Bliss (6 page)

He had seen his mother's sin on her death bed and he carried it with him for ten years knowing that when his time would come it would be the same for him, that her sin would be his sin, but worse, for although she feared damnation he knew she would be spared it.

He remembered now (in this antiseptic cold room full of dials), that dull grey hospital room of his mother's which smelt of cheap soap and the yellowed pages of old women's magazines. When he had arrived (puffed because he had run from the car park) she could no longer recognize him and thought that he was his father. He did not disillusion her, and had he tried she would have, in any case, maintained the illusion, for she was a stubborn woman when she had set her mind on something.

'Vance,' she wept, 'I have committed a terrible sin.'

He remembered how guilty he had felt, listening to her, as if he was prying into confessionals, opening letters not addressed to him. She clutched his hand, her skin was almost transparent, a dry crust of spittle marked the comers of her mouth.

'No,' he said, and then: 'What sin?'

'A terrible sin.'

'Don't tire yourself.' How stupid a remark. A few hours of life left, a few things to say, and what does tiredness matter? Don't talk, he had meant, be quiet!

'Vance...'

'Yes.'

'I have wasted my life waiting for you.'

'No!' But it was true.

'Waste, waste, waste.' She said. 'Oh, Vance, it is the only sin that cannot be forgiven.' And he saw, in the wrecked remains of her splendid dark eyes, his mother confront the shining steel orbs of hell.

It was not the buzzer which brought the Reverend Desmond Pearce but the good man's own blunt brogues, clumping down the hospital verandah as if testing for rot in its ancient planks. His swinging hands were rough, coarse with nicks and scabs, a hint that the saving of souls required something a bit more muscular than his 4PS, which – to get them out of the way here – were Prying, Preaching, Praying, and Pissing-off-when-you're-not-wanted.

Harry looked up from his cane chair, saw Desmond Pearce's face, and liked it immediately. It was a rugged, pock-marked face with a slightly squashed nose and a crooked grin. His hair was a curling mess and he showed the proper disregard for sartorial elegance which Harry had always seen as a sign of reliability in a person. Neat men always struck him as desperate and ambitious.

'G'day.'

'Hello,' Harry smiled, and noted the little gold cross, tucked away where a rotary badge might normally go, on the lapel of the crumpled grey sportscoat.

'Join you?'

'Go for your life.' There was something about Desmond Pearce that attracted such slanginess.

He dragged up a cane chair and sat down, pulling up his grey trousers to reveal footballer's legs and odd socks.

'What are you in for?'

'Heart,' Harry grinned. 'How about you?'

'Armed robbery.'

They laughed a little.

'Harry,' Harry said and held out his hand.

'Des.'

'The Reverend Des?'

'You bet.'

Harry tapped his fingers on his chair.

'It's a beautiful day,' said Desmond Pearce surveying the sun-filled garden. There was still dew on the course-bladed grass and honey-eaters hung from the fragile branches of a blue-flowered bush. 'And a good place to be sitting too.' He shifted his bulk around in his creaking chair, crossed his legs one way, then the other. 'Odd socks,' he said, leaning forward to take off his coat without uncrossing his legs. 'I've got odd socks.'

. But Harry wasn't looking at the socks. He was staring intently at Desmond Pearce and making him feel uncomfortable.

'Well,' Desmond Pearce said, and slapped his big knees. He had only just (four weeks now)·arrived from the country, where he had been very successful. He could talk to men in sales yards and paddocks, in pubs or at the football.

Harry was still staring.

'I have a lot of trouble with odd socks,' Des said. 'Sometimes I go to the laundromat with matched pairs and come back with all odd socks. Sometimes I go with all odd socks and come back with pairs.'

'Have been making a list,' Harry said, 'of religions.'

'Oh.'

When you talk to a man in the middle of a paddock, you look off into the distance, or at the ground, you do not stare at him like this.

'And seeing you are here,' Harry continued, 'I might ... ah ... ask your help.'

'Ah, yes,' said Pearce with a feeling of inadequacy, not to say dread, in the face of this velvety urbanity.

'The problem begins,' said Harry, closing his eyes and talking as if the whole thing had nothing to do with him personally, but rather about some character in a much-told story, 'with the high probability that I shall shortly die, mmm?'

And he smiled a slightly apologetic, but none the less charming, smile.

Des Pearce was not good with dying.

'Shall shortly die. Now, I think there is also a likelihood that I will go to Hell and that ... ah, I wish to avoid. But,' he pulled a battered notebook from his dressing-gown pocket and waved it at the clergyman who was beginning to wonder if he wasn't some ratbag atheist out to have some fun, 'but there are a lot of religions.' A pause. That dreadful stare. 'You see my problem.'

'Well, you've got a bugger of a problem,' he said carefully.

'I've had fifteen milligrams of Valium, I'm ashamed to say.'

'And you're not a Christian?'

'I was, but I think you'd call me lapsed.'

Was he an atheist?

Harry Joy folded his arms and Desmond Pearce was shocked to realize that his eyes were wet and that his face, half-hidden by his fringe, spectacles and moustache, showed real fear, that the dry rather indifferent tone had been adopted to get through a difficult subject.

'Lapsed as buggery,' said Harry Joy and they both watched a cabbage moth alight on Desmond Pearce's leg.

'Are you scared?'

Harry nodded.

'Of Hell?'

'Mmmm.'

'What have you done to make you think you'll go to Hell?'

Harry shrugged.

'Have you murdered someone, something like that?'

'Good heavens no.'

Des Pearce was feeling better now, better in the way you felt when you knew there was something you could actually do. 'Look, old mate,' he said, 'do you really think God is such a bastard he wants to punish you for all eternity?'

'Why shouldn't he?'

Des Pearce grinned. 'It doesn't make sense. It's like you wanting to torture flies, or ants.'

'Yes.'

'Do you?' he said, joking.

'That's my point. People do. Look, I read the Bible in there,' he gestured into the hospital. 'It doesn't muck about. It says you either believe or you go to Hell. And look,' he took from his notebook a grey, much folded pamphlet he had found as a bookmark in the library Bible. It was titled:
Memory in Hell
. 'Listen to this: "As the joys of Heaven are enjoyed by men, so the pains of Hell be suffered. As they will be men still, so will they feel and act as men.'"

'Harry, this was written in 1649.'

'I know. I saw that.'

'Well . .. it's a bit out of date isn't it? This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages.'

'We're talking about eternity,' Harry said incredulously, 'and you're talking about three hundred years. That's a drop in the bucket. You can't just modify Hell. You can't change it.'

'I haven't. The churches have.'

Harry was beginning to get hives. He could feel them now. There was this tightening in his throat and this curious swell-ing which always preceded them. His fingers moved, as if he wanted to clutch something. 'How can you change your mind about Hell?' he smiled. 'If it was true once it must always be true. What about the people you sent there in the Middle Ages? Have they all been allowed to go home?'

'It's the twentieth century,' Des Pearce grinned, but he felt irritated.

'Are you saying there is definitely no Hell?'

'I ...'

'There is a Hell.' He said it with that lunatic brightness Desmond Pearce had seen in the eyes of Mrs Origlass who had seen a flying saucer land beside the railway line at Anthony's Cutting.

'I can't imagine God wants to punish us, Harry.'

'Ah, but maybe not your God, you see. Maybe,' Harry looked around furtively (just like Mrs Origlass, he thought, that darting movement of the head), 'maybe another god. Maybe it's a god like none you've ever thought of. Maybe it's a 'they' and not a he. Maybe it's a great empty part of space charged with electricity. Maybe it's a whole lot of things in a space ship and flying saucers are really angels.'

(Landing beside the railway line at Anthony's Cutting.)

'Look,' Harry turned over the pages in his notebook. 'I made a list of religions, and do you know what I think?'

'What, Harry?'

'They're all wrong.'

'All of them?' he smiled.

'Every damned one of them: Harry said, 'maybe: And felt the hives swelling up beside his balls, like twenty nasty flea bites on top of each other.

'You must have done a lot of study: Des Pearce said, looking at the list and noting the absence of Animism and Zoroastrians before he handed it back.

'Study: Harry waved his arms, dismissing the hospital, its garden, certainly its library. 'What good is study?'

He made the gestures of an angry man and yet, Des Pearce saw, he still smiled charmingly.

'A God for people who read books?' Harry was saying. 'No. Definitely not. I will tell you two things I know: the first is that there is an undiscovered religion, and the second is that there definitely is a Hell.'

'Then,' Des Pearce held out his arms sadly, 'I can't help you …'

But maybe I'm wrong. Don't you damn well see, I might be wrong. Tell me what to do …'

'I can't.'

'Tell me to believe.'

'I can't.'

'Well you better go,' and he stood up and shook his hand warmly, still smiling as if the meeting had been a pleasure for him.

Desmond Pearce stood up. 'Is there a Heaven?' he asked.

'Yes, yes, there's a Heaven. There's everything.' And then he slumped back in his chair, his hand on his forehead.

Des Pearce had an almost uncontrollable desire to pick him up in his arms and comfort him, to carry him back to his bed, to give him absolution, to have him confess the sin that was eating at him. He would gladly have taken all Harry's pain in the palm of his strong plain hands and held it tight until it died there. But he also realized, looking at this peculiarly frail figure in the cane chair, that Harry Joy could not give up his pain to anyone, that he would carry it with him to the operating theatre and to wherever place he went to afterwards.

'Maybe I should have talked about cricket,' he said softly.

Harry tried to smile. The peculiar tortured twisting of his face was to stay with Desmond Pearce for a long time for it was now marked by those unsightly weals which Harry called hives; they would haunt Desmond Pearce and make him wonder if he had witnessed a warning from God, a proof a mark signifying the existence of Hell.

Dull grey bats swooped, darting, catching insects above his bent head. His stomach gurgled. In the yellow lighted wards off the verandah, nurses cast shadows and served unappetizing meals. He whispered. He leant towards her, talking quickly. The dew was already on the grass. Outside the garden walls the river ran sleepily carrying heavy metals past ships with humming generators. The air contained lead and sulphur but Harry noticed this no more than the heavy honeysuckle which, for Bettina, filled the evening air.

'You'll miss dinner,' she said.

His stomach gurgled again but he merely shook his head. He was not to have dinner tonight. Tomorrow was the day of his operation, a piece of information he could not bring himself to share.

'I'm not hungry,' he said. He patted his moustache and hugged his knee. He rocked back and forth and rubbed his aquiline nose. His eyes were slightly feverish and he had the beginnings of a headache. There were so many things he had to tell her and now, at the last moment, she had to listen. And no, not about death or about Hell, he had stopped all that four days ago.

'Are you listening, Betty?'

'Yes.'

He had talked about Joel for half an hour. He was talking about Joel still. He would not stop. Joel was not the man to run the agency.

Joel was a bad leader. Joel was selfish. Joel was a good salesman, no doubt about it. Joel was lazy. Joel was not a good strategic thinker. Joel was too pragmatic. Joel wouldn't look after the staff. Joel had been very good with the Spotless people. On the other hand he had lost the margarine business. Joel was too flashy. He should try driving a cheaper car, something like the Fiat. On the other hand you could trust Joel. Joel would not lie or deceive anyone. If you had to sell the agency, Joel would not deceive you.

Bettina wanted to tell him he was wrong. Was it only pride that prevented her? Was it simply that she couldn't bear her husband to know she was having an affair with someone he thought was a fool? Anyway, he was wrong. He was so wrong about so many things. Joel would deceive anyone if it suited him (she liked him for it, her un-goody-goody lover). But then, why did she keep on believing Harry about the rest of it? When he said Joel was a bad strategic thinker, maybe he was right. She believed he was right and she felt angry with Harry for having tricked her with his good opinion of Joel and then, just when it was important, withdrawing the sanction totally. Joel had always been the hot-shot. She assumed he was the hot-shot. Now he was saying the business couldn't survive with Joel alone and she would have to sell out the business to the Americans (fuck that!) if he died. If he died. He'd gone as pious and maudlin as his looney old mother.

He took her hand and looked into her eyes (was he really going to die?) just as he had done when he courted her. He would not permit her eyes to leave his. They had talked about America and he had known the names of famous bars and that was a long time ago and she was Bettina McPhee and she was going to be a hot-shot.

'You talk to me like I'm a fool,' she said.

'You should know these things.'