Bliss

Part Two. Various Tests and Their Results

He moved around the house in sandshoes and tracksuit and exhibited a curious stealth and – if you had not shared the general trauma at Palm Avenue, had not felt those creeping, inexplicable irritations – you may have found his antics funny.

Look at him: sneaking up the stairs you might have thought he was impersonating a cat in a pantomime, or even without a costume, a lizard. But this is all deadly serious, and what he is doing is throwing the whole emotional balance of the house-hold out of kilter, tipping the axis of his world and producing peculiar weather.

Is he mad?

A question he has asked himself. And if you follow him now, as he turns, for no apparent reason, and begins to go downstairs, hesitating before he crosses the shining expanse of living room, out on to the creaking verandah, down the steps, you will see him slip, like a shadow, into the garage.

There are a number of dusty old ammunition boxes lying higgledy piggledy in the comer, so dusty that they might have been there for years; and have. Yet those shining new brass padlocks give his secret away, and in a day or two this will occur to him too and he will come down here at five o'clock one morning and paint them with khaki paint, clogging up the keyholes and giving himself new difficulties. But now the key slips into the padlock smoothly and the shining book flicks open, and the lock is removed, and softly pocketed. Inside there are notebooks, fifteen spiral-bound, but at this date only six have been filled and a seventh started.

They contain all manner of peculiar observations. These are tests for madness. He is making them himself.

Harry Joy is running checks. He is comparing his life (termed 'life' in the books) with his other life, that is the days and years before he entered the operating room, the days before this cruel scar on his chest. If he had found someone he half-trusted he might have confessed, initially, that the chances of this being Hell were about sixty / forty. But as the weeks have rolled on, the evidence has mounted and he is not, according to his own checks, mad.

This is not the childish Hell of the Christian Bible with its flames. Here, obviously they planned more subtle things, and it has already occurred to him – a flush of panic as he stared into the 3 a.m. dark – that this, these boxes, locks, etc., are to be his punishment. He contemplated the possibility of Hell in a universe made like an infinite onion until he became as sick and frightened as he had once, as a child, lying on summer's black night grass, trying to grasp the infinity of space.

But to return to these books, and their entries. Here, on page 16 of the first book: FIAT IS WRONG.

While he was in hospital Lucy and David decided to clean the Fiat. It was a present. And they waited, like children, for his delight or at least his thanks and if not his thanks, his acknowledgement. They encouraged him to walk beside the garage, to enter the garage, to drive the car, but nothing they did could induce him to mention the Fiat, and Lucy, whose idea it had been and who had contributed most of the hard work it took, became angry and thought he had taken it for granted.

FIAT IS WRONG he wrote and, on page 20: THEY MADE MISTAKE WITH CARPET. Possibly they had, all things considered.

In the notebook he also recorded observations concerning 'Lucy,' 'David' and 'Betty'.

Some selected entries concerning 'David'.

23. I notice taking money.

25. Talks money.

26. More money talk.

36. Mean streak exhibited again.

39. Caught him lying.

43. Rattish face, quite different.

This last description could be made (uncharitably) to des-cribe not only David but Harry's own handsome face, which the Indonesian Consul had once favourably compared to the god Krishna in the Javanese Wayang Kulit. Krishna, the Consul said, had an almost identical aquiline nose and the same finely chiselled chin.

There he is now, locking himself in the toilet to make more observations, and it looks comic, the way he crouches so earnestly over the book, crabs his fingers around that little stub of pencil, holds his head to one side, sticks out his tongue, and gives a number to his latest piece of evidence. He is in torment. If he shits it will be watery-thin and black.

His family, in moments of clarity, saw and sensed his pain. They did the most absurd things to please him. David, who was fastidious enough to be repulsed by the black hairs that grew on Harry's big toe, cut his father's toe nails while Lucy, simultaneously, began to read him an amusing story about Don Camillo which, from an ideological point of view, she strongly disapproved of.

But he withheld his love – his vast, blind, uncritical love – from them, and they were like children withdrawn from the breast. When their love was not reciprocated they punished him with a fury that puzzled them and left them guilty and shaken, offering apologies that could not be accepted, the rejection of which, in turn, produced greater hurts, ripped scar tissue before it was healed, and ended in scenes of such emotion and frenzy that the neighbours turned off their lights and came out into their gardens, where they stood silently beside fragrant trees.

They were like heavy cigarette smokers suddenly denied their drug. They raged at the slightest rejection. They saw no light in Harry's eyes, and got from him no talk, no story, no smile. Depression spread like an insidious fungus through the whole family. The depression interacted and created a synergistic effect, each amplifying the other, and one can see, here and there, traces of quite mad behaviour in those members of the family whom one might expect to be sane.

Lucy was fifteen years old, a dialectical materialist, rational, sensible and, of all of them, the least given to hysteria. Yet it was she who decided that Harry had been given the wrong operation.

'Don't be absurd,' Bettina said when Lucy confided in her.

'It's true. I know.' They were whispering in the kitchen. In the next room Harry was recording 'mutterings' in his notebook.

'Lucy, stop it. You can see the scar on his chest.'

But Lucy exhibited the tenaciousness of the truly desperate. 'When I was rubbing his head, I saw a mark.'

'Nonsense.'

'It's true. They did something to him. You don't know what happens in hospitals.'

'Rubbish.'

That evening, as they sat around in the living room, Bettina got up and rubbed Harry's head. She stood behind his wing-backed chair and went through it as thoroughly as native women look for nits. As she worked you could see, if you were looking for it, the temper building up in her smooth round face, which became, as rage approaches, smoother and smoother.

'You silly bitch,' she screamed at Lucy who was sitting on a big cushion in front of the television. 'Why do you make up stories?'

Harry sat very still in his chair while inexplicable things happened around him. Lucy wept and hugged his legs. Bettina threw her favourite Royal Doulton jug across the room. It slammed into the plaster wall, left a hole, and dropped to the floor without breaking, DID NOT BREAK. Lucy left his legs and picked up the jug.

'You harlot,' she screamed at her mother.

Bettina danced up and down. Pranced. Stamped her small feet. 'You little slug,' she screamed at her daughter. 'Slug, slug, slug.'

Harry sat very still and made mental notes while 'Lucy' and 'Bettina' acted out their roles in Hell.

David leaned indolently across the front-verandah rail and watched Joel waddle as he walked up the drive. He did not acknowledge the chubby wave (delivered at the flower beds) but silently criticized the display of bad taste as it crossed the front lawn: the poisonous green cravat, the ostentatious ring, and, worst of all, Gucci slip-ons accompanied by white socks. David winced. Joel was someone, he thought, who should never be allowed to escape the safety of a conservative dark suit, and whose ties and socks should always be purchased for him once a year, in advance, by someone with enough love and concern to stop him committing outrageous errors.

'Where's your father, Davey?'

He pointed downwards, towards the garage.

'In here?'

David nodded, that cold, distant, masculine nod with which older boys had once so intimidated him. He retired from the edge of the verandah and sat on a wicker settee while, beneath him, Joel banged on a door which would be opened to no one, him least of all.

Later Joel ran the gauntlet of David's disdain before scurrying into the house, where Lucy would make him coffee while Bettina had her shower. Joel was trying to talk to Harry about business. Harry did not wish to discuss business.

David, hearing a creaking door, leant across the edge of the verandah, and saw Harry emerge from the garage and slip silently down the side of the house.

It wasn't until just before lunch that Joel caught up with him just as he was making a run for the toilet. Harry, in tracksuit and sneakers, sped softly along the back verandah whilst Joel struggled along beside him like a reporter trying to grab an important 'no comment'.

'I've brought balance sheets, Harry.'

'Uh-huh.'

What do you want me to do?'

'Just continue.'

'Come on, Harry, I can take advice.'

'Continue,' Harry said, 'that is my advice,' and the last half of the sentence was uttered from behind the snibbed safety of the toilet door.

It had become very obvious that Harry did not wish to go back to work. Just as it also became quite obvious that the business needed him. In this climate of upset and emergency, with everything threatening to crack and collapse around him, David decided it might be safe to sacrifice his famous medical career before it began. The pressures had built up on him, year after year since he was ten, and now he saw his chance to slip sideways, and away to freedom.

He approached Harry on the subject, waiting until he was securely ensconced in the hammock, which stretched from the red flaming poinciana to the side fence.

'Daddy.'

Harry, making a rare entry in his notebook, started, and shoved it stupidly up his shirt, in full view of his son.

'Don't creep up on me.'

'Sorry.'

The air was so fragrant that day, one could have imagined that the grass was perfumed. It was about twenty-eight degrees and their backyard was thick and glossy with the luxurious semi-tropical vegetation people fly half-way round the world for, but neither of them noticed it.

'Daddy': he swung the hammock for his father, 'I want to go into business.'

His father's dark eyes frightened him when they came to bear on him like that. They recalled, too sharply, those recent scenes of hurt and confusion, 'And I thought I might go and help in the agency. It'd be interesting work,' he said, 'I guess.'

'You guess?'

'Yes.'

'And what about this doctor business?'

'I'm prepared to give that up.'

'For what reason?'

'For family reasons. For the family business. I could help. You know...' and did not say (did not think he needed to) anything about the current business problems.

'For the money?' Harry said in a neutral tone, as if that were quite a reasonable thing. He swung a little in the hammock.

'O.K., for the money, that too.'

'Ha.'

'What?' David frowned.

'Ha.'

'All I said was money, money too.'

'Yes, precisely. I noted it.'

And then, as he was wont to do on these occasions, Harry arched an eyebrow and cocked his head on one side just to let them know that he understood what was going on, that he knew where he was. But he was quite likely, in the middle of this protective cynicism, to be struck with confusion, and the least display of pain or tears could make him wonder if his real family had not, after all, been sent to Hell to accompany him, just as the families of the Pharaohs accompanied the Pharaoh into heaven, and this confusing tendency to switch from one view to the other was to stay with him for a great deal of his time in Hell.

'You noted it?'

'Your interest in money. I have noted it,' Harry said, 'many times.'

'And I think the ad business could be better than medicine,' David said, pleased to be discussing finances, rather than .the sloppy old-fashioned view his father had once brought to the idea of medicine.

'The prime attraction of medicine is really the money?'

'Most of it,' David admitted, relieved.

'Its main attraction.'

'Yes.'

This was not his son. This was someone pretending. In the pay of someone.

'Who do you work for?' he asked his son, oh so casually, but the timing of it was wonderful: just slipped it in there, like so.

David looked at him, his eyes wide. How many times had he wanted to discuss his business activities, his interest in drugs, the trips to South America? He wanted to talk business with his father, not business business, but adventure business. 'You mean,' he said, 'who do I work for?'

'Yes.' Harry waited tensely. It was only a hunch. But look at him, look at him swallow, and his throat is dry when he talks:

'Who do I work for now?'

'Yes.' A single red poinciana flower dropped on Harry's white shirt and lay there like a pretty wound.

'You know?'

'What do you think? Who do you work for?'

'Abe da Silva,' David Joy said melodramatically.

Harry Joy did not know the heroes or the hierarchies of organized crime, so he did not understand either the size of the boast or the field of endeavour, neither could he judge that his son's claim was only true in the loosest most indirect way, just as a service station attendant might have once claimed to work for Aristotle Onassis.

But what he did get was a name, his first name in Hell. He was an explorer, a cartographer, and on that great white unmarked map of Hell he could put this name, although quite where he did not know. Although, when David finally left him (his question unanswered, his private business undiscussed), his father would go back to his mental map, and beneath it, where one might expect the scale to go, he produced this key, this code, by which he now expected, like a zoologist, to classify the creatures he found there. Generalizing from his experience, he made a note of these:

1. Captives. (Me)

2. Actors. 'David' et al.

3. Those in Charge. da Silva. Others?

Finally, of course, the expected happened: his family kept out of his way. He prowled the lawn, haunted the garage, stared at the TV, and found himself isolated by his madness. David slunk home to get drugs and departed silently. Forever in the house you could find someone slinking up a stair, departing by a back door, running across a lawn with imaginary eyes burning into their back while Harry, the mad master, masturbated dully in his hammock or sharpened his pencil in the anticipation of some rare tit-bit of evidence.

Bettina, once so fastidious about the house (for she had a strong streak of very-small-town politeness and a serious concern for what the neighbours thought, although she would have violently denied it), left pictures to hang crooked, floors unswept and meals, also, uncooked. She spent as much time as possible in Joel's flat viewing its idiosyncrasies with eyes sim-ilar to her son's, but having other, fleshier, compensations.

Lucy was up early to sell the Tribune and up late at meet-ings, some official, some secret, in which she plotted to reform a Communist Party branch. But, like David and Bettina, she could not pass through the dead dusty heart of the house without feeling a certain sadness, a cold shivering melancholy similar to that which might be produced by an old orange tree growing next to a wrecked chimney.

When she came home one night she found her room had been searched. She suspected the Special Branch, wrongly as it turned out.

'Are you a Communist?' her father said.

'Yes.' It was about time!

'Good,' he said truculently, and turned briskly on his heel.

He continued to do his exercises as instructed and, with a lot of walking and no regular meals, lost his belly. On his walks, he saw ugliness and despair where once he would have found an acceptable world: goitrous necks, phlegmy coughs, scabrous skin, lost legs, wall eyes, dropping hair, crooked spines, lost hope, and all of this he noted, but when nothing actually happened, he became bored.

And then, one morning, he woke feeling optimistic. There was no reason for it, unless it was that he was tired of the game, the staleness of the house, being lonely and cranky and isolated. Perhaps he was like someone unmechanical who turns on a defunct TV every now and then to see if it has healed itself, but, for whatever reason, he did not wear his tracksuit (stinking thing) or his sandshoes (worse) but showered and scrubbed himself and washed his hair and shaved fastidiously. He ironed a shirt and took his baggy white suit from the wardrobe where it had hung since the day he died in it.

The Fiat, the wrong Fiat of course, started immediately, and he was too happy to be suspicious.

He backed down the driveway, nearly ran down the postman, and accelerated down Palm Avenue, only pausing to clash his gears in a style that had once been familiar to those who lived near the bend in the road.

Bettina had given up on Harry.

She sat amongst the heavy Edwardian furniture of The Wellington Boot and listened to Joel argue with the waiter about the bill. In a moment she was going to order another drink, but she waited, swilling the last little drop of Gewürztraminer around the bottom of her lipstick-smudged glass. Joel was trying to write new figures on the bill and the waiter was taking offence.

'Here,' the waiter was saying, 'I will bring you a new piece of paper, sir. I will get it. You can write on that.'

Bettina looked out the window wondering if she might, this once, see someone particularly elegant or glamorous walk past, someone with some damn style, but she was rewarded with the same stream of heavy, dowdy, frumpy-looking people who she had always despised. Prague 1935, she thought, and found little except the motor cars to contradict this idea, al-though she had never been to Prague and certainly not in 1935.

She heard the tooting. And then five sets of brakes locked in squealing harmony, and through the middle of the inter-section sailed a small red Fiat Bambino with Harry at the wheel. It looked so carefree and eccentric that she forgot her animosity towards him and smiled. Dear Harry. She laughed out loud.

'What's so funny?' said Joel, who was now standing beside the waiter. They both looked down at Bettina with hurt expressions. 'I argued with the man because he charged us for a salad he didn't bring us. He admits his mistake.' His voice rose an octave, protesting at the injustice of her laughter.

'It was Harry,' she said. 'He must be feeling better. He's going to Milanos.'

Joel sat down very heavily and left the waiter standing. His head was wobbling. 'We are not going to talk about Harry any more,' he said.

Bettina held up the empty wine bottle to the waiter and smiled. 'One more,' she said, and didn't bother to notice his expression.

'We talk about Harry in bed. We talk about Harry while we fuck. We talk about Harry in the shower. We can't even come to our own goddamn restaurant...'

'Don't shout, honey,' she said in perfect American, 'and don't wobble your head.'

'I'm not shouting.' He adjusted his tie. 'I just don't want to talk about Harry any more.'

'Well don't talk about Harry. Talk about us. Talk about how we're going to set up our own agency. That interests me more than Harry.'

'Don't be a bitch.'

'Bitch, why bitch?'

He compressed his fleshy lips. 'You know the problems.'

'You want a business…'

'We need money…'

'...I want a business.'

'We need money.'

'Didn't you say we could get the money if we could get a client or two? Isn't that what you always say? Because if we...'

The waiter had arrived with the wine and was busy pouring it into glasses.

'Did you order this?' Joel asked her.

'Yes, darling.'

'Why didn't you order it before?'

'I wasn't thirsty before.'

Joel turned to the waiter. 'May I have the bill, please?'

The waiter raised his eyebrow a fraction of a centimetre. Joel looked at him for a moment and decided it wasn't any-thing definite enough to pick a fight on.

But when the waiter returned he smirked.

'Excuse me,' said Joel, 'but didn't I notice you lift your eyebrow in a disagreeable way?'

'I beg your pardon, sir?'

While Joel continued his conversation with the waiter, Bettina looked out the window. She saw a woman in a white linen suit and red shoes. She gave her seven out of ten.

He had always parked his car behind the public toilet in the park opposite Milanos. He had done it for fifteen years, and for fifteen years different parking inspectors had received a yearly present and turned a blind eye.

But today there was a circus in the middle of the park and he had to enter the park from the wrong side, and drive across the grass. He parked, as he had always parked, next to the MENS sign.

Then he walked across the road and up the stairs.

He had always liked Milanos. The walls were the colours of smoked salmon, the tablecloths the same. He was reminded of the inside of vaginas, of peace, and for no good reason, of a large blue lake. He liked the roses and the carnations in their old fashioned silver vases which sat on each table. He liked the mirrors, and the tasteless little shaded lights on the walls, which somehow looked so elegant here. All this, his favourite place in the world, was unchanged and he breathed an almost audible sigh of relief to see Aldo sitting behind the bar as usual, to feel (more than see) the rush of waiters, the rolling chrome marvel of the dessert trolley, the soft exciting noise of a long French cork being drawn, the muted clink of long-stemmed wine glasses.

When he found five people sitting at his comer table, he took his notebook from the pocket of his baggy white suit and began writing straight away.

Aldo, his dark face like a clenched fist, decorated with two intense intelligent eyes, watched him. He was irritated by Harry's apprehensive face, the tentative way he came in, poking his nose around the coffee machine like a rat. Aldo, who was famous for his prickliness, had always been polite to Harry. He had been pleased to see him; he had even liked him. And Harry had liked Aldo without reservation. He had made Aldo feel good. But now Aldo's antennae twitched and he wanted to smash Harry across the mouth. He wanted to smash him across the mouth for even being alive. He sent the new waiter to give Harry a table. It was a provocative act. He watched its effect.

Harry was led to a window table, where he seated himself without protest. The meekness with which he accepted the table irritated Aldo even more. So when Harry looked over and smiled uncertainly Aldo pretended not to see him. He let him wait five minutes and then, as he circulated the room talking to customers, appeared to find him by accident. Harry was waiting for the drink waiter without complaint.

'I cannot keep a table empty for three months as a monu-ment,' he said, watching Harry writing in his book. 'If you tell me you will be here you can have the whole big table and what in the hell do I care that the other five seats stay empty? Did I ever complain? Now you have this table, a good view. Many people ask for the window. Today, in particular, you can watch the elephants. There, see.'

'Hello, Aldo.'

'You are tanned. You are thin. Your operation is over. You should be happy, but look at your face. What do you want to drink? The Meursault again?'

'Thank you.'

'There is no Meursault. How about a Mercury Blanc?'

'And pearl perch with sorrel sauce.'

Aldo shrugged. All his creased dark face showed pain and discontent, 'Let me advise you not to open the window. It stinks of animals' shit.' He pocketed his order book. 'We eat, we shit, we die. I myself have cancer.'

'No, Aldo, that's terrible.'

'Terrible? How is it terrible? It just is, that's all. Aldo will die. They tell me you died once already, but you came back. Maybe I'll come back too,’ he laughed coldly.

'Ah,' Harry said sadly, 'you think so?'

'I think so?' Aldo said. 'I know you did. I know so.'

Aldo retired with the order and sent the Mercury Blanc to Harry's table. When the perch and sorrel sauce passed him on its way to Harry's table he did not, as he should have, send it back to the kitchen, but shrugged to himself and let it go. Harry who had been a mountain had become a pit. Aldo watched him play with his pearl perch and when he had nearly finished he wandered over.

'How was the meal?'

Harry made a see-saw motion with his hand.

'Pah. What was the matter with it?'

'Oh,' Harry said, 'nothing. Don't worry, Aldo.' He suddenly felt very sad, sad either because Aldo had been replaced with an Actor, or alternatively had not been replaced by an Actor and had cancer. In either case it was depressing. He had made notes of both options and put the notebook in his pocket.

Aldo took the plate away. Harry hadn't finished, but Aldo was embarrassed to see it on the table. He retired to his bar and watched Harry drink wine. He was ashamed of himself. He liked Harry. He wanted Harry to smile. He wanted energy from Harry, but Harry sat at his table like a man with his forebrain cut out. So later, when the Mercury Blanc was nearly finished, Aldo came over to the table with a couple of cognacs. He sat down opposite Harry. He tried not to be prickly. He tried to talk to Harry as he remembered him.

'Mr Joy,' he said, sliding the glass across the tablecloth, 'they are giving me chemo-therapy and it makes me ill. So, to prevent the illness which is caused by treating the illness, they give me this.' And he pulled, from his pocket, a little plastic bag full of green herb-like substance.

Harry picked it up and fingered it. It crunched inside its bag. 'Marihuana,' said Aldo. 'Illegal, except for fortunate people like me who are dying of cancer. It is for counteracting the chemo-therapy. Have you ever smoked it?'

Harry shook his head. He had always believed what the city's tabloids told him about marihuana. He clutched the notebook in his pocket. DRUG ADDICT.

'It's not bad stuff,' Aldo admitted, sipping his cognac. 'In comparison with wine, of course, it is definitely below par. I mean: no nose, no colour, no complex taste. But as a euphoric: very good, probably better than wine. I tell you this, Mr Joy, because I see you are not on top of the world for the first time in fifteen years, it probably would not hurt, at your age, to try a little.'

'No thanks, Aldo.' PUSHED DRUG. INSISTENT.

'Come on. What do you think will happen? You will tum into a heroin addict? You will rape little schoolgirls? Have some. Makes you feel nice. Trust me, I wouldn't lie to you. Just mix a little with your cigarette. You roll the cigarette like this, see, so the tobacco falls out the end, then you can put a little pinch inside. It's easy.'

'Why are you talking so much, Aldo? You never talked so much.' V. PERSUASIVE.

'Well,' Aldo paused thoughtfully, 'I am stoned as a matter of fact.'

'Ah,' said Harry and regarded Aldo closely.

'Do I look like I rape schoolgirls?'

'No.' SMALL PUPILS.

'Well take it.'

Harry pursed his lips and then bit his moustache.

'Take it, take it.'

'Thank you, Aldo,' said Harry. He slipped the little plastic packet into the big pocket of his voluminous white trousers.

'You will enjoy it and think of me.'

Harry wondered.

'But,' Aldo went on, 'let me tell you about this cancer business, Mr Joy, there is a great deal of it around and it makes me wonder.' He narrowed his eyes. 'A lot more around than before. My theory is that it is being sent to punish us for how we live, all this shit we breathe, all this rubbish we eat. My theory, if you are interested, is that cancer is going to save us from ourselves. It is going to stop us eating and breathing shit.'

'What shit?' Harry wondered about the pearl perch.

'What shit? You name it. But listen, you know George Bizneris from Shell he has it. You know Betty Glover, she has it. You know, ' and he started counting off names on his fin-gers, 'David McNamara, his wife too, the man who runs the news kiosk downstairs, my own father, and that man there, sit-ting in the comer with the woman with red hair, he says three children at his daughter's school have it. Three children, eh?'

Harry shook his head mournfully, wondering what it all meant.

'Ah,' Aldo stood up. 'I can't stay with you, Mr Joy, you're too depressing. Come and see me when you have a smoke.'

Harry had a weakness for Bisquit cognac and no matter who told him it was not a great cognac, nothing could diminish the pleasure it gave him. When, sitting by the window, he dropped his nose into the brandy balloon it was like the proboscis of some creature whose evolutionary success had been based on its ability to live on the fumes of volatile fluids. It did not matter what they had done to Aldo (there he goes, the dark little man, flitting across the restaurant with his hidden drugs) because Harry was warmed and soothed and Milanos still had its magic, even now, at three o'clock in the afternoon as they set up the tables for evening and one could imagine oneself the first guest rather than the last.

He felt at once brave and (was it possible?) contented. The second-rate table by the window had its advantages: he could watch the Captives limp and struggle along the crowded street below, observe the laughing face of the occasional Actor, and even (once only) the impassive masks of Those in Charge hiding behind the glossy windows of a Mercedes Benz.

On his white map of Hell he was pencilling in marks, crude, inexact, tentative at the moment, but surely even Livingstone must have become lost occasionally and needed some high ground to see the lay of the land.

And also, perhaps, a sanctuary like this where one could momentarily forget the tribulations and terrors of the unknown continent.

He heard coarse laughter. It came from the bar. It was not Milanos-type laughter. It was the laughter of street spruikers and early morning markets, not the laughter of crystal glasses and pink tablecloths.

He cocked his head on one side, watching carefully; Aldo pointed towards him. Then he led this other person (this wrong-laughter) towards him. It was a big red-faced sandy-haired man. He had huge bushy sandy eyebrows and large sandy-haired arms sticking out of a dirty yellow sleeveless sweater.

'Found you at last,' the stranger shouted to Harry when he was still only half-way across the restaurant. 'It's extraordinary.'

'This is wonderful,' Aldo said. They came and sat at his table without being asked and Harry had to put his notebook away again.

'This is Mr ...?' Aldo began.

'Mr…Billy, Billy de Vere,' said the sandy man holding out a hand which felt like it had been stored in a bag of unwashed potatoes.

'From the circus,' Aldo explained. 'Mr Joy.'

'Harry.'

'Pleased to meet you, Harry.' Billy de Vere placed a fistful of notes on the table. 'If you'll allow me,' he said, 'what will be your pleasure?'

'No, no,' AIdo said, 'this is on me,' and he waved a waiter over and whispered in his ear.

Harry sat motionless. His flicking eyes didn't miss a thing, not the nod to the waiter, the wink of Mr de Vere, the removal of the notes from the table, or the faint aroma, like wet dog, which came from the direction of the yellow sleeveless sweater.

'Alright, alright, Mr Joy, don't worry, cheer up,' Aldo said. 'Cheer up, cheer up, it's just an accident. A funny story…'

'What happened?' Harry asked thickly.

A bottle of Grande Armagnac was placed on the table and they all watched the waiter take his knife and break the green-wax seal on the cork and then pour the dark brown liquid into three brandy balloons. The bottle was left on the table.

'Drink first,' Mr de Vere said, clapping his hands together like a hungry man. 'Or you'll think I'm lying.'

Harry and Aldo shared a momentary comradeship, a shared astonishment as Mr de Vere downed his Armagnac in one fast disrespectful swallow.

'Good brandy,' he said, 'very smooth.'

Aldo giggled (out of character) and poured him some more.

'A drink for a man,' said Mr de Vere.

'This must be some story,' Harry said nervously.

'It is almost the same as the original story,' Mr de Vere said, placing his empty glass on the table with an appreciative sigh, in spite of which gentle compliment it was destined to remain unfilled for longer than he had hoped. 'It's like lightning hitting the same place twice.' He picked up his glass and looked at it. 'Which,' he said, his huge eyebrows rising, 'I've heard can actually happen, in spite of what they say.' He looked at Harry inquisitively as if he might prefer to discuss lightning for a while. 'This is almost the same as the original story,' he said.

'No,' Aldo said, 'certainly not. In the original story it was a red Volkswagen.' ·

'What story?' Harry said.

'No,' Billy de Vere said, 'it was a Fiat. I remember distinctly. A Bambino. A Fiat 500, the same as Mr Joy's.'

'I think you're mistaken, Mr de Vere. But, in any case…' Aldo relented and gave him a little more Grande Armagnac, 'in any case…close enough.'

'Life,' Billy de Vere raised his glass, 'imitating art. Or should I say,' he lowered his voice and winked, 'life imitating bullshit?'

'Do you know the story about the Elephant, Mr Joy?' Aldo said. 'Because very soon you are going to have to tell it to your insurance company.'

Aldo and Billy de Vere roared laughing.

'Go on…' Harry said, all the pleasure gone, only watch-fulness and suspicion left.

'It was trained to sit on red boxes.'

'Big red boxes.'

'Big for a box, small for a car. It's what you might call an apocryphal story.'

'It never really happened,' Billy de Vere said. 'This elephant was trained to sit on red boxes, see, and one day someone came and parked near her.'

'In a red Volkswagen,' Aldo said. 'Surely you've heard it?'

'Or Fiat.'

'And she sat on it.'

'An elephant sat on my car?' Harry said glumly. 'You're laughing because an elephant sat on my car.' He had never heard the story before. He was not interested in precedents. All he could see was that he had suffered an outlandish misfortune and that these people were sitting there laughing at him because of it. In Milanos!

'You've opened a bottle of Armagnac because my car has been ruined. What sort of place is this?' he said to Aldo.

'Look on the bright side,' Aldo told him darkly. 'You're not dying. You're drinking good Armagnac, and you are the first person whose car has really been sat on by an elephant. What a story. You like stories. Come on,' he gave Harry a little more Armagnac, 'drink up. Have fun.'

'Your insurance will pay,' Billy de Vere said. 'We have witnesses.'

'You are a ninny,' Aldo said, talking to Harry as he might talk to any customer who irritated him.

'A what?' said Harry, who had never been spoken to like this.'

'Ninny,' Aldo said, his eyes dark and dangerous.

Later Aldo was to regret this, to realize that he had gone too far, even for him, and that marihuana and Armagnac can be a tricky combination.

'A moony ninny,' he said, wilfully tormenting his best and oldest customer. 'A dill, a drongo, a silly-billy.'

It was to prey on Aldo's mind, and later, when he was dying, he tried to get a message to Harry Joy, but by then Harry Joy was nowhere to be found.

'A dingo,' he called after the departing figure in the white suit. 'A po-face,' he told Billy de Vere, 'a dim-wit, a 'poo-pant,' but by then he was laughing too much and further speech became impossible. Through a curtain of tears he watched Billy de Vere pour himself another Armagnac.

'Look at this fucking cretin, will you,' Senior Constable Box said.

He brought the patrol car into the lane beside the crushed Fiat 500 which was making a painful-sounding 50 kilometres an hour. Sitting behind its wheel, his head and shoulders emerging from its crumpled sunshine roof like the tank commander in some private war, his white suit splashed with the black grime from passing buses, his hair slicked and flattened by the heavy rain, was a man with the profile of the god :Krishna.

'Give him a wave,' said Box who was probably not tech-nically drunk. Hastings closed his eyes and sighed. Box was giving him the shits.

'Watch ...'

Box tooted the horn and waved and the lunatic waved back, smiling and nodding.

'O.K.,' Hastings said, 'that'll do. Stop fucking about with him. Pull him over.' And he made Box get out in the rain and talk to him while he watched the conversation in the rear-view mirror.

Presently Box came back, opened the door, and burped.

'What is it?'

'He said an elephant sat on it,' said Box, grinning.

'Is he a smart arse or a looney?'

'Don't know.'

'Take him back to the station.'

'I'm not going in that,' Box said.

'Nobody is going in that,' Hasting said slowly. 'It is an unroadworthy vehicle. Now will you ask the gentleman if he would like to accompany us to the station in a nice new car?'

The police station was not what he had expected. It was like a house. A small neat path ran between borders of flowers. A sprinkler threw little jewels of water through the rain. The sun came out as they walked up the path. Harry, Senior Constable Box and the second policeman who had not introduced himself.

Inside the station innocent people filled out applications for drivers' licences. They took Harry through a side door and down a passage. They took him to a room at the end of the passage and left him alone. There was a table in the middle, scuffed vinyl tiles on the floor, a kitchen sink in one corner, and a number of kitchen chairs which had the appearance of newly delivered furniture. The wall had two different types of cream paint: shiny at the bottom and flat above the shoulder line. Sellotaped to the wall was a small printed sign which explained, in ten sarcastic points, how to produce a juvenile delinquent. A light with a frilly shade hung above the table, on which were an ashtray full of butts and a coffee cup with lipstick on it.

There was a curtain rod but no curtain. Harry sat on one of the chairs and looked out the window. He was wet and mis-erable. Water dripped on to the floor. Outside the window there was a clothesline and a young woman was hanging clothes on it. Harry watched her peg a pair of very large pyjamas on to the wire, a brown sock with a diamond pattern, and three small pairs of white panties.

A small fair-haired boy dragged a yellow plastic red-wheeled tricycle across the grass beneath the clothesline. It was all wrong. Water dripped from Harry Joy as he waited for his punishment.

After ten minutes the second policeman entered the room. He was Sergeant David Hastings but he still did not introduce himself. David Hastings had also been born in a small country town. Looking at him you could still see the fair-haired boy with sandshoes on his feet and scabs on his short, skinny legs. His face was freckled, his hair stood up at the back, and although he no longer blushed as readily as he had, his face would still go red when he felt he was being mucked around. A gentle glow suffused his face.

'Now, Harold,' he said, 'here's a cup of coffee.'

'Thank you.'

David Hastings pulled up a chair and sat with his back to the window. 'We're very busy,' he said slowly, playing with his own cup of coffee, turning the cup a full 360 degrees on its saucer. 'We don't have time to muck around.'

Harry patted his pocket, hoping that the marihuana had somehow vanished, but when Hastings looked pointedly at his hand he pulled it away as if he’d scorched himself.

'Now, Harold, would you just tell us the truth about your accident and everything will be O.K. You'll get a little fine and we'll phone your wife to come and get you.'

'I told him.'

'Tell me,' encouraged the policeman, his face becoming a little redder.

'An elephant sat on it.'

The policeman closed his eyes and sighed. 'Oh Harold,' he said, 'don't be silly. If you're going to tell stories to the police, tell us something original. Don't come and tell us old elephant stories, and if you do, get the car changed. The car in the story was a Volkswagen.'

'An elephant sat on it,' Harry insisted, but he no longer believed the story himself, 'The guy from the circus came and told me.'

'Name being .. . ?' Hastings opened his notebook with a tired flick of the hand. But all Harry could see was de Vere drinking Armagnac and his name would not appear.

'I forget.'

Outside the small boy rode his tricycle into a wet sheet. He stayed immobile with the sheet wrapped around him, blowing little white linen bubbles. The sun shone brightly, illuminating the white-wrapped boy and the three wheels of the tricycle.

'Weren't you going to claim insurance? Didn't you write down his name?'

Harry didn't say anything. He knew he was in for it. He had been planted with drugs and he could only wait for his punishment. He started to think about the two different kinds of cream paint they used on the walls, the flat above, the gloss below. It was the same scheme they had used at school. He didn't like the flat paint. It reminded him of finger nails being dragged across a blackboard.

He pulled a face, remembering it.

'What's that in aid of?' David Hastings stood up, took Harry's coffee, and walked over to the sink where he emptied it.

'What?'

'Pulling that silly face. What's that in aid of?'

'I just remembered something.'

'You better do a lot of remembering very fast Harold, before I charge you with driving an unroadworthy vehicle, resisting arrest, obscene language, and obstructing a police officer in the course of his duty.'

'Phone the circus, 'Harry said, 'they'll tell you.'

Hastings put down his pad and walked across the room to Harry. He put his hand on Harry's chest and twisted his shirt and skin together. When he had twisted it tight enough for his satisfaction he picked him up and forced him against the wall.

'Now,' he said, 'don't tell me what to do. Second, don't muck me about.'

Harry burped.

'You filthy bastard.'

Harry, pinned against the wall, raised a questioning eyebrow.

'You've been eating garlic. You fucking stink.' And he slammed Harry against the wall.

'I'm sorry,' Harry said. He was frightened. He waited. He would not be punished for stinking. He would be punished for the real offence.

Hastings walked to the other side of the room. Harry undid a shirt button and looked at the scar on his chest. It was bleeding. He felt he was getting hives. He felt them massing inside him. He stood still, trying not to attract attention to himself.

Senior Constable Box entered the room. He was no longer wearing his raincoat. His belly bulged out over his belt. He had combed his black curling hair and washed his face roughly. There were still two little drops of water clinging to his small moustache.

'Still telling funny stories?' he asked.

'Not very funny stories,' Hastings said. 'Very old stories.'

Box pulled in his belly and hooked his thumbs over his belt. 'Maybe it could think of something original.'

Hastings shifted a chair around. 'Don't know if it’s capable of it.' He looked up at Harry and his freckles were almost invisible in his red face. He gripped the chair and placed it an inch further to the right. 'Maybe all it can do is tell old stories. Maybe I better pass him over to you.'

Box nodded in the manner of someone receiving a specific instruction. Harry watched. It was like a dance. Box retreated, Hastings approached. Hastings pulled Harry out from the wall and then stood behind him.

'Now,' Hastings said, 'I'll pass him over to you, Constable.'

He pushed hard. The sharp edge of the table-jabbed Harry between the legs.

He backed away from the table as Box moved behind him. 'No,' said Box, 'I might just pass him over to you.'

Harry hit the table again and Hastings pulled him back then shoved him forward, shoving him hard into the table with his boot. The corner of the table hit him in the balls. He tried to vomit. A boy stood on the tricycle, looking in.

'No, I think I'll pass him over to you.'

'No, I don't deal with drowned rats.'

Harry started to howl. He could not stand. They picked him up and sat him on a chair. His hives raged within him. He put his head back and howled to the heavens. He howled like someone locked in a dream. This, at last, was where he was sent to. Actors would punish him for all eternity while a child gazed through glass.

They were sitting down. They waited for him. He could not stand waiting for it to get worse. He had vertigo. He had to jump. He pulled the packet of marihuana out of his pocket and threw it on the table.

'There,' he yelled, 'there. That's the truth. That's the truth.'

There was a long silence while Hastings picked up the bag and Box leaned over his shoulder. Hastings had lost all his red colour. He tried not to smile. He sniffed the marihuana (a pitiful little packet, he thought, maybe half an ounce) and handed it to Box who looked like he was going to get the giggles.

'Alright,' Hastings said, only keeping a straight face with some difficulty. 'See if you can tell us something original this ,time.'

'Don't give us that old shit about elephants, Harold.'

'Something new.'

'A story.'

'Something interesting.'

'Something we haven't heard before.'

'We heard such a lot of stories, Harold,' Box said, sitting back-to-front on a chair, putting his arms on the table.

The man in the filthy white suit brushed his hair out of his eyes.

'About marihuana?' he said. 'About this marihuana?'

'About anything, Harold,' Box said, 'anything at all.'

'Alright,' the prisoner said, and shifted in his chair.

'But it must be totally original,' Box said.

'Come on…' Hastings said to Box. 'Let's just get his statement and…'

'No,' Box winked. 'You tell a story, Harold.'

The prisoner's face was showing huge red weals and Hastings looked at the tortured face with embarrassment. He stood up.

'I'll be back in a moment,' he told Box. He was going to walk out because he knew something nasty was going to happen, one of Box's degrading little tricks. Box didn't have a temper. (A temper, at least, was something clean and hot and fast.) Box liked tricks, slow, drawn-out entertainments.

'Alright,' the poor bunny was saying, 'I will tell you a completely original story.' Hastings had his hand on the door-knob as the man started his story; but that brown voice held him, like a cello on a grey afternoon, and he found himself releasing the door-knob and leaning against the wall.

He did not realize, for an instant, could not have guessed, that Harry was extemporizing the only original story he would ever tell. In fear of punishment, in hope of release, glimpsing the true nature of his sin, he told a story he had never heard about people he had never met in a place he had never visited.

There he is, a tightrope walker in the dark.

'He was very short,' Harry Joy began, 'and also shortsighted, although no one knew that then, not in the beginning, and that was why he always got into trouble for being late to school because he couldn't see the hands of the town hall clock.

'The town hall,' he decided, 'was across the road from the school.

'He did badly at school. He was not good at anything. Not sums, not writing, and not games.

'His mother was short too. She was a Cockney from Bow in London and she was only four foot seven tall; almost, but not quite, a midget. This story is set long ago, and one year there was a competition on the beach – the beaches were different then, with bathing boxes and competitions – the people were more easily amused – a competition,' he said, 'for the shortest woman.

'Now Daniel, or Little Titch as he was usually called, per-suaded his mother to go into the competition. The women were all lined up, ready to be judged, eyeing each other up, bending their knees, digging their feet down into the sand and so on, and everything was calm enough. But when they saw Little Titch's mother walk towards them a great cry of despair went up.

'Oh, no.'

And half the line of women just walked away. And Little Titch's mother took her place at one end of the line, very modestly, with that serious look she always wore on her face, and, naturally, she won.

'When they went home on the tram that night Little Titch carried the silver cup his mother had won. Although it tar-nished quickly you could still read the inscription years later. It read: The Shortest Woman, Queenscliff, 1909.

'Little Titch was both proud and puzzled by the cup. He was proud that the people had smiled at his mother and given her the cup. He was proud that the cup was silver and there, where it was engraved (and he traced the words with his grubby finger), it was gold. But he could not understand, as much as he might think about it, either then or in the months that followed, that his mother should be rewarded for the very thing he, her son, was punished for. People did not kick his mother because she was small, or pull her ears (let them try!) or her nose. They did not pinch her when she was asleep and then laugh at her when she cried. But these things, these punishments, were the daily lot of Little Titch. His brothers were bigger and older, more like his father, and they took it in turns to box his ears and tell him how stupid he was. So when he walked back into the house that day it was not with happiness but with his habitual sense of fear, which was laced with cunning and not a little slyness, and he crept off into the corner under the big grey laundry trough where he would hide, with his dirty little arms around his scabby knees, for hours on end. When this hiding place was discovered, and they were always discovered – under the tank stand, beneath the house, in the smelly space behind the outside toilet – he would find another one.

'He was not lazy. He always tried hard. And later, when his father took up aviation and bought a second-hand Bleriot monoplane, Little Titch would repeatedly break his arm, get-ting it caught by the great wooden propellors which had to be swung by hand.

'But at the time of this story his father did not have aero-planes, or even taxis, but a stables with horses. So the work of the family was all to do with horses, backing them into the shafts, tightening their girths, doing their shoes, mucking out the stables, feeding them, and so on.

'Little Titch tried to do whatever work they gave him but they said he was timid and stupid and only fit for shovelling out the stale straw and shit which he had to do each night after school and often he went to bed unwashed with only the cold smell of horse dung for company.

'The most difficult and troublesome horse in the stables,' Harry said, 'was a gelding named Billy-boy who was not only prone to kick, but also to bite with a ferocity unusual even in a horse. It was nothing for him, one morning when his girth was being tightened, to turn and bite the arm of whichever elder brother was doing it, not just the nasty bruising bite of an ordinary horse, but a ripping horrible bite that drew blood. And there was also the chance, in the confusion, of a kick or two for whoever came to the rescue.

'You could not touch Billy-boy's face, or go behind him, or beside him, and it seemed that most parts of his muscular anatomy had received beatings at one time or another and he was not eager that they be repeated.

'Little Titch's father said that Billy-boy had once killed a man, which was why he had been so cheap, no other person daring to deal with such a brute.

'It's good training for the boys,' the father said. But after two bitings and a nasty kick the mother forbade the bigger boys to go near Billy-boy and the father had to do it himself.

'So, life went on. Billy-boy bit the father, the father hit the boys, and the two big boys hit Little Titch and pulled his nose and boxed his ears and Little Titch looked for places to hide.

'But on this night, this particular night, the brothers could not find him, and in the end the whole family turned out, looking high and low, waking the neighbours calling out: "Little Titch, Little Titch".

'It was the father who found him,' Harry said.

'The horse killed him,' Box said.

'Billy-boy was standing there,' Harry insisted, 'and behind him, right next to his hind leg was Little Titch, his arms around Billy-boy's huge rear leg, his face pressed into the deep black warmth of his flank.

'Come here, Little Titch,' they said, 'come here at once'.

'But Little Titch,' Harry said, 'didn't have to do anything at all because the bastards couldn't touch him,' he said 'and that's the end of the story.'

There was a silence in the room and the two policemen looked the way people look when the lights come on in the cinema. Hastings looked out the window and saw it was raining again. Box yawned and stretched.

'I think you better piss off now,' Hastings said quietly to the story-teller who was looking as perplexed (who was Little Titch?) and as embarrassed as any of them.

As he was escorting Harry out the door Hastings noticed Box, almost absent-mindedly, slip the packet of marihuana into his pocket.

Hastings thought: You silly cunt, but he escorted Harry silently to freedom.

As the taxi drove him home across the bridge, the river below appeared as black as the Styx. Barges carried their carcinogens up river and neon lights advertised their final formulations against a blackening sky.

Harry Joy, his face ghastly with hives, his suit filthy, his chest bleeding, his back sore, lounged sideways in the back seat, drugged with sweet success. The buildings of Hell, glossy, black-windowed, gleaming with reflected lights, did not seem to him unconquerable. It seemed that a person of imagination and resources might well begin to succeed here, to remain dry, warm, and free from punishment. The old optimism flowed through him, warming him like brandy, and allowed him to feel some sympathy for the poor Captives who crowded the darkening streets, holding newspapers over their bowed heads in pitiful defence against the hail which noisily peppered the roof of the cab.

The rewards of originality have not been wasted on him and if he is, at this stage, unduly cocky, he might as well be allowed to enjoy it. So we will not interfere with the taxi driver, who is prolonging his euphoria by driving him the long way home.

Harry sat on the kitchen chair with the towel around him, red Mercurochrome marking the edges of his bleeding scar. There was a strange quiet when Bettina asked the question again.

'Now,' she said, 'tell me what happened.'

He wanted to tell her, but he dare not repeat the elephant story. He looked upwards. He shut his eyes. He sat in total mental blackness and waited for originality to visit him. A lost blow-fly circled the kitchen table until it settled above the door frame where Joel leaned.

The silence was terrible to him.

No new story would arrive. He sat on his hands and looked down at his feet and, after waiting a minute or two, Bettina and Joel went away.

He heard them talking in the next room, their words hidden in a hiss of television.

Harry was meant to start work at the bank on Monday. Then, on the Wednesday before, his mother won money in the lottery. And now, it seemed, his whole life was to change: he was going to art school instead.

He would rather have stayed in the town and worked in the bank. But he was going to art school tomorrow and he pretended to be pleased. Everyone knew. They shook his hand and were proud of him.

When he came home he found his mother dressed in a long gown, deep blue with splendid embroidery on the back and on the edges of its long wide sleeves. She had put her hair up, that jet black hair which was never to be quite so black again. Her eyes shone with excitement and she pulled up her sleeves, trying to keep them out of the cooking.

'Into the dining room, go on.'

She banished him. He sat alone in the dining room which was the living room, the parlour, the study, the drawing room. He sat in a comer in an old armchair and lit the fire.

He did not want to leave. He wanted to stay here. He loved this little room with its black polished-floor boards, the old floral carpet which lifted in ghostly waves in a high wind, the tiny fireplace with its metal grate which had to be blacked every Sunday, the ancient wireless with its vast round dial lit by a soft amber light. He walked around the table which was now covered with ·a spectacular white starched cloth, resplendent with shining silver knives and forks. Two candles sat in the middle of the table and he lit them.

That night his mother showed him things he had never known, as if she were giving him a dress rehearsal for another life. She cooked food of a type he had never eaten, a mousseline, light and delicate, duckling with whole green peppers. And there was wine, a golden wine in an elegant long-necked bottle.

'Ah,' she said, 'wine.' He was overcome with pride at his mother, yet he never asked her how she knew about such things, just as he never asked her who owned the house, when she was married, where the money came to live on, why his father had gone and when he might come back. And yet, that night before he left, she began to talk and he caught glimpses of other worlds, her wants, her loves, her disappointments. He was thrilled but also embarrassed. She drank the wine with pleasure and her eyes glowed with it. She danced like a butterfly through fields of conversation, fluttering for a second over one memory, barely touching it before she was on her way to the next.

'Ah, Harry,' she said, 'your whole life is in front of you. How I envy you. Do you mind your mother envying you? Of course not.'

She insisted on dancing with him. He was giddy from the wine. They whirled around the room and fell over each other. 'Oh Harry,' she collapsed on to the tattered couch, 'I'm so happy for you, so happy for you.'

But had he ever thanked her for sending him to the art school? Years later he tried to remember. Had he ever thought about what she had given up to send him there? She had pushed him on to the train, almost desperately, as if given a second thought she would have taken the money and travelled the world, visited his father at what ever place he was in then, seen the great galleries of Europe, the Uffizi, the Villa Borghese. Did it ever occur to him that she was the one who wanted to go to art school, that she had given him her dream and he had taken it without realizing what it was?

He had asked her if she’d be lonely.

'Lonely?' she laughed. 'How can I be lonely? All my friends are here.'

Yet it wasn't true. She had no close friends. She had people she helped, others she did favours for. There were those she felt sorry for and those she liked a chat with. As time passed pity would be her dominant emotion as she tried to help those she felt sorry for. She took to religion with a new enthusiasm that he soon found almost embarrassing.

Yet that night there was no talk of God, just giddy dancing and golden wine.

'Throw your glass into the fire.'

He didn't understand.

She showed him.

The glasses crashed in ecstasy. The wine sparkled in the lantern light. Outside the wind moaned in sheer pleasure and the great fir trees swayed under the night sky and great white clouds skudded across the heavens and Orion's belt lost its handle.

She found more glasses, long-stemmed and delicate, hidden in the back of a cupboard. She splashed a little wine into one and threw it.

'There,' she said, 'the end. Finito.'

It felt dangerous and thrilling. He followed her example. 'Finito,' he said.

'Now,' she said, and they toasted with two more glasses. 'Now, for both of us, a new stage.'

He did not understand. He looked at his mother's glowing eyes, her laughing lips and felt nervous, alone in territory he did not recognize.

'Now,' she sipped the wine and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. 'Now, you go to be an artist and I,' she emptied the glass and hurled t into the fire, 'I go to polish floors.'

'Oh no.' He stood up hugged her. 'Oh, no.'

But she did not look unhappy. She was bright, almost feverish. 'Oh yes,' she said, 'Oh Harry I want to. I am happy, happy, happy.'

'You don't want to polish floors.'

'Polish, polish,' she waved her hand. 'Not just polish. I am trying to explain, Harry, this is new stage. I have planned it. Harry, I am going to be good.'

She was crying now but still smiling. Tears sprang to his eyes in sympathy.

'No, no,' she said, 'don't cry. I'm happy. I'm crying because I'm happy. This is my new life. I'm going to be good.'

He did not understand.

'I promised God,' she smiled, 'if I won the lottery.' The wine was drunk. His childhood over. Few things ever happened afterwards to match this moment of tingling promise where Harry and his mother had trembled on the edge of life.

Alex Duval spent his Saturday morning as usual. He was the only person on the floor occupied by Joy, Kerlewis & Day and so allowed himself some laziness in dress. His grey gardening pullover was unravelling at the neck and a bright red shirt shone through the holes in the elbows. As he walked along the corridor to his office he carried two Italian doughnuts (the kind with a big blob of apricot jam hidden in the middle) and triple espresso coffee. Soon he would go down for another coffee and he'd probably (certainly) buy another doughnut or two.

The last of the corridor's neon lights finished its nervous flickering as he entered his office. He pulled a face at the stale aroma of pipe tobacco and placed his coffee and doughnuts on his large clean desk. He took from the top drawer a little L-shaped metal key which he now used to unlock the double-glazed windows. It was raining. He sniffed the air, yawned, and stretched.

Today, as usual, Alex Duval would write his second set of conference reports. A conference report is written in an advertising agency any time the agency and its client decide to take action on anything. It can record a budget allocation, the acceptance of an advertisement, approvals and rejections of media schedules, marketing strategies; all the business of a client and the agency's role in it is documented and then kept for up to seven years. In disputes between clients and their agencies, the conference report is regarded as a binding document.

And every Saturday morning for the last ten years Alex Duval, Account Director, had sat at his desk and written and typed a set of conference reports in which his role, seen by the revolutionary investigators he imagined would one day sit in judgement on him, would be blameless.

He was physically a large man, but there was a softness about him, the look of someone who has just stepped out of a hot bath. He was unnaturally pink, and his face with its pale intelligent eyes still carried, in some marks as subtle as the smell of white camellias, the signs of defeat. Alex Duval was a man of principle who had decided, a long time ago, that men of principle can never win. Yet he hoped and feared he was wrong. He voted for the Communist Party and rewrote his conference reports every Saturday morning. He ate cakes. Now and again he had an affair with a secretary. He no longer expected anything good to happen to him and sincerely hoped that the world would not be destroyed until after his death.

In spite of such pessimism, he derived real pleasure from the doughnut, which was perfectly oily, and the black coffee, which was very strong. He did not rush this second breakfast, but savoured each mouthful of it, and if he was impatient at all it was only to contrast the slightly bitter taste of the coffee with the sweet oiliness of the doughnut.

Before he began work on his conference reports he washed his big soft hands and carried a heavy black IBM electric typewriter from his secretary's desk to his own. Although she didn't know it he could type faster than she could: one hundred and thirty words per minute.

And so he began, his belly sagging over his trouser belt, the natural stoop of his shoulders inclining him towards the black machine, the high intelligent forehead marked with creases of concentration. The hands flew. An observer would never have remarked that this was a man involved with a tedious chore, but rather one in the throes of a sometimes difficult but often exciting creation. For as he wrote these conference reports Alex Duval emitted a strange series of little cries: an ejaculation of triumph, a snort of disgust, an attenuated giggle. He typed quickly, perfectly, in complete command of his mat-erial, using the fixed language of the conference report with consummate ease: Client requested that Agency should prepare such and such. Agency expressed the opinion that such and such. Agency warned client that this practice was unprincipled, that this promise should not be made, that this chemical was carcinogenic, that this product could cause liver damage.

He was not so mad as to not know he was mad. He knew, almost exactly, how mad he was. But he also allowed himself the 1 per cent chance that he was taking a useful precaution, and so his Saturday morning sessions had continued. Later, going down in the lift, he would feel the damp sour shame of a perversion finally practised, a lust satisfied. And in the street, walking amongst other men, be would feel at once self-hatred and a strange sense of superiority.

So when Harry Joy came to find out who were Actors and who were Captives on that Saturday morning, he came down the corridor walking softly on his sandshoes. He had adopted a white shirt and white trousers, and he walked loosely, not at all like someone come to spy. He heard the typing and imagined one of the copywriters. He followed the metallic clatter through the stale weekend air to Alex's office, where, standing at the doorway, he watched the process of creation.

Alex was chuckling. He kept typing with one hand while he reached for the coffee. Harry thought of Winifred Atwell playing 'Black and White Rag'.

Harry had left Lucy sobbing in her bedroom because he had remembered to treat her like an Actor. He could no longer act consistently – treating everyone as his mortal enemy one minute and then, totally forgetting where he was, as an old friend the next.

He hadn't seen Alex for three months and he smiled now, forgetting he had come to spy. He leant against the doorway and watched him work, giggling at his manic energy.

'Christ… Harry.' Alex rocked back and held his heart, dropped his head. 'Oh shit.'

He tried to cover the paper, to stand up, to shake Harry's hand. He was flustered and couldn't pay attention to what he was doing or saying.

'Harry, Harry.' He came and hugged him. Harry smelt the wet armpits around his ears, for Alex was a very tall man. 'Harry, Harry, we've missed you, Harry.' He started to lead Harry out of the office, away from the paper, out into the dull light of the corridor. 'Out here, where I can see you. Harry, you've lost weight. You look wonderful.'

Harry couldn't stop smiling. 'Thank you, Alex, it's good to see you.'

'Harry, Harry.' He put his big hands in his pockets and rocked to and fro on his creased old black shoes. 'The place hasn't been the same. It needs you Harry, you old bastard. Are you back?'

'Almost.'

'Harry, Harry, everyone will be so happy. You wait till you see them smiling. Nothing against Joel, but it's not the same. It isn't fun without you. What we miss, Harry, is your bleeding blind optimism.'

'Come and sit down, Alex.' Harry slipped into Alex's office before he could be stopped. He picked up the conference reports. Alex, flustering in behind him, tried to act as if they were nothing important, told himself to make no move towards them, to draw no attention to them. He was pleased to talk to Harry but he felt like a radio tuned to two stations at once.

'You look so well. You've lost your belly, you old bastard.'

'I've been walking.'

'And swimming. That tan makes you look ten years younger.'

'Sometimes I go to the beach with Lucy,' Harry flicked idly through the conference reports.

'So how is Lucy?'

'Mmm.'

'And Bettina?'

'Fucking hell, Alex, what's all this?'

'Nothing, Harry, just a joke.'

'You told them that saccharin causes cancer? You told them that, Alex?'

'It's a joke, Harry, that's all. I was just having fun.'

Harry sniffed. He could smell Alex's fear. He saw the big slumped sad man with his red shirt showing through his gardening sweater and saw him light one more Low Tar Cigarette. 'This isn't a joke, Alex. You're not doing this for a joke.' His eyes narrowed, wondering what category of torment was contained here. 'Tell me the truth, old mate,' he said, using his genuine affection as bait in the trap.

Alex sat down behind the desk and looked up at him.

'Oh Harry, you know me…' Alex felt as if someone had filleted his soul and thrown it on the desk. It was pale and slippery, a pitiful thing.

Harry was still reading through the conference reports with astonishment.

'Harry, it's not real. I didn't do it.'

'What happens when you send this out? We lose the busi-ness? Is that it?'

'No, no, Harry you don't understand. Here, take this key. Take it. It's the only one. You open that filing cabinet behind you. That's the key to it. Go on.' He waited while Harry did it. 'There are seven years of conference reports with stuff like that. They don't get sent out.'

'But why?'

'I guess I'm crazy.' He tried to smile, the smile of a fat schmuck who thinks he's a fat schmuck.

All Harry could see was his pain. It was almost a visible aura, a pale trembling force that burned around him. 'No,' he said, 'you're not crazy. You're frightened.'

'Harry, Harry, I'd rather you found me sucking cocks.'

'Alex, tell me...'

'How can I tell you, it's so crazy.'

'You've got to tell.'

'I can't damn tell you,' Alex thumped the desk and a tear ran down his shining face. 'I can't damn fucking tell you. It's ridiculous. It's my punishment, Harry, that's all.'

Harry sat down carefully on the edge of the desk 'Pun-ishment for what?' he said.

Alex was really crying now and Harry handed him a handkerchief impatiently.

'Punishment,' Alex said, 'for what we do here.'

'Ah.'

'You'd never understand. You're right. You're the normal one, Harry. I know you're right and I'm wrong, but I'm just crazy. It upsets me. I write… I write these conference reports for when they come to get me… to punish me.'

Harry felt cautious. He didn't move quickly. He accepted his wet handkerchief back and didn't say a thing. He was like man watching a splendid bird perform rare rituals in deepest forest.

Even when he spoke it was softly, and very carefully, as if the jab of a consonant or the scratch of a vowel might break the spell.

'Come on,' he whispered, 'let's go and get a drink'

He walked softly on his white sandshoes and Alex squeaked behind him carrying a box of Kleenex tissues. They went first to Harry's office, where they found ancient layouts stacked all over the desk The refrigerator was missing and two dirty glasses and a quarter of a bottle of campari were gathering dust in the once-generous bar.

'Joel's got the fridge.'

Harry nodded. 'Tell Tina to tidy this up and stock the bar.'

'Joel fired Tina.'

They went to Joel's office and found the refrigerator locked inside a newly built cupboard. It wasn't much of a lock. They broke it with a screwdriver and went back to Alex's office with a bottle of Scotch and a big bucket of ice.

Alex sat down in the chair behind the desk, and Harry lounged in the low guest's armchair. He crossed his legs and put the tumbler of Scotch on the arm of the chair. He looked like a man on holiday. He looked handsome.

'Tell me who is punishing you?' he said.

'Don't, Harry... please.'

Harry saw the humiliation in his eyes.

Alex stood up and shut the door, but when he sat down again he obviously didn't know how to start talking. 'I guess,' he said, and then stopped. 'I guess I'm just punishing myself.'

'I don't think you're crazy,' Harry said softly. 'I don't think you're punishing yourself.'

'Then you're crazy too,' Alex said sourly.

'No,' Harry said and narrowed his eyes.

'O.K., O.K., don't get mad.'

'Do you believe in Good and Bad?' Harry asked.

A slight hint of irritation showed itself on Alex Duval's face, and for a moment it was possible to see he was also an arrogant man. 'You know I do,' he said. He took out a cigar-ette, worried about it, and put it back in the packet.

'And you're being punished for being Bad?'

The simplicity of this made everything sound so childish that Alex Duval was almost angry. 'Yes,' he said. 'If you want to put it like that.'

'So,' Harry stood up. He was smiling. 'So we'll be good.'

'Oh Harry, that's very nice, but not very sensible.'

'Sensible?' Harry's eyebrows rose alarmingly. 'Sensible? How isn't it sensible? We'll be good.'

'We.'

'Both of us.'

Alex blinked. 'You'll be good?'

'Alex,' Harry sat down again, but he hunched over his legs and looked down at the floor, 'Alex I'm a bit crazy too. I think I'm in Hell.'

There was a silence.

'You're the first person I've told. I don't know who to trust. I've been trying to work out what to do.'

'You mean you know you're in Hell.'

'Yes,' Harry said.

'Oh Christ,' Harry.

'You think I'm crazy.' Harry stood up. He looked bereft. His face was suddenly very white.

'No,' Alex Duval said quietly. It did not for a second occur to him that Harry meant everything he said literally. He was distressed merely because Harry was the last person he had ever expected to reveal deep unhappiness.

'Since when?' he asked.

'Since,' Harry smiled encouragingly but his voice was choked off with emotion. 'Since I was in hospital.'

'Ah yes.' Alex remembered that it was at about this time that Joel and Bettina's affair became public knowledge.

'It's good to talk to you, Alex.'

'It's good to talk to you, Harry.'

The two men lapsed into an embarrassed silence. Alex Duval finally lit his cigarette and Harry ate the ice in the bottom of his glass.

'I have a theory,' Harry announced when he had finished the ice.

'Tell me.' Alex lit a cigarette.

'There are three sorts of people in Hell. Captives, like us. Actors. And Those in Charge. What do you think?'

'Who are the Actors?'

'Most of them. They work for Those in Charge.'

'To persecute the Captives?'

'Yes.'

'They're Actors; acting; not what they seem.'

'Mmmm. What do you think?'

'Brilliant,' said Alex Duval pouring himself another Scotch. 'Exactly right.' As he sipped the Scotch he wondered if he and Harry might finally end up being friends, real friends, after all these years. He liked Harry's theory. There was no room for optimism in it.

'Joel is an Actor?' he asked.

'Definitely.'

'And Bettina?'

'Yes.'

'We are Captives?'

'Yes.'

'Have some more Scotch, Harry.'

'Thank you, Alex. The question is,' Harry dropped a fist full of ice into his glass, 'the question is who are the Captives and how can they be freed?'

'Harry,' Alex said, 'it is good to see you. It is nice to talk to you. We haven't talked like this since the Old Days. Remem-ber how we used to sit around till all hours and talk?' Alex stuffed tobacco into his little bent pipe and lit it. When he had it glowing he leant back in his chair. 'You old bastard,' he said. 'It's so nice to talk to you.'

'Let me ask you a question,' Harry said. 'An opinion… '

'Yes,' Alex settled down comfortably.

'The relative merits of Goodness and Originality… what do you reckon?'

'Harry,' he shook his head, 'you're amazing. I don't believe it.'

The two men smiled at each other proudly.

'Originality, without Goodness,' Alex said at last, 'is nothing, of no worth.'

'That's what I was thinking,' Harry said. 'Originality, by itself, is nothing?'

'Not a pinch of shit.'

'But with Goodness?'

'Dynamite.'

'I think we should fire Krappe Chemicals,' Harry said.

'I think that's the place to start.'

'Yes… ' Alex said cautiously.

'How much are they billing?'

'Just under two million.'

Alex began to feel that there was something in the conver-sation he had not heard, as if he had dozed off and missed some vital piece of information. He sat for a while puffing on his pipe and looking at the hockey match in the park across the way. Harry fished a piece of ice out of the bucket and crunched it up.

'Why?' Alex said at last.

'Why what?'

'Why fire Krappe Chemicals?'

Harry looked at him in astonishment, 'So you don't have to write your extra conference reports. I'm damned if I'm going to be punished for ever. Do you want to be punished for ever?'

Alex took the pipe out of his mouth. 'No,' he said, and held the pipe about three inches from his mouth, where smoke issued forth from both ends. 'Still,' he said, 'it's a lot of money… ' And, when Harry didn't comment: 'It might seem a little inconsistent... '

'How inconsistent?' said Harry through another mouthful of crunching ice.

'To suddenly, after all these years, fire them.'

, Ah, but they weren't doing it before.'

'Doing what?'

'Making you unhappy.'

Alex blinked. 'Harry, I've been doing these for ten years.'

'Mmmm,' said Harry Joy vaguely and poured himself a Scotch. 'Here's to us,' he said, 'we're going to be good.'

At night, lying in bed, Alex read Rousseau and Pascal, Bertrand Russell and Hegel, Marx and Plato, but now looking at Harry Joy, whom he had worked with for fifteen years, he was frightened that he had understood him.

'You mean Good, don't you? Capital G?'

'Capital G,' grinned Harry and wet his moustache in the Scotch.

'You mean GOOD.'

'Bet your arse.'

As a dream, as a possibility, this would have made Alex smile. Reading at night while his wife snored beside him he would have luxuriated in the ridiculous possibility of Harry Joy deciding to be Good. But now, facing the possibility of it in this stuffy Saturday office, he was filled with fear.

'You're really serious?'

'Sure. Why not.'

'You'll go broke.'

'Who cares.' Harry felt as if he had opened the windows in a locked-up house. He could smell fresh-mown grass.

Alex smiled a hurt ironical smile. 'Well I might. I need a job.!

Harry stood up and put both his hands on Alex's soft shoulders. 'You'll have a job. I'll make sure you have a job. We don't need a lot of money.'

Alex had always been given strength by Harry's enthusiasms but they had always promised him safety, not danger. And besides, there was something in him that was irritated by Harry's new discovery of morality and punishment, as if he were moving in on a territory that didn't belong to him, a territory where he, Alex, was much more familiar with the nuances of right and wrong, the details of the crimes of their clients, the exact nature of their own criminal compliance. It was Alex's field and he resented Harry's crude enthusiasm and his childish determination to be Good. A year ago, three months ago, Harry had had no interest in anything but a successful business and now he was acting as if he had sole proprietorship of the moral dilemmas of life. He had ignored Alex when he nervously, tentatively, suggested there was something wrong with various Krappe Chemicals products.

Now he, Harry Joy, was taking control.

'Still,' said Alex, 'it's good to see you, you old bastard.' But his smile was uncertain.

'Don't worry about the money, Alex. I'll make sure you don't go out on the street.'

'Sure,' said Alex and Harry decided not to hear the sarcasm in his voice. Instead they sat and talked about who were Captives and who were Actors and as afternoon came on and the bottle of Scotch gave up its last drinks, they composed a list, based on Alex's information.

Outside the streets were flooding and cars were stalling and being abandoned. But when the list was complete Harry Joy rolled up his trousers and went out to find a taxi.

Alex stayed in his office trying to open his filing cabinet with a screw-driver, cursing Harry Joy who now had the key.

It was one of those hot still mornings that come in the begin-ning of the wet season: the sky a brilliant cobalt blue, and beneath it legions of green all freshly washed or newly born and only the rustling dry leaves hanging like giant dried fish from the banana trees might suggest death, and then only to someone hunting eagerly for its signs. The air that blew through the open windows of the old wooden house was sweet and warm, and honeysuckle and frangipani lent their aromatic veils, which billowed like invisible curtains in the high-ceilinged rooms.

Harry Joy whistled and spread the old newspapers across the kitchen table and set up the boot polish (dark tan, light tan, black and neutral) and the matching brushes and the polishing cloths. He brought to his goodness the slightly obsessive concern with method which is the hallmark of the amateur. He picked up the first pair of shoes and was pleased to see them muddy. He took an old knife and scraped them carefully; then a slightly damp cloth to wipe them; then the brush and polish; now the cloth. Then considering he had rushed the job and perhaps done it badly, he removed the laces and began again.

In the hour before eight o'clock he had cleaned the whole family’s shoes, and none of them had so much as stirred. He allowed himself the luxury of a cup of tea and while the kettle boiled he watched a family of honey-eaters attack the last of the previous season's pawpaws on the tree outside the kitchen window. He tried to memorize the form and colours of the birds but he knew he had no talent for it. In three minutes' time the honey-eaters would be a crude blurr in his memory and all he would know was that they had a yellow marking near the eye.

When he had finished his tea he began to clean the win-dows, beginning in the kitchen where a fine layer of grease lay across the surface of the glass. He was engaged in rubbing this dry with old newspaper when David, already dressed with his wet hair combed neatly, came into the kitchen.

'Morning,' said Harry.

David took in the shoes which were now lined up on the back doorstep, the clean window, and Harry Joy resplendent in bare scarred chest and Balinese sarong, his taut body glis-tening with sweat, his yellowed teeth biting his lower lip in concentration. He didn't know what to be indignant about first.

He picked up his shoes. 'Did you do this?'

'Yes.'

'Dad, please, you mustn't.'

'It's O.K., it gave me pleasure.'

It was true. He couldn't remember ever having had so nice a time as this morning, alone with his family’s shoes. He had enjoyed everything about it.

'You must not,' his son said.

'They were dirty.' He rubbed the window until the smeary marks had all gone. 'It gave me pleasure,' he said. 'I liked cleaning them for you.'

David's dark eyes shone. 'No. I should clean your shoes.'

'If you want to… '

'But it's wrong for you to clean mine.'

'David, I enjoyed it.'

He was not displeased with his son's irritation. It seemed to indicate the efficacy of the ritual.

'But you mustn't, Dad, you mustn't. Don't you understand? Why don't you understand?' He started shaking his head and smoothing down his wet hair.

'What is there to understand?'

'You're so insensitive, I can't believe it! It's like the Fiat. You never understood why that was wrong;'

'It embarrassed you.'

David was pouring milk over breakfast cereal. 'Oh great,' he said sarcastically. 'After ten years you understand. Great.'

'Well you don't have to tell your friends I cleaned your shoes.'

'Dad,' David pushed his bowl away as if he'd be sick if he ate any more, 'you are the head of this household. Doesn't that mean anything to you?'

'It seems a funny sort of household these days,' Harry said, 'to me, at least. How does it seem to you?'

'And whose fault do you think that is?' David said, his eyes wide and challenging, his head cocked on one side. 'Do you think it's mine? Do you thilik it's Lucy's? Do you think it's Bettina's? It's yours.'

'Mine,' Harry said happily. 'It's my fault.' The windows were so clean he could see the honey-eaters much more clearly. They had a grey underbelly and little red wattles hanging like earrings from the sides of their heads. He stared at them with fascination, looking at the hollow they had made inside the pawpaw.

'You are the head of the household. You should lead us. You should punish us.'

'Jesus.'

'Yes. When we do wrong, we should be punished.'

'Christ.'

'There is no discipline. That's what's wrong. That's why Mum is unhappy. That's why Lucy takes drugs.'

'What drugs?'

'You mustn't clean our shoes or shine our windows. You've got to make us do all that.'

'What drugs?'

'When we have our lunch today you let everyone else do the work. You walk in the garden. You'll make us all happy.'

'No.'

'You and I can play Monopoly.'

'I thought you were going to work.'

David retrieved his bowl of breakfast cereal. 'Really,' he said, 'there's not an awful lot I can do.'

Harry returned to his window and tried to forget about this painful impersonation of his son. He allowed his mind to focus on the merest speck of fly-shit, to think about nothing else but the problem of its removal. He vaguely heard David depart and he didn't hear Bettina arrive at all.

'You are about as subtle as a ton of bricks!'

She didn't look well. Her mascara ran over one eye. It gave her a crooked, slightly demonic appearance. She sat at the kitchen table and angrily smoked two cigarettes.

When she had finished the second cigarette she put it out very brutally. 'You are trying to make me look like a tart,' she said.

She was trying to make him angry but he wouldn't get angry. He was Good.

He put on the kettle and started to make the tea.

'Don't you damn well make me tea.' Bettina was stumbling to her feet. 'Don't you dare.'

He clung to the tea canister determinedly. 'It gives me pleasure,' he said. 'Please. Let me.'

Bettina turned off the gas and threw the water down the sink. 'Don't try and be a martyr with me.'

'I'm just making you tea.'

'I know what you're doing.'

With a terrible chill it occurred to Harry she might know exactly what he was doing.

'Oh,' he said. He pursed his lips and then sucked in his cheeks.

'Oh yes,' she said, her wide eyes mocking him.

'Does it cause you pain?' He tried to appear disinterested.

'In the arse, yes.'

'Ah,' and he regarded her with interest, his head on one side, scratching his right leg with his left bare foot.

'Come and sit here, old mate.' She patted the chair beside her. It was a term of affection from another time, and Harry, standing on one leg like a shy tropical bird, allowed himself to be induced to sit at the table.

She held his hand and kissed him on his splendid nose. They hadn't made love for two months.

'Harry...'

'Yes.'

'Do you think you're going a bit loopy?'

Harry shrugged. 'All I'm doing… ' but he stopped, not wishing to show his hand.

'What are you doing, old mate?'

'All I'm doing is cleaning windows.'

'So you can make me look like a tart.'

'No.'

'So everyone can see I don't do anything?'

'I'd have thought you'd be glad for me to do it.'

'You're a sarcastic bastard aren't you,' she said good-humouredly, 'Alright, get out.'

'Get out where?'

'Get out of the fucking kitchen and let me get on with it.'

'No, let me clean some more.'

Bettina pointed a single finger and started jabbing him around the edges of his scar. 'Look, you, get out, out.'

He retreated upstairs. He managed to clean half the bath-room before she came and found him.

She was going to be a hot-shot but she met Harry Joy and fell in love with him. They told her he was from the French Consulate and she watched him for a while, not in the least impatient, merely fascinated by him. He wore a beautifully tailored rather loose white suit. He had a huge moustache. He looked Splendid. She watched how he moved, grace-fully, as if his feet hardly touched the floor, the walk of a dancer.

It was a party for a departing Trade Commissioner, full of businessmen with rotary badges. She had come with her boss who ran the local Ogilvy & Mather office.

'Come on, Tina,' he had said, 'grab your hat. We're going to a party.'

She sat in a chair and began to watch Harry Joy. She was shy and had no plan for meeting him. She was happy enough to look and admire.

Even then she was offended by the drabness of the town, its dullness, its lack of style. Her only escape was in her stinking room above her father's service station. Downstairs Billy McPhee burped and farted, wise-cracked, giggled, ran between cash register and pump, pump and cash register; upstairs, his daughter turned the shining pages of the New York Art Directors' Annual.

Men sat beside her and engaged her in conversation but her eyes never left the exotic man in the beautiful white suit. It was not even possible, she thought, that he spoke English.

And then he was standing in front of her.

'You've been staring at me,' he said and he was not French at all, but he spoke with such a low, slow drawl that she was not in the least disappointed.

'Yes,' she said. She couldn't think of anything else. Yet the brevity of her reply probably struck him as bold.

He sat beside her and surveyed the motel room full of grey suits and striped carpet. 'Mmmm,' he said.

She thought he was the most original person she'd ever met.

'It's a beautiful suit,' she said. She was so tense her finger-nails ached.

When he smiled, his eyes crinkled. 'Why are you wearing gloves?'

She was nineteen. She said: 'My hands sweat.'

A smile stirred beneath that vast moustache. 'Are you eccentric?' he asked.

'Yes.'

He called a waiter and ordered vodka. Then he undressed her hands and wiped them with a handkerchief dipped in vodka. He borrowed a towel from the waiter and dried them.

'There,' he said, 'all you need is a splash of vermouth and you could have a very dry vodkatini.' He was twenty-two. He had read about vodkatinis in the New Yorker.

She did not ask him what he did. She detested people who did it to her.

'Ask me in three years,' she'd say.

'Why?'

'Because in three years I'll have something interesting to tell you.'

Even the two men who ran Ogilvy & Mather did not know their secretary, receptionist and switchboard operator held ambitions to be an advertising hot-shot. She probably knew more about the history of American advertising than they did. She owned a total of fifteen annuals from the New York Art Directors' Club and she knew who had written everyone of the Volkswagen ads since the first ones Bill Bembach had done himself. She devoured the American trade papers and knew all the gossip. If there had been anyone to tell she would have told them funny stories about Mary Wells and Jack Tinker but there was only her father, bug-eyed on pills, scattering his own verbal garbage behind him: 'ten out of ten, number one son, go for it Gloria.' She lived in a wreckers yard of works.

'I'm in advertising,' Harry Joy offered. 'Harry Joy.'

It was enough information for her to be able to place him exactly. He was only twenty-two and he was the Joy in Day, Kerlewis & Joy. He had been made a partner after only eight months when Mr Kerlewis died suddenly. She knew how much he was reputed to earn, what commercials he had written, and the names of three women he had been seen with regularly.

She did not want to tell him she was a receptionist at Ogilvy & Mather. She did not wish to be ordinary. Later, later, she would be exceptional, but now when it was important she was a little Miss Nobody with nothing interesting to say. She looked at him in despair as if he might, at any instant, be snatched from her and she acted quickly, with the outrageous courage of the very shy.

She stood up and put her gloves back on.

'Where are you going?' He looked hurt.

'I'm going to dinner,' she said. 'Want to come?'

'O.K.,' he said as though he was asked out by women every night of the week. Her hands were bathed in nervous sweat and later that night when she kicked off her shoes they stank of all the hopes and anxieties that had never once showed on that smooth olive-skinned face which had so beguiled dear Harry Joy.

On the way to dinner he decided, without consulting her, that he needed petrol.

'No,' she said, 'not here:

But it was too late. They were already parked on the fore-court and Billy McPhee, a stinking rag in his back pocket, was bounding out of the office, his worn red head low, his arms swinging, whistling some piece of nonsense he'd misheard on the radio, and Harry was saying to her: 'Why did you say that?'

'Nothing,' she said. 'It doesn't matter.'

She tried to be invisible.

'Fill 'er up,' Harry said.

'Oil, water, Captain's Daughter?' Billy said, peering into the car but Bettina turned the other way. 'Fix your windscreen?'

She never forgot it. Eighteen years later it could still mike her moan out loud. How could she have betrayed him? How could she, heartless cruel nineteen-year-old, have refused to acknowledge that the man looking at her through the wind-screen was her father?

More than her father. Her mother too, because her real mother had left Billy and Billy had not missed a beat – he just brought her up, right there on the forecourt. He changed her nappies beside the cash register. He parked her pram between the pumps. While the gallons clicked over he talked to her continually. 'You were born into this business,' he told her. 'It's in your blood. You are one hundred and twenty octane.' He had been young once, keen, self-starting, go-ahead, with plans: But somewhere all his energy and his dreams got out of control as he gabbled around the forecourt making plans to buy a block of flats, then two blocks of flats, and then three. But he didn't even own their own flat. He stank of sweat and speed and perished rubber and his pale blue eyes bugged out his unnaturally white skin.

Bettina saw her father through the window. She looked right through him. Something, a spasm, a tic, wrenched Billy's mouth and then his eyes just clouded over and he finished wiping the window and filled up the tank.

'Could you check the tyres?' Harry said.

'Get fucked,' Billy McPhee told his future son-in-law. 'Give me the money and piss off before I punch your ugly head in.'

Later when they knew each other neither of them ever got over the obstacle created by that night.

Bettina McPhee hadn't expected to fall in love with anyone. She hadn't been able to imagine it and it had played no part in her plan. Later, perhaps, in America or somewhere else, but not here and now.

But next thing she knew, she'd done it. Like that. Without even pausing to think. And then everything went out the window and she pursued her love with a reckless sort of enthusiasm and she suddenly didn't give a hoot about being a hot-shot or going to America because she was happy and her happiness seemed so perfect it needed nothing. She applied herself to marriage with wild enthusiasm, as if it might yield up treasures in exact proportion to the energy she plunged into it. She decided to find the town interesting. They bought an old stilted house in Palm Avenue and she became pregnant without even stopping to think if she wanted to be. She went along with the whole mad rush of it and, six months pregnant with David, she was still smashing out a central wall with a jemmy and a sledgehammer and ending her days with bloodied hands and plaster-covered hair.

Billy McPhee's daughter, without a doubt.

She did not abandon her interest in advertising; it was, after all, her husband's business. She read the American trade papers. She bought the new Art Directors' Annuals. She criticized Harry's work with a keen intelligence.

She was shocked when she realized how complacent he was. 'It worked,' he said, defending a television commercial he'd written.

'So it worked;' she said, 'so what. Was it great?'

'Oh, come on, Bettina... '

'Was it great?'

'Alright,' he said, 'it wasn't great. But it makes us money.'

'To hell with the money,' she said. 'I don't care about the money. All I care about is that you do witty, beautiful won-derful advertisements.'

'You're right,' he said, and she tried to accept that he would never do great ads.

She hadn't been quite so keen to become pregnant the sec-ond time. She was going to be a hot-shot. Each year she told herself that she was still young. And while she waited she became more American than the Americans. She supported their wars, saw their movies, bought their products, despised their enemies. Even their most trivial habits were adopted as articles of faith and there was always iced water on the table at Palm Avenue. She believed in the benevolence of their companies, the triumph of the astronauts, the law of the market-place and the twin threats of Communism and the second-rate, although not necessarily in that order.

By the time Lucy was ten they were having arguments about whether Bettina could come into the business. In Harry's mind they had never been bitter arguments, and, in a superficial sense, he was right. But Bettina had been deeply offended by his refusal to consider it. It was a rejection more painful than any she had ever experienced and she could not forgive him for it.

In Bettina's view, it was that rejection which had produced their present unhappiness. Yet, even now, in the midst of Harry' s madness, in the total ruin of their marriage, there. were days when they would find themselves, almost forgetfully, on the verge of having fun (although something would always go wrong, some irritation would creep in and everything would suddenly go sour and hatreds and resentments would come spilling out of her and lie in a nasty slippery mess along with the water from the sprouts and the spilt pieces of cabbage on the kitchen floor).

'Who cleaned the shoes?'

'Your idiot father.'

Her daughter was the wild, untended variety of the same plant, loose like a dog, her dark hair curling in. masses, her movements still graceful but lackadaisical. She had her mother's almond-eyes but her olive skin was nearly black from the sun. She sat on the kitchen table and watched Bettina rubbing at the glass.

'Have you been swimming again?' Bettina said, puffing a little.

'Yes.'

She worried about the size of her daughter'S shoulders. She turned and gave a crooked mascara look.

'Don't worry, Mum, I'll marry a gorilla.'

'You might have to,' she said drily. 'Have a shower.'

'I can't. Daddy's cleaning out the bathroom.'

'Oh fuck him,' screamed Bettina and ran up the stairs. She gave Harry credit for greater deviousness than he was capable of. She had heard him tell his methods for dealing with difficult clients and she now felt some subtle net was being drawn around her. Why was he polishing the bath in his sarong? Why were there clean shoes' sitting in a line on the back door step? He made her feel like a tart, an adultress, a drunk, a failure. He was humiliating himself in order to humiliate her.

She found him in the bathroom and after she had hit him with the mop she asked him to forgive her. She held him then, and in spite of all her resolutions, all her determination, her ambitions, she felt the old stirrings of a familiar love.

'You won't let me love you,' she said to the man she had decided to leave, who drove her crazy and sent her into wild displays of rage.

She felt him tremble. She liked his body since he had been sick: it was thinner and harder, She even liked the big silky scar on his chest.

'You won't let me get close.' She was damn well seducing him, in the bathroom, with her hand up his sarong. She bit his ear. 'Harry, Harry.' She felt him resist, and then, without a word, he just unknotted, and it was like the old days, the old times when they had stayed in bed on Saturday morning, days before the invention of Joel, and with one hand he was locking the door and with the other he was tearing off her dressing gown.

'Betty, Betty,' he said, 'is it you?'

In the mythology of the family the McPhees were dark, dis-contented, poetic, and the Joys were placid and rather ordin-ary. In this classification it was necessary to forget Harry's eccentric mother and his wandering father. It was equally important to forget Bettina's sad bug-eyed father who had died of an overdose of amphetamines and anger, howling at a customer who wanted a dollar's worth of petrol.

'Dollar's worth,' screamed Billy McPhee, literally jumping up and down beside the pump, 'you expect me to give you a fucking dollar's worth.' And Bettina, paying her guilty last respects, imagined she could detect, amidst the sweet-petalled aromas of funeral flowers, the more familiar perfumes of her youth: oil, petrol, and perished rubber. This pale dead man was not a McPhee.

David Joy was a McPhee, and was teased by his sister because of it: 'How's the master race?'

'You,' Bettina told Lucy, flying in the face of all physical evidence, 'are a Joy.' And, as if to compensate for this mis-fortune, it was always said: 'Lucy is going to be happy.' She made it sound as if there was something dreadfully wrong with being happy in this particular way.

Her mother's elitist attitudes irritated Lucy. 'What's the mat-ter with being ordinary?' she said. 'Why do you want to be special?'

'I couldn't bear to be second-rate.'

'I wouldn't mind being sixth-rate, or tenth-rate.'

'Can't you do something about your appearance?'

'My appearance is fine.' She bit an apple. She accepted herself so completely that she could not help but be beautiful, and ven if her bum was already too big and her ankles too thick, there was something about her that made people calmer and better just to be with her. Men would always be attracted to her as boys were now. She liked fucking them too. Given her appetites it is a wonder – when you consider the provincial nature of the town – that she was not derided for them.

'You are complacent,' her mother said (had said, would say, repeatedly). 'You are going to be a social worker and you'll just get your degree and end up with a line of children and a house in the suburbs.'

'I don't want to be a social worker.'

'Don't you ever say that to your father.'

'Yeah, yeah. I know.'

'What do you want to do?'

But you couldn't tell Bettina McPhee that you were going to overthrow the Americans.

Harry set the table in the dining room. It was Georgian, made from English Ash and imported by a sea captain from a certain Percy Lewis Esq., who surely could not have imagined his table in this room with this monstrously exaggerated view of a mountain like a sugar loaf and a tree that flowered flame. Now, as Harry placed the silver on the table, the clouds slid in over the flat mangrove swamps to the south and, as if aware of the almost unbearable richness of the view, wrapped themselves around Sugar Loaf and covered the gleaming bay beneath.

It was drippingly humid. Lucy and David and Bettina sat out on the wide verandah and fought against or relaxed into the heat, according perhaps to the amounts of McPhee or Joy apportioned them. Bettina, certainly, did not enjoy the heat and collapsed back into her stockman's chair with her eyes shut. David affected the quality he thought proper for a Sunday Luncheon and although he wore a cashmere sweater, looked not in the least hot. Lucy sat on the verandah rail in a white cheesecloth dress and looked at the bangalow palms, which, in the absence of any wind, mysteriously rustled their fish-bone fronds, as if talking to each other.

Today was to be a real family lunch, a re-enactment of some tradition they imagined they had always shared. It had been Lucy's idea; she had guessed, not incorrectly, at the healing power of the ritual.

Harry drifted out on to the verandah with some more Veuve Cliquot and arranged himself in a large cane chair.

'Ah,' he said, and sipped his champagne.

Like a dog who keeps sneaking on to a sofa it is forbidden, it was the nature of Harry Joy that he would always seek out comfort. So here we have him two weeks after his vow to be Good, to fire his largest client, to save his colleague from the tortures of Hell. The client is not fired. The tortures of his colleague, if anything, have increased: now he loses sleep, tosses and turns in unemployed nightmares, and wanders around a house in which neither his wife nor his Pascal can provide him with any comfort. And as for Goodness, it seems to have degenerated into something as silly as setting the table for a Sunday Lunch.

And Harry, meanwhile, can lie back on the verandah of his charming house at Palm Avenue and sip his Veuve Cliquot and wait for the rain to come and try to persuade himself that he may, after all, have been crazy.

Lucy went to sit beside her mother who held her hand contentedly. The lunch might just work, if Betty didn't get too drunk, if Harry didn't start taking notes again.

'What's the first course?' Harry said.

'Escrivée Amoureuse.'

'Ah,' he said.

The rain began to fall, very gently at first, making loud slapping noises on the banana leaves, where it collected in tiny dams which dipped and broke and then reformed. The poinciana, like so many feathery hands held palm upwards, let the rain brush carelessly through its fingers.

The Veuve Cliquot was old enough to have assumed a golden colour, and Harry was rot unappreciative of its beauty, nor was he ignorant of its cost, nor the contribution Krappe Chemicals made towards its purchase.

He had reread his notebooks and found them a little extreme, a little frenzied, not to say unbalanced. And all their evidence, he thought, was insufficient to justify this terrible, risky strategy of Goodness which he viewed, just now, sitting before this gentle curtain of rain, in a little the same way as he might have thought of a slightly embarrassing sexual indiscretion.

But he is not quite ready to deny his notebooks. Even now, as he yawns, stretches, and points his sandalled feet, he .has promised himself One Last Test.

The bar wasn't quite right, but it would do. It was the best bar she knew but in no way equalled the bars she would have liked to sit in. The bars she would have liked to sit in had a chrome rail parallel to the smooth leather bar top. They had elegant art deco mirrors reflecting beautiful people carelessly dressed, and those little lamps with figurines by Lalique, each one valued at something like three thousand dollars.

But here, at least, they did put pistachios on the bar instead of peanuts and they made the Tequila Sunrises from real orange juice and it was the best bar in this town and as long as nobody told her it was a chic and elegant bar (thus forcing her to disagree violently with their provincial judgement) Bettina was very happy there. She didn't mind that Joel was late. She wasn't even mildly irritated. She looked at the bottles on the shelf, felt the shiny dark envelop her, and wondered (raising her eyes to the mirror) whether she mightn't just pick up someone. She looked, she thought, interesting. She was satisfied with her sleek dark hair which now, thanks to Edouard, came in two sleek sweeping pincers beneath the high cheek bones of her rounded face. Her large mouth (Revlon Crimson Flush No. 7) was very red. She did not look nice, or easy, but she did look interesting. She could have been anywhere (Budapest 1923, Blakes Hotel London 1975).

When she had finally gone through the agonies of leaving Harry, when she had her own business, she would go to Blakes Hotel in London and sit in the bar there.

She sat at one end of the bar and watched the door with a wonderful sense of expectation as if, at any moment, the most beautiful man might walk through the door, three days' growth on his handsome face, a loose linen jacket thrown over his shoulders, a dark face, sensuous and violent, but an intelligent forehead.

So when Joel came scurrying through at this moment she was, without knowing why, irritated and depressed. She was always disappointed when she saw him: physically he was not quite what she had remembered.

Joel always rushed. He had no cool. Harry had more style than Joel, who almost waddled, and there, there still, were those damn cufflinks he wouldn’t take off.

'Hello, honey.' The bar stool farted when he sat on it. She tried to tell herself it would have happened to anyone. 'I've been getting your husband on to an aeroplane.'

'Do you really have to wear those cufflinks?'

But Joel was ordering a drink. 'He nearly missed the damn plane.'

'If you really want to wear cufflinks why don't you come with me and I'll buy you some.'

'I don't know why in the hell he wants to go down there, we could have done it on the phone. Hey... get your hands off my cufflinks. What are you doing?'

'I'm taking your damn cufflinks off.' Joel sat at the bar with his cuffs flapping at the bottom of his coat sleeves. 'What in the hell do I do now?'

'Pull your sleeves up,' she said and started giggling. 'Did you have a nice day at the office?'

'Hell, honey, that isn't funny.'

Bettina ordered another Sunrise and Joel removed his suit coat, put it fussily over the next bar stool, rolled his shirt sleeves up, and put his coat back on. He sulked for a while and Bettina looked around. In the end he started talking to stop her looking around.

'He's not in a very healthy state of mind?'

'Who, honey?'

'Your husband.'

'Ah,' Bettina waved a ringed hand, 'he's just growing up.'

She liked Harry when she was away from him. He towered over everyone else she knew.

Joel started laughing incredulously, 'Oh that's good, honey, that's really good. Just growing up. He tells me in the car that he is going to be Good. Is that sane? Because, honey, if that's sane, then I want to be crazy.'

'It's not your style, darling.'

'What isn't?'

'Being crazy isn't your style.'

'What in the goddamn hell do you mean by that?'

His chin was starting to wobble so she changed the subject. 'Who did you take to lunch?'

'I'm taking George Lewis out to lunch next week. I've got a table booked at La Belle Epoque.'

'He said he'd go last week.'

'Well he had to cancel.'

'Why can't we steal someone else's clients? Why do we have to steal Harry's clients?'

'We haven't stolen anyone's clients yet.'

'Damn right we haven't,' said Bettina bitterly, wondering if she had got herself stuck with a schmuck who couldn't even get one account. She had listened to Harry when she shouldn't have, and ignored him when she should have listened.

'You do it then.'

'Alright, fuck you, I just might.' The bastard. He knew she couldn't. He knew it gave her the shits to be unable to do this thing that she wanted to do more than anything else. But how could Harry Joy's wife phone up a prospective client and take him out to lunch.

'Well do,' he said smugly. 'Do it yourself.'

'I just might.'

But he wasn't even threatened by it. In fact it restored his good humour and a little colour crept into his face.

'What I was thinking,' he said, and began to run his chubby finger around the wet rim of his Scotch glass.

Bettina listened. When Joel spoke like this she thought of an ice-skater. Suddenly the little bugger was so damn elegant it was almost unbearable.

'What I was thinking was it might be better and simpler and less disruptive for everyone if we just had him committed.'

He took her breath away. Bettina, literally, could not speak. And when she looked at Joel she saw that he meant it: he had that strange little prim smile on his face and his eyes were wet but how or why they were wet she didn't know. Some emotion moved him. But she smelt no weakness, only a sly satisfaction, a boneless strength.

'Christ,' she said, 'you little creep.' But her eyes were bright with admiration and the smile seemed to stay on Joel's face even while he sipped his Scotch.

That night, in the branches of the fig tree beside his house, Harry would conduct his Final Test.

It had not been easy to get there. Joel had been attentive and kind. He had driven him to the airport and waited for him to board the plane.

'You go, Joel. No point in waiting here.'

'No, no, I'm fine.'

When the plane had finally begun to board Harry had still waited.

'You go,' he said. 'I'll go on in a second. I'll just wait for most of them to get on.'

But still Joel wouldn't go, and Harry found himself both irritated and moved by his kindness. Joel waited to watch him walk down the boarding finger and waved him all the way on to the plane.

He took his seat and stood up again.

'I'm on the wrong plane,' he told the hostess, and smiled wanly. 'Sorry:' She took the ticket from his hand.

'No,' she said, 'you're on the right plane, sir. Please be seated.'

'I want to get off.'

'But this is your plane.'

'I don't care. I don't want to fly on it. I was only pretending to get on it.'

'And you just got carried away?' the hostess said sourly, stepping back into the galley to let him past.

And now he was up the fig tree just as he had planned to be, ready to observe what Actors did when they had no audience. The final test was hardly worth all the effort.

It was not so uncomfortable. He had been in worse situ-ations. For this particular branch he had a good view of his neighbour who was taking advantage of the late summer light to dig a hole. This was quite consistent with his behaviour in all the years before Harry had died and he found it, in a peculiar way, soothing to watch him scurrying and puffing around his garden like a little mole. The neighbour always enjoyed holes and mounds of dirt. The earth in his garden could never lie in peace, always on the move from one corner to another. Just when it was settled in, he would decide to shift it. It had all the senseless motion of a sadistic punishment and yet the man (known affectionately as 'the Miner' by the entire Joy family) looked happy enough as he surveyed his mound of dirt and his hole in the ground.

Harry settled in against the trunk and lit a cigarette just as the Miner was walking across to his back door. He stopped and stared up at the tree. He stood very still.

'Hey you,' he called at last, 'you, in the tree.'

'It's only me,' Harry hissed.

'Who's you?'

'Mr Joy.'

The Miner replied in a similar style, in a piercing whisper: 'What's up?'

'I've lost my key.'

The Miner's wife came and stood on the back step: 'Who is it?'

'Mr Joy, from next door.'

'What's he doing?'

'He's lost his key.'

'The boy is home.'

'Your son is home,' hissed the Miner.

Harry knew that his son was home: he could see yellow light shining through the chink in the heavy curtains three feet above his head.

'I know,' he hissed back.

Down on the back step of their house the Miner and his wife had an anxious little conference.

'He knows,' the Miner said.

'I'm not deaf.'

The Miner took a tentative step towards the fence. 'Do you want me to ring the bell for you?'

'Stupid, stupid,' the wife exploded and went inside and slammed the door.

'I want to surprise them,' Harry whispered.

'He wants to surprise them,' the Miner told the darkened screen door. Obviously she had not given up all interest. The door creaked outwards, inquiringly. Another whispered conference concluded with a sharp little bang as the screen door shut like a trap and the Miner, as in the manner of one reluctantly following orders, left his territory and came down the side path on the Joys' side of the fence.

It would appear that he wished a more confidential talk.

It was not an easy tree to climb and the Miner did not acquit himself well. The problem was the first branch.

'Stand on the chair,' Harry whispered, deciding it better that the climb be executed quietly if it was going to be done at all.

'What chair?'

'There.'

It was almost dark now but it was still possible to see the bulges and creases in the Miner's bulbous form as it approached, heralded by wheezing.

'Hi.'

'Hi.'

Such American-style casualness in the middle of a tree. Was he going to remark on the weather?

'He's not here,' the Miner said at last.

There were so many people who were not there. Harry couldn't think what he meant.

'The blue BMW.'

Joel drove a blue BMW, but why would anyone climb a tree to tell him that Joel, as was perfectly obvious, was not visiting his house.

'The person you are trying to surprise,' said the Miner, trying to take possession of Harry's branch, 'is not here.'

'Thank you, Mr Harrison.'

'You're welcome any time.'

'Can you find your own way down?'

'Yes, I think so.' But he had only retreated by one branch when he stopped. 'Mr Joy?'

'Yes.'

'I must discuss the fence with you sometime. We are going to have to replace it.'

'I'll drop in, Mr Harrison.'

'No hurry.'

He crashed his way through the lower branches and just when Harry judged him safely down, there was a sharp crack followed by a soft thud and a yelp of pain.

'Are you alright?' he called.

There was no answer, but he thought he saw the shadow of the Miner limping along the darker shadow of the fence and then saw it slide inside the still-dark screen door.

Harry, already, was doubting the wisdom of his final test and the Miner had reminded him, had let him see himself as he must be seen: Harry Joy was crazy. He fervently hoped he had been. His theory, so cleverly arrived at (if they are Actors they will reveal themselves when they think their audience is absent) seemed puerile to him, more affected by champagne than common sense.

So there he was, considering leaving his tree, climbing down, finding a bottle of wine, removing himself from that uncomfortable, undignified position, when Joel's blue BMW pulled up outside, and it was only the fear of being thought mad that stopped him climbing down and saying: here I am.

He waited, and, with no real interest, watched.

He heard Joel turn off his blaring radio. He saw Bettina lurch from the car. The clink of bottles. Bettina saying: 'You open the door for me again and I'll break your bloody arm.' Laughter. Joel locking the door and having trouble with his keys.

His partner kissing his wife. His partner's leg jammed hard between his wife's legs, in the glow of the street light, against the hedge, beside the footpath.

No.

Harry retreated up the tree in pain.

Joel, far below, said: 'We should have gone to my place.'

He did not want to hear anything. He came to escape pain, not find it.

But Bettina's voice insisted on reaching him: 'I can't stand your bloody brass any more. If I have to look at your brass any more, I'll puke.'

Eastern brass artifacts in Joel's bedroom. He had bought a crate-load of them in a market in Kabul and a woman was paid to polish them every week. In the living room there were books he had bought by the metre.

Harry kept climbing, away from voices.

He wanted normality and peace so badly that he could still deny he had seen this torture. He could have erased it from his memory. He wanted normality and warmth. Instinctively, seeking comfort, he put his eye to the chink in his son's bedroom curtain. Show me my son.

There: David Joy, his trousers around his knees and Lucy, her skirt beside her on the floor, sucking his son's pale-skinned penis.

Harry Joy at the windows of Hell.

He moaned and staggered on his branch like a man pole-axed. He began to descend, forgetting that trees should not be left in a hurry, but slowly, carefully, one leg at a time, even by those practised in the art.

But Harry, hurrying, left his branch too quickly and barely held the next branch for a second before he was on his way further down the tree. He crashed ten feet, was wrenched, and held.

The sharp end of the branch the Miner had broken in his fall now held Harry securely like a butcher's hook in the trousers of his suit.

He stayed there, suspended, and swung a little in front of one more vista. For in front of his eyes, the curtains properly parted, was a window where he was presented with one last glimpse of his partner's pudgy little hand disappearing up his wife's dress.

Bettina Joy looked up and saw her husband's head staring in the window, upside down.

Harry saw her mouth open wide and her eyes bulge a little. He thought of fish eyes in shop windows and Billy McPhee screaming about a dollar's worth of petrol.

Bettina Joy hit Joel Davis who misunderstood and would not stop.

Harry saw Joel Davis turn and saw his mouth wide open. Joel Davis wiped his hand on his handkerchief before he made a move towards the window.

'I put you on the plane,' he said. And, indeed, he looked up into the sky as if Harry might have dropped out.

'Just cut my trousers.'

They were there in a second: all the cast of tormentors: the partner, the faithful wife, the good neighbour, the loving children. They fooled around with him on the broken branch, claiming to lack strength and height. He felt them circle beneath his blood-filled head like a congregation of Satanic dwarves come to perform magic rituals.

They discussed ladders. They made it a protracted affair.

He begged them to cut his trousers.

But, no: 'I'll get the aluminium ladder.'

'No, the wooden one will be better.'

'Alright, you get the wooden one.' Which was further away, next door.

Then, with the ladder, they fooled around some more and claimed they should not lift him off. He lifted his head upwards, trying not to black out.

Joel Davis knelt so he could look into his senior partner's bloodshot eye: 'We're going to have to cut you down.' He held up a rusty old razor blade. 'O.K.?'

Harry closed his eyes. He felt them cut and then, suddenly, there was a loud rip and he fell into an untidy nest of elbows and arms with fingers poking out the top of it. Bettina poked a finger in his eye. David put an elbow in his throat.

When he had vomited, he spat sedately on the lawn and looked at them. They had all gathered in a little group beside the house, like people posed for a photograph, each one looking a little self-consciously into the lens, no one quite sure what expression to adopt.

The Final Test.

'I curse you,' he said, and the anachronistic sound of the word impressed him with its power. 'I curse you all, for all time, without exception.'

They stood before him silently, giving him the respect awarded the holy and the insane.