by Peter Carey
'Aren't you going to pick it up?' she said.
'Why should I?'
'So you can take it and put it with the other money in the back of the Fiat.'
Something in David's body tightened, and Lucy, who knew him well, stiffened. Her eyes did not, for an instant, leave his.
If she had thought him incapable of hurting her, his behaviour would have been melodramatic. For he now revelled in the threats he posed her, the darkness and danger he might represent, and he applied himself to this with the same single-mindedness that he would, outside the door of this room, bring to the role of a sensible intelligent boy who wished to be a doctor.
'Who told you?'
'I found it,' she said. 'I was looking for a pencil I dropped.'
'When?'
'Two months ago.'
'If you tell anyone, I'll kill you.'
'I know.' She shivered. She was not exactly sure that he would kill her.
The tension went away for a moment and David bent down and picked up the money.
'What are you going to do with your money?' she said.
'Why do you ask questions when you know the answer?'
'You're still going to New York?'
'See ... you know.' She didn't know. She didn't know about South America and he would never tell her because she would laugh.
'To go into business?'
'Haven't you got anything else to do?' he said coldly; yet he didn't want her to go. His sister's presence charged him with a strange erotic energy. He was not thinking about what he said. He spoke, merely, to keep her there. She had boyfriends. People liked her. He wanted to touch her hair.
Lucy shrugged. You couldn't talk to David. He wouldn't talk. Except once, a long time ago, he had told her his dream, his secret, his vision of New York. She had wanted to hear about it again, this glistening dream he had made in the darkness of his discontents.
'When you are rich in New York, will you send for me?'
'No,' he said, 'what do you want?'
Lucy smiled.
She had not come to see him because she liked him. She was being nice because she wanted something. That was the way the world was. Yet in his dreams he returned with presents for her: a sapphire necklace worked with Inca gold.
'The answer,' he said, 'is no.'
'Oh ... please, David ... just a deal.'
I'm not doing grass any more.'
'Oh, David ... please.'
'All I've got is some flowers and beads and I'm keeping them.'
'What else have you got?'
'Coke, MDA, speed.'
'Go on, please, give me some grass. I'm feeling low.'
'Take a Valium.'
'I don't want a Valium. I want some grass. Oh, please ... be nice to your sister.'
'My sister won't be nice to me.' His voice was hoarse. He hardly knew what he was saying.
She stopped smiling for a moment because she recognized the voice. A harshness came into her face.
'Is that what you want then?' she said.
'I just want my sister to be nice to me.' For a second his hard-locked eyes shifted uncertainly and his mouth wobbled before it fixed itself again.
'I've got forty dollars,' she said. 'why don't you just take the money?'
She saw him hesitate. She thought he was weighing it up, the pros and cons, putting a dollar value on pleasure, assessing the pleasure in profit.
'If you blow me,' he said softly, 'I'll give you some.' Her lips tightened. 'How much?'
'A bag, a deal.'
'A full deal? Show me.'
'No. You want it: yes or no?'
She shrugged. She didn’t like blowing him, but there were worse things. He came quick and then she'd have the grass and the money.
'O.K.,' she said, 'get it out.'
'Don't talk like that.'
'Like what?' She had him now. Now she was the one with power.
'Don't talk tough, talk soft. O.K.?'
'O.K.,' she said.
She sucked him then, with neither passion nor revulsion, thinking what a stupid thing it was to say: don't talk tough, talk soft: how could she talk? It did not occur to her for a moment that he wanted her affection and love.
'Sister,' he said, 'little sister.'
He was miming affection, she thought, simulating love. It was necessary for him and she felt sorry for him. She could imagine him, in a brown shirt, being a Fascist, his hair slicked flat, the dark irises of his eyes stopped down to exclude ordinary people, to include nothing but the fiery bright light of some impossible hero, some unvisited place. This hate was all he had managed to pick up from his mother, who, at this very moment, was entering the front door.
Lucy stopped. 'Betty's home,' she said.
He forced her head down and she knew, as she heard the footsteps and her mother's voice, that he would not let her go. The footsteps were coming up the stairs when he finally shot his 10 ccs.
When Bettina opened the door she found David sitting at his desk with a book and Lucy brushing past her. David was smiling. Before she could ask him what the joke was she heard Lucy retching in the toilet.
'Hello, Mummy,' he said, 'how's Daddy?'
'What's the matter with Lucy?'
He shrugged. 'I guess she's a bit sick. How's Daddy?'
Bettina looked at him sharply. 'You little bugger,' she said. 'What have you done to her?'
It was not a question that would have occurred to Harry, who had never seen his family as you, dear reader, have now been privileged to.
The fluorescent light cast green over everything. The apples and bananas and grapes and biscuits and Black Forest torte and smoked trout were all placed on a small table and arranged like flowers. Why did everybody bring him food? Why, now, did they all look so sinister, the dead green things he had been given?
He sucked on his sheet and lay quite still.
The apple had once been connected to a tree. Now it was disconnected. Did it die? What was death to an apple? It had never occurred to him before that there was a vast distance between the apple on the tree and the apple on the table. Nor had he thought of the trout as connected to a river, a silver and pink being in cold blue water, eating, breathing and fucking, now laid out in a morgue under green light, a place as unimaginable to the trout as his vision of Hell had been to him.
But these things were gifts, given to him by people who loved him! They wanted him, needed him, wished him alive. As John Spearitt said, 'You always make me feel happier, Harry. Even now, when you're sick.' These were no polite little lies. And how about old George Meaney who ran the newspaper kiosk below Milanos, who had travelled by bus and tram to reach him, had hobbled painfully up the steps and stood awkwardly in this room to give him (how had he known?) smoked trout.
Yet what power would these people (coughing John, hob-bling George) have to save him? Why, even the green light could suck the life from their gifts as if reality itself (hadn't he seen it? Wasn't it proven?) was only something as thin as a tissue paper and you put your foot through (like glass, quicksand, ice) and you were, suddenly, like the trout.
For the hundredth time he clenched his eyes shut against the terrors of infinite space. He was going to die! He felt himself sucked down long green corridors of despair where he could not define his 'I' except by a dull pain which would not stop. The room began to be not a room at all, but a construction caught in the wafers of undefined space. The apples ceased to be apples, the trout was merely the external form of pain.
'Hello, Daddy.' He looked with staring eyes at his son who held a wrapped parcel in his hands.
'David,' he sat up. He was still half-caught in his waking dream. He tried to smile. He took the parcel. 'Well, well, this is nice.'
He busied himself over the parcel, hiding his confusion. 'Chocolates?'
'No, not chocolates.'
He ripped at the paper. 'Ah, a book' He felt confused. People did not give him books. He did not read books.
'I know you don't read,'
David was saying, 'but it's a very unusual book. It's about drugs.'
'Ah.'
Looking at Harry's puzzled face, David began to wonder at the wisdom of giving him the book It was a thrilling, adventurous book about cocaine smuggling and the drug business. Yet when he saw the book in his father's hands he knew he would never understand it. To Harry it would be a book about criminals.
'Medical drugs?' Harry smiled at his son and turned the book over and over, wondering about its title: Snow Blind.
'No. It's about drug smuggling.'
'Ah,' said Harry and turned it over once more. 'Ah, I see.'
In spite of himself, David felt irritated. The father he imagined was never the same as the father he spoke to. He had crept out of the house, so he could come here without Lucy, so he could be alone with his father. He had imagined a different conversation, which he now tried to induce: 'It's really very exciting,' he said. 'There's a lot about South America.'
'Ah.'
'It seems to be quite an unusual business.' He felt an almost overwhelming desire to tell his father what he was really like, that he gave not a damn about medicine or being a doctor, that he would be a son to be proud of, journeying to foreign places, confronting dangers, laughing at lightning, falling in love in Colombia. He would be a businessman adventurer and return with money and strange stories.
Harry looked at his son and was very proud of him. He was proud of how he looked, of his dark intelligent face and his rather shy gentle smile. He was proud that he had given him a book about an unusual business. He was proud of his academic record.
'How's school?'
'It's O.K. They treat us like kids.'
'Well, you are a kid.' Harry took his hand for a moment and neither of them quite knew what to do. They wanted to hug each other but it was not what the family did. They were not touchers. Sometimes they tickled. Harry, for instance, was known to have particularly ticklish feet and David was remarkable for being almost immune.
He did not want to burden his son with his father's death, and yet it seemed to him to be wrong not to tell him. They might only meet three, four, five more times and how would David feel to be cheated of this time, to squander it while his father tore up wrapping paper into little nervous strips.
And yet when he did say it, it was so unreal, so lacking in feeling or conviction that he wondered, for an instant, if he wasn't just making it up.
'David,' his son was still smiling, 'I've got to talk to you about what plans I've made,' the smile had gone, a frown begun, 'because there is some chance I'm going to die.' The dark eyes wide with shock, the mouth open, the head shaking.
'No.' Harry took his hand. 'Don't be frightened. I'm not frightened.'
'No.' Tears streamed down his face: 'You can't.'
And suddenly they were in each other's arms and Harry held the hard young body as it was ripped with sobs.
'Daddy, Daddy, I love you.'
The trout lay on the table. The fluorescent light washed green. Everything Harry Joy thought about became more and more complicated, less and less clear.
He no longer knew if he was going to die, if he was play-acting at dying, if he felt frightened or brave, because at this moment he felt an enormous strength, a curious triumph, as he held the body of his weeping son in his arms. He held him firmly, full of joy, the pair of them in a room full of gifts.
There was toughness in Harry Joy you may not have yet suspected, .and although he appears, lying between the sheets of his hospital bed, surrounded by food and friends, to be mushy, soft, like a rotten branch you think you can crack with a soft tap of your axe, you will find, beneath that soft white rotted sapwood, something unexpected: a long pipe of hard red wood which will, after all, take a good saw and some sweat if you are going to burn it.
Harry Joy, for all his vanity (watch him look sideways now, trying to catch an impossible evasive profile in the mirror), his blindness, his laziness, all his other foolishnesses, brought a surprisingly critical cast of mind to the question of salvation and damnation.
For if you had thought he would go running back into the skirts of his childhood church (what would Jesus have done?) weeping, asking for forgiveness, last rites and so on, you were in error. Which is not to suggest that the thought did not enter his mind – and cross it, most attractively, its sweet-smelling wool skirts swishing softly – for it did, on many occasions, and on more than one of them he put his hand to the buzzer and, once, pressed it, to ask them to bring him a priest.
'Yes, Mr Joy.'
'Nothing, Jeanette. I pushed it by mistake.'
He could not (for all his fear, for all his proof of Hell) bring himself to fully believe. He had never rejected the Christian God. But now, to believe just because he was frightened of hell seemed to him to be unreasonably opportunistic, and he could not do it.
(He hoped, just the same, that God saw him and at least gave him some marks for his honesty.)
Scratching around in that overgrown mess which constitutes his mental landscape, we might find a few undiscovered reasons for this. This is not to take credit away from him, for he hasn’t seen them, and is acting by his own lights, bravely.
But, look: the place he went to when he died bears abso-lutely no resemblance to the little wooden church of his youth, and the smells are not the smells of his Christianity, which were dry and clean like Palestinian roads through rocky landscapes, scented with cheap altar wine, floor polish, and the thin, almost ascetic, odour of his mother's perfume. It did not fit. It did not fit anything at all, except perhaps some stories he has since forgotten, but still retains, so one day he will remember them, even though they never appeared to him to have any religious intent.
Here, then, a fragment, dredged up from some dark comer of his memory: Vance Joy pretending to be a Hopi Indian.
'You may need a tree for something – firewood, or a house. You offer four sacred stones. You pray, saying: 'You have grown large and powerful. I have to cut you. I know you have knowledge in you from what happens around you. I am sorry, but I need your strength and power. I will give you these stones, but I must cut you down. These stones and my thoughts will be sure that another tree will take your place.'
'The trees and the brush will talk back to you, when you talk to them. They can tell you what's coming or what came by, if you can read them.'
Thus, Vance Joy, many years before. And perhaps it is the force of fragments like these, his father's unconfessed pan-theism, that kept his finger away from the buzzer for another day.
But, as the Reverend Desmond Pearce would say tomorrow, and as Bettina implied two days ago, there was no reason to think that, even if there was a Hell, Harry Joy should be sent there.
What monstrous crimes had he committed? A little adultery perhaps, an amount of covetousness when it came to other men's wives, but that was about all. So why should he lie in bed and gnash his teeth when, in all likelihood, he would be a Good Bloke for all eternity? And that, too, would have been the argument of his friends if he had ever been able to push through the dark curtain of embarrassment which surrounded the subject and actually lay down his frightful secret – there, disgusting thing! – before them.
But he could not, and did not, and instead the pressures of daily life in hospital crowded in upon him and he found time, all the time, being stolen from him in thin, wafer-thin, slices and great fat slabs during which he was placed on metal tables, had catheters inserted along the length of arteries and into his very heart, while wires connected him to dials and screens, and life itself contained enough terror to push his heart, one afternoon, into a dangerous arrhythmia.
He had seen his mother's sin on her death bed and he carried it with him for ten years knowing that when his time would come it would be the same for him, that her sin would be his sin, but worse, for although she feared damnation he knew she would be spared it.
He remembered now (in this antiseptic cold room full of dials), that dull grey hospital room of his mother's which
smelt of cheap soap and the yellowed pages of old women's magazines. When he had arrived (puffed because he had run from the car park) she could no longer recognize him and thought that he was his father. He did not disillusion her, and had he tried she would have, in any case, maintained the illusion, for she was a stubborn woman when she had set her mind on something.
'Vance,' she wept, 'I have committed a terrible sin.'
He remembered how guilty he had felt, listening to her, as if he was prying into confessionals, opening letters not addressed to him. She clutched his hand, her skin was almost transparent, a dry crust of spittle marked the comers of her mouth.
'No,' he said, and then: 'What sin?'
'A terrible sin.'
'Don't tire yourself.' How stupid a remark. A few hours of life left, a few things to say, and what does tiredness matter? Don't talk, he had meant, be quiet!
'Vance...'
'Yes.'
'I have wasted my life waiting for you.'
'No!' But it was true.
'Waste, waste, waste.' She said. 'Oh, Vance, it is the only sin that cannot be forgiven.' And he saw, in the wrecked remains of her splendid dark eyes, his mother confront the shining steel orbs of hell.
It was not the buzzer which brought the Reverend Desmond Pearce but the good man's own blunt brogues, clumping down the hospital verandah as if testing for rot in its ancient planks. His swinging hands were rough, coarse with nicks and scabs, a hint that the saving of souls required something a bit more muscular than his 4PS, which – to get them out of the way here – were Prying, Preaching, Praying, and Pissing-off-when-you're-not-wanted.
Harry looked up from his cane chair, saw Desmond Pearce's face, and liked it immediately. It was a rugged, pock-marked face with a slightly squashed nose and a crooked grin. His hair was a curling mess and he showed the proper disregard for sartorial elegance which Harry had always seen as a sign of reliability in a person. Neat men always struck him as desperate and ambitious.
'G'day.'
'Hello,' Harry smiled, and noted the little gold cross, tucked away where a rotary badge might normally go, on the lapel of the crumpled grey sportscoat.