Harry heard the word and saw how Joel liked Bettina. He looked out of his tiny eyes as if he adored her. His fleshy face lit up when he talked to her. 'Ah,' he said gruffly, 'it was nothing.' It was obviously 'something' and Harry against his will, coaxed the story from him. He was worried that it would make Joel appear in too good a light.
Harry moved another ad and sat down opposite him and Bettina, equally reluctant, did the same.
'Well,' Joel said, lighting a cigarette, moving an ashtray close to him, offering Harry a cigarette, closing the packet and standing it neatly beside the ashtray. 'I was just crossing the road near the office, Harry. (Really it's nothing, don't worry) and this little kid, must have been about three, came running out of that big brown block of flats and an old man you often see him there sweeping the footpath – well not so old, a bit older than you, came out and this woman... '
He stopped to draw on his cigarette and Harry noticed Bettina shift uncomfortably in her chair. She caught his eye. He didn't know why. He looked back at Joel.
' ...had one of those plastic buckets and she threw the bucket full of... I thought it was water but it wasn't...over the little kid. Ask me why?'
He was staring at Harry challengingly.
'Why?'
'I don't
Joel held up the cigarette.
Harry hit his hand down on the table. 'No.'
'Yes. Cigarette. In his mouth. They both went up.'
'Shit.'
'Burst into flames.'
Harry shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut to eliminate the vision.
'But it's alright,' Joel said, 'because I threw myself on top .of them and put out the flames.'
There was a silence. Harry stared at his partner.
He heard Bettina's voice say: 'Joel, that's bullshit.'
He saw Joel look down at the table.
He looked at Bettina who was now staring at Joel.
'Joel?' she said.
'Alright,' he said, 'it's bullshit. You don't have to say it's bullshit. I know it's bullshit, but Harry didn't know it was bullshit.'
Harry got up to have another look at the suit. It was really burnt. This beautiful English pure wool was burnt. Behind the burnt wool he could see Joel's red flesh.
'You've burnt yourself,' he said.
'What the fuck. Who cares?' Joel said.
Heard steps, running and suddenly he was being hugged.
'Daddy.' It was Lucy, clinging to him, apologizing for not having visited him. She smelt like her grandfather, the late Billy McPhee. 'Daddy, welcome home.'
Joel was taking off his burnt suit and dropping it on the floor. He looked tired and dejected, an artist scraping down a failed canvas.
'Get out,' Bettina yelled at Lucy. 'Get out. I can't stand that damn petrol smell.'
'This is my father,' Lucy said to a young man with broken teeth and a wizened face, wearing greasy overalls. 'Kenneth McLaren, this is my father Harry.'
'Mr Joy,' said Ken.
'Out,' said Bettina, gathering up her precious advertisements and removing them from this contamination. 'Outside.'
Joel sat on his mattress in his underpants and rubbed antiseptic cream on his burns. It was getting cold. He gave his suit to Lucy.
'Use it for rags,' he said. 'It's no good any more.'
'Thanks, Joel,' Lucy said.
'You bring that suit back here.' Bettina dropped a pile of comped-up ads on the floor and ran across the room to grab the dark woollen bundle from her daughter's greasy hands. She stood in the middle of the room smoothing the suit out against her body. She lay the trousers carefully across the back of one chair and hung the coat on another.
She walked across to Joel and sat down beside him on his mattress. 'Now,' she said, 'let's see what you've done with yourself.'
Harry didn't know what to feel. It was like the aftermath of a war: everything shattered but people going about their lives with a certain optimism. He went up to his room and found his suits and shirts. He changed without showering and came down to find his wife sitting on the living room floor rubbing analgesic cream into the naked, shining, battery-fed body of his partner, well – not quite naked – his joke underpants were down around his pudgy hips and his burnt body gleamed in oil.
Harry stroked the collar of his silk shirt and marvelled at the richness and variety of life in Hell.
Bettina, as she explained to Harry later, no longer found Joel sexually desirable. (Harry didn't listen. He found it painful that she ever had.)
Joel was no longer admirable and it was admiration (she called it love) that made her want to fuck people. It was a cold brilliant sort of emotion, this admiration, and was backed up, invariably, with the unpalatable tastes of self-doubt and inferiority. She had worried all her life that she was cold. She had never felt for her children what a mother is meant to feel. She had despaired at this coldness and criticized herself for it while at the same time she hated (literally) mothers who dis-played their maternal qualities in too obvious a way.
But now, although she would never have used the word, and would have denied it vigorously if anyone had dared to suggest it, she loved Joel. She had not begun to love him until he had begun to fail and then, she believed, he became automatically sexually uninteresting to her. But it was only after he crashed, after he began to do these stupid, dangerous bizarre things to gain her respect, that she actually began to love him.
He was her responsibility. She had pushed him too far and now she would have to look after him. She rubbed the analgesic cream across his back. The burns were not too bad:
'Ah, Betty, you think I'm a schmuck.'
'You try too hard, baby.' Physically they were alike, stocky people from peasant stock.
'You didn't have to say it was bullshit.'
'No, no, I know. I'm sorry.'
'Fucking suit. My best suit too.'
'Never mind, never mind.'
Harry watched this and felt jealous. It was the sort of jeal-ousy a man can feel towards a child at a woman's breast. Sitting at the table by himself he was able to see the emotion clearly and know exactly what it was.
When David Joy arrived home with his two Big Macs at eight o'clock, his father was sitting by the fire. The sight of Joel's blubbery body stretched out at Harry's feet was as disgusting and terrible a reproach as any he had encountered in his nightmares. It was David's fault that Palm Avenue was like this. It was because he had paid money to have his father committed.
Yet he was struck with contradictory desires about his crime, for although he was remorseful he was also proud. He wanted to confess, be forgiven, chastized, admired, under-stood, sympathized with, everything at once. He-wanted his father to see how grown-up he was but also to forgive him as only a father could.
He was hurt, immediately, by Harry's lack of effusion in the greeting.
'Which one is mine?' his father asked, leading the way to the kitchen table.
'Both,' he said, although he had bought one for himself. He was starving.
David imagined his father looked at him suspiciously. Certainly he was opening the Big Mac box distrustfully. But now he lifted the hamburger to his mouth, bit it, and, 'Oh, Christ!' spat half-masticated food all over the table.
He was madder than when he went. There he was, his mouth half-full of old food, trying to smile at him.
'It's poisoned. I nearly ate it.' Harry tried to explain. How could he tell his son that he had thought of Honey
