Peter Carey - Bliss

'I don't believe all this rubbish about cancer.' Bettina jabbed the table with her little finger. 'But I am prepared to discuss it. I am terrified of it but I will talk about it.'

'You just get it,' Lucy said, 'don't worry. You either do or you don't.'

'You don't just get it,' Honey Barbara said.

'It's lies,' Bettina said.

'You said "discush",' Joel told her. 'You're prepared to discush it.'

'My mother,' Lucy said, 'has swallowed the whole thing. She believes the whole American myth. She believes General Motors are nice people. She thinks Nixon was unlucky. She thinks I.T.T. wouldn't lie. She believes in what she does.' And she gave Bettina a hug and a kiss. 'She is the real article. She is not a cynical manipulator.'

'Get off,' Bettina said, but just the same she was pleased.

'How you live,' Lucy said to Honey Barbara, 'might be fun.'

'You don't know how I live,' said Honey Barbara.

'No one knows,' Harry said proudly.

'We know,' Ken said.

'We guess,' Lucy said. 'We guess how you live.'

'Lived.'

'And will live again. But it is no better than this is. This society is fucked. You'll go down with it too. You won't escape.'

'No!' Bettina stood up. She looked as if she wanted to propose a toast. Her chair fell backwards with a crash. 'You're all so negative.'

'I agree with you,' said Honey Barbara, rising and clinking her glass against Bettina's. Thus alliances were made and, in a similar fashion, broken.

Lucy and Bettina agreed that Honey Barbara was full of shit about food. Lucy and Honey Barbara agreed that everyone would get cancer. Honey Barbara and Bettina then agreed they wouldn't, but as Honey Barbara explained she only meant it for people who were careful with their food and where they lived, whereas Bettina was convinced that the whole cancer theory was a Communist conspiracy.

Joel always agreed with Bettina and when he spoke they all had to be quiet out of respect for Bettina. He was very boring but it was not permitted to shout him down. Bettina, watching him talk, smiled proudly and Harry, normally tolerant to a fault, allowed his moustache to reveal the sarcastic cast of his mouth.

Ken stood up and began to declaim Cavafy's poem. 'Waiting for the Barbarians'. His voice was as rasping as his teeth were jagged and he recited from memory as if his finger was dragging along printed lines, but there was a force in his rusty voice and David, for one, was impressed to hear things he did not understand.

'What are we waiting for all crowded in the forum?' Ken declaimed, struggling to his feet and glaring around the table. He held a finger high.

'The Barbarians are to arrive today,' he answered.

'Within the Senate House why is there such inaction?

The Senators make no laws, what are they sitting there for?

Because the Barbarians arrive today. What laws now should the Senate be making?

When the Barbarians come, they'll make the laws.'

Bettina began to smell petrol in the second verse. She did not realize what it was and she was only aware of being depressed.

She listened glumly and when Ken finished she said: 'No one talked like this before. All this gloom-doom business. It's since you came,' she told Honey Barbara, 'you encourage all this.'

'It's not her,' Lucy said, 'it's Harry. He used to be see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil.'

But Harry did not speak. He sat, as he always did, and listened. He was a sponge in their midst.

'He used to stop us saying bad things,' David said. 'I think he was right.'

'I can smell petrol,' Bettina said.

'I washed,' Lucy said.

'I washed too,' Ken said.

It was the smell of her childhood, the fumes drifting up from the forecourt and in her open window. It was the smell of her father when she embraced him and, she swore, you could still smell the petrol coming from his coffin when he was lowered into his grave.

A dirty rag was found out on the verandah, and the subject of petrol was avoided by David who, eager to contribute some-thing, told the table the entire plot of a spy thriller he had seen at the drive-in the night before.

So the matter of petrol, the Cadillac, Lucy's refusal to work, her wasted education, were saved for another night when it would take a predictable form, something like this:

'You are going backwards,' Bettina would tell Lucy. 'That's why we gave you an education, Lucy.' She looked disapprovingly at Ken. 'So you would not get involved with stinking petrol.'

'You never told me,' Lucy grinned.

'Please-get a job,' Bettina said.

'I don't want to be a boss.'

'Be a worker.'

'I don't want to be a slave.'

And Lucy could paint a very convincing picture of the cruelties and iniquities of Hell. Harry listened to her describe the economic system, the blindness of profit seekers and so on.

'You are spoilt children.'

'We are waiting for the Barbarians.'

'You should learn how to feed yourself and protect yourself,' Honey Barbara said sternly.

'No one will survive,' Ken said, filling Harry's glass with Cabernet Sauvignon.

'I will survive,' said Honey Barbara. 'And Harry will survive. The rest of you are fucked.'

But in the morning her eyes in the mirror were small and grey, and there were black marks like tiny freckles around her eyes: blood vessels she had burst vomiting.

As the weeks went on, the structural flaws in their relationship became apparent to Honey Barbara. It was, she thought, like being in a hut with a leaking rusty roof: you keep living in it, you try to ignore it, you mark the leaking parts with chalk and promise yourself you'll make temporary repairs with bituminous paint, but then, when it's dry, you forget about it. In the wet you live amongst plinking buckets but never enough of them, and you kick them over anyway, and everything becomes damp, and mould and mildew grow everywhere, even in your bed, until, in the end, it all becomes too much and you find your ladder and, just as the sunlight strikes the roof and the steam starts rising from it, you rip the fucker to pieces and the rusty iron disintegrates as easily as a dead leaf in your hand. Underneath it you find fat cockroaches, wooden battens white with rot,·leaves, mulch, decay, mice, a tree-snake with a yellow belly and some peculiar ice blue fungi growing from the rotten wood: a whole eco-system built on lethargy and failure.

In short, she knew she should have left him but she couldn't. She was doing what she had done years before with Albert (Peugeot Albert, American Albert), finding herself in the mid-dle of a situation she disapproved of, living with a man who was fucked, but who she stayed with anyway, like some novice board rider who tries to stay with a bad wave to its painful end.

She sought refuge in the garden and in the bedroom where she painted the frames of the three windows three different colours: blue, red, purple. (Bettina sucked in her breath but said nothing.) She began a mural above the bed but didn't finish it. It showed a part of a small hut with blue, red and purple window frames, and an old Peugeot, rust brown, which she intended to cover with creeper and long grass. On the verandah outside the red window she installed a hammock and sometimes, when Harry was more drunk or aggressive than usual; she would sleep out there. She had five yards of muslin for a mosquito net: she wrapped them around the hammock and lay there until the morning when he would come with red-eyed remorse and entice her back to bed and they would make peace and fuck until their eyes were wide and their mouths full of pillow.

With Bettina and Joel, Harry had formed a gang. Nightly they reported successes. They walked in the door clinking bottles and shouting. They had won this Account or that Account. They had sold a campaign. She could not be happy for them, although she had tried.