and down. 'It is a darkness you can't imagine. A blackness. Cold black ink. Like death.'
Across the other side of the dining room, the other Harry Joy was laughing.
'They steal your memories from you,' said Nurse, mixing his mashed potato with his gravy. 'They take away all your faces, all your pictures.'
He must have liked Harry Joy. He took him outside and showed him his book. He was writing down all the memories he had left. He wrapped them up in plastic bags and buried them in the garden when they were full. Later Harry was to find out that Nurse told everyone his secret and thus even his notebook memories would be stolen from him.
Harry developed pains across his chest and he began to stoop. His shoulders rounded and his chest hollowed, and it may have been because Alex was breaking him down or it could have been that the pain he felt was not his pain, but the pain of the people he moved amongst, and he adopted it with a sympathy quite new to him. In any case, his shoes had been stolen. They had given him slippers instead.
Alex came and sat on his bed one night just after cocoa time. He was flushed and exuberant. He had just beaten the so-called Intellectuals in French Scrabble. He talked about it happily for a quarter of an hour and became irritable when Harry would not share his triumph.
'It's irritating,' he said, 'both of us having the same name and the same moustache, and now,' he smoothed his baggy white trousers, 'we have the same suit.'
'Yes,' Harry agreed, 'very irritating.'
'So,' the big man said, his legs dangling loosely from his bed, 'you could be Alex.'
Harry felt as if someone was sitting on his chest.
'Alex is a schmuck,' he said truculently and felt his chest tighten another notch. There was a silence, He had hurt. He was pleased he'd hurt.
'He suits you,' Alex said coldly. 'He's worried about good and bad and doing the right thing. For Christ's sake,' he said, 'be reasonable.'
'What's so great about being Harry Joy?' He was bitter and confused. He did not like the Harry Joy that Alex portrayed. He could not imagine anyone wanting it. But Harry Joy was his name. He was Harry Joy and no one else and he squeezed himself in some mental doorway, resisting having the name pulled from him.
Alex poured himself a glass of water and added a drop of his 'privilege,' a little blackcurrant cordial, superior to the orange type. 'I'm a successful advertising man who's gone crazy. I've got power and money and I don't have to prove a thing.'
'I know,' Harry said. 'I've bloody well seen you.'
'But it wouldn't suit you any more,' Alex said oilily. 'Can't you see it should be repulsive to you? I think it is repulsive to you ... isn't it?'
What a crawling voice it was. 'Alex,' Harry said, 'for Christ-sakes... '
He didn't even put the glass down. 'You call me Alex again,' he said, taking a sip of blackcurrant, 'and I'll hit you.' He said it so quietly that Harry would never make the same mistake again. 'It's not just for me. Mrs Dalton asked me to talk to you.'
'Why can't she talk to me herself?'
This wasn't like Alex, this driving insistence. They were going to steal his name and leave him with the name of a flop and failure.
'There are two Harry Joys on the Social Welfare computer,' Alex said, 'and they want to reject one of us as fraudulent. So I suppose you could say, the hour has come.'
'That's you. You're fraudulent.' But you could hear the weakness in the voice. You could hear, already, the surrender.
'Mrs Dalton thinks you're being difficult.' There was no nastier threat that could be made in the hospital. There was only one thing that happened to difficult patients. Alex, some of his old humanitarian principles still weakly showing, felt momentarily guilty. 'Come on, Harry,' he said, 'please, for old times' sake.'
Harry!
There was a silent lake around the island of the mistake. Had they been dogs they would have scratched themselves and looked at the ceiling.
'I'll think about it,' Harry said, but he was already beginning to embrace the pale, shuffling unhappiness of an Alex.
There was considerable pressure on him to shave his mous-tache and adopt a different style of dress but he made excuses. He had made a silly decision and as time went on he resented it more and more. Only rich men seek salvation by giving away the trappings of power. If a poor man has a car, he clings on to it. If he has a penny he doesn't throw it from him. He dreams of making a fortune, having a good name. And here, he had given away the privilege of being Harry Joy, and the minute it was done, signed and sealed and tucked away in the computer, he was sorry. While he had still been the legitimate Harry Joy some power was attached to him and even if they had given him the Therapy he would still have been Harry Joy.
But once he was an Alex everyone knew he was a crumpled thing, a failure, defenceless. Three silk shirts were stolen from him and were worn, brazenly, in his presence.
He sat in the sunshine with Nurse and took over the pen for him when his fingers were cramped.
'A dog is a funny thing the way it trots along,' Nurse would say, and Harry would write it in the book. 'It could put its head up high and its tail, too. Then there are other dogs who walk with their noses down and they make me laugh too. I was in Cooktown and there was a fellow there with a black dog I used to feed scraps. I forget its name. Now, cats... ' and he would move on to the next subject and Harry Joy, wearing his pyjama jacket, would bend over the notebook and write as neatly as he could.
In the afternoons, on the days when Nurse had not been 'done,' they would go the rounds of the traps, as Nurse called it, checking on what memories had been stolen. One day they found someone had written 3/10 in a book, and then reburied it.
The new Harry Joy conferred with Alice in her office and ordered the old men about. The new Alex heard him and was jealous. He envied his loud happy laugh, the way he threw back his big balding head and just laughed, laughed and laughed as if there was nothing in the world to worry about, no pain, no agony, no indecision, no one stealing Nurse's memory from his head and his holes in the ground.
They had authority over him. They made him sweep the concrete paths and he did it. They tried to feed him like an Alex. They did it for sport. For their amusement. They brought him big doughnuts and laughed at him when he pulled faces. He told Nurse the food was full of poisons. He told him everything he had learned from Honey Barbara and Nurse insisted it be written in the book even though it wasn't a memory because it would be, should be, a memory the next day, and therefore should be entered. He did not tell the new Harry Joy about the poisoned food in case they decided to give him Therapy. He wrote Honey Barbara's rules in Nurse's book, paying particular attention to her thoughts on paranoia.
Hunger, lethargy, and the anger he had not yet recognized came to be his constant companions. His shoulders were permanently rounded, his chest hollowed, and when he walked down the concrete paths beside the wings he shuffled in his slippers like a defeated man.
Seeing him shuffle around the place his enemies made the mistake of thinking him permanently defeated. Yet a small revolution was brewing inside the stooped man known as Alex, and depression and lethargy were probably as important for its proper conclusion as optimism might be at a later time.
The change which would, anyway, have come, was accelerated by the arrival of the formidable Mrs Martha Duval, who was not to be denied her husband by something as ineffectual as a bribed Social Welfare clerk. She arrived on a Wednesday morning and was, shortly after lunch, introduced to a person Mrs Dalton claimed was her husband. She declared this person to be none other than Harry Joy.
More officers of the Department of Social Welfare were called. Interviews were conducted. And finally, from the far corner of the garden, the real Alex Duval was somehow unearthed and presented to his wife in the bitumen courtyard in front of Alice Dalton's office.
Social Security men stood around holding their clipboards and Mrs Dalton attempted to usher various select people into her office, but they all stood their ground, watching in terrible fascination as the false Harry Joy began to moan. He pulled at his moustache and gnashed his teeth. He sat on top of one of the old men and pissed in his pants. He rolled across the bitumen and bit Jimmy on the ankle. He curled into a ball and wailed.
All he could see was a great grey cat with a crayfish clamped on his back. There was a loud crack as he
