Free Bliss by Peter Carey Page A

little in the hammock.
    'O.K., for the money, that too.'
    'Ha.'
    'What?' David frowned.
    'Ha.'
    'All I said was money, money too.'
    'Yes, precisely. I noted it.'
    And then, as he was wont to do on these occasions, Harry arched an eyebrow and cocked his head on one side just to let them know that he understood what was going on, that he knew where he was. But he was quite likely, in the middle of this protective cynicism, to be struck with confusion, and the least display of pain or tears could make him wonder if his real family had not, after all, been sent to Hell to accompany him, just as the families of the Pharaohs accompanied the Pharaoh into heaven, and this confusing tendency to switch from one view to the other was to stay with him for a great deal of his time in Hell.
    'You noted it?'
    'Your interest in money. I have noted it,' Harry said, 'many times.'
    'And I think the ad business could be better than medicine,' David said, pleased to be discussing finances, rather than .the sloppy old-fashioned view his father had once brought to the idea of medicine.
    'The prime attraction of medicine is really the money?'
    'Most of it,' David admitted, relieved.
    'Its main attraction.'
    'Yes.'
    This was not his son. This was someone pretending. In the pay of someone.
    'Who do you work for?' he asked his son, oh so casually, but the timing of it was wonderful: just slipped it in there, like so.
    David looked at him, his eyes wide. How many times had he wanted to discuss his business activities, his interest in drugs, the trips to South America? He wanted to talk business with his father, not business business, but adventure business. 'You mean,' he said, 'who do I work for?'
    'Yes.' Harry waited tensely. It was only a hunch. But look at him, look at him swallow, and his throat is dry when he talks:
    'Who do I work for now?'
    'Yes.' A single red poinciana flower dropped on Harry's white shirt and lay there like a pretty wound.
    'You know?'
    'What do you think? Who do you work for?'
    'Abe da Silva,' David Joy said melodramatically.
    Harry Joy did not know the heroes or the hierarchies of organized crime, so he did not understand either the size of the boast or the field of endeavour, neither could he judge that his son's claim was only true in the loosest most indirect way, just as a service station attendant might have once claimed to work for Aristotle Onassis.
    But what he did get was a name, his first name in Hell. He was an explorer, a cartographer, and on that great white unmarked map of Hell he could put this name, although quite where he did not know. Although, when David finally left him (his question unanswered, his private business undiscussed), his father would go back to his mental map, and beneath it, where one might expect the scale to go, he produced this key, this code, by which he now expected, like a zoologist, to classify the creatures he found there. Generalizing from his experience, he made a note of these:
    1. Captives. (Me)
    2. Actors. 'David' et al .
    3. Those in Charge. da Silva. Others?
    Finally, of course, the expected happened: his family kept out of his way. He prowled the lawn, haunted the garage, stared at the TV, and found himself isolated by his madness. David slunk home to get drugs and departed silently. Forever in the house you could find someone slinking up a stair, departing by a back door, running across a lawn with imaginary eyes burning into their back while Harry, the mad master, masturbated dully in his hammock or sharpened his pencil in the anticipation of some rare tit-bit of evidence.
    Bettina, once so fastidious about the house (for she had a strong streak of very-small-town politeness and a serious concern for what the neighbours thought, although she would have violently denied it), left pictures to hang crooked, floors unswept and meals, also, uncooked. She spent as much time as possible in Joel's flat viewing its idiosyncrasies with eyes sim-ilar to her son's, but having other,