Bliss (8 page)

'Lucy, stop it. You can see the scar on his chest.'

But Lucy exhibited the tenaciousness of the truly desperate. 'When I was rubbing his head, I saw a mark.'

'Nonsense.'

'It's true. They did something to him. You don't know what happens in hospitals.'

'Rubbish.'

That evening, as they sat around in the living room, Bettina got up and rubbed Harry's head. She stood behind his wing-backed chair and went through it as thoroughly as native women look for nits. As she worked you could see, if you were looking for it, the temper building up in her smooth round face, which became, as rage approaches, smoother and smoother.

'You silly bitch,' she screamed at Lucy who was sitting on a big cushion in front of the television. 'Why do you make up stories?'

Harry sat very still in his chair while inexplicable things happened around him. Lucy wept and hugged his legs. Bettina threw her favourite Royal Doulton jug across the room. It slammed into the plaster wall, left a hole, and dropped to the floor without breaking, DID NOT BREAK. Lucy left his legs and picked up the jug.

'You harlot,' she screamed at her mother.

Bettina danced up and down. Pranced. Stamped her small feet. 'You little slug,' she screamed at her daughter. 'Slug, slug, slug.'

Harry sat very still and made mental notes while 'Lucy' and 'Bettina' acted out their roles in Hell.

David leaned indolently across the front-verandah rail and watched Joel waddle as he walked up the drive. He did not acknowledge the chubby wave (delivered at the flower beds) but silently criticized the display of bad taste as it crossed the front lawn: the poisonous green cravat, the ostentatious ring, and, worst of all, Gucci slip-ons accompanied by white socks. David winced. Joel was someone, he thought, who should never be allowed to escape the safety of a conservative dark suit, and whose ties and socks should always be purchased for him once a year, in advance, by someone with enough love and concern to stop him committing outrageous errors.

'Where's your father, Davey?'

He pointed downwards, towards the garage.

'In here?'

David nodded, that cold, distant, masculine nod with which older boys had once so intimidated him. He retired from the edge of the verandah and sat on a wicker settee while, beneath him, Joel banged on a door which would be opened to no one, him least of all.

Later Joel ran the gauntlet of David's disdain before scurrying into the house, where Lucy would make him coffee while Bettina had her shower. Joel was trying to talk to Harry about business. Harry did not wish to discuss business.

David, hearing a creaking door, leant across the edge of the verandah, and saw Harry emerge from the garage and slip silently down the side of the house.

It wasn't until just before lunch that Joel caught up with him just as he was making a run for the toilet. Harry, in tracksuit and sneakers, sped softly along the back verandah whilst Joel struggled along beside him like a reporter trying to grab an important 'no comment'.

'I've brought balance sheets, Harry.'

'Uh-huh.'

What do you want me to do?'

'Just continue.'

'Come on, Harry, I can take advice.'

'Continue,' Harry said, 'that is my advice,' and the last half of the sentence was uttered from behind the snibbed safety of the toilet door.

It had become very obvious that Harry did not wish to go back to work. Just as it also became quite obvious that the business needed him. In this climate of upset and emergency, with everything threatening to crack and collapse around him, David decided it might be safe to sacrifice his famous medical career before it began. The pressures had built up on him, year after year since he was ten, and now he saw his chance to slip sideways, and away to freedom.

He approached Harry on the subject, waiting until he was securely ensconced in the hammock, which stretched from the red flaming poinciana to the side fence.

'Daddy.'

Harry, making a rare entry in his notebook, started, and shoved it stupidly up his shirt, in full view of his son.

'Don't creep up on me.'

'Sorry.'

The air was so fragrant that day, one could have imagined that the grass was perfumed. It was about twenty-eight degrees and their backyard was thick and glossy with the luxurious semi-tropical vegetation people fly half-way round the world for, but neither of them noticed it.

'Daddy': he swung the hammock for his father, 'I want to go into business.'

His father's dark eyes frightened him when they came to bear on him like that. They recalled, too sharply, those recent scenes of hurt and confusion, 'And I thought I might go and help in the agency. It'd be interesting work,' he said, 'I guess.'

'You guess?'

'Yes.'

'And what about this doctor business?'

'I'm prepared to give that up.'

'For what reason?'

'For family reasons. For the family business. I could help. You know...' and did not say (did not think he needed to) anything about the current business problems.

'For the money?' Harry said in a neutral tone, as if that were quite a reasonable thing. He swung a little in the hammock.

'O.K., for the money, that too.'

'Ha.'

'What?' David frowned.

'Ha.'

'All I said was money, money too.'

'Yes, precisely. I noted it.'

And then, as he was wont to do on these occasions, Harry arched an eyebrow and cocked his head on one side just to let them know that he understood what was going on, that he knew where he was. But he was quite likely, in the middle of this protective cynicism, to be struck with confusion, and the least display of pain or tears could make him wonder if his real family had not, after all, been sent to Hell to accompany him, just as the families of the Pharaohs accompanied the Pharaoh into heaven, and this confusing tendency to switch from one view to the other was to stay with him for a great deal of his time in Hell.

'You noted it?'

'Your interest in money. I have noted it,' Harry said, 'many times.'

'And I think the ad business could be better than medicine,' David said, pleased to be discussing finances, rather than .the sloppy old-fashioned view his father had once brought to the idea of medicine.

'The prime attraction of medicine is really the money?'

'Most of it,' David admitted, relieved.

'Its main attraction.'

'Yes.'

This was not his son. This was someone pretending. In the pay of someone.

'Who do you work for?' he asked his son, oh so casually, but the timing of it was wonderful: just slipped it in there, like so.

David looked at him, his eyes wide. How many times had he wanted to discuss his business activities, his interest in drugs, the trips to South America? He wanted to talk business with his father, not business business, but adventure business. 'You mean,' he said, 'who do I work for?'

'Yes.' Harry waited tensely. It was only a hunch. But look at him, look at him swallow, and his throat is dry when he talks:

'Who do I work for now?'

'Yes.' A single red poinciana flower dropped on Harry's white shirt and lay there like a pretty wound.

'You know?'

'What do you think? Who do you work for?'

'Abe da Silva,' David Joy said melodramatically.

Harry Joy did not know the heroes or the hierarchies of organized crime, so he did not understand either the size of the boast or the field of endeavour, neither could he judge that his son's claim was only true in the loosest most indirect way, just as a service station attendant might have once claimed to work for Aristotle Onassis.

But what he did get was a name, his first name in Hell. He was an explorer, a cartographer, and on that great white unmarked map of Hell he could put this name, although quite where he did not know. Although, when David finally left him (his question unanswered, his private business undiscussed), his father would go back to his mental map, and beneath it, where one might expect the scale to go, he produced this key, this code, by which he now expected, like a zoologist, to classify the creatures he found there. Generalizing from his experience, he made a note of these:

1. Captives. (Me)

2. Actors. 'David'
et al
.

3. Those in Charge. da Silva. Others?

Finally, of course, the expected happened: his family kept out of his way. He prowled the lawn, haunted the garage, stared at the TV, and found himself isolated by his madness. David slunk home to get drugs and departed silently. Forever in the house you could find someone slinking up a stair, departing by a back door, running across a lawn with imaginary eyes burning into their back while Harry, the mad master, masturbated dully in his hammock or sharpened his pencil in the anticipation of some rare tit-bit of evidence.

Bettina, once so fastidious about the house (for she had a strong streak of very-small-town politeness and a serious concern for what the neighbours thought, although she would have violently denied it), left pictures to hang crooked, floors unswept and meals, also, uncooked. She spent as much time as possible in Joel's flat viewing its idiosyncrasies with eyes sim-ilar to her son's, but having other, fleshier, compensations.

Lucy was up early to sell the
Tribune
and up late at meet-ings, some official, some secret, in which she plotted to reform a Communist Party branch. But, like David and Bettina, she could not pass through the dead dusty heart of the house without feeling a certain sadness, a cold shivering melancholy similar to that which might be produced by an old orange tree growing next to a wrecked chimney.

When she came home one night she found her room had been searched. She suspected the Special Branch, wrongly as it turned out.

'Are you a Communist?' her father said.

'Yes.' It was about time!

'Good,' he said truculently, and turned briskly on his heel.

He continued to do his exercises as instructed and, with a lot of walking and no regular meals, lost his belly. On his walks, he saw ugliness and despair where once he would have found an acceptable world: goitrous necks, phlegmy coughs, scabrous skin, lost legs, wall eyes, dropping hair, crooked spines, lost hope, and all of this he noted, but when nothing actually happened, he became bored.

And then, one morning, he woke feeling optimistic. There was no reason for it, unless it was that he was tired of the game, the staleness of the house, being lonely and cranky and isolated. Perhaps he was like someone unmechanical who turns on a defunct TV every now and then to see if it has healed itself, but, for whatever reason, he did not wear his tracksuit (stinking thing) or his sandshoes (worse) but showered and scrubbed himself and washed his hair and shaved fastidiously. He ironed a shirt and took his baggy white suit from the wardrobe where it had hung since the day he died in it.

The Fiat, the wrong Fiat of course, started immediately, and he was too happy to be suspicious.

He backed down the driveway, nearly ran down the postman, and accelerated down Palm Avenue, only pausing to clash his gears in a style that had once been familiar to those who lived near the bend in the road.

Bettina had given up on Harry.

She sat amongst the heavy Edwardian furniture of The Wellington Boot and listened to Joel argue with the waiter about the bill. In a moment she was going to order another drink, but she waited, swilling the last little drop of Gewürztraminer around the bottom of her lipstick-smudged glass. Joel was trying to write new figures on the bill and the waiter was taking offence.

'Here,' the waiter was saying, 'I will bring you a new piece of paper, sir. I will get it. You can write on that.'

Bettina looked out the window wondering if she might, this once, see someone particularly elegant or glamorous walk past, someone with some damn style, but she was rewarded with the same stream of heavy, dowdy, frumpy-looking people who she had always despised. Prague 1935, she thought, and found little except the motor cars to contradict this idea, al-though she had never been to Prague and certainly not in 1935.

She heard the tooting. And then five sets of brakes locked in squealing harmony, and through the middle of the inter-section sailed a small red Fiat Bambino with Harry at the wheel. It looked so carefree and eccentric that she forgot her animosity towards him and smiled. Dear Harry. She laughed out loud.

'What's so funny?' said Joel, who was now standing beside the waiter. They both looked down at Bettina with hurt expressions. 'I argued with the man because he charged us for a salad he didn't bring us. He admits his mistake.' His voice rose an octave, protesting at the injustice of her laughter.

'It was Harry,' she said. 'He must be feeling better. He's going to Milanos.'

Joel sat down very heavily and left the waiter standing. His head was wobbling. 'We are not going to talk about Harry any more,' he said.

Bettina held up the empty wine bottle to the waiter and smiled. 'One more,' she said, and didn't bother to notice his expression.

'We talk about Harry in bed. We talk about Harry while we fuck. We talk about Harry in the shower. We can't even come to our own goddamn restaurant...'

'Don't shout, honey,' she said in perfect American, 'and don't wobble your head.'

'I'm not shouting.' He adjusted his tie. 'I just don't want to talk about Harry any more.'

'Well don't talk about Harry. Talk about us. Talk about how we're going to set up our own agency. That interests me more than Harry.'

'Don't be a bitch.'

'Bitch, why bitch?'

He compressed his fleshy lips. 'You know the problems.'

'You want a business…'

'We need money…'

'...I want a business.'

'We need money.'

'Didn't you say we could get the money if we could get a client or two? Isn't that what you always say? Because if we...'

The waiter had arrived with the wine and was busy pouring it into glasses.

'Did you order this?' Joel asked her.

'Yes, darling.'

'Why didn't you order it before?'

'I wasn't thirsty before.'