Peter Carey

by Bliss

She lay on her bed and looked at the ceiling. She rolled a joint and turned on the radio to block out the conspiratorial murmur which reached her from the room downstairs.

  You could not call it jostling, for they were all seated on chairs and the chairs did not move, except occasionally to scrape impatiently, or to see-saw back and forth on their precarious back legs; but yet what had happened with Joel and David was exactly like the jostling that takes place on the football field as two players position themselves for a ball that is still half-way down the field, an irritating elbowing sort of movement which can often flare up into a fist fight and then you have one player lying on the ground and the crowd wondering what has happened.

  They vied for Bettina's attention, consideration, and rarely spoke to one another directly.

  The subject, of course, was having Harry committed.

  Initially David had taken little part in these conversations but as the nights went on he became more and more astonished at what he saw as Joel's ineptness. He listened with astonishment to the decisions that were made. If the world was full of people like Joel it was going to be a very easy life, a lot easier than he had ever imagined. If this was a businessman (an American businessman) then business was a pushover. Were they all so sloppy-minded and stupid as this little frog with the beads of perspiration on his lip?

  But tonight he would not jostle. Tonight, he would hit.

  Like an out-of-favour general, David waited to be asked to take command. He was in no real hurry and the irritation he felt was not unpleasant. He secretly rolled his eyes and curled his lip as he listened to the latest reports of failure to have his father committed. They were children. They couldn't bribe their way out of a traffic offence.

  And now they were worried about money. It was pathetic to listen to Joel talk about money. He did it like a petty cash clerk who is two cents out. He was so frightened of spending money he could never, ever, hope to make any. He fretted. He brought bills to the table and threw them around.

  'But he's taken a suite,' Joel was saying, 'That's what I keep trying to tell you, honey. It isn't a room. It's a suite.'

  'I know the difference,' Bettina snapped. 'I've probably stayed in more suites than you have. What do you think he is? You expect him to stay in a room?'

  'How damn long will he stay there? You know the sort of wine he drinks.'

  'The Hilton's got a lousy wine list.'

  'Betty, that's not the point.'

  David stood up and walked around the room, looking carefully at the insect screens. There it was: an improperly closed insect screen on the front door. He clicked it shut with a small over-precise movement of his stiff left hand.

  'Joel,' he said.

  Joel had taken advantage of his absence to hunch over into a conspiratorial whisper, but when David spoke Bettina looked up and Joel was forced to acknowledge him.

  'Yes, Davey.'

  David rolled his eyes towards the ceiling. He could not stand being called Davey. It reminded him of a dog or a simpering little boy in a sailor's suit. He walked silently to the table where his mother held out her hand. He took the hand absent-mindedly but didn't sit down. 'Joel, when you come in you must shut the door properly.'

  'Sorry, old mate.'

  'The mosquitoes get in.'

  'O.K., sorry.'

  David placed his mother's hand carefully on the table and walked out to the kitchen.

  'He hates mosquitoes,' Bettina said.

  Joel pulled a face of ambiguous meaning.

  'He's just upset.'

  'Oh, sure!' Joel thought otherwise, but if he was going to say anything else he was stopped by David who re-entered the room firing insecticide into the air from two aerosol cans, one held in each hand high above his head. He circuited the room and started up the stairs, the cans still firing.

  'Put your hand over your drink,' Bettina said.

  Upstairs they could hear heavy footsteps.

  'Lucy doesn't like insecticide,' Bettina explained.

  When David returned to the room he was pleased to see that Joel had his hand over his drink, although he couldn't have explained why.

  David sat down. There was a silence. Joel lifted his hand off his drink and wiped the rim with his finger before drinking. The silence continued. David stretched his long legs beneath the table. He threw back his arms and yawned. He was loose and relaxed. The silence continued further. It was quite delicious.

  'I know how to do it,' he said.

  Joel clicked his tongue in irritation but Bettina was looking at him.

  'How?' she asked.

  'Oh come on,' Joel said to her, 'now you ask a boy: what does he know? Who do you want to listen to?'

  David shrugged. 'O.K.,' he said, 'I was only offering.'

  'Tell me,' Bettina said and Joel moved his chair angrily.

  'Well, you won't get anyone to commit him the straight way, that's the first thing.' His mother was looking at him in a way she had never looked at him before.

  'Go on,' she said.

  'Davey, I don't want to be rude,' Joel said. 'But you are seventeen years old. You are hardly an expert.'

  'Well you're not an expert either. That's why Harry is still in the Hilton.' He turned to Bettina. 'I know how to have him committed but it'll cost money.'

  'Ah well, there you are,' Joel said, ' ...money.'

  The petty cash clerk!

  'Five thousand dollars,' David said, enunciating the words very carefully and looking straight at Bettina.

  'Look,' Joel said to Bettina, 'do I have to listen to this.' He sifted angrily through the American Express and Diners Club bills that littered the table. 'Look at these.'

  A mental dwarf! Look at him stacking his little bills into a neat pile. David curled his lip and revealed a neat row of small white teeth.

  'I'll pay the five grand,' David said. He hadn't planned this, but it didn't matter. It was worth every cent of it.

  Look at Joel, his frog mouth wide in disbelief, and Bettina too, staring at him. But she, his mother, had a smile waiting to accompany her astonishment.

  'Where would you get five thousand dollars from?' Joel said.

  It was wonderful.

  'I want something,' he told his mother. 'When Harry is committed, let me drop all this university thing. I'm not going to go. I want to go into business.'

  'You're astonishing,' his mother said. 'I don't believe it. For God's sake,' she turned to Joel, 'don't you ever tell Harry about this, or I'll kill you.'

  'You must really hate your father,' Joel said to David.

  'No... '

  'Five thousand dollars,' Joel shook his head. 'That's a lot of money.'

  'I don't hate him,' David said, 'he's sick.'

  But Joel was sitting there, smiling smugly, shaking his head. 'Oh boy,' he said.

  'You're a hypocrite,' David said hotly.

  But Joel was smiling that big revolting red-lipped smile, as if he had won.

  'I didn't want to do it,' David told his perplexed mother, 'I didn't want to have to do it... ' And startled everyone by bursting into tears.

  He waited to be acted on, as he always had, having the pecu-. liar good luck to be at once passive and attractive, so that he had rarely been left to moulder by the roadside, but had been picked up, cared for, involved in schemes, .affairs, businesses, the conception of children. Even love had come to him like this, delivered to him where he stood in his wonderful white suit. Appearing to need nothing, he attracted everything, women in particular, who found in him something feline, graceful, as slow and sensuous as a snake.

  He waited and doctors came to him. He said nothing to them of his pains. He knew their game and played it and they went away. In those first few days he felt, like the plotting members of his family, that he was on the brink of something new, although in his case he did not anticipate improvement, but the reverse.

  Yet the days passed and nothing happened. He watched the ugly goods yard beneath his window and looked out over the whole ex
panse of Hell which lay under a poisonous yellow cloud. The doctors ceased coming. The phone did not ring. Actors came and went. They carried food, emptied ashtrays, vacuum-cleaned the floor and made the beds. Their performances were lack-lustre, their eyes dull. They were thinking about other things they would rather have done. They did their jobs and would not talk to him.

  This had never happened to Harry Joy before, and it was only happening now because the whole hotel knew about the madman in room 2121. There had been conversations between doctors and management, management and family, and so on. You cannot keep secrets in a big hotel. The staff treated him politely, but with great caution and great reticence.

  He bought himself little treats, like his family: magazines, flowers, candies, Premier Cru Bordeaux wine. He had more white suits made and ordered an exercise bicycle which was delivered by two youths who giggled before and after entering the madman's suite.

  The pain was continual. A tightness across the chest produced some invisible steel bands so he could hardly breathe. He drank heavily to eliminate the visions of his fam-ily. But somehow, it seemed, he could not get drunk, or not drunk enough, for they remained before his eyes and would not go away.

  It was in this painful mood that he at last telephoned Krappe Chemicals, but not, one would guess, having any great faith in Goodness, but simply to find a diversion, a person, some action that would take his mind away from the razor-blade tortures of Hell.

  When Adrian Clunes, Marketing Director of Krappe Chemicals (Consumer Products), was summoned to meet Harry Joy at the Hilton, he did not ask why. He assumed he was at the Hilton because he had left his wife. (Everyone had been waiting for it.) Adrian was surprised and pleased that Harry had turned to him.

  All he said was: 'When?'

  'Whenever you like. How about today?'

  'I'll be there at one.'

  And at exactly one o'clock Adrian Clunes slouched through the door in his donnish uniform of grey slacks and leather-patched tweed sports coat, a style only made possible by his air-conditioned car. He dumped his unfashionably large briefcase on the middle of a table, pushed his round tortoise-shell spectacles back on to his slightly melted nose, and clapped his hands together in the manner of one about to get down to hard work.

  'Well,' he said, squinting across at Harry who was reclining in a white towelling dressing gown. 'This is a jolly nice place to be doing business. What are we going to do? Drink champagne?'

  Adrian Clunes, as is obvious enough, was English. He had not, originally, made a thing of being English but finding himself admired for it, he had ceased trying to hide it. His Englishness gushed from him untempered and brought him a reputation for an intelligence he did not possess.

  'Nice dressing gown,' he said quizzically.

  'I'm having a new suit made. I tore my trousers.'

  There was a flatness about Harry Joy he had never seen before. The man looked dull. Even his voice seemed to have become tighter as if there was a constriction in his throat. He was taking it hard.

  'Beer then,' he said, 'if there's no champagne.'

  'I got a special fridge,' Harry said mournfully. 'They have these damn silly little self-service things full of rubbish. Would you like San Miguel?'

  'Thank you.'

  Harry walked to the bar slowly and then poured the beer slowly; then he seemed to forget why he had done it. He sipped the beer himself and put it down on the bar.

  'I didn’t want to talk on the phone,' he said, 'or in the office.'

  'Are you drinking alone?'

  Harry looked at the beer and then he poured another one which he handed to his guest.

  'They can all go to hell,' Adrian Clunes said, collapsing into one of the Hilton's low chairs.

  'I'm not going back there today. Let them stew,' he said. 'Let's have a nice lunch.'

  Harry leaned against the bar and played with his San Miguel. He did not bother about who Adrian Clunes was, although he remembered with some sadness they had once, somewhere, enjoyed each other's company.

  'Jolly nice beer,' Adrian said with froth on his big lips. 'Why don't we go somewhere and have dozens of oysters.' He giggled and freckles jumped around on his face. He was shocked with Harry Joy. He would not have thought it pos-sible. 'God it's nice to get into the city, Harry, it's so horrible out there. It is ghastly. They live on curried egg sandwiches! What a disgusting thing to do to an innocent egg. They don't even taste of curry.'

  Harry Joy's face expressed nothing.

  'Come on,' Adrian said, 'let's go to Milanos and terrorize Aldo.'

  'Adrian, I can't have you as a client any more. I have to fire you,'

  'Well, I'll pay for the lunch.'

  Harry came to sit opposite him. Their knees (Harry's bare, Adrian's flannelled) nearly touched. 'No,' he said with a feeling of unreality, 'I'm serious.' But all he could think about was the nights he had gone on drunks with Adrian Clunes and ended up at the Spanish Club, drinking vodka at three in the morning. 'I'm serious,' he said again. 'It's not you. It's the products.'

  'Is this what you got me here for?' Adrian put his beer down slowly and it made a sharp clink when it touched the low glass-topped table. He started to wipe the beer froth from his top lip and then, half-way through the motion, stopped. He whistled and a little froth sailed through the air.

  'Holy Jesus,' he said quietly. 'You're serious, aren't you?'

  'Yes.' No he wasn't, no he wasn't. His chest hurt.

  'You got me to drive twenty miles so you could fire me. I came here to jolly you up because I thought you'd left your wife.'

  'Why would I leave my wife?' Harry said narrowly.

  'No reason, that's all I thought.'

  'Seems a funny thing to think. We've been married eighteen years.'

  'Yes, now you mention it. It's just what I assumed.'

  Their chairs were low, designed so that matrons would not have to reach far for their handbags. The two men, knee to knee, looked slightly ridiculous.

  'You are here to be fired,' Harry said coldly.

  'Holy Jesus. You're mad.'

  'No.'

  Adrian lifted a bushy ginger eyebrow. 'Are you?'

  'No,' said Harry Joy but looked too cunning when he said it.

  'You've landed a competitive account. You got General Foods!'

  'No.'

  'Well why are you firing us?'

  'I have evidence,' Harry Joy said slowly, 'that three of your products cause cancer.'

  'Oh, shit ...'

  'You deny it.'

  'Of course I don't deny it. For Christsake Harry, it's been going on for years. It's been in the papers. The tests in Amer-ica. You remember.'

  'Ah, those tests. Those tests didn't mean anything. They used too much saccharin.'

  'Oh, Harry, Harry, Harry.'

  'What do you mean: Harry, Harry, Harry? That's what you told me. Or somebody,' he said levelly, 'who resembled you.'

  'Harry, you know and I know that's the company line. No one believed it. We all had to pretend we believed it.'

  'You don't deny it?'

  'Deny what?'

  'You make products that cause cancer.'

  'Oh shit ...'

  'Come on.'

  'Of course not.'

  'Then,' Harry Joy said standing up, 'you're fired.'

  'You're impossible,' Adrian Clunes said at last. 'People like you don't exist. You cannot exist, Harry. You handle our business for ten years and then you… Look, think about it. Consider it. You make 17½ per cent of two million dollars. Every year. What do you gain by resigning it?'

  He put his head in his hands. 'The rest of us went through all this seven years ago.'

  'I just found out.'

  'Oh, rot and rubbish.'

  'I just found out. I won't do it.'

  Adrian Clunes sighed and stood up. He walked to the bar and brought back more beers. He filled Harry's glass and then his own. When he sat down again he was laughing.

  'It's impossible,' he said. He li
fted his beer. 'To Harry Joy, the newest, most impossible idealist in the world. Laugh, damn you,' he said, 'it's a joke. Oh, God help me, don't be miserable as well. Look,' he walked to the phone and picked it up. 'If you can throw away money I can help you throw away some more.' He ordered Bollinger and oysters.

  'Now,' he said to Harry Joy, putting his arm around his shoulders, 'do you feel better?'

  'A little, yes.'

  They drank beer and waited for the oysters and champagne.

  'Ah,' Adrian said, as he squeezed lemon juice over the flinch-ing oysters, 'bloody marvellous oysters in this country. You know, Harry, where are you going to draw the line? If you fire us, you'll have to fire all your clients.'

  Harry was feeling better. He didn't believe a word Adrian Clunes said. 'Oh yes,' he said sarcastically.

  'Harry, you're astonishing. You're a child. I can't understand how you've survived so long. Listen, they release something like eighty thousand totally new organic compounds every year. They're not properly tested. God knows how many cause cancer. Cancer takes years to show up. The whole of the Western world is built on things that cause cancer. They can't afford to stop making them. For Christsake, look at your client list. Mobil have benzine in petrol which is carcinogenic. Firestone use it making tyres too. We use saccharin, and even if we switch across to cyclamates instead, that's carcinogenic. ICI make dieldrin which is carcinogenic and that mob, your dry-cleaning client, use carbon tetrachloride which is the same. And every time an announcement is made that something causes cancer, it makes people less worried because they can't believe that half the things they breathe and eat are carcinogenic. And there are you,' Adrian rested, breathless, 'resigning our business because we use saccharin.'

  Harry sipped his champagne. He smiled. It was the smile of a man who is smart enough to know when he's being bull-shitted to.

  'You don't bloody believe me,' Adrian Clunes said in astonishment. 'Look at this man. He does not believe me.'

  He leapt up from the table. 'I will damn well prove it to you.' His voice was high-pitched. 'I will prove to you how bad it is, and how piddling you are being. What you are doing,' he went to his briefcase, 'is nothing.'

  He pulled a map from his case and spread it on the floor.

  There: before him: the actual map of Hell. Harry did not need to be told. He looked at the colours, the hot red centre, the vermilion, the crimson, the hard industrial orange, the poisonous yellows radiating out from its hot centre.