Read At Last for Free Online Page B

for help?” “Well,” says the man, “I saw the light in the window and I felt drawn to it, so I just flew in.”’
    ‘That’s a good one,’ said Patrick, sinking deeper into Becky’s imagined nakedness, while wondering how long his latest dose of oxazepam would last. ‘Do you specialize in Priory patients because of your sunny temperament?’
    ‘You say that,’ said the driver, ‘but last year for about four months I literally couldn’t get out of bed, literally couldn’t see the point in anything.’
    ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Patrick.
    From Hammersmith Broadway to the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, they talked about the causeless weeping, the suicidal daydreams, the excruciating slowness, the sleepless nights and the listless days. By the time they reached Bayswater, they were best friends and the driver turned round to Patrick and said with the full blast of his restored cheerfulness, ‘In a few months you’ll be looking back on what you’ve just been through and saying, “ What was all that about? What was all that fuss and aggravation about?” That’s what happened to me.’
    Patrick looked back down at Becky’s note. She had signed herself with the name of a beer. Becks. He started to whisper hoarsely under his breath, in a Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone voice, ‘The one who comes to you and asks for a meeting, and has the same name as a well-known brand of beer – she’s the one that wants you to have a relapse…’
    Not the voices, he mustn’t let them kick off. ‘It starts off with a little Marlon Brando impersonation,’ sighed Mrs Mop, ‘and the next thing you know…’
    ‘Shut up!’ Patrick interrupted.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Oh, not you. I’m sorry.’
    They turned into a big square with a central garden. The driver drew up to a white stucco building. Patrick leant sideways and looked out of the window. Becky was on the third floor, beautiful, available and mentally ill.
    To think of the things he’d done for a little intimacy; earth flying over his shoulder as he dug his own grave. There were the good women who gave him the care he had never had. They had to be tortured into letting him down, to show that they couldn’t really be trusted. And then there were the bad women who saved time by being untrustworthy straight away. He generally alternated between these two broad categories, enchanted by some variant which briefly masked the futility of defending the decaying fortress of his personality, while hoping that it would obligingly rearrange itself into a temple of peace and fulfilment. Hoping and moping, moping and hoping. With only a little detachment, his love life looked like a child’s wind-up toy made to march again and again over the precipice of a kitchen table. Romance was where love was most under threat, not where it was likely to achieve its highest expression. If a candidate was sufficiently hopeless, like Becky, she took on the magnetism of the obviously doomed. It was embarrassing to be so deluded, and even more embarrassing to react to the delusion, like a man running away from his own looming shadow.
    ‘I know this sounds a little bit crazy , for want of a better word,’ said Patrick with a snort of laughter, ‘but do you think you could drive me back? I’m not ready yet.’
    ‘Back to the Priory?’ said the driver, no longer quite as sympathetic to his passenger.
    He doesn’t want to know about those of us who have to go back, thought Patrick. He closed his eyes and stretched out in the back seat. ‘Talk would talk and go so far askance…something, something…You don’t want madhouse and the whole thing there.’ The whole thing there. The wonderful inarticulacy of it, expanding with threat and contracting with ostensive urgency.
    On the drive back, Patrick started to feel chest pains which even the violence of his longing for pathological romance could no longer explain. His hands were shaking and he could feel the sweat breaking out on his forehead.