Peter Carey - Bliss

'What happened? Nothing happened. The arseholes! Jesus, I'll be pleased to be out of this town. They all think it's Harry who does the ads. They automatically assume it's him. Oh, what a clever husband you have,' she whined in imitation. 'What a brilliant man. And what do you do, Mrs Joy?'

Then would come the latest bulletin in the campaign to get to New York. A letter from the famous Ed McCabe com-plimenting her on her work (she'd brought it to his notice, of course). A telegram from Mary Wells. She kept up a fast, furious correspondence with anyone who would answer her and her letters were tough, funny, and skilfully self-promoting. She wrote press releases for the New York trade press. She adopted Americanisms in her speech, remembering to say 'Garage' instead of 'Car Park,' and 'out back' instead of 'out the back'.

As she reminded Honey Barbara on this crisp, sunny morning: 'This is only a stopping place for me. Another six months and I'm taking my samples and half the profits and setting up in New York.

'But let me warn you, he is starting to like it.' He, in this case, was Harry. Joel was not liking it. Joel was waiting to go to New York. 'They all think he's an intellectual. The less he says the more brilliant they think he is. That's always been Harry's goddamned talent. When you talk to him he looks at you as if you're saying the most interesting and original things he's ever heard in his life. No wonder everyone likes him. No wonder we all think he's intelligent.'

'He is intelligent,' Honey Barbara said sharply.

'Yes,' Bettina said quickly. 'He is, but you know what I mean. He's in his element. It's true. You should spray those cabbages. They're getting eaten alive. I'll get someone to pick up a good spray for you.'

'Bettina... '

'I know, I know, but what's the point of growing them if you let something else eat them?'

'There's plenty left for us.'

'Mmmm,' Bettina said, thoughtfully. She stared at the cabbages. 'I've got to go,' she said.

She tip-toed off across the lawn so as not to dig her heels into the grass. She found Harry shaving.

'You remember,' she said, leaning in the doorway, 'how Monsanto said they'd talk to us if we could think of a new product they liked.'

'Mmm.'

'I've got it.'

'What?'

'Organic Poison.'

He left Honey Barbara on her metal chair with her glass of water, sitting perched in the backyard like a muddy flamingo. She was like an exotic flower picked by a thoughtless child. He thought of bedraggled polar bears pacing their concrete-floored cages, their lukewarm water dotted with the soggy wrappers of confectionery.

Even the cabbages would not grow properly. They were poor and dwarfed, struggling to survive in the heavy clay soil. The compost heap, her pledge of hope for the future, had begun to smell. Rats came at night to raid it and possums gorged themselves as if it were a colossal pudding.

Harry sat back in the passenger seat of the Jaguar and felt depressed. Bettina, her seat pushed forward, hunched over the wheel and drove with damp-handed bravado, abusing the innocent through the safety of shut windows. The air conditioner made hardly a sound. It was seventy degrees Fahrenheit.

'Look at the mutants!'

They had stopped at traffic lights. Pedestrians streamed around the car, their faces marked by dull punishments. Harry was surprised at the intensity of her hatred for these Captives.

'Ugly,' she chanted. 'Ugly, ugly, ugly.'

Bettina was not particularly beautiful. He mentally placed her in the midst of the crowd. He stole a drab overcoat from one woman, a string bag from another, and then, having dressed her with these secretly, let her walk in front of the Jaguar.

'It'll be the same in New York,' he said. 'Ordinary people in the street.'

'Rubbish. They're so damned dull.'

'What will happen,' he asked, 'if you can't get into America?'

'Cretin,' she shouted, swerving in front of a truck and applying her horn as two men with a ladder jumped out of the way. 'I'll get into America, don't worry.'

'But if you can't.'

'I will.'

'What if something goes wrong?'

'Do you want something to go wrong?'

He didn't answer immediately. He was the Managing Dir-ector of a business whose growth and success was now based solely on Bettina.

'Come with me,' she said.

He looked up, biting his lip. 'Where?'

'New York.' She gave those two words all their due. There was not a fleck of dust on them.

The bitten lip could not help but form a smile, and she could almost see the pictures in his mind, those idealized .towers of glass, Vance Joy's magic, but also more recent dreams, as elegantly tooled as 'The Talk of the Town' in the New Yorker .

'No,' he said, and shifted his body a little so he could look out his side window.

'You can't even hammer a nail in straight.'

'So.'

'You'll hate living in the bush.'

'The hut is built.'

'You won't go,' she said swinging on to the freeway. 'You're a city boy. You like soft things.'

Like an expert jeweller she tapped the flaw, the long thin fault that ran through his character: he loved comfort, soft things, silk, velvet, words you could also use about wine.

'No,' he said again. 'I can't.'

He was not prepared for what would happen when Bettina finally went. He chose to believe she would not go.

'I think we'll get a brand from British Tobacco,' he said to change the subject. 'Adrian says it'll be a two million dollar launch.'

'I'll be gone by then. Come on, Harry, come to New York. We'll bring everyone with us.'

He winced, thinking of his poor bedraggled Honey Barbara in New York.

'We can't walk out on the business, just when we've built it up.'

'Sure we can.'

'Our name will stink.'

'Who cares? We won't be back.'

'They'll hate us,' Harry said.

'I hate them ,' she said simply.

The town had never taken Bettina seriously, which she felt might have been justifiable in the past, but not now. They gave her no credit. They treated her like a fool and sometimes at night she invented extravagant ways to punish them. She did not ask much from them, only credit for what she had done. But to the town she was no one: Mrs Harry Joy.

'Look at the fucking mutants.' They had come off the freeway and were waiting at the lights.

Harry huddled into his seat. He liked the smell of leather. He felt protected in this large rich car. He did not want blis-tering heat, mud, leeches and hard work. He could not hammer a nail straight, it was true. When Honey Barbara told him stories about Bog Onion Road she did not mean to terrify him, but how could snakes and police and bushfires and a hanging man ever be attractive to him? He pushed the Cancer Map away into the darkness and sought his safety here, under the protection of Those in Charge. They liked him, or, if not liked, at least valued him. He was in favour, in fashion, and his days were dedicated to staying there, his nights to dreaming about a fall. They patted him on the back and asked him to stay for drinks. They made assumptions about his beliefs which were incorrect. He smiled and nodded and pretended he didn't know what it was like to be inside a police station or walk the corridors of Mrs Dalton's Free Enterprise Hospital and see the trolleys carrying captives to their therapy. He looked them in the eye and they found him both courageous and intelligent. He loathed them.

He was a prisoner with special privileges making his captors tea, coffee, folding their socks, telling them funny stories for their amusement, ironing their sheets, warming their beds as they saw fit.

His soul stank of Californian Poppy hair oil: a weasling cunning little thing.

Honey Barbara and Ken and Lucy had taught him a lot about the structure of Hell. When he listened to the trustees of the State Gallery with their silky talcumed talk he could see exactly where they stood in the scheme of things. It was they who trafficked in poisons, controlled the distribution of safety, the purity of water and air, or, more probably, the lack of it. Not for them the nipping little tortures one Captive might inflict on another. It was their privilege to inflict many special diseases and even death, to withhold treatment from the sick, to beat the brave, and torture the poor.