Peter Carey

by Bliss

  He could not find a place to lie and his head filled with won't-stay-still thoughts: Joel's blubbery body, his burnt suit, Bettina's ads, his son's tears, Lucy's unknown boyfriend and – sharp, so painful he sucked in his breath – Honey Barbara getting out the door of the Jaguar.

  His thoughts were a merry-go-round. He tried to be definite, to pin down his problems and ideas and dissect them coldly, to adopt a plan, have an aim against which he could measure himself.

  But he had never, it seemed, believed in anything but his comfort and even these silk shirts hanging in the cupboard were enough to seduce him away from Honey Barbara.

  He could not sleep. He could not escape himself. He saw himself as worthless, so loathsome, shallow, hollow, as to be worth nothing. The idea of suicide whirled past him but he did not even look at it. Those unseen gods would simply send him back in for another round.

  He rolled over, swaddling himself in his sheet. In the room across the hall he could hear his son talking in his sleep. When he was younger the boy had been troubled by nightmares. They sometimes found him sleepwalking, talking as he went. 'I didn't do it,' he told them. 'I didn't do it.' They had never asked him what it was.

  He knew how the deal had looked to Honey Barbara. And now it looked the same to him. He could not claim ignorance. He had seen the cancer map. It glowed malignantly in his mind's eye. He had chosen not to see the subjects of Bettina's ads, but how could he ignore them? He had made the agreement with Bettina, he told himself, to get Honey Barbara out of hospital. But then why hadn't he gone to consult her about the deal when it was made?

  What would he do? Was a promise worth anything? Hadn't he promised Bettina? And didn't he, anyway, owe her something for having stopped her in another life when doing ads was an innocent thing.

  He went to sleep and dreamed about green ants.

  When he woke it was ten minutes to three. He knew he would have to find Honey Barbara and leave the city. He could not live here.

  The rooster crowing in the dim dark four o'clock did not sound like a real rooster but something more sinister, some mutilated thing with the top half of its call sliced off, an electric warning device which wouldn't start.

  If he stayed in Palm Avenue he could be safe. If he could not find Honey Barbara he could, at least, protect himself. He got up and went down to the kitchen where he began to do profit projections. The big round noughts began to soothe him, to give him pleasure, like the crinkling sound of tissue paper around an expensive present.

  When (at four twenty) he went out on to the verandah he was thinking of the uses of wealth, no longer merely relating them to the colours of wine and the quality of crystal. He had never wanted to be rich before. He had never quite seen the need. But now he thought of high brick walls they built around themselves, the grates, grills, jagged glass, Alsatian dogs, alarms, patrols and so on. Those were things that might be necessary.

  Lucy's car sat beneath him, its great rococo shape a reminder of a more ignorant and optimistic time. He was curious about the car and walked down the steps wishing to touch it. He had hardly talked to Lucy. He did not know what she wanted or why she wanted it. He did not know how she was being hurt, who she was hurting. All he had seen was that she was carrying a dream and the car was part of it.

  They were all carrying a dream except him. He had no dream. He wanted only safety. Why was he so empty? Why should everyone else have these passions and he have none. He stroked the car absently.

  Inside the Cadillac, Honey Barbara stirred in her watchdog sleep. The dope had hung curtains in her mind and she was not quite sure what was happening. Someone, she knew, was walking around the car and mumbling. She could not see if it was a man or a woman. She could only see the shape, and occasionally it would move and blend with other shapes, blackness on blackness, the shapes of witches transmogrifying. She breathed in the petrol fumes and felt damp with terror.

  'Curious,' Harry Joy said out loud, 'Very curious.'

  He was talking to her. He knew she was in there. He was saying – she understood him with dazzling clarity – it is curious that you are lying there and I am standing here.

  He turned on his heel and she slipped out of the Cadillac and followed him into the house. She was a little more stoned than she knew.

  There are times when the lips seem to sleep, to abandon their role as the signifiers of happiness, while the eyes become almost electric and not only the lips but every other organ must be subservient to them in this, their most splendid and spectacular moment.

  Thus: Honey Barbara, standing in the doorway at four thirty-two a.m.

  Her mouth was pale pink and sleep-soft when they kissed and all the world around them assumed an impressionistic softness and everything they looked at was coloured with dusty pastels which gave no sharp edges to forms, and even the white refrigerator they embraced beside seemed as mellow as pearl shell.

  When she was an old woman with crinkled skin, Honey Barbara would still remember this moment and how the refrigerator looked and how perfectly happy she was, to hold her lover in her arms in the midst of enemy territory and how his eyes had been as soft as those of an animal, a foal, something slim and strong and gentle, looking at her with such emotion.

  He could not stop stroking her. He stroked her face, her arms, her shoulders. She knew it was right to have come back because she too had made her promise.

  (He was ready to tell her. He had made up his mind. He would have gone with her then at that moment, not saying goodbye to anyone. He would have walked out the door and left those advertisements where they lay, in a great pile beside Joel's bed. But it was Honey Barbara who spoke first.)

  'I will stay three months,' she said.

  'I will cook,' she said, thus protecting them further.

  Harry considered it for hardly an instant. The silk shirts won.

  Later Honey Barbara was to think about how innocent she had been. To imagine she could hold him against the forces around her. Surrounded by the smells of animal fat, Baygon, Silicone, Fluorozene, Rancid Butter, Stale Beer, Cigarette Smoke, Ash, and even Oil and Petrol, bombarded by fluorescent light, enveloped by aggressive red walls, she had not been daunted.

  Then he took her briefly into the living room to show her the advertisements he had promised to sell. They sat in a long room where a man with battery-fed hips slept on a mattress on the floor.

  'Her lover?'

  'Used to.'

  They carried the advertisements back into the kitchen where he made her sit amongst the remains of Big Macs while he tried to explain them to her. She was shocked. She knew there was something magical about these things to him and she sensed their power. Yet she imagined herself equal to it. She was young and strong and confident. Later she would think she had also been naive.

  They put the advertisements away and stayed at the table holding each other's hands, kissing, confessing their angers and their doubts or, in Harry's case, some of them.

  In Honey Barbara's mind Bettina was a witch: powdered, smooth, white-skinned, dressed in black. So when she came out to the kitchen at six thirty in a pink dressing gown with puffy eyes, an olive skin, and a throaty sleep-stuck voice, Honey Barbara didn't even recognize her and only knew it was her because it had to be. She was shorter too, without her stiletto heels, and she shuffled into the kitchen and saw, immediately, that they had been looking at her advertisements. It seemed more important to her than any other fact.

  'Did you like them?' she asked. Honey Barbara saw how vulnerable she would be to any criticism.

  'They're very nice,' she lied. Bettina was a witch, but she felt sorry for her. Her lover was fat and slept on the floor. Her husband was holding hands with another woman. It hurt her badly, it was obvious: she swallowed and looked away and went to fuss about things over the kitchen sink.

  Honey Barbara followed her and embraced her. It was an awkward embrace, not just because Bettina was considerably shorter, but it was not rejected.

  'I would lik
e to do the cooking for you.'

  'No, no, it's not necessary.' Bettina turned and started fossicking in the sink.

  'I want to.'

  'It's not necessary. We'll cope.'

  Barbara looked desperately to Harry.

  'It's different cooking,' he said.

  This disclosure, his intimate and familiar knowledge of Honey Barbara's cooking, was more hurtful to Bettina than anything else that had happened. She filled a glass with water, drank half of it and threw the other half out.

  'It's healthy,' he said.

  'Fine,' she said. 'That'd be good.'

  'What time do you like to eat dinner?'

  'Eight.'

  'Is there anything you don't like?'

  'Nothing.'

  Bettina left and slammed the door behind her and it was Honey Barbara, abandoning all principle, who made her toast with white bread, strong instant coffee with white sugar, and took it up to her room where she sat shivering on a single bed.

  When David Joy came down to breakfast he found Harry and Bettina already gone and a beautiful young woman in the kitchen. She had lined up all the plastic garbage cans and was emptying the cupboards as fast as she could. Bread, sugar, cans of beans, jars of coffee, cornflakes, white flour, were all dispatched without hesitation. Only a small unopened packet of Torula Yeast seemed to have escaped her wrath.

  'I'm Barbara,' the young woman said.

  'David.'

  'I'm a friend of your father's.'

  He nodded darkly.

  'Do you want breakfast?'

  He nodded again and shyly regarded her firm arse which the morning sun revealed beneath her white cotton baggy pants.

  She went to the dining room and came back with a big cloth bundle. From this she produced four little brown paper bags which contained unprocessed bran, wheat germ, lecithin, and raisins. She put a dessertspoonful of each in a plate, mixed them up, added milk, and passed it to David Joy who was sitting on the edge of his chair.

  'What's this?'

  She did not take offence at his curled lip. She told him.

  'Why?' he said. 'I have cornflakes every morning.'

  'I'm cooking now,' Honey Barbara said firmly. 'Today I'll make you some good bread but for the moment this is all there is. So eat it. It'll make you shit properly. It'll give you roughage and vitamins to make your intestine muscles contract. It'll make your ·shit float, you watch.' And she smiled.

  David pushed his plate away in disgust. 'I don't want to talk about shit,' he said, 'and particularly not with a woman.'

  Honey Barbara shrugged and went back to tidying up the cupboard.

  'Did he meet you in the hospital?'

  'Sure did.'

  David left his bowl on the table and went upstairs, where he tried to persuade Ken and Lucy (who were meant to occupy separate beds while Bettina was in the house) to come down to the kitchen and make some kind of stand.

  The woman was mad. He was scandalized by her madness, her obsession with shit, her wastefulness, her firm arse, her pubic hair. Everything about her was wild and untrammelled and he thought, passing her, that he could smell her sexual organ, and he felt weak. Madness horrified David. Yet often he felt it press upon him. He felt soft fingers touch the outside of the concrete brick walls of his bunker. He could feel mumblings, murmurings, the passage of lightning through an unseen sky.

  Ordinariness pressed upon him: he invited it, needed it, embraced it. Look at this suit, so conventionally cut he might be a mere clerk. Was it a disguise, or was it the truth? Would he be too weak for the lightning? Would he be too brittle, have bones like sparrow wings? Would he simply snap?

  He did not want the mad person downstairs but he could not convince them. He saw they had private jokes about him and he regretted ever having told Lucy his dreams. He was stiff and formal in his suit but had she ever told Ken that she had sucked her brother's cock and swallowed his come, or did she simply tell him that he was a clerk who wanted to be a bandit, one more pathetic Walter Mitty. Was that why they lay there like that and smiled?

  Lucy and Ken were very interested in Harry's mad woman. They came downstairs the minute David left the house and they watched her throw foods into the rubbish bins as if they were poisonous substances that should not be touched, let alone eaten.

  They introduced themselves and sat at the table to watch her.

  'David thinks you're crazy,' Lucy said. 'He says you talk about shit like it was food and food like it was shit.'

  It was an aggressive beginning but Honey Barbara liked her. Further this occurred to her: Lucy Joy was someone, not someone famous or influential or even talented, but just someone. She looked like a wild plant, something bred for a purpose now going its own sweet way. Honey Barbara did not even notice that she was overweight or worry that the whites of the eyes in that dark face were a little on the yellow side.

  'He thinks you can't tell the difference.'

  'Sorry,' Honey Barbara tore her eyes away from the face, 'difference between what?'

  'Shit and food,' Ken said. He wore a Kentucky Fried peak cap and his curling hair rushed out beneath it, swept behind two large pixie ears, one of which held a small gold earring.

  They were both smiling (when Ken smiled he showed a lot of broken teeth) and Honey Barbara smiled too.

  'Everyone here is crazy,' Lucy said. 'I'll make you herbal tea.'

  'You've got herbal tea? Here?'

  'Been there,' Lucy said, 'done that.'

  It was a long time, six months, since Honey Barbara had been around anyone as young as Lucy and she remembered what a charge you could get from fifteen-year-olds: how fresh they seemed, and confident and strong, and also, what a pain in the arse they could be.

  'Why is everyone here crazy?' Honey Barbara noted that it was Ken who made the tea (with a lumpily rolled cigarette burning beneath his equally lumpy nose). He squinted down into the packet while Lucy talked.

  'Bettina's crazy because she wants to be an American; Joel is crazy because he'll do anything to get sympathy; David is crazy because he wants to be a dope dealer; and Harry must he crazy because he let the others lock him up.'

  Honey Barbara was charmed. She pulled up a chair. 'And why are you crazy?'

  Ken brought the cups to the table and put a big bag of dope beside them.

  'We're crazy because we like everything.' He said 'everyfing'. That made Honey Barbara like him more.

  'We like you throwing all this stuff out,' Lucy said, 'and we like David being pissed off. We like everything. We like her-bal tea and Coca-Cola and dope. There isn't anything we disapprove of.'

  Honey Barbara thought they were decadent but she liked them anyway. Not even her rather Victorian morality could censor them. What she did not know, and what they never told her, was they were on holidays. They were doing what every Party member must sometimes, in some secret corner of his of her heart, feel like doing – stopping analysing, appraising, and to hell with it all.

  At this stage, however, they did not know they were on holidays. 'Afterwards,' Lucy said, 'when the world is over, no one will know that all of this was really beautiful.'

  Honey Barbara closed her eyes.

  'It's not heavy,' Ken said.

  'We are into the late twentieth century,' Lucy said, 'and definitely not fighting against it. Enjoy it. It's incredible. The sunsets wouldn't look so beautiful if there wasn't all this shit in the air. It refracts the light and makes better sunsets.'

  'That seems pretty negative to me,' Honey Barbara said. 'You should be trying to change it.' An uncharitable observer may have noted a slight primness in Honey Barbara's mouth.

  'It's too late,' Lucy said.

  'With herbal tea?' Ken said.

  'We are the last,' Lucy said. 'It was always going to end. We are the first people to come to the end of time.'

  Ken .rolled the joint. He was the one whose 'Catalogue of good things about the end of the world,' an ever-expanding loose-leafed opus, had set Lucy off on her Apo
calyptic Holiday.

  'Our Cadillac will do ten miles to the gallon,' Lucy said. 'Dig it.'

  'How do you sleep at nights?' Honey Barbara said, in no way cut by Ken's jibes about changing the world with herbal tea.

  'We fuck,' Lucy grinned, 'until we can't do it any more.'

  And they all laughed and Honey Barbara, in spite of her resolution not to, shared their dope with them.

  'Well,' Ken said, 'why are you crazy? Why do you treat food like shit?'

  He was not being unkind but he had tapped a serious flaw in Honey Barbara's character: she could not joke about food. She divided the world into people who ate shit and people who ate good food.

  'This food is shit,' she said, 'and if I'm going to live here, Harry and I are going to eat good food.'

  'What do you think is Good?' Lucy said, leaning over her folded arms.

  'If you don't know, how can I tell you?'

  'No salt? No sugar? No meat? No white flour? That sort of thing?'

  'Fucking right,' Honey Barbara said, standing up and transferring her attention to the refrigerator.

  'Sounds boring to me,' Lucy said. (Ken started bundling up his dope.)

  Honey Barbara emptied the fridge in five quick throws, saving only the chilled alarm clock from destruction.

  'Come back at dinner time, smart arse,' she said to Lucy, 'and we'll see how bored you are.'

  Lucy grabbed a can of Coke from the garbage can. 'I'll be there,' she said.

  She made spinach soup with spinach and potatoes and onions and spiced it with a little nutmeg. She baked potatoes in their jackets, pumpkin, onion, and stuffed mushrooms. She braised the cabbage with onion and apple and garlic and (eager not to lose her first engagement) threw in a little red wine she found in the cupboard. When challenged about the presence of wine later, she denied it all.

  She steamed the sugar peas and planned to serve them in a big bowl.

  I'll give you boring.

  She made her famous apple and rhubarb crumble and sweetened it with the Rolls Royce of honeys. She said 'boring' out loud, like an incantation. She cooked with love and venom in almost equal quantities, the sweetness of one managing to offset the bitterness of the other.