Peter Carey

by Bliss

  'Sorry. I don't follow you.'

  'Their fault,' she said impatiently, her voice rising in pitch, 'their own fault. Anyone who reads the papers knows what causes it.'

  'Ah, cigarettes.'

  'Cigarettes!' She swung in her chair and for a moment he thought she was about to leave the room. She put her thin arms along the arms of the chair and held them tight. 'Cigarettes.' Her eyes swam behind her glasses like gold fish. 'Alice, you are being intolerant,' she said. She bestowed upon him a smile which was obviously intended as a gift of some munificence. 'I thought the press had covered it quite adequately,' she said with buttered patience. 'But it is generally recognized by more advanced members of the profession that cancer is caused by emotional repressions. Now if they would use us as a therapeutic, preventative force...'

  Liar! Fart-face!

  It was not the lie that did it. It was the weeks, the months of slights, insults as fine as razor cuts across his undefended ego. But it was at this moment, at this particular lie, that anger came to him.

  He had known the quiet superiority of being a Good Bloke. But beside this there was a nagging doubt that something was missing from him, that he suffered an impotence. For instance, when he saw a chair raised above a head in a movie he felt both excitement and resentment that this passion was denied him. When Bettina became angry he felt a jealousy. When she threw a plate, he envied her.

  When he should have become angry, he got hives instead.

  And now, like a dream in which one can fly, he was angry.

  A wall of wax had gone, a blockage removed, and the feeling of anger flooded through him and it was better than it had been described, was more like he knew it must be. It was pleasant. It was a gift, a drug as wonderful in its way as sexual pleasure. It made you feel bigger, stronger, taller, invincible.

  But still he hid it, holding it like a hot chestnut in a cupped hand.

  'Saccharine causes cancer,' he said. He tugged at his moustache.

  'Are you a Communist, Mr Duval?'

  'No.' He ran his hands through his California Poppy hair.

  'That sounds very like a Communist to me. The Americans are a very fine race of people, Mr Duval, but they have filled their government agencies with Communists and liberals and they will not get rid of them.'

  The muscles around his neck were knotted into hard lumps and his eyes were red. Tendons stood out on his neck like lumps of straining rope.

  'These people hate business,' the liar was saying. 'They are jealous of people with power, successful men who have made a name for themselves.'

  He stared at her, his eyes bulging.

  'Perhaps I talk too much,' she sighed, trying to consider her complicated character with some objectivity.

  Harry Joy clasped and unclasped his hands.

  He would have liked to strangle her with his bare hands. He would have liked to break her neck and jump on her head till her brains oozed out her earholes. He could have broken up her desk with an axe and eaten her vases for breakfast.

  With a purr of pleasure, he opened his hands and let her escape.

  He walked down the steps in a daze, surprised to find sunlight and myna birds scavenging behind the kitchen. He was so angry, he wanted to sing.

  Jim and Jimmy were talking to a female patient. The female patient was about twenty-seven and dressed in baggy white pants and a yellow T shirt. She had a wide straw hat with a scarf around its brim, but not even' that could hide the luminosity of her big dark eyes.

  As he passed the group Harry heard her say: 'I don't feel a thing, not a thing.'

  Honey Barbara remembered the first time she had seen a new car. It was in Bog Onion Road and she was still a child. It was a raining day right in the middle of the wet season, just at the time when everything is starting to get covered with mildew and a treasured book or favourite cushion will suddenly show itself to be half rotten .with mould. Little Rufus came running through the bush to Paul Bees (Honey Barbara's father) to tell him there was an American with his car stuck on the second concrete ford and it was being swept away. If he’d known it was a new Peugeot, Paul would have run even faster than he did. But he didn't know, so he slipped on a pair of shorts out of respect for the unknown visitor and jogged down the track. He had a small body, but it was wiry and strong, and the American, one would guess, would have been pleased to see him coming.

  Paul Bees was also known as Peugeot Paul and ever since Honey Barbara could remember there had been long boring community meetings in which someone would raise the question of his Peugeots. He had a whole paddock full of them, or at least, a paddock devoted to five 'Peugeots of varying ages, dating back to a time when it had seemed to him that only a Peugeot would be strong enough and sensible enough to handle the rigours of Bog Onion Road. But by the time the American got stuck on the Ford they were slowly rusting, disappearing under the ever-encroaching lantana bush, and when they were discussed there were always those who thought them unsightly but there was not really anyone who didn't secretly agree with Paul's belief that they were potentially valuable. And indeed in those days it was not uncommon (yet hardly frequent) to find some lost man in an old Peugeot looking for Paul Bees and he would be directed to the only sign in all Bog Onion Road. It read: Paul Bees, Honey, Bog Onion Road. That was in the days when they still had visitors and her father and the stranger would spend an afternoon wresting some valuable part from an ancient Peugeot 203 and often it would turn out that the visitor had no money and would stay for dinner, and once, in the case of Ring-tail Phil, stayed for a whole year and had to be told to leave and then, as Paul pointed out so bitterly, left behind the wiper motor he had come to find in the first place.

  But on the day that Albert brought his new Peugeot to Bog Onion Road he did not come looking for second-hand parts, but for land. Later he was to learn that he had smuggled a Range Rover from Mexico into America by driving it across the Rio Grande, but if this was true he must have forgotten the trick because he stalled his new Peugeot in two feet of fast water and then opened its bonnet to let the monsoon rain com-plete the job.

  When Paul and Honey Barbara arrived at the creek it was raging high and Albert, his carrot red hair plastered flat on his head and his beard soaking, was standing on the downstream side of the stalled car, smiling a desperate gold-toothed smile at his rescuers, and trying to push the car back against the current.

  Soon Robert arrived, and Dani, and Sally Coe turned up with five bedraggled cockerels in the back of her ancient Peugeot. They pushed against Albert's Peugeot and had a conference. The rain poured down harder and harder but they kept their clothes on from respect for the man with the new car.

  The electrics were wet beyond saving and in the end it was agreed that Paul would get his winch, but the cable on it was broken and had to be repaired and while that was done Honey Barbara and the others leant against the car. The creek was stronger. It pushed the car towards the edge an inch at a time while they waited for Paul to fix the winch.

  Her father was a small wiry man who understood physics. In a problem like lifting a forty-foot-long tree trunk for a house's ridge beam or removing a Peugeot from a flooded creek, his opinion was always listened to. If there was an argument about how best to pump water or difficult problems to do with mechanics, Paul Bees was the person to see. If he didn't know, he had three physics text books he could refer to and if they didn't know he would have a pretty fair guess. One year he had bought a second-hand electronic calculator with Sines, Cosines and Tangents on it. But the batteries had gone flat and he had made, or started to make, an abacus, but he gave it away and the beads now, ten years later, were part of a curtain in Honey Barbara's own house.

  Honey Barbara's mother was not called on that day. Her expertise was in the area of healing and incantations and although, in one brief, disgraceful period, she had fallen prey to the Pentecostal Christians (it was said, jokingly, that she only rejected them because they insisted she marry Paul and stop living in sin), she espouse
d for the most part that peculiar hotch-potch of religion and belief and superstition which made up spiritual life in Bog Onion Road. Crystal was always called to adjudicate on such delicate matters as whether, when forming a circle to chant OM, the hands should be crossed right over left or left over right and whether the energy ran around the linked people in a clockwise or anti-clockwise direction. From her mother Honey Barbara learnt something about healing and a little ritual, but not very much. She could, at least, stand in the middle of the circle and pick up all the energy being generated by the people and then beam it to whoever in the circle needed help or energy or love, as in the case of a bereavement. She could also take the energy and beam it to people far away, but these were hardly special skills and there wasn't a kid standing there pushing against the side of the stalled Peugeot who couldn't do them too. From her mother she learned Tai Chi, massage, and from her also she inherited a strong straight body and beautiful eyes.

  But from her father she learned how levers work and how bees live and how to look after them. She learned to tell what honey had been collected by taste and when to move the hives and how to do it. She also learned how to graft fruit trees, how to kill a hen, nail a nail straight, make soap, play the guitar, dig a post hole, sharpen a saw and fight a bushfire with wet sacks.

  So there was nothing in her education to prepare her for the American on the bridge and although she did not remember even talking to him on that day (she remembered only the gold teeth which she had never seen before) she was to formally marry him in two years' time, almost to the day. The marriage, as it turned out, was bigamous. In fact, a great number of things turned out differently from how they appeared and from Albert Goodman she was to learn candle-making (he set up a factory in Bog Onion Road) and the hit-and-miss art of running from the police, who were looking for him constantly. At sixteen, standing on the bridge, she had never seen a city, never been to a restaurant or stayed in a hotel; she had never been a whore; she had never been in jail or in a mental home.

  All she understood was why that car, now connected by a winch to a large blood wood, was slowly inching its way out of the stream. She helped her father dry off the electrics and rode in her first new car up to their house where they all got stoned and Paul made everybody laugh by climbing under the new Peugeot with a torch, lying in the warm mud, admiring the ruggedness of its construction.

  They did not know then, giggling in the twilight with that damp, mildewy, warm smell that everyone lived in then, that in two years' time that Peugeot would be wrecked at the bottom of a valley and that later still Honey Barbara would strut across the bitumen with ugly high heels strapped to her beautiful feet, an expert on fear, poison and the city-life.

  Harry Joy slunk across the bitumen and sat beside the kitchen gully trap where the air was redolent of grease and cabbage. Steam issued forth from the metal grating in front of him but did nothing to obscure his greasy ratty Californian Poppy hair which fell across his collar in little tails and left dark brush-strokes of oil on his silk shirt.

  His ears stuck out. His once-proud nose had three pimples hovering just beneath the surface. His shoulders were hunched. His eyes bulged.

  This greasy-looking spiv is examining his anger like a beggar who has found a jewel. Look at his cunning face, the way it darts sly looks at Jim and Jimmy, and at Honey Barbara who is flirting with them.

  Honey Barbara thought she'd lost him for ever, and then she saw him sitting amongst the cabbage steam and her emotions were confused. She was so flustered she didn't know where to look and her smile, she knew, took on an idiot quality as she looked at Big Jimmy without even thinking what it meant and saying goodbye and walking across to Harry. She'd thought she loved him. She was not pleased with him. She had intended to punish him for his stupidity, but when she .saw his rat-face held down with guy-rope tendons, she was too upset to punish him.

  'Fuck,' she hissed, 'what have you been eating?'

  'Christ I missed you,' he said fiercely. 'I fucking missed you.'

  'What have you done to yourself? You look revolting.'

  He gave a street-rat's lift of the head, a pick-pocket's nod. 'Trying to sweet-talk her.'

  She folded her arms across her chest and squeezed all the colour from her lips. 'Harry, no one's going to fuck you looking like that. You left my address in your room.' She squatted down and looked into his eyes. 'That was very uncool.'

  'I should have had my suit,' he said. 'If I’d had my suit she would have been a walkover.'

  'Did you hear what I said? You left my address in your room.'

  'They came in the afternoon/ he sniffed. 'It's not my fault.'

  'They only come in the morning.'

  'But they came in the fucking afternoon.'

  'What's the matter with you?' She stared at the wreckage of his irises. 'You've been eating shit. Buckets of it.'

  He bent his fingers back and clicked his knuckles. 'I'm angry,' he said with self-satisfaction.

  'Your muscles are knotted.'

  'It's fucking fantastic,' he said, 'it's wonderful.'

  'And your hair stinks.'

  'I have erotic dreams about you,' he said, 'all the time. I miss you. I dream about honey and brown bread and fucking. Where have you been?'

  'Here,' she said. 'Where else? Because you left my address I had to get rid of the money.'

  'Why?'

  'Don't you start.'

  'You've been here all the bloody time?'

  'I thought they'd come and bust me for the money. I burnt it. I started to burn it and fucking Damian called the fucking cops.' Her voice rose involuntarily and Jim and Jimmy, squatting on the other side of the yard, looked up and grinned. 'And they bloody did an involuntary admission on me, for burning money.'

  Harry felt his penis grow hard and fill with blood.

  'I want to fuck you, Honey Barbara. Come and fuck with me.' He wanted to kiss her nipples and eat her pussy and fuck like they had in those paradise days in the Hilton Hotel.

  'I thought you wanted to fuck Dalton.'

  'Only so I could get out.'

  'Whose brilliant idea was that?' She was grinning.

  'Nurse.'

  'Nurse is crazy.'

  Harry shrugged.

  'If she liked you, she would have kept you, stupid. The only way to get out of here is money. M-o-n-e-y.'

  'Come and fuck with me, Honey Barbara.'

  'If you pay for me to get out, I'll fuck you for three years.' and she grinned a wide wonderful grin that even Harry, caught in the confusing cross-currents of anger and erotic need, could not help but echo.

  'Miss Harrison,' Jimmy called across the bitumen.

  'The bastards,' she hissed, 'they don't waste any time.'

  'Time for your bath,' Miss Harrison.'

  'I'm coming,' she called, and then in a whisper: 'That'll be the day.'

  'Honey Barbara, I love you.'

  She looked at him, stunned. 'I love you too,' she said, her eyes brimming with tears, 'and you've gone and made yourself look like a creep.'

  'I'm not a creep.'

  'Miss Harrison.'

  'I've got to go. I'll see you tomorrow night. I'll come and get you.'

  'O.K.' Harry said and when he saw her walk across the bitumen towards C Block and saw Jimmy saunter after her he felt jealousy, pure, undiluted, come to fuel his anger.

  Later that afternoon a delegation of Christian Scientists passed Harry and Nurse in the gardens. They were not in time for the early part of the conversation in which the power of m-o-n-e-y was compared with that of sweety-talking. They arrived just in time for the end.

  'I'm not a creep,' the natty-looking man with the moustache was saying to the one with the bulbous nose and long grey hair. 'On that point, she is incorrect.'

  'But,' the man with the bulbous nose said, 'you are creep-like.'

  It was at that point, they thought, that the fight started.

  Money.

  Plus Anger.

  Equals succe
ss.

  When you knew, it was easy, and Harry Joy did not waste a second of valuable time putting it into practice. He had bathed his cuts, washed his hair, and by the time the Christian Scientists had reached Ward L he was sitting opposite Mrs Dalton once again.

  He shook her hand and looked her in the eye. No threats of Therapy. No tut-tuts about violence. It was settled. The amount was fixed. The source of the money arranged. Mrs Dalton even complimented him on his business acumen. She had no interest in the cut above his eye.

  He had dirty trousers and a silk shirt spotted with hair oil but as he emerged from Mrs Dalton's office, a connoisseur might have noticed a certain jauntiness in his pick-pocket's walk, and if he'd had a coin in his pocket he would have flicked it in the air and caught it with a snap.

  Gene Kelly would have danced it, all the way across the bitumen and out along the concrete path.

  A creep?

  No sir!

  Creep-like?

  Not nearly.

  His hair was clean; it positively flopped up and down as he walked. He was not a lot like the Harry Joy who had come here. He had a cut above his eye, pimples on his nose, sore ribs from Nurse's knuckles. He was older, wiser. He had it worked out. He knew the game. And now he was going to be released, he was going to have a fuck, he was in love.

  *

  Honey Barbara traded certain favours to get a deserted staff flat from Jim and Jimmy, and other favours to buy candles, oil, bread, fruit, cheese, incense. While she waited for him she cleaned herself, cleaned her mind of their grunting red faces, washed out their simpering smiles, her stoned pretences, their moans, their cruelties, their fantasies, disfunctions, bulging eyes, the poisons exuding from their skins.

  She scrubbed her skin with a hard brush and then did breathing exercises.

  When it was dark she lit the candles to make a circle. Later when he arrived, he would want to know how she knew it was a magic circle, how it worked, why it was there. She wouldn't answer. She knew. She had always known how to make a magic circle.