Free The Paperchase by Marcel Theroux Page A

and I would go buy it together in west London, and I think for a couple of years we smoked exclusively beef stock cubes and Oregano. This prevented me from finding out how much I disliked the drug itself. Also, Vivian has always been a smoker and it took me a long time to accept that someone with so much of my DNA could have a fundamentally different reaction from me to a simple stimulant. So a very common experience for me would be this: I would be having a good time at a party or concert. Someone would pass round a joint as though it were as innocuous as a box of after-dinner mints.I would take one, two, three ill-advised puffs and spend the next two hours rooted to the spot, as though I’d been struck by a curare-tipped blowgun dart. Anyway, these are the kinds of things you find out about yourself, you learn to say no, and you improve with age.
    ‘Nice one,’ I said, taking the joint from his fingers, and inhaling greedily.
    ‘Skunk,’ said Stevo. ‘You want to take it a bit easy with that.’
    I held the fumes in my chest and smiled at him. A stray tendril of smoke curled into my eye and made it water.
    ‘Thanks,’ I said, and passed the joint back to Stevo and rinsed my mouth out with wine.
    ‘I just wanted to say, you know,’ Stevo began, draping his arm over my shoulder. ‘We’ve had our ups and downs over the years. You’re a very difficult person, but you’ll always be my friend. I love you, mate. You’re such a character.’
    ‘Are you all right, Stevo?’
    ‘Yeah – why do you ask?’
    ‘You’re being unusually generous.’
    ‘I had one and a half Es off Fabrice in the pub – but that’s not why I said it.’
    I began to feel light-headed and full of giggles – giggles that pushed upwards from my stomach like bubbles in sparkling wine. At the same time, I felt a familiar paranoia building up. I was finding Stevo difficult to talk to and wasn’t sure if it was me, or him, or the drugs. I went out of the kitchen and sat down on the sofa in the living room.
    Lloyd had taken his shirt off and was dancing in the middle of the room. This clownish, playful Lloyd made fewer and fewer appearances, but it was always reassuring to see that his body was still capable of usurping its gaolers. I smiled weakly at him, but by now I was feeling too sick to move.
    Someone came and sat next to me in the empty seat, so to forestall conversation I put my arm over their shoulders and patted them on the back, as if to suggest I was beyond thereach of verbal communication. After a while, sitting upright was too active a position. I didn’t want to lie down in front of everyone, so I went into my bedroom. I put one foot through the bedclothes and on to the floor to keep the bed from revolving. That was the end of the party for me. I could hear shouts and laughter coming from the sitting room, but I wasn’t able to get up and join in. I just lay there like a corpse at a wake. At the end of the evening some of my friends came in to pay their last respects. Stevo leaned over and ruffled my hair with a sweaty hand. I acknowledged them all by feebly waggling my fingers and groaning, then they filed silently out of my flat for the last time.

EIGHT
    THE HOUSE I HAD inherited had been built in the 1880s by a sea captain called Edward Nethers who made his money from whaling – the industry for which Ionia and the neighbouring islands became famous in the nineteenth century. Patrick had bought the house from one of Captain Nethers’ granddaughters, who had grown too infirm to live there alone. She cried when she left it for the last time and gave my uncle a photo of her granddaddy, looking severe in Victorian side-whiskers. Patrick kept the photograph on the mantelpiece in the library – or the room Patrick had designated the library: it was hard to imagine Captain Nethers with his nose in any book but a hymnal or a tide table. Alongside it Patrick put the original title deed to the property and an aerial photograph of