'Daddy, Daddy, I love you.'
The trout lay on the table. The fluorescent light washed green. Everything Harry Joy thought about became more and more complicated, less and less clear.
He no longer knew if he was going to die, if he was play-acting at dying, if he felt frightened or brave, because at this moment he felt an enormous strength, a curious triumph, as he held the body of his weeping son in his arms. He held him firmly, full of joy, the pair of them in a room full of gifts.
There was toughness in Harry Joy you may not have yet suspected, .and although he appears, lying between the sheets of his hospital bed, surrounded by food and friends, to be mushy, soft, like a rotten branch you think you can crack with a soft tap of your axe, you will find, beneath that soft white rotted sapwood, something unexpected: a long pipe of hard red wood which will, after all, take a good saw and some sweat if you are going to burn it.
Harry Joy, for all his vanity (watch him look sideways now, trying to catch an impossible evasive profile in the mirror), his blindness, his laziness, all his other foolishnesses, brought a surprisingly critical cast of mind to the question of salvation and damnation.
For if you had thought he would go running back into the skirts of his childhood church (what would Jesus have done?) weeping, asking for forgiveness, last rites and so on, you were in error. Which is not to suggest that the thought did not enter his mind – and cross it, most attractively, its sweet-smelling wool skirts swishing softly – for it did, on many occasions, and on more than one of them he put his hand to the buzzer and, once, pressed it, to ask them to bring him a priest.
'Yes, Mr Joy.'
'Nothing, Jeanette. I pushed it by mistake.'
He could not (for all his fear, for all his proof of Hell) bring himself to fully believe. He had never rejected the Christian God. But now, to believe just because he was frightened of hell seemed to him to be unreasonably opportunistic, and he could not do it.
(He hoped, just the same, that God saw him and at least gave him some marks for his honesty.)
Scratching around in that overgrown mess which constitutes his mental landscape, we might find a few undiscovered reasons for this. This is not to take credit away from him, for he hasn’t seen them, and is acting by his own lights, bravely.
But, look: the place he went to when he died bears abso-lutely no resemblance to the little wooden church of his youth, and the smells are not the smells of his Christianity, which were dry and clean like Palestinian roads through rocky landscapes, scented with cheap altar wine, floor polish, and the thin, almost ascetic, odour of his mother's perfume. It did not fit. It did not fit anything at all, except perhaps some stories he has since forgotten, but still retains, so one day he will remember them, even though they never appeared to him to have any religious intent.
Here, then, a fragment, dredged up from some dark comer of his memory: Vance Joy pretending to be a Hopi Indian.
'You may need a tree for something – firewood, or a house. You offer four sacred stones. You pray, saying: 'You have grown large and powerful. I have to cut you. I know you have knowledge in you from what happens around you. I am sorry, but I need your strength and power. I will give you these stones, but I must cut you down. These stones and my thoughts will be sure that another tree will take your place.'
'The trees and the brush will talk back to you, when you talk to them. They can tell you what's coming or what came by, if you can read them.'
Thus, Vance Joy, many years before. And perhaps it is the force of fragments like these, his father's unconfessed pan-theism, that kept his finger away from the buzzer for another day.
But, as the Reverend Desmond Pearce would say tomorrow, and as Bettina implied two days ago, there was no reason to think that, even if there was a Hell, Harry Joy should be sent there.
What monstrous crimes had he committed? A little adultery perhaps, an amount of covetousness when it came to other men's wives, but that was about all. So why should he lie in bed and gnash his teeth when, in all likelihood, he would be a Good Bloke for all eternity? And that, too, would have been the argument of his friends if he had ever been able to push through the dark curtain of embarrassment which surrounded the subject and actually lay down his frightful secret – there, disgusting thing! – before them.
But he could not, and did not, and instead the pressures of daily life in hospital crowded in upon him and he found time, all the time, being stolen from him in thin, wafer-thin, slices and great fat slabs during which he was placed on metal tables, had catheters inserted along the length of arteries and into his very heart, while wires connected him to dials and screens, and life itself contained enough terror to push his heart, one afternoon, into a dangerous arrhythmia.
He had seen his mother's sin on her death bed and he carried it with him for ten years knowing that when his time would come it would be the same for him, that her sin would be his sin, but worse, for although she feared damnation he knew she would be spared it.
He remembered now (in this antiseptic cold room full of dials), that dull grey hospital room of his mother's which smelt of cheap soap and the yellowed pages of old women's magazines. When he had arrived (puffed because he had run from the car park) she could no longer recognize him and thought that he was his father. He did not disillusion her, and had he tried she would have, in any case, maintained the illusion, for she was a stubborn woman when she had set her mind on something.
'Vance,' she wept, 'I have committed a terrible sin.'
He remembered how guilty he had felt, listening to her, as if he was prying into confessionals, opening letters not addressed to him. She clutched his hand, her skin was almost transparent, a dry crust of spittle marked the comers of her mouth.
'No,' he said, and then: 'What sin?'
'A terrible sin.'
'Don't tire yourself.' How stupid a remark. A few hours of life left, a few things to say, and what does tiredness matter? Don't talk, he had meant, be quiet!
'Vance...'
'Yes.'
'I have wasted my life waiting for you.'
'No!' But it was true.
'Waste, waste, waste.' She said. 'Oh, Vance, it is the only sin that cannot be forgiven.' And he saw, in the wrecked remains of her splendid dark eyes, his mother confront the shining steel orbs of hell.
It was not the buzzer which brought the Reverend Desmond Pearce but the good man's own blunt brogues, clumping down the hospital verandah as if testing for rot in its ancient planks. His swinging hands were rough, coarse with nicks and scabs, a hint that the saving of souls required something a bit more muscular than his 4PS, which – to get them out of the way here – were Prying, Preaching, Praying, and Pissing-off-when-you're-not- wanted.
Harry looked up from his cane chair, saw Desmond Pearce's face, and liked it immediately. It was a rugged, pock-marked face with a slightly squashed nose and a crooked grin. His hair was a curling mess and he showed the proper disregard for sartorial elegance which Harry had always seen as a sign of reliability in a person. Neat men always struck him as desperate and ambitious.
'G'day.'
'Hello,' Harry smiled, and noted the little gold cross, tucked away where a rotary badge might normally go, on the lapel of the crumpled grey sportscoat.
'Join you?'
'Go for your life.' There was something about Desmond Pearce that attracted such slanginess.
He dragged up a cane chair and sat down, pulling up his grey trousers to reveal footballer's legs and odd socks.
'What are you in for?'
'Heart,' Harry grinned. 'How about you?'
'Armed robbery.'
They laughed a little.
'Harry,' Harry said and held out his hand.
'Des.'
