Peter Carey

by Bliss

  'No,' he said, 'it is necessary.'

  And he went to stand against the embankment with his hands behind his back. He stood before the unhappy soldiers like a man posing for the photographer in the square of a tourist town. The mud was not visible to the camera.

  'Come on,' he said, 'hurry up.'

  Miguel Fernandez did not wish to look at the body, but it was expected. As he walked towards the crumpled thing that had been a man he was not ready for the look of ugly surprise he would see on the dead man's face, nor did he know that one night nearly twenty years later, his son's wife would tell him the story of The Man with the White Suit. It was not quite the real story; it had become mixed with other stories David Joy had told that night.

  The story of the man with the white suit ends formally, always the same, with the sun coming out as he falls, and they say Pero era sólo una mariposa (but it was only a butterfly) que se volaba (flying away).

  The wrapper of a sweet confection delivered fifty-five years through time. But not even Miguel Fernandez knew that.

  Harry Joy found Honey Barbara in the morning, one hundred miles up Highway One, and had he been two minutes earlier or ten minutes later, he would probably never have found her at all.

  He brought the Jaguar to a stop in front of her and watched her run towards the car. At the passenger door, she recognized him.

  'I'm not coming back,' she said.

  'I know.'

  'I'm going home.'

  'I'll take you.'

  She opened the door and looked at him, hesitating with her bundle resting on the seat.

  'It's four hundred miles.'

  'That's O.K.'

  'Not all the way.' She threw her bundle into the back seat and closed the door.

  It was a difficult journey for both of them but at least they both knew there was nothing to say.

  'I don't like you soft,' she said once, touching the cuff of his sleeve.

  He didn't understand and smiled painfully.

  'I like you hard. Not all this silk.' She clenched her fist and smiled.

  'What are you saying?'

  'We had nice times, Harry.'

  'Yes.'

  'We had some nice fucks.'

  'Yes.'

  They drove through Sunday traffic past giant fibreglass pineapples and bananas surrounded by buses and people with secret pimples on their arses.

  'Can I come and see you here?'

  'They'd think you were a spy.'

  'Who are they?'

  'Realists,' she said and sunk into her seat and watched the wipers slurp at the rain on the window.

  It was five o'clock and getting dark when she made him stop at the turn off to Paddy Melon Road just on the curve of the bitumen where Paddy Melon Road goes downhill through the casurinas, a collection of puddles in a hard ribbon of mustard clay.

  It. had stopped raining for the moment but there were heavy inky blue clouds behind Mount Warning.

  'It'll rain,' he said.

  'I don't mind the rain,' she said. 'They'll be waiting for it now. We have droughts in winter.'

  'Will you write to me?'

  She bit her lip and they kissed uncomfortably, their bodies spanning the bucket seats and instruments of the Jaguar.

  She took the bundle and closed the door without looking at him, and he stayed in the car with the engine running and watched her walk down the gravel road. He noticed that she flinched from time to time when a sharp rock bit into her soft bare feet.

  It was noon on a Friday and the city was crowded. People stopped to look at Bettina, and it was not because of her cleverly cut black dress or the silk scarf with the signature of the famous designer she wrapped around her black bag, nor was it because of the strut, the prance (almost) of her plump legs, but the sheer quality of anger she contained. Her cheeks had flattened, almost hollowed, as they did when she was very drunk or very angry, and she was not drunk.

  She bumped into people and did not look around.

  She stopped at a traffic light and a whiskery old woman winked at her.

  'Cheer-up, dearie.'

  'Mutant!' she said. Her dress was by Cardin, her shoes by Gucci.

  She had so much anger she did not know what to do with it, no, not anger – rage. They had made a fool (what a fool, what an idiot) of Bettina Joy.

  She walked into the corner pub opposite the railway station. It was the public bar. They made way for her and served her immediately. She ordered a double Scotch, drank it in a gulp, ordered another one and drank that.

  Fifty-six men watched her in silence.

  'That's it, girly.'

  Bettina curled her whole face into such a display of ugly contempt that the whole bar erupted into laughter. She threw money on the bar and left.

  Until today life had been nearly perfect. In the three months since Honey Barbara had gone Harry had settled into work, they had all settled into work. Now there was no real reason to come home early, or even come home at all. They had heated soup in an electric jug, drank a little (but not a lot) of white wine. They made toast. Whoever had the time would make the toast, it didn't matter. They changed the name to Joy, Joy & Davis, and that's what they were: a team.

  There was such a sense of excitement, of comradeship, and it was nothing (it was everything!) to work till three in the morning, or even, as they'd done on the second Mobil presentation, till dawn. They typed their own reports and bound them. There was nothing they couldn't do: she was good with ads, Harry was good with strategies, and Joel had revealed, finally, that he had a better eye for detail than either of them. Joel wrote the conference reports. He dotted i's and crossed t's with an enthusiasm that sometimes drove her crazy.

  Just two weeks ago they had opened a letter and found they had sixteen entries accepted in the New York One Show. Copywriter: Bettina Joy, Art Director: Bettina Joy, etc.

  Their profit projection for the calendar year was three hundred thousand dollars.

  The New York trade press printed one of Bettina's press releases.

  And then, this morning, in that grey dull little room with the wrought-iron balcony, that stale imitation of Paris with its waiting room stinking of meths, she had sat with no more trepidation than at the dentist's while he clipped the x-ray on to the screen and read a report.

  'Mrs Joy,' he said, 'have you ever been exposed to petrol over a... '

  'Tell me,' she said.

  He was tall and handsome and had a slightly roguish eye. She liked him even if she hated his business.

  'This is something,' he stopped and looked again. 'This is something we normally only find in people who are exposed to petrol fumes over a very long period. Mechanics, service station attendants... ' he faded away, smiling apologetically at such comparisons.

  'Tell me.'

  'We'll get another opinion,' he said, 'of course.'

  'It's something nasty.'

  'Have you been exposed to petrol a lot?' He managed a smile. 'Hardly.' Then, avoiding her eye for a second, using the time to look down at her card: 'It's a malignancy, I'm afraid. A rather nasty one.'

  'Yes.' She could be very normal. She would be. In all the times she had imagined this ·scene she had gone to pieces. 'Yes, it's alright. I think I knew.' This was not true. SHE HADN'T KNOWN. SHE HADN'T EVEN GUESSED.

  She had to find out the truth.

  'It is a particular malignancy normally caused by petrol.'

  'Petrol causes cancer?'

  He clicked his tongue sadly and pulled his lips back side-ways against his teeth. 'The benzine in petrol, to be precise.'

  'You'd think they'd tell people,' she said wryly. She was proud of herself. She had style. They told her she had cancer and she was being sardonic. But he still hadn't told her.

  'How long have I got?' she said the clichéd words. She said it to have it unsaid. He was going to say, oh, it's not lethal. That was the plan.

  She tricked him only too well.

  'Oh,' he said, 'you could have a year.'

/>   And only when the sentence was finished did he realize what a terrible mistake he had made, for he saw her face collapse and twist; defeat and rage battled with each other for control of her features, but both lost to the sheer force of her will.

  'I need more than a year,' she said.

  'Mrs Joy... '

  'You're ridiculous!' she said. 'I need three years to make it in New York. I can't do it in a year.'

  He folded his hands and when they rubbed across each other they sounded dry and papery.

  'Why don't they tell people?' she said.

  'I'm sorry...?' He fiddled in his drawer where he had a 10-ml ampule of Valium.

  'Petrol causes cancer. They were right.'

  He was ashamed of himself. He had bungled it. 'Who was right, Mrs Joy?'

  'The silly hippy was right. She said petrol causes cancer... '

  'There are many carcinogens in common use.'

  'Saccharin? PVC? ... '

  'Yes,' he said, surprised.

  'Well why don't they tell us?'

  He filled the hypodermic. 'I'm going to give you a shot of this.'

  'What is it?' and her eyes were momentarily bright with hope.

  'Valium,' he said, his eyes downcast.

  'Forget it,' she said.

  'It'll make you feel better.'

  'Nothing can make you feel better,' she said, 'when you have been made a fool of.'

  Her whole life had been built on bullshit.

  Later, Harry was to think that if she had had more time to think it over she would not have done what she did, if Lucy had been home, if Honey Barbara had still been there, if Joel had not been driving out to Krappe and if he had not been lunching with Adrian Clunes.

  He was wrong. Her actions were carefully thought out.

  He remembered coming back from lunch and staring with disbelief at the torn-up Mobil story boards outside her door.

  'What happened?' he asked Joel, who was sitting at his desk.

  'Changed her mind.'

  'Good,' he remembered saying. Bettina's best work always happened like that, rejecting a good campaign and then doing a brilliant one. 'Good.'

  That night they had all meant to go to the Krappe sales convention for 'Sweet-tooth' but Bettina begged off because her ads were not finished. She put a note in Harry's diary saying the time for the Mobil presentation had been put for-ward till eleven, and that she would meet him downstairs in the coffee shop at 10.45.

  When Harry came home she was asleep. When Bettina got up Harry was asleep. She must have gone straight to the office.

  As the tea lady remembered it, the whole thing had been very light-hearted. Everyone in the boardroom had been very relaxed and it seemed as if they were looking forward to the meeting. She heard Mrs Joy apologize for her husband's absence and Mr Jones, the Marketing Director, had suggested that they postponed the meeting but Mrs Joy had said: 'No, no need. You're stuck with me.'

  They had laughed.

  Mrs Joy had asked for a strong black coffee and when it was pointed out to her that all the coffee was one strength she asked for two cups. She had looked very smart, in a white linen suit with a large white hat. She did not normally wear hats, the tea lady thought, but it was very attractive, and the Chairman had commented on it. Bettina had coloured a little, pleased with the compliment.

  They were short one cup, because Mrs Joy had had two, and the tea lady had returned to the meeting temporarily with a cup for Mr Bernstein just as Bettina was unpacking a large cardboard box. On the table she placed three large bottles of petrol.

  Mr Cleveland said something about getting close to the product.

  It seems unlikely that Bettina ever found time to present her campaign. Perhaps her natural impatience got the better of her. But one can imagine her standing at the head of the table and the men leaning back and smiling, enjoying the little theatre that comes from a good presentation.

  'This,' she might have said, 'is petrol.'

  A joke, the sheer obviousness of it.

  And if the wicks were not already in the bottles she might well have enjoyed the suspense as she put them in. She must have kept their interest – no one left the room just yet.

  Did she say anything at all about her cancer?

  If so, one imagines she would have had to do it quickly, as a curse almost, and there would have been no time for questions.

  Miss Dobson, whose desk is outside the boardroom, beside the Managing Director's office, thought she heard Mrs Joy shout the word 'Mucus' and then there was that terrible explosion, followed by two more in sharp succession and all at once the overhead sprinklers poured down, drenching the eighth floor and Mr Cleveland ran out of the boardroom and collapsed screaming in front of her. She had not recognized him. He rolled into the curtains and set them on fire.

  Only one advertisement survived that inferno (certainly no people did) and beneath its bubbled cell overlay one could read the headline, set in Goudy caps and lower case: 'Petrol killed me,' it said and it is an interesting reflection on the art of advertising that it was four hours before anyone bothered to read the body copy and learned that the death in the headline was a death by cancer.

  So when the police interrogated Harry for the first time, on the shocked grey ghastly day in that dull little office in the Mobil Research Department, there was only one motive he could think of.

  'They must have rejected her ads,' he said.

  The faces at Palm Avenue had a grey waxy look. They were numbed and did not question the search but admired, in a vague distracted way, the style in which the police seemed not so much to search as to caress pieces of clothing, stroke objects, and when they slid their big blunt hands behind couches there was a deftness, almost a tenderness, that con-tradicted their gruff masculine manner. They stood on chairs and peered at the dead insects inside light shades; they worked their way along bookshelves and removed books with a gentleness that could be taken for respect.

  There were only two of them, Macdonald and Herpes – whose red inflamed face suggested some connection with his unfortunate name – and although they were both titled Detective, it was Macdonald who appeared to be in charge. They were both big men but broad rather than tall, a physical type that is sometimes compared, often with admiration, to a brick lavatory. They wore shorts and long white socks. They carried clipboards.

  It was Herpes who ushered everyone into the kitchen and Macdonald who began to interview them, one at a time, in the dining room. There was little conversation in the kitchen and what there was centred on such problems as whether a person wanted coffee or tea and such prosaic details as names and dates and places of birth. To all this, they submitted meekly.

  The more serious work took place next door and from time to time the smooth murmuring in the dining room would be broken by the lump of a sob as someone collided with some painful flotsam of memory.

  It was the thirteenth of September, that time of the year when one night can be hot and steamy and the next bitterly cold, as if there were forces still arguing for a continuation of winter and others for the beginning of summer and summer would win one night, and winter the next.

  The forces of winter were in control on the night after Bettina's death.

  Breath hung in the air in the kitchen as they sat around the table like effigies of themselves with only their suspended breath to suggest that they were flesh and blood.

  They were not yet told how or why Bettina had died. The police had only just read Bettina's body copy, and deliberately said nothing of her cancer. The questioning, they said, was routine.

  The following interview with Joel was not atypical, although it could hardly be judged to be routine. Imagine then, the policeman sitting at the head of the dining-room table (how far away those lunatic nights seemed now), a radiator at his feet and some thirty books, mostly paperbacks, stacked neatly on the table. The titles of these books might suggest a house with a far more serious political bent than it had. Kropotkin's revolutionary pamphl
ets, Ernest Mandel on Trotsky, an Everyman edition of Das Kapital in two volumes, Social Banditry, and so on. These books were Lucy's, but the book that interested Macdonald most of all was The Politics of Cancer by Samuel S. Epstein, which Honey Barbara had bought and abandoned after its fifth depressing page.

  'Do you have any particular theory about the cause of cancer?'

  'No, not really.'

  'Do you think cancer is political?'

  'I don't know.'

  'Is it someone’s fault?'

  'I suppose so.'

  'What do you mean exactly?'

  'Well I've heard people say it's caused by chemicals, but I don't... '

  'Which people were these?'

  'There was a woman, I don't know her real name, called Honey Barbara.'

  'Were there many meetings where this was discussed?'

  'No, not meetings. Everybody just got drunk.'

  'Have you ever seen this book before?'

  'No.'

  'But that is where you sleep, on that mattress?'

  'That's right. I told you already.'

  'This book was under that mattress.'

  'Many people used the bed, all the time.'

  'Many people? You said you slept only with Mrs Joy!'

  'Many people, during the day, to sit on, like a chair.'

  'And although you've slept on top of this book, you've never seen it?'

  'No.'

  'How thick would you say it was?'

  'Two inches.'

  'You slept on top of a two-inch-thick book and never felt it?'

  'No.'

  'Do you think people who cause cancer should be killed?'

  'I’ve never thought about it. Is that what Bettina did?'

  'How tall are you?'

  'Why do you want to know?'

  'How tall are you?'

  'Five foot six and a half.'

  And so on.

  They saved Harry till last. He entered the room with every intention of co-operating, of being perfectly polite. In return he hoped to have some clarification of his wife's death. There was a feeling of shame in the kitchen. As if they had all done something wrong and would; in due course, be punished.

  But Macdonald was soon asking him about Honey Barbara.

  'I don't know.'

  'They said she was your girlfriend.'