Peter Carey

by Bliss

  He was her responsibility. She had pushed him too far and now she would have to look after him. She rubbed the analgesic cream across his back. The burns were not too bad:

  'Ah, Betty, you think I'm a schmuck.'

  'You try too hard, baby.' Physically they were alike, stocky people from peasant stock.

  'You didn't have to say it was bullshit.'

  'No, no, I know. I'm sorry.'

  'Fucking suit. My best suit too.'

  'Never mind, never mind.'

  Harry watched this and felt jealous. It was the sort of jeal-ousy a man can feel towards a child at a woman's breast. Sitting at the table by himself he was able to see the emotion clearly and know exactly what it was.

  When David Joy arrived home with his two Big Macs at eight o'clock, his father was sitting by the fire. The sight of Joel's blubbery body stretched out at Harry's feet was as disgusting and terrible a reproach as any he had encountered in his nightmares. It was David's fault that Palm Avenue was like this. It was because he had paid money to have his father committed.

  Yet he was struck with contradictory desires about his crime, for although he was remorseful he was also proud. He wanted to confess, be forgiven, chastized, admired, under-stood, sympathized with, everything at once. He-wanted his father to see how grown-up he was but also to forgive him as only a father could.

  He was hurt, immediately, by Harry's lack of effusion in the greeting.

  'Which one is mine?' his father asked, leading the way to the kitchen table.

  'Both,' he said, although he had bought one for himself. He was starving.

  David imagined his father looked at him suspiciously. Certainly he was opening the Big Mac box distrustfully. But now he lifted the hamburger to his mouth, bit it, and, 'Oh, Christ!' spat half-masticated food all over the table.

  He was madder than when he went. There he was, his mouth half-full of old food, trying to smile at him.

  'It's poisoned. I nearly ate it.' Harry tried to explain. How could he tell his son that he had thought of Honey Barbara.

  'I didn't.'

  'It's not your fault.'

  'I didn't poison it,' David yelled, that dark hurt look all over his face.

  'I didn't say you did,' Harry yelled back and started laughing.

  'But I wouldn't do it to you,' David screamed. 'Don't you understand? I'll never do anything to you again. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.'

  Joel shut the door.

  It was after the war. It was a strange time. People's nerves were all shot to pieces. Harry stood and embraced his son who wept ecstatically on his chest.

  'Oh God,' he said. This was not an Actor. This was his son, in pain. He could feel the pain as keenly as any he had felt in Mrs Dalton's hospital. And he knew something like jagged glass was slicing at his son and hurting him, not some little boy's cut finger, but some great gaping wound. 'I didn't think you were poisoning me,' he said.

  'I didn't. I didn't.'

  'No, no, I know.'

  Everywhere the world seemed full of wounded.

  'I had you put away. I had you committed. It was me.'

  Harry heard him and believed him but it no longer mattered. It was the nature of Hell that Captives were made to hurt each other.

  'It doesn't matter,' he said, 'I don't mind. I forgive you.'

  Somehow the forgiveness seemed too off-hand to David who had yearned for something stronger. His father under-estimated him. He would not imagine, for a second, that his son had spent five thousand dollars of his own money, had taken risks, been more businesslike than Joel. His father did not know him.

  'So tell me,' Harry was saying, 'about this job.'

  'You're disappointed?'

  'No, not at all.' And it was true. He was even pleased that his son would not be a doctor. Doctors in Hell did evil work. He was pleased that his son wore a well-cut suit and that he could choose a maroon tie like that and wear it with a soft blue shirt. He liked the way his son held a wine glass and when he poured wine, as he did now, that he turned the bottle in his hand as he finished pouring so that it would not drip. His son was emotional, too full of pain, but that was probably a good thing too and it seemed more honourable to be like Nurse than to be like Mrs Dalton.

  David did not know how to tell him about the job. Looked at in one way the job did not sound very splendid at all. The idea of a Sales Representative for the Hughes Poker Machine Company did not exactly glitter in anybody's mind. It involved driving around the suburbs in a car and learning how to drink and not get drunk. But it was also a foot in the door of the da Silva organization. They had marked him, they hinted, for something big and it did not occur to him that what they had in mind was training for management in the organization's legitimate businesses. It still hadn't.

  It was the bigness he wanted to talk about, the ill-defined promised land of his future where he would not be afraid any more and where there was South America, New York, wide rivers, a future as dazzling and complicated as a Persian rug. And in its magical pattern there was now a new element, a new glow, a cast of a golden colour which suffused everything, the source of which was a character in a book he had read half of and would never finish. He was not interested in what happened to Jay Gatsby. He was only interested that Jay Gatsby should exist. And in all his dreams about the future he had added this element of Gatsby with his big house, alone, looking across the bay at night to the island of East Egg and the woman he loved. Yet in his dream, in its pinkest most sensitive comer, there was not a woman across the water at all: it was Harry Joy.

  'So tell me,' Harry said again, 'tell me about the great job. Do they give you a car?'

  To his eternal chagrin David told his father all about the car. He told him all the boring, predictable everyday details about the car. He even described the damned upholstery. And he talked about his salary, his boss, the machines he sold.

  'Wonderful,' Harry said, 'wonderful.'

  It was difficult not to be cross with him for being so excited at all the most banal things. This was nothing to be proud of. This was a car. A fucking Ford. These were things to be dis-gusted with, reasons to throw him out of the house. These were not reasons to be sitting there smiling and nodding.

  This was dross, dreck, brown paper camouflage.

  Yet they talked about this damned job for two hours, through two bottles of wine and now, as the second bottle finished, David teetered on the brink of telling him.

  'Well,' Harry said. He yawned and leaned back.

  It was not yet too late.

  'I think I'll go to bed.'

  'O.K.,' David said clenching his fist, 'Goodnight.'

  And sat alone with all those old dreams of Vance Joy's which have become such tawdry baubles that you might expect him, shortly, to abandon them completely. Yet he isn't going to give them up (these eyeless teddy bears) and they will finally lead him on to the Espreso de Sol and up to Bogotá, to a job as a waiter, to a wife called Anna, to his wife's brother's red Dodge truck, to the unlikely occupation of truck driver, which he will accept disdainfully, acting out his disdain by driving the muddy mountain roads from Bogota dressed in an immaculate white suit.

  Unknown to himself he became the romantic figure he had always wished to be, someone to swagger through one of Vance's stories with a cane beneath his arm.

  On the road of crippled trucks and miserable towns, his perfect cleanliness seemed almost magical.

  'What will happen,' they asked, 'if he has a flat tyre?'

  'He never has one.'

  There were no saints' medallions inside his truck. They looked to see. Perhaps he was a Communist. One day in the town of Armenia two nuns, coming upon him suddenly, crossed themselves.

  Then one night in the wet time of the year the long chain of stories he had so innocently begun brought a visitor to his door. His wife, now six months pregnant, was in bed asleep and he received the visitor alone.

  The man at his door was short and dark, a man with such a dark beard shadow that
David felt immediately sorry for him and, had he been receiving him in a restaurant, would have put him in a back table with his back to the window. The man had a long droll-looking jaw, small wire-framed spectacles on an almost Semitic nose, and very short hair. He had broad shoulders but he shrugged them humbly.

  He would not conduct his business in the doorway and forced, with a curious mixture of will and humility, David to invite him in. They sat in the kitchen. He refused a beer but accepted a coffee, holding his square hands around the tiny cup and speaking with a thin voice.

  David Joy found himself being asked to smuggle arms into the mountains. It was not put so clearly. It was circled around, prodded at, kicked, and in the end there was no doubt that the bulky wrapped unnamed thing their conversation kept brushing against was that.

  He began by adopting a superior air with the man but could not, for some reason, maintain it. Even the shrugging humility of his visitor seemed, at the same time, arrogant.

  Was he a spy? A provocateur.

  'Why do you come to me?'

  'That is your truck downstairs? You wear a white suit?'

  'Yes.'

  'We have no money,' the man said it softly as if this might be a compliment, an inducement, an advantage. It was ludicrous.

  'I'm a businessman. I only work for monei'

  The man smiled and shrugged. 'We have no money.'

  'I work for money.'

  He dipped his head. 'We have none.' And smiled.

  'You wish me to work for nothing?'

  'We did not think you would let us down.'

  'But who am I? Why do you ask me?'

  'You are el Hombre en el Traje Blanco -the man with the white suit.'

  'I am a businessman,' he said hopelessly. 'I am only inter-ested in money.'

  'But we have no money, you see,' the man said.

  'But it is dangerous. It is illegal.'

  'Of course,' he smiled as if he were making fun of himself, ducking his head and raising his eyebrows.

  'You have no money?'

  'We have no money.'

  'You could be a spy. A policeman.'

  'If I were a spy I would have offered you money. A spy would not expect a man to do it for nothing. They don't understand such things.'

  'And I do?'

  'Yes. Of course.'

  'But I am a businessman,' he said for the last time.

  When he had accepted the offer the man left and he realized he did not even know his name.

  That night he could not sleep. He tossed and turned and Anna became bad tempered and swore at him in a language he did not understand. He went and stood in the living room and looked at himself in the mirror. He was aware of the striking contrast between his appearance and the reality of his life. He looked dashing, interesting, even exotic, yet faced with local gangsters he had lacked the courage for anything more dangerous than being a waiter. There had been no rivers to cross and when the lightning played around the hills it brought only dampness and a nasty fungus which grew down the long back of his beautiful wife.

  Now he was thrilled to think that someone, through a misunderstanding, might think him brave.

  Standing in Bogotá, on the edge of his story, he composed one more letter to Harry Joy. Dear Daddy, he began.

  It was not the walk of city women, who, even when released from the hobble of high heels, still walk with invisible silk sashes tied between their ankles.

  Honey Barbara strode.

  She strode like women who can cross a creek by walking along a fallen log fifteen feet above the water, and do it with-out hesitation or any apparent thought. She walked as one accustomed to dirt tracks. The whistles of panel beaters did not affect her. She slung her saffron yellow bundle over her shoulder and strode down the street and they, seeing her, thought her haughty: her back straight, her head thrown back, her arms swinging. But she was not being haughty, she was merely walking.

  Walking was the best thing when you hurt. It was better than dope and better than eating. It was better than fucking and better than sleeping. You just emptied your mind of everything so that the inside of your head was like an empty terracotta jar and no matter what happened you kept it empty. You guarded its emptiness with your eyes and your ears and you did not even stop to consider where you were going. In this way you always arrived at the right place.

  She strode through streets filled with used-car yards, and others full of warehouses. She walked through department stores, a fish market, and along the wide rich streets at the bottom of Sugar Loaf. It was a fast walk, possibly six miles an hour. It brought her up those early gravel streets at the back of Sugar Loaf, where the rich houses end and where the crash of a famous developer left half-finished houses and unsewered blocks full of tall thistles and strangled with morning glory.

  Her feet welcomed the gravel. The gravel was like rain on the roof and she felt it and tried not to think about it, but she knew she was going up Sugar Loaf. She had known from the beginning. But she had tried not to know. She pitted her muscles against the mountain and felt them ache. Her feet were soft. Not soft by comparison with the panel beaters, for instance, but soft in comparison with their normal condition. The great pads of callus on her feet had gone white and spongey during her stay in the city. They were big feet, but perfectly proportioned, with high arches and curved heels. They hurt a little already, but it was not real hurt, not the hurt she really felt.

  She carried her bundle slung across her back. Her bundle contained a blanket, an alarm clock, a pair of baggies, two T shirts, an old sweater and a separate brown paper parcel full of her whoring clothes.

  She did not need anything else. She did not need to think where she would go, where she would sleep. She rose up above the coastal plain perhaps six inches in every step, a little higher, above the mangroves, the big brown ill-used river, the sapphire bay, and walked the unnamed streets on Sugar Loaf where the unemployed, hippies, junkies, and even the respectable poor lived amongst the smell of unsewered drains, half-buried shit, uncollected garbage, jasmine, honeysuckle and frangipani. Bananas grew untended and made their own jungles. Green plastic garbage bags lay in the grass with their guts spilling out. Morning glory tangled itself over rusting cars.

  Once there had been beds here to welcome her, but today the humpies were either gone or empty or filled with strangers who eyed her with suspicion. She had not been looking for them anyway. She had been looking for no one. She was merely walking, her head as empty of desire as a terracotta bowl.

  She strode through a paddock of tall grass, crossed the face of a small cliff wet with seepage, found a new road and began to walk downhill. She was breathing regularly but her eyes were slits.

  Down at the place where the bitumen began, she sat. She examined her feet: they were cut, but not badly. Her legs ached, but she welcomed that. The real pain was elsewhere and she didn't know what to do with it.

  She walked three miles to the Zen Inn and ordered an alfalfa tea. And although she should have felt soothed and at home in the Zen Inn, she did not. She was edgy and irritable when she should have been relaxed. They were her people. They had clear skins and good eyes. If she had wanted a fuck or just some warmth this was the place to be, yet it was nothing. She wanted to groan out loud. She could not even talk about her problem. How could anyone-understand that she loved an advertising man named Harry Joy.

  She bought some baked veggies and ate them slowly. She willed herself to taste them, to be thankful she was not eating shit anymore.

  When she left the Zen Inn she would have denied that she had made up her mind, but not that her mind had made up itself. She simply denied all knowledge of what her mind was up to. She wished merely to let it sort itself out and she would follow.

  In the city square she found a phone box. There was only one Joy in Palm Avenue and she memorized the street number.

  She crossed the square as it struck eleven. She stood in front of the huge glass-fronted street directory and turned the knobs cas
ually at first, as if merely looking at what streets the city had to offer. Finally she found Palm Avenue: another three miles.

  She did not stride so rapidly because this was a different sort of walking now. There was a drag in her steps which was produced not by tiredness but by knowing her destination and being frightened of it.

  Cars cruised beside her and tooted their horns as if wishing to escort her to Bettina's side:

  She did not approve of grass. It was a poison like any other poison, but she could not have been a whore without grass and she could not get her legs to Palm Avenue without grass. She dragged in rough lungfuls of the stuff, judging it to be very strong indeed. In the middle of the park her joint spluttered and glowed like a beacon.

  The streets she then walked along reminded her of a row of mausoleums she had once seen in a city cemetery, row after row of structures devoid of life. Even the trees seemed heavy and dull and she felt, as her bare feet fell softly on the concrete footpath, as if she was the only one alive.

  She turned the comer of Palm Avenue with a heavy heart. She had no plan. Dark house after dark house was bathed in the negative radiation of fluorescent street lights. She did not need Wilhelm Reich to tell her about Deadly Orgone Radi-ation. He might be the master of the theory but she knew what it really felt like. She nearly panicked and turned. She should not have been there. Her heart beat fast. She should have been heading back north, walking dirt tracks, have hard hands and clear eyes and be out at five every morning smelling the high flowers in the towering eucalypts.

  She stood in front of 25 Palm Avenue. There was no sign of life. But the Jaguar was in the driveway and she knew it was the car she had driven in and that Harry Joy was inside sleeping.

  She saw the Cadillac on the front lawn. It was, she reflected, more her style. She crawled into the back seat and there, surrounded by the dangerous perfumes of oil and petrol, she made a bed with her single blanket. She put her whore's clothes under her head and set her alarm clock for four a.m. Then she lay there, looking at the place where the night was blackest.

  He was shocked to recognize the sour stale smell of the bed he had once shared with Bettina. He had lived with that smell and never thought about it. Its smell must have once been comforting to him and he must have wrapped himself in it happily. But tonight it was unpleasant.