Peter Carey - Bliss

'Possibly.'

'It is unnecessary. Please, David... '

For a moment he hesitated. For an instant panic fluttered its wings in his ears.

'No,' he said, 'it is necessary.'

And he went to stand against the embankment with his hands behind his back. He stood before the unhappy soldiers like a man posing for the photographer in the square of a tourist town. The mud was not visible to the camera.

'Come on,' he said, 'hurry up.'

Miguel Fernandez did not wish to look at the body, but it was expected. As he walked towards the crumpled thing that had been a man he was not ready for the look of ugly surprise he would see on the dead man's face, nor did he know that one night nearly twenty years later, his son's wife would tell him the story of The Man with the White Suit. It was not quite the real story; it had become mixed with other stories David Joy had told that night.

The story of the man with the white suit ends formally, always the same, with the sun coming out as he falls, and they say Pero era sólo una mariposa (but it was only a butterfly) que se volaba (flying away).

The wrapper of a sweet confection delivered fifty-five years through time. But not even Miguel Fernandez knew that.

Harry Joy found Honey Barbara in the morning, one hundred miles up Highway One, and had he been two minutes earlier or ten minutes later, he would probably never have found her at all.

He brought the Jaguar to a stop in front of her and watched her run towards the car. At the passenger door, she recognized him.

'I'm not coming back,' she said.

'I know.'

'I'm going home.'

'I'll take you.'

She opened the door and looked at him, hesitating with her bundle resting on the seat.

'It's four hundred miles.'

'That's O.K.'

'Not all the way.' She threw her bundle into the back seat and closed the door.

It was a difficult journey for both of them but at least they both knew there was nothing to say.

'I don't like you soft,' she said once, touching the cuff of his sleeve.

He didn't understand and smiled painfully.

'I like you hard. Not all this silk.' She clenched her fist and smiled.

'What are you saying?'

'We had nice times, Harry.'

'Yes.'

'We had some nice fucks.'

'Yes.'

They drove through Sunday traffic past giant fibreglass pineapples and bananas surrounded by buses and people with secret pimples on their arses.

'Can I come and see you here?'

'They'd think you were a spy.'

'Who are they?'

'Realists,' she said and sunk into her seat and watched the wipers slurp at the rain on the window.

It was five o'clock and getting dark when she made him stop at the turn off to Paddy Melon Road just on the curve of the bitumen where Paddy Melon Road goes downhill through the casurinas, a collection of puddles in a hard ribbon of mustard clay.

It. had stopped raining for the moment but there were heavy inky blue clouds behind Mount Warning.

'It'll rain,' he said.

'I don't mind the rain,' she said. 'They'll be waiting for it now. We have droughts in winter.'

'Will you write to me?'

She bit her lip and they kissed uncomfortably, their bodies spanning the bucket seats and instruments of the Jaguar.

She took the bundle and closed the door without looking at him, and he stayed in the car with the engine running and watched her walk down the gravel road. He noticed that she flinched from time to time when a sharp rock bit into her soft bare feet.

It was noon on a Friday and the city was crowded. People stopped to look at Bettina, and it was not because of her cleverly cut black dress or the silk scarf with the signature of the famous designer she wrapped around her black bag, nor was it because of the strut, the prance (almost) of her plump legs, but the sheer quality of anger she contained. Her cheeks had flattened, almost hollowed, as they did when she was very drunk or very angry, and she was not drunk.

She bumped into people and did not look around.

She stopped at a traffic light and a whiskery old woman winked at her.

'Cheer-up, dearie.'

'Mutant!' she said. Her dress was by Cardin, her shoes by Gucci.

She had so much anger she did not know what to do with it, no, not anger – rage. They had made a fool (what a fool, what an idiot) of Bettina Joy.

She walked into the corner pub opposite the railway station. It was the public bar. They made way for her and served her immediately. She ordered a double Scotch, drank it in a gulp, ordered another one and drank that.

Fifty-six men watched her in silence.

'That's it, girly.'

Bettina curled her whole face into such a display of ugly contempt that the whole bar erupted into laughter. She threw money on the bar and left.

Until today life had been nearly perfect. In the three months since Honey Barbara had gone Harry had settled into work, they had all settled into work. Now there was no real reason to come home early, or even come home at all. They had heated soup in an electric jug, drank a little (but not a lot) of white wine. They made toast. Whoever had the time would make the toast, it didn't matter. They changed the name to Joy, Joy & Davis, and that's what they were: a team.

There was such a sense of excitement, of comradeship, and it was nothing (it was everything!) to work till three in the morning, or even, as they'd done on the second Mobil presentation, till dawn. They typed their own reports and bound them. There was nothing they couldn't do: she was good with ads, Harry was good with strategies, and Joel had revealed, finally, that he had a better eye for detail than either of them. Joel wrote the conference reports. He dotted i's and crossed t's with an enthusiasm that sometimes drove her crazy.

Just two weeks ago they had opened a letter and found they had sixteen entries accepted in the New York One Show. Copywriter: Bettina Joy, Art Director: Bettina Joy, etc.

Their profit projection for the calendar year was three hundred thousand dollars.

The New York trade press printed one of Bettina's press releases.

And then, this morning, in that grey dull little room with the wrought-iron balcony, that stale imitation of Paris with its waiting room stinking of meths, she had sat with no more trepidation than at the dentist's while he clipped the x-ray on to the screen and read a report.

'Mrs Joy,' he said, 'have you ever been exposed to petrol over a... '

'Tell me,' she said.

He was tall and handsome and had a slightly roguish eye. She liked him even if she hated his business.

'This is something,' he stopped and looked again. 'This is something we normally only find in people who are exposed to petrol fumes over a very long period. Mechanics, service station attendants... ' he faded away, smiling apologetically at such comparisons.

'Tell me.'

'We'll get another opinion,' he said, 'of course.'

'It's something nasty.'

'Have you been exposed to petrol a lot?' He managed a smile. 'Hardly.' Then, avoiding her eye for a second, using the time to look down at her card: 'It's a malignancy, I'm afraid. A rather nasty one.'

'Yes.' She could be very normal. She would be. In all the times she had imagined this ·scene she had gone to pieces. 'Yes, it's alright. I think I knew.' This was not true. SHE HADN'T KNOWN. SHE HADN'T EVEN GUESSED.

She had to find out the truth.

'It is a particular malignancy normally caused by petrol.'

'Petrol causes cancer?'

He clicked his tongue sadly and pulled his lips back side-ways against his teeth. 'The benzine in petrol, to be precise.'

'You'd think they'd tell people,' she said wryly. She was proud of herself. She had style. They told her she had cancer and she was being sardonic. But he still hadn't told her.