Mary had been a devoted mother to Robert, but after the absorption of the first year she had resurfaced as a wife, if only because she wanted another child. With Thomas, perhaps because she knew that he was her last child, she seemed to be trapped in a Madonna and Child force field, preserving a precinct of purity, including her own rediscovered virginity. Patrick was in the unenviable role of Joseph in this enduring, unendurable Bethlehem. Mary had completely withdrawn her attention from him and the more he requested it the more he appeared in the light of an imposturous rival to his younger son. He had turned elsewhere, to Julia, and once that had collapsed, to the oblivious embrace of alcohol. He must stop. At his age he either had to join the resistance or become a collaborator with death. There was no room to play with self-destruction once the juvenile illusion of indestructibility had evaporated.
Oh dear, he’d made rather too much progress with the Maker’s Mark. The logical thing to do was to take this bottle upstairs and pour the rest of it into the depleted bottle of bourbon hidden in his rucksack, and then nip into town to buy another one for Nancy’s drinks table. He would, of course, have to make convincing inroads into the new bottle so that it resembled the old bottle before he had almost finished it. Practically anything was less complicated than being a successful alcoholic. Bombing Third World countries – now there was an occupation for a man of leisure. ‘It’s all right for some,’ he muttered, weaving his way across the room. He was arguably just a teeny-weeny bit too drunk for this time of day. His thoughts were cracking up, going staccato, getting overtrumped just as he was about to pick up the trick.
Check: family in the garden. Check: silence in the hall. Run up the stairs, close the door, get the rucksack, decant the bourbon – all over his hand. Hide the empty on top of cupboard. Car keys. Down and out. Tell family? Yes. No. Yes. No! Get in car. Ding ding ding. Fucking American car safety ding ding. Safer to assume sudden violent death. Police no please no police, p-l-e-a-s-e. Slip away over crunchy nutritious gravel. Cruise control, out of control. Suggestible suggestions. Jump the tracks, get out of the syllable cruncher and into, into the sunlit death-trap countryside. Better pave the whole thing over. Angry posses of ordinary citizens with chain saws and concrete mixers. ‘We’ve lived in fear for long enough! We’ve got a right to protect our families! It says in the Bible, “The wild places shall be made tame. And the people shall have dominion over the ticks.”’
He was drifting along in his silvery blue Buick LeSabre, screaming in a hillbilly accent. He couldn’t stop. He couldn’t stop anything. He couldn’t stop the car, he couldn’t stop drinking, he couldn’t stop the Koncrete Klux Klan. A bright red Stop sign slipped by as he merged quietly with the main road into town. He parked next to the Vino Veritas liquor store. The car had somehow locked itself, just to be on the safe side. Ding ding ding. Keys still in the ignition. He arched backwards trying to ease the dull pain in his lower back. Eroded vertebrae? Swollen kidneys? ‘We have to think our way out of the box of our habitual dichotomies,’ he purred, in the smug tones of a self-help tape. ‘It’s not an either vertebrae or kidneys situation, it’s a both kidneys and vertebrae situation. Think outside the box! Be creative!’
And here, straight ahead of him, across the railway tracks, down among the playing fields, was another both and situation. Both the exuberant sentimentality of American family life unfolding among the brightly coloured tubes and slides and swings of a playground, with its soft wood-chip landing sites and, on a large area of grass beyond the chain-link fence, two pot-bellied policemen training an Alsatian to tear apart any sick fucks who thought to disturb the peace and prosperity of New Milton. One policeman held the dog by the collar, the other stood at the far end of the green with a huge padded arm guard. The Alsatian streaked across the grass, leapt onto the padded arm and shook his head savagely from side to side, his growling just audible through the humid air pierced by the cries of children and the sonic solicitude of safety-conscious cars. Did the children feel safer, or just feel that it was safer to assume they were always in danger? A Botero-shaped family munching soft buns at a round-cornered picnic table looked on as the first policeman hurried across the green and tried to detach the keen young Alsatian from his colleague’s arm. The second policeman was by now floundering on the grass trying to persuade the dog that he was not a sick fuck but one of the good guys.
Vino Veritas had three sizes of Maker’s Mark. Not sure which one he was supposed to replace, Patrick bought all three.
‘Better be safe than sorry,’ he explained to the salesman.
‘You’d better believe it,’ said the salesman with a fervour that catapulted Patrick back into the parking lot.
He was already in another phase of drunkenness. Sweatier, sadder, slower. He needed both another drink and a huge amount of coffee, so that he could stand up at Walter and Beth’s, or indeed anywhere. He was in fact certain, he might as well admit it, that the smallest bottle of Maker’s Mark was not the one he had to replace. He hadn’t been able to resist buying the baby bottle to complete the family. Ding ding ding. He unpeeled the red faux-wax cap and uncorked the bottle. As the bourbon slipped down his throat, he pictured a flaming beam crashing through the floors and ceilings of a building, spreading fire and wreckage. What a relief.
The Better Latte Than Never coffee shop lived up to the maddening promise of its name. Patrick sailed past the invitation to a skinny caramel grande vanilla frapuccino in a transparent plastic cup jam-packed with mouthwatering ice and strawberry-flavoured whipped cream, and ordered some black coffee. He moved along the assembly line.
‘Have a great one!’ said Pete, a heavy-jawed blond beast in an apron, sliding the coffee across the counter.
Old enough to remember the arrival of ‘Have a nice day’, Patrick could only look with alarm on the hyperinflation of ‘Have a great one’. Where would this Weimar of bullying cheerfulness end? ‘You have a profound and meaningful day now,’ he simpered under his breath as he tottered across the room with his giant mug. ‘Have a blissful one,’ he snapped as he sat at a table. ‘You all make sure you have an all-body orgasm,’ he whispered in a Southern accent, ‘and make it last.’ Because you deserve it. Because you owe it to yourself. Because you’re a unique and special person. In the end, there was only so much you could expect from a cup of coffee and an uneatable muffin. If only Pete had confined himself to realistic achievements. ‘Have a cold shower,’ or ‘Try not to crash your car.’
He was back in the inflammatory, deranged drunkenness he had lost in the hot parking lot. Yes yes yes. After a few gallons of coffee there’d be no stopping him. Across the room, a voluptuous medical student in a pink cardigan and faded jeans was working on her computer. Her mobile phone was on the slate ledge of the Heat and Glow fireplace, next to the Walkman and the complicated drink. She sat on her chair with her knees raised and her legs wide open as if she had just given birth to her Hewlett Packard, The Pathology of Disease squashing some loose notes on the edge of the table. He must have her, on a must-have basis. She was so relaxed in her body. He stared at her and she looked back at him with a calm even gaze. She smiled. It was absolutely terrifying how perfect she was. He looked away and smiled bashfully at his kneecap. He couldn’t bear her being friendly. It made him want to cry. She was practically a doctor, she could probably completely save him. His sons would miss him at first, but they’d get over it. Anyway, they could come and stay. She was obviously an incredibly warm and loving person.