The stump twitched upward in brisk involuntary jerks. Heavy smoker. Hater of the world.
Mon semblable.
Other people's words.

Still, there were some important differences. Patrick distributed banknotes to the doorman and the bellboy. The driver opened the door for him and he climbed into the back with his brown-paper bag. He sprawled across the black leather seat, closed his eyes, and pretended to sleep.

 

SOME HOPE

 

1

PATRICK WOKE UP KNOWING
he had dreamed but unable to remember the contents of his dream. He felt the familiar ache of trying to track something that had just disappeared off the edge of consciousness but could still be inferred from its absence, like a whirlwind of scrap paper left by the passage of a fast car.

The obscure fragments of his dream, which seemed to have taken place beside a lake, were confused with the production of
Measure for Measure
he had seen the night before with Johnny Hall. Despite the director's choice of a bus depot as the setting for the play, nothing could diminish the shock of hearing the word ‘mercy' so many times in one evening.

Perhaps all his problems arose from using the wrong vocabulary, he thought, with a brief flush of excitement that enabled him to throw aside the bedcovers and contemplate getting up. He moved in a world in which the word ‘charity', like a beautiful woman shadowed by her jealous husband, was invariably qualified by the words ‘lunch', ‘committee', or ‘ball'. ‘Compassion' nobody had any time for, whereas ‘leniency' made frequent appearances in the form of complaints about short prison sentences. Still, he knew that his difficulties were more fundamental than that.

He was worn out by his lifelong need to be in two places at once: in his body and out of his body, on the bed and on the curtain pole, in the vein and in the barrel, one eye behind the eyepatch and one eye looking at the eyepatch, trying to stop observing by becoming unconscious, and then forced to observe the fringes of unconsciousness and make darkness visible; cancelling every effort, but spoiling apathy with restlessness; drawn to puns but repelled by the virus of ambiguity; inclined to divide sentences in half, pivoting them on the qualification of a ‘but', but longing to unwind his coiled tongue like a gecko's and catch a distant fly with unwavering skill; desperate to escape the self-subversion of irony and say what he really meant, but really meaning what only irony could convey.

Not to mention, thought Patrick, as he swung his feet out of bed, the two places he wanted to be tonight: at Bridget's party and
not
at Bridget's party. And he wasn't in the mood to dine with people called Bossington-Lane. He would ring Johnny and arrange to have dinner with him alone. He dialled the number but immediately hung up, deciding to call again after he had made some tea. He had scarcely replaced the receiver when the phone rang. Nicholas Pratt was ringing to chastise him for not answering his invitation to Cheatley.

‘No need to thank me,' said Nicholas Pratt, ‘for getting you invited to this glittering occasion tonight. I owe it to your dear Papa to see that you get into the swim of things.'

‘I'm drowning in it,' said Patrick. ‘Anyhow, you prepared the way for my invitation to Cheatley by bringing Bridget down to Lacoste when I was five. Even then one could tell she was destined to command the heights of society.'