Bliss (16 page)

Harry retreated up the tree in pain.

Joel, far below, said: 'We should have gone to my place.'

He did not want to hear anything. He came to escape pain, not find it.

But Bettina's voice insisted on reaching him: 'I can't stand your bloody brass any more. If I have to look at your brass any more, I'll puke.'

Eastern brass artifacts in Joel's bedroom. He had bought a crate-load of them in a market in Kabul and a woman was paid to polish them every week. In the living room there were books he had bought by the metre.

Harry kept climbing, away from voices.

He wanted normality and peace so badly that he could still deny he had seen this torture. He could have erased it from his memory. He wanted normality and warmth. Instinctively, seeking comfort, he put his eye to the chink in his son's bedroom curtain. Show me my son.

There: David Joy, his trousers around his knees and Lucy, her skirt beside her on the floor, sucking his son's pale-skinned penis.

Harry Joy at the windows of Hell.

He moaned and staggered on his branch like a man pole-axed. He began to descend, forgetting that trees should not be left in a hurry, but slowly, carefully, one leg at a time, even by those practised in the art.

But Harry, hurrying, left his branch too quickly and barely held the next branch for a second before he was on his way further down the tree. He crashed ten feet, was wrenched, and held.

The sharp end of the branch the Miner had broken in his fall now held Harry securely like a butcher's hook in the trousers of his suit.

He stayed there, suspended, and swung a little in front of one more vista. For in front of his eyes, the curtains properly parted, was a window where he was presented with one last glimpse of his partner's pudgy little hand disappearing up his wife's dress.

Bettina Joy looked up and saw her husband's head staring in the window, upside down.

Harry saw her mouth open wide and her eyes bulge a little. He thought of fish eyes in shop windows and Billy McPhee screaming about a dollar's worth of petrol.

Bettina Joy hit Joel Davis who misunderstood and would not stop.

Harry saw Joel Davis turn and saw his mouth wide open. Joel Davis wiped his hand on his handkerchief before he made a move towards the window.

'I put you on the plane,' he said. And, indeed, he looked up into the sky as if Harry might have dropped out.

'Just cut my trousers.'

They were there in a second: all the cast of tormentors: the partner, the faithful wife, the good neighbour, the loving children. They fooled around with him on the broken branch, claiming to lack strength and height. He felt them circle beneath his blood-filled head like a congregation of Satanic dwarves come to perform magic rituals.

They discussed ladders. They made it a protracted affair.

He begged them to cut his trousers.

But, no: 'I'll get the aluminium ladder.'

'No, the wooden one will be better.'

'Alright, you get the wooden one.' Which was further away, next door.

Then, with the ladder, they fooled around some more and claimed they should not lift him off. He lifted his head upwards, trying not to black out.

Joel Davis knelt so he could look into his senior partner's bloodshot eye: 'We're going to have to cut you down.' He held up a rusty old razor blade. 'O.K.?'

Harry closed his eyes. He felt them cut and then, suddenly, there was a loud rip and he fell into an untidy nest of elbows and arms with fingers poking out the top of it. Bettina poked a finger in his eye. David put an elbow in his throat.

When he had vomited, he spat sedately on the lawn and looked at them. They had all gathered in a little group beside the house, like people posed for a photograph, each one looking a little self-consciously into the lens, no one quite sure what expression to adopt.

The Final Test.

'I curse you,' he said, and the anachronistic sound of the word impressed him with its power. 'I curse you all, for all time, without exception.'

They stood before him silently, giving him the respect awarded the holy and the insane.

PART THREE

The Rolls Royce of Honeys

It was like a holiday. Everything seemed bigger than life: nice wine, dramas, whispered conversations, madness, maybe even love. The Joys' house at Palm Avenue felt like the head-quarters of some ecstatic campaign in which madness played a vital role, but whether as an ally or assailant was not always clear.

Harry had retreated to a suite on the twenty-first floor of the Hilton, from which privileged position he managed to charm the doctors who were sent to commit him. They savoured the champagne, letting its acidity take away the feeling that they had almost been associated with something unclean.

They had disliked Joel and had found his cufflinks offensive.

The beluga caviar Harry Joy offered them helped erase the last of this vulgarity and they chatted about the Hiltons they remembered from other countries and other times. They remembered lost luggage at airports, cancelled flights, and bored each other a little until the champagne was drunk and they departed smiling, a little unsteady on their feet.

Even' while Joel was complaining about the expenses Harry was running up, Bettina was ordering take-away food from Milanos and having it delivered by taxi. They all felt themselves to be trembling on the edge of something new and wonderful. Lucy saw all this and understood it instinctively. She couldn't understand why their happiness surprised them or needed to be denied.

'You were stuck,' she told Bettina.

'How stuck?'

'Stuck. Now you're unstuck.'

'You're too young to understand.'

'You've got a new lover,' she hugged her mother. 'You're having a wonderful time.'

'You've got no feelings. What about your father? Your father is crazy. He's insane.' And she burst into tears...

They ate chocolates and had curaçao in their coffee. They made pancakes and mulled wine. They all put on weight and their faces became rounder, their skin tauter, and it made none of them less attractive but somehow tumescent.

They tidied the house as if they were expecting important visitors. They had conferences about Harry in which they pretended everything was being done for his good, as if even the chocolates would somehow help to bring about the cure they said they wanted. They sat around the shining Georgian table and; as they acted out their concern, they came to believe it. Joel's eyes shone with emotion and no one could doubt that he wanted his partner well.

To Lucy the conferences began to stink of hypocrisy and she could no longer enter into the spirit of things. She sat glumly at the table and listened to the unsaid things, the dark brown words with soft centres. There was something 'off' about the meetings. She thought of stale water inside a defrosted refrigerator.

Lucy spoiled it for the others. They were happier and easier when she went off to bed; and as she left the room she could hear their chairs shifting and their bodies unfolding and, sometimes, a light clunk, as Bettina's shoes were dropped gently to the floor.

Lucy did not go to meetings (official or secret) of the Communist Party. She had resigned from the branch and her Comrades were disgusted with her. Comrade Dilettante, they had called her.

She lay on her bed and looked at the ceiling. She rolled a joint and turned on the radio to block out the conspiratorial murmur which reached her from the room downstairs.

You could not call it jostling, for they were all seated on chairs and the chairs did not move, except occasionally to scrape impatiently, or to see-saw back and forth on their precarious back legs; but yet what had happened with Joel and David was exactly like the jostling that takes place on the football field as two players position themselves for a ball that is still half-way down the field, an irritating elbowing sort of movement which can often flare up into a fist fight and then you have one player lying on the ground and the crowd wondering what has happened.

They vied for Bettina's attention, consideration, and rarely spoke to one another directly.

The subject, of course, was having Harry committed.

Initially David had taken little part in these conversations but as the nights went on he became more and more astonished at what he saw as Joel's ineptness. He listened with astonishment to the decisions that were made. If the world was full of people like Joel it was going to be a very easy life, a lot easier than he had ever imagined. If this was a businessman (an
American
businessman) then business was a pushover. Were they all so sloppy-minded and stupid as this little frog with the beads of perspiration on his lip?

But tonight he would not jostle. Tonight, he would hit.

Like an out-of-favour general, David waited to be asked to take command. He was in no real hurry and the irritation he felt was not unpleasant. He secretly rolled his eyes and curled his lip as he listened to the latest reports of failure to have his father committed. They were children. They couldn't bribe their way out of a traffic offence.

And now they were worried about money. It was pathetic to listen to Joel talk about money. He did it like a petty cash clerk who is two cents out. He was so frightened of spending money he could never, ever, hope to make any. He fretted. He brought bills to the table and threw them around.

'But he's taken a suite,' Joel was saying, 'That's what I keep trying to tell you, honey. It isn't a room. It's a suite.'

'I know the difference,' Bettina snapped. 'I've probably stayed in more suites than you have. What do you think he is? You expect him to stay in a
room
?'

'How damn long will he stay there? You know the sort of wine he drinks.'

'The Hilton's got a lousy wine list.'

'Betty, that's not the point.'

David stood up and walked around the room, looking carefully at the insect screens. There it was: an improperly closed insect screen on the front door. He clicked it shut with a small over-precise movement of his stiff left hand.

'Joel,' he said.

Joel had taken advantage of his absence to hunch over into a conspiratorial whisper, but when David spoke Bettina looked up and Joel was forced to acknowledge him.

'Yes, Davey.'

David rolled his eyes towards the ceiling. He could not stand being called Davey. It reminded him of a dog or a simpering little boy in a sailor's suit. He walked silently to the table where his mother held out her hand. He took the hand absent-mindedly but didn't sit down. 'Joel, when you come in you must shut the door properly.'

'Sorry, old mate.'

'The mosquitoes get in.'

'O.K., sorry.'

David placed his mother's hand carefully on the table and walked out to the kitchen.

'He hates mosquitoes,' Bettina said.

Joel pulled a face of ambiguous meaning.

'He's just upset.'

'Oh, sure!' Joel thought otherwise, but if he was going to say anything else he was stopped by David who re-entered the room firing insecticide into the air from two aerosol cans, one held in each hand high above his head. He circuited the room and started up the stairs, the cans still firing.

'Put your hand over your drink,' Bettina said.

Upstairs they could hear heavy footsteps.

'Lucy doesn't like insecticide,' Bettina explained.

When David returned to the room he was pleased to see that Joel had his hand over his drink, although he couldn't have explained why.

David sat down. There was a silence. Joel lifted his hand off his drink and wiped the rim with his finger before drinking. The silence continued. David stretched his long legs beneath the table. He threw back his arms and yawned. He was loose and relaxed. The silence continued further. It was quite delicious.

'I know how to do it,' he said.

Joel clicked his tongue in irritation but Bettina was looking at him.

'How?' she asked.

'Oh come on,' Joel said to her, 'now you ask a boy: what does he know? Who do you want to listen to?'

David shrugged. 'O.K.,' he said, 'I was only offering.'

'Tell me,' Bettina said and Joel moved his chair angrily.

'Well, you won't get anyone to commit him the straight way, that's the first thing.' His mother was looking at him in a way she had never looked at him before.

'Go on,' she said.

'Davey, I don't want to be rude,' Joel said. 'But you are seventeen years old. You are hardly an expert.'

'Well you're not an expert either. That's why Harry is still in the Hilton.' He turned to Bettina. 'I know how to have him committed but it'll cost money.'

'Ah well, there you are,' Joel said, ' ...money.'

The petty cash clerk!

'Five thousand dollars,' David said, enunciating the words very carefully and looking straight at Bettina.

'Look,' Joel said to Bettina, 'do I have to listen to this.' He sifted angrily through the American Express and Diners Club bills that littered the table. 'Look at these.'

A mental dwarf! Look at him stacking his little bills into a neat pile. David curled his lip and revealed a neat row of small white teeth.

'I'll pay the five grand,' David said. He hadn't planned this, but it didn't matter. It was worth every cent of it.

Look at Joel, his frog mouth wide in disbelief, and Bettina too, staring at him. But she, his mother, had a smile waiting to accompany her astonishment.

'Where would you get five thousand dollars from?' Joel said.

It was wonderful.

'I want something,' he told his mother. 'When Harry is committed, let me drop all this university thing. I'm not going to go. I want to go into business.'

'You're astonishing,' his mother said. 'I don't believe it. For God's sake,' she turned to Joel, 'don't you ever tell Harry about this, or I'll kill you.'

'You must really hate your father,' Joel said to David.

'No... '

'Five thousand dollars,' Joel shook his head. 'That's a lot of money.'

'I don't hate him,' David said, 'he's sick.'

But Joel was sitting there, smiling smugly, shaking his head. 'Oh boy,' he said.