The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (55 page)

‘Margaret’s here,’ he said.

His father turned around while Robert watched her plaintive bulk roll towards them. She came to a halt a few feet away from them.

‘No harm done,’ she said, half asking.

‘He seems OK,’ said his father.

‘This won’t affect my reference, will it?’

‘What reference?’ asked his father.

‘Oh, I see,’ said Margaret, half wounded, half angry, all dignified.

‘Shall we have lunch?’ said his father.

‘I shan’t be needing any lunch, thank you very much,’ said Margaret.

She turned towards the staircase and began her laborious climb.

Suddenly, Robert couldn’t bear it any longer.

‘Poor Margaret,’ he said.

‘Poor Margaret,’ said his father. ‘What will we do without her?’

3

ROBERT WAS WATCHING AN
ant disappear behind the sweating bottle of white wine on the stone table. The condensation suddenly streaked down the side of the bottle, smoothing the beaded surface in its wake. The ant reappeared, magnified through the pale green glass, its legs knitting frantically as it sampled a glittering grain of sugar spilt by Julia when she had sweetened her coffee after lunch. The sound of the cicadas billowed around them in and out of time with the limp flapping of the canvas awning over their heads. His mother was having a siesta with Thomas, and Lucy was watching a video, but he had stayed behind, despite Julia almost forcing him to join Lucy.

‘Most people wait for their parents to die with a mixture of tremendous sadness and plans for a new swimming pool,’ his father was saying to Julia. ‘Since I’m going to have to renounce the swimming pool, I thought I might ditch the sadness as well.’

‘But couldn’t you pretend to be a shaman and keep this place?’ said Julia.

‘Alas, I’m one of the few people on the planet with absolutely no healing powers. I know that everyone else has just discovered their inner shaman, but I remain trapped in my materialistic conception of the universe.’

‘There’s such a thing as hypocrisy, you know,’ said Julia. ‘There’s a shop round the corner from me called the Rainbow Path, I could get you a drum and some feathers.’

‘I can already feel the power surging into my fingertips,’ said his father, yawning. ‘I, too, have a special gift to offer the tribe. I didn’t realize until now that I have incredible psychic powers.’

‘There you go,’ said Julia encouragingly, ‘you’ll be running the place in no time.’

‘I have enough trouble looking after my family without saving the world.’

‘Looking after children can be a subtle way of giving up,’ said Julia, smiling at Robert sternly. ‘They become the whole ones, the well ones, the postponement of happiness, the ones who won’t drink too much, give up, get divorced, become mentally ill. The part of oneself that’s fighting against decay and depression is transferred to guarding them from decay and depression. In the meantime one decays and gets depressed.’

‘I disagree,’ said his father, ‘when you’re just fighting for yourself it’s defensive and grim.’

‘Very useful qualities,’ Julia interrupted him. ‘That’s why it’s important not to treat children too well – they won’t be able to compete in the real world. If you want your children to become television producers, for instance, or chief executives, it’s no use filling their little heads with ideas of trust and truth-telling and reliability. They’ll just end up being somebody’s secretary.’

Robert decided to ask his mother whether this was true, or whether Julia was being – well, like Julia. She came to stay every year with Lucy, her quite stuck-up daughter a year older than Robert. He knew his mother wasn’t wild about Julia, because she was an old girlfriend of his father’s. She felt a little bit jealous of her, but also a little bit bored. Julia didn’t know how to stop wanting people to think she was clever. ‘Really clever people are just thinking aloud,’ his mother had told him, ‘Julia is thinking about what she sounds like.’

Julia was always trying to throw Robert and Lucy together. The day before, Lucy had tried to kiss him. That was why he didn’t want to watch a video with her. He doubted that his front teeth would survive another collision like that. The theory that it was good for him to spend time with children of his own age, even if he didn’t like them, ground on. Would his father ask a woman to tea just because she was forty?

Julia was playing with the sugar again, spooning it back and forth in the bowl.

‘Since divorcing Richard,’ she said, ‘I get these horrible moments of vertigo. I suddenly feel as if I don’t exist.’

‘I get that!’ said Robert, excited that they had chosen a subject he knew something about.

‘At your age,’ said Julia, ‘I think that’s very pretentious. Are you sure you haven’t just heard grown-ups talking about it?’

‘No,’ he said, in his dazed by injustice voice, ‘I get it all on my own.’

‘I think you’re being unfair,’ said his father to Julia. ‘Robert has always had a capacity for horror well beyond his years. It doesn’t interfere with his being a happy child.’

‘Well, it does, actually,’ he corrected his father, ‘when it’s going on.’

‘Ah, when it’s going on,’ his father conceded with a gentle smile.

‘I see,’ said Julia, resting her hand on Robert’s. ‘In that case, welcome to the club, darling.’

He didn’t want to be a member of Julia’s club. He felt prickly all over his body because he wanted to take his hand away but didn’t want to be rude.

‘I always thought children were simpler than us,’ said Julia, removing her hand and placing it on his father’s forearm. ‘We’re like ice-breakers crashing our way towards the next object of desire.’

‘What could be simpler than crashing one’s way towards the next object of desire?’ asked his father.

‘
Not
crashing one’s way towards it.’

‘That’s renunciation – not as simple as it looks.’

‘It’s only renunciation if you have the desire in the first place,’ said Julia.

‘Children have plenty of desire in the first place,’ said his father, ‘but I think you’re right, it’s essentially one desire: to be close to the people they love.’

‘The normal ones want to watch
Raiders of the Lost Ark
as well,’ said Julia.

‘We’re more easily distracted,’ said his father, ignoring her last remark, ‘more used to a culture of substitution, more easily confused about exactly who we do love.’

‘Are we?’ said Julia, smiling. ‘That’s nice.’

‘Up to a point,’ said his father.

He didn’t really know what they were talking about now, but Julia seemed to have cheered up. Substitution must be something pretty wonderful. Before he got the chance to ask what it meant, a voice, a caring Irish voice, called out.

‘Hello? Hello?’

‘Oh, Christ,’ muttered his father, ‘it’s the boss.’

‘Patrick!’ said Seamus warmly, walking towards them in a shirt covered in palm trees and rainbows. ‘Robert,’ he greeted him, ruffling his hair vigorously. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said to Julia, fixing her with his candid blue eyes and his firm handshake. Nobody could accuse him of not being friendly.

‘Oh, it’s a lovely spot here,’ he said, ‘lovely. We often sit out here after a session, with everyone laughing or crying, or just being with themselves, you know. This is definitely a power point, a place of tremendous release. That’s right,’ he sighed, as if agreeing with someone else’s wise insight, ‘I’ve seen people let go of a lot of stuff here.’

‘Talking of “letting go of a lot of stuff ”,’ his father handed the phrase back to Seamus, held by the corner like someone else’s used handkerchief, ‘when I opened the drawer of my bedside table I found it so full of “Healing Drum” brochures that there was no room for my passport. There are also several hundred copies of
The Way of the Shaman
in my wardrobe which are getting in the way of the shoes.’

‘The Way of the Shoes,’ said Seamus, letting out a great roar of healthy laughter, ‘now that would be a good title for a book about, you know, staying grounded.’

‘Do you think that these signs of institutional life,’ continued his father coldly, rapidly, ‘could be removed before we come down here on holiday? After all, my mother does want the house to return each August to its incarnation as a family home.’

‘Of course, of course,’ said Seamus. ‘I apologize, Patrick. That’ll be Kevin and Anette. They were going through a very powerful personal process, you know, before going back to Ireland on holiday, and they obviously weren’t thorough enough in getting things ready for you.’

‘Are you also going back to Ireland?’ his father asked.

‘No, I’ll be in the cottage through August,’ said Seamus. ‘The Pegasus Press have asked me to write a short book about the shamanic work.’

‘Oh, really,’ said Julia, ‘how fascinating. Are you a shaman yourself?’

‘I had a look at the book that was in the way of my shoes,’ said his father, ‘and some obvious questions spring to mind. Have you spent twenty years being the disciple of a Siberian witch doctor? Have you gathered rare plants under the full moon during the brief summer? Have you been buried alive and died to the world? Have your eyes watered in the smoke of campfires while you muttered prayers to the spirits who might help you to save a dying man? Have you drunk the urine of caribou who have grazed on outcrops of
Amanita muscaria
and journeyed into other worlds to solve the mystery of a difficult diagnosis? Or did you study in Brazil with the
ayahuascaras
of the Amazon basin?’

‘Well,’ said Seamus, ‘I trained as a nurse with the Irish National Health.’

‘I’m sure that was an adequate substitute for being buried alive,’ said his father.

‘I worked in a nursing home for many years, doing the basics, you know: washing patients who were covered in their own faeces and urine; spoon-feeding old people who couldn’t feed themselves any more.’

‘Please,’ said Julia, ‘we’ve only just finished our lunch.’

‘That was my reality at the time,’ said Seamus. ‘I sometimes wondered why I hadn’t gone on to university and got the medical qualifications, but looking back I’m grateful for those years in the nursing home – they’ve helped to keep me grounded. When I discovered the Holotropic Breathwork and went to California to study with Stan Grof, I met some pretty out-there people, you know. I remember one particular lady, wearing a sunset-coloured dress, and she stood up and said, “I am Tamara from the Vega system, and I have come to the Earth to heal and to teach.” Well, at that point, I thought about the old people in the home in Ireland and I was grateful to them for keeping my feet firmly planted on the ground.’

‘Is holo … whatever you called it, a shamanic thing?’ asked Julia.

‘No, not really. That’s what I was doing before I got into the shamanic work, but it all ties in, you know. It gets people in touch with that something beyond, that other dimension. When people touch that, it can trigger a radical change in their lives.’

‘But I don’t understand why this counts as a charity. People pay to come here, don’t they?’ said Julia.

‘They do, they do,’ said Seamus, ‘but we recycle the profits, you see, so as to give scholarships to students like Kevin and Anette who are learning the shamanic work. And they’ve started to bring groups of inner-city kids from the estates in Dublin. We let them attend the courses for free, you know, and it’s a wonderful thing to see the transformations. They love the trance music and the drumming. They come up to me and say, “Seamus, this is incredible, it’s like tripping without the drugs,” and they take that message back to the inner city and start up shamanic groups of their own.’

‘Do we need a charity for tripping?’ asked his father. ‘Of all the ills in the world, the fact that there are a few people who are not tripping seems a wild hole to plug. Besides, if people want to trip, why not give them a strong dose of acid, instead of messing about with drums?’

‘You can tell he’s a barrister,’ said Seamus amiably.

‘I’m all for people having hobbies,’ said his father. ‘I just think they should explore them in the comfort of their own homes.’

‘Sadly, Patrick,’ said Seamus, ‘some homes are not that comfortable.’

‘I know the feeling,’ said his father. ‘Which reminds me, do you think we could clear out some of those books, advertisements, brochures, bric-a-brac’

‘Surely,’ said Seamus, ‘surely.’

His father and Seamus got up to leave and Robert realized that he was going to be left alone with Julia.

‘I’ll help,’ he said, following them round the terrace. His father led the way into the hall and stopped almost immediately.

‘These fluttering leaflets,’ he said, ‘advertising other centres, other institutes, healing circles, advanced drumming courses – they’re really wasted on us. In fact, this whole noticeboard,’ he continued, unhooking it from the wall, ‘despite its attractive cork surface and its multicoloured drawing pins, might as well not be here.’

‘No problem,’ said Seamus, embracing the notice-board.

Although his father’s manner remained supremely controlled, Robert could feel that he was intoxicated with rage and contempt. Seamus clouded over when Robert tried to make out what he was feeling, but eventually he groped his way to the terrible conclusion that Seamus pitied his father. Knowing that he was in charge, Seamus could afford to indulge the fury of a betrayed child. His repulsive pity saved him from feeling the impact of Patrick’s fury, but Robert found himself caught between the punchbag and the punch and, feeling frightened and useless, he slipped out of the front door, while his father marched Seamus on to the next offence.

Outside, the shadow of the house was spreading to the flower beds on the edge of the terrace, indicating to some effortless part of his mind that the middle of the afternoon had arrived. The cicadas scratched on. He could see without looking, hear without listening; he was aware that he was not thinking. His attention, which usually bounced from one thing to another, was still. He pushed to test its resistance but he didn’t push too hard, knowing that he could probably make himself pinball around again if he tried. His mind was glazed over, like a pond drowsily repeating the pattern of the sky.