Bliss

by Peter Carey

  'It is very beautiful,' she said gently. 'There is no shit at all.'

  'But not safe.'

  How could he sound triumphant?

  'Yes, safe.'

  'But you're the one who's been to jail. I haven't been to jail. I haven't spent half my life worried about the police. They don't come here harassing us. My kids didn't grow up setting their alarm clocks for four in the morning.'

  'Maybe they should learn.'

  And it was, of course, with retorts like this, that she allowed herself to be drawn into it. He had become like a racehorse, or a dog bred for fighting.

  'You are making this into Hell,' she said. 'You've decided that's what it is and that's what you're making it.'

  He shook his head and looked at the black night window. He would not discuss Hell with her.

  'Whose Hell are you in?' she would say, trying to play his game. 'Someone must be running it.'

  But that sort of talk only made things worse.

  'You tell me,' he'd say nastily.

  'I don't know.'

  'How interesting.'

  And so on.

  But just as there are dry days when even the rustiest roof can't leak, there were times when life felt very pleasant. There were miles of wide beaches both north and south of the town and at weekends they could surf and swim naked and let the sea tumble their bodies and rattle out their devils and deliver them on a blanket of white froth to the yellow sand. They lit huge fires on the empty beach and lay there at night watching the stars.

  But it was, as she told him one Sunday night, only 2/7 of a life. The other 5/7 were devoted to fear and anger.

  Once she had been silly and young, and she had seen Albert on the flooded creek with his Peugeot and not known about hotels and restaurants and the city life. It was long ago. Even the creek was different then and everyone was naive enough to uncritically welcome its raging strength in the monsoon and it meant nothing to them but life. But two seasons later a twenty-two-month-old girl had been swept away and drowned just near that spot and the creek always sounded different after that and no one could cross the ford without thinking of that little girl and how, that cold July morning, they had waded the creek in the high dangerous water hoping they would not find her body and that, glancing into the undergrowth beside the creek, they would glimpse her making her way back home.

  But they did find her and two weeks later Albert's Peugeot was at the bottom of a gully and Honey Barbara was on her first aeroplane, high on cocaine, wearing high-heeled shoes. She didn't know what she was doing, or where she was going, but now, with another ten years gone, she had no such excuse.

  Then what kept her at Palm Avenue? She confessed one morning, to the bathroom mirror: 'Orgasms,' she told her grin-ning face, 'and flushing toilets.'

  David Joy was lying in bed in his room. He heard her laughter through the wall.

  Bettina was burning brightly. She was consuming herself. She lost half a stone and had to buy new clothes. She could not sleep. She woke at 4 a.m. considering options, redoing ads, mentally rewriting letters to Americans about her future. Her mind was attuned to problems and she could not stand to see them unsolved, even for a moment, so that when the wine was opened in a restaurant she could not wait for the waiter to begin filling glasses, she pointed: there. This too was her responsibility, this problem of the bottle of wine and empty glass with the glaringly simple solution.

  She wasn't even aware that she did it, so she would certainly never have guessed that she was known to the wine-waiters of one restaurant as 'The Glass-pointer' and Harry as 'Mr Glass-pointer'.

  And if she had known? 'Well,' she would have said, 'I only do it to save time.'

  Perhaps one of the secrets of Bettina's success was that she applied herself as earnestly to trivial details as she did to big ideas. It was seven o'clock in the morning and Honey Barbara was sitting on the grassed edge of the vegetable garden with a glass of demineralized water. 'Do you want to hear what happened last night?'

  It was now near the end of Honey Barbara's third month in Palm Avenue (her deadline, and still she stayed!) and the dining room table had all but been abandoned as Harry and Bettina became (for business reasons, so they said) involved in the social life of the town. Bettina had produced a much-admired advertising campaign for the State Gallery (Art Schmart, she said, it's mouldy junk) and as a result of this Harry (Harry!) had been nominated and then elected as a trustee. In less than six months they had moved up that impossible last rung of the ladder and entered the very inner circle of society.

  'Formal. No lovers.' Bettina would announce when the invitations came. She would grin, and the lovers, laughing, did not always successfully hide their resentment.

  'What happened? Nothing happened. The arseholes! Jesus, I'll be pleased to be out of this town. They all think it's Harry who does the ads. They automatically assume it's him. Oh, what a clever husband you have,' she whined in imitation. 'What a brilliant man. And what do you do, Mrs Joy?'

  Then would come the latest bulletin in the campaign to get to New York. A letter from the famous Ed McCabe com-plimenting her on her work (she'd brought it to his notice, of course). A telegram from Mary Wells. She kept up a fast, furious correspondence with anyone who would answer her and her letters were tough, funny, and skilfully self-promoting. She wrote press releases for the New York trade press. She adopted Americanisms in her speech, remembering to say 'Garage' instead of 'Car Park,' and 'out back' instead of 'out the back'.

  As she reminded Honey Barbara on this crisp, sunny morning: 'This is only a stopping place for me. Another six months and I'm taking my samples and half the profits and setting up in New York.

  'But let me warn you, he is starting to like it.' He, in this case, was Harry. Joel was not liking it. Joel was waiting to go to New York. 'They all think he's an intellectual. The less he says the more brilliant they think he is. That's always been Harry's goddamned talent. When you talk to him he looks at you as if you're saying the most interesting and original things he's ever heard in his life. No wonder everyone likes him. No wonder we all think he's intelligent.'

  'He is intelligent,' Honey Barbara said sharply.

  'Yes,' Bettina said quickly. 'He is, but you know what I mean. He's in his element. It's true. You should spray those cabbages. They're getting eaten alive. I'll get someone to pick up a good spray for you.'

  'Bettina... '

  'I know, I know, but what's the point of growing them if you let something else eat them?'

  'There's plenty left for us.'

  'Mmmm,' Bettina said, thoughtfully. She stared at the cabbages. 'I've got to go,' she said.

  She tip-toed off across the lawn so as not to dig her heels into the grass. She found Harry shaving.

  'You remember,' she said, leaning in the doorway, 'how Monsanto said they'd talk to us if we could think of a new product they liked.'

  'Mmm.'

  'I've got it.'

  'What?'

  'Organic Poison.'

  He left Honey Barbara on her metal chair with her glass of water, sitting perched in the backyard like a muddy flamingo. She was like an exotic flower picked by a thoughtless child. He thought of bedraggled polar bears pacing their concrete-floored cages, their lukewarm water dotted with the soggy wrappers of confectionery.

  Even the cabbages would not grow properly. They were poor and dwarfed, struggling to survive in the heavy clay soil. The compost heap, her pledge of hope for the future, had begun to smell. Rats came at night to raid it and possums gorged themselves as if it were a colossal pudding.

  Harry sat back in the passenger seat of the Jaguar and felt depressed. Bettina, her seat pushed forward, hunched over the wheel and drove with damp-handed bravado, abusing the innocent through the safety of shut windows. The air conditioner made hardly a sound. It was seventy degrees Fahrenheit.

  'Look at the mutants!'

  They had stopped at traffic lights. Pedestrians streamed around the car, their faces marked by dul
l punishments. Harry was surprised at the intensity of her hatred for these Captives.

  'Ugly,' she chanted. 'Ugly, ugly, ugly.'

  Bettina was not particularly beautiful. He mentally placed her in the midst of the crowd. He stole a drab overcoat from one woman, a string bag from another, and then, having dressed her with these secretly, let her walk in front of the Jaguar.

  'It'll be the same in New York,' he said. 'Ordinary people in the street.'

  'Rubbish. They're so damned dull.'

  'What will happen,' he asked, 'if you can't get into America?'

  'Cretin,' she shouted, swerving in front of a truck and applying her horn as two men with a ladder jumped out of the way. 'I'll get into America, don't worry.'

  'But if you can't.'

  'I will.'

  'What if something goes wrong?'

  'Do you want something to go wrong?'

  He didn't answer immediately. He was the Managing Dir-ector of a business whose growth and success was now based solely on Bettina.

  'Come with me,' she said.

  He looked up, biting his lip. 'Where?'

  'New York.' She gave those two words all their due. There was not a fleck of dust on them.

  The bitten lip could not help but form a smile, and she could almost see the pictures in his mind, those idealized .towers of glass, Vance Joy's magic, but also more recent dreams, as elegantly tooled as 'The Talk of the Town' in the New Yorker.

  'No,' he said, and shifted his body a little so he could look out his side window.

  'You can't even hammer a nail in straight.'

  'So.'

  'You'll hate living in the bush.'

  'The hut is built.'

  'You won't go,' she said swinging on to the freeway. 'You're a city boy. You like soft things.'

  Like an expert jeweller she tapped the flaw, the long thin fault that ran through his character: he loved comfort, soft things, silk, velvet, words you could also use about wine.

  'No,' he said again. 'I can't.'

  He was not prepared for what would happen when Bettina finally went. He chose to believe she would not go.

  'I think we'll get a brand from British Tobacco,' he said to change the subject. 'Adrian says it'll be a two million dollar launch.'

  'I'll be gone by then. Come on, Harry, come to New York. We'll bring everyone with us.'

  He winced, thinking of his poor bedraggled Honey Barbara in New York.

  'We can't walk out on the business, just when we've built it up.'

  'Sure we can.'

  'Our name will stink.'

  'Who cares? We won't be back.'

  'They'll hate us,' Harry said.

  'I hate them,' she said simply.

  The town had never taken Bettina seriously, which she felt might have been justifiable in the past, but not now. They gave her no credit. They treated her like a fool and sometimes at night she invented extravagant ways to punish them. She did not ask much from them, only credit for what she had done. But to the town she was no one: Mrs Harry Joy.

  'Look at the fucking mutants.' They had come off the freeway and were waiting at the lights.

  Harry huddled into his seat. He liked the smell of leather. He felt protected in this large rich car. He did not want blis-tering heat, mud, leeches and hard work. He could not hammer a nail straight, it was true. When Honey Barbara told him stories about Bog Onion Road she did not mean to terrify him, but how could snakes and police and bushfires and a hanging man ever be attractive to him? He pushed the Cancer Map away into the darkness and sought his safety here, under the protection of Those in Charge. They liked him, or, if not liked, at least valued him. He was in favour, in fashion, and his days were dedicated to staying there, his nights to dreaming about a fall. They patted him on the back and asked him to stay for drinks. They made assumptions about his beliefs which were incorrect. He smiled and nodded and pretended he didn't know what it was like to be inside a police station or walk the corridors of Mrs Dalton's Free Enterprise Hospital and see the trolleys carrying captives to their therapy. He looked them in the eye and they found him both courageous and intelligent. He loathed them.

  He was a prisoner with special privileges making his captors tea, coffee, folding their socks, telling them funny stories for their amusement, ironing their sheets, warming their beds as they saw fit.

  His soul stank of Californian Poppy hair oil: a weasling cunning little thing.

  Honey Barbara and Ken and Lucy had taught him a lot about the structure of Hell. When he listened to the trustees of the State Gallery with their silky talcumed talk he could see exactly where they stood in the scheme of things. It was they who trafficked in poisons, controlled the distribution of safety, the purity of water and air, or, more probably, the lack of it. Not for them the nipping little tortures one Captive might inflict on another. It was their privilege to inflict many special diseases and even death, to withhold treatment from the sick, to beat the brave, and torture the poor.

  The very smoothness of their skin frightened him, the per-fection of their fingernails, the sharp white lines along which they parted their perfectly cut hair.

  When he sat across the desk from the local Managing Director of Helena Rubenstein he could easily imagine that this smiling cultured man ('You've never read Conrad? We must remedy that.'), that this urbane man could very easily torture him, not mentally, but physically, in an ordinary pale blue room on a sunny afternoon while the rest of the world went about its business. He saw fissures in their smooth exteriors and glimpsed the rage reserved for those who disobeyed.

  'New York,' Bettina said, 'Imagine.'

  He did not imagine New York. He imagined Honey Bar-bara. Holding her, he was destroying her. All the things he loved about her were slowly fading: her strength, her con-fidence, her belief in herself, her food, her body, her mind. They made fun of her beliefs and called them mumbo-jumbo. They doubted the power of an OM. Her calloused feet had grown white and soft and where they once had been hard and strong they had now become big and ugly, city feet with flaking skin.

  Bettina screeched the Jaguar down into the basement car park, skidded across an oil slick, and arrived in her spot. 'What about it?' she said.

  'Maybe,' Harry said thus removing the subject from his mind.

  'Maybe Baby,' Bettina sang, and then stopped when she realized where Buddy Holly's words were leading her.

  Honey Barbara drank Scotch with Joel. She didn't like the taste of Scotch; she mixed it with dry ginger.

  While Bettina was away Joel became an expert on every-thing. He lay on his mattress eating Ken and Lucy's dinner and told Honey Barbara the best way to grow vegetables. He polished his glasses, rubbed his belly, wiped his ketchuped mouth with a napkin while she sat at the table and made patterns with the spilled dry ginger. She listed, for her own amusement, the things that Joel claimed to have done. He had edited a newspaper in Texas, run a trucking company and later a bus service, managed a rock-'n'-roll band, owned a travel agency, worked for McCann Erickson in Los Angeles and Caracas, imported brass goods from Pakistan, been a disc jockey, written a radio play which was performed by Orson Welles and spent five years at Day, Kerlewis & Joy. Although he was only twenty-six, Honey Barbara was prepared to believe him, but when he started to tell her how to grow cabbages she knew he was a fraud.

  She yawned. He didn't notice.

  The television was playing and he managed to look at this while he talked, occasionally pausing mid-sentence to let some hack comedian deliver a punch line and to join in the canned laughter. Harry and Bettina were hours away from rescuing her, and Ken and Lucy were out compiling their 'Directory of Positive Things about The End of the World'. She wished they would come home. She would rather argue with them.

  The only things that kept her alive were the things she hated most: argument, discord, acrimony, noise. She was disgusted with herself. She was disgusted to sit here and listen to this battery fed man patronize her.

  She was drunk when
she stood up and that disgusted her too.

  'Goodnight, Joel.'

  'Kiss,' he demanded offering his lips like rose petals to be admired. Kissing was the social custom. When the others were out Joel would normally include a little fondling on his own account.

  'Not tonight,' she said. She stumbled going out the door and he called out something which might not have been intended spitefully.

  It was a house where she had learned to restrain noises signifying pain or pleasure. You choked them back, held them tight in your throat, buried them under blankets or drowned them in noisy water. But tonight the timbers of the house were saturated with the ultrasonic hiss of television and the canned laughter would drown her sobs as well as any pillow. She lay on the bed and cried. There was no pleasure or release in it, only self-hatred and the feeling that you might die from lack of air.

  She had felt lonely before, and unwanted before, and even unloved, but she had never felt unnecessary. She was a dec-oration on a poisonous cake. She was like the great bloated whale of a Cadillac that sat on the front lawn and consumed energy and enthusiasm and interest, all for no useful purpose. It was refitted with pleated silk door trim while its body rusted.

  She felt his hand and pulled away.

  'No, Joel, go away.'

  But it was David, his dark eyes full of sympathy, who sat gingerly on the edge of his father's bed.

  'Here.' It was a handkerchief.

  David had changed his mind about Honey Barbara the night she told the story about the amphetamines.

  'This is a story,' she began, 'about a million dollars' worth of amphetamines.' She told the story, as seemed the custom, in the first person. Even Harry did this and it was sometimes confusing because he said 'I' when the 'I' in the story was Vance Joy and once even it was Vance Joy's father, but it was always 'I' in Bogotá and New York.

  The story was not hers at all; it belonged to her friend Annette Brownlee, or Annette Horses as she was more commonly known, who had once been involved, so she claimed, with this hoard of amphetamines which lay buried still in a city in Europe. Honey Barbara, always cautious about such matters, had changed Europe into South America, and it was just this change of geography which had so enraptured David Joy, who knew by heart the old city of Quito, and when she described the little plastic bags of white powder and the damp underground passages, he went very pale and his eyes contracted as if he had heard someone recite his dreams.