Peter Carey

by Bliss

  'Listen,' Joel said smiling, 'listen.'

  'You block your dirty ears,' she said, but the creakings of the house were honeyed and erotic. 'Come to the kitchen.'

  There was a murmuring, a slow sensuous stirring as if the house itself still contained, in its dry grey timbers, the sap of sexual pleasure, and it twisted, stretching against its nails, and through the huan pine ceiling came the moan of her daughter, soft as wool.

  She put the kettle on and did not feel discontented. She read the note from Lucy asking her to wake them up if need be, but there was no need, and Lucy was certainly not asleep. It had been a long hard night in the casualty ward and sometimes a little frightening when the police were mentioned, but in the end Joel was bandaged, the police were not called, the knife was returned and now when Joel put his hand out on the table she covered it with hers. She had made so many decisions, hard steel decisions all locked together with little belts, cross-braced, double-checked. The easiest decision was not to fuck Joel any more because, although she loved him, it was she who was stronger. Weak men did not excite her. She had always known that.

  'I am crazy in love, mooshey-mooshey.'

  Bettina smiled and patted his hand.

  Honey Barbara had never felt her body so exactly. It felt oiled, every part of it taken to pieces and put back together again by a master watchmaker. Perhaps it was also partly the feeling of being in the heart of enemy territory, two good beings pitted against the dangerous and seductive forces of evil, or perhaps sympathetic paranoia can act as an aphrodisiac, perhaps it was this that made them move together so perfectly. They were in a cone of darkness in the centre of the world, and Harry was past questioning the nipping tortures of Hell, although had he been granted his secret prayer to be saved from them he would have been very bored indeed.

  They did not hear Lucy's murmurs or Ken's moans, although they must have felt them, like you hear the sea at night or as you hear a river when you sleep beside it and, all night, water runs beside your dreams. They must have felt the current of pleasure pick them up and sweep them gently away from the bank and into the centre of the stream where the water is deep and fast and you can drown easily without caring and all that pours into your unresisting lungs is the sensuous liquid dark.

  Honey Barbara had never been hypnotized, of course, but she had never had an orgasm either and tonight, for a reason she never understood, would be the first. Possibly it was a technical matter, relating to the gentle skill with which Harry had worked his tongue, but in all likelihood it was not, and it seems much more likely that it was related to the whole erotic sway of the house which set up harmonic waves of pleasure and, the waves not quite coinciding, produced beats, which are heard like droning. But for whatever reason on that night, in that black room, she called out loud like a nightbird in the darkness, two loud musical cries and gave herself to herself, and herself to Harry Joy, and all her resistance to Palm Avenue seemed far away and she lay there afterwards, warm and wet, caught in its glistening web while Lucy's last cry fell through the house like an echo of her own: She drifted, mumbling, into sleep and began to dream of Bog Onion Road.

  But when Joel shrieked, she sat upright. She was out of bed and running before Harry could stop her. She ran to the top of the stairs with visions of that pearl-handled knife, blood, mutilation, those waxy eyes, that soporific smile, the madness of his obsession.

  Lucy and Ken met her on the stairs, and all of them rushed forwards, holding sheets and towels in front of them and behind them. And Harry followed, holding Honey Barbara's embroidered white silk dressing gown around himself.

  God knows what they expected.

  It certainly wasn't this: Joel flat on the kitchen floor, his pants around his ankles, surgical dressing around his chest, and Bettina on top of him, taking her last pleasure stroke while the kettle on the stove screamed with delight.

  *

  The winters at that latitude were like European summer. It was in winter that there was plenty: avocados, custard apples, new oranges and lemons, and even papaya, though these last would be pale yellow and sometimes a little sour in the winter, depending on where they stood and how they were fertilized. The vegetable gardens were also full of food: cauliflowers, cabbages, potatoes, peas, beans, spinach, tiny tomatoes, lettuces, artichokes. Winter was an easy time, Honey Barbara thought. The honey would have been spun, and the jars stacked and distributed. In the winter you could spare honey for your tea and you could spoon it on to your bread. The hard time was later, in the wet, and food would be scarce then and it would be pumpkins and cucumbers, papaya, watermelon, marrow, zucchini, wet squashy things which were fine for a while, but depressing later.

  The first thing Honey Barbara did at Palm Avenue was begin the vegetable garden. While Ken and Lucy worked on the Cadillac on the front, she took to the back lawn with a spade and turned it into something useful. She added blood and bone by the bagful and started a compost heap. She ordered spoilt hay and mulched with it. She bought seedlings from Garry at the Zen Inn and soon had a garden going. Not everybody admired it.

  She cleaned the house, helped with that Cadillac, wrote letters home and cooked the dinner and participated in those terrible nights around the table. To her shame she developed a taste for expensive wine and four weeks after her arrival could be found nosing a claret with some knowledge, not to say style, and holding the glass up to the light to judge the colour, in spite of which early elegance she still found herself becoming as loud and argumentative as the others.

  So Honey Barbara was sucked into the madness which took place around the dining room table at Palm Avenue. The conversations often sounded more like the last moments of a wool auction with everyone screaming out their bids for salvation, attention, laughter or forgiveness, and if it was late, which it usually was, Bettina would be found sitting up on the mattress on the floor which she now shared with Joel, either asking them to shut-up or to pay attention, demanding Joel's presence or his absence, or simply screaming good-natured abuse at her daughter.

  They always meant to move Bettina's bed (it hadn't been Joel's bed since she moved in). They discussed it. They argued about it. Plans would be made for the morning when it was to be shifted to the landing upstairs. A caravan was to be rented, a new wing built, a storey added, a cellar dug, a hotel room leased. But in the morning it always seemed more important to move the empty bottles and so the mattress remained on the floor and suffered spilt wine and cigarette ash and the irritations of its inhabitants.

  Honey Barbara's marvellous eyes were becoming dulled and she found ways to avoid her gaze in the mirror. She made excuses for herself, the most practical one was that Harry was giving her money to send home. What alarmed her silent Victorian heart was that she was starting to enjoy the life. She was enjoying shouting and arguing which would have been considered boorish at home. She used salt in her cooking to make them happy. She complained triumphantly about her hangovers.

  'At least they're alive,' she told herself. At least they were not sitting back zonked out on dope asking each other ques-tions about their gardens. She wrote long letters home giving detailed instructions for the care of the bees and demanding to know who was looking after them and requesting a personal account from those concerned. The letters weren't answered.

  'I don't believe all this rubbish about cancer.' Bettina jabbed the table with her little finger. 'But I am prepared to discuss it. I am terrified of it but I will talk about it.'

  'You just get it,' Lucy said, 'don't worry. You either do or you don't.'

  'You don't just get it,' Honey Barbara said.

  'It's lies,' Bettina said.

  'You said "discush",' Joel told her. 'You're prepared to discush it.'

  'My mother,' Lucy said, 'has swallowed the whole thing. She believes the whole American myth. She believes General Motors are nice people. She thinks Nixon was unlucky. She thinks I.T.T. wouldn't lie. She believes in what she does.' And she gave Bettina a hug and a kiss. 'She is the real
article. She is not a cynical manipulator.'

  'Get off,' Bettina said, but just the same she was pleased.

  'How you live,' Lucy said to Honey Barbara, 'might be fun.'

  'You don't know how I live,' said Honey Barbara.

  'No one knows,' Harry said proudly.

  'We know,' Ken said.

  'We guess,' Lucy said. 'We guess how you live.'

  'Lived.'

  'And will live again. But it is no better than this is. This society is fucked. You'll go down with it too. You won't escape.'

  'No!' Bettina stood up. She looked as if she wanted to propose a toast. Her chair fell backwards with a crash. 'You're all so negative.'

  'I agree with you,' said Honey Barbara, rising and clinking her glass against Bettina's. Thus alliances were made and, in a similar fashion, broken.

  Lucy and Bettina agreed that Honey Barbara was full of shit about food. Lucy and Honey Barbara agreed that everyone would get cancer. Honey Barbara and Bettina then agreed they wouldn't, but as Honey Barbara explained she only meant it for people who were careful with their food and where they lived, whereas Bettina was convinced that the whole cancer theory was a Communist conspiracy.

  Joel always agreed with Bettina and when he spoke they all had to be quiet out of respect for Bettina. He was very boring but it was not permitted to shout him down. Bettina, watching him talk, smiled proudly and Harry, normally tolerant to a fault, allowed his moustache to reveal the sarcastic cast of his mouth.

  Ken stood up and began to declaim Cavafy's poem. 'Waiting for the Barbarians'. His voice was as rasping as his teeth were jagged and he recited from memory as if his finger was dragging along printed lines, but there was a force in his rusty voice and David, for one, was impressed to hear things he did not understand.

  'What are we waiting for all crowded in the forum?' Ken declaimed, struggling to his feet and glaring around the table. He held a finger high.

  'The Barbarians are to arrive today,' he answered.

  'Within the Senate House why is there such inaction?

  The Senators make no laws, what are they sitting there for?

  Because the Barbarians arrive today. What laws now should the Senate be making?

  When the Barbarians come, they'll make the laws.'

  Bettina began to smell petrol in the second verse. She did not realize what it was and she was only aware of being depressed.

  She listened glumly and when Ken finished she said: 'No one talked like this before. All this gloom-doom business. It's since you came,' she told Honey Barbara, 'you encourage all this.'

  'It's not her,' Lucy said, 'it's Harry. He used to be see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil.'

  But Harry did not speak. He sat, as he always did, and listened. He was a sponge in their midst.

  'He used to stop us saying bad things,' David said. 'I think he was right.'

  'I can smell petrol,' Bettina said.

  'I washed,' Lucy said.

  'I washed too,' Ken said.

  It was the smell of her childhood, the fumes drifting up from the forecourt and in her open window. It was the smell of her father when she embraced him and, she swore, you could still smell the petrol coming from his coffin when he was lowered into his grave.

  A dirty rag was found out on the verandah, and the subject of petrol was avoided by David who, eager to contribute some-thing, told the table the entire plot of a spy thriller he had seen at the drive-in the night before.

  So the matter of petrol, the Cadillac, Lucy's refusal to work, her wasted education, were saved for another night when it would take a predictable form, something like this:

  'You are going backwards,' Bettina would tell Lucy. 'That's why we gave you an education, Lucy.' She looked disapprovingly at Ken. 'So you would not get involved with stinking petrol.'

  'You never told me,' Lucy grinned.

  'Please-get a job,' Bettina said.

  'I don't want to be a boss.'

  'Be a worker.'

  'I don't want to be a slave.'

  And Lucy could paint a very convincing picture of the cruelties and iniquities of Hell. Harry listened to her describe the economic system, the blindness of profit seekers and so on.

  'You are spoilt children.'

  'We are waiting for the Barbarians.'

  'You should learn how to feed yourself and protect yourself,' Honey Barbara said sternly.

  'No one will survive,' Ken said, filling Harry's glass with Cabernet Sauvignon.

  'I will survive,' said Honey Barbara. 'And Harry will survive. The rest of you are fucked.'

  But in the morning her eyes in the mirror were small and grey, and there were black marks like tiny freckles around her eyes: blood vessels she had burst vomiting.

  As the weeks went on, the structural flaws in their relationship became apparent to Honey Barbara. It was, she thought, like being in a hut with a leaking rusty roof: you keep living in it, you try to ignore it, you mark the leaking parts with chalk and promise yourself you'll make temporary repairs with bituminous paint, but then, when it's dry, you forget about it. In the wet you live amongst plinking buckets but never enough of them, and you kick them over anyway, and everything becomes damp, and mould and mildew grow everywhere, even in your bed, until, in the end, it all becomes too much and you find your ladder and, just as the sunlight strikes the roof and the steam starts rising from it, you rip the fucker to pieces and the rusty iron disintegrates as easily as a dead leaf in your hand. Underneath it you find fat cockroaches, wooden battens white with rot,·leaves, mulch, decay, mice, a tree-snake with a yellow belly and some peculiar ice blue fungi growing from the rotten wood: a whole eco-system built on lethargy and failure.

  In short, she knew she should have left him but she couldn't. She was doing what she had done years before with Albert (Peugeot Albert, American Albert), finding herself in the mid-dle of a situation she disapproved of, living with a man who was fucked, but who she stayed with anyway, like some novice board rider who tries to stay with a bad wave to its painful end.

  She sought refuge in the garden and in the bedroom where she painted the frames of the three windows three different colours: blue, red, purple. (Bettina sucked in her breath but said nothing.) She began a mural above the bed but didn't finish it. It showed a part of a small hut with blue, red and purple window frames, and an old Peugeot, rust brown, which she intended to cover with creeper and long grass. On the verandah outside the red window she installed a hammock and sometimes, when Harry was more drunk or aggressive than usual; she would sleep out there. She had five yards of muslin for a mosquito net: she wrapped them around the hammock and lay there until the morning when he would come with red-eyed remorse and entice her back to bed and they would make peace and fuck until their eyes were wide and their mouths full of pillow.

  With Bettina and Joel, Harry had formed a gang. Nightly they reported successes. They walked in the door clinking bottles and shouting. They had won this Account or that Account. They had sold a campaign. She could not be happy for them, although she had tried.

  There was no joy in their triumphs, only anger, revenge, nose-thumbing, name-calling, and although Bettina provided the emotional tone, Harry followed it willingly and even lent to this unpleasant cocktail a dominant flavour of fear. She saw him encouraging these negative things in himself, as if by letting them expand and take over he would be better assured of success.

  It was Honey Barbara who had instructed him in the use-fulness of money, but now, a month later, when she questioned its value as a measure of worth, she was irritated to see what his moustache did not quite hide – his you're-only-saying-that-because-you-haven't-got any smile.

  She tried to make the bedroom a peaceful place. She made cushions and bought candles and tried to forget it was Harry's money. She lit incense and put wind chimes out on the verandah where she did her Tai Chi exercises every morning and night.

  But still they argued. It seemed there was nothing that could be done to pr
event the discord. No meditation, exercise, massage, or even prayer. Nastiness would creep in between them and push them apart. He defended fear and anger as necessary emotions and mocked her when she said there must be another way.

  'How?'

  'With love.'

  He laughed.

  'It doesn't work like that.' He lay against the pillows with a glass of wine in one hand and a bottle in the other. He was not the same person she had met in the Hilton. 'You've got to be angry,' he said. 'It gives you strength. You commit yourself to win. Because if you don't get them, they get you. See?' He jabbed his finger. 'You understand?'

  'Christ,' she said despairingly, 'you know it's shit.'

  'Of course I know it's shit.'

  She compressed her lips.

  'Don't you look so superior,' he said.

  She didn't answer.

  'You drink my wine. You drive the Jag.'

  'I'd rather not.'

  He put his wine glass and bottle down and leaned towards her in such a way that she thought he was going to kiss her and her lips were already moving towards his when she felt the wine glass wrenched from her hand. He threw it out the window and she heard it shatter.

  She was too tired to be angry. She hugged herself and felt cold.

  He leaned back on the pillow. 'If you don't want it, don't drink it.'

  After a moment or two he said: 'Do you know how much you cost me?'

  'A lot of money.'

  'You cost me a fucking fortune,' he said, 'so don't say you don't love me.'

  She wasn't even astonished. 'You're getting poisoned with this shit you're doing Harry. You can't fuck around with it. You're catching it. You're becoming one of them.'

  She went and sat beside him. He stroked her hair sadly.

  'It's what I've got to do,' he said.

  A silence.

  'Come home with me,' she said.

  He stopped stroking her hair. More silence.

  'It's safe there,' she said softly. 'We'll be fine.' She touched the lambswool shoulder with the ends of her fingers.

  'It doesn't sound safe to me.'

  Another silence (because he had never said this before and he was becoming angry and she felt betrayed).