Bliss (3 page)

'Vance!'

'My darling Patricia, you know it's true.'

'He believes everything you tell him, stop it.' She was sitting at the table, darning socks. She brushed her dark hair from her eyes and smiled.

'When God makes the next flood,' his father said, 'he will leave New York as a lesson to those who survive. Every other thing on earth will be destroyed except the buildings in New York. It will be a bible of buildings, a much better bible, a holy place which only the very learned will know how to read.'

'One day,' Harry said sleepily, 'I will go to New York.'

'You will too,' his father said, and read his palm to prove it to him.

He grew into a tall thin boy who had been at first what children (or at least the children in that town) called 'Gooby,' by which they meant someone who is a little slow and intro-verted and is likely to stand at odd places with his mouth open staring at things that no one would look at twice. But later, fed by the deep wells of his own self-regard, he became much liked. His height was a positive advantage in the type of football they played, and that too all worked in his favour. He was a deadly accurate kick and scored many goals; which was nothing less than what he had expected of himself, for he had been raised to expect excellence, and he did not, even for an instant, think it ridiculous, when confronted with some problem, to ask himself: what would Jesus have done? In fact he did it all the time. He sometimes had quiet dreams of martyrdom for some greater good.

They had wanted him to be Van Gogh, Jesus Christ and Zapata all rolled into one.

But somewhere there was something lacking, and as he grew older he came to show too great a regard for his father’s maxims about not working yourself to death. His mother took him to a city specialist to see if he had a problem with his thyroid gland, so lethargic did he begin to appear. He was like a wonderful racing car with a severely underpowered engine, and whether it was his father's final departure, or simply the onset of puberty, his idealistic concern for goodness seemed to have fallen away. He did not ask himself what Jesus would have done since he had been faced with prospect of Jeanette Grandell's wonderful fourteen-year-old breasts.

But although it would be a long long time before he concerned himself with goodness again, it did fall into the sediment of his character, and at times over the years he found himself wondering would like him to do.

But now he was a man of thirty-nine lying in a hospital bed and contemplating death. He could not allow himself to know that he was sickened with his life. He was like someone who has lain in bed too long eating rich food: within his soul there was suddenly a yearning for tougher, stronger things, for ecstasies, for the thrill of goodness perfectly achieved, to see butterflies in doorways in Belize, to be part of the lightning dance, to quiver in terror before the cyclone.

But it was too late for all those things, far too late. He stared out at the sunlit garden and listened to a banana leaf flap against the rainwater spout on verandah. In the garden, an old woman with swollen arms picked roses. Beside his bed a man with a striped suit and eyes like weak tea dropped, for the third time, the card that contained the details of Harry's medical condition. The man picked up the card with thick sausage fingers and yet it was not the surgeon's clumsiness that convinced Joy he was about to die, nor was it the admission that the operation entailed something like a 5 per cent risk. In fact he was less worried about dying than where he would go after he died.

He watched the surgeon’s unnaturally red lips move and could not bring himself to talk about the lingering taste of heaven and hell, explain that hell was like chrome-yellow flowers, that there were worlds in the afterlife layer after layer of filo pastry, that he, Harry Joy, lay now at the crossroads, that he had been warned.

What happened to him now, what he thought, what he decided, would determine whether he entered Heaven or Hell.

Vance Joy's stories had drifted like groundsel seeds and taken root in the most unlikely places. They had rarely grown in the way he would have imagined, in that perfect green landscape of his imagination, intersected with streams and redolent of orange blossom.

In certain climates they became like weeds, uncontrollable, not always beautiful, a blaze of rage or desire from horizon to horizon.

All these Harry had carried innocently, passing them on to his wife, his son, his daughter. Not having understood them, he transmitted them imperfectly and they came to mean quite different things. Vance Joy's stories of New York contained apocalyptic visions and conflicts between Good and Evil, but to Harry they were merely stories to be told, and to Bettina they were something else again.

New York was her antidote for the town she hated. She hated its wide colonial verandahs, its slow muddy river, its sleepy streets, its small-town pretensions. She loathed the perpetual Sunday afternoons, the ugly people, the inelegant bars and frumpy little frocks. Here, marooned on the edge of the Empire, she had spent ten years waiting for Harry's promise that they would go to New York.

'How could you?' she had asked (how many years ago?).

'Easy,' he said.

'How?'

'Sell up the business and go there.'

'When?'

'One day.'

He hadn't not-meant it, but he hadn't really meant it either. His business was a grand, slightly decrepit, old boat drifting with the current down a slow muddy river and every now and then he would get out and, with a long pole, push it away from the bank. Sitting back in the wheelhouse he could afford to dream about New York, but the thought of really competing in that turbulent water filled him with fatigue.

Bettina did not give up her dreams so easily. She spoke of New York to no one. She secretly married it to another dream, rolled the two together, harboured them within her and let them grow. She cultivated Americans and read their magazines. She saved money and put it in a special account. She did exercises to preserve her body for that time of arrival. And there had been times – how could she deny it to herself – when she had imagined, dreamed, the easiest solution to her problem would be if Harry would quietly die in his sleep. And sometimes, sitting in the kitchen at Palm Avenue, waiting for him to arrive from some late conference, she had watched the clock-hand edge its way sideways around the dial and she'd thought – of course she was drunk – he's dead. And there was such lightness in the thought, such relief.

Ah, she was not a nice person. It was obvious. Nice people were usually boring, always boring.

She was drunk, and hated the town. She hated Harry's Fiat: it was ten years old and full of cigarette butts and old newspapers and, for some reason she could never understand, he was proud of it. He bought a Jaguar and gave it to her, but he kept that Fiat for himself as if it were somehow vulgar to display any wealth.

'But why? Why? For Christsakes, why?'

'I like it.' And you could see that he didn't even know why he liked it, but that he clung to it like an old teddy bear, some piece of damn rubbish Crazy Vance or Silly Patricia had scrounged from the tip.

But the Jaguar was (again) in the garage having its cooling system fixed (the cretins) and she had to drive this little joke car.

She grated the gears going into the hospital. She saw no charm in the old building, smothered in bougainvillaea and surrounded by big old flame trees, frangipanis and mangoes. It was only Americans who found it charming and when they did she suspected them of being patronizing, just as now, parking beside a particularly large and rather gross Ford, she thought she detected a certain superiority, a certain condescension directed towards her by its owner.

Fuck you. If I'd arrived in the Jaguar you'd have known who I was.

The woman left the Ford and minced towards the hospital. (Look at the mutant in her black Crimplene pant suit!)

Bettina stood beside the Fiat and picked cigarette butts off her white linen jacket. She was late. As she hurried across behind the Crimplene pant suit, she remembered that she had a pussy full of semen. It was only held in by a Kleenex and a pair of panty-hose. He would smell it. He would know. She wondered whether she should go home but hurried forward, catching her five-inch heel in a metal grating and falling heavily.

'Fuck it.' She had grazed her leg.

The Crimplene pant suit, summoned by the urgency of her obscenity, had hurried back.

'Are you alright?'

Bettina, her leg bleeding, her linen jacket ripped, sat up and gave her most charming middle-class smile. 'Yes,' she said, 'thank you so much.'

In the hospital she had to fight off the nurses who wanted to fix up her knee. If they had known she didn't have knickers on they'd have been scandalized. If they got a sniff of her pussy, God knows what would happen.

She backed away from them, her knee smarting, her lips smiling politely.

'Thank you ever so much,' she said, emphasizing the 'ever' in an English sort of way. 'But I'm in a hurry. I'll fix it when I get home.' She would have liked to have picked the nurses up by their necks and shaken them for their dreary ambitions and their dreary lives. Their sunburnt noses irritated her. They carried their bedpans and buggered up their insides lifting heavy weights. They went back to the suburbs and had families. They ran around answering buzzers and falling in love.

There, Bettina thought, but for the Grace of God, and so on.

'Sit closer.'

'No, no,' she smiled. 'I'm fine.'

'Why are you sitting so far away?'

'I think I'm getting a cold,' she lied. The fishy smell rose from between her legs and in her guilty imagination it assumed the splendid obviousness of a smoke flare spewing upwards from her discreetly tailored lap.

'Had any visitors?'

'Oh,' he laughed, that famous deep brown laugh, and for a moment he looked so
happy
with himself, sitting up in bed in his silk pyjamas. 'It's been a circus in here. Tom Flynn and Ernie from the cleaners, Jack and Belinda, Mike, Dee, the Clarkes. We played poker dice. I won ten dollars.'

The table in the comer was piled high with fruit. There were pineapples and bananas and passionfruit and grapes, so many grapes, and custard apples and avocados. He was proud of these offerings, she saw, but when Bettina looked at his table, she thought only that it represented the monstrous lack of originality of his friends.

'Eat some,' he said. 'I can't eat it all. Please come and sit here.'

He stretched out his hand. He would never believe, in his wildest dreams, that she no longer loved him. She had said it once, but he would dismiss these sorts of things as 'tem-perament' or 'wine' as if a bottle contained an infusion of foreign thoughts with which she had innocently poisoned herself.

'Come and give your old man a kiss.'

She kissed his hand, making a joke of it.

'On the lips.'

She leant across the bed and kissed him quickly. Of course she loved him, a little at least.

'Phew,' he said, wrinkling up his nose.

Betrayed, she burnt red.

'What have you been up to?'

'Nothing.'

'You've been drinking whisky,' he said.

'Oh, yes,' she said, and added bravely, 'with Joel I got a bit drunk. I fell over in the car park.' And she withdrew a little to show him her bleeding knee. 'I ripped my jacket.' She could feel herself still blushing and he was looking at her with those big dark eyes, as if he knew. But that was a trick of his, not an intentional trick but a misleading sign. He saw nothing. It looked as if he could see everything and people always gave him credit for it.

She dragged the horrible plastic orange chair another inch closer and leaned forward to hold his hand.

'You can bring it closer than that.'

'I'm alright.' She stank. 'What's the matter?'

'Nothing. I'm fine.'

'You've got something on your mind.'

He never knew what was on his mind until he was ques-tioned about it. He would not let himself see his own worries and even his own mind, she thought, was a strange territory to him and it always needed someone else to come along and sift through it and point out interesting or painful things to him. Often she would find him frowning, and, after due ques-tioning, he would say: 'ah, I think I must have a headache.'

But she would not question him today. That slight contrac-tion of the brow could be caused by, probably was caused by, the fishy smell he would not acknowledge.

'I'm going to die,' he said.

'Why do you go on with that?' She didn't mean to snap, but she felt accused. There was no logical, medical reason for him to think he should die.

'Don't be angry.'

'I'm not angry.' Yet she was. Unreasonably angry.

'You're frowning like a bulldog.'

'You're only talking yourself into it. It's like your hives...'

'I don't talk myself into hives.'

'You always know when you're going to get them.'

'I can feel them coming on. I can feel them before you can see them, that's all.'

'You're not going to die.'

'You don't understand,' he said, 'listen to me: I don't mind dying.'

Why did he always give you the feeling that he knew things, that he knew she had dreamed his death a hundred times and now, meekly, he held out his throat to be cut. He would make himself die to show her how wrong she was. She looked at that long sinewy arm, the hairy wrist that emerged from the pyjama coat, and thought about its life and saw, before her eyes, how it would be dead, decaying. She saw maggots, crawling things, and looked up at his face.

'I don't want you to die!' She said as if her secret wish were the core of the problem and once she had said this the problem was solved.

He looked at her with astonishment.

'Why don't you believe me?' she said.

When he didn't answer her (he couldn't think of what to say) she lapsed into angry silence.

'Do you believe in God, Bettina?' She winced. If she had been religious she would have believed in Satan and would have found him, in her terms, 'generally less boring'. But religion represented all the goody-goody two-shoes and she found it embarrassing even to talk about.