Bliss Read online

  'Come on,' she said, 'other room.'

  They pulled the blankets back into the bedroom and shut the door on it.

  'Want food?' she asked, carrying the box.

  He shook his head.

  'He fought them,' she said. 'Good on him.'

  They both looked ill. They didn't know whether to sit or stand. Honey Barbara finally put the box down at the table and sat there in a chair. Harry leant against the window.

  'They'll let him go,' he said, 'when they find out.'

  She shook her head. 'Don't count on it. The hospital gets a subsidy. They'll try and keep him.'

  He picked up the phone.

  'What you doing?'

  'I'm going to ring my family and tell them.'

  'What?' She was already standing and walking towards him.

  'They got the wrong person.'

  She snatched the phone from his hand and put it gently back on the receiver. 'No.'

  'I can't have this on my conscience. I've got to.'

  'Darling, they'll come and get you.'

  'They can't get me. I get up too early.' He picked up the phone and began to dial. He had more confidence in Honey Barbara's theories than Honey Barbara did.

  'Hello,' Joel said sleepily.

  'It's Harry Joy here,' Harry told his junior partner. 'I am phoning you that whoever you sent to lock me up has just taken Alex Duval instead.'

  He could hear Joel laughing. 'Really? Really? Oh Harry... '

  'Did you hear me?'

  'Harry you don't know how funny it is.'

  'I said you got Alex Duval...

  ' ...instead of you.'

  He hung up. 'What happened?' she said.

  'He laughed.'

  It was like a room in which someone has died.

  They made love but it was somehow funereal and they looked into each other's eyes with sadness and nuzzled each other for comfort. Everything had suddenly become full of insurances and precautions. He ran off sixteen Diners Club bills for her while she watched tearfully.

  'I should take you back home with me.'

  He smiled painfully.

  'But you wouldn't like it: mud and leeches,' she said, 'no electricity, no silk shirts.'

  After a pause, she said: 'Anyway, they wouldn't understand you. They'd think you were a spy.'

  She wrote down the address of the house where she was living and made him promise to memorize it. There was an air of emergency in everything and when Honey Barbara went to have a shower she was sure it was her last shower in a Hilton Hotel.

  Doctors Hennessy and Cornelius called on Harry two weeks later at four o'clock in the afternoon, injected him swiftly and carried him off without the slightest struggle.

  When Honey Barbara let herself in the next morning she found the suite as he'd left it, including a little piece of paper on which she'd written her address.

  She did not have another shower at the Hilton.

  PART FOUR

  Some Unpleasant Facts

  Alice Dalton had not been expecting Sea Scouts. She told Jim and Jimmy that she had no appointment marked but the Sea Scouts, it appeared, were insistent. She had imagined a bus load but when she discovered there were only two of them and that one of them was very small, she had them shown into her office and let them sit and stare at her vases while she brought the admission forms up to date. She wanted them to see what it was really like.

  Mrs Dalton was a woman with a mission, which was to demystify the treatment of mental illness. It was her experi-ence that a lot of sentimental garbage was spoken on the subject and she herself had spent many unhappy years until she had finally realised that Mental Illness was a business, just like anything else.

  Once this decision had been made, her life had become more satisfying. As for the treatment itself, her greatest axiom was derived from a psychiatrist who had explained it this way: the ones that are going to get better, get better; all the rest is psychiatrists being neurotic or self-important or anxious or guilty; effectively they cost a lot and achieve nothing.

  'Now,' she said, 'what did they tell you about me?'

  It was a question she would have liked to have asked many of her visitors – but one couldn't ask such questions of adults, more's the pity – because Alice Dalton was fascinated by her own notoriety. 'All I do,' she beamed at her questioners until her little round face was so tight it looked as if it might split, 'is what is obvious.' But she could never ask them what they really thought of her. What she thought of herself was simple: she was a pioneer in the Mental Health business, an opinion obviously shared by Mr da Silva who had recently purchased 30 per cent of the stock.

  But the Sea Scouts were having some difficulty in remem-bering what, if anything, had been said to them on the subject of Alice Dalton. They looked at her pale blue eyes as they swam behind her bright pink spectacles and felt that they had probably done something wrong.

  'They never told us,' the smaller boy said.

  'Have you seen me on the Television?'

  They shook their heads almost imperceptibly.

  She felt irritated but smiled and nodded. The bigger boy took out a notebook and held a pencil in readiness. Somehow this cheered her up and she was thoughtful enough to speak slowly.

  'This is a Mental Hospital,' she began with a bluntness that always gave her pleasure, 'where we lock up mad people.'

  She folded her arms and leant forward: 'First unpleasant truth,' she said to the smaller boy because the first one was bent over his notebook. 'Second unpleasant truth: this is a business and I am doing it to make money, just like everybody else. What is the purpose of a business?' she asked the smaller boy who had a strange stunned quality about him. 'It's to make money,' she answered herself. 'At the end of the year,' she tapped her pencil on the pile of admission papers, 'we must declare a profit.'

  She decided against her third unpleasant truth which went like this: 'It's a garbage disposal.' Pause. 'Do you find that shocking?' Terribly, almost always. 'Because that is what it is. Do you want to look after the old men? They're soaked in urine. They are garbage. Someone threw them out. Do you want me to love them as well?'

  'Do you find that shocking?' She asked the Sea Scouts who seemed unsure.

  'It's not shocking to me. It's life.'

  The small Sea Scout put up his hand.

  'Yes?'

  'When do we get our ginger coffee?'

  'I beg your pardon.'

  'He means ginger toffee,' the bigger boy said, looking up from his notes. 'He wants to know if we get our ginger toffee before the tour or afterwards.'

  'There is no ginger toffee here,' said Mrs Dalton firmly, in the manner of an aunt impolitely asked for biscuits.

  'Oh yes there is,' the small boy said, 'that's what we chose this project for. This is the one with the ginger toffee.'

  There was something in Mrs Dalton's expression that frightened the smaller Sea Scout terribly. He had been frightened since they came into this room with its vases and flowers and funny smell. He looked at Mrs Dalton and began to cry.

  The buzzer sounded and a big man in a white coat came into the room.

  'Take them across to the Ginger Factory,' the woman said.

  The small Sea Scout began to shriek hysterically and even his bigger friend let a tear roll down his ruddy cheeks.

  'It's only the Ginger Factory,' Mrs Dalton tried to smile. 'He's taking you where you are meant to be.'

  She was not believed and finally it took both Jim and Jimmy to pick up the two screaming Sea Scouts and deliver them bodily to the Ginger Factory across the road.

  In Hell his sense of smell was the first to be truly awakened.

  He was too giddy to stand up, but he could smell, and even though he had never been in a mental hospital in his life he knew without having to be told that this was the distinctive odour of a mental hospital. Floor polish, methylated spirits and chlorine seemed to dominate, but were given character and colour by the smallest concentration of stale orang
e peel, urine, and something very closely related to dead roses. There was no sympathy in the smell and every one of its components recalled, in different ways, in different degrees, fear (even if the fear was as petty as that summoned up by the methylated spirits with its associations of cotton swabs, cold skin, doctors' surgeries, steel needles, and chrome surfaces).

  Without him knowing it, Honey Barbara had taught him to smell, and when he thought of her now it would not be in terms of how she looked but rather in relationship to the whole wonderful array of smells he associated with her: strong and salty as goats' cheese, rich and flowery as leatherwood honey.

  He fought against the Pentothal but could not better it. For perhaps an hour he lay on his back, during which time, in giddy reconnaissances, he managed to gather that the room contained four beds, one of which was much larger than the others, that the walls were a yellow perhaps intended to be 'sunny,' that the fly-wire screens over the two small windows were torn, that the vinyl-tiled floor had a long black rubber skid-mark which ran from beneath the windows to the door on the opposite wall, and also: that he was wearing pyjamas which were not his.

  He was not so much frightened as impatient to know what would happen next, and it was irritation with his drug-induced weakness which finally drove him, wobbly-legged, across the room to the window.

  He had expected walls.

  What he saw reminded him of a number of country railway stations all moored in a park of dwarf trees, covered walk-ways leading from one to the other. The red-brick buildings were long and thin and seemed to be only one room wide, with fading green doors opening out on to verandahs. Sometimes, he saw, the doors had signs such as 'Social Workers' instead of 'Station Master' or 'Waiting Room' but there was, amongst the people he saw, the same melancholy one finds amongst passengers who have just missed the train to the city and know they will he marooned here for the next four hours. They paced up and down, sat still on benches, talked to each other, or more commonly established a hostile isolation amongst the dwarf trees. The sun sank below the roof of the Ginger Factory (although Harry took this ugly rusting corrugated-iron building to be part of the hospital) and the very green, perfectly mown grass assumed a darker, blacker coloration.

  It was then that he heard the Sea Scouts screaming. Abso-lute bowel-loosening terror cut through the air and hung there, vibrating. The patients, like grazing animals, suddenly froze. Harry crossed the room in two strides and opened his door. There was no grass here, only bitumen, across which black expanse two large men hurried, carrying the struggling bodies of two small male children. A notebook was dropped. A pen-cil, somehow pitiful, fell and rolled across the bitumen. A woman descended the steps of a box-like aluminium building and, with a slight hop, like a magpie scavenging beside a busy road, picked up the pencil. As she rose she caught sight of Harry Joy, who, instinctively, shut the door.

  The screams now came through the open window as Jim and Jimmy carried the kicking Sea Scouts across the grass towards the Ginger Factory. Harry saw the patients move out of the way and then close behind in curiosity. The Sea Scouts screamed as if they knew the secrets of those smoking chimneys.

  Honey Barbara had rules for survival in this particular quarter of Hell. They were as follows: Do not aggravate them, be quiet, smile nicely, don't let them know how smart you are. Eat all your food and don't steal jam. Fuck whoever wants to be fucked and then forget about it. Never tell a doctor the truth but make everything you tell them interesting. Never say you're not sick. Keep your nose clean and do not write complaining letters.

  Harry was determined to follow the rules exactly and it was his desire, made more intense by the frightful screaming, that led him, so early, to his first mistake. His heart was racing. He was panicked and still dizzy from Pentothal. Yet he saw it clearly, there plain as day, on the end of the big bed. It was not the bed he had been sleeping in, but there it was: his name: Mr HARRY JOY, in metallic tape.

  Already he was courting disaster. He was in the wrong bed. ('Never tell them,' Honey Barbara said, 'that a thing is their fault, even if it is.') A mistake had been made, or a trick. Perhaps he had been delivered to the wrong bed or a prankster had shifted him while he slept.

  Quickly, dizzily, he made the bed he had been asleep in and shifted himself into the correct bed.

  And there he was: keeping his nose clean, obeying the rules, not complaining either verbally or in writing. He was in the right bed, only worried now that he might have been given the wrong pyjamas and, in fact, he was sitting up in bed, peering over his shoulder and trying to read the label on his pyjama coat when Alice Dalton entered the room, already a little on edge.

  She had a pencil in her hand. It was the Sea Scouts' pencil. She held it without feeling and he watched her narrowly as she approached the bed, thus ignoring one of Honey Barbara's many rules: 'Always give out a good vibe, never let them think you hate them.'

  She stood at the foot of his bed for some seconds, her head bowed, her temples held delicately between thumb and middle finger. When she looked up at last, her mouth was drawn very tight.

  'Mr Joy, I am Mrs Dalton. This is my hospital and you are here because you are sick.'

  Harry waited. He had remembered Honey Barbara's rule about vibes but all he could think was that he didn't like this pencil woman. He disliked her self-importance, her mottled red face, her pink glasses, her tightly permed indifferent-coloured hair, her sparrow legs, her fussy voice, her black shoes, and he would have gone on, finding more things to dislike, except that she started to talk and he had to concentrate on her ridiculous words.

  'Unpleasant fact number two,' said Mrs Dalton, 'is you are in the wrong bed. Please don't interrupt. Now when we assign you a bed we do it for a good reason, probably a whole number of reasons. We know things, Mr Joy, that you could never possibly know so if you start changing your bed... well, it's impossible.'

  'It has my name on it,' Harry said. He wasn't meaning to argue. He was simply trying to clarify. He did not wish to argue.

  Mrs Dalton sighed. She held her temples again, in the same delicate way, between thumb and middle finger. Harry kept a respectful silence.

  'I will not argue, Mr Joy,' she said at last. 'You see, this is a perfect example. How could you possibly know that there are two Mr Joys in this room? You see how silly that makes you look? You thought you knew it all, and now you find you don't. You find there are other factors. Even,' she said, 'if you were healthy you could not know. So,' she said with some attempt at friendliness, 'be a love and get back into your own bed.'

  He did not want to argue. He knew it was not politic, but the fact remained:

  'But I am Harry Joy.'

  'No, you're Mr Joy.'

  'Mr Harry Joy.'

  'You are not Mr Harry Joy. Kindly do not tell me my own business.'

  'I should know my own name.'

  She smiled and allowed herself two good seconds before she answered.

  'If you knew your own name, Mr Joy, you probably would not be here. I am here because I do know my own name. Not only my own name, but also the names of all my patients. You see, Mr Joy, this is my speciality. It is my business.'

  'I am not Harry Joy?'

  'No. You are Mr Joy. Now why don't you get out of Mr Harry Joy's bed before he comes back You don't want to start off in his bad books too:

  Harry climbed out of the bed which was bigger and more comfortable than the one the horrible Mrs Dalton wished him to sleep in. When he had done that she tucked in the other bed and smoothed it obsessively. Then she came and sat on his bed.

  'I'm sorry to growl,' she smiled.

  For one horrifying moment he thought she was going to take his hand.

  'That's O.K.'

  'It's confusing, I know: two Mr Joys in the one room.'

  'My name is Harry too.'

  'Well you'll have to give it up for a little while,' she said. 'Let him have it for a while. Do you have a second name?'

  'Stanthorpe.'

 
'Alright, Stanthorpe. It's a very aristocratic name.'

  Stanthorpe!

  'You can be Stanthorpe.'

  'I don't want to be Stanthorpe.'

  'Then you'll damn well have to be plain Mr Joy,' she said, standing up irritably. 'I can't spend all day arguing. Good afternoon, Mr Joy.'

  He wished to be polite but he had forgotten her name already.

  'Goodnight,' he said vaguely. The only name that came to mind was Pencil.

  When he woke up he was hungry, and later, looking back on all the indignities and irritations in this part of Hell, he was to remember the hunger as the predominant thing, the mel-ancholy gurglings of his empty stomach.

  It was night and there was someone else in the room. He heard the sound of a page turning and a loud hearty chuckle.

  'Oh dear,' said a familiar voice, 'oh dearie dearie-me.'

  He propped himself up on his elbow and saw the person who had been designated as Mr Harry Joy.

  'Jesus. Alex.'

  Alex was lying on his bed and reading. He did not stop reading just because he had been spoken to. In fact he con-tinued to read for a good thirty seconds before he dropped his book down on to his lap, and then his face showed none of the pleasure his jovial 'dearie me's' might have suggested. His high white forehead was creased up like a piece of rejected writing paper and the beginnings of a moustache accentuated the down-turned line of his mouth.

  'Christ, Alex. What a fuck-up. I'm sorry.'

  'I thought they told you.'

  'No, no. I just found out. I mean, I just found out you were here. Alex, I'm sorry.'

  'I thought they told you,' Alex said slowly, 'that my name is Harry Joy.'

  There was a long silence and Harry Joy stopped smiling.

  'Oh come on, Alex, don't be silly.'

  'I am not being silly. If you think I'm being silly, talk to Mrs Dalton.'

  'I don't blame you for being mad, Alex. I shouldn't have left you in the Hilton. You're quite right for being angry with me.'

  Alex shut his eyes and rubbed his big hand across them. Harry was reminded of Mrs Dalton.