Bliss (24 page)

'Don't talk about the black.'

'Alright then, but... '

'She'd never look twice at me,' Harry said, 'she hates me.'

But Nurse was grinning and shifting around inside his trousers. He thrust the brown paper parcel into Harry's lap. 'There,' he said, 'open it.'

The parcel contained one pair of shoes, one silk shirt, toothpaste, aftershave and hair oil.

'Californian Poppy,' Nurse said holding the bottle of hair oil with a tenderness that Harry Joy had once displayed towards bottles of French wine.

Harry's trousers were smudged with his attempts to use soap on them, but his shirt was magnificent, silk without blemish. His shoes shone. His teeth sparkled. And yet she had chosen that the interview should be across the desk and not in the comfortable armchairs that surrounded the flower-burdened coffee table. She was still in mourning for the imposter. She rocked back and forth in her squeaking chair while fish swam in the aquarium behind her head and she played churches and steeples with her short-fingered hands.

He sat on the edge of his chair and smiled and nodded, raised his eyebrows, inclined his head politely and, when his nose ran, had a pressed handkerchief to wipe it with.

'You will never be the real Mr Joy,' she said. 'I'm sorry. I know that's unfair, but it's true.'

There was a silence. Harry gave her a sly grin.

'There is something, don't you think, about successful men that is immensely attractive, a certain lack of desperation.'

He pushed his shoulders back and let his arm hang loosely.

'I have been reading my back issues of
Financial Review
, and look, here he is.' She pushed a tom piece of newspaper across the desk (there was no chance for fingers to touch) and withdrew to be closer to her fish. 'Not a good likeness though. Some people take good photographs,' she said. 'My late husband never had a good photograph taken. I regret it now. I always meant to commission a portrait. If you're trying to butter me up with that silly grin you might as well forget it. I can't afford to let you out.'

He rubbed his face, as if slapped.

'And don't try running away.' She took off her pink spec-tacles and cleaned the lenses with a yellow cloth. 'If you try, Jim and Jimmy will bring you back.'

'The boys in white,' he joked weakly.

'Sometimes they wear white, sometimes they wear grey,' she said contrarily. 'Sometimes they wear shorts and white socks and sometimes, should you try in the ·middle of the night, I must warn you, they wear nothing at all. Mr Duval,' she sighed, and while Harry Joy was still flinching from this insult, repeated it: 'Mr Duval, I try not to have favourites. I try not to have personal dislikes, but I'm afraid I do not take to you.'

'I'm sorry.' Surely many romances grew from such unpromising beginnings.

'It is not your fault. You have an unfortunate manner and you are, of course, sick, so it would not have occurred to you how inconsiderate your request is.'

'I'm sorry.' He would begin again, on the right foot this time.

'You don't have to apologize all the time. That's exactly the sort of thing I mean. If you apologized less you might listen more. Then you would ask me why your request was inconsiderate and then I would have told you.'

'Please tell me.'

'I'm not sure that I want to any more.'

'Please, Mrs Dalton.' He summoned up all his reserves of confidence. He had once been told he looked like the God Krishna.

'The nature of growth industries,' she sighed, 'is often cyc-lical. There is under-supply and then, next thing you know, everyone is on the band waggon and there is over-supply. So from a shortage of beds we go to a surplus of beds and people like myself, pioneers in the business, are the first to suffer.'

'But in time,' Harry said (here was his chance to establish himself as a man of intelligence), 'it is bound to pick up.'

'Ah, in time!' she said bitterly. 'In time. But will I still be in business 'in time'? Those nasty little worms in Social Welfare expel my patients or put their clients into the cheapest place they can find. And believe me, there are some very cheap beds being offered, not the luxury we have here. Even the cancer patients don't make up the shortfall.'

'Cancer patients? Here?' he asked. She was softening. He raised his eyebrows with great interest. Ah, he told himself, you greasy genius!

'They become quite upset poor dears. I advis~ you, by the way, to stay well away from L Block. They can become very violent while they've still got their strength, although as anyone knows, it's their own fault.'

'Sorry. I don't follow you.'

'Their fault,' she said impatiently, her voice rising in pitch, 'their own fault. Anyone who reads the papers knows what causes it.'

'Ah, cigarettes.'

'Cigarettes!' She swung in her chair and for a moment he thought she was about to leave the room. She put her thin arms along the arms of the chair and held them tight. 'Cigarettes.' Her eyes swam behind her glasses like gold fish. 'Alice, you are being intolerant,' she said. She bestowed upon him a smile which was obviously intended as a gift of some munificence. 'I thought the press had covered it quite adequately,' she said with buttered patience. 'But it is generally recognized by more advanced members of the profession that cancer is caused by emotional repressions. Now if they would use us as a therapeutic, preventative force...'

Liar! Fart-face!

It was not the lie that did it. It was the weeks, the months of slights, insults as fine as razor cuts across his undefended ego. But it was at this moment, at this particular lie, that anger came to him.

He had known the quiet superiority of being a Good Bloke. But beside this there was a nagging doubt that something was missing from him, that he suffered an impotence. For instance, when he saw a chair raised above a head in a movie he felt both excitement and resentment that this passion was denied him. When Bettina became angry he felt a jealousy. When she threw a plate, he envied her.

When he should have become angry, he got hives instead.

And now, like a dream in which one can fly, he was angry.

A wall of wax had gone, a blockage removed, and the feeling of anger flooded through him and it was better than it had been described, was more like he knew it must be. It was pleasant. It was a gift, a drug as wonderful in its way as sexual pleasure. It made you feel bigger, stronger, taller, invincible.

But still he hid it, holding it like a hot chestnut in a cupped hand.

'Saccharine causes cancer,' he said. He tugged at his moustache.

'Are you a Communist, Mr Duval?'

'No.' He ran his hands through his California Poppy hair.

'That sounds very like a Communist to me. The Americans are a very fine race of people, Mr Duval, but they have filled their government agencies with Communists and liberals and they will not get rid of them.'

The muscles around his neck were knotted into hard lumps and his eyes were red. Tendons stood out on his neck like lumps of straining rope.

'These people hate business,' the liar was saying. 'They are jealous of people with power, successful men who have made a name for themselves.'

He stared at her, his eyes bulging.

'Perhaps I talk too much,' she sighed, trying to consider her complicated character with some objectivity.

Harry Joy clasped and unclasped his hands.

He would have liked to strangle her with his bare hands. He would have liked to break her neck and jump on her head till her brains oozed out her earholes. He could have broken up her desk with an axe and eaten her vases for breakfast.

With a purr of pleasure, he opened his hands and let her escape.

He walked down the steps in a daze, surprised to find sunlight and myna birds scavenging behind the kitchen. He was so angry, he wanted to sing.

Jim and Jimmy were talking to a female patient. The female patient was about twenty-seven and dressed in baggy white pants and a yellow T shirt. She had a wide straw hat with a scarf around its brim, but not even' that could hide the luminosity of her big dark eyes.

As he passed the group Harry heard her say: 'I don't feel a thing, not a thing.'

Honey Barbara remembered the first time she had seen a new car. It was in Bog Onion Road and she was still a child. It was a raining day right in the middle of the wet season, just at the time when everything is starting to get covered with mildew and a treasured book or favourite cushion will suddenly show itself to be half rotten .with mould. Little Rufus came running through the bush to Paul Bees (Honey Barbara's father) to tell him there was an American with his car stuck on the second concrete ford and it was being swept away. If he’d known it was a new Peugeot, Paul would have run even faster than he did. But he didn't know, so he slipped on a pair of shorts out of respect for the unknown visitor and jogged down the track. He had a small body, but it was wiry and strong, and the American, one would guess, would have been pleased to see him coming.

Paul Bees was also known as Peugeot Paul and ever since Honey Barbara could remember there had been long boring community meetings in which someone would raise the question of his Peugeots. He had a whole paddock full of them, or at least, a paddock devoted to five 'Peugeots of varying ages, dating back to a time when it had seemed to him that only a Peugeot would be strong enough and sensible enough to handle the rigours of Bog Onion Road. But by the time the American got stuck on the Ford they were slowly rusting, disappearing under the ever-encroaching lantana bush, and when they were discussed there were always those who thought them unsightly but there was not really anyone who didn't secretly agree with Paul's belief that they were potentially valuable. And indeed in those days it was not uncommon (yet hardly frequent) to find some lost man in an old Peugeot looking for Paul Bees and he would be directed to the only sign in all Bog Onion Road. It read: Paul Bees, Honey, Bog Onion Road. That was in the days when they still had visitors and her father and the stranger would spend an afternoon wresting some valuable part from an ancient Peugeot 203 and often it would turn out that the visitor had no money and would stay for dinner, and once, in the case of Ring-tail Phil, stayed for a whole year and had to be told to leave and then, as Paul pointed out so bitterly, left behind the wiper motor he had come to find in the first place.

But on the day that Albert brought his new Peugeot to Bog Onion Road he did not come looking for second-hand parts, but for land. Later he was to learn that he had smuggled a Range Rover from Mexico into America by driving it across the Rio Grande, but if this was true he must have forgotten the trick because he stalled his new Peugeot in two feet of fast water and then opened its bonnet to let the monsoon rain com-plete the job.

When Paul and Honey Barbara arrived at the creek it was raging high and Albert, his carrot red hair plastered flat on his head and his beard soaking, was standing on the downstream side of the stalled car, smiling a desperate gold-toothed smile at his rescuers, and trying to push the car back against the current.

Soon Robert arrived, and Dani, and Sally Coe turned up with five bedraggled cockerels in the back of her ancient Peugeot. They pushed against Albert's Peugeot and had a conference. The rain poured down harder and harder but they kept their clothes on from respect for the man with the new car.

The electrics were wet beyond saving and in the end it was agreed that Paul would get his winch, but the cable on it was broken and had to be repaired and while that was done Honey Barbara and the others leant against the car. The creek was stronger. It pushed the car towards the edge an inch at a time while they waited for Paul to fix the winch.

Her father was a small wiry man who understood physics. In a problem like lifting a forty-foot-long tree trunk for a house's ridge beam or removing a Peugeot from a flooded creek, his opinion was always listened to. If there was an argument about how best to pump water or difficult problems to do with mechanics, Paul Bees was the person to see. If he didn't know, he had three physics text books he could refer to and if they didn't know he would have a pretty fair guess. One year he had bought a second-hand electronic calculator with Sines, Cosines and Tangents on it. But the batteries had gone flat and he had made, or started to make, an abacus, but he gave it away and the beads now, ten years later, were part of a curtain in Honey Barbara's own house.

Honey Barbara's mother was not called on that day. Her expertise was in the area of healing and incantations and although, in one brief, disgraceful period, she had fallen prey to the Pentecostal Christians (it was said, jokingly, that she only rejected them because they insisted she marry Paul and stop living in sin), she espoused for the most part that peculiar hotch-potch of religion and belief and superstition which made up spiritual life in Bog Onion Road. Crystal was always called to adjudicate on such delicate matters as whether, when forming a circle to chant OM, the hands should be crossed right over left or left over right and whether the energy ran around the linked people in a clockwise or anti-clockwise direction. From her mother Honey Barbara learnt something about healing and a little ritual, but not very much. She could, at least, stand in the middle of the circle and pick up all the energy being generated by the people and then beam it to whoever in the circle needed help or energy or love, as in the case of a bereavement. She could also take the energy and beam it to people far away, but these were hardly special skills and there wasn't a kid standing there pushing against the side of the stalled Peugeot who couldn't do them too. From her mother she learned Tai Chi, massage, and from her also she inherited a strong straight body and beautiful eyes.

But from her father she learned how levers work and how bees live and how to look after them. She learned to tell what honey had been collected by taste and when to move the hives and how to do it. She also learned how to graft fruit trees, how to kill a hen, nail a nail straight, make soap, play the guitar, dig a post hole, sharpen a saw and fight a bushfire with wet sacks.