Bliss Read online

  He existed nowhere in solitary terror. Visions of days before his death moved towards him and receded: his mother in that dusty street giving him the cheque. 'Now go,' she said, 'now go. I’ve won the lottery.' And in that white empty room, the Sunday School, the single sentence he had carried with him like a limpet since his youth: It is harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.

  When he saw the shapes around him it was through grey veils. He was tormented with shifting images of his wife, his children, of Desmond Pearce. Joel circled him. With what intention?

  Someone said: 'He will be confused for a while.'

  Yes, he thought bitterly, I will be confused; it will not be as they described it. He knew himself to be ripped with huge wounds, a vast punishment down his chest. Thin wires and tubes. A poor weak Gulliver.

  He looked bitterly at those around him, forms which became more and more distinct, but he was ready for them before he saw them. He was in a room beside a verandah. Is this what they did to you? He demanded they state his sins although he could already guess them. They never answered directly, never once. 'As they will be men still,' he thought, 'so they will feel and act as men.'

  Slowly, during his convalescence from his successful operation, Harry Joy became totally convinced that he was actually in Hell. He watched them, as cunning as a cat, silently indignant that fate should play such a trick on him.

  PART TWO

  Various Tests and Their Results

  He moved around the house in sandshoes and tracksuit and exhibited a curious stealth and – if you had not shared the general trauma at Palm Avenue, had not felt those creeping, inexplicable irritations – you may have found his antics funny.

  Look at him: sneaking up the stairs you might have thought he was impersonating a cat in a pantomime, or even without a costume, a lizard. But this is all deadly serious, and what he is doing is throwing the whole emotional balance of the house-hold out of kilter, tipping the axis of his world and producing peculiar weather.

  Is he mad?

  A question he has asked himself. And if you follow him now, as he turns, for no apparent reason, and begins to go downstairs, hesitating before he crosses the shining expanse of living room, out on to the creaking verandah, down the steps, you will see him slip, like a shadow, into the garage.

  There are a number of dusty old ammunition boxes lying higgledy piggledy in the comer, so dusty that they might have been there for years; and have. Yet those shining new brass padlocks give his secret away, and in a day or two this will occur to him too and he will come down here at five o'clock one morning and paint them with khaki paint, clogging up the keyholes and giving himself new difficulties. But now the key slips into the padlock smoothly and the shining book flicks open, and the lock is removed, and softly pocketed. Inside there are notebooks, fifteen spiral-bound, but at this date only six have been filled and a seventh started.

  They contain all manner of peculiar observations. These are tests for madness. He is making them himself.

  Harry Joy is running checks. He is comparing his life (termed 'life' in the books) with his other life, that is the days and years before he entered the operating room, the days before this cruel scar on his chest. If he had found someone he half-trusted he might have confessed, initially, that the chances of this being Hell were about sixty / forty. But as the weeks have rolled on, the evidence has mounted and he is not, according to his own checks, mad.

  This is not the childish Hell of the Christian Bible with its flames. Here, obviously they planned more subtle things, and it has already occurred to him – a flush of panic as he stared into the 3 a.m. dark – that this, these boxes, locks, etc., are to be his punishment. He contemplated the possibility of Hell in a universe made like an infinite onion until he became as sick and frightened as he had once, as a child, lying on summer's black night grass, trying to grasp the infinity of space.

  But to return to these books, and their entries. Here, on page 16 of the first book: FIAT IS WRONG.

  While he was in hospital Lucy and David decided to clean the Fiat. It was a present. And they waited, like children, for his delight or at least his thanks and if not his thanks, his acknowledgement. They encouraged him to walk beside the garage, to enter the garage, to drive the car, but nothing they did could induce him to mention the Fiat, and Lucy, whose idea it had been and who had contributed most of the hard work it took, became angry and thought he had taken it for granted.

  FIAT IS WRONG he wrote and, on page 20: THEY MADE MISTAKE WITH CARPET. Possibly they had, all things considered.

  In the notebook he also recorded observations concerning 'Lucy,' 'David' and 'Betty'.

  Some selected entries concerning 'David'.

  23. I notice taking money.

  25. Talks money.

  26. More money talk.

  36. Mean streak exhibited again.

  39. Caught him lying.

  43. Rattish face, quite different.

  This last description could be made (uncharitably) to des-cribe not only David but Harry's own handsome face, which the Indonesian Consul had once favourably compared to the god Krishna in the Javanese Wayang Kulit. Krishna, the Consul said, had an almost identical aquiline nose and the same finely chiselled chin.

  There he is now, locking himself in the toilet to make more observations, and it looks comic, the way he crouches so earnestly over the book, crabs his fingers around that little stub of pencil, holds his head to one side, sticks out his tongue, and gives a number to his latest piece of evidence. He is in torment. If he shits it will be watery-thin and black.

  His family, in moments of clarity, saw and sensed his pain. They did the most absurd things to please him. David, who was fastidious enough to be repulsed by the black hairs that grew on Harry's big toe, cut his father's toe nails while Lucy, simultaneously, began to read him an amusing story about Don Camillo which, from an ideological point of view, she strongly disapproved of.

  But he withheld his love – his vast, blind, uncritical love – from them, and they were like children withdrawn from the breast. When their love was not reciprocated they punished him with a fury that puzzled them and left them guilty and shaken, offering apologies that could not be accepted, the rejection of which, in turn, produced greater hurts, ripped scar tissue before it was healed, and ended in scenes of such emotion and frenzy that the neighbours turned off their lights and came out into their gardens, where they stood silently beside fragrant trees.

  They were like heavy cigarette smokers suddenly denied their drug. They raged at the slightest rejection. They saw no light in Harry's eyes, and got from him no talk, no story, no smile. Depression spread like an insidious fungus through the whole family. The depression interacted and created a synergistic effect, each amplifying the other, and one can see, here and there, traces of quite mad behaviour in those members of the family whom one might expect to be sane.

  Lucy was fifteen years old, a dialectical materialist, rational, sensible and, of all of them, the least given to hysteria. Yet it was she who decided that Harry had been given the wrong operation.

  'Don't be absurd,' Bettina said when Lucy confided in her.

  'It's true. I know.' They were whispering in the kitchen. In the next room Harry was recording 'mutterings' in his notebook.

  '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 smooth
er.

  '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.