by Peter Carey
They knelt on the floor beside it.
'This,' Adrian Clunes said, 'is a cancer map. It shows the incidence of cancers according to place of residence and place of work. There is a damn cancer epidemic going on, Harry Joy. They will not even sell these maps any more, let me tell you, they are shitting themselves.'
Harry watched it in horror. He could not disbelieve the map. He did not bother to study the relative proportions of tumours or understand all the accompanying statistics. He noted only that they were, at this moment, in the epicentre of Hell.
'It is an epidemic,' Adrian Clunes said angrily. 'And wait. You wait for another five years. This,' he tapped the paper, 'is what we get for how we live. And believe me, it is just hotting up.'
When he went back to his half-finished oysters he had become chalkish and pale.
.'My wife has cancer, Harry,' he said quietly. 'She weighs four stone and six pounds and everyone comes, like ghouls, to look at her. Our friends are nice enough to stay away,' he held up his hand. 'It's alright. Don't say anything. But don't preach to me about cancer. I know about cancer, dear Friend, from both sides.' He pushed his oysters away. 'I've lost my appetite.'
'I have to fire you,' Harry Joy said softly.
'I admire you,' Adrian Clunes said quietly. 'You are very eccentric, and most surprising, but I admire you. I wish you well.'
And as things turned out that day it became Harry Joy's task to think of ways to cheer up Adrian Clunes. He started by filling up his glass.
Lucy, it must be remembered, was only fifteen and a half years old, so although she was capable of some maturity, not to say wisdom, she was also capable of acting just like a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old.
Lucy is standing by the Mobil Station, hitching a lift to see Harry in the Hilton.
And there, right on the bend of the road, rolling hard and squealing its tyres, is a rusty Cadillac Eldorado with an unemployed motor mechanic named Kenneth McLaren at the wheel. He is twenty-two years old and his false teeth have been made to reproduce the crooked, oddly spaced teeth he had before. His cheeks are hollowed. He has a wizened, slightly old face, a mess of curling tangled hair and, in the centre of this wreckage, two doe-like brown eyes.
In the backseat of the Eldorado, together with fan belts, old radiator pipes, and reconditioned fuel pumps, is a great pile of papers.
There are two coincidences involved here. The first, the biggest, is that Kenneth McLaren has just, five minutes before, resigned from the Communist Party; the second, hardly a coincidence at all when you consider that Lucy, in her cheesecloth dress looks at once romantic and attractive and that she has her thumb out, is that he stops for her. And right now, it may as well be revealed: Lucy Joy will never get to the Hilton. Comrade Dilettante, meet Comrade Doomsday.
Adrian Clunes's high-pitched laughter filtered through the shut door.
Harry Joy sat on a low chair in his dressing gown and watched his girl. She was tall and straight and everything about her was vertical, even her profile, which was almost flat, interrupted only by the bump of her nose and lift of her lips. She was, from instant to instant, severely plain then astonishingly beautiful, and her most beautiful and obvious feature was her very large, almost impossibly large, brown eyes, which glistened with what Harry, entranced, chose to believe was suspicion. He was not wrong. She was like a cat that has come in a window. He knew her. He knew how she felt when she walked across the room touching things with her curious, long-fingered hands, stroking lamps, feeling fabrics, smiling absently. She was someone with a notebook in her hand. He felt that if he had jumped up from his chair she would have bolted, left in one silky movement: the leap of the cat from chair to window ledge.
'This your wallet?' It was sitting on top of the bar amongst some melting ice.
'Yes.'
'Your credit card in here?' She had a funny shy, sly smile.
'Is it the Diners Club?'
'American Express,' he said contrarily. He let her touch the wallet, open it, remove the card. He trusted her suspicion.
'Don't worry about me if I talk too much,' she said. 'I've just got all this city shit in my system. It makes me speedy.'
'Are you from the country?'
'No,' she said sharply. She brought a bulky credit card machine from her handbag. 'I'm not from anywhere.'
He smiled.
She smiled back, but uncertainly. 'I'm not into any funny stuff. No Golden Showers.'
'I don't want any funny stuff.'
'Change your mind, it's O.K. I'll just call the office, they'll send someone else.'
'It's O.K.,' he said. 'I don't want anything funny.'
'Better to get all that up front.'
'Cards on the table,' he teased her.
'All hanging out.'
'Et cetera,' he said.
She laughed, and ruined her third Diners Club form.
'Fuck it,' she said.
But she got the fourth one right and brought it to Harry to sign.
'Well,' she said, 'that's that.'
She went back to the bar and turned her back to him. She dropped a spoon and picked it up hurriedly.
'You wonder what I'm doing, don't you?'
Harry shrugged. She had a Band-aid on her leg, under her stocking.
'It's not what you think.'
'I didn't think anything.'
'It's not cocaine.'
'What is it?'
'Honey.' She held up a little jar about as big as an expensive shoe cream. She raised an eyebrow and he saw in the twist of her pale pink lips a drollness – this was a face that could be anything. She took a teaspoon full of honey and held it up before she ate it.
'This is very powerful honey. You shouldn't have more than a teaspoonful.' She screwed the lid back on and dropped it back into her bag.
'What does it do?'
'You people,' she said. Which people did she mean? 'You people are amazing. Look at my eyes. No, come here. Come over to the mirror.'
She held out her hand and he stood up. She led him to the vanity table where, sitting side by side, they put their faces up to the mirror.
'Put your face closer to mine,' she ordered. 'So you can see your eyes and my eyes.'
Harry looked into his dull grey eyes and looked at her glistening dark ones, the iris of such a dark blue it was almost black, the whites perfectly white.
'Your eyes are beautiful,' he said sincerely, looking at the reflection of her solemn face.
'Honey,' she said. She leant back from the mirror and looked at him critically.
'What do you eat?'
Harry tried to tell her.
'Christ,' she said in amazement. 'Let me look at your eyes. Hold still.'
She held his head and peered closely into his eyes while Harry was overwhelmed by the aromatics of her powerful honey. 'You eat a lot of salt,' she said.
'It's all there, in your eyes, years of salt. But you have very nice eyelashes,' she said: 'And you look a little like... turn that way… Krishna.'
'So I've been told.'
'You know who Krishna is?'
'Certainly.'
'You do?'
'Yes.'
She raised her eyebrows in surprise. 'Well,' she said, 'would you like some of my honey?'
She brought the spoon and fed it to him. 'This is leatherwood honey,' she said. 'The Rolls Royce of Honeys, from the leatherwood tree. Are you in a hurry to fuck me, or what, because if you want to, I'm you know, free any time.' She held out her hands, indicating the presence of a body. 'I guess this talk isn't very erotic for you.'
'More than you think,' he said rolling the honey around the inside of his mouth.
'Do you have lots of whores?' she asked him.
'A few.'
'Well you're lucky today,' she grinned, 'because you have struck a gifted amateur.'
What Honey Barbara said was not really true: she was not, strictly speaking, an amateur. Whoring was her one com-mercial talent and once a year, for two months, she
came down to the city and signed up with the Executive Escort Agency. She felt as ambivalent about it as she felt about the city itself, sometimes looking back on it with nostalgia and forgetting that daily life was normally spent in fear and homesickness.
Sometimes she liked her clients, but usually she didn't and when things got really bleak she would spend her time, against all her principles, doped to the eyeballs so she didn't feel a thing.
But this was her first commercial fuck of the year and he wasn't fat and flabby and when he got undressed she wouldn't get that unpleasant feeling that comes, like a sour gas, from bulging white mesh and nylon socks. Besides, he looked like Krishna.
She saw his passiveness and knew he was easy to handle, that she could walk away from him and it would be O.K. or she could take him, right now, and spread him out, like that, and have him lie, like so, on the floor, and devour him, first of all with her mouth and that there, at least, he would not smell too bad for a city man, and he would not fuck like someone running for a bus.
He was just a businessman, but she felt at home enough with him to put her heart into her work for an hour or two while she tangled her long legs with him, and when he brought his big moustache against her face, she did not mind kissing him.
*
She would never know, if she lived to be a hundred, how a big glob of come could be worth three hundred dollars. Three hundred dollars was enough to live on for six weeks. It was a roof. A water tank. A stove. It was thirty avocado trees. Half a horse.
'Was I worth three hundred dollars?' She snuggled into him. He looked pleased with himself. He had a crinkle in the corner of his eye.
'Every cent,' he said.
'Would you see me again?'
'Well,' he said, 'what do you think?' He was a thin man with a roly-poly voice. He was so foreign she couldn't imagine what his thoughts might be. Even his clothes felt foreign. She could not understand someone with a silk shirt.
'Oh,' she rubbed her head. 'I don't feel a thing.'
'Nothing?'
'Not a thing.'
'You must feel something,' he insisted, touching the nipple on her small breast. They both watched it grow erect.
'Something.' She pulled the sheet over the offending nipple. 'It's my Karma. You don't know what Karma is, do you?' she grinned. 'You know you look like Krishna. But you don't know what Karma is?'
He bowed his head humbly.
'Karma means that what you do in one life affects what happens to you in the next. Maybe I was a whore in the last life, so this life I don't like fucking much. It means if you're Good in this life you'll have a better time in the next one. Hey,' she hit his arm, 'are you taking the piss out of me?'
He was doing an imitation of a staring man. 'If you're Good?' he said.
'Stop it. Stop taking the piss.' She pulled the sheet up over her nose.
'No, tell me. If you're Good in one life you have a better time the next one?'
'Yes,' she said cautiously. 'Right.'
'That's what I'm doing.'
She started to laugh, but when she saw he was serious, she stopped. 'But you're a businessman.'
'Advertising.'
'That's really bad Karma.'
'No,' he said, 'no, I'm being Good.'
'You can't,' she said stubbornly. (How conceited. How stu-pid.) 'How can you? How could you?' She pulled the sheet down and let him see the straight thin line of her mouth.
'I just fired a two-rnillion-dollar client because his product causes cancer,' he said. 'That's him in the next room.'
Two million dollars!
'Really three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, I get 10 per cent commission from media and 7½ per cent service fee, which is three hundred and fifty thousand on two million.'
'Christ.'
'That's Good,' he said. 'It has to be.'
'I don't know,' Honey Barbara said, 'I suppose it must be.' It was more than you got for a good dope crop.
'And I'll tell you something else.' He jumped out of bed and ran across the room on tip-toe. 'I'll tell you something else.' He picked up a brightly coloured map and brought it back to bed. 'A cancer map.'
'Shit.'
Cancer Maps were part of Honey Barbara's folk literature, just like the Dream Police (a legendary squad of psychiatrists) and the whole cast of Cosmic Conspirators, the CIA, flying saucers, multinationals with seed-patents.
She had never seen a cancer map in her life. She looked at Harry Joy with new respect. 'Where did you get it?'
'I stole it,' he decided, 'from him.' He nodded his head next door.
'You're one hell of a businessman,' she said.
He bounced his bum around the bed.
'I trusted you when you walked in,' he said. He paused. He smiled. 'It is my opinion,' he said, 'that I am living in Hell, that this, all this,' he waved his hand around the room, 'is Hell.'
And sat there, with his eyebrows arched.
Where Honey Barbara came from, people believed many different things about the nature of reality. Christopher Rocks believed in Wood Spirits, and Edith Valdora understood how flying saucers propelled themselves; she was going to build a flying saucer herself and no one thought (no one said) she was crazy. John Lane had been a fish in another life, and people believed in Jesus Christ, the Buddha, reincarnation, levitation, and feared the three 6' s on the Bankcard as a sign of the Beast of the Apocalypse. Bart Pavlovich had been Astral travelling for years and would think nothing of opening a conversation by saying, '1 was on the Moon last night.' Which, as everybody said, was his reality.
When Harry Joy told her he thought they were in Hell she did not, for an instant, think that he meant it metaphorically. She understood him perfectly.
'Far out,' she said.
'But,' he said, 'what do you think?'
The connecting door was opening. She pulled a blanket up to hide the cancer map as the naked figure of Adrian Clunes stumbled across the room and lurched into the toilet. They waited while he vomited.
'Sorry,' he said when he emerged, 'she's using the other one.' He picked up his briefcase and walked back into the other room.
Honey Barbara threw the blanket back.
'Do you think I'm crazy?' he said.
'You're not crazy.'
'They're trying to lock me up.'
'1 bet they are.' She had never met anyone who had refused 350,000 dollars. She was more than a little impressed.
And then Honey Barbara, who knew a lot about such things, gave him his first lesson for survival in Hell, which dealt, for the most part, with psychiatrists and the police, and went under the loose heading of keeping yourself clean, by which she meant: no drugs, no funny books, no funny friends, just clean. Don't be a smart-arse with the cops, don't argue with them, don't let them search your room without a witness. Be nice to them, make them tea, don't let your voice shake when you talk to them, try to think of them as human beings. Always have money, never write down the names of lawyers but memorize their phone numbers and make sure they're up to date. If they send the Dream Police then don't fight with them because they're unhealthy and unfit and will use drug-guns on you and not their fists and you will arrive unconscious and not be able to admit yourself voluntarily (always admit yourself, always sign yourself in, and then, with luck you can sign yourself out later). Most of all, never admit that anyone is trying to threaten you, get you, attack you, hurt you, poison you, radiate you, punch you, pinch you, fuck you, or, in any way at all, do you the slightest bit of harm for these are the symptoms of paranoia and they are, Honey Barbara said, illegal and you can get locked up for showing them even though you really are being radiated by the air and poisoned by the water.
Harry was overcome with this gift. He looked at her, smil-ing, shaking his head and holding her hand.
He was in love.
He wanted to give her a present, something glistening and wonderful. He brought it out and displayed it, revealing it shyly, the way one draws back the tissue paper from around
an opal to display it lying in its fragile nest.
He told her what it was like to die. When he had finished the room was totally dark and all he could see were Honey Barbara's two huge eyes.
'I'm going to leave you some honey,' she whispered at last.
It was only later that he appreciated it, what it meant; leaving the honey behind, and then he only appreciated a little of it and it would be another full year before he knew the whole truth about Honey Barbara, who may have been only an amateur whore but was more than a little knowledgeable about other things.
She became Harry’s trusted guide to Hell, and he became her client, so that every morning at around ten o'clock she would enter his room and run off a Diners Club card.
Honey Barbara lived not far from the Hilton in a small crumbling house with fifteen green plastic garbage bags of marihuana stashed above its bulging plaster ceiling. She shared the house with Damian who had come down with her and whose job it was to sell the crop, something he seemed to have stuffed up. He was immersing himself in a whole lot of city shit that Honey Barbara didn't understand. He was eating Kentucky Frieds and Big Macs and she noted with disapproval that he was starting to put on fat around his hips.
She woke him to tell him.
Maybe, she thought later, that hadn't been very nice, but he was always asleep when she got home and in the mornings, of course, they always had to get up at four a.m. and get out of the house, just in case.
He shouldn't even have been there. He should have sold the crop and been on the road home.
'You're getting really fat, man.'
'What?'
'The whole house stinks of dead chicken.'
'You woke me up to tell me that?' Damian sat up in his bed and she could see that layer of fat just sort of hanging, nothing really noticeable yet, but soon he would be covered with poisonous fat from cancered chickens and Big Macs. 'You're fucking unreal.'
'Come on, Damian. I'm doing my job. I'm working. I've got a right to know. What are you doing about the dope? Why are you eating all this shit? You should be home by now. They need the money, you know that'