Peter Carey

by Bliss

  'Join you?'

  'Go for your life.' There was something about Desmond Pearce that attracted such slanginess.

  He dragged up a cane chair and sat down, pulling up his grey trousers to reveal footballer's legs and odd socks.

  'What are you in for?'

  'Heart,' Harry grinned. 'How about you?'

  'Armed robbery.'

  They laughed a little.

  'Harry,' Harry said and held out his hand.

  'Des.'

  'The Reverend Des?'

  'You bet.'

  Harry tapped his fingers on his chair.

  'It's a beautiful day,' said Desmond Pearce surveying the sun-filled garden. There was still dew on the course-bladed grass and honey-eaters hung from the fragile branches of a blue-flowered bush. 'And a good place to be sitting too.' He shifted his bulk around in his creaking chair, crossed his legs one way, then the other. 'Odd socks,' he said, leaning forward to take off his coat without uncrossing his legs. 'I've got odd socks.'

  . But Harry wasn't looking at the socks. He was staring intently at Desmond Pearce and making him feel uncomfortable.

  'Well,' Desmond Pearce said, and slapped his big knees. He had only just (four weeks now)·arrived from the country, where he had been very successful. He could talk to men in sales yards and paddocks, in pubs or at the football.

  Harry was still staring.

  'I have a lot of trouble with odd socks,' Des said. 'Sometimes I go to the laundromat with matched pairs and come back with all odd socks. Sometimes I go with all odd socks and come back with pairs.'

  'Have been making a list,' Harry said, 'of religions.'

  'Oh.'

  When you talk to a man in the middle of a paddock, you look off into the distance, or at the ground, you do not stare at him like this.

  'And seeing you are here,' Harry continued, 'I might ... ah ... ask your help.'

  'Ah, yes,' said Pearce with a feeling of inadequacy, not to say dread, in the face of this velvety urbanity.

  'The problem begins,' said Harry, closing his eyes and talking as if the whole thing had nothing to do with him personally, but rather about some character in a much-told story, 'with the high probability that I shall shortly die, mmm?'

  And he smiled a slightly apologetic, but none the less charming, smile.

  Des Pearce was not good with dying.

  'Shall shortly die. Now, I think there is also a likelihood that I will go to Hell and that ... ah, I wish to avoid. But,' he pulled a battered notebook from his dressing-gown pocket and waved it at the clergyman who was beginning to wonder if he wasn't some ratbag atheist out to have some fun, 'but there are a lot of religions.' A pause. That dreadful stare. 'You see my problem.'

  'Well, you've got a bugger of a problem,' he said carefully.

  'I've had fifteen milligrams of Valium, I'm ashamed to say.'

  'And you're not a Christian?'

  'I was, but I think you'd call me lapsed.'

  Was he an atheist?

  Harry Joy folded his arms and Desmond Pearce was shocked to realize that his eyes were wet and that his face, half-hidden by his fringe, spectacles and moustache, showed real fear, that the dry rather indifferent tone had been adopted to get through a difficult subject.

  'Lapsed as buggery,' said Harry Joy and they both watched a cabbage moth alight on Desmond Pearce's leg.

  'Are you scared?'

  Harry nodded.

  'Of Hell?'

  'Mmmm.'

  'What have you done to make you think you'll go to Hell?'

  Harry shrugged.

  'Have you murdered someone, something like that?'

  'Good heavens no.'

  Des Pearce was feeling better now, better in the way you felt when you knew there was something you could actually do. 'Look, old mate,' he said, 'do you really think God is such a bastard he wants to punish you for all eternity?'

  'Why shouldn't he?'

  Des Pearce grinned. 'It doesn't make sense. It's like you wanting to torture flies, or ants.'

  'Yes.'

  'Do you?' he said, joking.

  'That's my point. People do. Look, I read the Bible in there,' he gestured into the hospital. 'It doesn't muck about. It says you either believe or you go to Hell. And look,' he took from his notebook a grey, much folded pamphlet he had found as a bookmark in the library Bible. It was titled: Memory in Hell. 'Listen to this: "As the joys of Heaven are enjoyed by men, so the pains of Hell be suffered. As they will be men still, so will they feel and act as men.'"

  'Harry, this was written in 1649.'

  'I know. I saw that.'

  'Well . .. it's a bit out of date isn't it? This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages.'

  'We're talking about eternity,' Harry said incredulously, 'and you're talking about three hundred years. That's a drop in the bucket. You can't just modify Hell. You can't change it.'

  'I haven't. The churches have.'

  Harry was beginning to get hives. He could feel them now. There was this tightening in his throat and this curious swell-ing which always preceded them. His fingers moved, as if he wanted to clutch something. 'How can you change your mind about Hell?' he smiled. 'If it was true once it must always be true. What about the people you sent there in the Middle Ages? Have they all been allowed to go home?'

  'It's the twentieth century,' Des Pearce grinned, but he felt irritated.

  'Are you saying there is definitely no Hell?'

  'I ...'

  'There is a Hell.' He said it with that lunatic brightness Desmond Pearce had seen in the eyes of Mrs Origlass who had seen a flying saucer land beside the railway line at Anthony's Cutting.

  'I can't imagine God wants to punish us, Harry.'

  'Ah, but maybe not your God, you see. Maybe,' Harry looked around furtively (just like Mrs Origlass, he thought, that darting movement of the head), 'maybe another god. Maybe it's a god like none you've ever thought of. Maybe it's a 'they' and not a he. Maybe it's a great empty part of space charged with electricity. Maybe it's a whole lot of things in a space ship and flying saucers are really angels.'

  (Landing beside the railway line at Anthony's Cutting.)

  'Look,' Harry turned over the pages in his notebook. 'I made a list of religions, and do you know what I think?'

  'What, Harry?'

  'They're all wrong.'

  'All of them?' he smiled.

  'Every damned one of them: Harry said, 'maybe: And felt the hives swelling up beside his balls, like twenty nasty flea bites on top of each other.

  'You must have done a lot of study: Des Pearce said, looking at the list and noting the absence of Animism and Zoroastrians before he handed it back.

  'Study: Harry waved his arms, dismissing the hospital, its garden, certainly its library. 'What good is study?'

  He made the gestures of an angry man and yet, Des Pearce saw, he still smiled charmingly.

  'A God for people who read books?' Harry was saying. 'No. Definitely not. I will tell you two things I know: the first is that there is an undiscovered religion, and the second is that there definitely is a Hell.'

  'Then,' Des Pearce held out his arms sadly, 'I can't help you …'

  But maybe I'm wrong. Don't you damn well see, I might be wrong. Tell me what to do …'

  'I can't.'

  'Tell me to believe.'

  'I can't.'

  'Well you better go,' and he stood up and shook his hand warmly, still smiling as if the meeting had been a pleasure for him.

  Desmond Pearce stood up. 'Is there a Heaven?' he asked.

  'Yes, yes, there's a Heaven. There's everything.' And then he slumped back in his chair, his hand on his forehead.

  Des Pearce had an almost uncontrollable desire to pick him up in his arms and comfort him, to carry him back to his bed, to give him absolution, to have him confess the sin that was eating at him. He would gladly have taken all Harry's pain in the palm of his strong plain hands and held it tight until it died there. But he also r
ealized, looking at this peculiarly frail figure in the cane chair, that Harry Joy could not give up his pain to anyone, that he would carry it with him to the operating theatre and to wherever place he went to afterwards.

  'Maybe I should have talked about cricket,' he said softly.

  Harry tried to smile. The peculiar tortured twisting of his face was to stay with Desmond Pearce for a long time for it was now marked by those unsightly weals which Harry called hives; they would haunt Desmond Pearce and make him wonder if he had witnessed a warning from God, a proof a mark signifying the existence of Hell.

  Dull grey bats swooped, darting, catching insects above his bent head. His stomach gurgled. In the yellow lighted wards off the verandah, nurses cast shadows and served unappetizing meals. He whispered. He leant towards her, talking quickly. The dew was already on the grass. Outside the garden walls the river ran sleepily carrying heavy metals past ships with humming generators. The air contained lead and sulphur but Harry noticed this no more than the heavy honeysuckle which, for Bettina, filled the evening air.

  'You'll miss dinner,' she said.

  His stomach gurgled again but he merely shook his head. He was not to have dinner tonight. Tomorrow was the day of his operation, a piece of information he could not bring himself to share.

  'I'm not hungry,' he said. He patted his moustache and hugged his knee. He rocked back and forth and rubbed his aquiline nose. His eyes were slightly feverish and he had the beginnings of a headache. There were so many things he had to tell her and now, at the last moment, she had to listen. And no, not about death or about Hell, he had stopped all that four days ago.

  'Are you listening, Betty?'

  'Yes.'

  He had talked about Joel for half an hour. He was talking about Joel still. He would not stop. Joel was not the man to run the agency.

  Joel was a bad leader. Joel was selfish. Joel was a good salesman, no doubt about it. Joel was lazy. Joel was not a good strategic thinker. Joel was too pragmatic. Joel wouldn't look after the staff. Joel had been very good with the Spotless people. On the other hand he had lost the margarine business. Joel was too flashy. He should try driving a cheaper car, something like the Fiat. On the other hand you could trust Joel. Joel would not lie or deceive anyone. If you had to sell the agency, Joel would not deceive you.

  Bettina wanted to tell him he was wrong. Was it only pride that prevented her? Was it simply that she couldn't bear her husband to know she was having an affair with someone he thought was a fool? Anyway, he was wrong. He was so wrong about so many things. Joel would deceive anyone if it suited him (she liked him for it, her un-goody-goody lover). But then, why did she keep on believing Harry about the rest of it? When he said Joel was a bad strategic thinker, maybe he was right. She believed he was right and she felt angry with Harry for having tricked her with his good opinion of Joel and then, just when it was important, withdrawing the sanction totally. Joel had always been the hot-shot. She assumed he was the hot-shot. Now he was saying the business couldn't survive with Joel alone and she would have to sell out the business to the Americans (fuck that!) if he died. If he died. He'd gone as pious and maudlin as his looney old mother.

  He took her hand and looked into her eyes (was he really going to die?) just as he had done when he courted her. He would not permit her eyes to leave his. They had talked about America and he had known the names of famous bars and that was a long time ago and she was Bettina McPhee and she was going to be a hot-shot.

  'You talk to me like I'm a fool,' she said.

  'You should know these things.'

  'You should have let me come into the business,' she said, 'when I wanted to.'

  'No.'

  It was their old argument, a bitter one for Bettina, now doubly bitter. (But he wouldn't die. Nothing would change on its own.)

  'We wouldn't have this trouble,' she said.

  Harry regretted not having found someone better than Joel to run the place, but he was not sorry that Bettina had never joined the business. He had offered her enough money to start a little boutique instead, but she did not want that.

  'I offered you money,' he said now, years later, on a veran-dah, the night before an operation.

  'You should have let me come in.'

  'No.'

  'I was more clever than Alex.'

  'You still are.'

  'I'm as clever as Joel'.

  'More clever.'

  'Then you were wrong.'

  'No.' he said, 'you didn't have the experience.' .But the truth was not that, it was painfully simple: he did not want his wife around the office undermining his dignity. He never thought about it like this, but when he imagined her there he became irritated.

  'I think,' Harry said, 'the thing to do would be to find an American buyer this year. Don't let them talk you out of it.'

  And then he went on, droning on about the provisions he'd made, in his will, the formula to sell on, who was best, and on and on about Joel. She stopped listening. She started to wish he damn well would die.

  'Do you understand that?'

  'Yes.' she lied. She was bored. She wanted to see Joel. If he dies, she thought, I will run the business and I will run it well and the only shame will be that he's not alive to see it. And then, shocked at her thought, fearful of its magical power, she embraced him.

  Leaning across the uncomfortable cane arm of the chair, a lump of loose cane sticking into her breast, she felt his fear. It was gnarled and sour and as she held his handsome head in her hands she found herself handling it as one handles overripe fruit, being careful not to squeeze too hard.

  He wasn't ready. He would never be ready. His mind was full of unfolded shapes and twisted sheets and it was too late to put them into order.

  He wrote his farewell note on a piece of cardboard torn from the box his slippers had come in. The address was printed on one side: to Bettina and Lucy and David Joy, 25 Palm Avenue, Mt Pleasant. His whole world was contained in those ten words written on grey cardboard. It seemed nothing, a life so pitiful and thin that it was an insult to whoever made him. It was not so much that he had achieved nothing, but that he had seen nothing, remembered nothing. A series of politenesses, lunches, hangovers, dirty plates and glasses, food trodden into carpets, spilt wines, the sour realization that he had made a fool of himself and done things he hadn't meant to.

  Yes he had been happy. Of course he'd been happy. But he had always been happy in the expectation that something else would happen, some wonderful unnamed thing which he was destined for, some quivering butterfly dream soaked in sunlight in a doorway.

  And now: only this sour dull fear, this lethal hangover.

  But he remembered. He remembered the day they went to the bank to sign the mortgage, a rusting gutter he had tried to fix, the lawn, all those weeds he had laboured over, the trees she planted (trees most painful of all), layers of wood, one layer for each year, the cambium, the sap, the roots and those other ones (What were their names? The ones near the bottom fence?) she had planted the first year they were married, the year she lost the twins and he went to see them in their humidicribs, each tiny feature perfect, and went home to change the sheets and blankets on the bed, wet with the broken water from her womb, and those flowers, like bottle brushes, were out then and he took them to her.

  They had beautiful clever children but there was no satis-faction in that, no pleasure to remember that he had bathed them and read them stories.

  'Now,' the Kodak advertisement said, 'before it all changes.' He had always admired the line but never taken the photographs. Just as well, just as well. Why would details make it any better?

  He could hardly write. He had to force himself to spell each word fully. He dug these words in soft cardboard: No farewell. Sorry. Operation today but could not bear to say farewell. Love you all. Fingers crossed. Bless ... Harry.

  He pressed the buzzer above the bed.

  'Envelope,' he asked, and waved the cardboard.

  Denise came
from the country. Her father and mother kept poultry. She was used to milking cows and finding eggs under bushes. She looked at Harry Joy with his ash-grey hair, his huge moustache and his piece of cardboard and couldn't imagine how he had been made.

  'Wouldn't you like some paper, Mr Joy?'

  'No.'

  His smile was so painful it made her want to be able to do something, anything. The smile was worse than a scream. In the matron's office she found a huge Manila envelope; nearly sixteen inches long. She brought it to him gently and watched him drop the tattered cardboard inside and write in large careful letters the names of his family.

  'Stamp,' he gave her money.

  'I'll fix it in the morning, don't worry.'

  'Now, please.'

  'O.K., stamp now.' And she went plodding off in her soft white slippers and stole stamps for Harry Joy. She covered the envelope with stamps, giving him the only thing she could give. She brought him a pill too and he didn't even ask what it was, but ate it almost greedily, his hand shaking and spilling water down his front.

  The pill soon reduced his world to a hazy blur, within which, in the sharpest detail, the seeds of Hell, long ago planted and recently nurtured, began to sprout and unfold their chrome-yellow petals.

  Under Pentothal, he tried to name things. He tried to name the garden but could not do it properly. As he went deeper the names were lost and there were only shapes, tied with yellow string, revolving on a Ferris wheel.

  He existed with white shadowy forms and sharp astringent odours. He had died again and he waited, fearfully, wondering. Lost, he felt nauseous, a floating feeling, his body without substance.

  He closed his eyes, conscious of being handled with mechanisms, an object in space, without time.

  Instruments were applied to him cruelly, without love.

  He was split by pains, small and sharp, long and monot-onous.

  He was pervaded by a full consciousness of punishment and the curious certainty of death enveloped him like a shroud.

  Sometimes he cried with self-pity. Frightened as a child, he begged for mercy.

  He was on a shuddering railway of merciless steel, voices echoed coldly. There were noises of silver wheels or distant thunder.