Peter Carey - Bliss

'And I think the ad business could be better than medicine,' David said, pleased to be discussing finances, rather than .the sloppy old-fashioned view his father had once brought to the idea of medicine.

'The prime attraction of medicine is really the money?'

'Most of it,' David admitted, relieved.

'Its main attraction.'

'Yes.'

This was not his son. This was someone pretending. In the pay of someone.

'Who do you work for?' he asked his son, oh so casually, but the timing of it was wonderful: just slipped it in there, like so.

David looked at him, his eyes wide. How many times had he wanted to discuss his business activities, his interest in drugs, the trips to South America? He wanted to talk business with his father, not business business, but adventure business. 'You mean,' he said, 'who do I work for?'

'Yes.' Harry waited tensely. It was only a hunch. But look at him, look at him swallow, and his throat is dry when he talks:

'Who do I work for now?'

'Yes.' A single red poinciana flower dropped on Harry's white shirt and lay there like a pretty wound.

'You know?'

'What do you think? Who do you work for?'

'Abe da Silva,' David Joy said melodramatically.

Harry Joy did not know the heroes or the hierarchies of organized crime, so he did not understand either the size of the boast or the field of endeavour, neither could he judge that his son's claim was only true in the loosest most indirect way, just as a service station attendant might have once claimed to work for Aristotle Onassis.

But what he did get was a name, his first name in Hell. He was an explorer, a cartographer, and on that great white unmarked map of Hell he could put this name, although quite where he did not know. Although, when David finally left him (his question unanswered, his private business undiscussed), his father would go back to his mental map, and beneath it, where one might expect the scale to go, he produced this key, this code, by which he now expected, like a zoologist, to classify the creatures he found there. Generalizing from his experience, he made a note of these:

1. Captives. (Me)

2. Actors. 'David' et al .

3. Those in Charge. da Silva. Others?

Finally, of course, the expected happened: his family kept out of his way. He prowled the lawn, haunted the garage, stared at the TV, and found himself isolated by his madness. David slunk home to get drugs and departed silently. Forever in the house you could find someone slinking up a stair, departing by a back door, running across a lawn with imaginary eyes burning into their back while Harry, the mad master, masturbated dully in his hammock or sharpened his pencil in the anticipation of some rare tit-bit of evidence.

Bettina, once so fastidious about the house (for she had a strong streak of very-small-town politeness and a serious concern for what the neighbours thought, although she would have violently denied it), left pictures to hang crooked, floors unswept and meals, also, uncooked. She spent as much time as possible in Joel's flat viewing its idiosyncrasies with eyes sim-ilar to her son's, but having other, fleshier, compensations.

Lucy was up early to sell the Tribune and up late at meet-ings, some official, some secret, in which she plotted to reform a Communist Party branch. But, like David and Bettina, she could not pass through the dead dusty heart of the house without feeling a certain sadness, a cold shivering melancholy similar to that which might be produced by an old orange tree growing next to a wrecked chimney.

When she came home one night she found her room had been searched. She suspected the Special Branch, wrongly as it turned out.

'Are you a Communist?' her father said.

'Yes.' It was about time!

'Good,' he said truculently, and turned briskly on his heel.

He continued to do his exercises as instructed and, with a lot of walking and no regular meals, lost his belly. On his walks, he saw ugliness and despair where once he would have found an acceptable world: goitrous necks, phlegmy coughs, scabrous skin, lost legs, wall eyes, dropping hair, crooked spines, lost hope, and all of this he noted, but when nothing actually happened, he became bored.

And then, one morning, he woke feeling optimistic. There was no reason for it, unless it was that he was tired of the game, the staleness of the house, being lonely and cranky and isolated. Perhaps he was like someone unmechanical who turns on a defunct TV every now and then to see if it has healed itself, but, for whatever reason, he did not wear his tracksuit (stinking thing) or his sandshoes (worse) but showered and scrubbed himself and washed his hair and shaved fastidiously. He ironed a shirt and took his baggy white suit from the wardrobe where it had hung since the day he died in it.

The Fiat, the wrong Fiat of course, started immediately, and he was too happy to be suspicious.

He backed down the driveway, nearly ran down the postman, and accelerated down Palm Avenue, only pausing to clash his gears in a style that had once been familiar to those who lived near the bend in the road.

Bettina had given up on Harry.

She sat amongst the heavy Edwardian furniture of The Wellington Boot and listened to Joel argue with the waiter about the bill. In a moment she was going to order another drink, but she waited, swilling the last little drop of Gewürztraminer around the bottom of her lipstick-smudged glass. Joel was trying to write new figures on the bill and the waiter was taking offence.

'Here,' the waiter was saying, 'I will bring you a new piece of paper, sir. I will get it. You can write on that.'

Bettina looked out the window wondering if she might, this once, see someone particularly elegant or glamorous walk past, someone with some damn style, but she was rewarded with the same stream of heavy, dowdy, frumpy-looking people who she had always despised. Prague 1935, she thought, and found little except the motor cars to contradict this idea, al-though she had never been to Prague and certainly not in 1935.

She heard the tooting. And then five sets of brakes locked in squealing harmony, and through the middle of the inter-section sailed a small red Fiat Bambino with Harry at the wheel. It looked so carefree and eccentric that she forgot her animosity towards him and smiled. Dear Harry. She laughed out loud.

'What's so funny?' said Joel, who was now standing beside the waiter. They both looked down at Bettina with hurt expressions. 'I argued with the man because he charged us for a salad he didn't bring us. He admits his mistake.' His voice rose an octave, protesting at the injustice of her laughter.

'It was Harry,' she said. 'He must be feeling better. He's going to Milanos.'

Joel sat down very heavily and left the waiter standing. His head was wobbling. 'We are not going to talk about Harry any more,' he said.

Bettina held up the empty wine bottle to the waiter and smiled. 'One more,' she said, and didn't bother to notice his expression.

'We talk about Harry in bed. We talk about Harry while we fuck. We talk about Harry in the shower. We can't even come to our own goddamn restaurant...'

'Don't shout, honey,' she said in perfect American, 'and don't wobble your head.'

'I'm not shouting.' He adjusted his tie. 'I just don't want to talk about Harry any more.'

'Well don't talk about Harry. Talk about us. Talk about how we're going to set up our own agency. That interests me more than Harry.'

'Don't be a bitch.'

'Bitch, why bitch?'

He compressed his fleshy lips. 'You know the problems.'

'You want a business…'

'We need money…'

'...I want a business.'

'We need money.'

'Didn't you say we could get the money if we could get a client or two? Isn't that what you always say? Because if we...'