Peter Carey - Bliss

'You must not,' his son said.

'They were dirty.' He rubbed the window until the smeary marks had all gone. 'It gave me pleasure,' he said. 'I liked cleaning them for you.'

David's dark eyes shone. 'No. I should clean your shoes.'

'If you want to… '

'But it's wrong for you to clean mine.'

'David, I enjoyed it.'

He was not displeased with his son's irritation. It seemed to indicate the efficacy of the ritual.

'But you mustn't, Dad, you mustn't. Don't you understand? Why don't you understand?' He started shaking his head and smoothing down his wet hair.

'What is there to understand?'

'You're so insensitive, I can't believe it! It's like the Fiat. You never understood why that was wrong;'

'It embarrassed you.'

David was pouring milk over breakfast cereal. 'Oh great,' he said sarcastically. 'After ten years you understand. Great.'

'Well you don't have to tell your friends I cleaned your shoes.'

'Dad,' David pushed his bowl away as if he'd be sick if he ate any more, 'you are the head of this household. Doesn't that mean anything to you?'

'It seems a funny sort of household these days,' Harry said, 'to me, at least. How does it seem to you?'

'And whose fault do you think that is?' David said, his eyes wide and challenging, his head cocked on one side. 'Do you think it's mine? Do you thilik it's Lucy's? Do you think it's Bettina's? It's yours.'

'Mine,' Harry said happily. 'It's my fault.' The windows were so clean he could see the honey-eaters much more clearly. They had a grey underbelly and little red wattles hanging like earrings from the sides of their heads. He stared at them with fascination, looking at the hollow they had made inside the pawpaw.

'You are the head of the household. You should lead us. You should punish us.'

'Jesus.'

'Yes. When we do wrong, we should be punished.'

'Christ.'

'There is no discipline. That's what's wrong. That's why Mum is unhappy. That's why Lucy takes drugs.'

'What drugs?'

'You mustn't clean our shoes or shine our windows. You've got to make us do all that.'

'What drugs?'

'When we have our lunch today you let everyone else do the work. You walk in the garden. You'll make us all happy.'

'No.'

'You and I can play Monopoly.'

'I thought you were going to work.'

David retrieved his bowl of breakfast cereal. 'Really,' he said, 'there's not an awful lot I can do.'

Harry returned to his window and tried to forget about this painful impersonation of his son. He allowed his mind to focus on the merest speck of fly-shit, to think about nothing else but the problem of its removal. He vaguely heard David depart and he didn't hear Bettina arrive at all.

'You are about as subtle as a ton of bricks!'

She didn't look well. Her mascara ran over one eye. It gave her a crooked, slightly demonic appearance. She sat at the kitchen table and angrily smoked two cigarettes.

When she had finished the second cigarette she put it out very brutally. 'You are trying to make me look like a tart,' she said.

She was trying to make him angry but he wouldn't get angry. He was Good.

He put on the kettle and started to make the tea.

'Don't you damn well make me tea.' Bettina was stumbling to her feet. 'Don't you dare.'

He clung to the tea canister determinedly. 'It gives me pleasure,' he said. 'Please. Let me.'

Bettina turned off the gas and threw the water down the sink. 'Don't try and be a martyr with me.'

'I'm just making you tea.'

'I know what you're doing.'

With a terrible chill it occurred to Harry she might know exactly what he was doing.

'Oh,' he said. He pursed his lips and then sucked in his cheeks.

'Oh yes,' she said, her wide eyes mocking him.

'Does it cause you pain?' He tried to appear disinterested.

'In the arse, yes.'

'Ah,' and he regarded her with interest, his head on one side, scratching his right leg with his left bare foot.

'Come and sit here, old mate.' She patted the chair beside her. It was a term of affection from another time, and Harry, standing on one leg like a shy tropical bird, allowed himself to be induced to sit at the table.

She held his hand and kissed him on his splendid nose. They hadn't made love for two months.

'Harry...'

'Yes.'

'Do you think you're going a bit loopy?'

Harry shrugged. 'All I'm doing… ' but he stopped, not wishing to show his hand.

'What are you doing, old mate?'

'All I'm doing is cleaning windows.'

'So you can make me look like a tart.'

'No.'

'So everyone can see I don't do anything?'

'I'd have thought you'd be glad for me to do it.'

'You're a sarcastic bastard aren't you,' she said good-humouredly, 'Alright, get out.'

'Get out where?'

'Get out of the fucking kitchen and let me get on with it.'

'No, let me clean some more.'

Bettina pointed a single finger and started jabbing him around the edges of his scar. 'Look, you, get out, out.'

He retreated upstairs. He managed to clean half the bath-room before she came and found him.

She was going to be a hot-shot but she met Harry Joy and fell in love with him. They told her he was from the French Consulate and she watched him for a while, not in the least impatient, merely fascinated by him. He wore a beautifully tailored rather loose white suit. He had a huge moustache. He looked Splendid. She watched how he moved, grace-fully, as if his feet hardly touched the floor, the walk of a dancer.

It was a party for a departing Trade Commissioner, full of businessmen with rotary badges. She had come with her boss who ran the local Ogilvy & Mather office.

'Come on, Tina,' he had said, 'grab your hat. We're going to a party.'

She sat in a chair and began to watch Harry Joy. She was shy and had no plan for meeting him. She was happy enough to look and admire.

Even then she was offended by the drabness of the town, its dullness, its lack of style. Her only escape was in her stinking room above her father's service station. Downstairs Billy McPhee burped and farted, wise-cracked, giggled, ran between cash register and pump, pump and cash register; upstairs, his daughter turned the shining pages of the New York Art Directors' Annual.

Men sat beside her and engaged her in conversation but her eyes never left the exotic man in the beautiful white suit. It was not even possible, she thought, that he spoke English.

And then he was standing in front of her.

'You've been staring at me,' he said and he was not French at all, but he spoke with such a low, slow drawl that she was not in the least disappointed.

'Yes,' she said. She couldn't think of anything else. Yet the brevity of her reply probably struck him as bold.

He sat beside her and surveyed the motel room full of grey suits and striped carpet. 'Mmmm,' he said.

She thought he was the most original person she'd ever met.

'It's a beautiful suit,' she said. She was so tense her finger-nails ached.

When he smiled, his eyes crinkled. 'Why are you wearing gloves?'

She was nineteen. She said: 'My hands sweat.'

A smile stirred beneath that vast moustache. 'Are you eccentric?' he asked.

'Yes.'

He called a waiter and ordered vodka. Then he undressed her hands and wiped them with a handkerchief dipped in vodka. He borrowed a towel from the waiter and dried them.

'There,' he said, 'all you need is a splash of vermouth and you could have a very dry vodkatini.' He was twenty-two. He had read about vodkatinis in the New Yorker.

She did not ask him what he did. She detested people who did it to her.

'Ask me in three years,' she'd say.

'Why?'

'Because in three years I'll have something interesting to tell you.'

Even the two men who ran Ogilvy & Mather did not know their secretary, receptionist and switchboard operator held ambitions to be an advertising hot-shot. She probably knew more about the history of American advertising than they did. She owned a total of fifteen annuals from the New York Art Directors' Club and she knew who had written everyone of the Volkswagen ads since the first ones Bill Bembach had done himself. She devoured the American trade papers and knew all the gossip. If there had been anyone to tell she would have told them funny stories about Mary Wells and Jack Tinker but there was only her father, bug-eyed on pills, scattering his own verbal garbage behind him: 'ten out of ten, number one son, go for it Gloria.' She lived in a wreckers yard of works.