He read books and hoarded their contents. He chose South America as his special domain. He knew Paraguay and Patagonia, Chile and Brazil. He dreamed of wealth and adventure, and yet he was frightened of almost everything. On the football field he cowered and cringed. Confronted with fist fights he ran away and hid. In dark comers he rehearsed his triumphal return from South America when he would make presents to his family (his enemies too) and tell them stories of his adventures.
He hoarded money and counted his bank balance. He sold newspapers in the evenings (a long-legged boy fearfully dodging peak-hour traffic) and saved everything he made. When he was fifteen he began selling marihuana to his class-mates. It brought him money and prestige, yet he dealt with damp hands, fearful of discovery and punishment. He told his father he wished to study medicine because his father indicated it would please him. His business broadened to tabs of acid, speed, and lignococaine which he sold as cocaine. He never took drugs. He was frightened of going mad. And yet the cocaine entranced him because it (if it had been real cocaine and not lignocaine) had come from South America.
This then is Harry's son, who in his father's words is 'a good boy, going to be a doctor'. He contemplated arrest and murder by knife; he stood before these visions with his hands clenched, his body rigid, while the lightning danced around the nearby hills.
'The story of the butterfly.
'I was in Bogota and waiting for a lady friend. I was in love, a long time ago. I waited three days. I was hungry but could not go out for food, lest she come and I not be there to greet her. Then, on the third day, I heard a knock.
'I hurried along the old passage and there, in the sunlight, there was nothing.
'Just,' Vance Joy said, 'a butterfly, flying away.'
David Joy had decorated his bedroom in the style of an office. The walls were covered in brown felt, the floor with a dark brown carpet. A black desk occupied a central position in the room, which was illuminated solely by a small chrome desk-lamp. Beside the desk was a chrome and leather swivel-chair and in front of the desk there was another chrome and leather chair, but in this case it had no swivel.
His bed, tucked away in a dark comer, was covered with a large brown rug. With the curtains drawn and the desk-lamp on, one could forget the bed was even there.
His parents could not see that it was not a bedroom but an office.
He was seventeen years old. Now, sitting at a desk, wearing a fawn cashmere sweater, his dark hair conservatively cut, he might have been a student from any good middle-class home, except that the top of the desk was covered with money, some of it in large denominations. It was, in this quiet and private moment, arranged from the highest to the lowest denominations, from left to right, from far to near, one note occupying one space.
The notes glowed magically. He sat perfectly still, had already sat perfectly still for fifteen minutes with only those dark eyes sweeping ceaselessly back and forth along the eight rows in front of him: additions, subtractions, dreams that swept the Americas from New York to Tierra del Fuego.
He heard his sister approach and although she may just as easily have been going to her own room he gave himself five seconds to clear the desk. He did it in eight polished, rehearsed movements, as graceful as a card sharp, with no hint of panic or fear, only this wonderfully svelte movement. He was not, however, perfect: as Lucy entered the room a single note was still floating from desk to floor and David would have found it undignified to grab for it.
Lucy saw it but she knew better than to touch it. Things had changed in their relationship since the time when she had teased him about his tears and his lies. She walked around the note and sat facing her brother across the desk. She was fifteen years old and still in her school uniform. She resembled her mother except that the slightly desperate quality that Bettina carried was totally missing and, in its place, a rather dream-like detachment which would make the lips in her plump olive face more sensuous than her mother's, the eyes somehow wider, the dark hair fuller and richer.
'Aren't you going to pick it up?' she said.
'Why should I?'
'So you can take it and put it with the other money in the back of the Fiat.'
Something in David's body tightened, and Lucy, who knew him well, stiffened. Her eyes did not, for an instant, leave his.
If she had thought him incapable of hurting her, his behaviour would have been melodramatic. For he now revelled in the threats he posed her, the darkness and danger he might represent, and he applied himself to this with the same single-mindedness that he would, outside the door of this room, bring to the role of a sensible intelligent boy who wished to be a doctor.
'Who told you?'
'I found it,' she said. 'I was looking for a pencil I dropped.'
'When?'
'Two months ago.'
'If you tell anyone, I'll kill you.'
'I know.' She shivered. She was not exactly sure that he would kill her.
The tension went away for a moment and David bent down and picked up the money.
'What are you going to do with your money?' she said.
'Why do you ask questions when you know the answer?'
'You're still going to New York?'
'See ... you know.' She didn't know. She didn't know about South America and he would never tell her because she would laugh.
'To go into business?'
'Haven't you got anything else to do?' he said coldly; yet he didn't want her to go. His sister's presence charged him with a strange erotic energy. He was not thinking about what he said. He spoke, merely, to keep her there. She had boyfriends. People liked her. He wanted to touch her hair.
Lucy shrugged. You couldn't talk to David. He wouldn't talk. Except once, a long time ago, he had told her his dream, his secret, his vision of New York. She had wanted to hear about it again, this glistening dream he had made in the darkness of his discontents.
'When you are rich in New York, will you send for me?'
'No,' he said, 'what do you want?'
Lucy smiled.
She had not come to see him because she liked him. She was being nice because she wanted something. That was the way the world was. Yet in his dreams he returned with presents for her: a sapphire necklace worked with Inca gold.
'The answer,' he said, 'is no.'
'Oh ... please, David ... just a deal.'
I'm not doing grass any more.'
'Oh, David ... please.'
'All I've got is some flowers and beads and I'm keeping them.'
'What else have you got?'
'Coke, MDA, speed.'
'Go on, please, give me some grass. I'm feeling low.'
'Take a Valium.'
'I don't want a Valium. I want some grass. Oh, please ... be nice to your sister.'
'My sister won't be nice to me.' His voice was hoarse. He hardly knew what he was saying.
She stopped smiling for a moment because she recognized the voice. A harshness came into her face.
'Is that what you want then?' she said.
'I just want my sister to be nice to me.' For a second his hard-locked eyes shifted uncertainly and his mouth wobbled before it fixed itself again.
'I've got forty dollars,' she said. 'why don't you just take the money?'
She saw him hesitate. She thought he was weighing it up, the pros and cons, putting a dollar value on pleasure, assessing the pleasure in profit.
