Bliss (34 page)

'You can't even hammer a nail in straight.'

'So.'

'You'll hate living in the bush.'

'The hut is built.'

'You won't go,' she said swinging on to the freeway. 'You're a city boy. You like soft things.'

Like an expert jeweller she tapped the flaw, the long thin fault that ran through his character: he loved comfort, soft things, silk, velvet, words you could also use about wine.

'No,' he said again. 'I can't.'

He was not prepared for what would happen when Bettina finally went. He chose to believe she would not go.

'I think we'll get a brand from British Tobacco,' he said to change the subject. 'Adrian says it'll be a two million dollar launch.'

'I'll be gone by then. Come on, Harry, come to New York. We'll bring everyone with us.'

He winced, thinking of his poor bedraggled Honey Barbara in New York.

'We can't walk out on the business, just when we've built it up.'

'Sure we can.'

'Our name will stink.'

'Who cares? We won't be back.'

'They'll hate us,' Harry said.

'I hate
them
,' she said simply.

The town had never taken Bettina seriously, which she felt might have been justifiable in the past, but not now. They gave her no credit. They treated her like a fool and sometimes at night she invented extravagant ways to punish them. She did not ask much from them, only credit for what she had done. But to the town she was no one: Mrs Harry Joy.

'Look at the fucking mutants.' They had come off the freeway and were waiting at the lights.

Harry huddled into his seat. He liked the smell of leather. He felt protected in this large rich car. He did not want blis-tering heat, mud, leeches and hard work. He could not hammer a nail straight, it was true. When Honey Barbara told him stories about Bog Onion Road she did not mean to terrify him, but how could snakes and police and bushfires and a hanging man ever be attractive to him? He pushed the Cancer Map away into the darkness and sought his safety here, under the protection of Those in Charge. They liked him, or, if not liked, at least valued him. He was in favour, in fashion, and his days were dedicated to staying there, his nights to dreaming about a fall. They patted him on the back and asked him to stay for drinks. They made assumptions about his beliefs which were incorrect. He smiled and nodded and pretended he didn't know what it was like to be inside a police station or walk the corridors of Mrs Dalton's Free Enterprise Hospital and see the trolleys carrying captives to their therapy. He looked them in the eye and they found him both courageous and intelligent. He loathed them.

He was a prisoner with special privileges making his captors tea, coffee, folding their socks, telling them funny stories for their amusement, ironing their sheets, warming their beds as they saw fit.

His soul stank of Californian Poppy hair oil: a weasling cunning little thing.

Honey Barbara and Ken and Lucy had taught him a lot about the structure of Hell. When he listened to the trustees of the State Gallery with their silky talcumed talk he could see exactly where they stood in the scheme of things. It was they who trafficked in poisons, controlled the distribution of safety, the purity of water and air, or, more probably, the lack of it. Not for them the nipping little tortures one Captive might inflict on another. It was their privilege to inflict many special diseases and even death, to withhold treatment from the sick, to beat the brave, and torture the poor.

The very smoothness of their skin frightened him, the per-fection of their fingernails, the sharp white lines along which they parted their perfectly cut hair.

When he sat across the desk from the local Managing Director of Helena Rubenstein he could easily imagine that this smiling cultured man ('You've never read Conrad? We must remedy that.'), that this urbane man could very easily torture him, not mentally, but physically, in an ordinary pale blue room on a sunny afternoon while the rest of the world went about its business. He saw fissures in their smooth exteriors and glimpsed the rage reserved for those who disobeyed.

'New York,' Bettina said, 'Imagine.'

He did not imagine New York. He imagined Honey Bar-bara. Holding her, he was destroying her. All the things he loved about her were slowly fading: her strength, her con-fidence, her belief in herself, her food, her body, her mind. They made fun of her beliefs and called them mumbo-jumbo. They doubted the power of an OM. Her calloused feet had grown white and soft and where they once had been hard and strong they had now become big and ugly, city feet with flaking skin.

Bettina screeched the Jaguar down into the basement car park, skidded across an oil slick, and arrived in her spot. 'What about it?' she said.

'Maybe,' Harry said thus removing the subject from his mind.

'Maybe Baby,' Bettina sang, and then stopped when she realized where Buddy Holly's words were leading her.

Honey Barbara drank Scotch with Joel. She didn't like the taste of Scotch; she mixed it with dry ginger.

While Bettina was away Joel became an expert on every-thing. He lay on his mattress eating Ken and Lucy's dinner and told Honey Barbara the best way to grow vegetables. He polished his glasses, rubbed his belly, wiped his ketchuped mouth with a napkin while she sat at the table and made patterns with the spilled dry ginger. She listed, for her own amusement, the things that Joel claimed to have done. He had edited a newspaper in Texas, run a trucking company and later a bus service, managed a rock-'n'-roll band, owned a travel agency, worked for McCann Erickson in Los Angeles and Caracas, imported brass goods from Pakistan, been a disc jockey, written a radio play which was performed by Orson Welles and spent five years at Day, Kerlewis & Joy. Although he was only twenty-six, Honey Barbara was prepared to believe him, but when he started to tell her how to grow cabbages she knew he was a fraud.

She yawned. He didn't notice.

The television was playing and he managed to look at this while he talked, occasionally pausing mid-sentence to let some hack comedian deliver a punch line and to join in the canned laughter. Harry and Bettina were hours away from rescuing her, and Ken and Lucy were out compiling their 'Directory of Positive Things about The End of the World'. She wished they would come home. She would rather argue with them.

The only things that kept her alive were the things she hated most: argument, discord, acrimony, noise. She was disgusted with herself. She was disgusted to sit here and listen to this battery fed man patronize her.

She was drunk when she stood up and that disgusted her too.

'Goodnight, Joel.'

'Kiss,' he demanded offering his lips like rose petals to be admired. Kissing was the social custom. When the others were out Joel would normally include a little fondling on his own account.

'Not tonight,' she said. She stumbled going out the door and he called out something which might not have been intended spitefully.

It was a house where she had learned to restrain noises signifying pain or pleasure. You choked them back, held them tight in your throat, buried them under blankets or drowned them in noisy water. But tonight the timbers of the house were saturated with the ultrasonic hiss of television and the canned laughter would drown her sobs as well as any pillow. She lay on the bed and cried. There was no pleasure or release in it, only self-hatred and the feeling that you might die from lack of air.

She had felt lonely before, and unwanted before, and even unloved, but she had never felt unnecessary. She was a dec-oration on a poisonous cake. She was like the great bloated whale of a Cadillac that sat on the front lawn and consumed energy and enthusiasm and interest, all for no useful purpose. It was refitted with pleated silk door trim while its body rusted.

She felt his hand and pulled away.

'No, Joel, go away.'

But it was David, his dark eyes full of sympathy, who sat gingerly on the edge of his father's bed.

'Here.' It was a handkerchief.

David had changed his mind about Honey Barbara the night she told the story about the amphetamines.

'This is a story,' she began, 'about a million dollars' worth of amphetamines.' She told the story, as seemed the custom, in the first person. Even Harry did this and it was sometimes confusing because he said 'I' when the 'I' in the story was Vance Joy and once even it was Vance Joy's father, but it was always 'I' in Bogotá and New York.

The story was not hers at all; it belonged to her friend Annette Brownlee, or Annette Horses as she was more commonly known, who had once been involved, so she claimed, with this hoard of amphetamines which lay buried still in a city in Europe. Honey Barbara, always cautious about such matters, had changed Europe into South America, and it was just this change of geography which had so enraptured David Joy, who knew by heart the old city of Quito, and when she described the little plastic bags of white powder and the damp underground passages, he went very pale and his eyes contracted as if he had heard someone recite his dreams.

Days later Honey Barbara knew that something had hap-pened, but she never ever guessed that it was Annette Horses' old story about the amphetamines which had caused it. After all, it was only one of the stories in the great repertoire of drug-paranoia stories, which were all a little too real to have any romantic interest for her.

Annette Horses, and therefore Honey Barbara, always ended the story with the claim that she was the only person in the world (only person in the world not in jail) who knew where these drugs were. Yet it was not avarice that made David change his mind about her – he had lived in Palm Avenue long enough to know that a good story always had a little extra romance than real life. ('Every good story should always have at least one tower in it,' Vance Joy had said and, typically, having made the rule to suit a story about a tower, abandoned it in the desert, a puzzling shard that was polished and cared for by his descendants.)

So slowly that it was not at first remarked on, David Joy became polite to Honey Barbara and, once polite, helpful. He helped her to wash dishes and even, on one occasion, weed the vegetable garden, although he loathed the dry too-smooth feeling that settled on his dirty hands and he retired as soon as was politely possible to wash them and rub them with Bettina's Oil of Ulay. He did not go for walks with her like Harry did, or brush (suggestively) past her like Joel did, and he was certainly far too inhibited to ask for Kissing Rights. But he did, in his strange tight whisky voice, talk to Honey Barbara here and there and, at certain quiet times when the others were busy, make some confessions of his plans, his ideas about South America.

She had not discouraged his dreams. Better, she thought, that he got out of that job and actually did something.

He showed her selected sections of his dreams and she saw something black and glistening like oil, but not without beauty. While Joel looked at television she and David some-times looked at the atlas together and she felt pleased that he liked her, for he had seemed so cramped, so tense, so unnatural that she thought about him in the way she thought about Bonsai trees which she always ached to liberate: to gently break their pots, unbind their roots, to take them back into the bush and let them grow. Her pride was that she was good with living things and she liked to see David Joy smile and she was proud to see him become calmer and more confident. At least, she thought, she could do something good at Palm Avenue, and tonight just when everything was so bleak he came and gave her a beautiful handkerchief made from yellow silk.

She lay on her stomach and he touched the muscles around her neck. 'Knotted,' he said softly.

He began to massage them and she was surprised, first that he touched her at all, and second that he massaged her well.

'I did what you said,' he said. 'I went to the workshop at the Zen Inn'.

She felt his fingers breaking up the knots and smiled. She had taught him things he had begun by ridiculing, and she smiled that he had done these things in his secret way, and imagined how they would have handled him in the workshop, seeing him there in his shiny black shoes and expensive grey cardigan.

In her most paranoid moment she would never have imagined that David Joy had mentally rehearsed this moment for the last month, had nightly run over it in his mind, had taken the massage course for this, and only this, reason and moment. He had watched her with a cunning, a furtiveness that, to him, in no way contradicted the feeling of his heart. He had observed her slow collapse and had managed to at once welcome it-and disapprove of Harry for causing it.

'I'll have to sit up here. O.K.'

'O.K.'

He massaged her back, working her spine through her singlet and she was the one who took it off. He went quickly to his room for oil. He massaged beautifully, with great sensitivity, and understood the importance of an uninterrupted stroke as he drew all the tension from her shoulders out through her fingertips.

When he turned her over, her eyes were shut and he gasped, privately behind his frozen face, to see the beauty of her breasts.

'Take your baggies off.'

'I haven't got any other pants on.'

'It's O.K.'

She must have suspected that it right not be O.K., that he right have changed a little, but he had not changed that much, and he was still the same dark-eyed, furtive, inhibited boy who had begun by despising her and wanting her removed; but she was a sucker for massage and he had learnt his lessons well. He did her legs and then her arms and her neck and her stomach, and her breasts and she did not even know by then it was not O.K., but when he worked the fleshy mound of his palms between the petal lips of her vulva her wetness smeared his hand and gave the lie to it.

He had so many dreams, so many fantasies, revenges, loves, schemes, hopes, impossible Eldorados that when he felt this perfumed smear he was awash with emotions and his limbs felt so weak that he fell over trying to remove his clothes.

His body was surprisingly hard but also lithe like a snake in its sinuous movements and she took him into her with a sound which could have been heard as either a whimper or a sigh.