by Peter Carey
'Did you wake me up to have a fight? Are you so full of city shit you have to fight someone?'
'I am not full of city shit. Who's been eating Big Macs?'
'Well go to sleep.'
'I want to talk now. It's the only time we can talk.'
'Spend some time here tomorrow.'
'I've got a client.'
'Who's full of city shit then?' He smiled his big white smile and raised a guru-type eyebrow, or at least that was the intention of the eyebrow. 'Maybe that's just your projection, Honey Barbara, because you're into this bad trip fucking fat businessmen.'
'It wasn't my decision.'
'It doesn't matter whose decision it was because in the end it's your decision. It's your Dharma.'
'My client isn't fat. You'd like him, Day. He's astonishing.'
He rolled over and left her to look at his hairy back. 'You're really into a bad scene, Barb. I don't want to hear about the fucking... '
'Come on, Day,' she sat beside him. 'You know I don't feel anything...
He laughed into the pillow.
'I was hypnotised,' she yelled, 'you know I was hypnotised. It cost fifty dollars so don't you laugh.'
He stopped laughing but he lay still.
'What's happening with the dope?' she asked quietly. She waited for a while. 'Day?' He didn't move. 'You're lying here all day getting radiated with television and smoking cigarettes and eating sick chickens full of antibiotics and God knows what shit you're breathing. You're meant to be home. They need the money.'
Damian rolled on his back and stared at her. 'We got ripped off,' he said. 'They had a gun. They took it all. I can't go home.' And there, in the middle of the dead chicken carcasses and the Big Mac boxes, he started crying.
'Good old Honey Barbara,' she thought bitterly as she held his weeping body in her arms.
She always forgot the fear when she remembered the city afterwards. She did not forget its existence, but she forgot the intensity of it, its total gut-wrenching, dull-eyed, damp-handed presence. It was not the run down in the truck with the bags of dope in the back. That wasn't so bad. They dressed like farmers and drove the back roads.
It was the time of waiting to sell it that she always forgot: the fear of the police, the fear of narcs, spies, the fear of being ripped off, so that everyone they spoke to was potentially an enemy and there was no such thing as 'just a police car' or 'just a visitor'. Everyone looked like a narc. Every parked car seemed occupied by big men reading newspapers. Every public phone box contained strange clicks and faint voices. When the front door bell rang your guts went tight.
But each year when the wet ended she found herself looking forward to it again, and if she remembered the fear about the dope at all, there was no chance of her recalling that other, duller, perhaps more dreadful fear she felt in the city.
She remembered the bars and restaurants and movies and even the junk food seemed tasty in her memory and the businessmen didn't seem so bad and she remembered the good times and ones who danced. And when it was almost time to go people said, 'Look at Honey Barbara,' for she was high as a kite just at the thought of it and when they hit the wide yellow plains going south and there were no hills, just this wonderful yellow sea and huge sky her heart damn near burst with happiness, and she had forgotten.
She had forgotten how damn miserable they all looked and how dirty the air was and most of all she had forgotten the anger. They seemed knotted in anger, and the whole of the city seemed like it was about to uncoil itself in a paroxysm of fury.
She went to the movies but no longer understood the lives on the screen and she felt a lack of sympathy which would have enraged the rest of the audience who laughed or cried on cue, as expected.
'They're so fucked up,' she said. 'How can I identify with that? It's all so depressing and ugly. I can't stand all this negativity.'
To Honey Barbara the city was a force, half machine, half human, exuding poisons.
And this year it was worse. This year they had been ripped off. This year there had been a gun. This year there was no money, and a whole season's work, all those bags of manure they had carried on their backs along bush tracks, all those little plants they had nurtured, protected from wallabies, hidden from the air, all this was wasted.
This year the only money would come from Honey Barbara, lying on her back, staring at the ceiling, too doped-up to feel a thing.
She sat in the Hilton in Harry's room and not even the long blue stripes on the carpet, the turquoise Thai silk covers on the chairs, none of the carefully chosen blues or greens did anything to give her peace because they were cold and synthetic and looked poisonous to touch.
Harry was talking on the phone and lying to Adrian Clunes about the cancer map. It was probably bad Karma. They had discussed it seriously.
The map lay on the table, and somewhere, somewhere she wouldn't tell Harry, was the place where Honey Barbara lived. She looked longingly at the cool (safe) yellow of the north and the fine blue line of the unnamed creek she knew, and imagined, for it wasn't shown on the map, the rutted track that ran up to Mount Warning and the Silky Oak plantation where Bog Onion Road had once been and the smell of the mill when it worked in the winter and the good clear hard noise of the blade as it cut into a tallow wood, beside whose stump, in the bush, another tree had been planted.
And most of all she thought about those blossoms which grew through the swaying green umbrellas which made up the roof of the forest, and on which the bees feasted: the stringybark with its characteristic sharpness, the sarsaparilla which was sweet and heavy and a little dull, and the showy red flowering gums bending in the south-easterly which swept the hill above the valley.
She did not, thinking about all this, forget bad things and a number of deaths salted the memory, one in particular: the bloated body of an unknown man hanging from a casurina above the falls. Nor did she ignore the presence of neigh-bouring people who thought differently: Ananda Marga, the Orange People, the Hari Krishnas and others, not all of whom could be trusted to be peaceful and some of whom had armies of their own, weapons, deadly secrets, secret rituals, ritual killings. Witchcraft was practised in the bush and the head of a sheep, or a pig, writhing with maggots, lay often in the path of Honey Barbara's horse, and the night was a less innocent place than it had once been.
Yet Honey Barbara, in the Hilton, wanted only to tell Harry how it was to wake up in the morning and hear those giant tallow woods talking to each other.
He put down the phone and smiled at her.
'I'm pleased I met you,' she said, looking up at him from the synthetic floor.
'I'm pleased I met you.'
'I don't think I could hack it otherwise.'
'Likewise.'
'How about,' she said, 'we go out today, to the park, and I tell you the names of trees.'
'They're taking their time coming for me,' said Harry who could not have appreciated the difficulties a seventeen-year-old boy has in being taken seriously, especially when he is carrying five thousand dollars in cash in his back pocket and runs the risk of simply having it removed from his person.
'They'll come,' Honey Barbara said. 'Just when you think they've forgotten, they'll turn up. That's why you've got to get up early.'
'I've never been able to get up early,' he yawned. It was certainly true that he had shown a remarkable facility for ignoring alarm clocks, telephone calls and the sound of the human voice.
'The alarm goes ·off at 4 a.m. and I get up and sit in the park till seven.'
'They might come at seven thirty, just when you get home.'
'No, they never do.'
'Or seven fifteen, or lunchtime.'
'No, they only come early in the morning. Even in the country, when they have to drive hundreds of miles, they never come after seven. Your alarm clock,' she said, 'is your key to freedom.'
It was one of her expressions. The other was: 'One in every three is a spy,' a statistic she quoted with great confidence.
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'I feel safer in the Hilton,' he said.
'You are safer in the park with me.'
So every morning they sat and shivered in the pre-dawn grey of the park, arriving too late for the warmest places which were inhabited by winos. They wrapped themselves in Honey Barbara's blankets. Their teeth chattered. Sometimes they made love. They were not unhappy.
Harry was more alive than he knew, and his life was filled with more delights than he could ever remember, and all of this took place in a climate of fear and watchfulness, where every waiter was a spy, every wino an informer. His eyes improved. He learned to recognize the glittering poisons the city placed in his path. Gleaming fruit had DDT lying just beneath the surface of its tempting skin.
He gave up meat, coffee, salt and anything they cooked in the Hilton kitchen. They ate fruit with spots and bread with lumps in it. He gave up everything his guide suggested except wine and it was he who introduced her to it: at the end of weeks of tuition she could truly appreciate the crushed violet nose of a 1973 Cheval Blanc.
Honey Barbara submitted to the evils of alcohol with a guilty flush. Dropping her perky little nose into a glass of Mouton Rothschild, she murmured: 'It's probably organic' before she took the precious fluid into her mouth and closed her glistening eyes with pleasure.
It was three thirty in the morning when the phone rang.
'Hello.'
'Harry, it's Alex.'
'Hello, Alex.'
'Got to talk to you, Harry.'
'Where are you?'
'Reception. Downstairs.'
'O.K., it's 2121. The twenty-first floor.'
He hung up and dressed quickly.
He turned on the light in the sitting room and opened its door a little. Then he retired to the bedroom, locked the interconnecting door, turned off its light and opened the door just a fraction so he could see out of the lift. He had his shoes on, his wallet in his pocket.
But when the lift door opened it revealed only the-large soft stumbling figure of Alex Duval.
'In here, Alex.' He turned on the light in the bedroom and held open the door.
'Sorry, Harry.'
'Don't be sorry.'
Alex had a big, pale, sick face. 'Harry I've got to talk to you. I'm drunk. I'm sorry I'm drunk,' he said belligerently as he stumbled into the room and sat heavily on the bed. Harry went into the sitting room and brought back a bottle of Scotch, a glass, and a jug of water. Alex drank greedily from the big tumbler. Harry leant against the window, waiting silently.
'You don't talk much any more, Harry.'
'Not so much.'
'You were a good talker, Harry. That's what made you, you know that? Not what you said, no.' He paused and considered this. 'It was the damn way you said it.'
'I'm learning to listen,' Harry smiled, but he was cautious.
'I'm leaving the agency.'
'Ah.'
'That all you can say? Ah?' he mimicked nastily. 'Ah.' He poured another Scotch, half Scotch, half water; the tumbler filled to the brim. While he occupied himself with this, neither of them said anything.
Alex sipped and looked up, his white face sweating alcohol.
'You're a smart-arse, Harry.' He had Chinese food spilled down his shirt. 'You're a cold fish.'
Harry appeared to lean against the window without a tight muscle in his body. He was ready to run.
'You were never cold, Harry, you were warm. You were such a warm person. You were a fool,' he lifted his finger, careful that his argument should proceed honestly, 'you were a fool, but you were warm. Now you're cold. All you care about is yourself and you've left us in the lurch. What's in there?'
'That's the sitting room.'
'Fuck it, we go there. I didn't come here to sleep with you.'
Harry followed the big man into the sitting room and watched him lower his sizeable arse on to the little Thai silk chair.
'Didn't come to sleep,' he said, arranging his bottle and his jug on the floor, 'How much does all this cost?'
'Two hundred a day.'
'Fuck you, Harry. You've left us in the lurch. You fire Krappe Chemicals. Poor Joel, poor little schmuck, poor dumb ambitious little schmuck. It's not his fault. You don't even tell him, you just talk to the client and fire him. Two million dollars. Poof. Like that. What's in there?'
'That's the passage.'
'Ah.'
'Alex,' Harry said cautiously, 'don't you remember we had a talk one Saturday morning, I promised I'd fire them for you.'
'I didn't ask you to.' Alex sprang from his chair and then forgot why he'd done it. The Scotch in his hand swayed dan-gerously. 'You decided to do it. You stole my fucking key,' he said incredulously. 'You stole my key. You interfered in my life. So I'm crazy. So what? So I write funny conference reports and never send them to anyone. Was it doing any harm? Did it hurt you?' He started to sit down but stopped. 'You are so naive, do you know that? All your life you walk around and never see anything bad. Anybody who says any-thing is bad looks like a sour grape. That's what you do to people. I say, 'Oh, so-and-so's an old cunt' and you look at me, Harry, like I'm a cunt. You don't want to hear bad about anything. The papers are full of this cancer stuff and what do you say, 'Oh, it's nothing, just a scare,' because you think they're cunts for calling Krappe cunts. Now you bloody wake up. God knows why. Why?' he asked.
'Doesn't matter why,' he answered. 'You don't know why. I don't know why. But when you suddenly realize what the world is like, then you go around destroying all the people who've known all along. Why do you want to destroy me?'
It was five minutes to four, five minutes before Harry had to leave the room. Now Alex's hand was twisting his shirt just the way Hastings had done. Alex was a big man. He stood over Harry and twisted his shirt with more strength than anyone would have guessed him capable of.
'Why do you want to destroy me?'
A look of indescribable contempt passed over his soft fleshy face, turned in on itself, and collapsed into nothing. His hand unclenched and he left Harry with only pain.
Alex lowered himself into the chair, letting himself drop the last six inches. 'I drove round all night because I was frightened to tell you. Why should I be frightened of you? You're pathetic. You're not worth being frightened of. I'm going to work at Ogilvy's. They like me. They damn well like me. Adrian Clunes phoned me and asked me if I would handle his account. You see, it's amazing isn't it? It's bloody amazing. All these years I've handled the account and you've taken the profit. Well now they're making me a director. That's what I'm worth to them.'
'I fired them for you,' Harry said, and came and sat opposite him in just the way he had, a week before, sat opposite Adrian Clunes. 'I fired them to save you, damn it. Don't you remember? I fired them because you were a Captive and ...'
'Ah,' Alex waved a hand and spilt whisky down his shirt. 'Captives…'
'Were you trying to trick me? Did you trick me into firing them?'
'Harry...' He opened his big pink palms and held them out.
'Because if you did…'
'Harry.'
' ...I don't mind.'
'You're looking at your watch and I'm trying to tell you I'm sorry.'
'I've got to go soon.'
'Everything's shut. I'm fucking saying I'm sorry. Doesn't that mean anything? I've got to live, that's all. I've got to make money. You would have fired me in the end. You would have had to. Don't blame me.'
'I'm putting you to bed.'
'I'm not an Actor, Harry. I’m just Alex, fuck it,' he sniffed. 'Fuck it.'
He did not resist when Harry led him into the bedroom and he began, without any hesitation, to get undressed. 'I betray you, you betray me,' he said. 'Oh, fuck.' He fell over one leg in his trousers and Harry helped him out of his big grey socks and his surprisingly fine silk underpants. He registered, in a moment of shock, the enormous size of his flaccid penis and, as he tucked him into bed, he thought how unused it looked, fed on doughnuts and cream cake.
It
was three minutes past four.
Doctors Hennessy and Cornelius travelled up in the lift bound for the twenty-first floor. They did not like each other. Cornelius's squashed little face was hidden behind a trimmed black beard and his shirt was open to reveal a hairy chest. He looked up at Hennessy and winked for no reason.
'How is it, Ace?'
Hennessy regarded him from pale, pale blue eyes. 'Well enough,' he said coldly, 'well enough.'
On the twenty-first floor they knocked, and when they were not admitted, entered with the key which had been provided. They found their mark sitting up with the sheet held the way women do when they want to hide their breasts.
'Good morning,' Hennessy said formally, 'I am Dr Hennessy and this is Dr Cornelius.'
'You've come for Harry, haven't you?'
'Yes,' Cornelius said, and opened his bag on his unmade bed, looking at the mark and guessing his weight at 200 lbs or 400 mgs of Pentothal.
'He's really gone crazy.'
'So they say,' said Cornelius, drawing up the required 400 mgs into the hypodermic.
'Well ... are you going to wait ... or what?'
'Or what, I should think,' Hennessy said drily, taking his papers from his bag, watching while Cornelius fitted the charged hypodermic into the dart gun he had personally invented.
'Now, Mr Joy,' Cornelius said, 'we would like you to come with us very quietly and we will take you somewhere where they will make you better.'
'No,' Alex said, 'you don't understand.'
The bedclothes trailed out into the corridor like guts from the disemboweled room.
Neither Harry Joy nor Honey Barbara said a word. They stood for a moment and listened. Only the muffled noise of the lift dropping down the shaft broke the stillness.
Harry entered the room first. When he saw the broken chair in the doorway, the blood on the floor, the gaping guts of the television set, and the hunk of hair on the bathroom basin which looked pubic but had actually come from Dr Cornelius's bleeding face, he merely nodded, and although he was shocked he was not surprised.
Honey Barbara put down the box of food on the ruined bed. 'Poor man,' she said. 'He fought them.'
Harry nodded. He felt ill. He stood the bedside lamp upright and put the phone back on its hook.