Peter Carey - Bliss

'Don't worry about it.'

'Of course I worry about it. You don't want me to worry about it. But I've got to worry about it, because I'm happy now. I feel really happy with being Harry Joy. I'm a successful advertising man without the smallest scruple. I've made money, made a name and don't worry about a damn thing. I'm crazy and happy.' He had started to cheer up as he listed the advantages of being Harry Joy. 'I can relax,' he beamed. 'We could get up a darts team and beat the old men.'

'Are they going to torture me?' Harry did not expect an honest answer.

'No, they like us. They want our subsidies.'

One in every three is a spy.

'They'll give us electric shocks and put electrodes in our brains. They'll give us pills and make us zombies.'

'Harry, you are part of the biggest growth industry of the decade. You can have peace here. No one will hurt you.'

Harry Joy considered it. As he watched Alex it occurred to him that he had the healthy pink glow of a pregnant woman. He plumped up his pillow and made himself comfortable, considering the implication of this amazing transformation.

'Fuck it.'

'What?'

'I called you Harry again.'

The real Harry Joy's stomach gurgled mournfully, dreaming of wholemeal bread and Honey Barbara.

Alex Duval had this dream only once but it had been so vivid that it had pushed its way through into his conscious where it occupied an important corner of his waking mind, metamorphosed from a dream to a memory.

There is a plush green carpet and a svelte grey cat with silky fur. On the cat's back is a large crayfish, about the same size as the cat. The crayfish is digging its sharp claws into the cat's body. There is a crackling sound. It is the cat tearing off those of the crayfish legs it can reach with its mouth. Alex Duval is watching. He believes at first that the crayfish will die, but then it occurs to him that this is stupid – dream-logic – and that the crayfish is in agony and cannot scream. The noise of the legs in the cat's mouth is the same noise you hear when you bite a cooked crayfish leg.

It was a portrait of his marriage. Who was the cat? Who was the crayfish? He didn't know.

He had wanted to leave his wife for ten years. Daily, nightly, he had been on the very brink of doing it and daily, nightly, he had failed, he had been defeated and fallen into bed drunk. Viewed in this light his guilty conference reports can be seen to be less of a punishment and more of an escape. He was like an unhappy man who retires to his dusty garage to play war games.

At first it is difficult to see why he didn't leave her or why, when he had left her the first time – and this is where the trouble really started, ten years before – he ever went back.

It was 'friends' who had persuaded him to return the first time, and his own oversized conscience as he thought of her getting fatter and less desirable, alone in that vast house, and he, Alex Duval, responsible for the destruction of a life.

But although this is important in its way, it has nothing to do with why Alex Duval stayed there still, year after year; for the only really important factor in his continual imprisonment and punishment was the ingenuity of his wife, who everybody thought of as a slow, bovine sort of woman, not very intelligent, always unhappy, and all the words they used to describe her suggested something large and blunt and totally lacking in elegance.

Yet she played games with Alex Duval more cruelly elegant than anything her critics could have dreamed of, and had this 'dull' woman applied herself to something more public in life she may well have been called a genius.

It is impossible to describe the games she played with Alex Duval: they could centre around something as everyday as a torn postage stamp, a crumpled piece of paper, a blue towel and proceed by a series of moves as imperceptible as the hands of a clock. (‘Did I move?' says the clock. 'Look at me.' 'Yes, you moved.' 'I am perfectly still,' the clock insists, 'you're crazy. You're imagining things.’)

A game concerning odd socks took two days of moves and counter-moves to reach its conclusion. At which point Alex Duval would explode with rage and fury.

But this is not the end of the game. Now, for this brief time, this is the whole point. Here one needs skill. Now he is dangerous. He can walk out the door. He may kill her with a blow.

Martha Duval's great slow face closes down and in the slitted eyes one might glimpse passion, fear, and as her shoulders finally relax, triumph.

Time after time, game after game, he was trapped, cornered, and could only turn his anger on himself.

She watched him break a dainty piece of china he had collected or stab the nib of his beloved pen into the wall where the blue ink mark would be, could be, if needed, the introduction to another game.

She had devoted her life to paying him back for having left her once. The scales would not balance. No amount of pain she inflicted on him could balance the hurt and terror of those thirteen days, ten years before. He could not leave her. She would not let him. She played him as if he were a ten pound trout on a three-pound line.

And into this life, by mistake, without meaning well, doc-tors Cornelius and Hennessy had come.

Alex Duval wasn't even a fraction mad. They wanted him to be Harry Joy, he would be. To the whisker. He made notes on Harry Joy: his manner of speech, the quality of his voice, his eyebrow habits, his floating walk, his folding limbs. He sloughed off his Pascal and his Rousseau and felt a great lightness.

He immersed himself in the part and nothing gave him more pleasure than finding some mannerism, a gesture of the hand, a flick of the head, that made him more perfectly Harry Joy. He laughed and told stories. He made stories up. Better stories. He sat in quiet corners inventing Harry Joy-type stories.

He had assiduously paid court to Mrs Dalton, had even made himself pretend he liked her. It was Mrs Dalton who decided on who got Electro-Convulsive Therapy (the only the-rapy available) and who did not. They discussed her Clarice Cliff collection together, taking out the little triangular-handled cups and cooing over them.

And then he had his illicit pleasures, those books Alex Duval loved which Harry Joy would never have thought to open: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Flaubert, Chekhov. These had to be read in secret, but this only increased his pleasure. In public he flicked through Reader's Digest impatiently, only showing an interest in the ads. He sat in the television room and told anyone who would listen how TV commercials were made and how much they cost. He did it so realistically, so charmingly, that he was more popular than the programmes.

And now the real Harry Joy had come to interfere with his happiness. He would not succeed. This time Alex Duval would turn all the resources of his considerable mind to the problem of this parvenu Joy, a problem which was to become more pressing when the two Harry Joys were noticed by the Social Welfare's computer.

No matter what Honey Barbara had told him about mental hospitals, he had not been ready for the depression and boredom. There was nothing to do. There was no tennis court, no swimming pool, no dart boards. There wasn't even any basket weaving. There was a library which was controlled by some racket he didn't even try to understand. Alex, he noticed, always had books under his pillow.

There was only television and that was made difficult by the bad state of the sets, which would break down and then take weeks to be repaired. There was nothing to do but walk up and down in the midst of mad people. In the mornings the Electro-Convulsive Therapy patients were wheeled, some protesting, some passive, to the place where they were 'done'. This procession of trolleys along the concrete paths was watched with morbid curiosity and had something of the attraction of a public hanging, although the ceremony itself was private.