Bliss by Peter Carey Read Free Book Online Page A

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