Bliss

same melancholy one finds amongst passengers who have just missed the train to the city and know they will he marooned here for the next four hours. They paced up and down, sat still on benches, talked to each other, or more commonly established a hostile isolation amongst the dwarf trees. The sun sank below the roof of the Ginger Factory (although Harry took this ugly rusting corrugated-iron building to be part of the hospital) and the very green, perfectly mown grass assumed a darker, blacker coloration.

It was then that he heard the Sea Scouts screaming. Abso-lute bowel-loosening terror cut through the air and hung there, vibrating. The patients, like grazing animals, suddenly froze. Harry crossed the room in two strides and opened his door. There was no grass here, only bitumen, across which black expanse two large men hurried, carrying the struggling bodies of two small male children. A notebook was dropped. A pen-cil, somehow pitiful, fell and rolled across the bitumen. A woman descended the steps of a box-like aluminium building and, with a slight hop, like a magpie scavenging beside a busy road, picked up the pencil. As she rose she caught sight of Harry Joy, who, instinctively, shut the door.

The screams now came through the open window as Jim and Jimmy carried the kicking Sea Scouts across the grass towards the Ginger Factory. Harry saw the patients move out of the way and then close behind in curiosity. The Sea Scouts screamed as if they knew the secrets of those smoking chimneys.

Honey Barbara had rules for survival in this particular quarter of Hell. They were as follows: Do not aggravate them, be quiet, smile nicely, don't let them know how smart you are. Eat all your food and don't steal jam. Fuck whoever wants to be fucked and then forget about it. Never tell a doctor the truth but make everything you tell them interesting. Never say you're not sick. Keep your nose clean and do not write complaining letters.

Harry was determined to follow the rules exactly and it was his desire, made more intense by the frightful screaming, that led him, so early, to his first mistake. His heart was racing. He was panicked and still dizzy from Pentothal. Yet he saw it clearly, there plain as day, on the end of the big bed. It was not the bed he had been sleeping in, but there it was: his name: Mr HARRY JOY, in metallic tape.

Already he was courting disaster. He was in the wrong bed. ('Never tell them,' Honey Barbara said, 'that a thing is their fault, even if it is.') A mistake had been made, or a trick. Perhaps he had been delivered to the wrong bed or a prankster had shifted him while he slept.

Quickly, dizzily, he made the bed he had been asleep in and shifted himself into the correct bed.

And there he was: keeping his nose clean, obeying the rules, not complaining either verbally or in writing. He was in the right bed, only worried now that he might have been given the wrong pyjamas and, in fact, he was sitting up in bed, peering over his shoulder and trying to read the label on his pyjama coat when Alice Dalton entered the room, already a little on edge.

She had a pencil in her hand. It was the Sea Scouts' pencil. She held it without feeling and he watched her narrowly as she approached the bed, thus ignoring one of Honey Barbara's many rules: 'Always give out a good vibe, never let them think you hate them.'

She stood at the foot of his bed for some seconds, her head bowed, her temples held delicately between thumb and middle finger. When she looked up at last, her mouth was drawn very tight.

'Mr Joy, I am Mrs Dalton. This is my hospital and you are here because you are sick.'

Harry waited. He had remembered Honey Barbara's rule about vibes but all he could think was that he didn't like this pencil woman. He disliked her self-importance, her mottled red face, her pink glasses, her tightly permed indifferent-coloured hair, her sparrow legs, her fussy voice, her black shoes, and he would have gone on, finding more things to dislike, except that she started to talk and he had to concentrate on her ridiculous words.

'Unpleasant fact number two,' said Mrs Dalton, 'is you are in the wrong bed. Please don't interrupt. Now when we assign you a bed we do it for a good reason, probably a whole number of reasons. We know things, Mr Joy, that you could never possibly know so if you start changing your bed... well, it's impossible.'

'It has my name on it,' Harry said. He wasn't meaning to argue. He was simply trying to clarify. He did not wish to argue.

Mrs Dalton sighed. She held her temples again, in the same delicate way, between thumb and middle finger. Harry kept a respectful silence.

'I will not argue, Mr Joy,' she said at last. 'You see, this is a perfect example. How could you possibly know that there are two Mr Joys in this room? You see how silly that makes you look? You thought you knew it all, and now you find you don't. You find there are other factors. Even,' she said, 'if you were healthy you could not know. So,' she said with some attempt at friendliness, 'be a love and get back into your own bed.'

He did not want to argue. He knew it was not politic, but the fact remained:

'But I am Harry Joy.'

'No, you're Mr Joy.'

'Mr Harry Joy.'

'You are not Mr Harry Joy. Kindly do not tell me my own business.'

'I should know my own name.'

She smiled and allowed herself two good seconds before she answered.

'If you knew your own name, Mr Joy, you probably would not be here. I am here because I do know my own name. Not only my own name, but also the names of all my patients. You see, Mr Joy, this is my speciality. It is my business.'

'I am not Harry Joy?'

'No. You are Mr Joy. Now why don't you get out of Mr Harry Joy's bed before he comes back You don't want to start off in his bad books too:

Harry climbed out of the bed which was bigger and more comfortable than the one the horrible Mrs Dalton wished him to sleep in. When he had done that she tucked in the other bed and smoothed it obsessively. Then she came and sat on his bed.

'I'm sorry to growl,' she smiled.

For one horrifying moment he thought she was going to take his hand.

'That's O.K.'

'It's confusing, I know: two Mr Joys in the one room.'

'My name is Harry too.'

'Well you'll have to give it up for a little while,' she said. 'Let him have it for a while. Do you have a second name?'

'Stanthorpe.'

'Alright, Stanthorpe. It's a very aristocratic name.'

Stanthorpe!

'You can be Stanthorpe.'

'I don't want to be Stanthorpe.'

'Then you'll damn well have to be plain Mr Joy,' she said, standing up irritably. 'I can't spend all day arguing. Good afternoon, Mr Joy.'

He wished to be polite but he had forgotten her name already.

'Goodnight,' he said vaguely. The only name that came to mind was Pencil.

When he woke up he was hungry, and later, looking back on all the indignities and irritations in this part of Hell, he was to remember the hunger as the predominant thing, the mel-ancholy gurglings of his empty stomach.

It was night and there was someone else in the room. He heard the sound of a page turning and a loud hearty chuckle.

'Oh dear,' said a familiar voice, 'oh dearie dearie-me.'

He propped himself up on his elbow and saw the person who had been designated as Mr Harry Joy.

'Jesus. Alex.'

Alex was lying on his bed and reading. He did not stop reading just because he had been spoken to. In fact he con-tinued to read for a good thirty seconds before he dropped his book down on to his lap, and then his face showed none of the pleasure his jovial 'dearie me's' might have suggested. His high white forehead was creased up like a piece of rejected writing paper and the beginnings of a moustache accentuated the down-turned line of his mouth.

'Christ, Alex. What a fuck-up. I'm sorry.'