Peter Carey - Bliss

The following interview with Joel was not atypical, although it could hardly be judged to be routine. Imagine then, the policeman sitting at the head of the dining-room table (how far away those lunatic nights seemed now), a radiator at his feet and some thirty books, mostly paperbacks, stacked neatly on the table. The titles of these books might suggest a house with a far more serious political bent than it had. Kropotkin's revolutionary pamphlets, Ernest Mandel on Trotsky, an Everyman edition of Das Kapital in two volumes, Social Banditry , and so on. These books were Lucy's, but the book that interested Macdonald most of all was The Politics of Cancer by Samuel S. Epstein, which Honey Barbara had bought and abandoned after its fifth depressing page.

'Do you have any particular theory about the cause of cancer?'

'No, not really.'

'Do you think cancer is political?'

'I don't know.'

'Is it someone’s fault ?'

'I suppose so.'

'What do you mean exactly?'

'Well I've heard people say it's caused by chemicals, but I don't... '

'Which people were these?'

'There was a woman, I don't know her real name, called Honey Barbara.'

'Were there many meetings where this was discussed?'

'No, not meetings. Everybody just got drunk.'

'Have you ever seen this book before?'

'No.'

'But that is where you sleep, on that mattress?'

'That's right. I told you already.'

'This book was under that mattress.'

'Many people used the bed, all the time.'

'Many people? You said you slept only with Mrs Joy!'

'Many people, during the day, to sit on, like a chair.'

'And although you've slept on top of this book, you've never seen it?'

'No.'

'How thick would you say it was?'

'Two inches.'

'You slept on top of a two-inch-thick book and never felt it?'

'No.'

'Do you think people who cause cancer should be killed?'

'I’ve never thought about it. Is that what Bettina did?'

'How tall are you?'

'Why do you want to know?'

'How tall are you?'

'Five foot six and a half.'

And so on.

They saved Harry till last. He entered the room with every intention of co-operating, of being perfectly polite. In return he hoped to have some clarification of his wife's death. There was a feeling of shame in the kitchen. As if they had all done something wrong and would; in due course, be punished.

But Macdonald was soon asking him about Honey Barbara.

'I don't know.'

'They said she was your girlfriend.'

'No.'

Macdonald looked at him and sucked his teeth. He had a big face with small ears like delicate handles on an ugly hand-made pot.

'Look here, fellow... ' he began.

He went no further. Harry had heard that tone before. It was the sound of a policeman who thinks he can get away with murder and he was not going to have it.

'Do you know who I am?' Harry said, pushing his face close to Macdonald's. 'Do you know who my friends are? Do you realize,' he stood up and it would have been ridiculous for Macdonald to stand up too so that Harry remained towering over him, 'that the Chairman of Mobil was a close friend of mine. Not only my wife... ' he hesitated, 'is dead, but also my colleagues. Now if you wish to harass me, to cause me and my family trouble tonight I will be on the telephone and I shall have your arse kicked so hard you'll spit your teeth out.'

Macdonald hesitated.

It is a measure of Harry's confidence in his safe position in Hell that his slow anger at the behaviour of the police, his grief, his irritation that Macdonald had commandeered the dining room rather than the kitchen, that no one was going to light the fire if he didn't, came forth in such a controlled silk-gowned display of rage.

Macdonald, having seen the house to be expensive but not of the first rank, was as surprised – more surprised – than the people in the kitchen who stirred expectantly and waited.

When Macdonald gave in it was not because Harry's face was red and his eyes yellow, nor that he was a widower, possibly an innocent one, nor was it the quality of his hand-stitched suit, whose expensive subtleties were lost on Mac-donald, but that Harry said ' shall ' have your arse kicked so hard you'll spit your teeth out.

There was something in this combination of correctness and violence which he instinctively reacted to, and he decided to give him, at least for the moment, the benefit of the doubt.

'We have an unpleasant job to do,' he said stiffly, lining up some pieces of paper on his clipboard, 'and we try to do it as pleasantly as possible. I understand that you're upset.'

Harry nodded and stepped back to allow the man to stand.

On this sort of night (wind rattling the tall windows in the dining room, the big fig scratching itself against the western wall) they would have eaten pea soup from big white bowls, baked vegetables and Honey Barbara's apple pie. They would have opened a magnum of Raussan Segla. Bettina would have sat in her wing-back chair, her face tired, a glass in her hand, while Joel nestled at her feet and gently rubbed her generous calves. And everyone would have been momentarily caught in a honeyed silence accompanied only by the oboe of the wind, the brush of the fig and the low percussive thump of the door.

Ah, Honey Barbara would have thought, all those dreams! And seen behind all those flame-flickered eyes the shimmering shades of decadent utopias.

But tonight the room was dark and the street light threw down a blue sheen, like a spilled light globe trapped beneath the wax of the polished floor, and there was a deadness in their eyes that even the lights, once turned on, did nothing to change.

Only Joel burned bright and it occurred to no one that the energy he brought to lighting the fire and preparing the meal which no one had the stomach to eat (bacon, eggs, pancakes, maple syrup) was not fuelled by inexhaustible supplies of life but was more like that expended by blow-flies caught against the glass.

They admired his optimism and were irritated by it at the same time. They wanted a warm place to weep freely without shame but he placed sensible, practical things in their laps.

Yet nothing could prevent the mental image they all secretly carried: blackened, bubbling, Bettina's unseen corpse, this turd floating insistently before them, showing itself; unfolding, parading even before their open eyes.

Among the practical things they discussed, huddled around the fire on blankets and mattresses, was the need to remain silent about Honey Barbara. It was Harry's suggestion and they all supported it, except Joel who could not see that it was so important.

'I told them already,' Joel said, 'but they weren't interested.'

'They were interested,' Harry said, 'they asked me. If they ask you again say you made a mistake.'

'Why?'

'Because,' Harry hissed, 'she's poor. That's how it works, isn't it. We're rich, they leave us alone. We've bought our safety.'

'You were fantastic,' Lucy said, 'you were wonderful.'

'But we haven't done anything wrong,' David said.

'Don't matter,' Ken said. 'I was busted once by the cops for dope and it couldn't have been my stash because it was in the teapot, a great big lump of hash, and they were drinking tea out of it. The stuff they busted me for, they planted on me, but I couldn't say that in court. Harry's right. They bust poor people.'

'But we haven't done anything,' Joel said.

'They don't need a reason,' Harry said.

'Because Bettina has killed a lot of rich people,' Ken said. 'And rich people don't like to see other rich people get killed. It makes them go crazy.'

They shared out tranquillizers solemnly and drank them with cognac to make them work better and then they built up the fire and bedded down beside it, without even discussing why they might do such an unusual thing. They huddled together on an odd assortment of mattresses, lumpy shapes under blue blankets and pale eiderdowns, like travellers in a waiting room in a foreign country.