Bliss (33 page)

In short, she knew she should have left him but she couldn't. She was doing what she had done years before with Albert (Peugeot Albert, American Albert), finding herself in the mid-dle of a situation she disapproved of, living with a man who was fucked, but who she stayed with anyway, like some novice board rider who tries to stay with a bad wave to its painful end.

She sought refuge in the garden and in the bedroom where she painted the frames of the three windows three different colours: blue, red, purple. (Bettina sucked in her breath but said nothing.) She began a mural above the bed but didn't finish it. It showed a part of a small hut with blue, red and purple window frames, and an old Peugeot, rust brown, which she intended to cover with creeper and long grass. On the verandah outside the red window she installed a hammock and sometimes, when Harry was more drunk or aggressive than usual; she would sleep out there. She had five yards of muslin for a mosquito net: she wrapped them around the hammock and lay there until the morning when he would come with red-eyed remorse and entice her back to bed and they would make peace and fuck until their eyes were wide and their mouths full of pillow.

With Bettina and Joel, Harry had formed a gang. Nightly they reported successes. They walked in the door clinking bottles and shouting. They had won this Account or that Account. They had sold a campaign. She could not be happy for them, although she had tried.

There was no joy in their triumphs, only anger, revenge, nose-thumbing, name-calling, and although Bettina provided the emotional tone, Harry followed it willingly and even lent to this unpleasant cocktail a dominant flavour of fear. She saw him encouraging these negative things in himself, as if by letting them expand and take over he would be better assured of success.

It was Honey Barbara who had instructed him in the use-fulness of money, but now, a month later, when she questioned its value as a measure of worth, she was irritated to see what his moustache did not quite hide – his you're-only-saying-that-because-you-haven't-got any smile.

She tried to make the bedroom a peaceful place. She made cushions and bought candles and tried to forget it was Harry's money. She lit incense and put wind chimes out on the verandah where she did her Tai Chi exercises every morning and night.

But still they argued. It seemed there was nothing that could be done to prevent the discord. No meditation, exercise, massage, or even prayer. Nastiness would creep in between them and push them apart. He defended fear and anger as necessary emotions and mocked her when she said there must be another way.

'How?'

'With love.'

He laughed.

'It doesn't work like that.' He lay against the pillows with a glass of wine in one hand and a bottle in the other. He was not the same person she had met in the Hilton. 'You've got to be angry,' he said. 'It gives you strength. You commit yourself to win. Because if you don't get them, they get you. See?' He jabbed his finger. 'You understand?'

'Christ,' she said despairingly, 'you know it's shit.'

'Of course I know it's shit.'

She compressed her lips.

'Don't you look so superior,' he said.

She didn't answer.

'You drink my wine. You drive the Jag.'

'I'd rather not.'

He put his wine glass and bottle down and leaned towards her in such a way that she thought he was going to kiss her and her lips were already moving towards his when she felt the wine glass wrenched from her hand. He threw it out the window and she heard it shatter.

She was too tired to be angry. She hugged herself and felt cold.

He leaned back on the pillow. 'If you don't want it, don't drink it.'

After a moment or two he said: 'Do you know how much you cost me?'

'A lot of money.'

'You cost me a fucking fortune,' he said, 'so don't say you don't love me.'

She wasn't even astonished. 'You're getting poisoned with this shit you're doing Harry. You can't fuck around with it. You're catching it. You're becoming one of them.'

She went and sat beside him. He stroked her hair sadly.

'It's what I've got to do,' he said.

A silence.

'Come home with me,' she said.

He stopped stroking her hair. More silence.

'It's safe there,' she said softly. 'We'll be fine.' She touched the lambswool shoulder with the ends of her fingers.

'It doesn't sound safe to me.'

Another silence (because he had never said this before and he was becoming angry and she felt betrayed).

'It is very beautiful,' she said gently. 'There is no shit at all.'

'But not safe.'

How could he sound triumphant?

'Yes, safe.'

'But you're the one who's been to jail. I haven't been to jail. I haven't spent half my life worried about the police. They don't come here harassing us. My kids didn't grow up setting their alarm clocks for four in the morning.'

'Maybe they should learn.'

And it was, of course, with retorts like this, that she allowed herself to be drawn into it. He had become like a racehorse, or a dog bred for fighting.

'You are making this into Hell,' she said. 'You've decided that's what it is and that's what you're making it.'

He shook his head and looked at the black night window. He would not discuss Hell with her.

'Whose Hell are you in?' she would say, trying to play his game. 'Someone must be running it.'

But that sort of talk only made things worse.

'You tell me,' he'd say nastily.

'I don't know.'

'How interesting.'

And so on.

But just as there are dry days when even the rustiest roof can't leak, there were times when life felt very pleasant. There were miles of wide beaches both north and south of the town and at weekends they could surf and swim naked and let the sea tumble their bodies and rattle out their devils and deliver them on a blanket of white froth to the yellow sand. They lit huge fires on the empty beach and lay there at night watching the stars.

But it was, as she told him one Sunday night, only 2/7 of a life. The other 5/7 were devoted to fear and anger.

Once she had been silly and young, and she had seen Albert on the flooded creek with his Peugeot and not known about hotels and restaurants and the city life. It was long ago. Even the creek was different then and everyone was naive enough to uncritically welcome its raging strength in the monsoon and it meant nothing to them but life. But two seasons later a twenty-two-month-old girl had been swept away and drowned just near that spot and the creek always sounded different after that and no one could cross the ford without thinking of that little girl and how, that cold July morning, they had waded the creek in the high dangerous water hoping they would not find her body and that, glancing into the undergrowth beside the creek, they would glimpse her making her way back home.

But they did find her and two weeks later Albert's Peugeot was at the bottom of a gully and Honey Barbara was on her first aeroplane, high on cocaine, wearing high-heeled shoes. She didn't know what she was doing, or where she was going, but now, with another ten years gone, she had no such excuse.

Then what kept her at Palm Avenue? She confessed one morning, to the bathroom mirror: 'Orgasms,' she told her grin-ning face, 'and flushing toilets.'

David Joy was lying in bed in his room. He heard her laughter through the wall.

Bettina was burning brightly. She was consuming herself. She lost half a stone and had to buy new clothes. She could not sleep. She woke at 4 a.m. considering options, redoing ads, mentally rewriting letters to Americans about her future. Her mind was attuned to problems and she could not stand to see them unsolved, even for a moment, so that when the wine was opened in a restaurant she could not wait for the waiter to begin filling glasses, she pointed: there. This too was her responsibility, this problem of the bottle of wine and empty glass with the glaringly simple solution.

She wasn't even aware that she did it, so she would certainly never have guessed that she was known to the wine-waiters of one restaurant as 'The Glass-pointer' and Harry as 'Mr Glass-pointer'.

And if she had known? 'Well,' she would have said, 'I only do it to save time.'

Perhaps one of the secrets of Bettina's success was that she applied herself as earnestly to trivial details as she did to big ideas. It was seven o'clock in the morning and Honey Barbara was sitting on the grassed edge of the vegetable garden with a glass of demineralized water. 'Do you want to hear what happened last night?'

It was now near the end of Honey Barbara's third month in Palm Avenue (her deadline, and still she stayed!) and the dining room table had all but been abandoned as Harry and Bettina became (for business reasons, so they said) involved in the social life of the town. Bettina had produced a much-admired advertising campaign for the State Gallery (Art Schmart, she said, it's mouldy junk) and as a result of this Harry (Harry!) had been nominated and then elected as a trustee. In less than six months they had moved up that impossible last rung of the ladder and entered the very inner circle of society.

'Formal. No lovers.' Bettina would announce when the invitations came. She would grin, and the lovers, laughing, did not always successfully hide their resentment.

'What happened? Nothing happened. The arseholes! Jesus, I'll be pleased to be out of this town. They all think it's Harry who does the ads. They automatically assume it's him. Oh, what a clever husband you have,' she whined in imitation. 'What a brilliant man. And what do
you
do, Mrs Joy?'

Then would come the latest bulletin in the campaign to get to New York. A letter from the famous Ed McCabe com-plimenting her on her work (she'd brought it to his notice, of course). A telegram from Mary Wells. She kept up a fast, furious correspondence with anyone who would answer her and her letters were tough, funny, and skilfully self-promoting. She wrote press releases for the New York trade press. She adopted Americanisms in her speech, remembering to say 'Garage' instead of 'Car Park,' and 'out back' instead of 'out the back'.

As she reminded Honey Barbara on this crisp, sunny morning: 'This is only a stopping place for me. Another six months and I'm taking my samples and half the profits and setting up in New York.

'But let me warn you, he is starting to like it.' He, in this case, was Harry. Joel was not liking it. Joel was waiting to go to New York. 'They all think he's an intellectual. The less he says the more brilliant they think he is. That's always been Harry's goddamned talent. When you talk to him he looks at you as if you're saying the most interesting and original things he's ever heard in his life. No wonder everyone likes him. No wonder we all think he's intelligent.'

'He is intelligent,' Honey Barbara said sharply.

'Yes,' Bettina said quickly. 'He is, but you know what I mean. He's in his element. It's true. You should spray those cabbages. They're getting eaten alive. I'll get someone to pick up a good spray for you.'

'Bettina... '

'I know, I know, but what's the point of growing them if you let something else eat them?'

'There's plenty left for us.'

'Mmmm,' Bettina said, thoughtfully. She stared at the cabbages. 'I've got to go,' she said.

She tip-toed off across the lawn so as not to dig her heels into the grass. She found Harry shaving.

'You remember,' she said, leaning in the doorway, 'how Monsanto said they'd talk to us if we could think of a new product they liked.'

'Mmm.'

'I've got it.'

'What?'

'Organic Poison.'

He left Honey Barbara on her metal chair with her glass of water, sitting perched in the backyard like a muddy flamingo. She was like an exotic flower picked by a thoughtless child. He thought of bedraggled polar bears pacing their concrete-floored cages, their lukewarm water dotted with the soggy wrappers of confectionery.

Even the cabbages would not grow properly. They were poor and dwarfed, struggling to survive in the heavy clay soil. The compost heap, her pledge of hope for the future, had begun to smell. Rats came at night to raid it and possums gorged themselves as if it were a colossal pudding.

Harry sat back in the passenger seat of the Jaguar and felt depressed. Bettina, her seat pushed forward, hunched over the wheel and drove with damp-handed bravado, abusing the innocent through the safety of shut windows. The air conditioner made hardly a sound. It was seventy degrees Fahrenheit.

'Look at the mutants!'

They had stopped at traffic lights. Pedestrians streamed around the car, their faces marked by dull punishments. Harry was surprised at the intensity of her hatred for these Captives.

'Ugly,' she chanted. 'Ugly, ugly, ugly.'

Bettina was not particularly beautiful. He mentally placed her in the midst of the crowd. He stole a drab overcoat from one woman, a string bag from another, and then, having dressed her with these secretly, let her walk in front of the Jaguar.

'It'll be the same in New York,' he said. 'Ordinary people in the street.'

'Rubbish. They're so damned dull.'

'What will happen,' he asked, 'if you can't get into America?'

'Cretin,' she shouted, swerving in front of a truck and applying her horn as two men with a ladder jumped out of the way. 'I'll get into America, don't worry.'

'But if you can't.'

'I will.'

'What if something goes wrong?'

'Do you want something to go wrong?'

He didn't answer immediately. He was the Managing Dir-ector of a business whose growth and success was now based solely on Bettina.

'Come with me,' she said.

He looked up, biting his lip. 'Where?'

'New York.' She gave those two words all their due. There was not a fleck of dust on them.

The bitten lip could not help but form a smile, and she could almost see the pictures in his mind, those idealized .towers of glass, Vance Joy's magic, but also more recent dreams, as elegantly tooled as 'The Talk of the Town' in the
New Yorker
.

'No,' he said, and shifted his body a little so he could look out his side window.