Peter Carey - Bliss

'How is it, Ace?'

Hennessy regarded him from pale, pale blue eyes. 'Well enough,' he said coldly, 'well enough.'

On the twenty-first floor they knocked, and when they were not admitted, entered with the key which had been provided. They found their mark sitting up with the sheet held the way women do when they want to hide their breasts.

'Good morning,' Hennessy said formally, 'I am Dr Hennessy and this is Dr Cornelius.'

'You've come for Harry, haven't you?'

'Yes,' Cornelius said, and opened his bag on his unmade bed, looking at the mark and guessing his weight at 200 lbs or 400 mgs of Pentothal.

'He's really gone crazy.'

'So they say,' said Cornelius, drawing up the required 400 mgs into the hypodermic.

'Well ... are you going to wait ... or what?'

'Or what, I should think,' Hennessy said drily, taking his papers from his bag, watching while Cornelius fitted the charged hypodermic into the dart gun he had personally invented.

'Now, Mr Joy,' Cornelius said, 'we would like you to come with us very quietly and we will take you somewhere where they will make you better.'

'No,' Alex said, 'you don't understand.'

The bedclothes trailed out into the corridor like guts from the disemboweled room.

Neither Harry Joy nor Honey Barbara said a word. They stood for a moment and listened. Only the muffled noise of the lift dropping down the shaft broke the stillness.

Harry entered the room first. When he saw the broken chair in the doorway, the blood on the floor, the gaping guts of the television set, and the hunk of hair on the bathroom basin which looked pubic but had actually come from Dr Cornelius's bleeding face, he merely nodded, and although he was shocked he was not surprised.

Honey Barbara put down the box of food on the ruined bed. 'Poor man,' she said. 'He fought them.'

Harry nodded. He felt ill. He stood the bedside lamp upright and put the phone back on its hook.

'Come on,' she said, 'other room.'

They pulled the blankets back into the bedroom and shut the door on it.

'Want food?' she asked, carrying the box.

He shook his head.

'He fought them,' she said. 'Good on him.'

They both looked ill. They didn't know whether to sit or stand. Honey Barbara finally put the box down at the table and sat there in a chair. Harry leant against the window.

'They'll let him go,' he said, 'when they find out.'

She shook her head. 'Don't count on it. The hospital gets a subsidy. They'll try and keep him.'

He picked up the phone.

'What you doing?'

'I'm going to ring my family and tell them.'

'What?' She was already standing and walking towards him.

'They got the wrong person.'

She snatched the phone from his hand and put it gently back on the receiver. 'No.'

'I can't have this on my conscience. I've got to.'

'Darling, they'll come and get you.'

'They can't get me. I get up too early.' He picked up the phone and began to dial. He had more confidence in Honey Barbara's theories than Honey Barbara did.

'Hello,' Joel said sleepily.

'It's Harry Joy here,' Harry told his junior partner. 'I am phoning you that whoever you sent to lock me up has just taken Alex Duval instead.'

He could hear Joel laughing. 'Really? Really? Oh Harry... '

'Did you hear me?'

'Harry you don't know how funny it is.'

'I said you got Alex Duval...

' ...instead of you.'

He hung up. 'What happened?' she said.

'He laughed.'

It was like a room in which someone has died.

They made love but it was somehow funereal and they looked into each other's eyes with sadness and nuzzled each other for comfort. Everything had suddenly become full of insurances and precautions. He ran off sixteen Diners Club bills for her while she watched tearfully.

'I should take you back home with me.'

He smiled painfully.

'But you wouldn't like it: mud and leeches,' she said, 'no electricity, no silk shirts.'

After a pause, she said: 'Anyway, they wouldn't understand you. They'd think you were a spy.'

She wrote down the address of the house where she was living and made him promise to memorize it. There was an air of emergency in everything and when Honey Barbara went to have a shower she was sure it was her last shower in a Hilton Hotel.

Doctors Hennessy and Cornelius called on Harry two weeks later at four o'clock in the afternoon, injected him swiftly and carried him off without the slightest struggle.

When Honey Barbara let herself in the next morning she found the suite as he'd left it, including a little piece of paper on which she'd written her address.

She did not have another shower at the Hilton.

Alice Dalton had not been expecting Sea Scouts. She told Jim and Jimmy that she had no appointment marked but the Sea Scouts, it appeared, were insistent. She had imagined a bus load but when she discovered there were only two of them and that one of them was very small, she had them shown into her office and let them sit and stare at her vases while she brought the admission forms up to date. She wanted them to see what it was really like.

Mrs Dalton was a woman with a mission, which was to demystify the treatment of mental illness. It was her experi-ence that a lot of sentimental garbage was spoken on the subject and she herself had spent many unhappy years until she had finally realised that Mental Illness was a business, just like anything else.

Once this decision had been made, her life had become more satisfying. As for the treatment itself, her greatest axiom was derived from a psychiatrist who had explained it this way: the ones that are going to get better, get better; all the rest is psychiatrists being neurotic or self-important or anxious or guilty; effectively they cost a lot and achieve nothing.

'Now,' she said, 'what did they tell you about me?'

It was a question she would have liked to have asked many of her visitors – but one couldn't ask such questions of adults, more's the pity – because Alice Dalton was fascinated by her own notoriety. 'All I do,' she beamed at her questioners until her little round face was so tight it looked as if it might split, 'is what is obvious.' But she could never ask them what they really thought of her. What she thought of herself was simple: she was a pioneer in the Mental Health business, an opinion obviously shared by Mr da Silva who had recently purchased 30 per cent of the stock.

But the Sea Scouts were having some difficulty in remem-bering what, if anything, had been said to them on the subject of Alice Dalton. They looked at her pale blue eyes as they swam behind her bright pink spectacles and felt that they had probably done something wrong.

'They never told us,' the smaller boy said.

'Have you seen me on the Television?'

They shook their heads almost imperceptibly.

She felt irritated but smiled and nodded. The bigger boy took out a notebook and held a pencil in readiness. Somehow this cheered her up and she was thoughtful enough to speak slowly.

'This is a Mental Hospital,' she began with a bluntness that always gave her pleasure, 'where we lock up mad people.'

She folded her arms and leant forward: 'First unpleasant truth,' she said to the smaller boy because the first one was bent over his notebook. 'Second unpleasant truth: this is a business and I am doing it to make money, just like everybody else. What is the purpose of a business?' she asked the smaller boy who had a strange stunned quality about him. 'It's to make money,' she answered herself. 'At the end of the year,' she tapped her pencil on the pile of admission papers, 'we must declare a profit.'

She decided against her third unpleasant truth which went like this: 'It's a garbage disposal.' Pause. 'Do you find that shocking?' Terribly, almost always. 'Because that is what it is. Do you want to look after the old men? They're soaked in urine. They are garbage. Someone threw them out. Do you want me to love them as well?'