away with it.
When Harry thought of that house afterwards it would always be night and the wood stove crackled and made dull thumps and hisses and it shifted its burning innards make itself more comfortable. A soft yellow kerosene threw benevolent shadows across the room and his father (who lived in the house for a total of four years and two months) would always be there, telling a story in a languid way, stuffing a pipe with tobacco, feeding a stove, or cooking some unappetizing peasant porridge that he had taken a liking to in India or South America or Oregon.
And stories, always stories: Wood Spirits, lightning, the death of Kings, and New York, New York, New York.
'In New York there are towers of glass. It is the most beau-tiful and terrible city on earth. All good, all evil exist there.' He could say the word 'evil' so you felt it, a cold sinuous thing that could come in under a locked door and push up into your bowels. 'If you know where to look, you can find the devil. That is where he lives. If you keep your eyes peeled you can see him drive down 42nd Street in a Cadillac with darkened windows. He lives in Park Avenue, surrounded by his servants. But New York is full of saints, they ...'
'Vance!'
'My darling Patricia, you know it's true.'
'He believes everything you tell him, stop it.' She was sitting at the table, darning socks. She brushed her dark hair from her eyes and smiled.
'When God makes the next flood,' his father said, 'he will leave New York as a lesson to those who survive. Every other thing on earth will be destroyed except the buildings in New York. It will be a bible of buildings, a much better bible, a holy place which only the very learned will know how to read.'
'One day,' Harry said sleepily, 'I will go to New York.'
'You will too,' his father said, and read his palm to prove it to him.
He grew into a tall thin boy who had been at first what children (or at least the children in that town) called 'Gooby,' by which they meant someone who is a little slow and intro-verted and is likely to stand at odd places with his mouth open staring at things that no one would look at twice. But later, fed by the deep wells of his own self- regard, he became much liked. His height was a positive advantage in the type of football they played, and that too all worked in his favour. He was a deadly accurate kick and scored many goals; which was nothing less than what he had expected of himself, for he had been raised to expect excellence, and he did not, even for an instant, think it ridiculous, when confronted with some problem, to ask himself: what would Jesus have done? In fact he did it all the time. He sometimes had quiet dreams of martyrdom for some greater good.
They had wanted him to be Van Gogh, Jesus Christ and Zapata all rolled into one.
But somewhere there was something lacking, and as he grew older he came to show too great a regard for his father’s maxims about not working yourself to death. His mother took him to a city specialist to see if he had a problem with his thyroid gland, so lethargic did he begin to appear. He was like a wonderful racing car with a severely underpowered engine, and whether it was his father's final departure, or simply the onset of puberty, his idealistic concern for goodness seemed to have fallen away. He did not ask himself what Jesus would have done since he had been faced with prospect of Jeanette Grandell's wonderful fourteen-year-old breasts.
But although it would be a long long time before he concerned himself with goodness again, it did fall into the sediment of his character, and at times over the years he found himself wondering would like him to do.
But now he was a man of thirty-nine lying in a hospital bed and contemplating death. He could not allow himself to know that he was sickened with his life. He was like someone who has lain in bed too long eating rich food: within his soul there was suddenly a yearning for tougher, stronger things, for ecstasies, for the thrill of goodness perfectly achieved, to see butterflies in doorways in Belize, to be part of the lightning dance, to quiver in terror before the cyclone.
But it was too late for all those things, far too late. He stared out at the sunlit garden and listened to a banana leaf flap against the rainwater spout on verandah. In the garden, an old woman with swollen arms picked roses. Beside his bed a man with a striped suit and eyes like weak tea dropped, for the third time, the card that contained the details of Harry's medical condition. The man picked up the card with thick sausage fingers and yet it was not the surgeon's clumsiness that convinced Joy he was about to die, nor was it the admission that the operation entailed something like a 5 per cent risk. In fact he was less worried about dying than where he would go after he died.
He watched the surgeon’s unnaturally red lips move and could not bring himself to talk about the lingering taste of heaven and hell, explain that hell was like chrome-yellow flowers, that there were worlds in the afterlife layer after layer of filo pastry, that he, Harry Joy, lay now at the crossroads, that he had been warned.
What happened to him now, what he thought, what he decided, would determine whether he entered Heaven or Hell.
Vance Joy's stories had drifted like groundsel seeds and taken root in the most unlikely places. They had rarely grown in the way he would have imagined, in that perfect green landscape of his imagination, intersected with streams and redolent of orange blossom.
In certain climates they became like weeds, uncontrollable, not always beautiful, a blaze of rage or desire from horizon to horizon.
All these Harry had carried innocently, passing them on to his wife, his son, his daughter. Not having understood them, he transmitted them imperfectly and they came to mean quite different things. Vance Joy's stories of New York contained apocalyptic visions and conflicts between Good and Evil, but to Harry they were merely stories to be told, and to Bettina they were something else again.
New York was her antidote for the town she hated. She hated its wide colonial verandahs, its slow muddy river, its sleepy streets, its small-town pretensions. She loathed the perpetual Sunday afternoons, the ugly people, the inelegant bars and frumpy little frocks. Here, marooned on the edge of the Empire, she had spent ten years waiting for Harry's promise that they would go to New York.
'How could you?' she had asked (how many years ago?).
'Easy,' he said.
'How?'
'Sell up the business and go there.'
'When?'
'One day.'
He hadn't not-meant it, but he hadn't really meant it either. His business was a grand, slightly decrepit, old boat drifting with the current down a slow muddy river and every now and then he would get out and, with a long pole, push it away from the bank. Sitting back in the wheelhouse he could afford to dream about New York, but the thought of really competing in that turbulent water filled him with fatigue.
Bettina did not give up her dreams so easily. She spoke of New York to no one. She secretly married it to another dream, rolled the two together, harboured them within her and let them grow. She cultivated Americans and read their magazines. She saved money and put it in a special account. She did exercises to preserve her body for that time of arrival. And there had been times – how could she deny it to herself – when she had imagined, dreamed, the easiest solution to her problem would be if Harry would quietly die in his sleep. And sometimes, sitting in the kitchen at Palm Avenue, waiting for him to arrive from some late conference, she had watched the clock-hand edge its way sideways around the dial and she'd thought – of course she was drunk – he's dead. And there was such lightness in the thought, such relief.
Ah, she was not a nice person. It was obvious. Nice people were usually boring, always boring.
She was drunk, and hated the town. She hated Harry's Fiat: it was ten years old and full of cigarette butts and old newspapers and, for some reason she could never understand, he was proud of it. He bought a Jaguar and gave it to her, but he kept that Fiat for himself as if it were somehow vulgar to display any wealth.
'But why? Why? For Christsakes, why?'
'I like it.' And you could see that he didn't even know why he liked it, but that he clung to it like an old teddy bear, some piece of damn rubbish Crazy Vance or Silly Patricia had scrounged from the tip.
But the Jaguar was (again) in the garage having its cooling system fixed (the cretins) and she had to drive this little joke car.
She grated the gears going into the hospital. She saw no charm in the old building, smothered in bougainvillaea and surrounded by big old flame trees, frangipanis and mangoes. It was only Americans who found it charming and when they did she suspected them of being patronizing, just as now, parking beside a particularly
