‘Fucking hell,’ he cursed, sliding down the wall. However often he did it, being sick never lost its power to surprise him.
Shaken by coming so close to choking, he lit a cigarette and smoked it through the bitter slime that coated his mouth. The question now, of course, was whether to take some heroin to help him calm down.
The risk was that it would make him feel even more nauseous.
Wiping the sweat from his hands, he gingerly opened the packet of heroin over his lap, dipped his little finger into it, and sniffed through both nostrils. Not feeling any immediate ill effects, he repeated the dose.
Peace at last. He closed his eyes and sighed. The others could just fuck off. He wasn’t going back. He was going to fold his wings and (he took another sniff) relax. Where he took his smack was his home, and more often than not that was in some stranger’s bog.
He was so tired; he really must get some sleep. Get some sleep. Fold his wings. But what if George and the others sent somebody to look for him and they found the sick-spattered basin and hammered on the door of the cubicle? Was there no peace, no resting place? Of course there wasn’t. What an absurd question.
11
‘I’M HERE TO COLLECT the remains of David Melrose,’ said Patrick to the grinning young man with the big jaw and the mop of shiny chestnut hair.
‘Mr … David … Melrose,’ he mused, as he turned the pages of a large leather register.
Patrick leaned over the edge of the counter, more like a grounded pulpit than a desk, and saw, next to the register, a cheap exercise book marked ‘Almost Dead’. That was the file to get on; might as well apply straight away.
Escaping from the Key Club had left him strangely elated. After passing out for an hour in the loo, he had woken refreshed but unable to face the others. Bolting past the doorman like a criminal, he had dashed round the corner to a bar, and then walked on to the funeral parlour. Later he would have to apologize to George. Lie and apologize as he always did or wanted to do after any contact with another human being.
‘Yes, sir,’ said the receptionist brightly, finding the page. ‘Mr David Melrose.’
‘I have come not to praise him, but to bury him,’ Patrick declared, thumping the table theatrically.
‘Bu-ry him?’ stammered the receptionist. ‘We under-stood that party was to be cre-mated.’
‘I was speaking metaphorically.’
‘Metaphorically,’ repeated the young man, not quite reassured. Did that mean the customer was going to sue or not?
‘Where are the ashes?’ asked Patrick.
‘I’ll go fetch them for you, sir,’ said the receptionist. ‘We have you down for a box,’ he added, no longer as confident as he’d sounded at first.
‘That’s right,’ said Patrick. ‘No point in wasting money on an urn. The ashes are going to be scattered anyway.’
‘Right,’ said the receptionist with uncertain cheerfulness.
Glancing sideways he quickly rectified his tone. ‘I’ll attend to that right away, sir,’ he said in an unctuous and artificially loud singsong, setting off promptly towards a door concealed in the panelling.
Patrick looked over his shoulder to find out what had provoked this new eagerness. He saw a tall figure he recognized without immediately being able to place him.
‘We’re in an industry where the supply and the demand are bound to be identical,’ quipped this half-familiar man.
Behind him stood the bald, moustachioed director who had led Patrick to his father’s corpse the previous afternoon. He seemed to wince and smile at the same time.
‘We’ve got the one resource that’s never going to run out,’ said the tall man, obviously enjoying himself.
The director raised his eyebrows and flickered his eyes in Patrick’s direction.
Of course, thought Patrick, it was that ghastly man he’d met on the plane.
‘Goddamn,’ whispered Earl Hammer, ‘I guess I still got something to learn about PR.’ Recognizing Patrick, he shouted ‘Bobby!’ across the chequered marble hall.
‘Patrick,’ said Patrick.
‘Paddy! Of course. That eyepatch was unfamiliar to me. What happened to you anyway? Some lady give you a black eye?’ Earl guffawed, pounding over to Patrick’s side.
‘Just a little inflammation,’ said Patrick. ‘Can’t see properly out of that eye.’
‘That’s too bad,’ said Earl. ‘What are you doing here anyhow? When I told you on the plane that I had been diversifying my business interests, I bet you never guessed that I was in the process of acquiring New York’s premier funeral parlour.’
‘I hadn’t guessed that,’ confessed Patrick. ‘And I don’t suppose you guessed that I was coming to collect my father’s remains from New York’s premier funeral parlour.’
‘Hell,’ said Earl, ‘I’m sorry to hear that. I’ll bet he was a fine man.’
‘He was perfect in his way,’ said Patrick.
‘My condolences,’ said Earl, with that abrupt solemnity that Patrick recognized from the discussion about Miss Hammer’s volleyball prospects.
The receptionist returned with a simple wooden box about a foot long and eight inches high.
‘It’s so much more compact than a coffin, don’t you think?’ commented Patrick.
‘There’s no way of denying that,’ Earl replied.
‘Do you have a bag?’ Patrick asked the receptionist.
‘A bag?’
‘Yes, a carrier bag, a brown-paper bag, that sort of thing.’
‘I’ll go check that, sir.’
‘Paddy,’ said Earl, as if he had been giving the matter some thought, ‘I want you to have a ten per cent discount.’
‘Thank you,’ said Patrick, genuinely pleased.
‘Don’t mention it,’ said Earl.
The receptionist returned with a brown-paper bag that was already a little crumpled, and Patrick imagined that he’d had to empty out his groceries hastily in order not to fail in front of his employer.
‘Perfect,’ said Patrick.
‘Do we charge for these bags?’ asked Earl, and then, before the receptionist could answer, he added, ‘Because this one’s on me.’
‘Earl, I don’t know what to say.’
‘It’s nothing,’ said Earl. ‘I have a meeting right now, but I would be honoured if you would have a drink with me later.’
‘Can I bring my father?’ asked Patrick, raising the bag.
‘Hell, yes,’ said Earl, laughing.
‘Seriously, though, I’m afraid I can’t. I’m going out to dinner tonight and I have to fly back to England tomorrow.’
‘That’s too bad.’
‘Well, it’s a great regret to me,’ said Patrick with a wan smile, as he headed quickly for the door.
‘Goodbye, old friend,’ said Earl, with a big wave.
‘Bye now,’ said Patrick, flicking up the collar of his overcoat before he ventured into the rush hour street.
* * *
In the black-lacquered hall, opposite the opening doors of the elevator, an African mask gawked from a marble-topped console table. The gilded aviary of a Chippendale mirror gave Patrick a last chance to glance with horror at his fabulously ill-looking face before turning to Mrs Banks, Marianne’s emaciated mother, who stood vampirishly in the elegant gloom.
Opening her arms so that her black silk dress stretched from her wrists to her knees, like bat’s wings, she cocked her head a little to one side, and exclaimed with excrutiated sympathy, ‘Oh, Patrick, we were so sorry to hear your news.’
‘Well,’ said Patrick, tapping the casket he held under his arm, ‘you know how it is: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. What the Lord giveth he taketh away. After what I regard, in this case, as an unnaturally long delay.’
‘Is that…?’ asked Mrs Banks, staring round-eyed at the brown-paper bag.
‘My father,’ confirmed Patrick.
‘I must tell Ogilvy we’ll be one more for dinner,’ she said with peals of chic laughte
r. That was Nancy Banks all over, as magazines often pointed out after photographing her drawing room, so daring but so right.
‘Banquo doesn’t eat meat,’ said Patrick, putting the box down firmly on the hall table.
Why had he said Banquo? Nancy wondered, in her husky inner voice which, even in the deepest intimacy of her own thoughts, was turned to address a large and fascinated audience. Could he, in some crazy way, feel responsible for his father’s death? Because he had wished for it so often in fantasy? God, she had become good at this after seventeen years of analysis. After all, as Dr Morris had said when they were talking through their affair, what was an analyst but a former patient who couldn’t think of anything better to do? Sometimes she missed Jeffrey. He had let her call him Jeffrey during the ‘letting-go process’ that had been brought to such an abrupt close by his suicide. Without even a note! Was she really meeting the challenges of life, as Jeffrey had promised? Maybe she was ‘incompletely analysed’. It was too dreadful to contemplate.
‘Marianne’s dying to see you,’ she murmured consolingly as she led Patrick into the empty drawing room. He stared at a baroque escritoire cascading with crapulous putti.
‘She got a phone call the moment you arrived and couldn’t get out of answering it,’ she added.
‘We have the whole evening…’ said Patrick. And the whole night, he thought optimistically. The drawing room was a sea of pink lilies, their shining pistils accusing him of lust. He was dangerously obsessed, dangerously obsessed. And his thoughts, like a bobsleigh walled with ice, would not change their course until he had crashed or achieved his end. He wiped his hands sweatily on his trousers, amazed to have found a preoccupation stronger than drugs. ‘Ah, there’s Eddy,’ exclaimed Nancy.
Mr Banks strode into the room in a chequered lumberjack shirt and a pair of baggy trousers. ‘Hello,’ he said with his rapid little blur, ‘I was tho thorry to hear about your fawther. Marianne says that he was a wemarkable man.’
‘You should have heard the remarks,’ said Patrick.
‘Did you have a very difficult relationship with him?’ asked Nancy encouragingly.
‘Yup,’ Patrick replied.
‘When did the twouble stawt?’ asked Eddy, settling down on the faded orange velvet of a bow-legged marquise.
‘Oh, June the ninth, nineteen-o-six, the day he was born.’
‘That early?’ smiled Nancy.
‘Well, we’re not going to resolve the question of whether his problems were congenital or not, at least not before dinner; but even if they weren’t, he didn’t delay in acquiring them. By all accounts, the moment he could speak he dedicated his new skill to hurting people. By the age of ten he was banned from his grandfather’s house because he used to set everyone against each other, cause accidents, force people to do things they didn’t want to.’
‘You make him sound evil in a rather old-fashioned way. The satanic child,’ said Nancy sceptically.
‘It’s a point of view,’ said Patrick. ‘When he was around, people were always falling off rocks, or nearly drowning, or bursting into tears. His life consisted of acquiring more and more victims for his malevolence and then losing them again.’
‘He must have been charming as well,’ said Nancy.
‘He was a kitten,’ said Patrick.
‘But wouldn’t we now say that he was just wery disturbed?’ asked Eddy.
‘So what if we did? When the effect somebody has is destructive enough the cause becomes a theoretical curiosity. There are some very nasty people in the world and it is a pity if one of them is your father.’
‘I don’t think that people noo so much about how to bring up kids in those days. A lot of parents in your fawther’s generation just didn’t know how to express their love.’
‘Cruelty is the opposite of love,’ said Patrick, ‘not just some inarticulate version of it.’
‘Sounds right to me,’ said a husky voice from the doorway.
‘Oh, hi,’ said Patrick, swivelling around in his chair, suddenly self-conscious in Marianne’s presence.
Marianne sailed towards him across the dim drawing room, its floorboards creaking underfoot, and her body tipped forward at a dangerous angle like the figurehead on the prow of a ship.
Patrick rose and wrapped his arms around her with greed and desperation.
‘Hey, Patrick,’ she said, hugging him warmly. ‘Hey,’ she repeated soothingly when he seemed reluctant to let go. ‘I’m so sorry. Really, really sorry.’
Oh, God, thought Patrick, this is where I want to be buried.
‘We were just tawking about how parents sometimes don’t know how to express their love,’ lisped Eddy.
‘Well, I guess I wouldn’t know about that,’ said Marianne with a cute smile.
Her back as curved as a negress’s, she walked towards the drinks tray with awkward and hesitating grace, as if she were a mermaid only recently equipped with human legs, and helped herself to a glass of champagne.
‘Does anybody wanna a glass of this,’ she stammered, craning her neck forward and frowning slightly, as if the question might contain hidden depths.
Nancy declined. She preferred cocaine. Whatever you said about it, it wasn’t fattening. Eddy accepted and Patrick said he wanted whisky.
‘Eddy hasn’t really gotten over his father’s death,’ said Nancy to nudge the conversation on a little.
‘I never really told my fawther how I felt,’ explained Eddy, smiling at Marianne as she handed him a glass of champagne.
‘Neither did I,’ said Patrick. ‘Probably just as well in my case.’
‘What would you have said?’ asked Marianne, fixing him intently with her dark blue eyes.
‘I would have said … I can’t say…’ Patrick was bewildered and annoyed by having taken the question seriously. ‘Never mind,’ he mumbled, and poured himself some whisky.
Nancy reflected that Patrick was not really pulling his weight in this conversation.
‘They fuck you up. They don’t mean to but they do,’ she sighed.
‘Who says they don’t mean to?’ growled Patrick.
‘Philip Larkin,’ said Nancy, with a glassy little laugh.
‘But what was it about your father that you couldn’t get over?’ Patrick asked Eddy politely.
‘He was kind of a hero to me. He always noo what to do in any situation, or at least what he wanted to do. He knew how to handle money and women; and when he hooked a three-hundred-pound marlin, the marlin always lost. And when he bid for a picture at auction, he always got it.’
‘And when you wanted to sell it again you always succeeded,’ said Nancy humorously.
‘Well, you’re my hero,’ stammered Marianne to her father, ‘and I don’t want to get over it.’
Fucking hell, thought Patrick, what do these people do all day, write scripts for The Brady Bunch? He hated happy families with their mutual encouragement, and their demonstrative affection, and the impression they gave of valuing each other more than other people. It was utterly disgusting.
‘Are we going out to dinner together?’ Patrick asked Marianne abruptly.
‘We could have dinner here.’ She swallowed, a little frown clouding her face.
‘Would it be frightfully rude to go out?’ he insisted. ‘I’d like to talk.’
The answer was clearly yes, as far as Nancy was concerned, it would be frightfully rude. Consuela was preparing the scallops this very minute. But in life, as in entertaining, one had to be flexible and graceful and, in this case, some allowances should be made for Patrick’s bereavement. It was hard not to be insulted by the implication that she was handling it badly, until one considered that his state of mind was akin to temporary insanity.
‘Of course not,’ she purred.
‘Where shall we go?’ asked Patrick.
‘Ah … there’s a small Armenian restaurant I really really like,’ Marianne suggested.
‘A small Armenian restaurant,’ Patrick repeated flatly.
12
UNDER A CERULEAN DOME dotted with dull-gold stars Marianne and Patrick, in a blue velveteen booth of their own, read the plastic-coated menus of the Byzantium Grill. The muffled rumble of a subway train shuddered underfoot and the iced water, always so redundant and so quick to arrive, trembled in the stout ribbed glasses. Everything was shaking, thought Patrick, molecules dancing in the tabletop, electrons spinning, signals and soundwaves undulating through his cells, cells shimmering with country music and police radios, roaring garbage trucks and shattering bottles; his cranium shuddering like a drilled wall, and each sensation Tabasco-flicked onto his soft grey flesh.
A passing waiter kicked Patrick’s box of ashes, looked round and apologized. Patrick refused his offer to ‘check that for you’ and slid the box further under the table with his feet.
Death should express the deeper being rather than represent the occasion for a new role. Who had said that? The terror of forgetting. And yet here was his father being kicked around by a waiter. A new role, definitely a new role.
Perhaps Marianne’s body would enable him to forget his father’s corpse, perhaps it contained a junction where his obsession with his father’s death and his own dying could switch tracks and hurtle towards its new erotic destination with all of its old morbid élan. What should he say? What could he say?
Angels, of course, made love without obstruction of limb or joint, but in the sobbing frustration of human love-making, the exasperating substitution of ticklishness for interfusion, and the ever-renewed drive to pass beyond the mouth of the river to the calm lake where we were conceived, there would have been, thought Patrick, as he pretended to read the menu but in fact fixed his eyes on the green velvet that barely contained Marianne’s breasts, an adequate expression of the failure of words to convey the confusion and intensity he felt in the wake of his father’s death.
Besides, not having fucked Marianne was like not having read the Iliad – something else he had been meaning to do for a long time.
Like a sleeve caught in some implacable and uncomprehending machine, his need to be understood had become lodged in her blissful but dangerously indifferent body. He would be dragged through a crushing obsession and spat out the other end without her pulse flickering or her thoughts wandering from their chosen paths.
The Patrick Melrose Novels Page 24