Bliss Read online

  'Are you alright?'

  Bettina, her leg bleeding, her linen jacket ripped, sat up and gave her most charming middle-class smile. 'Yes,' she said, 'thank you so much.'

  In the hospital she had to fight off the nurses who wanted to fix up her knee. If they had known she didn't have knickers on they'd have been scandalized. If they got a sniff of her pussy, God knows what would happen.

  She backed away from them, her knee smarting, her lips smiling politely.

  'Thank you ever so much,' she said, emphasizing the 'ever' in an English sort of way. 'But I'm in a hurry. I'll fix it when I get home.' She would have liked to have picked the nurses up by their necks and shaken them for their dreary ambitions and their dreary lives. Their sunburnt noses irritated her. They carried their bedpans and buggered up their insides lifting heavy weights. They went back to the suburbs and had families. They ran around answering buzzers and falling in love.

  There, Bettina thought, but for the Grace of God, and so on.

  'Sit closer.'

  'No, no,' she smiled. 'I'm fine.'

  'Why are you sitting so far away?'

  'I think I'm getting a cold,' she lied. The fishy smell rose from between her legs and in her guilty imagination it assumed the splendid obviousness of a smoke flare spewing upwards from her discreetly tailored lap.

  'Had any visitors?'

  'Oh,' he laughed, that famous deep brown laugh, and for a moment he looked so happy with himself, sitting up in bed in his silk pyjamas. 'It's been a circus in here. Tom Flynn and Ernie from the cleaners, Jack and Belinda, Mike, Dee, the Clarkes. We played poker dice. I won ten dollars.'

  The table in the comer was piled high with fruit. There were pineapples and bananas and passionfruit and grapes, so many grapes, and custard apples and avocados. He was proud of these offerings, she saw, but when Bettina looked at his table, she thought only that it represented the monstrous lack of originality of his friends.

  'Eat some,' he said. 'I can't eat it all. Please come and sit here.'

  He stretched out his hand. He would never believe, in his wildest dreams, that she no longer loved him. She had said it once, but he would dismiss these sorts of things as 'tem-perament' or 'wine' as if a bottle contained an infusion of foreign thoughts with which she had innocently poisoned herself.

  'Come and give your old man a kiss.'

  She kissed his hand, making a joke of it.

  'On the lips.'

  She leant across the bed and kissed him quickly. Of course she loved him, a little at least.

  'Phew,' he said, wrinkling up his nose.

  Betrayed, she burnt red.

  'What have you been up to?'

  'Nothing.'

  'You've been drinking whisky,' he said.

  'Oh, yes,' she said, and added bravely, 'with Joel I got a bit drunk. I fell over in the car park.' And she withdrew a little to show him her bleeding knee. 'I ripped my jacket.' She could feel herself still blushing and he was looking at her with those big dark eyes, as if he knew. But that was a trick of his, not an intentional trick but a misleading sign. He saw nothing. It looked as if he could see everything and people always gave him credit for it.

  She dragged the horrible plastic orange chair another inch closer and leaned forward to hold his hand.

  'You can bring it closer than that.'

  'I'm alright.' She stank. 'What's the matter?'

  'Nothing. I'm fine.'

  'You've got something on your mind.'

  He never knew what was on his mind until he was ques-tioned about it. He would not let himself see his own worries and even his own mind, she thought, was a strange territory to him and it always needed someone else to come along and sift through it and point out interesting or painful things to him. Often she would find him frowning, and, after due ques-tioning, he would say: 'ah, I think I must have a headache.'

  But she would not question him today. That slight contrac-tion of the brow could be caused by, probably was caused by, the fishy smell he would not acknowledge.

  'I'm going to die,' he said.

  'Why do you go on with that?' She didn't mean to snap, but she felt accused. There was no logical, medical reason for him to think he should die.

  'Don't be angry.'

  'I'm not angry.' Yet she was. Unreasonably angry.

  'You're frowning like a bulldog.'

  'You're only talking yourself into it. It's like your hives...'

  'I don't talk myself into hives.'

  'You always know when you're going to get them.'

  'I can feel them coming on. I can feel them before you can see them, that's all.'

  'You're not going to die.'

  'You don't understand,' he said, 'listen to me: I don't mind dying.'

  Why did he always give you the feeling that he knew things, that he knew she had dreamed his death a hundred times and now, meekly, he held out his throat to be cut. He would make himself die to show her how wrong she was. She looked at that long sinewy arm, the hairy wrist that emerged from the pyjama coat, and thought about its life and saw, before her eyes, how it would be dead, decaying. She saw maggots, crawling things, and looked up at his face.

  'I don't want you to die!' She said as if her secret wish were the core of the problem and once she had said this the problem was solved.

  He looked at her with astonishment.

  'Why don't you believe me?' she said.

  When he didn't answer her (he couldn't think of what to say) she lapsed into angry silence.

  'Do you believe in God, Bettina?' She winced. If she had been religious she would have believed in Satan and would have found him, in her terms, 'generally less boring'. But religion represented all the goody-goody two-shoes and she found it embarrassing even to talk about.

  'You won't die,' she said. She had torn the crutch of her pantyhose somehow.

  'Something very strange happened to me when I had the attack,' he said. 'I haven't told anyone.'

  'You should tell the doctor,' she said warily. If her panty-hose had torn...

  Bettina shifted in her chair.

  'I had a vision.'

  'It was lack of oxygen,' she said confidently.

  He had a distant look in his eyes like he did when he watched Casablanca on the television. 'I left my body and went up in the air.'

  She looked at him with alarm. 'Maybe you should see a psychologist.'

  But he did not appear to hear her. He began speaking very quickly, with none of the grace notes, none of the velvety drawl that he would bring to a story; he rushed through the events of his death and described to her, exactly, who had stood where on the lawn, who had carried his body, what the doctor had worn, the details of everything that had happened while he was dead.

  'It was a warning,' he said finally. 'I saw Heaven and Hell. There is a Heaven. There is a Hell.'

  'It was lack of oxygen,' she insisted, but he shook his head with uncharacteristic stubbornness.

  'I'll get him fired,' she said firmly.

  'Who?'

  'The doctor. He's a clumsy fool. No wonder you're frightened.'

  'It's nothing to do with the doctor.'

  'He's got sausage fingers.'

  'I know.'

  'He drops things.'

  'I know.'

  She moved her chair closer to the bed and patted his hand.

  'You won't go to Hell, Harry. You're too nice to go to Hell.

  If anyone’s going to Hell it'll be me.'

  And Harry, not for the first time, failed to recognize the resentment in her voice.

  When he was about to die in a foreign country, years later, Harry's son would tell his captors that he had been born in an electrical storm. Like so many of the things he had said throughout his short life, the story was not quite true.

  David Joy remembered the night his father took him to see lightning. It was his first memory.

  He could still remember the stale musty smell of the rain-coat wrapped around his tiny body. It was ha
rd and nasty and would always make him associate mildew with terror. His father held him and laughed. His great moustache had tickled his face.

  How the earth had shaken! What monstrous shapes the lightning showed.

  'Lightning.'

  Could he speak? Did he answer? There was only the memory of mildew, tobacco, and rain needles on his uncovered head.

  His father always maintained that he had not cried, that he had pointed with pleasure and gurgled with delight, but that was not quite true either, not at all true, but reflected what Harry would have wanted of his son.

  No, he had not gurgled, he had stared with big dark eyes full of terror.

  His mother said he screamed, yet he did not scream until, in the middle of a rolling thunder clap, a monster came rushing through the night and seized him from the precarious safety of his father's arms. And then he screamed. Held tightly in the foreign arms he was transported through the storm.

  It was only when they entered the house that he saw the monster was his mother, her face white, her eyes wide with fear and anger. With what urgency she kissed him, with what fierceness she hugged him. He knew something terrible had happened. He smelt sheets drying by the fire, warm and sweet, and his father, standing, smiling, saying: '1 was only showing him the lightning.'

  And his mother, wrapping him in a milk-soft towel: 'Oh you fool, you fool'

  When he was older he would go and stand in the lightning by himself. They told him he was like his father. He was pleased. He did not confess that the lightning had always filled him with fear. He stood in raincoats of different colours, with different smells, and forced himself to confront the most violent storms of the monsoon. Seven seconds between thunder clap and lightning meant the lightning was one mile distant. He stood and counted, his wet lips moving. He stood rigid and confronted Mount Sugar Loaf while the lightning hit its peak and danced like a devil around its dark dead shape. He stood while it marched closer, surrounded by mildew, alone in the storm.

  But later, in the warm house, he would be told he was like his father and he would look with masculine superiority at his mother who drew the curtains to cut out the storm.

  David grew tall and thin and they said he was like his father. They did not notice the dark eyes that trembled with dreams, the smooth olive skin of his mother. It was better to be like his father, that was what they all wanted. He went to his father's office and sometimes, if there was an empty desk, sat in a big chair and wrote advertisements like his father did. Did they never notice that he was in no way like his father, that he did not make friends easily and was full of secrets?

  At school he told lies. They found him out. He told them that he had been to New York. He stood up in the classroom and described it as his mother had described it to him. He mentioned bars where people drank a wonderful green drink (his own invention) from tall thin glasses he had quietly stolen from Bettina's Vogue. Yet when Lucy came home and told his mother, while he stood and listened, rigid with panic, bright with shame, no one had reproached him seriously.

  'Ah,' Bettina said, cutting shortbreads, 'he is like his father, always telling stories.'

  Yet the dreams that shone most brightly in his imagination were often gathered from his mother who, without really meaning to, taught him about the meanness, the insignificance of the town he lived in, the smallness of his life and thus, in her own perverse way, showed him the beauty of the world or, at least, the beauty of Other Places.

  He read adventure books and bought an atlas with money stolen from his father's bedside table.

  When Harry told him Vance Joy's story of the Beggar-King he heard the story with his mother's ears.

  'There was a king,' Harry said, 'a long time ago in a country full of tall mountains. The winter was full of ice and the summers were so hot that children and old people died. There were many beggars in the country,' Harry said, repeating, thirty years later, the exact words of the story, 'and the king felt sorry for them. At night he could not sleep. He lay awake thinking of the beggars. Like all kings,' Harry said, forever ignoring the political implications of what he said, 'it did not occur to him to give away his wealth, but rather he wished to punish himself for being rich.' (Don't you remember, Harry, the lovely ice-thin malice in your father's voice, or were you too young to hear it?)

  'One day he decided to dress as a beggar and go out amongst the people.'

  At this stage of the story it was necessary to pull a coat or a woollen sweater around the head, to cover the face, to wander dolefully around the room. (But don't you remember how your father did it, how he managed to get that unbeggarly strut into his walk so that beneath that old brown sweater you knew there was a king pretending to be a beggar?)

  'He had a dark cloak made and wandered the streets. He didn't fool anyone. They all knew he was the king, even the little children knew it was the king. When he came down the street in his dark robe calling piteously for alms they rushed from their houses and gave him gold.

  'Each day the king returned to his palace laden with wealth. When he counted his gold and saw how much one beggar could make in a day, he became very angry. He felt that the beggars had tricked him and so he made a law forbidding them: anyone found begging would be put to death, by the sword.

  'All that winter,' Harry said in his father's doleful voice, 'the beggars slowly starved to death and when the spring came there were no more beggars to be seen.'

  And that was the story, in Harry's hands a poor directionless thing, left to bump around by itself and mean what you wanted it to, although it was not without effect and young David Joy sat silently before its sword-sharp edges.

  'But why?'

  Harry felt uncomfortable before such questions. 'It's just a story.'

  'I will be rich,' his son said, 'and have jewels.'

  Can we blame this story for David’s avarice? Hardly. He was already stealing from his father's bedside table when he was six (To young, you say? Not a bit of it.) and one should not think him lacking in sympathy for the beggars, quite the opposite: he brimmed full of emotion and saw that sharp-edged sword come down on the pitiful skin of their blue, cold necks.

  As he became older, people came to think of him as cold, yet he was so full of emotions he could not speak. He dared not reveal his destiny.

  He read books and hoarded their contents. He chose South America as his special domain. He knew Paraguay and Patagonia, Chile and Brazil. He dreamed of wealth and adventure, and yet he was frightened of almost everything. On the football field he cowered and cringed. Confronted with fist fights he ran away and hid. In dark comers he rehearsed his triumphal return from South America when he would make presents to his family (his enemies too) and tell them stories of his adventures.

  He hoarded money and counted his bank balance. He sold newspapers in the evenings (a long-legged boy fearfully dodging peak-hour traffic) and saved everything he made. When he was fifteen he began selling marihuana to his class-mates. It brought him money and prestige, yet he dealt with damp hands, fearful of discovery and punishment. He told his father he wished to study medicine because his father indicated it would please him. His business broadened to tabs of acid, speed, and lignococaine which he sold as cocaine. He never took drugs. He was frightened of going mad. And yet the cocaine entranced him because it (if it had been real cocaine and not lignocaine) had come from South America.

  This then is Harry's son, who in his father's words is 'a good boy, going to be a doctor'. He contemplated arrest and murder by knife; he stood before these visions with his hands clenched, his body rigid, while the lightning danced around the nearby hills.

  'The story of the butterfly.

  'I was in Bogota and waiting for a lady friend. I was in love, a long time ago. I waited three days. I was hungry but could not go out for food, lest she come and I not be there to greet her. Then, on the third day, I heard a knock.

  'I hurried along the old passage and there, in the sunlight, there was nothing.

  'Just,
' Vance Joy said, 'a butterfly, flying away.'

  David Joy had decorated his bedroom in the style of an office. The walls were covered in brown felt, the floor with a dark brown carpet. A black desk occupied a central position in the room, which was illuminated solely by a small chrome desk-lamp. Beside the desk was a chrome and leather swivel-chair and in front of the desk there was another chrome and leather chair, but in this case it had no swivel.

  His bed, tucked away in a dark comer, was covered with a large brown rug. With the curtains drawn and the desk-lamp on, one could forget the bed was even there.

  His parents could not see that it was not a bedroom but an office.

  He was seventeen years old. Now, sitting at a desk, wearing a fawn cashmere sweater, his dark hair conservatively cut, he might have been a student from any good middle-class home, except that the top of the desk was covered with money, some of it in large denominations. It was, in this quiet and private moment, arranged from the highest to the lowest denominations, from left to right, from far to near, one note occupying one space.

  The notes glowed magically. He sat perfectly still, had already sat perfectly still for fifteen minutes with only those dark eyes sweeping ceaselessly back and forth along the eight rows in front of him: additions, subtractions, dreams that swept the Americas from New York to Tierra del Fuego.

  He heard his sister approach and although she may just as easily have been going to her own room he gave himself five seconds to clear the desk. He did it in eight polished, rehearsed movements, as graceful as a card sharp, with no hint of panic or fear, only this wonderfully svelte movement. He was not, however, perfect: as Lucy entered the room a single note was still floating from desk to floor and David would have found it undignified to grab for it.

  Lucy saw it but she knew better than to touch it. Things had changed in their relationship since the time when she had teased him about his tears and his lies. She walked around the note and sat facing her brother across the desk. She was fifteen years old and still in her school uniform. She resembled her mother except that the slightly desperate quality that Bettina carried was totally missing and, in its place, a rather dream-like detachment which would make the lips in her plump olive face more sensuous than her mother's, the eyes somehow wider, the dark hair fuller and richer.