Bliss

'Yes.' No he wasn't, no he wasn't. His chest hurt.

'You got me to drive twenty miles so you could fire me. I came here to jolly you up because I thought you'd left your wife.'

'Why would I leave my wife?' Harry said narrowly.

'No reason, that's all I thought.'

'Seems a funny thing to think. We've been married eighteen years.'

'Yes, now you mention it. It's just what I assumed.'

Their chairs were low, designed so that matrons would not have to reach far for their handbags. The two men, knee to knee, looked slightly ridiculous.

'You are here to be fired,' Harry said coldly.

'Holy Jesus. You're mad.'

'No.'

Adrian lifted a bushy ginger eyebrow. 'Are you?'

'No,' said Harry Joy but looked too cunning when he said it.

'You've landed a competitive account. You got General Foods!'

'No.'

'Well why are you firing us?'

'I have evidence,' Harry Joy said slowly, 'that three of your products cause cancer.'

'Oh, shit ...'

'You deny it.'

'Of course I don't deny it. For Christsake Harry, it's been going on for years. It's been in the papers. The tests in Amer-ica. You remember.'

'Ah, those tests. Those tests didn't mean anything. They used too much saccharin.'

'Oh, Harry, Harry, Harry.'

'What do you mean: Harry, Harry, Harry? That's what you told me. Or somebody,' he said levelly, 'who resembled you.'

'Harry, you know and I know that's the company line. No one believed it. We all had to pretend we believed it.'

'You don't deny it?'

'Deny what?'

'You make products that cause cancer.'

'Oh shit ...'

'Come on.'

'Of course not.'

'Then,' Harry Joy said standing up, 'you're fired.'

'You're impossible,' Adrian Clunes said at last. 'People like you don't exist. You cannot exist, Harry. You handle our business for ten years and then you… Look, think about it. Consider it. You make 17? per cent of two million dollars. Every year. What do you gain by resigning it?'

He put his head in his hands. 'The rest of us went through all this seven years ago.'

'I just found out.'

'Oh, rot and rubbish.'

'I just found out. I won't do it.'

Adrian Clunes sighed and stood up. He walked to the bar and brought back more beers. He filled Harry's glass and then his own. When he sat down again he was laughing.

'It's impossible,' he said. He lifted his beer. 'To Harry Joy, the newest, most impossible idealist in the world. Laugh, damn you,' he said, 'it's a joke. Oh, God help me, don't be miserable as well. Look,' he walked to the phone and picked it up. 'If you can throw away money I can help you throw away some more.' He ordered Bollinger and oysters.

'Now,' he said to Harry Joy, putting his arm around his shoulders, 'do you feel better?'

'A little, yes.'

They drank beer and waited for the oysters and champagne.

'Ah,' Adrian said, as he squeezed lemon juice over the flinch-ing oysters, 'bloody marvellous oysters in this country. You know, Harry, where are you going to draw the line? If you fire us, you'll have to fire all your clients.'

Harry was feeling better. He didn't believe a word Adrian Clunes said. 'Oh yes,' he said sarcastically.

'Harry, you're astonishing. You're a child. I can't understand how you've survived so long. Listen, they release something like eighty thousand totally new organic compounds every year. They're not properly tested. God knows how many cause cancer. Cancer takes years to show up. The whole of the Western world is built on things that cause cancer. They can't afford to stop making them. For Christsake, look at your client list. Mobil have benzine in petrol which is carcinogenic. Firestone use it making tyres too. We use saccharin, and even if we switch across to cyclamates instead, that's carcinogenic. ICI make dieldrin which is carcinogenic and that mob, your dry-cleaning client, use carbon tetrachloride which is the same. And every time an announcement is made that something causes cancer, it makes people less worried because they can't believe that half the things they breathe and eat are carcinogenic. And there are you,' Adrian rested, breathless, 'resigning our business because we use saccharin.'

Harry sipped his champagne. He smiled. It was the smile of a man who is smart enough to know when he's being bull-shitted to.

'You don't bloody believe me,' Adrian Clunes said in astonishment. 'Look at this man. He does not believe me.'

He leapt up from the table. 'I will damn well prove it to you.' His voice was high-pitched. 'I will prove to you how bad it is, and how piddling you are being. What you are doing,' he went to his briefcase, 'is nothing.'

He pulled a map from his case and spread it on the floor.

There: before him: the actual map of Hell. Harry did not need to be told. He looked at the colours, the hot red centre, the vermilion, the crimson, the hard industrial orange, the poisonous yellows radiating out from its hot centre.

They knelt on the floor beside it.

'This,' Adrian Clunes said, 'is a cancer map. It shows the incidence of cancers according to place of residence and place of work. There is a damn cancer epidemic going on, Harry Joy. They will not even sell these maps any more, let me tell you, they are shitting themselves.'

Harry watched it in horror. He could not disbelieve the map. He did not bother to study the relative proportions of tumours or understand all the accompanying statistics. He noted only that they were, at this moment, in the epicentre of Hell.

'It is an epidemic,' Adrian Clunes said angrily. 'And wait. You wait for another five years. This,' he tapped the paper, 'is what we get for how we live. And believe me, it is just hotting up.'

When he went back to his half-finished oysters he had become chalkish and pale.

.'My wife has cancer, Harry,' he said quietly. 'She weighs four stone and six pounds and everyone comes, like ghouls, to look at her. Our friends are nice enough to stay away,' he held up his hand. 'It's alright. Don't say anything. But don't preach to me about cancer. I know about cancer, dear Friend, from both sides.' He pushed his oysters away. 'I've lost my appetite.'

'I have to fire you,' Harry Joy said softly.

'I admire you,' Adrian Clunes said quietly. 'You are very eccentric, and most surprising, but I admire you. I wish you well.'

And as things turned out that day it became Harry Joy's task to think of ways to cheer up Adrian Clunes. He started by filling up his glass.

Lucy, it must be remembered, was only fifteen and a half years old, so although she was capable of some maturity, not to say wisdom, she was also capable of acting just like a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old.

Lucy is standing by the Mobil Station, hitching a lift to see Harry in the Hilton.

And there, right on the bend of the road, rolling hard and squealing its tyres, is a rusty Cadillac Eldorado with an unemployed motor mechanic named Kenneth McLaren at the wheel. He is twenty-two years old and his false