‘Is that what you want,’ his mother asked Robert, ‘to watch a video?’
‘Yeah, sure,’ he said, desperate to get away.
‘It’s difficult to see how he could swim,’ admitted his father, ‘with all the inflatable food in the pool.’
‘Come on!’ said Jo, sticking a hand out on each side. She seemed to think that Josh and Robert were going to take a hand each and skip up the hill with her.
‘Isn’t anybody going to hold my hand?’ howled Jo, in a fit of mock blubbing.
Josh joined his pudgy palm with hers, but Robert managed to stay free, following at a little distance, fascinated by Jo’s pouting khaki bottom.
‘We’re entering the video cave,’ said Jo, making spooky noises. ‘Right! What are you two going to watch? And I don’t want any fighting.’
‘The Adventures of Sinbad,’ shouted Josh.
‘Again! Crikey!’ said Jo, and Robert couldn’t help agreeing with her. He liked to watch a good video five or six times, but when he knew all the dialogue by heart and each shot was like a drawer full of identical socks, he started to feel a twinge of reluctance. Josh was different. He started out with a sort of sullen greed for a new video and only developed real enthusiasm somewhere around the twentieth viewing. Love, an emotion he didn’t throw around lightly, was reserved for The Adventures of Sinbad, now seen over a hundred times, far too many of them with Robert. Videos were Josh’s daydreams, Robert’s daydream was solitude. How could he escape from the video cave? When you’re a child nobody leaves you alone. If he ran away now, they would send out a search party, round him up and entertain him to death. Maybe he could just lie there and think while Josh’s borrowed imagination flickered on the wall. The whine of the rewind was slowing down and Josh had collapsed back into the dent already made by his breakfast viewing and resumed munching the bright orange cheese puffs scattered on the table next to him. Jo started the tape, switched off the light and left discreetly. Josh was no fast-forward vandal: the warning about video piracy, the previews of films he had already seen, the plugs for merchandised toys he had already discarded and the message from the Video Standards Authority were not allowed to rush past like so many ugly suburbs before a train breaks out into the bovine melancholy of true countryside; they were appreciated in their own right, granted their own dignity, which suited Robert fine, since the rubbish now pouring from the screen was too familiar to make any impact on his attention at all.
He closed his eyes and let the pool-side inferno dissipate. After a few hours of other people, he had to get the pile-up of impressions out of him one way or another; by doing impersonations, or working out how things worked, or just trying to empty his mind. Otherwise the impressions built up to a critical density and he felt as if he was going to explode.
Sometimes, when he was lying in bed, a single word like ‘fear’ or ‘infinity’ flicked the roof off the house and sucked him into the night, past the stars that had been bent into bears and ploughs, and into a pure darkness where everything was annihilated except the feeling of annihilation. As the little capsule of his intelligence disintegrated, he went on feeling its burning edges, its fragmenting hull, and when the capsule flew apart he was the bits flying apart, and when the bits turned into atoms he was the flying apart itself, growing stronger instead of fading, like an evil energy defying the running out of everything and feeding on waste, and soon enough the whole of space was a waste-fuelled rush and there was no place in it for a human mind; but there he was, still feeling.
He would reel down the corridor to his parents’ bedroom, choking. He would do anything to make it stop, sign any contract, take any vow, but he knew it was useless, he knew that he had seen something true, that he couldn’t change it, only ignore it for a while, cry in his mother’s arms, and let her put the roof back on and introduce him to some kinder words.
It was not that he was unhappy. It was just that he had seen something and sometimes it was truer than anything else. He first saw it when his grandmother had a stroke. He hadn’t wanted to abandon her but she could hardly speak and so he had spent a lot of time imagining what she was feeling. Everybody said you had to be loyal, so he stuck at it. He held her hand for a long time and she gripped his. He didn’t like it but he didn’t let go. He could tell that she was frightened. Her eyes were dimmed. Part of her was relieved: she had always had trouble communicating, now nobody expected her to make the effort. Part of her was already gone, back to the source, perhaps, or at least far from the material plane about which she had such chronic doubts. What he could get close to was the part of her that was left behind wondering, now that she couldn’t help keeping them, if she wanted all those secrets after all. Illness had blown her apart like a dandelion clock. He had wondered if he would end up like that, a few seeds sticking to a broken stem.
‘This is my favourite bit,’ said Josh, love-struck. Pirates were boarding Sinbad’s ship. The ship’s parrot flew in the face of the meanest-looking pirate. He staggered around disoriented and was effortlessly tipped overboard by Sinbad’s men. Shot of pleased parrot squawking.
‘Hmm,’ said Robert. ‘Listen, I’ll be back in a minute.’
Josh paid no attention to his departure. Robert scanned the corridor for Jo, but she was not there. He retraced the route they had come in by, and when he got to the garden door, saw that the grown-ups were no longer around the pool. He slipped outside and hooked round to the back of the house. The tailored lawn petered out to a carpet of pine needles and a couple of big dustbins. He sat down and leant back against the ridged bark of the pine, unsupervised.
He wondered who was wasting the most time by spending a day with the Packers, not counting the Packers themselves who were always wasting more time than anybody, and usually had a film to prove it. Thomas was only sixty days old, so it was the biggest waste of time for him, because one day was one-sixtieth of his life, whereas his father, who was forty, was wasting the smallest proportion of his life. Robert tried to work out what proportion of their lives a day was for each of them. The calculations were hard to hold in his mind, so he imagined different sizes of wheels in a clock. Then he wondered how to include the opposite facts: that Thomas had his whole life ahead of him, whereas his parents had quite a lot of theirs behind them, so that one day was less wasteful for Thomas because he had more days left. That created a new set of wheels – red instead of silver – his father’s spinning round and Thomas’s turning with a stately infrequent click. He still had to include the different qualities of suffering and the different benefits for each of them, but that made his machine fantastically complicated and so, in one salutary sweep, he decided that they were all suffering equally, and that none of them had got anything out of it at all, making the value of the day a nice fat zero. Hugely relieved, he got back to visualizing the rods connecting the two sets of wheels. It all looked quite like the big steam engine in the Science Museum, except that paper came out at one end with a figure for the units of waste. It turned out, when he read the figures, that he was wasting more time than anyone else. He was horrified by this result, but at the same time quite pleased. Then he heard Jo’s dreadful voice calling his name.
For a moment he froze with indecision. The trouble was that hiding only made the search party more frantic and furious. He decided to act casual and amble round the corner just in time to hear Jo bawling his name for the second time.
‘Hi,’ he said.
‘Where have you been? I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’
‘You can’t have been, or you would have found me,’ he said.
‘Don’t get smart with me, young man,’ said Jo. ‘Have you been fighting with Josh?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘How could anyone fight with Josh? He’s just a blob.’
‘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.
The Patrick Melrose Novels Page 45
