Peter Carey - Bliss

Only Joel stayed awake, feeding the fire. At one o'clock Harry heard him cooking potato chips in the kitchen.

*

The noise was insistent and irritating, a continual bump, bump, bump. It was Lucy who wrapped a blanket around herself and went down the wet steps on that grey overcast morning.

The noise came from underneath the verandah and was caused, she later discovered, by Ken's electric drill which was hanging from its cord and being blown against one of the house's high wooden stumps: bump, bump, bump.

It was not the drill she saw, however, it was Joel, who had used its strong black cord to hang himself. His shining shoes were just an inch from the ground and the smell, the horrible stench of his shit, made it perfectly clear that, this time at least, he was not playing a joke.

There was no sympathy from the police. They put everyone back in the kitchen and started all over again, but this time there was a pale excitement in their faces and when Harry saw the thin impatient set of Macdonald's lips he knew that there was no safety for him in Hell. He was persona non grata with Those in Charge.

They yarded them like cattle, dragging them out for ques-tioning one at a time, sometimes just for one question, for ten seconds, then back into the yard.

'In here.' Lucy was called into the dining room where Harry stood.

'Say that in front of her,' Macdonald said to Harry.

'I've never seen that map before,' Harry said.

'O.K., take her back.'

It was unnerving. Like standing in front of one of those machines that throw tennis balls.

'How tall are you?'

'Five foot eleven.'

'When did you first meet Joel?'

No one was nice any more. Herpes did not show the photo of his holiday house. Macdonald told no jokes. Other policemen with beards and long hair began a search of the house which was neither stylish nor gentle. In the garage outside they used a rattling power tool to dismantle the Jaguar.

'You fink Joel was in on it, don't you?' Ken asked Herpes.

Herpes pointed a thick finger and narrowed his red-lidded eyes. Ken was quiet.

The police found passports, air tickets to New York, a can-, cer map. They did not doubt that Joel was in on it.

When everyone had been interrogated once, Macdonald came and leant against the doorway in the kitchen.

'This family,' he said, 'has been harbouring at least two terrorists, possibly more. I have had the unpleasant duty to spend most of last night in those homes where fathers and husbands have been murdered by two people from this house. So today,' he bit the inside of his cheek and looked thoughtfully at Harry, 'we won't be having any shouting or threats. At least,' he smiled, 'not from you.' It was a pleasant smile, and more frightening because of it.

Finally, after one more round of interrogation, the police departed, leaving behind them a book-strewn house with a dismantled Jaguar still in the garage, its body panels stacked on the lawn.

'She had cancer,' Harry said slowly, 'She damn-well had cancer.'

No one was listening to him. They had other things on their minds. They turned up the radio to protect themselves from bugs. They turned on taps and had whispered conversations. They still wore big pullovers and thick socks although the afternoon had become suddenly hot. They prickled under wool.

Ken and Lucy were arguing with David. Ken was pushing a dirty finger at David's cashmere chest. David was looking frightened but he stood his ground.

'She had cancer,' Harry said. 'From this house, living with us.'

David had stolen an air ticket from under Macdonald's nose, sliding it off the table while he looked the policeman in the eye. Ken was backing him against the refrigerator.

'It's my ticket,' David was saying.

'I don't want your ticket, sonny,' Ken said.

'You can't have it.'

Ken closed his eyes in pain. He went to the kitchen table and sat down:

'The middle class are fucking disgusting.'

'You can't stop me,' David said, but he didn't move from where he had been pushed. 'I was the one who hid his passport. If I want to go, I go.'

'And leave us in the shit,' Lucy said. 'Typical.'

'What shit? We haven't done anything.'

'She had cancer,' Harry said, but no one was interested. The radio played the traffic reports. The bridges were blocked. David and Lucy forgot about the suspected bugs and started shouting at each other. Ken sat with his head in his hands at the kitchen table.

Harry could feel the cancer in the air. It had been here all the time. It was impregnated in the walls, like spores, like a mould, invisible but always there in what they breathed, what they ate. He could feel the cells in his own body rising, multiplying, marshalling against him, to make him beg for mercy, for death, for release, slowly, agonizingly over an eternity of pain that they would call, euphemistically, A Long Illness.

What was about to begin was possibly the lowest, most shameful period of his life, five hours of panic in which he would abandon Ken and Lucy to the Special Branch and fight his son for money.

But his behaviour was not so different, in fact much milder, than the panic that was to run through the Western world (and parts of the industrialized East) ten years later when the cancer epidemic really arrived, and then it came at a time of deep recession, material shortages, unemployment and threatening nuclear war, and it proved the last straw for the West which had, until then, still managed to tie its broken pieces together with cotton threads of material optimism which served instead of the older social fabric of religion and established custom. Then the angry cancer victims could no longer be contained by devices as simple as Alice Dalton's Ward L, and took to the streets in what began as demonstrations and ended in half-organized bands, looting for heroin first, and then everything else, and Bettina's act in the Mobil office was no more than a brief eddy before the whirlwind of their rage.

So as you watch Harry Joy running around his own house in panic you have the comfort of knowing he is something less than freakish. His cancer map has come to life like some deadly pin-ball machine finally (the penny dropped) activated. His skin prickles. His stomach hurts and he notices a strange coldness at the place where he imagines (incorrectly) his liver is.

And there he is, looting, going through his son's (nice boy, going to be a doctor) drawers looking for money, and yes, actually wrestling with the boy as they fight for a bundle of notes which fall from the desk top and float across the room. They scramble to pick them up. He catches his son's foot and sits on his chest, and from this position negotiates a puffing red-faced deal.

'Half. 50-50. O.K.?'

'O.K.'

But once released the scramble is on again, and there must be another fight, and the son must be subdued again, and this time with a backhanded blow which will partly deafen him and cause him great pain on the aeroplane he will shortly board.

'You won't need it,' Harry grunted, scrambling across the carpet. 'I need it. I'm leaving.'

'I'm leaving too.'

'Where going?'

'New York.'

They fought over a photograph of Bettina, and David won the bigger piece. Harry went to his room and packed a bag, cramming in silk shirts as if they were currency. He arrived downstairs just behind his partly deaf son. David had his suitcase with him.

'You think you're a real smart dude,' Ken said to David, 'but those coppers aren't dumb. They'll know you knocked off that ticket.'

'Right under their nose,' David said, but he stayed near the doorway, sitting on his case.

Harry sat at the table and let Ken pour him tea.

'You're a fool,' Lucy told her brother.

He spat at her. 'You're not so smart,' he said, 'limpet.'