Bliss

A woman gave him a shawl to sit on in case the cafe chairs should soil his suit. He accepted it graciously, as his due. In return he told them stories which were translated a sentence at a time.

At about three o'dock in the morning Miguel Fernandez joined the table, a glass of wine in his hand, his uniform unbuttoned.

'David,' he said, 'you will only have to say where you were taking the guns.' He was smiling, 'That is all.'

Some of the townspeople had gone home. But the fifteen-year-old boy was still awake to translate this for the audience. They waited. They looked at David Joy, their laughter ready, like pigeons, to fly around the room.

'No,' David Joy said.

'Non,' the fifteen-year-old translated needlessly.

They did not know that he could not have provided the information anyway. But even if he had known it is doubtful if he would have weakened. He could not soil the perfection of this, this pure white perfect thing. The only perfect thing.

It is likely that the audience would have stayed to the bitter end, trooped out into the cold dawn and gone down under the bridge where the execution was to be carried out. But the Major cleared them out in a fury, screaming abuse at them.

'Carrion,' he told them, 'vermin. Go before it is too late.'

So when the time came there was only the German to join the procession and he locked the cafe before following the party down the muddy embankment. It occurred to him, watching the Major and the man in the white suit, that it was the Major who looked as if he would be shot and the other who would do the shooting.

It was cold. David's balls retracted into his stomach and he knew his scrotum was a tough tight little purse. He wanted a piss. Would he piss himself after he died, as he died? He shivered. He stopped and turned his back to piss. The party halted. The men watched him. His penis had shrivelled in the cold. He turned his back because he did not want them to doubt his manhood. He watched the steam rise as his warm urine hit the ground. He felt like he had as a child on Sunday nights watching the highway full of cars returning home after a weekend.

He was not frightened at all. There had been no fear since the episode started. It had all been so easy. If he had known it would be this easy he would not have worried about it.

He was more distressed when, going down the embankment, he slipped and muddied the back of his suit.

'Fuck,' he said.

But when he saw Miguel Fernandez's sick melancholy face it relieved him even of that pain.

'Cheer up,' he told him, and felt again some of the bravado he had felt in the warm of the cafe with the soldiers gathered around him and the jukebox playing and that girl he had danced with, he had missed her name. 'Cheer up, Miguel. You can have a big breakfast.'

'You're a fool,' the Major said bitterly.

'Possibly.'

'It is unnecessary. Please, David... '

For a moment he hesitated. For an instant panic fluttered its wings in his ears.

'No,' he said, 'it is necessary.'

And he went to stand against the embankment with his hands behind his back. He stood before the unhappy soldiers like a man posing for the photographer in the square of a tourist town. The mud was not visible to the camera.

'Come on,' he said, 'hurry up.'

Miguel Fernandez did not wish to look at the body, but it was expected. As he walked towards the crumpled thing that had been a man he was not ready for the look of ugly surprise he would see on the dead man's face, nor did he know that one night nearly twenty years later, his son's wife would tell him the story of The Man with the White Suit. It was not quite the real story; it had become mixed with other stories David Joy had told that night.

The story of the man with the white suit ends formally, always the same, with the sun coming out as he falls, and they say Pero era solo una mariposa (but it was only a butterfly) que se volaba (flying away).

The wrapper of a sweet confection delivered fifty-five years through time. But not even Miguel Fernandez knew that.

Harry Joy found Honey Barbara in the morning, one hundred miles up Highway One, and had he been two minutes earlier or ten minutes later, he would probably never have found her at all.

He brought the Jaguar to a stop in front of her and watched her run towards the car. At the passenger door, she recognized him.

'I'm not coming back,' she said.

'I know.'

'I'm going home.'

'I'll take you.'

She opened the door and looked at him, hesitating with her bundle resting on the seat.

'It's four hundred miles.'

'That's O.K.'

'Not all the way.' She threw her bundle into the back seat and closed the door.

It was a difficult journey for both of them but at least they both knew there was nothing to say.

'I don't like you soft,' she said once, touching the cuff of his sleeve.

He didn't understand and smiled painfully.

'I like you hard. Not all this silk.' She clenched her fist and smiled.

'What are you saying?'

'We had nice times, Harry.'

'Yes.'

'We had some nice fucks.'

'Yes.'

They drove through Sunday traffic past giant fibreglass pineapples and bananas surrounded by buses and people with secret pimples on their arses.

'Can I come and see you here?'

'They'd think you were a spy.'

'Who are they?'

'Realists,' she said and sunk into her seat and watched the wipers slurp at the rain on the window.

It was five o'clock and getting dark when she made him stop at the turn off to Paddy Melon Road just on the curve of the bitumen where Paddy Melon Road goes downhill through the casurinas, a collection of puddles in a hard ribbon of mustard clay.

It. had stopped raining for the moment but there were heavy inky blue clouds behind Mount Warning.

'It'll rain,' he said.

'I don't mind the rain,' she said. 'They'll be waiting for it now. We have droughts in winter.'

'Will you write to me?'

She bit her lip and they kissed uncomfortably, their bodies spanning the bucket seats and instruments of the Jaguar.

She took the bundle and closed the door without looking at him, and he stayed in the car with the engine running and watched her walk down the gravel road. He noticed that she flinched from time to time when a sharp rock bit into her soft bare feet.

It was noon on a Friday and the city was crowded. People stopped to look at Bettina, and it was not because of her cleverly cut black dress or the silk scarf with the signature of the famous designer she wrapped around her black bag, nor was it because of the strut, the prance (almost) of her plump legs, but the sheer quality of anger she contained. Her cheeks had flattened, almost hollowed, as they did when she was very drunk or very angry, and she was not drunk.

She bumped into people and did not look around.

She stopped at a traffic light and a whiskery old woman winked at her.