Bliss

Even' while Joel was complaining about the expenses Harry was running up, Bettina was ordering take-away food from Milanos and having it delivered by taxi. They all felt themselves to be trembling on the edge of something new and wonderful. Lucy saw all this and understood it instinctively. She couldn't understand why their happiness surprised them or needed to be denied.

'You were stuck,' she told Bettina.

'How stuck?'

'Stuck. Now you're unstuck.'

'You're too young to understand.'

'You've got a new lover,' she hugged her mother. 'You're having a wonderful time.'

'You've got no feelings. What about your father? Your father is crazy. He's insane.' And she burst into tears...

They ate chocolates and had curacao in their coffee. They made pancakes and mulled wine. They all put on weight and their faces became rounder, their skin tauter, and it made none of them less attractive but somehow tumescent.

They tidied the house as if they were expecting important visitors. They had conferences about Harry in which they pretended everything was being done for his good, as if even the chocolates would somehow help to bring about the cure they said they wanted. They sat around the shining Georgian table and; as they acted out their concern, they came to believe it. Joel's eyes shone with emotion and no one could doubt that he wanted his partner well.

To Lucy the conferences began to stink of hypocrisy and she could no longer enter into the spirit of things. She sat glumly at the table and listened to the unsaid things, the dark brown words with soft centres. There was something 'off' about the meetings. She thought of stale water inside a defrosted refrigerator.

Lucy spoiled it for the others. They were happier and easier when she went off to bed; and as she left the room she could hear their chairs shifting and their bodies unfolding and, sometimes, a light clunk, as Bettina's shoes were dropped gently to the floor.

Lucy did not go to meetings (official or secret) of the Communist Party. She had resigned from the branch and her Comrades were disgusted with her. Comrade Dilettante, they had called her.

She lay on her bed and looked at the ceiling. She rolled a joint and turned on the radio to block out the conspiratorial murmur which reached her from the room downstairs.

You could not call it jostling, for they were all seated on chairs and the chairs did not move, except occasionally to scrape impatiently, or to see-saw back and forth on their precarious back legs; but yet what had happened with Joel and David was exactly like the jostling that takes place on the football field as two players position themselves for a ball that is still half-way down the field, an irritating elbowing sort of movement which can often flare up into a fist fight and then you have one player lying on the ground and the crowd wondering what has happened.

They vied for Bettina's attention, consideration, and rarely spoke to one another directly.

The subject, of course, was having Harry committed.

Initially David had taken little part in these conversations but as the nights went on he became more and more astonished at what he saw as Joel's ineptness. He listened with astonishment to the decisions that were made. If the world was full of people like Joel it was going to be a very easy life, a lot easier than he had ever imagined. If this was a businessman (an American businessman) then business was a pushover. Were they all so sloppy-minded and stupid as this little frog with the beads of perspiration on his lip?

But tonight he would not jostle. Tonight, he would hit.

Like an out-of-favour general, David waited to be asked to take command. He was in no real hurry and the irritation he felt was not unpleasant. He secretly rolled his eyes and curled his lip as he listened to the latest reports of failure to have his father committed. They were children. They couldn't bribe their way out of a traffic offence.

And now they were worried about money. It was pathetic to listen to Joel talk about money. He did it like a petty cash clerk who is two cents out. He was so frightened of spending money he could never, ever, hope to make any. He fretted. He brought bills to the table and threw them around.

'But he's taken a suite,' Joel was saying, 'That's what I keep trying to tell you, honey. It isn't a room. It's a suite.'

'I know the difference,' Bettina snapped. 'I've probably stayed in more suites than you have. What do you think he is? You expect him to stay in a room?'

'How damn long will he stay there? You know the sort of wine he drinks.'

'The Hilton's got a lousy wine list.'

'Betty, that's not the point.'

David stood up and walked around the room, looking carefully at the insect screens. There it was: an improperly closed insect screen on the front door. He clicked it shut with a small over-precise movement of his stiff left hand.

'Joel,' he said.

Joel had taken advantage of his absence to hunch over into a conspiratorial whisper, but when David spoke Bettina looked up and Joel was forced to acknowledge him.

'Yes, Davey.'

David rolled his eyes towards the ceiling. He could not stand being called Davey. It reminded him of a dog or a simpering little boy in a sailor's suit. He walked silently to the table where his mother held out her hand. He took the hand absent-mindedly but didn't sit down. 'Joel, when you come in you must shut the door properly.'

'Sorry, old mate.'

'The mosquitoes get in.'

'O.K., sorry.'

David placed his mother's hand carefully on the table and walked out to the kitchen.

'He hates mosquitoes,' Bettina said.

Joel pulled a face of ambiguous meaning.

'He's just upset.'

'Oh, sure!' Joel thought otherwise, but if he was going to say anything else he was stopped by David who re-entered the room firing insecticide into the air from two aerosol cans, one held in each hand high above his head. He circuited the room and started up the stairs, the cans still firing.

'Put your hand over your drink,' Bettina said.

Upstairs they could hear heavy footsteps.

'Lucy doesn't like insecticide,' Bettina explained.

When David returned to the room he was pleased to see that Joel had his hand over his drink, although he couldn't have explained why.

David sat down. There was a silence. Joel lifted his hand off his drink and wiped the rim with his finger before drinking. The silence continued. David stretched his long legs beneath the table. He threw back his arms and yawned. He was loose and relaxed. The silence continued further. It was quite delicious.

'I know how to do it,' he said.

Joel clicked his tongue in irritation but Bettina was looking at him.

'How?' she asked.

'Oh come on,' Joel said to her, 'now you ask a boy: what does he know? Who do you want to listen to?'

David shrugged. 'O.K.,' he said, 'I was only offering.'

'Tell me,' Bettina said and Joel moved his chair angrily.

'Well, you won't get anyone to commit him the straight way, that's the first thing.' His mother was looking at him in a way she had never looked at him before.

'Go on,' she said.

'Davey, I don't want to be rude,' Joel said. 'But you are seventeen years old. You are hardly an expert.'

'Well you're not an expert either. That's why Harry is still in the Hilton.' He turned to Bettina. 'I know how to have him committed but it'll cost money.'

'Ah well, there you are,' Joel said, ' ...money.'