Bliss (20 page)

'I didn't ask you to.' Alex sprang from his chair and then forgot why he'd done it. The Scotch in his hand swayed dan-gerously. 'You decided to do it. You stole my fucking key,' he said incredulously. 'You stole my key. You interfered in my life. So I'm crazy. So what? So I write funny conference reports and never send them to anyone. Was it doing any harm? Did it hurt you?' He started to sit down but stopped. 'You are so naive, do you know that? All your life you walk around and never see anything bad. Anybody who says any-thing is bad looks like a sour grape. That's what you do to people. I say, 'Oh, so-and-so's an old cunt' and you look at me, Harry, like
I'm
a cunt. You don't want to hear bad about anything. The papers are full of this cancer stuff and what do you say, 'Oh, it's nothing, just a scare,' because you think they're cunts for calling Krappe cunts. Now you bloody wake up. God knows why. Why?' he asked.

'Doesn't matter why,' he answered. 'You don't know why. I don't know why. But when you suddenly realize what the world is like, then you go around destroying all the people who've known all along. Why do you want to destroy me?'

It was five minutes to four, five minutes before Harry had to leave the room. Now Alex's hand was twisting his shirt just the way Hastings had done. Alex was a big man. He stood over Harry and twisted his shirt with more strength than anyone would have guessed him capable of.

'Why do you want to destroy me?'

A look of indescribable contempt passed over his soft fleshy face, turned in on itself, and collapsed into nothing. His hand unclenched and he left Harry with only pain.

Alex lowered himself into the chair, letting himself drop the last six inches. 'I drove round all night because I was frightened to tell you. Why should I be frightened of you? You're pathetic. You're not worth being frightened of. I'm going to work at Ogilvy's. They like me. They damn well like me. Adrian Clunes phoned me and asked me if I would handle his account. You see, it's amazing isn't it? It's bloody amazing. All these years I've handled the account and you've taken the profit. Well now they're making me a director. That's what I'm worth to them.'

'I fired them for you,' Harry said, and came and sat opposite him in just the way he had, a week before, sat opposite Adrian Clunes. 'I fired them to save you, damn it. Don't you remember? I fired them because you were a Captive and ...'

'Ah,' Alex waved a hand and spilt whisky down his shirt. 'Captives…'

'Were you trying to trick me? Did you trick me into firing them?'

'Harry...' He opened his big pink palms and held them out.

'Because if you did…'

'Harry.'

' ...I don't mind.'

'You're looking at your watch and I'm trying to tell you I'm sorry.'

'I've got to go soon.'

'Everything's shut. I'm fucking saying I'm sorry. Doesn't that mean anything? I've got to live, that's all. I've got to make money. You would have fired me in the end. You would have had to. Don't blame me.'

'I'm putting you to bed.'

'I'm not an Actor, Harry. I’m just Alex, fuck it,' he sniffed. 'Fuck it.'

He did not resist when Harry led him into the bedroom and he began, without any hesitation, to get undressed. 'I betray you, you betray me,' he said. 'Oh, fuck.' He fell over one leg in his trousers and Harry helped him out of his big grey socks and his surprisingly fine silk underpants. He registered, in a moment of shock, the enormous size of his flaccid penis and, as he tucked him into bed, he thought how unused it looked, fed on doughnuts and cream cake.

It was three minutes past four.

Doctors Hennessy and Cornelius travelled up in the lift bound for the twenty-first floor. They did not like each other. Cornelius's squashed little face was hidden behind a trimmed black beard and his shirt was open to reveal a hairy chest. He looked up at Hennessy and winked for no reason.

'How is it, Ace?'

Hennessy regarded him from pale, pale blue eyes. 'Well enough,' he said coldly, 'well enough.'

On the twenty-first floor they knocked, and when they were not admitted, entered with the key which had been provided. They found their mark sitting up with the sheet held the way women do when they want to hide their breasts.

'Good morning,' Hennessy said formally, 'I am Dr Hennessy and this is Dr Cornelius.'

'You've come for Harry, haven't you?'

'Yes,' Cornelius said, and opened his bag on his unmade bed, looking at the mark and guessing his weight at 200 lbs or 400 mgs of Pentothal.

'He's really gone crazy.'

'So they say,' said Cornelius, drawing up the required 400 mgs into the hypodermic.

'Well ... are you going to wait ... or what?'

'Or what, I should think,' Hennessy said drily, taking his papers from his bag, watching while Cornelius fitted the charged hypodermic into the dart gun he had personally invented.

'Now, Mr Joy,' Cornelius said, 'we would like you to come with us very quietly and we will take you somewhere where they will make you better.'

'No,' Alex said, 'you don't understand.'

The bedclothes trailed out into the corridor like guts from the disemboweled room.

Neither Harry Joy nor Honey Barbara said a word. They stood for a moment and listened. Only the muffled noise of the lift dropping down the shaft broke the stillness.

Harry entered the room first. When he saw the broken chair in the doorway, the blood on the floor, the gaping guts of the television set, and the hunk of hair on the bathroom basin which looked pubic but had actually come from Dr Cornelius's bleeding face, he merely nodded, and although he was shocked he was not surprised.

Honey Barbara put down the box of food on the ruined bed. 'Poor man,' she said. 'He fought them.'

Harry nodded. He felt ill. He stood the bedside lamp upright and put the phone back on its hook.

'Come on,' she said, 'other room.'

They pulled the blankets back into the bedroom and shut the door on it.

'Want food?' she asked, carrying the box.

He shook his head.

'He fought them,' she said. 'Good on him.'

They both looked ill. They didn't know whether to sit or stand. Honey Barbara finally put the box down at the table and sat there in a chair. Harry leant against the window.

'They'll let him go,' he said, 'when they find out.'

She shook her head. 'Don't count on it. The hospital gets a subsidy. They'll try and keep him.'

He picked up the phone.

'What you doing?'

'I'm going to ring my family and tell them.'

'What?' She was already standing and walking towards him.

'They got the wrong person.'

She snatched the phone from his hand and put it gently back on the receiver. 'No.'

'I can't have this on my conscience. I've got to.'

'Darling, they'll come and get you.'

'They can't get me. I get up too early.' He picked up the phone and began to dial. He had more confidence in Honey Barbara's theories than Honey Barbara did.

'Hello,' Joel said sleepily.

'It's Harry Joy here,' Harry told his junior partner. 'I am phoning you that whoever you sent to lock me up has just taken Alex Duval instead.'

He could hear Joel laughing. 'Really? Really? Oh Harry... '

'Did you hear me?'

'Harry you don't know how funny it is.'

'I said you got Alex Duval...

' ...instead of you.'

He hung up. 'What happened?' she said.

'He laughed.'

It was like a room in which someone has died.

They made love but it was somehow funereal and they looked into each other's eyes with sadness and nuzzled each other for comfort. Everything had suddenly become full of insurances and precautions. He ran off sixteen Diners Club bills for her while she watched tearfully.

'I should take you back home with me.'

He smiled painfully.

'But you wouldn't like it: mud and leeches,' she said, 'no electricity, no silk shirts.'

After a pause, she said: 'Anyway, they wouldn't understand you. They'd think you were a spy.'

She wrote down the address of the house where she was living and made him promise to memorize it. There was an air of emergency in everything and when Honey Barbara went to have a shower she was sure it was her last shower in a Hilton Hotel.

Doctors Hennessy and Cornelius called on Harry two weeks later at four o'clock in the afternoon, injected him swiftly and carried him off without the slightest struggle.

When Honey Barbara let herself in the next morning she found the suite as he'd left it, including a little piece of paper on which she'd written her address.

She did not have another shower at the Hilton.

PART FOUR

Some Unpleasant Facts

Alice Dalton had not been expecting Sea Scouts. She told Jim and Jimmy that she had no appointment marked but the Sea Scouts, it appeared, were insistent. She had imagined a bus load but when she discovered there were only two of them and that one of them was very small, she had them shown into her office and let them sit and stare at her vases while she brought the admission forms up to date. She wanted them to see what it was really like.

Mrs Dalton was a woman with a mission, which was to demystify the treatment of mental illness. It was her experi-ence that a lot of sentimental garbage was spoken on the subject and she herself had spent many unhappy years until she had finally realised that Mental Illness was a business, just like anything else.

Once this decision had been made, her life had become more satisfying. As for the treatment itself, her greatest axiom was derived from a psychiatrist who had explained it this way: the ones that are going to get better, get better; all the rest is psychiatrists being neurotic or self-important or anxious or guilty; effectively they cost a lot and achieve nothing.

'Now,' she said, 'what did they tell you about me?'

It was a question she would have liked to have asked many of her visitors – but one couldn't ask such questions of adults, more's the pity – because Alice Dalton was fascinated by her own notoriety. 'All I do,' she beamed at her questioners until her little round face was so tight it looked as if it might split, 'is what is obvious.' But she could never ask them what they really thought of her. What she thought of herself was simple: she was a pioneer in the Mental Health business, an opinion obviously shared by Mr da Silva who had recently purchased 30 per cent of the stock.

But the Sea Scouts were having some difficulty in remem-bering what, if anything, had been said to them on the subject of Alice Dalton. They looked at her pale blue eyes as they swam behind her bright pink spectacles and felt that they had probably done something wrong.

'They never told us,' the smaller boy said.

'Have you seen me on the Television?'

They shook their heads almost imperceptibly.

She felt irritated but smiled and nodded. The bigger boy took out a notebook and held a pencil in readiness. Somehow this cheered her up and she was thoughtful enough to speak slowly.

'This is a Mental Hospital,' she began with a bluntness that always gave her pleasure, 'where we lock up mad people.'

She folded her arms and leant forward: 'First unpleasant truth,' she said to the smaller boy because the first one was bent over his notebook. 'Second unpleasant truth: this is a business and I am doing it to make money, just like everybody else. What is the purpose of a business?' she asked the smaller boy who had a strange stunned quality about him. 'It's to make money,' she answered herself. 'At the end of the year,' she tapped her pencil on the pile of admission papers, 'we must declare a profit.'

She decided against her third unpleasant truth which went like this: 'It's a garbage disposal.' Pause. 'Do you find that shocking?' Terribly, almost always. 'Because that is what it is. Do you want to look after the old men? They're soaked in urine. They are garbage. Someone threw them out. Do you want me to love them as well?'

'Do you find that shocking?' She asked the Sea Scouts who seemed unsure.

'It's not shocking to me. It's life.'

The small Sea Scout put up his hand.

'Yes?'

'When do we get our ginger coffee?'

'I beg your pardon.'

'He means ginger
toffee
,' the bigger boy said, looking up from his notes. 'He wants to know if we get our ginger toffee before the tour or afterwards.'

'There is no ginger toffee here,' said Mrs Dalton firmly, in the manner of an aunt impolitely asked for biscuits.

'Oh yes there is,' the small boy said, 'that's what we chose this project for. This is the one with the ginger toffee.'

There was something in Mrs Dalton's expression that frightened the smaller Sea Scout terribly. He had been frightened since they came into this room with its vases and flowers and funny smell. He looked at Mrs Dalton and began to cry.

The buzzer sounded and a big man in a white coat came into the room.

'Take them across to the Ginger Factory,' the woman said.

The small Sea Scout began to shriek hysterically and even his bigger friend let a tear roll down his ruddy cheeks.

'It's only the Ginger Factory,' Mrs Dalton tried to smile. 'He's taking you where you are meant to be.'

She was not believed and finally it took both Jim and Jimmy to pick up the two screaming Sea Scouts and deliver them bodily to the Ginger Factory across the road.

In Hell his sense of smell was the first to be truly awakened.

He was too giddy to stand up, but he could smell, and even though he had never been in a mental hospital in his life he knew without having to be told that this was the distinctive odour of a mental hospital. Floor polish, methylated spirits and chlorine seemed to dominate, but were given character and colour by the smallest concentration of stale orange peel, urine, and something very closely related to dead roses. There was no sympathy in the smell and every one of its components recalled, in different ways, in different degrees, fear (even if the fear was as petty as that summoned up by the methylated spirits with its associations of cotton swabs, cold skin, doctors' surgeries, steel needles, and chrome surfaces).