Bliss (22 page)

'Are they going to torture me?' Harry did not expect an honest answer.

'No, they like us. They want our subsidies.'

One in every three is a spy.

'They'll give us electric shocks and put electrodes in our brains. They'll give us pills and make us zombies.'

'Harry, you are part of the biggest growth industry of the decade. You can have peace here. No one will hurt you.'

Harry Joy considered it. As he watched Alex it occurred to him that he had the healthy pink glow of a pregnant woman. He plumped up his pillow and made himself comfortable, considering the implication of this amazing transformation.

'Fuck it.'

'What?'

'I called you Harry again.'

The real Harry Joy's stomach gurgled mournfully, dreaming of wholemeal bread and Honey Barbara.

Alex Duval had this dream only once but it had been so vivid that it had pushed its way through into his conscious where it occupied an important corner of his waking mind, metamorphosed from a dream to a memory.

There is a plush green carpet and a svelte grey cat with silky fur. On the cat's back is a large crayfish, about the same size as the cat. The crayfish is digging its sharp claws into the cat's body. There is a crackling sound. It is the cat tearing off those of the crayfish legs it can reach with its mouth. Alex Duval is watching. He believes at first that the crayfish will die, but then it occurs to him that this is stupid – dream-logic – and that the crayfish is in agony and cannot scream. The noise of the legs in the cat's mouth is the same noise you hear when you bite a cooked crayfish leg.

It was a portrait of his marriage. Who was the cat? Who was the crayfish? He didn't know.

He had wanted to leave his wife for ten years. Daily, nightly, he had been on the very brink of doing it and daily, nightly, he had failed, he had been defeated and fallen into bed drunk. Viewed in this light his guilty conference reports can be seen to be less of a punishment and more of an escape. He was like an unhappy man who retires to his dusty garage to play war games.

At first it is difficult to see why he didn't leave her or why, when he had left her the first time – and this is where the trouble really started, ten years before – he ever went back.

It was 'friends' who had persuaded him to return the first time, and his own oversized conscience as he thought of her getting fatter and less desirable, alone in that vast house, and he, Alex Duval, responsible for the destruction of a life.

But although this is important in its way, it has nothing to do with why Alex Duval stayed there still, year after year; for the only really important factor in his continual imprisonment and punishment was the ingenuity of his wife, who everybody thought of as a slow, bovine sort of woman, not very intelligent, always unhappy, and all the words they used to describe her suggested something large and blunt and totally lacking in elegance.

Yet she played games with Alex Duval more cruelly elegant than anything her critics could have dreamed of, and had this 'dull' woman applied herself to something more public in life she may well have been called a genius.

It is impossible to describe the games she played with Alex Duval: they could centre around something as everyday as a torn postage stamp, a crumpled piece of paper, a blue towel and proceed by a series of moves as imperceptible as the hands of a clock. (‘Did I move?' says the clock. 'Look at me.' 'Yes, you moved.' 'I am perfectly still,' the clock insists, 'you're crazy. You're imagining things.’)

A game concerning odd socks took two days of moves and counter-moves to reach its conclusion. At which point Alex Duval would explode with rage and fury.

But this is not the end of the game. Now, for this brief time, this is the whole point. Here one needs skill. Now he is dangerous. He can walk out the door. He may kill her with a blow.

Martha Duval's great slow face closes down and in the slitted eyes one might glimpse passion, fear, and as her shoulders finally relax, triumph.

Time after time, game after game, he was trapped, cornered, and could only turn his anger on himself.

She watched him break a dainty piece of china he had collected or stab the nib of his beloved pen into the wall where the blue ink mark would be, could be, if needed, the introduction to another game.

She had devoted her life to paying him back for having left her once. The scales would not balance. No amount of pain she inflicted on him could balance the hurt and terror of those thirteen days, ten years before. He could not leave her. She would not let him. She played him as if he were a ten pound trout on a three-pound line.

And into this life, by mistake, without meaning well, doc-tors Cornelius and Hennessy had come.

Alex Duval wasn't even a fraction mad. They wanted him to be Harry Joy, he would be. To the whisker. He made notes on Harry Joy: his manner of speech, the quality of his voice, his eyebrow habits, his floating walk, his folding limbs. He sloughed off his Pascal and his Rousseau and felt a great lightness.

He immersed himself in the part and nothing gave him more pleasure than finding some mannerism, a gesture of the hand, a flick of the head, that made him more perfectly Harry Joy. He laughed and told stories. He made stories up. Better stories. He sat in quiet corners inventing Harry Joy-type stories.

He had assiduously paid court to Mrs Dalton, had even made himself pretend he liked her. It was Mrs Dalton who decided on who got Electro-Convulsive Therapy (the only the-rapy available) and who did not. They discussed her Clarice Cliff collection together, taking out the little triangular-handled cups and cooing over them.

And then he had his illicit pleasures, those books Alex Duval loved which Harry Joy would never have thought to open: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Flaubert, Chekhov. These had to be read in secret, but this only increased his pleasure. In public he flicked through
Reader's Digest
impatiently, only showing an interest in the ads. He sat in the television room and told anyone who would listen how TV commercials were made and how much they cost. He did it so realistically, so charmingly, that he was more popular than the programmes.

And now the real Harry Joy had come to interfere with his happiness. He would not succeed. This time Alex Duval would turn all the resources of his considerable mind to the problem of this parvenu Joy, a problem which was to become more pressing when the two Harry Joys were noticed by the Social Welfare's computer.

No matter what Honey Barbara had told him about mental hospitals, he had not been ready for the depression and boredom. There was nothing to do. There was no tennis court, no swimming pool, no dart boards. There wasn't even any basket weaving. There was a library which was controlled by some racket he didn't even try to understand. Alex, he noticed, always had books under his pillow.

There was only television and that was made difficult by the bad state of the sets, which would break down and then take weeks to be repaired. There was nothing to do but walk up and down in the midst of mad people. In the mornings the Electro-Convulsive Therapy patients were wheeled, some protesting, some passive, to the place where they were 'done'. This procession of trolleys along the concrete paths was watched with morbid curiosity and had something of the attraction of a public hanging, although the ceremony itself was private.

One old man with long grey hair and a big bulbous nose always seemed to be there, grimly riding the trolley to this much-feared therapy. His name was Nurse and Harry was to meet him later.

Not even the meals provided any relief. The food was wheeled out into the echoing dining room in big electrically-heated aluminium trolleys, inside which, in cylindrical con-tainers like bulk ice-cream drums, would be mashed potato, mashed pumpkin, minced meat in watery gravy, and an endless variety of custards, all concocted in the belief that they were not only mad but also toothless. For breakfast they would have reheated fried eggs with hard centres. For an extra five cents you could purchase a sweet orange cordial to take away the taste.

And Alex was always at his elbow waiting for him to share some mindless enthusiasm.

'Isn't this a wonderful trifle?'

'Look at that tree. Must be a hundred years old.'

'Look at that fellow play chess. They say he beat Granscy in Poland.'

Harry saw no logical reason to deny Alex the happiness that came from being Harry Joy, and yet it ate at him. It upset him to see the changes that had come over Alex as he grew into the part. It upset him in puzzling, contradictory ways.

Alex had grown a creditable moustache which might, in time, develop the authentic droop. And even now one might have believed, if one had been charitable, that he was an uncle of the first Harry Joy, fatter, older, slightly slower, but also (and this was one of the things that hurt) more authoritative, less passive. He had managed to adopt certain mannerisms of the original character so that, like a good actor called upon to play a famous man he does not physically resemble, he managed to give an unnerving impression of being Harry Joy. The original Harry Joy found even this disconcerting, like being endlessly mocked and criticized by an ageing child. He watched the second Harry Joy laugh and joke with Jim and Jimmy and Mrs Dalton, watched as an outsider excluded from a favoured circle, watched the familiarity with which he patted Mrs Dalton's arm, the confidence with which he jabbed Jimmy's chest with his finger, the expansive, jolly way he laughed. There was a largeness, a warmth, a freedom in his movements which seemed to indicate that the second Harry Joy was genuinely happy and this brought nothing to Harry but irritation.

Was Alex totally blind? Couldn't he see that his bumbling stupid optimism was out of place? It showed no sensitivity, no regard for the feelings of people here. When he saw him strut in that white suit or laugh with Mrs Dalton he was reminded of a film he had seen about Nazi collaborators.

Alex did not talk to the patients. He talked at them. Harry could hear his loud booming voice across the courtyard, intoning some interminable story with a self-satisfied air. He began to hide from Alex, to seek out odd corners of the grounds where he would not be found. He became furtive, and developed a habit of walking close to walls.

He was escaping from Alex's 'Harry Joy' voice one morning when he saw Nurse, a wiry, bony sixty-eight-year-old with enormous strength in his limbs, holding himself rigidly against the jamb of a doorway while Jim and Jimmy pummelled him to get him out. He said not a word. He did not even grunt. He stood there, like a Christ in a doorway, and when he collapsed and went limp it was because he chose to.

The next day Harry found him in the dining room. He sat next to him. They talked about E.C.T. It was not an uncom-mon topic of conversation.

'You don't get breakfast the morning they come,' he said. 'They don't give you nothing. That's how you know, see. Then they come and try and get you before you can struggle. They get you anyway, doesn't matter what you do. I don't fight them to win, because you can't win. I fight them because they're bastards, see.' He ran his hand through his great mane of grey hair and flicked it jauntily out of his eye. He jutted his jaw. 'Then they take you to the shock table and they put these two bits of tin, bits of metal, on your head. Here. And then the doctor turns on the juice.' He had stopped eating, held his hands together, as if they might have contained dice, and beat them up and down. 'It is a darkness you can't imagine. A blackness. Cold black ink. Like death.'

Across the other side of the dining room, the other Harry Joy was laughing.

'They steal your memories from you,' said Nurse, mixing his mashed potato with his gravy. 'They take away all your faces, all your pictures.'

He must have liked Harry Joy. He took him outside and showed him his book. He was writing down all the memories he had left. He wrapped them up in plastic bags and buried them in the garden when they were full. Later Harry was to find out that Nurse told everyone his secret and thus even his notebook memories would be stolen from him.

Harry developed pains across his chest and he began to stoop. His shoulders rounded and his chest hollowed, and it may have been because Alex was breaking him down or it could have been that the pain he felt was not his pain, but the pain of the people he moved amongst, and he adopted it with a sympathy quite new to him. In any case, his shoes had been stolen. They had given him slippers instead.

Alex came and sat on his bed one night just after cocoa time. He was flushed and exuberant. He had just beaten the so-called Intellectuals in French Scrabble. He talked about it happily for a quarter of an hour and became irritable when Harry would not share his triumph.

'It's irritating,' he said, 'both of us having the same name and the same moustache, and now,' he smoothed his baggy white trousers, 'we have the same suit.'

'Yes,' Harry agreed, 'very irritating.'

'So,' the big man said, his legs dangling loosely from his bed, 'you could be Alex.'

Harry felt as if someone was sitting on his chest.

'Alex is a schmuck,' he said truculently and felt his chest tighten another notch. There was a silence, He had hurt. He was pleased he'd hurt.

'He suits you,' Alex said coldly. 'He's worried about good and bad and doing the right thing. For Christ's sake,' he said, 'be reasonable.'

'What's so great about being Harry Joy?' He was bitter and confused. He did not like the Harry Joy that Alex portrayed. He could not imagine anyone wanting it. But Harry Joy was his name. He was Harry Joy and no one else and he squeezed himself in some mental doorway, resisting having the name pulled from him.

Alex poured himself a glass of water and added a drop of his 'privilege,' a little blackcurrant cordial, superior to the orange type. 'I'm a successful advertising man who's gone crazy. I've got power and money and I don't have to prove a thing.'

'I know,' Harry said. 'I've bloody well seen you.'

'But it wouldn't suit you any more,' Alex said oilily. 'Can't you see it should be repulsive to you? I think it is repulsive to you ... isn't it?'