Peter Carey

by Bliss

  'Thank you,' he said, sitting forward, 'thank you.'

  As she turned the car Bettina knew that no one would understand her, turning around to look for the woman her husband liked fucking. But no one ever did understand that Bettina would sacrifice everything for this deal. They had never understood her ambition, not her bug-eyed father, not her languid husband, not even Joel had understood what it meant to her. No one later on would understand either. They would never know what weight she had put on it. They never saw an advertisement the way she did, nor did they have her glittering visions of capitalism which she merely called by the pet name of New York.

  She would rather not have the complication of Harry's girl, but it was only a detail so she did not mind looking for her either. She had decided not to be jealous and when she had decided something like that she always had the strength to stick to it. She could isolate whole areas of the brain and mentally amputate whole organs if that was what was needed to achieve what she wanted.

  She had decided she did not want to fuck Harry or Joel. She had decided that she had no need to fuck anybody. She did not fuck Harry because it was now impossible, and Joel because he was too mediocre to consider, and no one else because life would become too complicated and it would only get in the way. So she had disconnected herself, and it was detectable already in the way she kissed Harry and even in the way she walked: the signs of celibacy, subtle, delicate, would show themselves to people who shook her hand or passed her in the street.

  She did not mind looking for the girl. Which is not to say that she was totally free of jealousy or that she wasn't hurt by Harry’s anger and irritation. But as she prowled up and down the factory-lined streets, while Harry questioned rows of workmen having sandwiches on the footpath, she was as conscientious as she could be. In the end, however, she could not stop herself from suggesting they give up and go home. It wasn't that she was frightened of finding Honey Barbara, or even that she was bored.

  She just wanted to show Harry her ads.

  PART FIVE

  Drunk in Palm Avenue

  The house was in disarray. Harry had always liked it neat: the grass trim, the floors polished, the magazines in their rack, but today he was pleased to see it looking different. At least there was some external sign of change. There was a mattress on the floor in the living room (Joel – he won't go home) and another upstairs folded against the wall (friend of Lucy's). There were empty tins everywhere and, on the front lawn, an ancient Cadillac with a crumpled tail fin (some nonsense Lucy's going on with: tell her to shift it). The back garden was high with weeds (had to fire the gardener) and Bettina glowed.

  She was a hot-shot.

  'Let me show you ads,' she said. 'Let me show you ads.'

  'Where do I sleep?' he asked, looking around the blanket-strewn living room.

  'You have our old room.'

  'What about you?'

  'Don't worry, don't worry, it'll be alright. Come on, Harry, look at my ads.'

  He sat down at the table, his heart heavy with thoughts of Honey Barbara, while his wife stood up near the fireplace and presented him with some forty comped-up magazine advertisements.

  A comped-up ad is not a final ad. It is, technically, a rough. It is the sort of rough that is done when a client has no imagination or, more often, when the person doing the ad is too much in love with it to show it in any way that is really rough and does everything to make it appear finished, taking 'rough' photography and getting colour prints, ordering headline type and sticking down body copy in the exact type face (if not the correct words), carefully cut to give the appearance of the final paragraphs. And over all of this is placed a cell overlay, so that a comp ad, framed with white, mounted on heavy board, covered with its glistening cell overlay, looks more precious to its maker than it ever will again.

  But as Bettina said, presenting her work to Harry, 'It's only a rough.'

  For a moment Harry forgot his pain. 'Who did these?'

  'I did. I told you.'

  'I mean, who did the art direction?'

  'I did it all. I wrote them. I laid them out. I ordered the type.'

  He was silent for a long time, rubbing his moustache.

  Bettina stood at the end of the table, holding an ad upright.

  'You did it all?'

  'Yes,' she said.

  'Oh Bettina,' he said, 'I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.'

  She had dreamed of this moment for years and still she was shocked to hear the pain and remorse in her husband's voice. He was like a dead man's friend speaking to the dead man's widow.

  She did not need to ask him why he was sorry. It was damned right that he be sorry. But it was shocking. And embarrassing. She could not look him in the eye. She became frightened he might display weakness and weep. But it was right, he should weep for all those wasted years when he wouldn't listen to her.

  She did not regret the years. She valued them. She valued the strength they had given her. If she had spent the years working with him she would, probably, have had her skill blunted, her perfectionism tainted with pragmatism. There were no greater teachers than the Advertising Annuals she studied, no harsher critic than herself. If she had worked with him, she would have been good. But now she was not just good: she was great.

  'Don't be sorry,' she said. A cold, polished consolation she gave him, a hard-starched handkerchief for his tears. And anyway, she did not want to veil his eyes with tears or remorse and blubbering about the past. She wanted nothing to come between his eyes and the crystal clarity of the images in the advertisement. There was nothing in the past to discuss, only the future.

  'I'm really sorry,' he said slowly.

  'Don't be sorry.' She lined up three cardboard-mounted ads on the mantelpiece. 'Are they great ads or are they great ads?'

  She arranged them around him in a magic circle, along the couch, propped on chairs, along the skirting board. She did not intend a ritual. She was merely being practical. He stood in the middle of the circle and blew his nose.

  What he saw in those advertisements, in their shimmering reflections, was the possibility of safety. With advertisements like that you could make a lot of money. You could be rich and even, in a limited way, famous. You would be undeniably Harry Joy and there would be no one to take it from you. No one was going to steal your shirts or suits or shoes. If anyone tried to give you Therapy you could give them money. The principle was so simple, it delighted him.

  He did not, for an instant, forget Honey Barbara. He would find her. He would bring her here. She could be safe too. There were so many silk shirts here, so many suits.

  'When do these appear?' he asked Bettina.

  'They've been rejected. We can't sell them.'

  'We?'

  'Joel, me,' she still had the vulnerable air of the amateur. 'We.'

  The cretins couldn't sell them. Other morons couldn't buy them. He (money plus anger equals success) would sell them: He, Harry Joy.

  From nowhere, for no reason, an erection forced itself up sideways along his leg and he eased it upright, secretly smiling at Bettina. He wanted to fuck her, to celebrate their life, their power, their joys of freedom, fame, riches, safety, no Therapy, anything and everything.

  'I'll sell them for you, Bettina. They're beautiful ads.' He knew how to survive here. He stood up to hold her, to forgive her, to be forgiven, to congratulate her, to push his hard cock against her little stomach.

  But she made it a stranger’s embrace: all angles, bones and stiff hard lips.

  'Thank you,' she said.

  Honey Barbara would have understood this ceremony: the powerful circle of advertisements surrounding him.

  Had the neighbours been able to see the advertisements the way Bettina did they would have been in no way surprised. They knew that something decadent was going on in number 25 Palm Avenue and the only firm sign they had of it was this great derelict Cadillac parked in the middle of the nice neat lawn. Around this Cadillac they had watched Lucy and her new
boyfriend dance with wrenches and electric drills, but they did not see that as the problem, more as a symbol.

  It was a straight-laced suburb where people brought home alcohol in special little cases. And only the clink of two bottles as they went through their front gates gave them away. The children, what few there were, all had clean nails and in many houses they still said grace.

  Perhaps if they had stumbled into number 25 on this night at half-past six and found the stove unlit, the fireplace full of cold ashes and only two lights turned on in this big empty room where Harry and Bettina (madman and wife) stared at these cellophane covered mock-ups of advertisements, they might have guessed at their black magical powers, but they would not have seen. Few people in the world could see, perhaps fifty in England, eighty in America. Most of the people who made advertisements for a living could not see.

  Even Harry could not see what Bettina saw: the combination of all the complexities of a product, a market, competing forces, the position, the image, this writhing, fluxing, strug-gling collection of worms all finally stilled, distilled and expressed in its most perfect form, which, to Bettina's taste, was in one big picture and one single line of type running underneath it.

  But the neighbours could not see this witchcraft, nor could they ever understand what these advertisements meant to Bettina who sought, as the apotheosis of her endeavours, something as unbearably perfect as the English Benson and Hedges advertisements, which had, against all possibility of government regulation, produced a totally new language with no words, only pictures.

  As English society had broken slowly apart it had produced these wonderful flowers which grew amongst the rubble. But Bettina had never seen the rubble, merely these flowers, as exotic as anything stolen from a landscape by Rousseau.

  Bettina had known how to see advertisements since she was Billy McPhee's daughter living in her vibrating little room above the air compressor, which switched itself on and off throughout the long hot afternoons. And she had known then that one day she would be a hot-shot and this afternoon, at half-past six, she could not get the smile off her face. Her eyes crinkled and her large mouth could not keep in its place. Even Joel's arrival could not take the shine off her happiness. He, poor man, could not see advertisements, and failure had done bad things to him. She felt sorry for him. It was her fault, her bad judgement, that had brought him unstuck. She had given him a chance too big for him. Bettina was amazed at what fragile props held up some personalities, tiny twigs, a frail hope, an almost possible conceit, not enough, you would think, to hold the whole structure together until you pulled it out and you not only snapped the twig, you brought everything down around your ears.

  'Harry.'

  'Joel.'

  She watched them for animosity. She saw the glint in Harry's eye, a slight squint almost. She was not to know that when he squeezed Joel's hand he did it with a punishing viciousness, so she did not understand the red '0' of surprise Joel formed with his fleshy lips.

  'You look well, Harry.'

  'You too.'

  'Hospital doesn't seem to have hurt you.'

  'Done me good.'

  'You're feeling better?'

  'Yes, much.'

  'That's good.'

  But in the middle of this awkward exchange Harry noticed Joel's damaged suit. He had always admired the effort Joel put into his suits. Joel had an excellent tailor and he followed the most conservative lines and used only the best material. His suits were like his business card and people who did not really trust him still, somehow, could let themselves trust him because of his suits. For a man blessed with no natural taste, his suits were a triumph.

  Harry had already stooped down. 'What in Christ's name have you done to your suit?' The burnt fabric crumpled in his inquisitive fingers. It was pure wool and still it had burnt, right up one trouser leg, one arm, and half across one breast. It was a dark material, or he would have noticed immediately.

  'It's nothing, nothing.' Joel shook his head. 'Come on, stand up. Tell me your news.' And he walked away and drew up a chair at the table, shifting one of Bettina's ads to make room.

  Bettina winced. She winced for shame, not at Joel, but at herself. She knew about this burn. She did not know its details, but she knew. It was as if she'd been left to look after someone's cat and let it be run over or savaged by rats. She had not acquitted herself well with Joel.

  'What happened, snooky?' she asked softly.

  Harry heard the word and saw how Joel liked Bettina. He looked out of his tiny eyes as if he adored her. His fleshy face lit up when he talked to her. 'Ah,' he said gruffly, 'it was nothing.' It was obviously 'something' and Harry against his will, coaxed the story from him. He was worried that it would make Joel appear in too good a light.

  Harry moved another ad and sat down opposite him and Bettina, equally reluctant, did the same.

  'Well,' Joel said, lighting a cigarette, moving an ashtray close to him, offering Harry a cigarette, closing the packet and standing it neatly beside the ashtray. 'I was just crossing the road near the office, Harry. (Really it's nothing, don't worry) and this little kid, must have been about three, came running out of that big brown block of flats and an old man you often see him there sweeping the footpath – well not so old, a bit older than you, came out and this woman... '

  He stopped to draw on his cigarette and Harry noticed Bettina shift uncomfortably in her chair. She caught his eye. He didn't know why. He looked back at Joel.

  ' ...had one of those plastic buckets and she threw the bucket full of... I thought it was water but it wasn't...over the little kid. Ask me why?'

  He was staring at Harry challengingly.

  'Why?'

  'I don't know why,' Joel said. 'That's the terrible thing, but she did, and the old man starts yelling out in Greek. He must have been saying, it's petrol, it's petrol. He dashed over to pick the kid up and you see, he'd forgotten. He had... '

  Joel held up the cigarette.

  Harry hit his hand down on the table. 'No.'

  'Yes. Cigarette. In his mouth. They both went up.'

  'Shit.'

  'Burst into flames.'

  Harry shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut to eliminate the vision.

  'But it's alright,' Joel said, 'because I threw myself on top .of them and put out the flames.'

  There was a silence. Harry stared at his partner.

  He heard Bettina's voice say: 'Joel, that's bullshit.'

  He saw Joel look down at the table.

  He looked at Bettina who was now staring at Joel.

  'Joel?' she said.

  'Alright,' he said, 'it's bullshit. You don't have to say it's bullshit. I know it's bullshit, but Harry didn't know it was bullshit.'

  Harry got up to have another look at the suit. It was really burnt. This beautiful English pure wool was burnt. Behind the burnt wool he could see Joel's red flesh.

  'You've burnt yourself,' he said.

  'What the fuck. Who cares?' Joel said.

  Heard steps, running and suddenly he was being hugged.

  'Daddy.' It was Lucy, clinging to him, apologizing for not having visited him. She smelt like her grandfather, the late Billy McPhee. 'Daddy, welcome home.'

  Joel was taking off his burnt suit and dropping it on the floor. He looked tired and dejected, an artist scraping down a failed canvas.

  'Get out,' Bettina yelled at Lucy. 'Get out. I can't stand that damn petrol smell.'

  'This is my father,' Lucy said to a young man with broken teeth and a wizened face, wearing greasy overalls. 'Kenneth McLaren, this is my father Harry.'

  'Mr Joy,' said Ken.

  'Out,' said Bettina, gathering up her precious advertisements and removing them from this contamination. 'Outside.'

  Joel sat on his mattress in his underpants and rubbed antiseptic cream on his burns. It was getting cold. He gave his suit to Lucy.

  'Use it for rags,' he said. 'It's no good any more.'

  'Thanks, Joel,' Lucy said
.

  'You bring that suit back here.' Bettina dropped a pile of comped-up ads on the floor and ran across the room to grab the dark woollen bundle from her daughter's greasy hands. She stood in the middle of the room smoothing the suit out against her body. She lay the trousers carefully across the back of one chair and hung the coat on another.

  She walked across to Joel and sat down beside him on his mattress. 'Now,' she said, 'let's see what you've done with yourself.'

  Harry didn't know what to feel. It was like the aftermath of a war: everything shattered but people going about their lives with a certain optimism. He went up to his room and found his suits and shirts. He changed without showering and came down to find his wife sitting on the living room floor rubbing analgesic cream into the naked, shining, battery-fed body of his partner, well – not quite naked – his joke underpants were down around his pudgy hips and his burnt body gleamed in oil.

  Harry stroked the collar of his silk shirt and marvelled at the richness and variety of life in Hell.

  Bettina, as she explained to Harry later, no longer found Joel sexually desirable. (Harry didn't listen. He found it painful that she ever had.)

  Joel was no longer admirable and it was admiration (she called it love) that made her want to fuck people. It was a cold brilliant sort of emotion, this admiration, and was backed up, invariably, with the unpalatable tastes of self-doubt and inferiority. She had worried all her life that she was cold. She had never felt for her children what a mother is meant to feel. She had despaired at this coldness and criticized herself for it while at the same time she hated (literally) mothers who dis-played their maternal qualities in too obvious a way.

  But now, although she would never have used the word, and would have denied it vigorously if anyone had dared to suggest it, she loved Joel. She had not begun to love him until he had begun to fail and then, she believed, he became automatically sexually uninteresting to her. But it was only after he crashed, after he began to do these stupid, dangerous bizarre things to gain her respect, that she actually began to love him.