Peter Carey

by Bliss

  Garry had already found the Cadillac on Paddy Melon Road and he and Margot had gone to jump-start it and hide it in the bush for the night. It was not, they reflected, even a useful make for spare parts and they talked about the Peugot Albert had rolled into the valley off the hairpin bend.

  Crystal said that the pattern of two new cars, two criminals, was not just a coincidence and must have wider meaning and it was Honey Barbara, who had endured all the comments in a hot prickling silence, who spoke up and said that this was bullshit because the Cadillac was not new and that she hadn't brought American Albert into the valley, that he had come here by himself, and he had been welcomed by everyone and that her romance with him had been actively encouraged by certain people who were old enough, at the time, to know better, but may well have been too stoned to know what was happening in front of their noses. Further, she said, she had not invited this man with the silk shirts to Bog Onion Road, but had left him behind in the city because he was fucked.

  But it was Paul who reminded them that it was Harry Joy's American Express cards which had provided them with some money after the dope crop was ripped off and it was Paul who offered to take responsibility for his welfare.

  'They won't find him here,' Paul said, and finally he was allowed to stay because the rain forest was reckoned a safe place, guarded on its edges by lantana under whose barbed and secret arches leaf-paved paths led to Paul's house, and even from the air, it was thought, the dark roof of the hut would be invisible. The visitor was forbidden to leave the rain forest.

  As it turned out, the visitor would have to be, finally, ordered out of it. He would not wish to leave. He understood the protection of the rain forest only too well and when Paul began to go out on the van again and help Honey Barbara with the hives and the spinning, Harry was more than happy to be left behind. He would, in time, left to his own devices, have become some slinking little animal, a furtive wingless bird of a drab colour and monotonous cry, a noise, rustling in the lantana·on the edge of the forest, a disturbance amongst the dead leaves.

  He ventured out of the hut, cautiously at first, amidst this twilight forest with the air festooned with creeper like some deserted vegetable telephone exchange. Even the creek below the hut was full of arm-thick roots and creepers, lying in the water like tangled pipes. The ground was soft and leaf-covered, littered with moss-green stones and laced with fine vine trip-wires which were best proceeded through without haste. And into this dark spongy world came slices of sunlight as sharp and clear as the cries of whip-birds and caught such jewels as the multicoloured pitta bird turning over a leaf, Harry Joy wearing the white baggy clothes Paul had made for him, the splendid green cat bird high in a palm, the unlikely owner of such a forlorn cry.

  And Paul Bees, a month from this night, would not understand why Harry (who would sweep the floor, dust the hooks, collect kindling, split wood, collect water from the creek, bake vegetables for dinner, have warm water for Paul's shower) could not be persuaded to go to the open paddock fifty yards from the edge of the rain forest to collect eggs or fetch wood or release a bleating goat from its tangled tether.

  Once he had gone to the edge of the lantana, at the top of the rise above the spring and, seeing the wide grassed paddock and open sky, felt almost faint. He scurried backwards, dragging sharp lantana across his heedless skin. The beginning of real agoraphobia.

  But all of this, on the second night, was yet to come. The fever was leaving him and he could, at last, eat without vomiting. He did not know what the rain forest even looked like. He did not know the feeling that would come to him from trees, the dizzy ecstasy, the swoon almost as he looked up at the green canopy above him and felt these allies keep him safe from harm.

  Paul Bees put stringy bark honey in his cup and grinned at his guest. He saw the stories. He was the first one to even guess at them.

  As usual, she drove with her head out the window, looking up. It was a bee-keeper's habit. It came from staring up at the blossoms, and accounted for the lash of creeper that had drawn blood across her face. The Commer van lumbered on to the switchback and she stopped for a moment to look across to the Boggy Plains where, amongst the swampy country of tiger snakes, the ti-trees would feed the bees for the winter, those paper-barked trees which once, as a child, had meant nothing more to her than a source of mysterious paper to write secret messages on while her father had placed the hives.

  The road was half washed out and the wet season hadn't even started. Her eyes were continually drawn between the problems of the truck and the possibilities of some unseen blossom. The community did not truly appreciate the prob-lems of bee-keepers, and while they were happy enough to let the bee-keepers do the trading when they went to market, to barter a little milk or eggs for honey or the mead Paul Bees made from the groundsel honey, and even, on occasion, to make generous speeches on the subject, it seemed to Honey Barbara that not enough practical sign of appreciation was made.

  It was five o'clock but it was still hot. Her bare arms were covered with a fine talcum dust and her eyes were red and strained. The others would be down at the dam. She thought about the water and everyone lying around, feeling satisfied with their day's work while she walked this lumbering old van down the hill. It was the only petrol-driven vehicle that used the roads now (they had wrecked the Cadillac bringing it into the valley and it lay rusting amongst the Peugeots) and no one seemed to think that even this one van was necessary. That the roads were guttered and ripped was somehow seen as a desirable thing, and they did not think about her problems in actually driving these forest roads, a maze of cutbacks, dead-ends and deliberately contrived false leads which were interrupted by fallen trees. The old forest roads were being planted out as part of the reafforestation.

  And the reafforestation, which they were all so smug about, was dominated by Clive and Ian and what was planted was what they thought was good timber, particularly tallow woods and blood woods, hard timber, one hundred-year trees. There were also a few flooded gums because they grew quickly and made good straight poles for building. But no one really appreciated the problems of honey and they could, if they'd listened to her, have planned for both honey and timber, and then the replanting would have contained more brush box, stringybark, red flowering gum, and there were even a few places where a ti-tree forest could have grown but they had timber farmer's eyes about ti-tree and called it scrub.

  'Honey Barbara wants us to plant scrub.' She could not get people to support her, and in the places where ti-tree would have grown they planted flooded gum instead.

  'If you want it,' Clive said, 'you should plant it.' Which was all very well, but she was busy enough doing what she had to do, and there were people like Harry Joy (that's right!) whose only job in the world was to plant trees and for that they managed to get great kudos, for one simple job any idiot could do.

  Harry Joy was somewhere below the switchback, down there, planting-out road, and she felt irritable in anticipation of seeing him. He had fooled them all. And even though they liked to joke about how he had to be physically removed from the rain forest and set to work, they liked the way he had gone about it once they gave him the trees and placed him on the road. Paul liked to tell the story about how dark came and so Harry was in sight, how he had waited, smoked a joint, waited some more, gone to sleep, and finally woken up at about eight, and when he had finally gotten it together to walk down the track he found Harry Joy still digging this vast hole for one tiny tree because Margot, when she left him, had said: 'The bigger the hole, the faster it'll grow.'

  Paul took him back and bandaged his hands and it was another two weeks before he could work again.

  He still dug big holes. That was admired. A person who dug big holes for a tree and did not take short cuts was much admired here. 'It looks like he'll be a good worker,' they said.

  But she knew. She didn't say, but she knew. He was digging those holes big so that the trees would grow and cover him. He was digging with negative en
ergy, because he was afraid of the sky and the sun and he was chicken shit. He thought he was in Hell, and that was why he was digging big holes. He was driven by fear and did not love trees except for the wrong selfish reasons.'

  'Your friend,' they said when referring to Harry Joy.

  'He's not my friend.'

  And while they learned to accept him they continued to distrust her, she thought, because she had brought him there. If not, how come no one had said anything to her about going down with the dope crop this year? She did not want to go; she would certainly have refused but there was no doubt in her mind that she should be asked, and her advice sought on the disposal of the crop and now, it seemed, Damian was to go (God help us, she thought) and no one actually told her this but she found out by things half said and others unsaid.

  'He is not my friend,' she said out loud, straddling a par-ticularly deep wash-away with the Commer and praying she would not slip in. He was not her friend. She had no friend. And although she had felt contented with her celibacy before Harry arrived, other things had happened which now made her lonely.

  She had enjoyed her visits to Paul. She hadn't gone often, maybe once a week, but they had talked long into the night and even when she was alone in her hut she knew it was something she could do if she wanted to, but now she would walk down the little ridge above the rain forest at night and hear their voices (The Old Codgers) coming up from the dark of the valley floor and the damp fecund odours of the rain forest no longer seemed welcome to her and she would not enter. She was hurt that Paul had ditched her so easily in favour of a stranger.

  Crystal was worse. She had adopted her new lover's polit-ics, religion and dietary habits with an enthusiasm which Honey Barbara found unprincipled. She saw her mother adopting the mental wardrobe of the Ananda Marga just as she had with everything from Sufi dancing to Buddhism and Pentecostal Christianity, pecking at any idea with coloured beads or tinsel paper.

  'You have the spiritual life of a crow,' she told her mother.

  She had been bad-tempered with everyone. Crystal, even now, sat on the hillside waiting for her daughter's apology. It was not forthcoming. Everywhere she went she heard bits and pieces of Harry Joy and his stories and that only made it worse. He had been, in every way, inconsiderate, and it had not even occurred to him that he should come and apologize to her.

  He was down there. She had seen him when she drove out and now she would see him again in two bends' time. He was digging fucking holes and when she came round the corner he would be standing there naked with his crowbar or his shovel, standing back from his giant hole, waiting for a compliment.

  Oh, they just loved the way Harry Joy dug holes.

  She felt herself becoming angrier and angrier as she crossed the Saddleback and then back up a creek bed for ten yards and then sharply down. It was all unnecessary, this ridiculous complicated entry into the property, but it amused Clive and the other paranoids. If the cops wanted anything important, they'd do a helicopter bust. They didn't need roads.

  And there he was.

  She slid the Commer to a halt even though it was a steep and stony hill. He was planting out the junction with old Billy Road, or that, at least, was what they had called it on the forestry maps. He had three planted.

  'Tallow wood,' she said, 'typical.'

  'It's good timber,' he said.

  Who was he to be suddenly such an expert on the timber at Bog Onion Road? What did he know?

  'It's hundred-year timber,' he said.

  Repeating what he had been told.

  'You planted one over there,' she said.

  'Yes,' he said, 'to make a pair, one on either side of the road.'

  She turned off the engine. 'Do you realize,' she said, 'that when these two trees grow, in a hundred years, you won't be able to get a van this wide through or,' she said, anticipating the words ready to emerge from his opening mouth, 'or a horse and cart.'

  The big moustache had now been joined by a beard and his long lank hair had been cut brutally short. He had some funny looking bumps on the back of his head. His naked body had taken the light honey colour typical of people who live with the sun so much that they do not seek it for pleasure.

  He looked at her and smiled. 'Yes,' he said, 's'pose I better shift it.'

  'Hear you're building a place.'

  'Yes.'

  'Good one.'

  'Yes, should be good.'

  'Bush poles?'

  'Yeah, bush poles. I'm going to try shingles.'

  'Hard to cut,' she said, squinting at him.

  'Might try anyway.'

  'Yeah, you should try.'

  'We should have a talk sometime,' he said. 'You should come over.'

  She started the engine. 'Yeah,' she said vaguely.

  'I miss you,' he said.

  But she was already concentrating on the next section of road, trying to keep the speed down so she wouldn't crack the sump on the crossing at the bottom. She did not have time to think about her feelings, but the bees knew, as they always did, and droned unhappily around the entrance to their hives.

  It is a measure of how well Harry had adapted to life at Bog Onion that the hut which was planned for the late spring did not finally get under way until after the wet. There was no desperate rush and the subject of the hut, its design, materials, siting and so on, became the medium through which he came to know his neighbours and make new friendships.

  He had become used to waking early, but on the morning he was to drop the five tallow woods he had marked out for his house, he got up even earlier. There was something he wanted to do before Daze and Clive arrived with the horse to snig the logs out of the forest. He did not make tea. He did not fill the bush shower on the verandah, or do anything to make a noise because the thing he wanted to do was something he felt shy about, a small thing perhaps, but more important than he would have cared to admit; he might so easily have been laughed at.

  He slipped into his shorts and pulled a dirty singlet on. Then he took the dirty singlet off and rummaged in the canvas bag which contained his few things. He took out a clean white singlet and put it on.

  The axe was already sharp. He had sharpened it last night while he and Paul had sat on the verandah. He had sharpened it slowly, enjoying the sound. You could shave your arm with that axe and Paul, having examined it, declared it too sharp. Harry was learning confidence in his own ways. He left it sharp.

  He did not wear shoes. There were none to be had and his feet had made up for the lack and grown their own thick soles. It is not hard to see the changes six months of hard work, clean air and less food have made to the man. It is a pleasure to watch him as he descends the steps of the hut and walks into the rain forest, a svelte shadow amongst the tangled roots and creepers. He had never ceased to see where he lived and, having begun with the aesthetic of a whip bird to whom the rain forest is shelter and cannot be left except nervously, he had, as the months passed, developed a more relaxed view in which gratitude to the trees and people of Bog Onion was not his sole emotion but had become blended with wonder and made volatile with some lighter spirit.

  He nodded briefly (no one was there to see him) to the monsteriosa. No one could tell him with any confidence whether the monsteriosa was a native of the rain forest or an interloper but he felt he understood the way it wrapped its roots around the white blotched trunk of a cedar. Each morn-ing when he passed through the rain forest he nodded his head briefly and compressed his lips and sometimes you might hear a small tsk of appreciation, a sound as light as a twig dropping, signifying, perhaps, the surprise he felt in being there at all.

  He walked up the steps formed by tree roots, stooped to walk through the lantana hedge and emerged at the big burnt logs (like half-spent conversations) where they sometimes sat at night when the rain forest became too oppressive. They had lit some big fires here and told some good stories, and around this fire he had found himself remembering things he had not even known he knew.

  H
e tried to talk to Paul about the trees but in the end, he thought, he had become boring and he felt that Paul would rather hear about other things, some story of Vance's, the episode with Alice Dalton, what an expensive whore house was like, what Milanos looked like, what the menu said, how much a glass of French wine would have cost. (Alright, Paul said, a bottle then – how much is a bottle?)

  Paul Bees, however, was not at all bored by trees. He did not doubt that trees had spirits, that there was a collective spirit of the forest, but he could talk about these things with anybody, and Harry Joy had much more astonishing things to tell, for instance: how a television commercial was made and how much it cost.

  Harry did not talk about trees and the forest as much as he would have liked, but nothing could stop him thinking about them. He had done what Honey Barbara had once told him to (back in the days when she still spoke to him), which was to place his arms around a big tallow wood when the wind blows and feel its strength and put his face against its rough bark. He could not walk through the bush now without feeling beneath his feet the whole interlinked network of roots, some thicker than his leg, some as fine as the hair on his arm, the great towers of trunks, the columns of the forest, the channels between the world of the roots and the canopy of the forest which was not only alive with blossoms and leaves but which – sometimes he could almost feel it – breathed continually, interchanging carbon dioxide for the oxygen he would breathe in. All of this was new to him. He would walk through the forest, not in a calm way, but in the slightly agitated manner of someone feeling too many things at once.

  He had planted peas and watched them grow. Could this corny, ordinary human act really be so earth-shattering to a man, that at the age of forty he is reduced to open-mouthed amazement by the sight of a pea he has planted uncurling through the soil?

  Everybody has pointed this out to everybody else before. They have made films about it and called them 'Miracle of life' and so on. He may even have seen them, but when Harry Joy squatted on his haunches and contemplated a pea growing it did not matter a damn to him (it did not even occur to him) that his experience was not new. He was not interested in newness. When he was by himself he could say and think what he wished, and he was by himself the greater amount of the day. He could touch the deep rough scaled bark of a blood wood like someone else might stroke a cat, speaking not to be literally understood.