Peter Carey - Bliss

She had had a lonely youth. She had read poetry and novels and when she learned to drive had avoided squashing the cane toads that gathered on the roads at night. She had released blow-flies trapped against the glass and was attracted to psychiatric nursing as soon as she knew such a thing existed.

And yet it was to prove too much for her: this dull, grey piss-soaked world of the mad where people did not get better or worse and where no amount of moist-eyed love seemed to do anything but invite rejection and derision.

At twenty-one she had a complete breakdown and was admitted to hospital. It was here, at last, that she was to develop her attitudes towards mental illness, her list of unpleasant facts. She grasped the nettle of commerce. She felt herself grow strong, and when she returned to nursing her superiors felt her to be mercifully free of the romanticism that had afflicted her before.'

Alice Dalton had become objective.

She had never been a feminist. She was too much of an authoritarian to believe in any sort of equality. And while those around her came to regard her as strong, while they stepped out of her way, as she gathered power and influence, she craved to be recognized as a poor weak woman by a strong and sensitive man.

Yet such men rarely came her way. Mad people, she dis-covered, were not normally very bright, were more likely to be poor than rich, and were less likely to be sensitive (in her definition of the term) than sane people. Her marriage to the schizophrenic Henry Dalton lasted two weeks, and while she cried at his funeral, something inside her had acknowledged his suicide as beneficial to both of them.

The nights then were long and lonely and she felt it was not unreasonable for her to have Mr Harry Joy and she had expected more sympathy from the Department of Social Welfare. She arranged the Clarice Cliff and wiped the slightly dusty lid of the 'Bizarre' sugar bowl. She wished she had been alive in 1929, working for Clarice Cliff and her girls at the pottery, painting gay scenes, travelling to London to promote their wares, wearing artists' smocks and smiling at the' camera.

Did they meet men on their visits to the capital? Or were they too left alone as she was, at eleven o'clock at night, with this... itch. She did not wish to ring for Jim or Jimmy. With her finger, she began, but in the end it was always the same no matter what the feminists said about masturbation and the clitoris, had always been the same, always would be. There was a hole. A damn hole. An aching emptiness that had not yet revealed itself, not yet, and for the moment, this moment, she could always delude herself into thinking that the final humiliating need to press the buzzer for Jim or Jimmy could be avoided. In her mind Alice Dalton had a mental picture of herself as something quivering, vulnerable, glisteningly pink: a garden snail without its shell.

Harry Joy watched Nurse walk towards him. He was a dis-tinctive figure. He had no hips and no arse. He kept his trousers done up tightly with a rope belt but it still looked as if his backside had been stolen from him and when he arrived at the bench and turned to sit down there would be a big empty sack of material hanging from the back of his belt.

Nurse called Harry by the name of Mo because, as he said, 'Anyone with a mo like yours is called Mo, always have been and always will be.'

'Good news for Mo,' he announced and placed a crinkled brown paper parcel on the bench between them. He made no invitation to open the parcel. Harry stared at it and looked away.

'Mo is getting out,' Nurse said provocatively.

'How?'

When it came to answering questions, Nurse always liked to take the Scenic Route rather than the Freeway. 'To survive in this place,' he said, 'you've got to be mad as a spider on a thirty-dollar note. Are you mad?'

'No.'

'No, you're not mad. You won't survive. See,' he indicated the garden with outstretched hands, 'this is my job here. It's my work. I've got my notebooks, all my memories. This garden is like my brain, full of memories. All my little rabbit burrows, full of memories. But look at you!'

Harry's trousers had food stains on them. His pyjama coat was filthy. The left-hand slipper had been stolen and replaced by an odd one. He looked cowed and rat-like.

'You've got your buttons in the wrong holes.'

Harry redid his buttons.

'There. That's better. You're a good-looking fellow.'

Harry grinned coyly.

'Sit up straight. There you are. A good-looking fellow.'

'You should have seen me when I had my suit.'

'Forget your suit. Why are you always talking about your suit? You don't need a suit.' Nurse was shaking his cupped hands up and down. 'She's a lonely woman,' he said, 'and you're a good-looking fellah.'

Harry didn't understand. 'You sweety-talk her and... ' he raised his eyebrows and grinned lasciviously. 'You know what to do.'

'She won't.'

'Yes she will. Look,' Nurse dropped his voice to a whisper although there was no one nearby, 'they steal your slippers and your shirts. I can't look after you all the time. I'm too busy. You wait, they'll come and give you Therapy next time you lose your slippers. They'll take your faces and your pictures.'

'Don't talk about the black.'

'Alright then, but... '

'She'd never look twice at me,' Harry said, 'she hates me.'

But Nurse was grinning and shifting around inside his trousers. He thrust the brown paper parcel into Harry's lap. 'There,' he said, 'open it.'

The parcel contained one pair of shoes, one silk shirt, toothpaste, aftershave and hair oil.

'Californian Poppy,' Nurse said holding the bottle of hair oil with a tenderness that Harry Joy had once displayed towards bottles of French wine.

Harry's trousers were smudged with his attempts to use soap on them, but his shirt was magnificent, silk without blemish. His shoes shone. His teeth sparkled. And yet she had chosen that the interview should be across the desk and not in the comfortable armchairs that surrounded the flower-burdened coffee table. She was still in mourning for the imposter. She rocked back and forth in her squeaking chair while fish swam in the aquarium behind her head and she played churches and steeples with her short-fingered hands.

He sat on the edge of his chair and smiled and nodded, raised his eyebrows, inclined his head politely and, when his nose ran, had a pressed handkerchief to wipe it with.

'You will never be the real Mr Joy,' she said. 'I'm sorry. I know that's unfair, but it's true.'

There was a silence. Harry gave her a sly grin.

'There is something, don't you think, about successful men that is immensely attractive, a certain lack of desperation.'

He pushed his shoulders back and let his arm hang loosely.

'I have been reading my back issues of Financial Review , and look, here he is.' She pushed a tom piece of newspaper across the desk (there was no chance for fingers to touch) and withdrew to be closer to her fish. 'Not a good likeness though. Some people take good photographs,' she said. 'My late husband never had a good photograph taken. I regret it now. I always meant to commission a portrait. If you're trying to butter me up with that silly grin you might as well forget it. I can't afford to let you out.'

He rubbed his face, as if slapped.

'And don't try running away.' She took off her pink spec-tacles and cleaned the lenses with a yellow cloth. 'If you try, Jim and Jimmy will bring you back.'

'The boys in white,' he joked weakly.

'Sometimes they wear white, sometimes they wear grey,' she said contrarily. 'Sometimes they wear shorts and white socks and sometimes, should you try in the ·middle of the night, I must warn you, they wear nothing at all. Mr Duval,' she sighed, and while Harry Joy was still flinching from this insult, repeated it: 'Mr Duval, I try not to have favourites. I try not to have personal dislikes, but I'm afraid I do not take to you.'