‘I really ought to be going now,’ he said curtly.
‘Really? Won’t you stay to say hello to Victor?’
‘No, I must go,’ he said impatiently.
‘OK, but let me give you Samantha’s address.’
‘What?’
‘The party.’
‘Oh, yes. I doubt I’ll come,’ said Patrick.
Anne wrote down the address on a piece of paper and handed it to Patrick. ‘There you are.’
‘Thank you,’ said Patrick abruptly, flicking up the collar of his overcoat. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’
‘Or see you tonight.’
‘Maybe.’
He turned around and hurried towards the door. He had to get outside. His heart seemed to be about to leap out of his chest, like a jack-in-the-box, and he felt that he could only force the lid down for a few seconds more.
‘Goodbye,’ he called from the door.
‘Goodbye,’ said Anne.
Down in the sluggish airless lift, past the fat moronic doorman, and into the street. The shock of standing again under the wide pale sky, completely exposed. This must be what the oyster feels when the lemon juice falls.
Why had he left the shelter of Anne’s flat? And so rudely. Now she would hate him forever. Everything he did was wrong.
Patrick looked down the avenue. It was like the opening shot of a documentary on overpopulation. He walked down the street, imagining the severed heads of passers-by rolling into the gutter in his wake.
4
HOW COULD HE THINK his way out of the problem when the problem was the way he thought, Patrick wondered, not for the first time, as he slipped reluctantly out of his overcoat and handed it to a brilliantined red-jacketed waiter.
Eating was only a temporary solution. But then all solutions were temporary, even death, and nothing gave him more faith in the existence of an afterlife than the inexorable sarcasm of Fate. No doubt suicide would turn out to be the violent preface to yet another span of nauseating consciousness, of diminishing spirals and tightening nooses, and memories like shrapnel tearing all day long through his flesh. Who could guess what exquisite torments lay ahead in the holiday camps of eternity? It almost made one grateful to be alive.
Only behind a waterfall of brutal and pleasurable sensations, thought Patrick, accepting the leather-clad menu without bothering to glance up, could he hide from the bloodhounds of his conscience. There, in the cool recess of the rock, behind that heavy white veil, he would hear them yelping and snarling confusedly on the river bank, but at least they couldn’t tear out his throat with the fury of their reproach. After all, the trail he’d left was not hard to follow. It was littered with the evidence of wasted time and hopeless longing, not to mention those bloodstained shirts, and the syringes whose spikes he had bent in a fit of disgust and then unbent again for one last fix. Patrick drew in his breath sharply and folded his arms over his chest.
‘A dry martini. Straight up, with a twist,’ he drawled. ‘And I’m ready to order.’
A waiter was coming right on over to take his order. Everything was under control.
Most people who were withdrawing and speeding, jet-lagged and cudgelled by Quaaludes, might have lost their interest in food, but Patrick found that all his appetites were operational at all times, even when his loathing of being touched gave his desire for sex a theoretical complexion.
He could remember Johnny Hall saying indignantly of a girlfriend he had recently thrown out, ‘She was the kind of girl who came over and ruffled your hair when you’d just had a fix of coke.’ Patrick had howled at the horror of such a tactless act. When a man is feeling as empty and fragile as a pane of glass, he does not want to have his hair ruffled. There could be no negotiation between people who thought that cocaine was a vaguely naughty and salacious drug and the intravenous addict who knew that it was an opportunity to experience the arctic landscape of pure terror.
That terror was the price he had to pay for the first heartbreaking wave of pleasure when consciousness seemed to burst out, like white blossoms, along the branches of every nerve. And all his scattered thoughts came rushing together, like loose iron filings as a magnet is held over them and draws them into the shape of a rose. Or – he must stop thinking about it – or like a solution of saturated copper sulphate under the microscope, when it suddenly transforms and crystals break out everywhere on its surface.
He must stop thinking about it – and do it. No! And think about something else. His father’s corpse, for instance. Would that be an improvement? It would get rid of the problem of desire, but hatred could be compulsive too.
Ah, here was the dry martini. If not the cavalry, at least some more ammunition. Patrick drained the cold unctuous liquid in one gulp.
‘Would you care for another one, sir?’
‘Yes,’ said Patrick brusquely.
A more senior waiter in a dinner jacket came over to take Patrick’s order.
‘Tartare de Saumon Cru, followed by the Steak Tartare,’ said Patrick, taking an innocent pleasure in saying ‘tartare’ twice and pleased to be ordering two adult forms of baby food, already cut up and squished together for him.
A third waiter, with a golden bunch of grapes in his lapel, and a large golden wine-tasting cup dangling from a chain around his neck, was only too ready to bring Patrick a bottle of Corton Charlemagne straight away and to open a bottle of Ducru-Beaucaillou for later on. Everything was under control.
No, he mustn’t think about it, or indeed about anything, and especially not about heroin, because heroin was the only thing that really worked, the only thing that stopped him scampering around in a hamster’s wheel of unanswerable questions. Heroin was the cavalry. Heroin was the missing chair leg, made with such precision that it matched every splinter of the break. Heroin landed purring at the base of his skull, and wrapped itself darkly around his nervous system, like a black cat curling up on its favourite cushion. It was as soft and rich as the throat of a wood pigeon, or the splash of sealing wax onto a page, or a handful of gems slipping from palm to palm.
The way other people felt about love, he felt about heroin, and he felt about love the way other people felt about heroin: that it was a dangerous and incomprehensible waste of time. What could he say to Debbie? ‘Although you know that my hatred for my father, and my love for drugs, are the most important relationships in my life, I want you to know that you come in third.’ What woman would not be proud to be ‘among the medals’ in such a contest?
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake shut up,’ mumbled Patrick out loud, drinking his second dry martini with as little restraint as the first. If things went on this way he would have to call Pierre, his truly wonderful New York dealer. No! He wasn’t going to do it, he had sworn that he wasn’t going to do it. 555–1726. The number might as well have been tattooed on his wrist. He hadn’t rung it since September, eight months ago, but he would never forget the bowel-loosening excitement of those seven digits.
Golden Grapes was back, peeling the heavy yellow lead from the neck of the Corton Charlemagne, and cradling the bottle of claret, while Patrick studied the picture of a white chateau under a flat gold sky. Perhaps with these consolations he would not have to score after dinner, thought Patrick sceptically, sucking a sample of Corton Charlemagne into his mouth.
The first taste made him break into a grin of recognition, like a man who has sighted his lover at the end of a crowded platform. Raising the glass again, he took a large gulp of the pale yellow wine, held it in his mouth for a few seconds, and then let it slide down his throat. Yes, it worked, it still worked. Some things never let him down.