Peter Carey - Bliss

One old man with long grey hair and a big bulbous nose always seemed to be there, grimly riding the trolley to this much-feared therapy. His name was Nurse and Harry was to meet him later.

Not even the meals provided any relief. The food was wheeled out into the echoing dining room in big electrically-heated aluminium trolleys, inside which, in cylindrical con-tainers like bulk ice-cream drums, would be mashed potato, mashed pumpkin, minced meat in watery gravy, and an endless variety of custards, all concocted in the belief that they were not only mad but also toothless. For breakfast they would have reheated fried eggs with hard centres. For an extra five cents you could purchase a sweet orange cordial to take away the taste.

And Alex was always at his elbow waiting for him to share some mindless enthusiasm.

'Isn't this a wonderful trifle?'

'Look at that tree. Must be a hundred years old.'

'Look at that fellow play chess. They say he beat Granscy in Poland.'

Harry saw no logical reason to deny Alex the happiness that came from being Harry Joy, and yet it ate at him. It upset him to see the changes that had come over Alex as he grew into the part. It upset him in puzzling, contradictory ways.

Alex had grown a creditable moustache which might, in time, develop the authentic droop. And even now one might have believed, if one had been charitable, that he was an uncle of the first Harry Joy, fatter, older, slightly slower, but also (and this was one of the things that hurt) more authoritative, less passive. He had managed to adopt certain mannerisms of the original character so that, like a good actor called upon to play a famous man he does not physically resemble, he managed to give an unnerving impression of being Harry Joy. The original Harry Joy found even this disconcerting, like being endlessly mocked and criticized by an ageing child. He watched the second Harry Joy laugh and joke with Jim and Jimmy and Mrs Dalton, watched as an outsider excluded from a favoured circle, watched the familiarity with which he patted Mrs Dalton's arm, the confidence with which he jabbed Jimmy's chest with his finger, the expansive, jolly way he laughed. There was a largeness, a warmth, a freedom in his movements which seemed to indicate that the second Harry Joy was genuinely happy and this brought nothing to Harry but irritation.

Was Alex totally blind? Couldn't he see that his bumbling stupid optimism was out of place? It showed no sensitivity, no regard for the feelings of people here. When he saw him strut in that white suit or laugh with Mrs Dalton he was reminded of a film he had seen about Nazi collaborators.

Alex did not talk to the patients. He talked at them. Harry could hear his loud booming voice across the courtyard, intoning some interminable story with a self-satisfied air. He began to hide from Alex, to seek out odd corners of the grounds where he would not be found. He became furtive, and developed a habit of walking close to walls.

He was escaping from Alex's 'Harry Joy' voice one morning when he saw Nurse, a wiry, bony sixty-eight-year-old with enormous strength in his limbs, holding himself rigidly against the jamb of a doorway while Jim and Jimmy pummelled him to get him out. He said not a word. He did not even grunt. He stood there, like a Christ in a doorway, and when he collapsed and went limp it was because he chose to.

The next day Harry found him in the dining room. He sat next to him. They talked about E.C.T. It was not an uncom-mon topic of conversation.

'You don't get breakfast the morning they come,' he said. 'They don't give you nothing. That's how you know, see. Then they come and try and get you before you can struggle. They get you anyway, doesn't matter what you do. I don't fight them to win, because you can't win. I fight them because they're bastards, see.' He ran his hand through his great mane of grey hair and flicked it jauntily out of his eye. He jutted his jaw. 'Then they take you to the shock table and they put these two bits of tin, bits of metal, on your head. Here. And then the doctor turns on the juice.' He had stopped eating, held his hands together, as if they might have contained dice, and beat them up and down. 'It is a darkness you can't imagine. A blackness. Cold black ink. Like death.'

Across the other side of the dining room, the other Harry Joy was laughing.

'They steal your memories from you,' said Nurse, mixing his mashed potato with his gravy. 'They take away all your faces, all your pictures.'

He must have liked Harry Joy. He took him outside and showed him his book. He was writing down all the memories he had left. He wrapped them up in plastic bags and buried them in the garden when they were full. Later Harry was to find out that Nurse told everyone his secret and thus even his notebook memories would be stolen from him.

Harry developed pains across his chest and he began to stoop. His shoulders rounded and his chest hollowed, and it may have been because Alex was breaking him down or it could have been that the pain he felt was not his pain, but the pain of the people he moved amongst, and he adopted it with a sympathy quite new to him. In any case, his shoes had been stolen. They had given him slippers instead.

Alex came and sat on his bed one night just after cocoa time. He was flushed and exuberant. He had just beaten the so-called Intellectuals in French Scrabble. He talked about it happily for a quarter of an hour and became irritable when Harry would not share his triumph.

'It's irritating,' he said, 'both of us having the same name and the same moustache, and now,' he smoothed his baggy white trousers, 'we have the same suit.'

'Yes,' Harry agreed, 'very irritating.'

'So,' the big man said, his legs dangling loosely from his bed, 'you could be Alex.'

Harry felt as if someone was sitting on his chest.

'Alex is a schmuck,' he said truculently and felt his chest tighten another notch. There was a silence, He had hurt. He was pleased he'd hurt.

'He suits you,' Alex said coldly. 'He's worried about good and bad and doing the right thing. For Christ's sake,' he said, 'be reasonable.'

'What's so great about being Harry Joy?' He was bitter and confused. He did not like the Harry Joy that Alex portrayed. He could not imagine anyone wanting it. But Harry Joy was his name. He was Harry Joy and no one else and he squeezed himself in some mental doorway, resisting having the name pulled from him.

Alex poured himself a glass of water and added a drop of his 'privilege,' a little blackcurrant cordial, superior to the orange type. 'I'm a successful advertising man who's gone crazy. I've got power and money and I don't have to prove a thing.'

'I know,' Harry said. 'I've bloody well seen you.'

'But it wouldn't suit you any more,' Alex said oilily. 'Can't you see it should be repulsive to you? I think it is repulsive to you ... isn't it?'

What a crawling voice it was. 'Alex,' Harry said, 'for Christ-sakes... '

He didn't even put the glass down. 'You call me Alex again,' he said, taking a sip of blackcurrant, 'and I'll hit you.' He said it so quietly that Harry would never make the same mistake again. 'It's not just for me. Mrs Dalton asked me to talk to you.'

'Why can't she talk to me herself?'

This wasn't like Alex, this driving insistence. They were going to steal his name and leave him with the name of a flop and failure.

'There are two Harry Joys on the Social Welfare computer,' Alex said, 'and they want to reject one of us as fraudulent. So I suppose you could say, the hour has come.'

'That's you. You're fraudulent.' But you could hear the weakness in the voice. You could hear, already, the surrender.

'Mrs Dalton thinks you're being difficult.' There was no nastier threat that could be made in the hospital. There was only one thing that happened to difficult patients. Alex, some of his old humanitarian principles still weakly showing, felt momentarily guilty. 'Come on, Harry,' he said, 'please, for old times' sake.'