Bliss by Peter Carey Read Free Book Online

laughing at lightning, falling in love in Colombia. He would be a businessman adventurer and return with money and strange stories.
    Harry looked at his son and was very proud of him. He was proud of how he looked, of his dark intelligent face and his rather shy gentle smile. He was proud that he had given him a book about an unusual business. He was proud of his academic record.
    'How's school?'
    'It's O.K. They treat us like kids.'
    'Well, you are a kid.' Harry took his hand for a moment and neither of them quite knew what to do. They wanted to hug each other but it was not what the family did. They were not touchers. Sometimes they tickled. Harry, for instance, was known to have particularly ticklish feet and David was remarkable for being almost immune.
    He did not want to burden his son with his father's death, and yet it seemed to him to be wrong not to tell him. They might only meet three, four, five more times and how would David feel to be cheated of this time, to squander it while his father tore up wrapping paper into little nervous strips.
    And yet when he did say it, it was so unreal, so lacking in feeling or conviction that he wondered, for an instant, if he wasn't just making it up.
    'David,' his son was still smiling, 'I've got to talk to you about what plans I've made,' the smile had gone, a frown begun, 'because there is some chance I'm going to die.' The dark eyes wide with shock, the mouth open, the head shaking.
    'No.' Harry took his hand. 'Don't be frightened. I'm not frightened.'
    'No.' Tears streamed down his face: 'You can't.'
    And suddenly they were in each other's arms and Harry held the hard young body as it was ripped with sobs.
    '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