Bliss

by Peter Carey

  'Why can't she talk to me herself?'

  This wasn't like Alex, this driving insistence. They were going to steal his name and leave him with the name of a flop and failure.

  'There are two Harry Joys on the Social Welfare computer,' Alex said, 'and they want to reject one of us as fraudulent. So I suppose you could say, the hour has come.'

  'That's you. You're fraudulent.' But you could hear the weakness in the voice. You could hear, already, the surrender.

  'Mrs Dalton thinks you're being difficult.' There was no nastier threat that could be made in the hospital. There was only one thing that happened to difficult patients. Alex, some of his old humanitarian principles still weakly showing, felt momentarily guilty. 'Come on, Harry,' he said, 'please, for old times' sake.'

  Harry!

  There was a silent lake around the island of the mistake. Had they been dogs they would have scratched themselves and looked at the ceiling.

  'I'll think about it,' Harry said, but he was already beginning to embrace the pale, shuffling unhappiness of an Alex.

  There was considerable pressure on him to shave his mous-tache and adopt a different style of dress but he made excuses. He had made a silly decision and as time went on he resented it more and more. Only rich men seek salvation by giving away the trappings of power. If a poor man has a car, he clings on to it. If he has a penny he doesn't throw it from him. He dreams of making a fortune, having a good name. And here, he had given away the privilege of being Harry Joy, and the minute it was done, signed and sealed and tucked away in the computer, he was sorry. While he had still been the legitimate Harry Joy some power was attached to him and even if they had given him the Therapy he would still have been Harry Joy.

  But once he was an Alex everyone knew he was a crumpled thing, a failure, defenceless. Three silk shirts were stolen from him and were worn, brazenly, in his presence.

  He sat in the sunshine with Nurse and took over the pen for him when his fingers were cramped.

  'A dog is a funny thing the way it trots along,' Nurse would say, and Harry would write it in the book. 'It could put its head up high and its tail, too. Then there are other dogs who walk with their noses down and they make me laugh too. I was in Cooktown and there was a fellow there with a black dog I used to feed scraps. I forget its name. Now, cats... ' and he would move on to the next subject and Harry Joy, wearing his pyjama jacket, would bend over the notebook and write as neatly as he could.

  In the afternoons, on the days when Nurse had not been 'done,' they would go the rounds of the traps, as Nurse called it, checking on what memories had been stolen. One day they found someone had written 3/10 in a book, and then reburied it.

  The new Harry Joy conferred with Alice in her office and ordered the old men about. The new Alex heard him and was jealous. He envied his loud happy laugh, the way he threw back his big balding head and just laughed, laughed and laughed as if there was nothing in the world to worry about, no pain, no agony, no indecision, no one stealing Nurse's memory from his head and his holes in the ground.

  They had authority over him. They made him sweep the concrete paths and he did it. They tried to feed him like an Alex. They did it for sport. For their amusement. They brought him big doughnuts and laughed at him when he pulled faces. He told Nurse the food was full of poisons. He told him everything he had learned from Honey Barbara and Nurse insisted it be written in the book even though it wasn't a memory because it would be, should be, a memory the next day, and therefore should be entered. He did not tell the new Harry Joy about the poisoned food in case they decided to give him Therapy. He wrote Honey Barbara's rules in Nurse's book, paying particular attention to her thoughts on paranoia.

  Hunger, lethargy, and the anger he had not yet recognized came to be his constant companions. His shoulders were permanently rounded, his chest hollowed, and when he walked down the concrete paths beside the wings he shuffled in his slippers like a defeated man.

  Seeing him shuffle around the place his enemies made the mistake of thinking him permanently defeated. Yet a small revolution was brewing inside the stooped man known as Alex, and depression and lethargy were probably as important for its proper conclusion as optimism might be at a later time.

  The change which would, anyway, have come, was accelerated by the arrival of the formidable Mrs Martha Duval, who was not to be denied her husband by something as ineffectual as a bribed Social Welfare clerk. She arrived on a Wednesday morning and was, shortly after lunch, introduced to a person Mrs Dalton claimed was her husband. She declared this person to be none other than Harry Joy.

  More officers of the Department of Social Welfare were called. Interviews were conducted. And finally, from the far corner of the garden, the real Alex Duval was somehow unearthed and presented to his wife in the bitumen courtyard in front of Alice Dalton's office.

  Social Security men stood around holding their clipboards and Mrs Dalton attempted to usher various select people into her office, but they all stood their ground, watching in terrible fascination as the false Harry Joy began to moan. He pulled at his moustache and gnashed his teeth. He sat on top of one of the old men and pissed in his pants. He rolled across the bitumen and bit Jimmy on the ankle. He curled into a ball and wailed.

  All he could see was a great grey cat with a crayfish clamped on his back. There was a loud crack as he broke a claw from the body. The crayfish felt like steel pins. He rolled up beneath the kitchen window and moaned, while the crayfish shrieked into his ear.

  There was no getting away from the fact that he was an imposter. Jim and Jimmy lifted him up and carried him to the building known as 'The Foyer' where he was declared sane and returned to the custody of the large motherly woman who was his wife.

  Harry Joy returned to the room he had shared with the imposter. He lay in the small bed and ate an apple. His eyes were dark with hurts and cunning: envy, fear, jealousy, rage, all showed their colours.

  Alice Dalton arranged the vases on the table. Normally she kept the vases separate from the cups, saucers, bowls, teapots, coffee-pots and so on, but tonight, she put them all together as if she wished to concentrate their power, to intensify their colour. There was a gayness, a girlishness about the work of Clarice Cliff with its bright colours, its stylized little houses and trees and, also, an optimism about the mechanical future suggested by those strange triangular handles and spouts which had first been marketed under the 'Bizarre' name as early as 1929. Now, perhaps the optimism did not appear to be well founded and was, therefore, all the more appreciated.

  It was Mr Harry Joy who had pointed all this out to her, and he had been able to talk for hours about those triangular handles and their significance. They had sat here, in this very room, their knees almost touching, and there had been a sense of almost breathless discovery, and while they had not become lovers everything was laid out, like a feast, and they were merely arranging the table decorations and putting out the place names, the final little touches, so that when the feast began it would have been a splendid thing, not only satisfying to the baser appetites but to the higher senses.

  But he was gone, snatched from her, and she was bereft. She knew it was, in one way, her fault and that she had been unprofessional. She had tried to cheat the computer. She was ashamed as well as angry. It was unthinkable that she should be so unprofessional. It would be spoken of. Mr da Silva might hear of it, and although he would not and could not do anything, or even say anything, his unsaid criticism, his disappointment, would cause her pain.

  For Alice Dalton's great pride was in her business abilities, her talent for facing unpleasant facts. No one knew what it was like to run a place like this. Those who criticized could not have done it. In sheer administrative terms, it was as complex as a large hotel. They criticized her for her lack of feelings, but they did not see her feelings, not her real feelings, and so they could be surprised on those rare occasions when sentiment gushed forth from Alice Dalton in a great wave as she wept and held so
me unfortunate whose mind was filled with shards of madness.

  Twenty years ago, as a young nurse, she had been very different. She had tried to believe that there was no insanity, merely a lack of love or understanding, and this could be remedied, her love given, her love returned. Perhaps para-doxically she also believed the world of the mad to be at once more intense and more beautiful and therefore, romantically, envied it.

  She had had a lonely youth. She had read poetry and novels and when she learned to drive had avoided squashing the cane toads that gathered on the roads at night. She had released blow-flies trapped against the glass and was attracted to psychiatric nursing as soon as she knew such a thing existed.

  And yet it was to prove too much for her: this dull, grey piss-soaked world of the mad where people did not get better or worse and where no amount of moist-eyed love seemed to do anything but invite rejection and derision.

  At twenty-one she had a complete breakdown and was admitted to hospital. It was here, at last, that she was to develop her attitudes towards mental illness, her list of unpleasant facts. She grasped the nettle of commerce. She felt herself grow strong, and when she returned to nursing her superiors felt her to be mercifully free of the romanticism that had afflicted her before.'

  Alice Dalton had become objective.

  She had never been a feminist. She was too much of an authoritarian to believe in any sort of equality. And while those around her came to regard her as strong, while they stepped out of her way, as she gathered power and influence, she craved to be recognized as a poor weak woman by a strong and sensitive man.

  Yet such men rarely came her way. Mad people, she dis-covered, were not normally very bright, were more likely to be poor than rich, and were less likely to be sensitive (in her definition of the term) than sane people. Her marriage to the schizophrenic Henry Dalton lasted two weeks, and while she cried at his funeral, something inside her had acknowledged his suicide as beneficial to both of them.

  The nights then were long and lonely and she felt it was not unreasonable for her to have Mr Harry Joy and she had expected more sympathy from the Department of Social Welfare. She arranged the Clarice Cliff and wiped the slightly dusty lid of the 'Bizarre' sugar bowl. She wished she had been alive in 1929, working for Clarice Cliff and her girls at the pottery, painting gay scenes, travelling to London to promote their wares, wearing artists' smocks and smiling at the' camera.

  Did they meet men on their visits to the capital? Or were they too left alone as she was, at eleven o'clock at night, with this... itch. She did not wish to ring for Jim or Jimmy. With her finger, she began, but in the end it was always the same no matter what the feminists said about masturbation and the clitoris, had always been the same, always would be. There was a hole. A damn hole. An aching emptiness that had not yet revealed itself, not yet, and for the moment, this moment, she could always delude herself into thinking that the final humiliating need to press the buzzer for Jim or Jimmy could be avoided. In her mind Alice Dalton had a mental picture of herself as something quivering, vulnerable, glisteningly pink: a garden snail without its shell.

  Harry Joy watched Nurse walk towards him. He was a dis-tinctive figure. He had no hips and no arse. He kept his trousers done up tightly with a rope belt but it still looked as if his backside had been stolen from him and when he arrived at the bench and turned to sit down there would be a big empty sack of material hanging from the back of his belt.

  Nurse called Harry by the name of Mo because, as he said, 'Anyone with a mo like yours is called Mo, always have been and always will be.'

  'Good news for Mo,' he announced and placed a crinkled brown paper parcel on the bench between them. He made no invitation to open the parcel. Harry stared at it and looked away.

  'Mo is getting out,' Nurse said provocatively.

  'How?'

  When it came to answering questions, Nurse always liked to take the Scenic Route rather than the Freeway. 'To survive in this place,' he said, 'you've got to be mad as a spider on a thirty-dollar note. Are you mad?'

  'No.'

  'No, you're not mad. You won't survive. See,' he indicated the garden with outstretched hands, 'this is my job here. It's my work. I've got my notebooks, all my memories. This garden is like my brain, full of memories. All my little rabbit burrows, full of memories. But look at you!'

  Harry's trousers had food stains on them. His pyjama coat was filthy. The left-hand slipper had been stolen and replaced by an odd one. He looked cowed and rat-like.

  'You've got your buttons in the wrong holes.'

  Harry redid his buttons.

  'There. That's better. You're a good-looking fellow.'

  Harry grinned coyly.

  'Sit up straight. There you are. A good-looking fellow.'

  'You should have seen me when I had my suit.'

  'Forget your suit. Why are you always talking about your suit? You don't need a suit.' Nurse was shaking his cupped hands up and down. 'She's a lonely woman,' he said, 'and you're a good-looking fellah.'

  Harry didn't understand. 'You sweety-talk her and... ' he raised his eyebrows and grinned lasciviously. 'You know what to do.'

  'She won't.'

  'Yes she will. Look,' Nurse dropped his voice to a whisper although there was no one nearby, 'they steal your slippers and your shirts. I can't look after you all the time. I'm too busy. You wait, they'll come and give you Therapy next time you lose your slippers. They'll take your faces and your pictures.'

  'Don't talk about the black.'

  'Alright then, but... '

  'She'd never look twice at me,' Harry said, 'she hates me.'

  But Nurse was grinning and shifting around inside his trousers. He thrust the brown paper parcel into Harry's lap. 'There,' he said, 'open it.'

  The parcel contained one pair of shoes, one silk shirt, toothpaste, aftershave and hair oil.

  'Californian Poppy,' Nurse said holding the bottle of hair oil with a tenderness that Harry Joy had once displayed towards bottles of French wine.

  Harry's trousers were smudged with his attempts to use soap on them, but his shirt was magnificent, silk without blemish. His shoes shone. His teeth sparkled. And yet she had chosen that the interview should be across the desk and not in the comfortable armchairs that surrounded the flower-burdened coffee table. She was still in mourning for the imposter. She rocked back and forth in her squeaking chair while fish swam in the aquarium behind her head and she played churches and steeples with her short-fingered hands.

  He sat on the edge of his chair and smiled and nodded, raised his eyebrows, inclined his head politely and, when his nose ran, had a pressed handkerchief to wipe it with.

  'You will never be the real Mr Joy,' she said. 'I'm sorry. I know that's unfair, but it's true.'

  There was a silence. Harry gave her a sly grin.

  'There is something, don't you think, about successful men that is immensely attractive, a certain lack of desperation.'

  He pushed his shoulders back and let his arm hang loosely.

  'I have been reading my back issues of Financial Review, and look, here he is.' She pushed a tom piece of newspaper across the desk (there was no chance for fingers to touch) and withdrew to be closer to her fish. 'Not a good likeness though. Some people take good photographs,' she said. 'My late husband never had a good photograph taken. I regret it now. I always meant to commission a portrait. If you're trying to butter me up with that silly grin you might as well forget it. I can't afford to let you out.'

  He rubbed his face, as if slapped.

  'And don't try running away.' She took off her pink spec-tacles and cleaned the lenses with a yellow cloth. 'If you try, Jim and Jimmy will bring you back.'

  'The boys in white,' he joked weakly.

  'Sometimes they wear white, sometimes they wear grey,' she said contrarily. 'Sometimes they wear shorts and white socks and sometimes, should you try in the ·middle of the night, I must warn you, they wear nothing at all. Mr Duval,' she sighed, and
while Harry Joy was still flinching from this insult, repeated it: 'Mr Duval, I try not to have favourites. I try not to have personal dislikes, but I'm afraid I do not take to you.'

  'I'm sorry.' Surely many romances grew from such unpromising beginnings.

  'It is not your fault. You have an unfortunate manner and you are, of course, sick, so it would not have occurred to you how inconsiderate your request is.'

  'I'm sorry.' He would begin again, on the right foot this time.

  'You don't have to apologize all the time. That's exactly the sort of thing I mean. If you apologized less you might listen more. Then you would ask me why your request was inconsiderate and then I would have told you.'

  'Please tell me.'

  'I'm not sure that I want to any more.'

  'Please, Mrs Dalton.' He summoned up all his reserves of confidence. He had once been told he looked like the God Krishna.

  'The nature of growth industries,' she sighed, 'is often cyc-lical. There is under-supply and then, next thing you know, everyone is on the band waggon and there is over-supply. So from a shortage of beds we go to a surplus of beds and people like myself, pioneers in the business, are the first to suffer.'

  'But in time,' Harry said (here was his chance to establish himself as a man of intelligence), 'it is bound to pick up.'

  'Ah, in time!' she said bitterly. 'In time. But will I still be in business 'in time'? Those nasty little worms in Social Welfare expel my patients or put their clients into the cheapest place they can find. And believe me, there are some very cheap beds being offered, not the luxury we have here. Even the cancer patients don't make up the shortfall.'

  'Cancer patients? Here?' he asked. She was softening. He raised his eyebrows with great interest. Ah, he told himself, you greasy genius!

  'They become quite upset poor dears. I advis~ you, by the way, to stay well away from L Block. They can become very violent while they've still got their strength, although as anyone knows, it's their own fault.'