Peter Carey - Bliss

'How long have I got?' she said the clichéd words. She said it to have it unsaid. He was going to say, oh, it's not lethal . That was the plan.

She tricked him only too well.

'Oh,' he said, 'you could have a year .'

And only when the sentence was finished did he realize what a terrible mistake he had made, for he saw her face collapse and twist; defeat and rage battled with each other for control of her features, but both lost to the sheer force of her will.

'I need more than a year,' she said.

'Mrs Joy... '

'You're ridiculous!' she said. 'I need three years to make it in New York. I can't do it in a year.'

He folded his hands and when they rubbed across each other they sounded dry and papery.

'Why don't they tell people?' she said.

'I'm sorry...?' He fiddled in his drawer where he had a 10-ml ampule of Valium.

'Petrol causes cancer. They were right.'

He was ashamed of himself. He had bungled it. 'Who was right, Mrs Joy?'

'The silly hippy was right. She said petrol causes cancer... '

'There are many carcinogens in common use.'

'Saccharin? PVC? ... '

'Yes,' he said, surprised.

'Well why don't they tell us?'

He filled the hypodermic. 'I'm going to give you a shot of this.'

'What is it?' and her eyes were momentarily bright with hope.

'Valium,' he said, his eyes downcast.

'Forget it,' she said.

'It'll make you feel better.'

'Nothing can make you feel better,' she said, 'when you have been made a fool of.'

Her whole life had been built on bullshit.

Later, Harry was to think that if she had had more time to think it over she would not have done what she did, if Lucy had been home, if Honey Barbara had still been there, if Joel had not been driving out to Krappe and if he had not been lunching with Adrian Clunes.

He was wrong. Her actions were carefully thought out.

He remembered coming back from lunch and staring with disbelief at the torn-up Mobil story boards outside her door.

'What happened?' he asked Joel, who was sitting at his desk.

'Changed her mind.'

'Good,' he remembered saying. Bettina's best work always happened like that, rejecting a good campaign and then doing a brilliant one. 'Good.'

That night they had all meant to go to the Krappe sales convention for 'Sweet-tooth' but Bettina begged off because her ads were not finished. She put a note in Harry's diary saying the time for the Mobil presentation had been put for-ward till eleven, and that she would meet him downstairs in the coffee shop at 10.45.

When Harry came home she was asleep. When Bettina got up Harry was asleep. She must have gone straight to the office.

As the tea lady remembered it, the whole thing had been very light-hearted. Everyone in the boardroom had been very relaxed and it seemed as if they were looking forward to the meeting. She heard Mrs Joy apologize for her husband's absence and Mr Jones, the Marketing Director, had suggested that they postponed the meeting but Mrs Joy had said: 'No, no need. You're stuck with me.'

They had laughed.

Mrs Joy had asked for a strong black coffee and when it was pointed out to her that all the coffee was one strength she asked for two cups. She had looked very smart, in a white linen suit with a large white hat. She did not normally wear hats, the tea lady thought, but it was very attractive, and the Chairman had commented on it. Bettina had coloured a little, pleased with the compliment.

They were short one cup, because Mrs Joy had had two, and the tea lady had returned to the meeting temporarily with a cup for Mr Bernstein just as Bettina was unpacking a large cardboard box. On the table she placed three large bottles of petrol.

Mr Cleveland said something about getting close to the product.

It seems unlikely that Bettina ever found time to present her campaign. Perhaps her natural impatience got the better of her. But one can imagine her standing at the head of the table and the men leaning back and smiling, enjoying the little theatre that comes from a good presentation.

'This,' she might have said, 'is petrol.'

A joke, the sheer obviousness of it.

And if the wicks were not already in the bottles she might well have enjoyed the suspense as she put them in. She must have kept their interest – no one left the room just yet.

Did she say anything at all about her cancer?

If so, one imagines she would have had to do it quickly, as a curse almost, and there would have been no time for questions.

Miss Dobson, whose desk is outside the boardroom, beside the Managing Director's office, thought she heard Mrs Joy shout the word 'Mucus' and then there was that terrible explosion, followed by two more in sharp succession and all at once the overhead sprinklers poured down, drenching the eighth floor and Mr Cleveland ran out of the boardroom and collapsed screaming in front of her. She had not recognized him. He rolled into the curtains and set them on fire.

Only one advertisement survived that inferno (certainly no people did) and beneath its bubbled cell overlay one could read the headline, set in Goudy caps and lower case: 'Petrol killed me,' it said and it is an interesting reflection on the art of advertising that it was four hours before anyone bothered to read the body copy and learned that the death in the headline was a death by cancer.

So when the police interrogated Harry for the first time, on the shocked grey ghastly day in that dull little office in the Mobil Research Department, there was only one motive he could think of.

'They must have rejected her ads,' he said.

The faces at Palm Avenue had a grey waxy look. They were numbed and did not question the search but admired, in a vague distracted way, the style in which the police seemed not so much to search as to caress pieces of clothing, stroke objects, and when they slid their big blunt hands behind couches there was a deftness, almost a tenderness, that con-tradicted their gruff masculine manner. They stood on chairs and peered at the dead insects inside light shades; they worked their way along bookshelves and removed books with a gentleness that could be taken for respect.

There were only two of them, Macdonald and Herpes – whose red inflamed face suggested some connection with his unfortunate name – and although they were both titled Detective, it was Macdonald who appeared to be in charge. They were both big men but broad rather than tall, a physical type that is sometimes compared, often with admiration, to a brick lavatory. They wore shorts and long white socks. They carried clipboards.

It was Herpes who ushered everyone into the kitchen and Macdonald who began to interview them, one at a time, in the dining room. There was little conversation in the kitchen and what there was centred on such problems as whether a person wanted coffee or tea and such prosaic details as names and dates and places of birth. To all this, they submitted meekly.

The more serious work took place next door and from time to time the smooth murmuring in the dining room would be broken by the lump of a sob as someone collided with some painful flotsam of memory.

It was the thirteenth of September, that time of the year when one night can be hot and steamy and the next bitterly cold, as if there were forces still arguing for a continuation of winter and others for the beginning of summer and summer would win one night, and winter the next.

The forces of winter were in control on the night after Bettina's death.

Breath hung in the air in the kitchen as they sat around the table like effigies of themselves with only their suspended breath to suggest that they were flesh and blood.

They were not yet told how or why Bettina had died. The police had only just read Bettina's body copy, and deliberately said nothing of her cancer. The questioning, they said, was routine.