Peter Carey - Bliss

There were marigolds in little jars on the table, and a small glass bowl of water with frangipanis floating in it. The wholemeal bread sat on a big piece of tallow-wood off-cut she had stolen from a building site, and around the table, in egg cups, she had placed, as a peace offering, sea salt.

Bettina was not displeased to see Honey Barbara in the kitchen. She suggested, in a quiet moment when the girl was absent, that Harry turn bisexual and get a chauffeur as well. The joke did not go down well. She drank a solitary toast to the death of humour. She did not like the moony way Harry followed Honey Barbara with his eyes, but she sat herself where she would not have to look at him.

She liked the way the table had been set. It had, in a naive way, style.

The Scotch was Bettina's first drink of the day and she let it evaporate somewhere at the back of her throat. She felt good. She had felt good all day, a tight, hard, relentless sort of good feeling, like a well-tuned guitar string. The feeling started after she had delivered Harry to their new offices: cheap warehouse space down by the river which she and Joel had personally painted in long evenings on high ladders until her back had ached and poor Joel, sweating away beside her, had gone to work in the mornings with his hair speckled pink. She had bought the desks from army disposals for eight dollars each and they had sanded and oiled each one. They laid black Pirelli tiles on the floor and painted the walls pink and the window frames Indian Red. The lights were second-hand creamy spheres which hung at regular intervals and even the couches were from a junk shop, re-covered with remnant fabric in an opulent cream.

It was her first business decision. She had sub-let the old premises with all their expensive old fittings and furniture for a considerable profit. The profit from the old lease would pay all the rent for this one.

And into this stylish, elegant space she introduced Harry and sat him at his swivel chair behind his army disposal desk. He complained when oil from the desk spotted his suit, but by three o'clock that afternoon he had sold his first campaign and he had something about him, a vitality, an edge, an aggressiveness she had never seen in him before.

Imagine this: a colour poster thirty inches long and eight inches deep. A photograph of a match, very large, occupies almost the entire length of the poster. Beneath it, in Franklin Gothic type, these words:

All the wood you need to burn this winter , and beneath that, the logo: Mobil LP Gas.

All this for stores in country areas, to stick on walls for flies to shit on, for mutants to stare at. But look at it there, lying against the pink wall with its cell overlay: a thing of great beauty destined to take its place in the One Show in New York with these credits:

Copywriter: Bettina Joy

Art Director: Bettina Joy

Typographer: Bettina Joy

Agency: Day, Kerlewis and Joy

Client: Mobil.

All the client had asked for was something cheap and nasty to shut up the country dealers who were complaining about a lack of promotional support. He had not asked for this pristine piece of art lying against the pink wall. It would cost five times as much to print, and there was no reason to spend the extra money, except that the damn poster looked so good.

It was not an easy sale for Harry Joy. The client had already rejected the poster twice and here he was, being presented with it a third time, and he was already shifting in his seat and unfolding his arms and tapping his pencil when Harry's total reserves of charm, good fellowness and cunning began to work on him and he saw (when it was expressed like that – why didn't they say so before?) the reason for the poster being like it was.

Bettina, watching this performance, felt ambivalent. She gave him credit for the skill but felt it was a shallow nasty sort of skill and did not really admire him for it. It was a skill like being born beautiful is a skill, in other words not a skill at all. She had never seen him at work before and so could not assess the enormous impact Hell had made on his technique. Gone was that dozy lethargic Harry Joy, the old tell-us-what-you-want-and-I'll-get-it-for-you pragmatist. In his place was a man who felt he must not fail, a cunning, slightly angry personality who hid his aggression behind the natural blanket of his charm.

Bettina resented all the years he had squashed her and resented the fact that he was now to share her triumph. Yet resentment was nothing new to her and this resentment was of a low-enough order for her to accept, just as she accepted exhaust fumes in the air. She was happy. She sat alone and warmed herself with her Scotch and her triumph.

'Will we wait for Joel?'

David was asking her, in that particularly petulant manner that he adopted for all matters relating to Joel.

'No,' she said, 'start.'

It was Joel who had stood on ladders and carried boxes of tiles up three flights of stairs, who had worked on a high plank until 3 a.m. Who else would have done that for her? Who else, if it came to that, cared about her?

Honey Barbara sat next to Harry. Bettina watched them and knew their legs were touching under the table. She felt too tense to taste the soup. Anybody could see that they were touching under the table and his stupid moony face was pathetic. Obviously everybody else was embarrassed too. Why else would they talk about food? Why else would anybody discuss a soup? They took the soup to pieces as if it were a child's puzzle and held up each component and talked about it.

The woman was a looney.

She was explaiiling that she'd walked 'six miles' to get spinach from someone who didn't spray it, for Christ's sake.

Bettina was pleased to see that Lucy was taking the piss out of her with some subtlety.

'And demineralized water,' Lucy said to Honey Barbara. 'You mean distilled water, with nothing in it but water.'

'Yes.'

'You'll still get cancer,' Lucy grinned, 'just like the rest of us.'

'Shut up,' Bettina said. Once a year she had a complete check for cancer. Her appointment was automatic. She was advised by mail on the week before and the rest of the year she did not think about it.

There was a silence. Everybody thought about cancer.

'I like your food,' Lucy said to Honey Barbara, 'and it isn't boring.'

'Thank you.'

'It's very good,' said Ken. 'I used to live wiv a lady who used to make soup like this and this is better soup and hers was very good.'

It was a long specch for Ken and possibly it would have been longer except that Joel arrived and a fuss was made to make sure he had his soup and his place opposite Bettina.

He sat down and smiled a calm shiny smile.

'Joel... ' Bettina said.

Joel beamed. Sometimes, Harry thought, he looked like a flesh-coloured frog.

'Are you alright, Joel?'

Or a waxy image of a Buddha. A marzipan Buddha, Harry thought, nodding politely at his junior partner.

'Pretty good,' Joel said to Bettina.

Lucy was looking at him sharply, her dark eyes narrowed, and Ken, as if waiting for something, held his soup spoon in the air. David rested his censorious eyes on Joel's face. Only Honey Barbara, engrossed in the problem of finding a clean soup bowl for him, paid no attention.

'What happened?' David said.

'Nothing Davey.'

Joel began to eat his soup and everyone gave up and began to worry about other things. As was the rule in Palm Avenue it was always easy to get two people to agree on any subject, but never three, so that whatever was mentioned there was always plenty of room for discussion and sometimes enough for a brawl.

Nobody noticed whether Joel and Bettina actually spoke to one another, whether an interrogation took place and Joel divulged, reluctantly, his secret. They were too busy talking about demineralized water and the high incidence of kidney stones caused, Honey Barbara claimed, by the current craze for mineral water and the high levels of sodium caused pri-marily by excess salt, when they heard Bettina scream.