Peter Carey - Bliss

There was no joy in their triumphs, only anger, revenge, nose-thumbing, name-calling, and although Bettina provided the emotional tone, Harry followed it willingly and even lent to this unpleasant cocktail a dominant flavour of fear. She saw him encouraging these negative things in himself, as if by letting them expand and take over he would be better assured of success.

It was Honey Barbara who had instructed him in the use-fulness of money, but now, a month later, when she questioned its value as a measure of worth, she was irritated to see what his moustache did not quite hide – his you're-only-saying-that-because-you-haven't-got any smile.

She tried to make the bedroom a peaceful place. She made cushions and bought candles and tried to forget it was Harry's money. She lit incense and put wind chimes out on the verandah where she did her Tai Chi exercises every morning and night.

But still they argued. It seemed there was nothing that could be done to prevent the discord. No meditation, exercise, massage, or even prayer. Nastiness would creep in between them and push them apart. He defended fear and anger as necessary emotions and mocked her when she said there must be another way.

'How?'

'With love.'

He laughed.

'It doesn't work like that.' He lay against the pillows with a glass of wine in one hand and a bottle in the other. He was not the same person she had met in the Hilton. 'You've got to be angry,' he said. 'It gives you strength. You commit yourself to win. Because if you don't get them, they get you. See?' He jabbed his finger. 'You understand?'

'Christ,' she said despairingly, 'you know it's shit.'

'Of course I know it's shit.'

She compressed her lips.

'Don't you look so superior,' he said.

She didn't answer.

'You drink my wine. You drive the Jag.'

'I'd rather not.'

He put his wine glass and bottle down and leaned towards her in such a way that she thought he was going to kiss her and her lips were already moving towards his when she felt the wine glass wrenched from her hand. He threw it out the window and she heard it shatter.

She was too tired to be angry. She hugged herself and felt cold.

He leaned back on the pillow. 'If you don't want it, don't drink it.'

After a moment or two he said: 'Do you know how much you cost me?'

'A lot of money.'

'You cost me a fucking fortune,' he said, 'so don't say you don't love me.'

She wasn't even astonished. 'You're getting poisoned with this shit you're doing Harry. You can't fuck around with it. You're catching it. You're becoming one of them.'

She went and sat beside him. He stroked her hair sadly.

'It's what I've got to do,' he said.

A silence.

'Come home with me,' she said.

He stopped stroking her hair. More silence.

'It's safe there,' she said softly. 'We'll be fine.' She touched the lambswool shoulder with the ends of her fingers.

'It doesn't sound safe to me.'

Another silence (because he had never said this before and he was becoming angry and she felt betrayed).

'It is very beautiful,' she said gently. 'There is no shit at all.'

'But not safe.'

How could he sound triumphant?

'Yes, safe.'

'But you're the one who's been to jail. I haven't been to jail. I haven't spent half my life worried about the police. They don't come here harassing us. My kids didn't grow up setting their alarm clocks for four in the morning.'

'Maybe they should learn.'

And it was, of course, with retorts like this, that she allowed herself to be drawn into it. He had become like a racehorse, or a dog bred for fighting.

'You are making this into Hell,' she said. 'You've decided that's what it is and that's what you're making it.'

He shook his head and looked at the black night window. He would not discuss Hell with her.

'Whose Hell are you in?' she would say, trying to play his game. 'Someone must be running it.'

But that sort of talk only made things worse.

'You tell me,' he'd say nastily.

'I don't know.'

'How interesting.'

And so on.

But just as there are dry days when even the rustiest roof can't leak, there were times when life felt very pleasant. There were miles of wide beaches both north and south of the town and at weekends they could surf and swim naked and let the sea tumble their bodies and rattle out their devils and deliver them on a blanket of white froth to the yellow sand. They lit huge fires on the empty beach and lay there at night watching the stars.

But it was, as she told him one Sunday night, only 2/7 of a life. The other 5/7 were devoted to fear and anger.

Once she had been silly and young, and she had seen Albert on the flooded creek with his Peugeot and not known about hotels and restaurants and the city life. It was long ago. Even the creek was different then and everyone was naive enough to uncritically welcome its raging strength in the monsoon and it meant nothing to them but life. But two seasons later a twenty-two-month-old girl had been swept away and drowned just near that spot and the creek always sounded different after that and no one could cross the ford without thinking of that little girl and how, that cold July morning, they had waded the creek in the high dangerous water hoping they would not find her body and that, glancing into the undergrowth beside the creek, they would glimpse her making her way back home.

But they did find her and two weeks later Albert's Peugeot was at the bottom of a gully and Honey Barbara was on her first aeroplane, high on cocaine, wearing high-heeled shoes. She didn't know what she was doing, or where she was going, but now, with another ten years gone, she had no such excuse.

Then what kept her at Palm Avenue? She confessed one morning, to the bathroom mirror: 'Orgasms,' she told her grin-ning face, 'and flushing toilets.'

David Joy was lying in bed in his room. He heard her laughter through the wall.

Bettina was burning brightly. She was consuming herself. She lost half a stone and had to buy new clothes. She could not sleep. She woke at 4 a.m. considering options, redoing ads, mentally rewriting letters to Americans about her future. Her mind was attuned to problems and she could not stand to see them unsolved, even for a moment, so that when the wine was opened in a restaurant she could not wait for the waiter to begin filling glasses, she pointed: there. This too was her responsibility, this problem of the bottle of wine and empty glass with the glaringly simple solution.

She wasn't even aware that she did it, so she would certainly never have guessed that she was known to the wine-waiters of one restaurant as 'The Glass-pointer' and Harry as 'Mr Glass-pointer'.

And if she had known? 'Well,' she would have said, 'I only do it to save time.'

Perhaps one of the secrets of Bettina's success was that she applied herself as earnestly to trivial details as she did to big ideas. It was seven o'clock in the morning and Honey Barbara was sitting on the grassed edge of the vegetable garden with a glass of demineralized water. 'Do you want to hear what happened last night?'

It was now near the end of Honey Barbara's third month in Palm Avenue (her deadline, and still she stayed!) and the dining room table had all but been abandoned as Harry and Bettina became (for business reasons, so they said) involved in the social life of the town. Bettina had produced a much-admired advertising campaign for the State Gallery (Art Schmart, she said, it's mouldy junk) and as a result of this Harry (Harry!) had been nominated and then elected as a trustee. In less than six months they had moved up that impossible last rung of the ladder and entered the very inner circle of society.

'Formal. No lovers.' Bettina would announce when the invitations came. She would grin, and the lovers, laughing, did not always successfully hide their resentment.