Bliss

Part One. Knocking at the Hellgate

Harry Joy was to die three times, but it was his first death which was to have the greatest effect on him, and it is this first death which we shall now witness.

There is Harry Joy lying in the middle of that green sub-urban lawn, beneath that tattered banana tree, partly obscured by the frangipani, which even now drops a single sweet flower beside his slightly grey face.

As usual Harry is wearing a grubby white suit, and as he lies there, quite dead, his blue braces are visible to all the world and anyone can see that he has sewn on one of those buttons himself rather than ask his wife. He has a thin face and at the moment it looks peaceful enough. It is only the acute angles struck by his long gangling limbs which announce the suddenness of his departure. His cheeks are slightly sunken, and his large moustache (a moustache far too big for such a thin face) covers his mouth and leaves its expression as enigmatic as ever. His straight grey hair, the colour of an empty ashtray, hangs over one eye. And, although no one seems to have noticed it, a cigarette still burns between two yellowed fingers, like some practical joke known to raise the dead.

Yet when the two fingers are burnt, he does not move. His little pot belly remains quite still. He does not twitch even his little finger. And the people huddled around his wife on the verandah twenty yards away have no justification for the optimistic opinions they shower on her so eagerly.

Harry Joy saw all of this in a calm, curious, very detached way. From a certain height above the lawn he saw the cigar-ette burning in his hand, but at the same time he had not immediately recognized the hand as his. He only really knew himself by the button on his trousers. The lawn was very, very green, composed of broad-leaved tropical grasses, each blade thrillingly clear, and he wondered why everyone else had forsaken it for the shade of the verandah. Weeping came to him, but distantly, like short-wave signals without special significance.

He felt perfectly calm, and as he rose higher and higher he caught a fleeting glimpse of the doctor entering the front gate, but it was not a scene that could hold his interest in competition with the sight of the blue jewelled bay eating into what had once been a coastal swamp, the long meandering brown river, the quiet streets and long boulevards planted with mangoes, palms, flame trees, jacarandas, and bordered by antiquated villas in their own grounds, nobly proportioned mansions erected by ship-owners, sea captains and vice-governors, and the decaying stuccoed houses of shopkeepers. Around the base of the granite monolith which dominated the town, the houses became meaner, the vegetation sparser, and the dust rose from gravel roads and whirled in small eddies in the Sunday evening air.

Ecstasy touched him. He found he could slide between the spaces in the air itself. He was stroked by something akin to trees, cool, green, leafy. His nostrils were assailed with the smell of things growing and dying, a sweet fecund smell like the valleys of rain forests. It occurred to him that he had died and should therefore be frightened.

It was only later that he felt any wish to return to his body, when he discovered that there were many different worlds, layer upon layer, as thin as filo pastry, and that if he might taste bliss he would not be immune to terror. He touched walls like membranes, which shivered with pain, and a sound, as insistent as a pneumatic drill, promised meaningless tortures as terrible as the Christian stories of his youth.

He recognized the worlds of pleasure and worlds of pain, bliss and punishment, Heaven and Hell.

He did not wish to die. For a moment panic assailed him and he crashed around like a bird surrounded by panes of glass. Yet he had more reserves than he might have suspected and in a calm, clear space he found his way back, willed his way to a path beside a house where men carried a stretcher towards an ambulance. He watched with detachment whilst the doctor thumped the man on the chest. The man was thin with a grubby white suit. He watched as they removed the suit coat and connected wires to the thin white chest.

'My God,' he thought, 'that can't be me.'

The electric shock lifted his body nine to ten inches off the table and at that moment his heart started and he lost all consciousness.

He had been dead for nine minutes.

Harry Joy was thirty-nine years old and believed what he read in the newspapers. In the provincial town where he lived he was someone of note but not of importance, occupying a social position below the Managing Director of the town's largest store and even the General Manager of the canning factory; he was not known to the descendants of the early pioneer families or members of the judiciary, but when he entered the best restaurants in his grubby suit and dropped his cigarette ash everywhere he was humoured and attended to, and pity help the new waiter who did not know that this was Harry Joy.

'Mr Joy, how good to see you. This way please.'

The lank figure with its little pot belly passed between the tables and left smiles and whispers in the air behind him.

'Are you happy, Mr Joy.'

'Yes, Aldo, perfectly.'

And indeed he thought himself happy, and why shouldn't he? He had a wife who loved him, children who gave no trouble, an advertising agency which provided a good enough living for a man with an almost aristocratic disdain for mercantile success, and, most important of all, the right to the best table in Milanos.

Here on the outposts of the American Empire, he conducted his business more or less in the American style, although with not quite the degree of seriousness the Americans liked. Telexes which began their journeys in Chicago, Detroit or New York found their way to him up river, where he interpreted these requests in a manner which, he would explain (ash dropping down his sleeve), suited local conditions.

'Someone is joining you, Mr Joy?'

'No, Aldo.'

'A half bottle of claret?'

'A full bottle, Aldo. You choose something.'

His great talent in life was to be a Good Bloke. He could walk· into a room and sit down and everybody would be happy to have him, even if all he ever did was smile, for they imagined behind that moustache, behind the smile it hid, something sterner, more critical and yet, also, tolerant, so that when he smiled they felt themselves approved of and they vied with each other to like him best.

It all came down to the feeling that he was intelligent enough to be critical of you, but was not. He laughed too, a rich deep brown laugh which made the laughs surrounding it or following it sound slightly too thin. He was something of a story-teller and no one ever thought to say that the way he told a story, his deep drawling confidence, his refusal to be interrupted, might have been a sign of selfishness or self centredness, for to criticize Harry only had the effect of making the critic himself appear somehow mean-minded.

For his part, Harry was never heard to criticize anyone (or for that matter, anything). He exhibited a blindness towards the faults of people and the injustices of the world which should have been irritating but which seemed to have almost the opposite effect: his very blindness reassured those around him and made them feel that their fears and nightmares were nothing but the products of their own overwrought imaginations.

They choose to love his grubby white suits, the way he lounged, dropping his ash everywhere, let himself be seduced by women (which he did, with rather appealing vanity) and accepted their praises without embarrassment. Even when he began to grow a belly it did not stop the women, who could never understand how he had married Bettina, who always seemed to speak badly of everyone and everything.

Bettina, for her part, had infidelities of her own, although she did it so less cleanly, so less gracefully. For if Harry, drunk, adopted an almost feline grace, a looseness so loose that you felt that if he collapsed it would be like a big cloth toy designed to do it, Bettina was louder, coarser, with rips in her stockings and lipstick smeared on her face, and her aggressions, normally so well hidden beneath a pancake make-up of niceness, cracked and broke on the third martini. Her choice of lovers was never good, limited as she was to men who were prepared to be unfaithful with the wife of a Good Bloke. Even this (particularly this) made her angry, this conspiracy of men, this almighty brotherhood of frauds, as she secretly called them.

Harry Joy was not particularly intelligent, not particularly successful, not particularly handsome and not particularly rich. Yet there was about him this feeling that he belonged to an elite and for no good reason (none that Bettina could see) he was curiously proud of himself.

When the patrons of Milanos saw his empty table on Monday lunchtime they already knew the news. They felt a gap, an emptiness, as if something very important was missing from the place.

When the table in the corner was taken by Joel Davis, his junior partner, and Harry's wife, there was (although they could not express it) something not quite decent about it.

Aldo would not have given them the table, not that particu-lar table, but the woman tricked him into it, and then, of course, it was impossible to take it away from her. She arrived first, by herself, and how was he to know she was lunching with that person.

'Ah, Mrs Joy.' He beamed. He held her hand. He had not been told. Other people had been told.

'For two, Aldo.'

'For two. Mr Joy will be joining you?' (He groaned, remembering.)

'Mr Joy will not be here.'

She did not tell him. Of course she was upset (possibly she was upset). No one told him. He, Aldo, was the only one who didn't know. It was a Monday, a difficult day to know things.

His mistake (when he discovered it) offended him throughout lunch, made him scowl to himself, and while he made sure that the service was scrupulous, he sulked behind the bar, preoccupied and uncertain.

When Joel came up the stairs, the penny dropped. But it was too late to shift them to another table.

And still he did not know about Harry! It would be another minute before he would know, and then from a winewaiter. Now he merely looked at Joel with a sour sort of contempt. He smiled, a baring of teeth.

Joel bared his teeth in return and checked his cufflinks, a salesman's habit he would have done well to be rid of. He did other American things (for he was an American), like insisting on iced water at table and then drinking spirits throughout the meal, which was noticed by everybody and not always approved of. The town had an ambivalent attitude towards Americans, envying their power and wishing to reject it and embrace it all at once. In business you could never be sure whether it was an asset or a liability to be an American.

Joel was only twenty-six but there was about him the sense of something over-ripe and gone to seed. He was not tall, and not exactly fat. But one noticed, immediately, those large red lips, which hovered on that balancing point where sensuality becomes greed. His fleshy face was a trifle too smooth and the skin glistened like a suspect apple which had been waxed to give it extra sales appeal.

He saw Bettina waiting, noted Aldo scowling, and instinctively, with no calculation, chose a route through the pink tablecloths which would take him past a prospective client, who would, he assumed, be eager for news of Harry.

Bettina watched him with qualified pride. She saw that the client liked him but that other people at the table were offended by his over familiar manner. He had no real idea of the impression he made. He would never understand why he offended people, why they thought him too pushy, too loud, or why they would also think him refreshing and clever.

'Hello, Mrs Joy,' he said.

'Mr Davis.' She did not smile. She felt the disapproval of the restaurant, like a slightly off odour, collectively generated. There was discomfort. A glass of wine was spilt at one table, a fork dropped at another.

Joel was busy searching for a waiter.

'It's O.K,' Bettina kicked his shin gently. 'I ordered you a daiquiri.'

He pulled a face. 'You know I don't like daiquiris.'

'How are they at the office?'

The office, like the restaurant, had displayed a certain mute hostility towards Joel as if the whole business had been his fault. They had detected signs of a new pomposity in him. He had 'borrowed' the little Birko jug Harry had kept in his office to make coffee and this, although he didn't know it, had created a minor scandal.

'It's O.K. in the office. Alex is looking for another job already. He doesn't trust me and if Harry ....'

He didn't say 'dies' and she lowered her eyes as if he had imprudently complimented her on the smoothness of her skin.

,And a couple of the girls were crying.'

'Which ones?'

He looked at her and laughed maliciously.

The daiquiri arrived. He sent it back and asked for a martini. He explained to the waiter how he would like the martini made.

'You bastard,' she said.

'What?'

'I ordered the daiquiri for you.'

'I don't like daquiris.'

'I would have drunk it,' she said.

Only after the food arrived did he ask her about Harry, and, just as in any business lunch the entrée is reserved for small talk-and the main course signals the commencement of serious business, it was at this point they began.

'Well ....?' he said.

'He thinks he's going to die.'

'And ....'

'The doctor says he'll be fine. It's a dangerous operation, but he's confident it'll be fine.'

'But he thinks he's going to die? Why?'

'You know Harry, it's like his hives. He decides he's going to get them and ....'

'When he decides he's getting hives, he gets them.'

'I didn't mean that. He looks good.'

'Good.'

'The doctor says there's nothing to worry about.'

'Marvellous,' he said, but kept looking her in the eye, his knife and fork lifted, as if looking for some secret sign. Joel, sometimes, lacked all subtlety.

Neither of them had the will or the strength to actually murder someone, although Bettina would certainly grow in leaps and bounds over the following year, and nor did they have the strength to say they would have liked Harry dead. In truth they wouldn't even look the idea in the face. Instead they flirted with it. They saw it pass sexily out of the comer of their eyes but did not, for a second, turn their heads to stare. They did not allow themselves' to know what they wanted or why they wanted it. They were blind-worms pushing forward, entwining in the dark. One could, unfairly perhaps, imagine them as the instruments of someone else's pleasure.

'Here comes the little monkey.'

He knew she was talking about Aldo and didn't look around. Joel had long ago given up trying to make Aldo like him.

'Mrs Joy,' Aldo looked at her reproachfully, his small dark head on one side, 'you didn't tell me ...'

Aldo did not much care for -Bettina Joy but he admitted to himself that she had something, a strength, a sexiness that was very rare for a slightly dumpy woman with fat legs. Her face was round and smooth and olive-skinned, her hair straight and dark, her eyes impenetrable.

'I'm sorry, Aldo.'

'I understand, I understand.'

'He's in the General. They'll be operating this week.'

'Such a young man. He'll be better though, soon. My brother had a heart attack twenty years ago. He's been healthier since he had it.' He laughed. 'It's probably the best thing.'

'Coronary by-pass surgery', Bettina said firmly, 'is very dangerous, but we all hope it will be fine.'

'Now perhaps he will give up those cigarettes.'

'Perhaps, yes.'

There was a pause and Joel thought: not a damn fool here knows I am fucking her.

('Your meal was enjoyable?')

When, of course, they all knew.

('Yes, thank you.')

They had watched it for months. They had her dull eyes glisten. They had heard her throaty laughter become a fraction shriller They had not talked about the curious ménage à trois at the corner table, merely absorbed its possible implications so that later, when everything became obvious, they would realize they had known all the time.

Aldo, strangely irritated, passed around the tables, making his way towards an inept food-writer who had also been sent to haunt him.

Bettina said: 'He's a cretin.' She was being unfair, but she was sick of being patronized by idiots who couldn't tie up shoe-laces. She wanted power success, not through a lover or a husband, but directly, for herself alone. Joel, at least, accepted this in her, and in this respect at least she felt equal with him. There was some perverse honesty she shared with him. She no longer had to pretend to be generous and kind and loving. She didn't want to be good, she wanted to be successful. She explored the border territories of pain and pleasure with him. Smeared with shit and semen she felt herself to be standing at new doorways with new possibilities.

All her were clean pink tablecloths.

Harry Joy was suckled on those long lost days in the little weatherboard house on the edge of town. The world he was born in had been fresh and green. Dew drops full of visions hung from morning grass and old Clydesdales stood silently in the paddock above the creek. Crickets sang songs and everything had meanings.

The sky was full of Gods and Indians and people smiled at him, touched him, stroked him, and brought him extraordinary gifts from the world outside where there were, he knew, exotic bazaars filled with people in gowns, strange fruits piled high, the air redolent with spices, and Jesus Christ, and the Good Samaritan, always dressed in his dusty grey robe with its one red patch on the left sleeve, and the soldier offering the dripping wet sponge of wine to Jesus, and there were small boiled sweets and white sheets and the smell of bread, and floor polish and, far away, New York, its glass towers trembling in an ecstasy of magic which was to become, his father said, one day, after the next flood, a splendid book read by all mankind with wonder.

His father came and went three times, the first to sire him, the second to drain the swamp, the third to see his son with vaguely disappointed eyes.

His father had lain in bed while the Shire Engineer had knocked on the door. He remembered his mother giggling and how happy it made him feel, those sounds like drops of water suspended in sunlight, and how his father, pulling on his tall boots had come to the door laughing, to admit the tight-faced engineer.

'You'll be dead a long time, Brophy,' his father told the engineer. His father was tall and had a big moustache. He had been born in New York State and had travelled the world. When Harry and his mother went to church, his father stayed in bed.

'I can talk to God from here,' he told the child, who never doubted that his father had a special relationship the Almighty. He would have rather stayed in the warm bed beside his father than venture out to the little wooden church with its gothic texts written on the arch above the nave, a cold austere place where people left to drink communion wine and returned with solemn faces and a slightly frightening smell. The church was always nearly empty and only his mother's soft contralto rose like a bird and warmed its empty spaces with its trembling wings.

Here he heard about Heaven and Hell and the tortures of Jesus. He sat aghast at such terrible cruelty and more than once wept in sympathy for the tortured God or fear for what the God might do to him.

He preferred the stories of his father.

'How I met your mother,' his father said, 'is a story you should know, but first you must give me blue bread or a sapphire.'

'I haven't got any,' the boy wailed. 'Tell me the story.'

'Don't tease him, Vance,' his mother said.

'Don't tease me,' the boy said petulantly.

'You must always give something for a story,' his father said. 'Either blue bread made from cedar ash, or a sapphire. That is something I learned from the Hopi. All stories come from the Holy People and you must give something for them.'

'What is a sapphire?'

'A stone.'

The boy ran outside and found a stone, a small brown stone with a white vein in it. He gave it to his father who accepted it solemnly.

'Thank you, now we will sit on the floor.'

'No, Vance, not the floor.'

But they sat on the floor, the father and son, the boy folding his legs the way his father showed him. Occasionally his father would stop the story to feed the wood stove.

'This,' said his father, 'is the story of the Vision Splendid. It had been dry for eight weeks and the whole of the air was full of dust, bright dust that settled on everything. Nobody thought it would ever rain again. And then one afternoon we saw the storm clouds coming from the south and we prayed for it to rain. Your mother, who I didn't know, went to the church and she prayed. And I prayed too, but not in the church. '

'Did it rain?'

'Did it rain? When your mother asks God for rain...'

'Vance,' his mother said, but she giggled.

'Did it rain? The rain poured down. It rained so heavily you couldn't see your hand in front of your face. It rained like all the air was a river and the drains in the main street filled up and then the water, red water, the same colour as the dust, crept out across the main street until there was just a white line going down the centre and red water all around it, and then there wasn't even the white line and the main street was a river three feet deep.'

'Captain's Creek flooded and I went down there with some other fellows to help the shopkeepers. We had old Malachy's clinker boat, half-gone with dry-rot, and when we got to the Co-op it sank on its mooring (we tied it to the verandah post). We were shifting the flour and grain up on top of the counter, away from the water, and I just looked out the door, just glancing up, and that was when I saw the Vision Splendid.'

'What was it?' asked the boy. 'What was the Vision Splendid?'

'It was your mother, lad, her long black hair blacker than coal, standing in the front of a boat which was piled high with all the things from the church vestry. She was standing in front of the boat holding the cross and her eyes, her eyes, my boy. Ah ... ' he stopped. 'All that red water and such luminous eyes.'

It was only a small house and when the February winds blew it rocked on its wooden stumps and it is a measure of their sense of their own specialness that they did not envy their neighbours' larger houses but found theirs in every way superior. To walk into that little cottage was to feel something that was available nowhere else in town: old oiled timbers, mellow lights, curious old rugs, and chipped plates with pretty patterns, which visitors would fondly imagine were the remnants of a misplaced fortune. Where everybody else bought glossy white paint and threw out their kitchen dressers; the Joys were seen removing the last vestiges of paint and fossicking out at the tip for their neighbours' rejected furniture.

They should have been hated, or at least ridiculed, but they weren't. Seen fossicking at the tip they were granted the right to eccentricity normally given only to aristocrats, and there were rumours that they were, in some not very clear way, almost aristocratic. Perhaps Vance Joy's English middle-class accent gave them this idea, or at least provided a core on which other layers of fantasy could be coated, creamy layer on creamy layer. Yet at the heart of it all was this: Vance Joy was a big expansive man with a generous spirit whom it was impossible to dislike; he would never say no to anyone who asked for help; he could, if need be, drink like a fish and, most important of all, knock any man down. Patricia Joy was at once very beautiful and very modest; she was well educated but never displayed it; she taught piano on Thursdays and Saturdays and once did a water-colour copy of 'The Last Supper' for the Sunday School, a work of art so highly valued that a departing clergyman had forever muddied his reputation by taking it with him when he left the town.

As everyone would say, as if expecting the contrary: 'They're hard-up, but not stuck-up.'

The Joys, charming, beautiful, educated, eccentric, played a part in this little game and in ways too subtle for anyone (themselves least of all) to notice, they encouraged it. They did feel themselves to be aristocrats of a sort: free-spirits, moralists, artists, bon vivants; and one must acknowledge, at least, the strength of character required to live their very slightly bohemian life in such a small and often intolerant community and, what is more, to get away with it.

When Harry thought of that house afterwards it would always be night and the wood stove crackled and made dull thumps and hisses and it shifted its burning innards make itself more comfortable. A soft yellow kerosene threw benevolent shadows across the room and his father (who lived in the house for a total of four years and two months) would always be there, telling a story in a languid way, stuffing a pipe with tobacco, feeding a stove, or cooking some unappetizing peasant porridge that he had taken a liking to in India or South America or Oregon.

And stories, always stories: Wood Spirits, lightning, the death of Kings, and New York, New York, New York.

'In New York there are towers of glass. It is the most beau-tiful and terrible city on earth. All good, all evil exist there.' He could say the word 'evil' so you felt it, a cold sinuous thing that could come in under a locked door and push up into your bowels. 'If you know where to look, you can find the devil. That is where he lives. If you keep your eyes peeled you can see him drive down 42nd Street in a Cadillac with darkened windows. He lives in Park Avenue, surrounded by his servants. But New York is full of saints, they ...'

'Vance!'

'My darling Patricia, you know it's true.'

'He believes everything you tell him, stop it.' She was sitting at the table, darning socks. She brushed her dark hair from her eyes and smiled.

'When God makes the next flood,' his father said, 'he will leave New York as a lesson to those who survive. Every other thing on earth will be destroyed except the buildings in New York. It will be a bible of buildings, a much better bible, a holy place which only the very learned will know how to read.'

'One day,' Harry said sleepily, 'I will go to New York.'

'You will too,' his father said, and read his palm to prove it to him.

He grew into a tall thin boy who had been at first what children (or at least the children in that town) called 'Gooby,' by which they meant someone who is a little slow and intro-verted and is likely to stand at odd places with his mouth open staring at things that no one would look at twice. But later, fed by the deep wells of his own self-regard, he became much liked. His height was a positive advantage in the type of football they played, and that too all worked in his favour. He was a deadly accurate kick and scored many goals; which was nothing less than what he had expected of himself, for he had been raised to expect excellence, and he did not, even for an instant, think it ridiculous, when confronted with some problem, to ask himself: what would Jesus have done? In fact he did it all the time. He sometimes had quiet dreams of martyrdom for some greater good.

They had wanted him to be Van Gogh, Jesus Christ and Zapata all rolled into one.

But somewhere there was something lacking, and as he grew older he came to show too great a regard for his father’s maxims about not working yourself to death. His mother took him to a city specialist to see if he had a problem with his thyroid gland, so lethargic did he begin to appear. He was like a wonderful racing car with a severely underpowered engine, and whether it was his father's final departure, or simply the onset of puberty, his idealistic concern for goodness seemed to have fallen away. He did not ask himself what Jesus would have done since he had been faced with prospect of Jeanette Grandell's wonderful fourteen-year-old breasts.

But although it would be a long long time before he concerned himself with goodness again, it did fall into the sediment of his character, and at times over the years he found himself wondering would like him to do.

But now he was a man of thirty-nine lying in a hospital bed and contemplating death. He could not allow himself to know that he was sickened with his life. He was like someone who has lain in bed too long eating rich food: within his soul there was suddenly a yearning for tougher, stronger things, for ecstasies, for the thrill of goodness perfectly achieved, to see butterflies in doorways in Belize, to be part of the lightning dance, to quiver in terror before the cyclone.

But it was too late for all those things, far too late. He stared out at the sunlit garden and listened to a banana leaf flap against the rainwater spout on verandah. In the garden, an old woman with swollen arms picked roses. Beside his bed a man with a striped suit and eyes like weak tea dropped, for the third time, the card that contained the details of Harry's medical condition. The man picked up the card with thick sausage fingers and yet it was not the surgeon's clumsiness that convinced Joy he was about to die, nor was it the admission that the operation entailed something like a 5 per cent risk. In fact he was less worried about dying than where he would go after he died.

He watched the surgeon’s unnaturally red lips move and could not bring himself to talk about the lingering taste of heaven and hell, explain that hell was like chrome-yellow flowers, that there were worlds in the afterlife layer after layer of filo pastry, that he, Harry Joy, lay now at the crossroads, that he had been warned.

What happened to him now, what he thought, what he decided, would determine whether he entered Heaven or Hell.

Vance Joy's stories had drifted like groundsel seeds and taken root in the most unlikely places. They had rarely grown in the way he would have imagined, in that perfect green landscape of his imagination, intersected with streams and redolent of orange blossom.

In certain climates they became like weeds, uncontrollable, not always beautiful, a blaze of rage or desire from horizon to horizon.

All these Harry had carried innocently, passing them on to his wife, his son, his daughter. Not having understood them, he transmitted them imperfectly and they came to mean quite different things. Vance Joy's stories of New York contained apocalyptic visions and conflicts between Good and Evil, but to Harry they were merely stories to be told, and to Bettina they were something else again.

New York was her antidote for the town she hated. She hated its wide colonial verandahs, its slow muddy river, its sleepy streets, its small-town pretensions. She loathed the perpetual Sunday afternoons, the ugly people, the inelegant bars and frumpy little frocks. Here, marooned on the edge of the Empire, she had spent ten years waiting for Harry's promise that they would go to New York.

'How could you?' she had asked (how many years ago?).

'Easy,' he said.

'How?'

'Sell up the business and go there.'

'When?'

'One day.'

He hadn't not-meant it, but he hadn't really meant it either. His business was a grand, slightly decrepit, old boat drifting with the current down a slow muddy river and every now and then he would get out and, with a long pole, push it away from the bank. Sitting back in the wheelhouse he could afford to dream about New York, but the thought of really competing in that turbulent water filled him with fatigue.

Bettina did not give up her dreams so easily. She spoke of New York to no one. She secretly married it to another dream, rolled the two together, harboured them within her and let them grow. She cultivated Americans and read their magazines. She saved money and put it in a special account. She did exercises to preserve her body for that time of arrival. And there had been times – how could she deny it to herself – when she had imagined, dreamed, the easiest solution to her problem would be if Harry would quietly die in his sleep. And sometimes, sitting in the kitchen at Palm Avenue, waiting for him to arrive from some late conference, she had watched the clock-hand edge its way sideways around the dial and she'd thought – of course she was drunk – he's dead. And there was such lightness in the thought, such relief.

Ah, she was not a nice person. It was obvious. Nice people were usually boring, always boring.

She was drunk, and hated the town. She hated Harry's Fiat: it was ten years old and full of cigarette butts and old newspapers and, for some reason she could never understand, he was proud of it. He bought a Jaguar and gave it to her, but he kept that Fiat for himself as if it were somehow vulgar to display any wealth.

'But why? Why? For Christsakes, why?'

'I like it.' And you could see that he didn't even know why he liked it, but that he clung to it like an old teddy bear, some piece of damn rubbish Crazy Vance or Silly Patricia had scrounged from the tip.

But the Jaguar was (again) in the garage having its cooling system fixed (the cretins) and she had to drive this little joke car.

She grated the gears going into the hospital. She saw no charm in the old building, smothered in bougainvillaea and surrounded by big old flame trees, frangipanis and mangoes. It was only Americans who found it charming and when they did she suspected them of being patronizing, just as now, parking beside a particularly large and rather gross Ford, she thought she detected a certain superiority, a certain condescension directed towards her by its owner.

Fuck you. If I'd arrived in the Jaguar you'd have known who I was.

The woman left the Ford and minced towards the hospital. (Look at the mutant in her black Crimplene pant suit!)

Bettina stood beside the Fiat and picked cigarette butts off her white linen jacket. She was late. As she hurried across behind the Crimplene pant suit, she remembered that she had a pussy full of semen. It was only held in by a Kleenex and a pair of panty-hose. He would smell it. He would know. She wondered whether she should go home but hurried forward, catching her five-inch heel in a metal grating and falling heavily.

'Fuck it.' She had grazed her leg.

The Crimplene pant suit, summoned by the urgency of her obscenity, had hurried back.

'Are you alright?'

Bettina, her leg bleeding, her linen jacket ripped, sat up and gave her most charming middle-class smile. 'Yes,' she said, 'thank you so much.'

In the hospital she had to fight off the nurses who wanted to fix up her knee. If they had known she didn't have knickers on they'd have been scandalized. If they got a sniff of her pussy, God knows what would happen.

She backed away from them, her knee smarting, her lips smiling politely.

'Thank you ever so much,' she said, emphasizing the 'ever' in an English sort of way. 'But I'm in a hurry. I'll fix it when I get home.' She would have liked to have picked the nurses up by their necks and shaken them for their dreary ambitions and their dreary lives. Their sunburnt noses irritated her. They carried their bedpans and buggered up their insides lifting heavy weights. They went back to the suburbs and had families. They ran around answering buzzers and falling in love.

There, Bettina thought, but for the Grace of God, and so on.

'Sit closer.'

'No, no,' she smiled. 'I'm fine.'

'Why are you sitting so far away?'

'I think I'm getting a cold,' she lied. The fishy smell rose from between her legs and in her guilty imagination it assumed the splendid obviousness of a smoke flare spewing upwards from her discreetly tailored lap.

'Had any visitors?'

'Oh,' he laughed, that famous deep brown laugh, and for a moment he looked so happy with himself, sitting up in bed in his silk pyjamas. 'It's been a circus in here. Tom Flynn and Ernie from the cleaners, Jack and Belinda, Mike, Dee, the Clarkes. We played poker dice. I won ten dollars.'

The table in the comer was piled high with fruit. There were pineapples and bananas and passionfruit and grapes, so many grapes, and custard apples and avocados. He was proud of these offerings, she saw, but when Bettina looked at his table, she thought only that it represented the monstrous lack of originality of his friends.

'Eat some,' he said. 'I can't eat it all. Please come and sit here.'

He stretched out his hand. He would never believe, in his wildest dreams, that she no longer loved him. She had said it once, but he would dismiss these sorts of things as 'tem-perament' or 'wine' as if a bottle contained an infusion of foreign thoughts with which she had innocently poisoned herself.

'Come and give your old man a kiss.'

She kissed his hand, making a joke of it.

'On the lips.'

She leant across the bed and kissed him quickly. Of course she loved him, a little at least.

'Phew,' he said, wrinkling up his nose.

Betrayed, she burnt red.

'What have you been up to?'

'Nothing.'

'You've been drinking whisky,' he said.

'Oh, yes,' she said, and added bravely, 'with Joel I got a bit drunk. I fell over in the car park.' And she withdrew a little to show him her bleeding knee. 'I ripped my jacket.' She could feel herself still blushing and he was looking at her with those big dark eyes, as if he knew. But that was a trick of his, not an intentional trick but a misleading sign. He saw nothing. It looked as if he could see everything and people always gave him credit for it.

She dragged the horrible plastic orange chair another inch closer and leaned forward to hold his hand.

'You can bring it closer than that.'

'I'm alright.' She stank. 'What's the matter?'

'Nothing. I'm fine.'

'You've got something on your mind.'

He never knew what was on his mind until he was ques-tioned about it. He would not let himself see his own worries and even his own mind, she thought, was a strange territory to him and it always needed someone else to come along and sift through it and point out interesting or painful things to him. Often she would find him frowning, and, after due ques-tioning, he would say: 'ah, I think I must have a headache.'

But she would not question him today. That slight contrac-tion of the brow could be caused by, probably was caused by, the fishy smell he would not acknowledge.

'I'm going to die,' he said.

'Why do you go on with that?' She didn't mean to snap, but she felt accused. There was no logical, medical reason for him to think he should die.

'Don't be angry.'

'I'm not angry.' Yet she was. Unreasonably angry.

'You're frowning like a bulldog.'

'You're only talking yourself into it. It's like your hives...'

'I don't talk myself into hives.'

'You always know when you're going to get them.'

'I can feel them coming on. I can feel them before you can see them, that's all.'

'You're not going to die.'

'You don't understand,' he said, 'listen to me: I don't mind dying.'

Why did he always give you the feeling that he knew things, that he knew she had dreamed his death a hundred times and now, meekly, he held out his throat to be cut. He would make himself die to show her how wrong she was. She looked at that long sinewy arm, the hairy wrist that emerged from the pyjama coat, and thought about its life and saw, before her eyes, how it would be dead, decaying. She saw maggots, crawling things, and looked up at his face.

'I don't want you to die!' She said as if her secret wish were the core of the problem and once she had said this the problem was solved.

He looked at her with astonishment.

'Why don't you believe me?' she said.

When he didn't answer her (he couldn't think of what to say) she lapsed into angry silence.

'Do you believe in God, Bettina?' She winced. If she had been religious she would have believed in Satan and would have found him, in her terms, 'generally less boring'. But religion represented all the goody-goody two-shoes and she found it embarrassing even to talk about.

'You won't die,' she said. She had torn the crutch of her pantyhose somehow.

'Something very strange happened to me when I had the attack,' he said. 'I haven't told anyone.'

'You should tell the doctor,' she said warily. If her panty-hose had torn...

Bettina shifted in her chair.

'I had a vision.'

'It was lack of oxygen,' she said confidently.

He had a distant look in his eyes like he did when he watched Casablanca on the television. 'I left my body and went up in the air.'

She looked at him with alarm. 'Maybe you should see a psychologist.'

But he did not appear to hear her. He began speaking very quickly, with none of the grace notes, none of the velvety drawl that he would bring to a story; he rushed through the events of his death and described to her, exactly, who had stood where on the lawn, who had carried his body, what the doctor had worn, the details of everything that had happened while he was dead.

'It was a warning,' he said finally. 'I saw Heaven and Hell. There is a Heaven. There is a Hell.'

'It was lack of oxygen,' she insisted, but he shook his head with uncharacteristic stubbornness.

'I'll get him fired,' she said firmly.

'Who?'

'The doctor. He's a clumsy fool. No wonder you're frightened.'

'It's nothing to do with the doctor.'

'He's got sausage fingers.'

'I know.'

'He drops things.'

'I know.'

She moved her chair closer to the bed and patted his hand.

'You won't go to Hell, Harry. You're too nice to go to Hell.

If anyone’s going to Hell it'll be me.'

And Harry, not for the first time, failed to recognize the resentment in her voice.

When he was about to die in a foreign country, years later, Harry's son would tell his captors that he had been born in an electrical storm. Like so many of the things he had said throughout his short life, the story was not quite true.

David Joy remembered the night his father took him to see lightning. It was his first memory.

He could still remember the stale musty smell of the rain-coat wrapped around his tiny body. It was hard and nasty and would always make him associate mildew with terror. His father held him and laughed. His great moustache had tickled his face.

How the earth had shaken! What monstrous shapes the lightning showed.

'Lightning.'

Could he speak? Did he answer? There was only the memory of mildew, tobacco, and rain needles on his uncovered head.

His father always maintained that he had not cried, that he had pointed with pleasure and gurgled with delight, but that was not quite true either, not at all true, but reflected what Harry would have wanted of his son.

No, he had not gurgled, he had stared with big dark eyes full of terror.

His mother said he screamed, yet he did not scream until, in the middle of a rolling thunder clap, a monster came rushing through the night and seized him from the precarious safety of his father's arms. And then he screamed. Held tightly in the foreign arms he was transported through the storm.

It was only when they entered the house that he saw the monster was his mother, her face white, her eyes wide with fear and anger. With what urgency she kissed him, with what fierceness she hugged him. He knew something terrible had happened. He smelt sheets drying by the fire, warm and sweet, and his father, standing, smiling, saying: '1 was only showing him the lightning.'

And his mother, wrapping him in a milk-soft towel: 'Oh you fool, you fool'

When he was older he would go and stand in the lightning by himself. They told him he was like his father. He was pleased. He did not confess that the lightning had always filled him with fear. He stood in raincoats of different colours, with different smells, and forced himself to confront the most violent storms of the monsoon. Seven seconds between thunder clap and lightning meant the lightning was one mile distant. He stood and counted, his wet lips moving. He stood rigid and confronted Mount Sugar Loaf while the lightning hit its peak and danced like a devil around its dark dead shape. He stood while it marched closer, surrounded by mildew, alone in the storm.

But later, in the warm house, he would be told he was like his father and he would look with masculine superiority at his mother who drew the curtains to cut out the storm.

David grew tall and thin and they said he was like his father. They did not notice the dark eyes that trembled with dreams, the smooth olive skin of his mother. It was better to be like his father, that was what they all wanted. He went to his father's office and sometimes, if there was an empty desk, sat in a big chair and wrote advertisements like his father did. Did they never notice that he was in no way like his father, that he did not make friends easily and was full of secrets?

At school he told lies. They found him out. He told them that he had been to New York. He stood up in the classroom and described it as his mother had described it to him. He mentioned bars where people drank a wonderful green drink (his own invention) from tall thin glasses he had quietly stolen from Bettina's Vogue. Yet when Lucy came home and told his mother, while he stood and listened, rigid with panic, bright with shame, no one had reproached him seriously.

'Ah,' Bettina said, cutting shortbreads, 'he is like his father, always telling stories.'

Yet the dreams that shone most brightly in his imagination were often gathered from his mother who, without really meaning to, taught him about the meanness, the insignificance of the town he lived in, the smallness of his life and thus, in her own perverse way, showed him the beauty of the world or, at least, the beauty of Other Places.

He read adventure books and bought an atlas with money stolen from his father's bedside table.

When Harry told him Vance Joy's story of the Beggar-King he heard the story with his mother's ears.

'There was a king,' Harry said, 'a long time ago in a country full of tall mountains. The winter was full of ice and the summers were so hot that children and old people died. There were many beggars in the country,' Harry said, repeating, thirty years later, the exact words of the story, 'and the king felt sorry for them. At night he could not sleep. He lay awake thinking of the beggars. Like all kings,' Harry said, forever ignoring the political implications of what he said, 'it did not occur to him to give away his wealth, but rather he wished to punish himself for being rich.' (Don't you remember, Harry, the lovely ice-thin malice in your father's voice, or were you too young to hear it?)

'One day he decided to dress as a beggar and go out amongst the people.'

At this stage of the story it was necessary to pull a coat or a woollen sweater around the head, to cover the face, to wander dolefully around the room. (But don't you remember how your father did it, how he managed to get that unbeggarly strut into his walk so that beneath that old brown sweater you knew there was a king pretending to be a beggar?)

'He had a dark cloak made and wandered the streets. He didn't fool anyone. They all knew he was the king, even the little children knew it was the king. When he came down the street in his dark robe calling piteously for alms they rushed from their houses and gave him gold.

'Each day the king returned to his palace laden with wealth. When he counted his gold and saw how much one beggar could make in a day, he became very angry. He felt that the beggars had tricked him and so he made a law forbidding them: anyone found begging would be put to death, by the sword.

'All that winter,' Harry said in his father's doleful voice, 'the beggars slowly starved to death and when the spring came there were no more beggars to be seen.'

And that was the story, in Harry's hands a poor directionless thing, left to bump around by itself and mean what you wanted it to, although it was not without effect and young David Joy sat silently before its sword-sharp edges.

'But why?'

Harry felt uncomfortable before such questions. 'It's just a story.'

'I will be rich,' his son said, 'and have jewels.'

Can we blame this story for David’s avarice? Hardly. He was already stealing from his father's bedside table when he was six (To young, you say? Not a bit of it.) and one should not think him lacking in sympathy for the beggars, quite the opposite: he brimmed full of emotion and saw that sharp-edged sword come down on the pitiful skin of their blue, cold necks.

As he became older, people came to think of him as cold, yet he was so full of emotions he could not speak. He dared not reveal his destiny.

He read books and hoarded their contents. He chose South America as his special domain. He knew Paraguay and Patagonia, Chile and Brazil. He dreamed of wealth and adventure, and yet he was frightened of almost everything. On the football field he cowered and cringed. Confronted with fist fights he ran away and hid. In dark comers he rehearsed his triumphal return from South America when he would make presents to his family (his enemies too) and tell them stories of his adventures.

He hoarded money and counted his bank balance. He sold newspapers in the evenings (a long-legged boy fearfully dodging peak-hour traffic) and saved everything he made. When he was fifteen he began selling marihuana to his class-mates. It brought him money and prestige, yet he dealt with damp hands, fearful of discovery and punishment. He told his father he wished to study medicine because his father indicated it would please him. His business broadened to tabs of acid, speed, and lignococaine which he sold as cocaine. He never took drugs. He was frightened of going mad. And yet the cocaine entranced him because it (if it had been real cocaine and not lignocaine) had come from South America.

This then is Harry's son, who in his father's words is 'a good boy, going to be a doctor'. He contemplated arrest and murder by knife; he stood before these visions with his hands clenched, his body rigid, while the lightning danced around the nearby hills.

'The story of the butterfly.

'I was in Bogota and waiting for a lady friend. I was in love, a long time ago. I waited three days. I was hungry but could not go out for food, lest she come and I not be there to greet her. Then, on the third day, I heard a knock.

'I hurried along the old passage and there, in the sunlight, there was nothing.

'Just,' Vance Joy said, 'a butterfly, flying away.'

David Joy had decorated his bedroom in the style of an office. The walls were covered in brown felt, the floor with a dark brown carpet. A black desk occupied a central position in the room, which was illuminated solely by a small chrome desk-lamp. Beside the desk was a chrome and leather swivel-chair and in front of the desk there was another chrome and leather chair, but in this case it had no swivel.

His bed, tucked away in a dark comer, was covered with a large brown rug. With the curtains drawn and the desk-lamp on, one could forget the bed was even there.

His parents could not see that it was not a bedroom but an office.

He was seventeen years old. Now, sitting at a desk, wearing a fawn cashmere sweater, his dark hair conservatively cut, he might have been a student from any good middle-class home, except that the top of the desk was covered with money, some of it in large denominations. It was, in this quiet and private moment, arranged from the highest to the lowest denominations, from left to right, from far to near, one note occupying one space.

The notes glowed magically. He sat perfectly still, had already sat perfectly still for fifteen minutes with only those dark eyes sweeping ceaselessly back and forth along the eight rows in front of him: additions, subtractions, dreams that swept the Americas from New York to Tierra del Fuego.

He heard his sister approach and although she may just as easily have been going to her own room he gave himself five seconds to clear the desk. He did it in eight polished, rehearsed movements, as graceful as a card sharp, with no hint of panic or fear, only this wonderfully svelte movement. He was not, however, perfect: as Lucy entered the room a single note was still floating from desk to floor and David would have found it undignified to grab for it.

Lucy saw it but she knew better than to touch it. Things had changed in their relationship since the time when she had teased him about his tears and his lies. She walked around the note and sat facing her brother across the desk. She was fifteen years old and still in her school uniform. She resembled her mother except that the slightly desperate quality that Bettina carried was totally missing and, in its place, a rather dream-like detachment which would make the lips in her plump olive face more sensuous than her mother's, the eyes somehow wider, the dark hair fuller and richer.

'Aren't you going to pick it up?' she said.

'Why should I?'

'So you can take it and put it with the other money in the back of the Fiat.'

Something in David's body tightened, and Lucy, who knew him well, stiffened. Her eyes did not, for an instant, leave his.

If she had thought him incapable of hurting her, his behaviour would have been melodramatic. For he now revelled in the threats he posed her, the darkness and danger he might represent, and he applied himself to this with the same single-mindedness that he would, outside the door of this room, bring to the role of a sensible intelligent boy who wished to be a doctor.

'Who told you?'

'I found it,' she said. 'I was looking for a pencil I dropped.'

'When?'

'Two months ago.'

'If you tell anyone, I'll kill you.'

'I know.' She shivered. She was not exactly sure that he would kill her.

The tension went away for a moment and David bent down and picked up the money.

'What are you going to do with your money?' she said.

'Why do you ask questions when you know the answer?'

'You're still going to New York?'

'See ... you know.' She didn't know. She didn't know about South America and he would never tell her because she would laugh.

'To go into business?'

'Haven't you got anything else to do?' he said coldly; yet he didn't want her to go. His sister's presence charged him with a strange erotic energy. He was not thinking about what he said. He spoke, merely, to keep her there. She had boyfriends. People liked her. He wanted to touch her hair.

Lucy shrugged. You couldn't talk to David. He wouldn't talk. Except once, a long time ago, he had told her his dream, his secret, his vision of New York. She had wanted to hear about it again, this glistening dream he had made in the darkness of his discontents.

'When you are rich in New York, will you send for me?'

'No,' he said, 'what do you want?'

Lucy smiled.

She had not come to see him because she liked him. She was being nice because she wanted something. That was the way the world was. Yet in his dreams he returned with presents for her: a sapphire necklace worked with Inca gold.

'The answer,' he said, 'is no.'

'Oh ... please, David ... just a deal.'

I'm not doing grass any more.'

'Oh, David ... please.'

'All I've got is some flowers and beads and I'm keeping them.'

'What else have you got?'

'Coke, MDA, speed.'

'Go on, please, give me some grass. I'm feeling low.'

'Take a Valium.'

'I don't want a Valium. I want some grass. Oh, please ... be nice to your sister.'

'My sister won't be nice to me.' His voice was hoarse. He hardly knew what he was saying.

She stopped smiling for a moment because she recognized the voice. A harshness came into her face.

'Is that what you want then?' she said.

'I just want my sister to be nice to me.' For a second his hard-locked eyes shifted uncertainly and his mouth wobbled before it fixed itself again.

'I've got forty dollars,' she said. 'why don't you just take the money?'

She saw him hesitate. She thought he was weighing it up, the pros and cons, putting a dollar value on pleasure, assessing the pleasure in profit.

'If you blow me,' he said softly, 'I'll give you some.' Her lips tightened. 'How much?'

'A bag, a deal.'

'A full deal? Show me.'

'No. You want it: yes or no?'

She shrugged. She didn’t like blowing him, but there were worse things. He came quick and then she'd have the grass and the money.

'O.K.,' she said, 'get it out.'

'Don't talk like that.'

'Like what?' She had him now. Now she was the one with power.

'Don't talk tough, talk soft. O.K.?'

'O.K.,' she said.

She sucked him then, with neither passion nor revulsion, thinking what a stupid thing it was to say: don't talk tough, talk soft: how could she talk? It did not occur to her for a moment that he wanted her affection and love.

'Sister,' he said, 'little sister.'

He was miming affection, she thought, simulating love. It was necessary for him and she felt sorry for him. She could imagine him, in a brown shirt, being a Fascist, his hair slicked flat, the dark irises of his eyes stopped down to exclude ordinary people, to include nothing but the fiery bright light of some impossible hero, some unvisited place. This hate was all he had managed to pick up from his mother, who, at this very moment, was entering the front door.

Lucy stopped. 'Betty's home,' she said.

He forced her head down and she knew, as she heard the footsteps and her mother's voice, that he would not let her go. The footsteps were coming up the stairs when he finally shot his 10 ccs.

When Bettina opened the door she found David sitting at his desk with a book and Lucy brushing past her. David was smiling. Before she could ask him what the joke was she heard Lucy retching in the toilet.

'Hello, Mummy,' he said, 'how's Daddy?'

'What's the matter with Lucy?'

He shrugged. 'I guess she's a bit sick. How's Daddy?'

Bettina looked at him sharply. 'You little bugger,' she said. 'What have you done to her?'

It was not a question that would have occurred to Harry, who had never seen his family as you, dear reader, have now been privileged to.

The fluorescent light cast green over everything. The apples and bananas and grapes and biscuits and Black Forest torte and smoked trout were all placed on a small table and arranged like flowers. Why did everybody bring him food? Why, now, did they all look so sinister, the dead green things he had been given?

He sucked on his sheet and lay quite still.

The apple had once been connected to a tree. Now it was disconnected. Did it die? What was death to an apple? It had never occurred to him before that there was a vast distance between the apple on the tree and the apple on the table. Nor had he thought of the trout as connected to a river, a silver and pink being in cold blue water, eating, breathing and fucking, now laid out in a morgue under green light, a place as unimaginable to the trout as his vision of Hell had been to him.

But these things were gifts, given to him by people who loved him! They wanted him, needed him, wished him alive. As John Spearitt said, 'You always make me feel happier, Harry. Even now, when you're sick.' These were no polite little lies. And how about old George Meaney who ran the newspaper kiosk below Milanos, who had travelled by bus and tram to reach him, had hobbled painfully up the steps and stood awkwardly in this room to give him (how had he known?) smoked trout.

Yet what power would these people (coughing John, hob-bling George) have to save him? Why, even the green light could suck the life from their gifts as if reality itself (hadn't he seen it? Wasn't it proven?) was only something as thin as a tissue paper and you put your foot through (like glass, quicksand, ice) and you were, suddenly, like the trout.

For the hundredth time he clenched his eyes shut against the terrors of infinite space. He was going to die! He felt himself sucked down long green corridors of despair where he could not define his 'I' except by a dull pain which would not stop. The room began to be not a room at all, but a construction caught in the wafers of undefined space. The apples ceased to be apples, the trout was merely the external form of pain.

'Hello, Daddy.' He looked with staring eyes at his son who held a wrapped parcel in his hands.

'David,' he sat up. He was still half-caught in his waking dream. He tried to smile. He took the parcel. 'Well, well, this is nice.'

He busied himself over the parcel, hiding his confusion. 'Chocolates?'

'No, not chocolates.'

He ripped at the paper. 'Ah, a book' He felt confused. People did not give him books. He did not read books.

'I know you don't read,' David was saying, 'but it's a very unusual book. It's about drugs.'

'Ah.'

Looking at Harry's puzzled face, David began to wonder at the wisdom of giving him the book It was a thrilling, adventurous book about cocaine smuggling and the drug business. Yet when he saw the book in his father's hands he knew he would never understand it. To Harry it would be a book about criminals.

'Medical drugs?' Harry smiled at his son and turned the book over and over, wondering about its title: Snow Blind.

'No. It's about drug smuggling.'

'Ah,' said Harry and turned it over once more. 'Ah, I see.'

In spite of himself, David felt irritated. The father he imagined was never the same as the father he spoke to. He had crept out of the house, so he could come here without Lucy, so he could be alone with his father. He had imagined a different conversation, which he now tried to induce: 'It's really very exciting,' he said. 'There's a lot about South America.'

'Ah.'

'It seems to be quite an unusual business.' He felt an almost overwhelming desire to tell his father what he was really like, that he gave not a damn about medicine or being a doctor, that he would be a son to be proud of, journeying to foreign places, confronting dangers, laughing at lightning, falling in love in Colombia. He would be a businessman adventurer and return with money and strange stories.

Harry looked at his son and was very proud of him. He was proud of how he looked, of his dark intelligent face and his rather shy gentle smile. He was proud that he had given him a book about an unusual business. He was proud of his academic record.

'How's school?'

'It's O.K. They treat us like kids.'

'Well, you are a kid.' Harry took his hand for a moment and neither of them quite knew what to do. They wanted to hug each other but it was not what the family did. They were not touchers. Sometimes they tickled. Harry, for instance, was known to have particularly ticklish feet and David was remarkable for being almost immune.

He did not want to burden his son with his father's death, and yet it seemed to him to be wrong not to tell him. They might only meet three, four, five more times and how would David feel to be cheated of this time, to squander it while his father tore up wrapping paper into little nervous strips.

And yet when he did say it, it was so unreal, so lacking in feeling or conviction that he wondered, for an instant, if he wasn't just making it up.

'David,' his son was still smiling, 'I've got to talk to you about what plans I've made,' the smile had gone, a frown begun, 'because there is some chance I'm going to die.' The dark eyes wide with shock, the mouth open, the head shaking.

'No.' Harry took his hand. 'Don't be frightened. I'm not frightened.'

'No.' Tears streamed down his face: 'You can't.'

And suddenly they were in each other's arms and Harry held the hard young body as it was ripped with sobs.

'Daddy, Daddy, I love you.'

The trout lay on the table. The fluorescent light washed green. Everything Harry Joy thought about became more and more complicated, less and less clear.

He no longer knew if he was going to die, if he was play-acting at dying, if he felt frightened or brave, because at this moment he felt an enormous strength, a curious triumph, as he held the body of his weeping son in his arms. He held him firmly, full of joy, the pair of them in a room full of gifts.

There was toughness in Harry Joy you may not have yet suspected, .and although he appears, lying between the sheets of his hospital bed, surrounded by food and friends, to be mushy, soft, like a rotten branch you think you can crack with a soft tap of your axe, you will find, beneath that soft white rotted sapwood, something unexpected: a long pipe of hard red wood which will, after all, take a good saw and some sweat if you are going to burn it.

Harry Joy, for all his vanity (watch him look sideways now, trying to catch an impossible evasive profile in the mirror), his blindness, his laziness, all his other foolishnesses, brought a surprisingly critical cast of mind to the question of salvation and damnation.

For if you had thought he would go running back into the skirts of his childhood church (what would Jesus have done?) weeping, asking for forgiveness, last rites and so on, you were in error. Which is not to suggest that the thought did not enter his mind – and cross it, most attractively, its sweet-smelling wool skirts swishing softly – for it did, on many occasions, and on more than one of them he put his hand to the buzzer and, once, pressed it, to ask them to bring him a priest.

'Yes, Mr Joy.'

'Nothing, Jeanette. I pushed it by mistake.'

He could not (for all his fear, for all his proof of Hell) bring himself to fully believe. He had never rejected the Christian God. But now, to believe just because he was frightened of hell seemed to him to be unreasonably opportunistic, and he could not do it.

(He hoped, just the same, that God saw him and at least gave him some marks for his honesty.)

Scratching around in that overgrown mess which constitutes his mental landscape, we might find a few undiscovered reasons for this. This is not to take credit away from him, for he hasn’t seen them, and is acting by his own lights, bravely.

But, look: the place he went to when he died bears abso-lutely no resemblance to the little wooden church of his youth, and the smells are not the smells of his Christianity, which were dry and clean like Palestinian roads through rocky landscapes, scented with cheap altar wine, floor polish, and the thin, almost ascetic, odour of his mother's perfume. It did not fit. It did not fit anything at all, except perhaps some stories he has since forgotten, but still retains, so one day he will remember them, even though they never appeared to him to have any religious intent.

Here, then, a fragment, dredged up from some dark comer of his memory: Vance Joy pretending to be a Hopi Indian.

'You may need a tree for something – firewood, or a house. You offer four sacred stones. You pray, saying: 'You have grown large and powerful. I have to cut you. I know you have knowledge in you from what happens around you. I am sorry, but I need your strength and power. I will give you these stones, but I must cut you down. These stones and my thoughts will be sure that another tree will take your place.'

'The trees and the brush will talk back to you, when you talk to them. They can tell you what's coming or what came by, if you can read them.'

Thus, Vance Joy, many years before. And perhaps it is the force of fragments like these, his father's unconfessed pan-theism, that kept his finger away from the buzzer for another day.

But, as the Reverend Desmond Pearce would say tomorrow, and as Bettina implied two days ago, there was no reason to think that, even if there was a Hell, Harry Joy should be sent there.

What monstrous crimes had he committed? A little adultery perhaps, an amount of covetousness when it came to other men's wives, but that was about all. So why should he lie in bed and gnash his teeth when, in all likelihood, he would be a Good Bloke for all eternity? And that, too, would have been the argument of his friends if he had ever been able to push through the dark curtain of embarrassment which surrounded the subject and actually lay down his frightful secret – there, disgusting thing! – before them.

But he could not, and did not, and instead the pressures of daily life in hospital crowded in upon him and he found time, all the time, being stolen from him in thin, wafer-thin, slices and great fat slabs during which he was placed on metal tables, had catheters inserted along the length of arteries and into his very heart, while wires connected him to dials and screens, and life itself contained enough terror to push his heart, one afternoon, into a dangerous arrhythmia.

He had seen his mother's sin on her death bed and he carried it with him for ten years knowing that when his time would come it would be the same for him, that her sin would be his sin, but worse, for although she feared damnation he knew she would be spared it.

He remembered now (in this antiseptic cold room full of dials), that dull grey hospital room of his mother's which smelt of cheap soap and the yellowed pages of old women's magazines. When he had arrived (puffed because he had run from the car park) she could no longer recognize him and thought that he was his father. He did not disillusion her, and had he tried she would have, in any case, maintained the illusion, for she was a stubborn woman when she had set her mind on something.

'Vance,' she wept, 'I have committed a terrible sin.'

He remembered how guilty he had felt, listening to her, as if he was prying into confessionals, opening letters not addressed to him. She clutched his hand, her skin was almost transparent, a dry crust of spittle marked the comers of her mouth.

'No,' he said, and then: 'What sin?'

'A terrible sin.'

'Don't tire yourself.' How stupid a remark. A few hours of life left, a few things to say, and what does tiredness matter? Don't talk, he had meant, be quiet!

'Vance...'

'Yes.'

'I have wasted my life waiting for you.'

'No!' But it was true.

'Waste, waste, waste.' She said. 'Oh, Vance, it is the only sin that cannot be forgiven.' And he saw, in the wrecked remains of her splendid dark eyes, his mother confront the shining steel orbs of hell.

It was not the buzzer which brought the Reverend Desmond Pearce but the good man's own blunt brogues, clumping down the hospital verandah as if testing for rot in its ancient planks. His swinging hands were rough, coarse with nicks and scabs, a hint that the saving of souls required something a bit more muscular than his 4PS, which – to get them out of the way here – were Prying, Preaching, Praying, and Pissing-off-when-you're-not-wanted.

Harry looked up from his cane chair, saw Desmond Pearce's face, and liked it immediately. It was a rugged, pock-marked face with a slightly squashed nose and a crooked grin. His hair was a curling mess and he showed the proper disregard for sartorial elegance which Harry had always seen as a sign of reliability in a person. Neat men always struck him as desperate and ambitious.

'G'day.'

'Hello,' Harry smiled, and noted the little gold cross, tucked away where a rotary badge might normally go, on the lapel of the crumpled grey sportscoat.

'Join you?'

'Go for your life.' There was something about Desmond Pearce that attracted such slanginess.

He dragged up a cane chair and sat down, pulling up his grey trousers to reveal footballer's legs and odd socks.

'What are you in for?'

'Heart,' Harry grinned. 'How about you?'

'Armed robbery.'

They laughed a little.

'Harry,' Harry said and held out his hand.

'Des.'

'The Reverend Des?'

'You bet.'

Harry tapped his fingers on his chair.

'It's a beautiful day,' said Desmond Pearce surveying the sun-filled garden. There was still dew on the course-bladed grass and honey-eaters hung from the fragile branches of a blue-flowered bush. 'And a good place to be sitting too.' He shifted his bulk around in his creaking chair, crossed his legs one way, then the other. 'Odd socks,' he said, leaning forward to take off his coat without uncrossing his legs. 'I've got odd socks.'

. But Harry wasn't looking at the socks. He was staring intently at Desmond Pearce and making him feel uncomfortable.

'Well,' Desmond Pearce said, and slapped his big knees. He had only just (four weeks now)·arrived from the country, where he had been very successful. He could talk to men in sales yards and paddocks, in pubs or at the football.

Harry was still staring.

'I have a lot of trouble with odd socks,' Des said. 'Sometimes I go to the laundromat with matched pairs and come back with all odd socks. Sometimes I go with all odd socks and come back with pairs.'

'Have been making a list,' Harry said, 'of religions.'

'Oh.'

When you talk to a man in the middle of a paddock, you look off into the distance, or at the ground, you do not stare at him like this.

'And seeing you are here,' Harry continued, 'I might ... ah ... ask your help.'

'Ah, yes,' said Pearce with a feeling of inadequacy, not to say dread, in the face of this velvety urbanity.

'The problem begins,' said Harry, closing his eyes and talking as if the whole thing had nothing to do with him personally, but rather about some character in a much-told story, 'with the high probability that I shall shortly die, mmm?'

And he smiled a slightly apologetic, but none the less charming, smile.

Des Pearce was not good with dying.

'Shall shortly die. Now, I think there is also a likelihood that I will go to Hell and that ... ah, I wish to avoid. But,' he pulled a battered notebook from his dressing-gown pocket and waved it at the clergyman who was beginning to wonder if he wasn't some ratbag atheist out to have some fun, 'but there are a lot of religions.' A pause. That dreadful stare. 'You see my problem.'

'Well, you've got a bugger of a problem,' he said carefully.

'I've had fifteen milligrams of Valium, I'm ashamed to say.'

'And you're not a Christian?'

'I was, but I think you'd call me lapsed.'

Was he an atheist?

Harry Joy folded his arms and Desmond Pearce was shocked to realize that his eyes were wet and that his face, half-hidden by his fringe, spectacles and moustache, showed real fear, that the dry rather indifferent tone had been adopted to get through a difficult subject.

'Lapsed as buggery,' said Harry Joy and they both watched a cabbage moth alight on Desmond Pearce's leg.

'Are you scared?'

Harry nodded.

'Of Hell?'

'Mmmm.'

'What have you done to make you think you'll go to Hell?'

Harry shrugged.

'Have you murdered someone, something like that?'

'Good heavens no.'

Des Pearce was feeling better now, better in the way you felt when you knew there was something you could actually do. 'Look, old mate,' he said, 'do you really think God is such a bastard he wants to punish you for all eternity?'

'Why shouldn't he?'

Des Pearce grinned. 'It doesn't make sense. It's like you wanting to torture flies, or ants.'

'Yes.'

'Do you?' he said, joking.

'That's my point. People do. Look, I read the Bible in there,' he gestured into the hospital. 'It doesn't muck about. It says you either believe or you go to Hell. And look,' he took from his notebook a grey, much folded pamphlet he had found as a bookmark in the library Bible. It was titled: Memory in Hell. 'Listen to this: "As the joys of Heaven are enjoyed by men, so the pains of Hell be suffered. As they will be men still, so will they feel and act as men.'"

'Harry, this was written in 1649.'

'I know. I saw that.'

'Well . .. it's a bit out of date isn't it? This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages.'

'We're talking about eternity,' Harry said incredulously, 'and you're talking about three hundred years. That's a drop in the bucket. You can't just modify Hell. You can't change it.'

'I haven't. The churches have.'

Harry was beginning to get hives. He could feel them now. There was this tightening in his throat and this curious swell-ing which always preceded them. His fingers moved, as if he wanted to clutch something. 'How can you change your mind about Hell?' he smiled. 'If it was true once it must always be true. What about the people you sent there in the Middle Ages? Have they all been allowed to go home?'

'It's the twentieth century,' Des Pearce grinned, but he felt irritated.

'Are you saying there is definitely no Hell?'

'I ...'

'There is a Hell.' He said it with that lunatic brightness Desmond Pearce had seen in the eyes of Mrs Origlass who had seen a flying saucer land beside the railway line at Anthony's Cutting.

'I can't imagine God wants to punish us, Harry.'

'Ah, but maybe not your God, you see. Maybe,' Harry looked around furtively (just like Mrs Origlass, he thought, that darting movement of the head), 'maybe another god. Maybe it's a god like none you've ever thought of. Maybe it's a 'they' and not a he. Maybe it's a great empty part of space charged with electricity. Maybe it's a whole lot of things in a space ship and flying saucers are really angels.'

(Landing beside the railway line at Anthony's Cutting.)

'Look,' Harry turned over the pages in his notebook. 'I made a list of religions, and do you know what I think?'

'What, Harry?'

'They're all wrong.'

'All of them?' he smiled.

'Every damned one of them: Harry said, 'maybe: And felt the hives swelling up beside his balls, like twenty nasty flea bites on top of each other.

'You must have done a lot of study: Des Pearce said, looking at the list and noting the absence of Animism and Zoroastrians before he handed it back.

'Study: Harry waved his arms, dismissing the hospital, its garden, certainly its library. 'What good is study?'

He made the gestures of an angry man and yet, Des Pearce saw, he still smiled charmingly.

'A God for people who read books?' Harry was saying. 'No. Definitely not. I will tell you two things I know: the first is that there is an undiscovered religion, and the second is that there definitely is a Hell.'

'Then,' Des Pearce held out his arms sadly, 'I can't help you …'

But maybe I'm wrong. Don't you damn well see, I might be wrong. Tell me what to do …'

'I can't.'

'Tell me to believe.'

'I can't.'

'Well you better go,' and he stood up and shook his hand warmly, still smiling as if the meeting had been a pleasure for him.

Desmond Pearce stood up. 'Is there a Heaven?' he asked.

'Yes, yes, there's a Heaven. There's everything.' And then he slumped back in his chair, his hand on his forehead.

Des Pearce had an almost uncontrollable desire to pick him up in his arms and comfort him, to carry him back to his bed, to give him absolution, to have him confess the sin that was eating at him. He would gladly have taken all Harry's pain in the palm of his strong plain hands and held it tight until it died there. But he also realized, looking at this peculiarly frail figure in the cane chair, that Harry Joy could not give up his pain to anyone, that he would carry it with him to the operating theatre and to wherever place he went to afterwards.

'Maybe I should have talked about cricket,' he said softly.

Harry tried to smile. The peculiar tortured twisting of his face was to stay with Desmond Pearce for a long time for it was now marked by those unsightly weals which Harry called hives; they would haunt Desmond Pearce and make him wonder if he had witnessed a warning from God, a proof a mark signifying the existence of Hell.

Dull grey bats swooped, darting, catching insects above his bent head. His stomach gurgled. In the yellow lighted wards off the verandah, nurses cast shadows and served unappetizing meals. He whispered. He leant towards her, talking quickly. The dew was already on the grass. Outside the garden walls the river ran sleepily carrying heavy metals past ships with humming generators. The air contained lead and sulphur but Harry noticed this no more than the heavy honeysuckle which, for Bettina, filled the evening air.

'You'll miss dinner,' she said.

His stomach gurgled again but he merely shook his head. He was not to have dinner tonight. Tomorrow was the day of his operation, a piece of information he could not bring himself to share.

'I'm not hungry,' he said. He patted his moustache and hugged his knee. He rocked back and forth and rubbed his aquiline nose. His eyes were slightly feverish and he had the beginnings of a headache. There were so many things he had to tell her and now, at the last moment, she had to listen. And no, not about death or about Hell, he had stopped all that four days ago.

'Are you listening, Betty?'

'Yes.'

He had talked about Joel for half an hour. He was talking about Joel still. He would not stop. Joel was not the man to run the agency.

Joel was a bad leader. Joel was selfish. Joel was a good salesman, no doubt about it. Joel was lazy. Joel was not a good strategic thinker. Joel was too pragmatic. Joel wouldn't look after the staff. Joel had been very good with the Spotless people. On the other hand he had lost the margarine business. Joel was too flashy. He should try driving a cheaper car, something like the Fiat. On the other hand you could trust Joel. Joel would not lie or deceive anyone. If you had to sell the agency, Joel would not deceive you.

Bettina wanted to tell him he was wrong. Was it only pride that prevented her? Was it simply that she couldn't bear her husband to know she was having an affair with someone he thought was a fool? Anyway, he was wrong. He was so wrong about so many things. Joel would deceive anyone if it suited him (she liked him for it, her un-goody-goody lover). But then, why did she keep on believing Harry about the rest of it? When he said Joel was a bad strategic thinker, maybe he was right. She believed he was right and she felt angry with Harry for having tricked her with his good opinion of Joel and then, just when it was important, withdrawing the sanction totally. Joel had always been the hot-shot. She assumed he was the hot-shot. Now he was saying the business couldn't survive with Joel alone and she would have to sell out the business to the Americans (fuck that!) if he died. If he died. He'd gone as pious and maudlin as his looney old mother.

He took her hand and looked into her eyes (was he really going to die?) just as he had done when he courted her. He would not permit her eyes to leave his. They had talked about America and he had known the names of famous bars and that was a long time ago and she was Bettina McPhee and she was going to be a hot-shot.

'You talk to me like I'm a fool,' she said.

'You should know these things.'

'You should have let me come into the business,' she said, 'when I wanted to.'

'No.'

It was their old argument, a bitter one for Bettina, now doubly bitter. (But he wouldn't die. Nothing would change on its own.)

'We wouldn't have this trouble,' she said.

Harry regretted not having found someone better than Joel to run the place, but he was not sorry that Bettina had never joined the business. He had offered her enough money to start a little boutique instead, but she did not want that.

'I offered you money,' he said now, years later, on a veran-dah, the night before an operation.

'You should have let me come in.'

'No.'

'I was more clever than Alex.'

'You still are.'

'I'm as clever as Joel'.

'More clever.'

'Then you were wrong.'

'No.' he said, 'you didn't have the experience.' .But the truth was not that, it was painfully simple: he did not want his wife around the office undermining his dignity. He never thought about it like this, but when he imagined her there he became irritated.

'I think,' Harry said, 'the thing to do would be to find an American buyer this year. Don't let them talk you out of it.'

And then he went on, droning on about the provisions he'd made, in his will, the formula to sell on, who was best, and on and on about Joel. She stopped listening. She started to wish he damn well would die.

'Do you understand that?'

'Yes.' she lied. She was bored. She wanted to see Joel. If he dies, she thought, I will run the business and I will run it well and the only shame will be that he's not alive to see it. And then, shocked at her thought, fearful of its magical power, she embraced him.

Leaning across the uncomfortable cane arm of the chair, a lump of loose cane sticking into her breast, she felt his fear. It was gnarled and sour and as she held his handsome head in her hands she found herself handling it as one handles overripe fruit, being careful not to squeeze too hard.

He wasn't ready. He would never be ready. His mind was full of unfolded shapes and twisted sheets and it was too late to put them into order.

He wrote his farewell note on a piece of cardboard torn from the box his slippers had come in. The address was printed on one side: to Bettina and Lucy and David Joy, 25 Palm Avenue, Mt Pleasant. His whole world was contained in those ten words written on grey cardboard. It seemed nothing, a life so pitiful and thin that it was an insult to whoever made him. It was not so much that he had achieved nothing, but that he had seen nothing, remembered nothing. A series of politenesses, lunches, hangovers, dirty plates and glasses, food trodden into carpets, spilt wines, the sour realization that he had made a fool of himself and done things he hadn't meant to.

Yes he had been happy. Of course he'd been happy. But he had always been happy in the expectation that something else would happen, some wonderful unnamed thing which he was destined for, some quivering butterfly dream soaked in sunlight in a doorway.

And now: only this sour dull fear, this lethal hangover.

But he remembered. He remembered the day they went to the bank to sign the mortgage, a rusting gutter he had tried to fix, the lawn, all those weeds he had laboured over, the trees she planted (trees most painful of all), layers of wood, one layer for each year, the cambium, the sap, the roots and those other ones (What were their names? The ones near the bottom fence?) she had planted the first year they were married, the year she lost the twins and he went to see them in their humidicribs, each tiny feature perfect, and went home to change the sheets and blankets on the bed, wet with the broken water from her womb, and those flowers, like bottle brushes, were out then and he took them to her.

They had beautiful clever children but there was no satis-faction in that, no pleasure to remember that he had bathed them and read them stories.

'Now,' the Kodak advertisement said, 'before it all changes.' He had always admired the line but never taken the photographs. Just as well, just as well. Why would details make it any better?

He could hardly write. He had to force himself to spell each word fully. He dug these words in soft cardboard: No farewell. Sorry. Operation today but could not bear to say farewell. Love you all. Fingers crossed. Bless ... Harry.

He pressed the buzzer above the bed.

'Envelope,' he asked, and waved the cardboard.

Denise came from the country. Her father and mother kept poultry. She was used to milking cows and finding eggs under bushes. She looked at Harry Joy with his ash-grey hair, his huge moustache and his piece of cardboard and couldn't imagine how he had been made.

'Wouldn't you like some paper, Mr Joy?'

'No.'

His smile was so painful it made her want to be able to do something, anything. The smile was worse than a scream. In the matron's office she found a huge Manila envelope; nearly sixteen inches long. She brought it to him gently and watched him drop the tattered cardboard inside and write in large careful letters the names of his family.

'Stamp,' he gave her money.

'I'll fix it in the morning, don't worry.'

'Now, please.'

'O.K., stamp now.' And she went plodding off in her soft white slippers and stole stamps for Harry Joy. She covered the envelope with stamps, giving him the only thing she could give. She brought him a pill too and he didn't even ask what it was, but ate it almost greedily, his hand shaking and spilling water down his front.

The pill soon reduced his world to a hazy blur, within which, in the sharpest detail, the seeds of Hell, long ago planted and recently nurtured, began to sprout and unfold their chrome-yellow petals.

Under Pentothal, he tried to name things. He tried to name the garden but could not do it properly. As he went deeper the names were lost and there were only shapes, tied with yellow string, revolving on a Ferris wheel.

He existed with white shadowy forms and sharp astringent odours. He had died again and he waited, fearfully, wondering. Lost, he felt nauseous, a floating feeling, his body without substance.

He closed his eyes, conscious of being handled with mechanisms, an object in space, without time.

Instruments were applied to him cruelly, without love.

He was split by pains, small and sharp, long and monot-onous.

He was pervaded by a full consciousness of punishment and the curious certainty of death enveloped him like a shroud.

Sometimes he cried with self-pity. Frightened as a child, he begged for mercy.

He was on a shuddering railway of merciless steel, voices echoed coldly. There were noises of silver wheels or distant thunder.

He existed nowhere in solitary terror. Visions of days before his death moved towards him and receded: his mother in that dusty street giving him the cheque. 'Now go,' she said, 'now go. I’ve won the lottery.' And in that white empty room, the Sunday School, the single sentence he had carried with him like a limpet since his youth: It is harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.

When he saw the shapes around him it was through grey veils. He was tormented with shifting images of his wife, his children, of Desmond Pearce. Joel circled him. With what intention?

Someone said: 'He will be confused for a while.'

Yes, he thought bitterly, I will be confused; it will not be as they described it. He knew himself to be ripped with huge wounds, a vast punishment down his chest. Thin wires and tubes. A poor weak Gulliver.

He looked bitterly at those around him, forms which became more and more distinct, but he was ready for them before he saw them. He was in a room beside a verandah. Is this what they did to you? He demanded they state his sins although he could already guess them. They never answered directly, never once. 'As they will be men still,' he thought, 'so they will feel and act as men.'

Slowly, during his convalescence from his successful operation, Harry Joy became totally convinced that he was actually in Hell. He watched them, as cunning as a cat, silently indignant that fate should play such a trick on him.