Bliss

Part Three. The Rolls Royce of Honeys

It was like a holiday. Everything seemed bigger than life: nice wine, dramas, whispered conversations, madness, maybe even love. The Joys' house at Palm Avenue felt like the head-quarters of some ecstatic campaign in which madness played a vital role, but whether as an ally or assailant was not always clear.

Harry had retreated to a suite on the twenty-first floor of the Hilton, from which privileged position he managed to charm the doctors who were sent to commit him. They savoured the champagne, letting its acidity take away the feeling that they had almost been associated with something unclean.

They had disliked Joel and had found his cufflinks offensive.

The beluga caviar Harry Joy offered them helped erase the last of this vulgarity and they chatted about the Hiltons they remembered from other countries and other times. They remembered lost luggage at airports, cancelled flights, and bored each other a little until the champagne was drunk and they departed smiling, a little unsteady on their feet.

Even' while Joel was complaining about the expenses Harry was running up, Bettina was ordering take-away food from Milanos and having it delivered by taxi. They all felt themselves to be trembling on the edge of something new and wonderful. Lucy saw all this and understood it instinctively. She couldn't understand why their happiness surprised them or needed to be denied.

'You were stuck,' she told Bettina.

'How stuck?'

'Stuck. Now you're unstuck.'

'You're too young to understand.'

'You've got a new lover,' she hugged her mother. 'You're having a wonderful time.'

'You've got no feelings. What about your father? Your father is crazy. He's insane.' And she burst into tears...

They ate chocolates and had curaçao in their coffee. They made pancakes and mulled wine. They all put on weight and their faces became rounder, their skin tauter, and it made none of them less attractive but somehow tumescent.

They tidied the house as if they were expecting important visitors. They had conferences about Harry in which they pretended everything was being done for his good, as if even the chocolates would somehow help to bring about the cure they said they wanted. They sat around the shining Georgian table and; as they acted out their concern, they came to believe it. Joel's eyes shone with emotion and no one could doubt that he wanted his partner well.

To Lucy the conferences began to stink of hypocrisy and she could no longer enter into the spirit of things. She sat glumly at the table and listened to the unsaid things, the dark brown words with soft centres. There was something 'off' about the meetings. She thought of stale water inside a defrosted refrigerator.

Lucy spoiled it for the others. They were happier and easier when she went off to bed; and as she left the room she could hear their chairs shifting and their bodies unfolding and, sometimes, a light clunk, as Bettina's shoes were dropped gently to the floor.

Lucy did not go to meetings (official or secret) of the Communist Party. She had resigned from the branch and her Comrades were disgusted with her. Comrade Dilettante, they had called her.

She lay on her bed and looked at the ceiling. She rolled a joint and turned on the radio to block out the conspiratorial murmur which reached her from the room downstairs.

You could not call it jostling, for they were all seated on chairs and the chairs did not move, except occasionally to scrape impatiently, or to see-saw back and forth on their precarious back legs; but yet what had happened with Joel and David was exactly like the jostling that takes place on the football field as two players position themselves for a ball that is still half-way down the field, an irritating elbowing sort of movement which can often flare up into a fist fight and then you have one player lying on the ground and the crowd wondering what has happened.

They vied for Bettina's attention, consideration, and rarely spoke to one another directly.

The subject, of course, was having Harry committed.

Initially David had taken little part in these conversations but as the nights went on he became more and more astonished at what he saw as Joel's ineptness. He listened with astonishment to the decisions that were made. If the world was full of people like Joel it was going to be a very easy life, a lot easier than he had ever imagined. If this was a businessman (an American businessman) then business was a pushover. Were they all so sloppy-minded and stupid as this little frog with the beads of perspiration on his lip?

But tonight he would not jostle. Tonight, he would hit.

Like an out-of-favour general, David waited to be asked to take command. He was in no real hurry and the irritation he felt was not unpleasant. He secretly rolled his eyes and curled his lip as he listened to the latest reports of failure to have his father committed. They were children. They couldn't bribe their way out of a traffic offence.

And now they were worried about money. It was pathetic to listen to Joel talk about money. He did it like a petty cash clerk who is two cents out. He was so frightened of spending money he could never, ever, hope to make any. He fretted. He brought bills to the table and threw them around.

'But he's taken a suite,' Joel was saying, 'That's what I keep trying to tell you, honey. It isn't a room. It's a suite.'

'I know the difference,' Bettina snapped. 'I've probably stayed in more suites than you have. What do you think he is? You expect him to stay in a room?'

'How damn long will he stay there? You know the sort of wine he drinks.'

'The Hilton's got a lousy wine list.'

'Betty, that's not the point.'

David stood up and walked around the room, looking carefully at the insect screens. There it was: an improperly closed insect screen on the front door. He clicked it shut with a small over-precise movement of his stiff left hand.

'Joel,' he said.

Joel had taken advantage of his absence to hunch over into a conspiratorial whisper, but when David spoke Bettina looked up and Joel was forced to acknowledge him.

'Yes, Davey.'

David rolled his eyes towards the ceiling. He could not stand being called Davey. It reminded him of a dog or a simpering little boy in a sailor's suit. He walked silently to the table where his mother held out her hand. He took the hand absent-mindedly but didn't sit down. 'Joel, when you come in you must shut the door properly.'

'Sorry, old mate.'

'The mosquitoes get in.'

'O.K., sorry.'

David placed his mother's hand carefully on the table and walked out to the kitchen.

'He hates mosquitoes,' Bettina said.

Joel pulled a face of ambiguous meaning.

'He's just upset.'

'Oh, sure!' Joel thought otherwise, but if he was going to say anything else he was stopped by David who re-entered the room firing insecticide into the air from two aerosol cans, one held in each hand high above his head. He circuited the room and started up the stairs, the cans still firing.

'Put your hand over your drink,' Bettina said.

Upstairs they could hear heavy footsteps.

'Lucy doesn't like insecticide,' Bettina explained.

When David returned to the room he was pleased to see that Joel had his hand over his drink, although he couldn't have explained why.

David sat down. There was a silence. Joel lifted his hand off his drink and wiped the rim with his finger before drinking. The silence continued. David stretched his long legs beneath the table. He threw back his arms and yawned. He was loose and relaxed. The silence continued further. It was quite delicious.

'I know how to do it,' he said.

Joel clicked his tongue in irritation but Bettina was looking at him.

'How?' she asked.

'Oh come on,' Joel said to her, 'now you ask a boy: what does he know? Who do you want to listen to?'

David shrugged. 'O.K.,' he said, 'I was only offering.'

'Tell me,' Bettina said and Joel moved his chair angrily.

'Well, you won't get anyone to commit him the straight way, that's the first thing.' His mother was looking at him in a way she had never looked at him before.

'Go on,' she said.

'Davey, I don't want to be rude,' Joel said. 'But you are seventeen years old. You are hardly an expert.'

'Well you're not an expert either. That's why Harry is still in the Hilton.' He turned to Bettina. 'I know how to have him committed but it'll cost money.'

'Ah well, there you are,' Joel said, ' ...money.'

The petty cash clerk!

'Five thousand dollars,' David said, enunciating the words very carefully and looking straight at Bettina.

'Look,' Joel said to Bettina, 'do I have to listen to this.' He sifted angrily through the American Express and Diners Club bills that littered the table. 'Look at these.'

A mental dwarf! Look at him stacking his little bills into a neat pile. David curled his lip and revealed a neat row of small white teeth.

'I'll pay the five grand,' David said. He hadn't planned this, but it didn't matter. It was worth every cent of it.

Look at Joel, his frog mouth wide in disbelief, and Bettina too, staring at him. But she, his mother, had a smile waiting to accompany her astonishment.

'Where would you get five thousand dollars from?' Joel said.

It was wonderful.

'I want something,' he told his mother. 'When Harry is committed, let me drop all this university thing. I'm not going to go. I want to go into business.'

'You're astonishing,' his mother said. 'I don't believe it. For God's sake,' she turned to Joel, 'don't you ever tell Harry about this, or I'll kill you.'

'You must really hate your father,' Joel said to David.

'No... '

'Five thousand dollars,' Joel shook his head. 'That's a lot of money.'

'I don't hate him,' David said, 'he's sick.'

But Joel was sitting there, smiling smugly, shaking his head. 'Oh boy,' he said.

'You're a hypocrite,' David said hotly.

But Joel was smiling that big revolting red-lipped smile, as if he had won.

'I didn't want to do it,' David told his perplexed mother, 'I didn't want to have to do it... ' And startled everyone by bursting into tears.

He waited to be acted on, as he always had, having the pecu-. liar good luck to be at once passive and attractive, so that he had rarely been left to moulder by the roadside, but had been picked up, cared for, involved in schemes, .affairs, businesses, the conception of children. Even love had come to him like this, delivered to him where he stood in his wonderful white suit. Appearing to need nothing, he attracted everything, women in particular, who found in him something feline, graceful, as slow and sensuous as a snake.

He waited and doctors came to him. He said nothing to them of his pains. He knew their game and played it and they went away. In those first few days he felt, like the plotting members of his family, that he was on the brink of something new, although in his case he did not anticipate improvement, but the reverse.

Yet the days passed and nothing happened. He watched the ugly goods yard beneath his window and looked out over the whole expanse of Hell which lay under a poisonous yellow cloud. The doctors ceased coming. The phone did not ring. Actors came and went. They carried food, emptied ashtrays, vacuum-cleaned the floor and made the beds. Their performances were lack-lustre, their eyes dull. They were thinking about other things they would rather have done. They did their jobs and would not talk to him.

This had never happened to Harry Joy before, and it was only happening now because the whole hotel knew about the madman in room 2121. There had been conversations between doctors and management, management and family, and so on. You cannot keep secrets in a big hotel. The staff treated him politely, but with great caution and great reticence.

He bought himself little treats, like his family: magazines, flowers, candies, Premier Cru Bordeaux wine. He had more white suits made and ordered an exercise bicycle which was delivered by two youths who giggled before and after entering the madman's suite.

The pain was continual. A tightness across the chest produced some invisible steel bands so he could hardly breathe. He drank heavily to eliminate the visions of his fam-ily. But somehow, it seemed, he could not get drunk, or not drunk enough, for they remained before his eyes and would not go away.

It was in this painful mood that he at last telephoned Krappe Chemicals, but not, one would guess, having any great faith in Goodness, but simply to find a diversion, a person, some action that would take his mind away from the razor-blade tortures of Hell.

When Adrian Clunes, Marketing Director of Krappe Chemicals (Consumer Products), was summoned to meet Harry Joy at the Hilton, he did not ask why. He assumed he was at the Hilton because he had left his wife. (Everyone had been waiting for it.) Adrian was surprised and pleased that Harry had turned to him.

All he said was: 'When?'

'Whenever you like. How about today?'

'I'll be there at one.'

And at exactly one o'clock Adrian Clunes slouched through the door in his donnish uniform of grey slacks and leather-patched tweed sports coat, a style only made possible by his air-conditioned car. He dumped his unfashionably large briefcase on the middle of a table, pushed his round tortoise-shell spectacles back on to his slightly melted nose, and clapped his hands together in the manner of one about to get down to hard work.

'Well,' he said, squinting across at Harry who was reclining in a white towelling dressing gown. 'This is a jolly nice place to be doing business. What are we going to do? Drink champagne?'

Adrian Clunes, as is obvious enough, was English. He had not, originally, made a thing of being English but finding himself admired for it, he had ceased trying to hide it. His Englishness gushed from him untempered and brought him a reputation for an intelligence he did not possess.

'Nice dressing gown,' he said quizzically.

'I'm having a new suit made. I tore my trousers.'

There was a flatness about Harry Joy he had never seen before. The man looked dull. Even his voice seemed to have become tighter as if there was a constriction in his throat. He was taking it hard.

'Beer then,' he said, 'if there's no champagne.'

'I got a special fridge,' Harry said mournfully. 'They have these damn silly little self-service things full of rubbish. Would you like San Miguel?'

'Thank you.'

Harry walked to the bar slowly and then poured the beer slowly; then he seemed to forget why he had done it. He sipped the beer himself and put it down on the bar.

'I didn’t want to talk on the phone,' he said, 'or in the office.'

'Are you drinking alone?'

Harry looked at the beer and then he poured another one which he handed to his guest.

'They can all go to hell,' Adrian Clunes said, collapsing into one of the Hilton's low chairs.

'I'm not going back there today. Let them stew,' he said. 'Let's have a nice lunch.'

Harry leaned against the bar and played with his San Miguel. He did not bother about who Adrian Clunes was, although he remembered with some sadness they had once, somewhere, enjoyed each other's company.

'Jolly nice beer,' Adrian said with froth on his big lips. 'Why don't we go somewhere and have dozens of oysters.' He giggled and freckles jumped around on his face. He was shocked with Harry Joy. He would not have thought it pos-sible. 'God it's nice to get into the city, Harry, it's so horrible out there. It is ghastly. They live on curried egg sandwiches! What a disgusting thing to do to an innocent egg. They don't even taste of curry.'

Harry Joy's face expressed nothing.

'Come on,' Adrian said, 'let's go to Milanos and terrorize Aldo.'

'Adrian, I can't have you as a client any more. I have to fire you,'

'Well, I'll pay for the lunch.'

Harry came to sit opposite him. Their knees (Harry's bare, Adrian's flannelled) nearly touched. 'No,' he said with a feeling of unreality, 'I'm serious.' But all he could think about was the nights he had gone on drunks with Adrian Clunes and ended up at the Spanish Club, drinking vodka at three in the morning. 'I'm serious,' he said again. 'It's not you. It's the products.'

'Is this what you got me here for?' Adrian put his beer down slowly and it made a sharp clink when it touched the low glass-topped table. He started to wipe the beer froth from his top lip and then, half-way through the motion, stopped. He whistled and a little froth sailed through the air.

'Holy Jesus,' he said quietly. 'You're serious, aren't you?'

'Yes.' No he wasn't, no he wasn't. His chest hurt.

'You got me to drive twenty miles so you could fire me. I came here to jolly you up because I thought you'd left your wife.'

'Why would I leave my wife?' Harry said narrowly.

'No reason, that's all I thought.'

'Seems a funny thing to think. We've been married eighteen years.'

'Yes, now you mention it. It's just what I assumed.'

Their chairs were low, designed so that matrons would not have to reach far for their handbags. The two men, knee to knee, looked slightly ridiculous.

'You are here to be fired,' Harry said coldly.

'Holy Jesus. You're mad.'

'No.'

Adrian lifted a bushy ginger eyebrow. 'Are you?'

'No,' said Harry Joy but looked too cunning when he said it.

'You've landed a competitive account. You got General Foods!'

'No.'

'Well why are you firing us?'

'I have evidence,' Harry Joy said slowly, 'that three of your products cause cancer.'

'Oh, shit ...'

'You deny it.'

'Of course I don't deny it. For Christsake Harry, it's been going on for years. It's been in the papers. The tests in Amer-ica. You remember.'

'Ah, those tests. Those tests didn't mean anything. They used too much saccharin.'

'Oh, Harry, Harry, Harry.'

'What do you mean: Harry, Harry, Harry? That's what you told me. Or somebody,' he said levelly, 'who resembled you.'

'Harry, you know and I know that's the company line. No one believed it. We all had to pretend we believed it.'

'You don't deny it?'

'Deny what?'

'You make products that cause cancer.'

'Oh shit ...'

'Come on.'

'Of course not.'

'Then,' Harry Joy said standing up, 'you're fired.'

'You're impossible,' Adrian Clunes said at last. 'People like you don't exist. You cannot exist, Harry. You handle our business for ten years and then you… Look, think about it. Consider it. You make 17½ per cent of two million dollars. Every year. What do you gain by resigning it?'

He put his head in his hands. 'The rest of us went through all this seven years ago.'

'I just found out.'

'Oh, rot and rubbish.'

'I just found out. I won't do it.'

Adrian Clunes sighed and stood up. He walked to the bar and brought back more beers. He filled Harry's glass and then his own. When he sat down again he was laughing.

'It's impossible,' he said. He lifted his beer. 'To Harry Joy, the newest, most impossible idealist in the world. Laugh, damn you,' he said, 'it's a joke. Oh, God help me, don't be miserable as well. Look,' he walked to the phone and picked it up. 'If you can throw away money I can help you throw away some more.' He ordered Bollinger and oysters.

'Now,' he said to Harry Joy, putting his arm around his shoulders, 'do you feel better?'

'A little, yes.'

They drank beer and waited for the oysters and champagne.

'Ah,' Adrian said, as he squeezed lemon juice over the flinch-ing oysters, 'bloody marvellous oysters in this country. You know, Harry, where are you going to draw the line? If you fire us, you'll have to fire all your clients.'

Harry was feeling better. He didn't believe a word Adrian Clunes said. 'Oh yes,' he said sarcastically.

'Harry, you're astonishing. You're a child. I can't understand how you've survived so long. Listen, they release something like eighty thousand totally new organic compounds every year. They're not properly tested. God knows how many cause cancer. Cancer takes years to show up. The whole of the Western world is built on things that cause cancer. They can't afford to stop making them. For Christsake, look at your client list. Mobil have benzine in petrol which is carcinogenic. Firestone use it making tyres too. We use saccharin, and even if we switch across to cyclamates instead, that's carcinogenic. ICI make dieldrin which is carcinogenic and that mob, your dry-cleaning client, use carbon tetrachloride which is the same. And every time an announcement is made that something causes cancer, it makes people less worried because they can't believe that half the things they breathe and eat are carcinogenic. And there are you,' Adrian rested, breathless, 'resigning our business because we use saccharin.'

Harry sipped his champagne. He smiled. It was the smile of a man who is smart enough to know when he's being bull-shitted to.

'You don't bloody believe me,' Adrian Clunes said in astonishment. 'Look at this man. He does not believe me.'

He leapt up from the table. 'I will damn well prove it to you.' His voice was high-pitched. 'I will prove to you how bad it is, and how piddling you are being. What you are doing,' he went to his briefcase, 'is nothing.'

He pulled a map from his case and spread it on the floor.

There: before him: the actual map of Hell. Harry did not need to be told. He looked at the colours, the hot red centre, the vermilion, the crimson, the hard industrial orange, the poisonous yellows radiating out from its hot centre.

They knelt on the floor beside it.

'This,' Adrian Clunes said, 'is a cancer map. It shows the incidence of cancers according to place of residence and place of work. There is a damn cancer epidemic going on, Harry Joy. They will not even sell these maps any more, let me tell you, they are shitting themselves.'

Harry watched it in horror. He could not disbelieve the map. He did not bother to study the relative proportions of tumours or understand all the accompanying statistics. He noted only that they were, at this moment, in the epicentre of Hell.

'It is an epidemic,' Adrian Clunes said angrily. 'And wait. You wait for another five years. This,' he tapped the paper, 'is what we get for how we live. And believe me, it is just hotting up.'

When he went back to his half-finished oysters he had become chalkish and pale.

.'My wife has cancer, Harry,' he said quietly. 'She weighs four stone and six pounds and everyone comes, like ghouls, to look at her. Our friends are nice enough to stay away,' he held up his hand. 'It's alright. Don't say anything. But don't preach to me about cancer. I know about cancer, dear Friend, from both sides.' He pushed his oysters away. 'I've lost my appetite.'

'I have to fire you,' Harry Joy said softly.

'I admire you,' Adrian Clunes said quietly. 'You are very eccentric, and most surprising, but I admire you. I wish you well.'

And as things turned out that day it became Harry Joy's task to think of ways to cheer up Adrian Clunes. He started by filling up his glass.

Lucy, it must be remembered, was only fifteen and a half years old, so although she was capable of some maturity, not to say wisdom, she was also capable of acting just like a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old.

Lucy is standing by the Mobil Station, hitching a lift to see Harry in the Hilton.

And there, right on the bend of the road, rolling hard and squealing its tyres, is a rusty Cadillac Eldorado with an unemployed motor mechanic named Kenneth McLaren at the wheel. He is twenty-two years old and his false teeth have been made to reproduce the crooked, oddly spaced teeth he had before. His cheeks are hollowed. He has a wizened, slightly old face, a mess of curling tangled hair and, in the centre of this wreckage, two doe-like brown eyes.

In the backseat of the Eldorado, together with fan belts, old radiator pipes, and reconditioned fuel pumps, is a great pile of papers.

There are two coincidences involved here. The first, the biggest, is that Kenneth McLaren has just, five minutes before, resigned from the Communist Party; the second, hardly a coincidence at all when you consider that Lucy, in her cheesecloth dress looks at once romantic and attractive and that she has her thumb out, is that he stops for her. And right now, it may as well be revealed: Lucy Joy will never get to the Hilton. Comrade Dilettante, meet Comrade Doomsday.

Adrian Clunes's high-pitched laughter filtered through the shut door.

Harry Joy sat on a low chair in his dressing gown and watched his girl. She was tall and straight and everything about her was vertical, even her profile, which was almost flat, interrupted only by the bump of her nose and lift of her lips. She was, from instant to instant, severely plain then astonishingly beautiful, and her most beautiful and obvious feature was her very large, almost impossibly large, brown eyes, which glistened with what Harry, entranced, chose to believe was suspicion. He was not wrong. She was like a cat that has come in a window. He knew her. He knew how she felt when she walked across the room touching things with her curious, long-fingered hands, stroking lamps, feeling fabrics, smiling absently. She was someone with a notebook in her hand. He felt that if he had jumped up from his chair she would have bolted, left in one silky movement: the leap of the cat from chair to window ledge.

'This your wallet?' It was sitting on top of the bar amongst some melting ice.

'Yes.'

'Your credit card in here?' She had a funny shy, sly smile.

'Is it the Diners Club?'

'American Express,' he said contrarily. He let her touch the wallet, open it, remove the card. He trusted her suspicion.

'Don't worry about me if I talk too much,' she said. 'I've just got all this city shit in my system. It makes me speedy.'

'Are you from the country?'

'No,' she said sharply. She brought a bulky credit card machine from her handbag. 'I'm not from anywhere.'

He smiled.

She smiled back, but uncertainly. 'I'm not into any funny stuff. No Golden Showers.'

'I don't want any funny stuff.'

'Change your mind, it's O.K. I'll just call the office, they'll send someone else.'

'It's O.K.,' he said. 'I don't want anything funny.'

'Better to get all that up front.'

'Cards on the table,' he teased her.

'All hanging out.'

'Et cetera,' he said.

She laughed, and ruined her third Diners Club form.

'Fuck it,' she said.

But she got the fourth one right and brought it to Harry to sign.

'Well,' she said, 'that's that.'

She went back to the bar and turned her back to him. She dropped a spoon and picked it up hurriedly.

'You wonder what I'm doing, don't you?'

Harry shrugged. She had a Band-aid on her leg, under her stocking.

'It's not what you think.'

'I didn't think anything.'

'It's not cocaine.'

'What is it?'

'Honey.' She held up a little jar about as big as an expensive shoe cream. She raised an eyebrow and he saw in the twist of her pale pink lips a drollness – this was a face that could be anything. She took a teaspoon full of honey and held it up before she ate it.

'This is very powerful honey. You shouldn't have more than a teaspoonful.' She screwed the lid back on and dropped it back into her bag.

'What does it do?'

'You people,' she said. Which people did she mean? 'You people are amazing. Look at my eyes. No, come here. Come over to the mirror.'

She held out her hand and he stood up. She led him to the vanity table where, sitting side by side, they put their faces up to the mirror.

'Put your face closer to mine,' she ordered. 'So you can see your eyes and my eyes.'

Harry looked into his dull grey eyes and looked at her glistening dark ones, the iris of such a dark blue it was almost black, the whites perfectly white.

'Your eyes are beautiful,' he said sincerely, looking at the reflection of her solemn face.

'Honey,' she said. She leant back from the mirror and looked at him critically.

'What do you eat?'

Harry tried to tell her.

'Christ,' she said in amazement. 'Let me look at your eyes. Hold still.'

She held his head and peered closely into his eyes while Harry was overwhelmed by the aromatics of her powerful honey. 'You eat a lot of salt,' she said.

'It's all there, in your eyes, years of salt. But you have very nice eyelashes,' she said: 'And you look a little like... turn that way… Krishna.'

'So I've been told.'

'You know who Krishna is?'

'Certainly.'

'You do?'

'Yes.'

She raised her eyebrows in surprise. 'Well,' she said, 'would you like some of my honey?'

She brought the spoon and fed it to him. 'This is leatherwood honey,' she said. 'The Rolls Royce of Honeys, from the leatherwood tree. Are you in a hurry to fuck me, or what, because if you want to, I'm you know, free any time.' She held out her hands, indicating the presence of a body. 'I guess this talk isn't very erotic for you.'

'More than you think,' he said rolling the honey around the inside of his mouth.

'Do you have lots of whores?' she asked him.

'A few.'

'Well you're lucky today,' she grinned, 'because you have struck a gifted amateur.'

What Honey Barbara said was not really true: she was not, strictly speaking, an amateur. Whoring was her one com-mercial talent and once a year, for two months, she came down to the city and signed up with the Executive Escort Agency. She felt as ambivalent about it as she felt about the city itself, sometimes looking back on it with nostalgia and forgetting that daily life was normally spent in fear and homesickness.

Sometimes she liked her clients, but usually she didn't and when things got really bleak she would spend her time, against all her principles, doped to the eyeballs so she didn't feel a thing.

But this was her first commercial fuck of the year and he wasn't fat and flabby and when he got undressed she wouldn't get that unpleasant feeling that comes, like a sour gas, from bulging white mesh and nylon socks. Besides, he looked like Krishna.

She saw his passiveness and knew he was easy to handle, that she could walk away from him and it would be O.K. or she could take him, right now, and spread him out, like that, and have him lie, like so, on the floor, and devour him, first of all with her mouth and that there, at least, he would not smell too bad for a city man, and he would not fuck like someone running for a bus.

He was just a businessman, but she felt at home enough with him to put her heart into her work for an hour or two while she tangled her long legs with him, and when he brought his big moustache against her face, she did not mind kissing him.

*

She would never know, if she lived to be a hundred, how a big glob of come could be worth three hundred dollars. Three hundred dollars was enough to live on for six weeks. It was a roof. A water tank. A stove. It was thirty avocado trees. Half a horse.

'Was I worth three hundred dollars?' She snuggled into him. He looked pleased with himself. He had a crinkle in the corner of his eye.

'Every cent,' he said.

'Would you see me again?'

'Well,' he said, 'what do you think?' He was a thin man with a roly-poly voice. He was so foreign she couldn't imagine what his thoughts might be. Even his clothes felt foreign. She could not understand someone with a silk shirt.

'Oh,' she rubbed her head. 'I don't feel a thing.'

'Nothing?'

'Not a thing.'

'You must feel something,' he insisted, touching the nipple on her small breast. They both watched it grow erect.

'Something.' She pulled the sheet over the offending nipple. 'It's my Karma. You don't know what Karma is, do you?' she grinned. 'You know you look like Krishna. But you don't know what Karma is?'

He bowed his head humbly.

'Karma means that what you do in one life affects what happens to you in the next. Maybe I was a whore in the last life, so this life I don't like fucking much. It means if you're Good in this life you'll have a better time in the next one. Hey,' she hit his arm, 'are you taking the piss out of me?'

He was doing an imitation of a staring man. 'If you're Good?' he said.

'Stop it. Stop taking the piss.' She pulled the sheet up over her nose.

'No, tell me. If you're Good in one life you have a better time the next one?'

'Yes,' she said cautiously. 'Right.'

'That's what I'm doing.'

She started to laugh, but when she saw he was serious, she stopped. 'But you're a businessman.'

'Advertising.'

'That's really bad Karma.'

'No,' he said, 'no, I'm being Good.'

'You can't,' she said stubbornly. (How conceited. How stu-pid.) 'How can you? How could you?' She pulled the sheet down and let him see the straight thin line of her mouth.

'I just fired a two-rnillion-dollar client because his product causes cancer,' he said. 'That's him in the next room.'

Two million dollars!

'Really three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, I get 10 per cent commission from media and 7½ per cent service fee, which is three hundred and fifty thousand on two million.'

'Christ.'

'That's Good,' he said. 'It has to be.'

'I don't know,' Honey Barbara said, 'I suppose it must be.' It was more than you got for a good dope crop.

'And I'll tell you something else.' He jumped out of bed and ran across the room on tip-toe. 'I'll tell you something else.' He picked up a brightly coloured map and brought it back to bed. 'A cancer map.'

'Shit.'

Cancer Maps were part of Honey Barbara's folk literature, just like the Dream Police (a legendary squad of psychiatrists) and the whole cast of Cosmic Conspirators, the CIA, flying saucers, multinationals with seed-patents.

She had never seen a cancer map in her life. She looked at Harry Joy with new respect. 'Where did you get it?'

'I stole it,' he decided, 'from him.' He nodded his head next door.

'You're one hell of a businessman,' she said.

He bounced his bum around the bed.

'I trusted you when you walked in,' he said. He paused. He smiled. 'It is my opinion,' he said, 'that I am living in Hell, that this, all this,' he waved his hand around the room, 'is Hell.'

And sat there, with his eyebrows arched.

Where Honey Barbara came from, people believed many different things about the nature of reality. Christopher Rocks believed in Wood Spirits, and Edith Valdora understood how flying saucers propelled themselves; she was going to build a flying saucer herself and no one thought (no one said) she was crazy. John Lane had been a fish in another life, and people believed in Jesus Christ, the Buddha, reincarnation, levitation, and feared the three 6' s on the Bankcard as a sign of the Beast of the Apocalypse. Bart Pavlovich had been Astral travelling for years and would think nothing of opening a conversation by saying, '1 was on the Moon last night.' Which, as everybody said, was his reality.

When Harry Joy told her he thought they were in Hell she did not, for an instant, think that he meant it metaphorically. She understood him perfectly.

'Far out,' she said.

'But,' he said, 'what do you think?'

The connecting door was opening. She pulled a blanket up to hide the cancer map as the naked figure of Adrian Clunes stumbled across the room and lurched into the toilet. They waited while he vomited.

'Sorry,' he said when he emerged, 'she's using the other one.' He picked up his briefcase and walked back into the other room.

Honey Barbara threw the blanket back.

'Do you think I'm crazy?' he said.

'You're not crazy.'

'They're trying to lock me up.'

'1 bet they are.' She had never met anyone who had refused 350,000 dollars. She was more than a little impressed.

And then Honey Barbara, who knew a lot about such things, gave him his first lesson for survival in Hell, which dealt, for the most part, with psychiatrists and the police, and went under the loose heading of keeping yourself clean, by which she meant: no drugs, no funny books, no funny friends, just clean. Don't be a smart-arse with the cops, don't argue with them, don't let them search your room without a witness. Be nice to them, make them tea, don't let your voice shake when you talk to them, try to think of them as human beings. Always have money, never write down the names of lawyers but memorize their phone numbers and make sure they're up to date. If they send the Dream Police then don't fight with them because they're unhealthy and unfit and will use drug-guns on you and not their fists and you will arrive unconscious and not be able to admit yourself voluntarily (always admit yourself, always sign yourself in, and then, with luck you can sign yourself out later). Most of all, never admit that anyone is trying to threaten you, get you, attack you, hurt you, poison you, radiate you, punch you, pinch you, fuck you, or, in any way at all, do you the slightest bit of harm for these are the symptoms of paranoia and they are, Honey Barbara said, illegal and you can get locked up for showing them even though you really are being radiated by the air and poisoned by the water.

Harry was overcome with this gift. He looked at her, smil-ing, shaking his head and holding her hand.

He was in love.

He wanted to give her a present, something glistening and wonderful. He brought it out and displayed it, revealing it shyly, the way one draws back the tissue paper from around an opal to display it lying in its fragile nest.

He told her what it was like to die. When he had finished the room was totally dark and all he could see were Honey Barbara's two huge eyes.

'I'm going to leave you some honey,' she whispered at last.

It was only later that he appreciated it, what it meant; leaving the honey behind, and then he only appreciated a little of it and it would be another full year before he knew the whole truth about Honey Barbara, who may have been only an amateur whore but was more than a little knowledgeable about other things.

She became Harry’s trusted guide to Hell, and he became her client, so that every morning at around ten o'clock she would enter his room and run off a Diners Club card.

Honey Barbara lived not far from the Hilton in a small crumbling house with fifteen green plastic garbage bags of marihuana stashed above its bulging plaster ceiling. She shared the house with Damian who had come down with her and whose job it was to sell the crop, something he seemed to have stuffed up. He was immersing himself in a whole lot of city shit that Honey Barbara didn't understand. He was eating Kentucky Frieds and Big Macs and she noted with disapproval that he was starting to put on fat around his hips.

She woke him to tell him.

Maybe, she thought later, that hadn't been very nice, but he was always asleep when she got home and in the mornings, of course, they always had to get up at four a.m. and get out of the house, just in case.

He shouldn't even have been there. He should have sold the crop and been on the road home.

'You're getting really fat, man.'

'What?'

'The whole house stinks of dead chicken.'

'You woke me up to tell me that?' Damian sat up in his bed and she could see that layer of fat just sort of hanging, nothing really noticeable yet, but soon he would be covered with poisonous fat from cancered chickens and Big Macs. 'You're fucking unreal.'

'Come on, Damian. I'm doing my job. I'm working. I've got a right to know. What are you doing about the dope? Why are you eating all this shit? You should be home by now. They need the money, you know that'

'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.

'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.

'Come on,' she said, 'other room.'

They pulled the blankets back into the bedroom and shut the door on it.

'Want food?' she asked, carrying the box.

He shook his head.

'He fought them,' she said. 'Good on him.'

They both looked ill. They didn't know whether to sit or stand. Honey Barbara finally put the box down at the table and sat there in a chair. Harry leant against the window.

'They'll let him go,' he said, 'when they find out.'

She shook her head. 'Don't count on it. The hospital gets a subsidy. They'll try and keep him.'

He picked up the phone.

'What you doing?'

'I'm going to ring my family and tell them.'

'What?' She was already standing and walking towards him.

'They got the wrong person.'

She snatched the phone from his hand and put it gently back on the receiver. 'No.'

'I can't have this on my conscience. I've got to.'

'Darling, they'll come and get you.'

'They can't get me. I get up too early.' He picked up the phone and began to dial. He had more confidence in Honey Barbara's theories than Honey Barbara did.

'Hello,' Joel said sleepily.

'It's Harry Joy here,' Harry told his junior partner. 'I am phoning you that whoever you sent to lock me up has just taken Alex Duval instead.'

He could hear Joel laughing. 'Really? Really? Oh Harry... '

'Did you hear me?'

'Harry you don't know how funny it is.'

'I said you got Alex Duval...

' ...instead of you.'

He hung up. 'What happened?' she said.

'He laughed.'

It was like a room in which someone has died.

They made love but it was somehow funereal and they looked into each other's eyes with sadness and nuzzled each other for comfort. Everything had suddenly become full of insurances and precautions. He ran off sixteen Diners Club bills for her while she watched tearfully.

'I should take you back home with me.'

He smiled painfully.

'But you wouldn't like it: mud and leeches,' she said, 'no electricity, no silk shirts.'

After a pause, she said: 'Anyway, they wouldn't understand you. They'd think you were a spy.'

She wrote down the address of the house where she was living and made him promise to memorize it. There was an air of emergency in everything and when Honey Barbara went to have a shower she was sure it was her last shower in a Hilton Hotel.

Doctors Hennessy and Cornelius called on Harry two weeks later at four o'clock in the afternoon, injected him swiftly and carried him off without the slightest struggle.

When Honey Barbara let herself in the next morning she found the suite as he'd left it, including a little piece of paper on which she'd written her address.

She did not have another shower at the Hilton.