Bliss

Part Four. Some Unpleasant Facts

Alice Dalton had not been expecting Sea Scouts. She told Jim and Jimmy that she had no appointment marked but the Sea Scouts, it appeared, were insistent. She had imagined a bus load but when she discovered there were only two of them and that one of them was very small, she had them shown into her office and let them sit and stare at her vases while she brought the admission forms up to date. She wanted them to see what it was really like.

Mrs Dalton was a woman with a mission, which was to demystify the treatment of mental illness. It was her experi-ence that a lot of sentimental garbage was spoken on the subject and she herself had spent many unhappy years until she had finally realised that Mental Illness was a business, just like anything else.

Once this decision had been made, her life had become more satisfying. As for the treatment itself, her greatest axiom was derived from a psychiatrist who had explained it this way: the ones that are going to get better, get better; all the rest is psychiatrists being neurotic or self-important or anxious or guilty; effectively they cost a lot and achieve nothing.

'Now,' she said, 'what did they tell you about me?'

It was a question she would have liked to have asked many of her visitors – but one couldn't ask such questions of adults, more's the pity – because Alice Dalton was fascinated by her own notoriety. 'All I do,' she beamed at her questioners until her little round face was so tight it looked as if it might split, 'is what is obvious.' But she could never ask them what they really thought of her. What she thought of herself was simple: she was a pioneer in the Mental Health business, an opinion obviously shared by Mr da Silva who had recently purchased 30 per cent of the stock.

But the Sea Scouts were having some difficulty in remem-bering what, if anything, had been said to them on the subject of Alice Dalton. They looked at her pale blue eyes as they swam behind her bright pink spectacles and felt that they had probably done something wrong.

'They never told us,' the smaller boy said.

'Have you seen me on the Television?'

They shook their heads almost imperceptibly.

She felt irritated but smiled and nodded. The bigger boy took out a notebook and held a pencil in readiness. Somehow this cheered her up and she was thoughtful enough to speak slowly.

'This is a Mental Hospital,' she began with a bluntness that always gave her pleasure, 'where we lock up mad people.'

She folded her arms and leant forward: 'First unpleasant truth,' she said to the smaller boy because the first one was bent over his notebook. 'Second unpleasant truth: this is a business and I am doing it to make money, just like everybody else. What is the purpose of a business?' she asked the smaller boy who had a strange stunned quality about him. 'It's to make money,' she answered herself. 'At the end of the year,' she tapped her pencil on the pile of admission papers, 'we must declare a profit.'

She decided against her third unpleasant truth which went like this: 'It's a garbage disposal.' Pause. 'Do you find that shocking?' Terribly, almost always. 'Because that is what it is. Do you want to look after the old men? They're soaked in urine. They are garbage. Someone threw them out. Do you want me to love them as well?'

'Do you find that shocking?' She asked the Sea Scouts who seemed unsure.

'It's not shocking to me. It's life.'

The small Sea Scout put up his hand.

'Yes?'

'When do we get our ginger coffee?'

'I beg your pardon.'

'He means ginger toffee,' the bigger boy said, looking up from his notes. 'He wants to know if we get our ginger toffee before the tour or afterwards.'

'There is no ginger toffee here,' said Mrs Dalton firmly, in the manner of an aunt impolitely asked for biscuits.

'Oh yes there is,' the small boy said, 'that's what we chose this project for. This is the one with the ginger toffee.'

There was something in Mrs Dalton's expression that frightened the smaller Sea Scout terribly. He had been frightened since they came into this room with its vases and flowers and funny smell. He looked at Mrs Dalton and began to cry.

The buzzer sounded and a big man in a white coat came into the room.

'Take them across to the Ginger Factory,' the woman said.

The small Sea Scout began to shriek hysterically and even his bigger friend let a tear roll down his ruddy cheeks.

'It's only the Ginger Factory,' Mrs Dalton tried to smile. 'He's taking you where you are meant to be.'

She was not believed and finally it took both Jim and Jimmy to pick up the two screaming Sea Scouts and deliver them bodily to the Ginger Factory across the road.

In Hell his sense of smell was the first to be truly awakened.

He was too giddy to stand up, but he could smell, and even though he had never been in a mental hospital in his life he knew without having to be told that this was the distinctive odour of a mental hospital. Floor polish, methylated spirits and chlorine seemed to dominate, but were given character and colour by the smallest concentration of stale orange peel, urine, and something very closely related to dead roses. There was no sympathy in the smell and every one of its components recalled, in different ways, in different degrees, fear (even if the fear was as petty as that summoned up by the methylated spirits with its associations of cotton swabs, cold skin, doctors' surgeries, steel needles, and chrome surfaces).

Without him knowing it, Honey Barbara had taught him to smell, and when he thought of her now it would not be in terms of how she looked but rather in relationship to the whole wonderful array of smells he associated with her: strong and salty as goats' cheese, rich and flowery as leatherwood honey.

He fought against the Pentothal but could not better it. For perhaps an hour he lay on his back, during which time, in giddy reconnaissances, he managed to gather that the room contained four beds, one of which was much larger than the others, that the walls were a yellow perhaps intended to be 'sunny,' that the fly-wire screens over the two small windows were torn, that the vinyl-tiled floor had a long black rubber skid-mark which ran from beneath the windows to the door on the opposite wall, and also: that he was wearing pyjamas which were not his.

He was not so much frightened as impatient to know what would happen next, and it was irritation with his drug-induced weakness which finally drove him, wobbly-legged, across the room to the window.

He had expected walls.

What he saw reminded him of a number of country railway stations all moored in a park of dwarf trees, covered walk-ways leading from one to the other. The red-brick buildings were long and thin and seemed to be only one room wide, with fading green doors opening out on to verandahs. Sometimes, he saw, the doors had signs such as 'Social Workers' instead of 'Station Master' or 'Waiting Room' but there was, amongst the people he saw, the same melancholy one finds amongst passengers who have just missed the train to the city and know they will he marooned here for the next four hours. They paced up and down, sat still on benches, talked to each other, or more commonly established a hostile isolation amongst the dwarf trees. The sun sank below the roof of the Ginger Factory (although Harry took this ugly rusting corrugated-iron building to be part of the hospital) and the very green, perfectly mown grass assumed a darker, blacker coloration.

It was then that he heard the Sea Scouts screaming. Abso-lute bowel-loosening terror cut through the air and hung there, vibrating. The patients, like grazing animals, suddenly froze. Harry crossed the room in two strides and opened his door. There was no grass here, only bitumen, across which black expanse two large men hurried, carrying the struggling bodies of two small male children. A notebook was dropped. A pen-cil, somehow pitiful, fell and rolled across the bitumen. A woman descended the steps of a box-like aluminium building and, with a slight hop, like a magpie scavenging beside a busy road, picked up the pencil. As she rose she caught sight of Harry Joy, who, instinctively, shut the door.

The screams now came through the open window as Jim and Jimmy carried the kicking Sea Scouts across the grass towards the Ginger Factory. Harry saw the patients move out of the way and then close behind in curiosity. The Sea Scouts screamed as if they knew the secrets of those smoking chimneys.

Honey Barbara had rules for survival in this particular quarter of Hell. They were as follows: Do not aggravate them, be quiet, smile nicely, don't let them know how smart you are. Eat all your food and don't steal jam. Fuck whoever wants to be fucked and then forget about it. Never tell a doctor the truth but make everything you tell them interesting. Never say you're not sick. Keep your nose clean and do not write complaining letters.

Harry was determined to follow the rules exactly and it was his desire, made more intense by the frightful screaming, that led him, so early, to his first mistake. His heart was racing. He was panicked and still dizzy from Pentothal. Yet he saw it clearly, there plain as day, on the end of the big bed. It was not the bed he had been sleeping in, but there it was: his name: Mr HARRY JOY, in metallic tape.

Already he was courting disaster. He was in the wrong bed. ('Never tell them,' Honey Barbara said, 'that a thing is their fault, even if it is.') A mistake had been made, or a trick. Perhaps he had been delivered to the wrong bed or a prankster had shifted him while he slept.

Quickly, dizzily, he made the bed he had been asleep in and shifted himself into the correct bed.

And there he was: keeping his nose clean, obeying the rules, not complaining either verbally or in writing. He was in the right bed, only worried now that he might have been given the wrong pyjamas and, in fact, he was sitting up in bed, peering over his shoulder and trying to read the label on his pyjama coat when Alice Dalton entered the room, already a little on edge.

She had a pencil in her hand. It was the Sea Scouts' pencil. She held it without feeling and he watched her narrowly as she approached the bed, thus ignoring one of Honey Barbara's many rules: 'Always give out a good vibe, never let them think you hate them.'

She stood at the foot of his bed for some seconds, her head bowed, her temples held delicately between thumb and middle finger. When she looked up at last, her mouth was drawn very tight.

'Mr Joy, I am Mrs Dalton. This is my hospital and you are here because you are sick.'

Harry waited. He had remembered Honey Barbara's rule about vibes but all he could think was that he didn't like this pencil woman. He disliked her self-importance, her mottled red face, her pink glasses, her tightly permed indifferent-coloured hair, her sparrow legs, her fussy voice, her black shoes, and he would have gone on, finding more things to dislike, except that she started to talk and he had to concentrate on her ridiculous words.

'Unpleasant fact number two,' said Mrs Dalton, 'is you are in the wrong bed. Please don't interrupt. Now when we assign you a bed we do it for a good reason, probably a whole number of reasons. We know things, Mr Joy, that you could never possibly know so if you start changing your bed... well, it's impossible.'

'It has my name on it,' Harry said. He wasn't meaning to argue. He was simply trying to clarify. He did not wish to argue.

Mrs Dalton sighed. She held her temples again, in the same delicate way, between thumb and middle finger. Harry kept a respectful silence.

'I will not argue, Mr Joy,' she said at last. 'You see, this is a perfect example. How could you possibly know that there are two Mr Joys in this room? You see how silly that makes you look? You thought you knew it all, and now you find you don't. You find there are other factors. Even,' she said, 'if you were healthy you could not know. So,' she said with some attempt at friendliness, 'be a love and get back into your own bed.'

He did not want to argue. He knew it was not politic, but the fact remained:

'But I am Harry Joy.'

'No, you're Mr Joy.'

'Mr Harry Joy.'

'You are not Mr Harry Joy. Kindly do not tell me my own business.'

'I should know my own name.'

She smiled and allowed herself two good seconds before she answered.

'If you knew your own name, Mr Joy, you probably would not be here. I am here because I do know my own name. Not only my own name, but also the names of all my patients. You see, Mr Joy, this is my speciality. It is my business.'

'I am not Harry Joy?'

'No. You are Mr Joy. Now why don't you get out of Mr Harry Joy's bed before he comes back You don't want to start off in his bad books too:

Harry climbed out of the bed which was bigger and more comfortable than the one the horrible Mrs Dalton wished him to sleep in. When he had done that she tucked in the other bed and smoothed it obsessively. Then she came and sat on his bed.

'I'm sorry to growl,' she smiled.

For one horrifying moment he thought she was going to take his hand.

'That's O.K.'

'It's confusing, I know: two Mr Joys in the one room.'

'My name is Harry too.'

'Well you'll have to give it up for a little while,' she said. 'Let him have it for a while. Do you have a second name?'

'Stanthorpe.'

'Alright, Stanthorpe. It's a very aristocratic name.'

Stanthorpe!

'You can be Stanthorpe.'

'I don't want to be Stanthorpe.'

'Then you'll damn well have to be plain Mr Joy,' she said, standing up irritably. 'I can't spend all day arguing. Good afternoon, Mr Joy.'

He wished to be polite but he had forgotten her name already.

'Goodnight,' he said vaguely. The only name that came to mind was Pencil.

When he woke up he was hungry, and later, looking back on all the indignities and irritations in this part of Hell, he was to remember the hunger as the predominant thing, the mel-ancholy gurglings of his empty stomach.

It was night and there was someone else in the room. He heard the sound of a page turning and a loud hearty chuckle.

'Oh dear,' said a familiar voice, 'oh dearie dearie-me.'

He propped himself up on his elbow and saw the person who had been designated as Mr Harry Joy.

'Jesus. Alex.'

Alex was lying on his bed and reading. He did not stop reading just because he had been spoken to. In fact he con-tinued to read for a good thirty seconds before he dropped his book down on to his lap, and then his face showed none of the pleasure his jovial 'dearie me's' might have suggested. His high white forehead was creased up like a piece of rejected writing paper and the beginnings of a moustache accentuated the down-turned line of his mouth.

'Christ, Alex. What a fuck-up. I'm sorry.'

'I thought they told you.'

'No, no. I just found out. I mean, I just found out you were here. Alex, I'm sorry.'

'I thought they told you,' Alex said slowly, 'that my name is Harry Joy.'

There was a long silence and Harry Joy stopped smiling.

'Oh come on, Alex, don't be silly.'

'I am not being silly. If you think I'm being silly, talk to Mrs Dalton.'

'I don't blame you for being mad, Alex. I shouldn't have left you in the Hilton. You're quite right for being angry with me.'

Alex shut his eyes and rubbed his big hand across them. Harry was reminded of Mrs Dalton.

'This is a wonderful place if you are reasonable about it. So don't go around the place saying you're Harry Joy because you'll only get yourself into trouble.'

Harry's stomach gurgled. 'I'm Harry Joy,' he said. His name was his name. His name was more than his name. In short, it was him. It could not be stolen from him.

'You're new here. You don't understand yet.'

'Understand what?'

'You have a primitive attitude towards your name.'

'I don't know what you're talking about. Talk in plain English.'

Alex hesitated, hearing the voice of Alex's employer talking to him, a voice that could no longer be used against him.

'It's a therapy,' he said at last, 'to find the right name. But first you have to give up your old name. You see, when I came here I was really stuck on being Alex. I didn't want to give it up. No damn way was I going to give it up,' he smiled, remembering. 'I didn't want to be Harry Joy. No way was I going to be Harry Joy but, finally, I just stopped fighting. And it worked, you see, the damn thing worked. I'd always hated being Alex.'

'That's not therapy. That's a fuck-up. They called you Harry Joy because they got you by mistake. You're not meant to be here. They meant to get me. They thought you were me.'

Alex smiled and shook his big head. 'Sorry,' he said, 'save your imagination for someone else.'

'It's true.'

'You can’t be destructive with me any more. I'm free of you.'

'You're insane.'

'You can't run my life and pull the strings any more. They've put you in here as a final test, that's obvious. It doesn't fool me. Well, I'm ready for you. You see: you can't affect me.'

'Did they actually tell you it was the final test?'

'Well there'd be no point in telling me would there. No, of course they wouldn't tell me. I don't have to be told.'

'Alex... '

'Please call me Harry.'

'Alright then, Harry. Harry you don't have to be in this hospital. It's not you they wanted. Go home.'

'You want me to go, don't you,' Alex smiled cunningly. 'You don't like having to share a room with Harry Joy,' he laughed. 'Oh, what irony, what irony.'

'Everyone knows you're not Harry Joy,' said Harry, who, in spite of his growing conviction that Alex had been put there to torture him, was rattled.

'Who?'

'Everyone at the office. Your wife. My wife. My children. Aldo... '

'Don't see any of them here.'

'Of course not.'

'All the people here know I'm Harry Joy.' He picked up his book to signal the end of the conversation but after a moment or two he put it down again. 'You know,' he said, gazing at the ceiling, 'I'm not at all surprised to see you end up here. I knew you were crazy. All that bullshit about firing clients and Captives and Actors. You've been crazy for years. You've made everybody else crazy.'

'I've been trying to be Good.'

'How naive,' Alex said. 'The most dangerous thing in the world: an untrained mind deciding to seek salvation. The most astonishing thing about you is that you kept your ignorance as long as you did. It's probably a record.'

'All that business about Hell... '

'We're all in Hell, you silly ding-bat,' said Alex, playing his idea of Harry Joy. 'It's a question of making yourself com-fortable. I mean, if you want to be tortured, you've come to the right place. But look... it's nice here. We can stay here for ever if we want to. They need the money they get in subsidies from the government. They need us, Harry.' He stopped petulantly. 'Fuck it.'

'What?'

'I called you Harry.'

'I didn't hear you.'

'I don't care what you heard. I heard. I called you Harry.'

'Don't worry about it.'

'Of course I worry about it. You don't want me to worry about it. But I've got to worry about it, because I'm happy now. I feel really happy with being Harry Joy. I'm a successful advertising man without the smallest scruple. I've made money, made a name and don't worry about a damn thing. I'm crazy and happy.' He had started to cheer up as he listed the advantages of being Harry Joy. 'I can relax,' he beamed. 'We could get up a darts team and beat the old men.'

'Are they going to torture me?' Harry did not expect an honest answer.

'No, they like us. They want our subsidies.'

One in every three is a spy.

'They'll give us electric shocks and put electrodes in our brains. They'll give us pills and make us zombies.'

'Harry, you are part of the biggest growth industry of the decade. You can have peace here. No one will hurt you.'

Harry Joy considered it. As he watched Alex it occurred to him that he had the healthy pink glow of a pregnant woman. He plumped up his pillow and made himself comfortable, considering the implication of this amazing transformation.

'Fuck it.'

'What?'

'I called you Harry again.'

The real Harry Joy's stomach gurgled mournfully, dreaming of wholemeal bread and Honey Barbara.

Alex Duval had this dream only once but it had been so vivid that it had pushed its way through into his conscious where it occupied an important corner of his waking mind, metamorphosed from a dream to a memory.

There is a plush green carpet and a svelte grey cat with silky fur. On the cat's back is a large crayfish, about the same size as the cat. The crayfish is digging its sharp claws into the cat's body. There is a crackling sound. It is the cat tearing off those of the crayfish legs it can reach with its mouth. Alex Duval is watching. He believes at first that the crayfish will die, but then it occurs to him that this is stupid – dream-logic – and that the crayfish is in agony and cannot scream. The noise of the legs in the cat's mouth is the same noise you hear when you bite a cooked crayfish leg.

It was a portrait of his marriage. Who was the cat? Who was the crayfish? He didn't know.

He had wanted to leave his wife for ten years. Daily, nightly, he had been on the very brink of doing it and daily, nightly, he had failed, he had been defeated and fallen into bed drunk. Viewed in this light his guilty conference reports can be seen to be less of a punishment and more of an escape. He was like an unhappy man who retires to his dusty garage to play war games.

At first it is difficult to see why he didn't leave her or why, when he had left her the first time – and this is where the trouble really started, ten years before – he ever went back.

It was 'friends' who had persuaded him to return the first time, and his own oversized conscience as he thought of her getting fatter and less desirable, alone in that vast house, and he, Alex Duval, responsible for the destruction of a life.

But although this is important in its way, it has nothing to do with why Alex Duval stayed there still, year after year; for the only really important factor in his continual imprisonment and punishment was the ingenuity of his wife, who everybody thought of as a slow, bovine sort of woman, not very intelligent, always unhappy, and all the words they used to describe her suggested something large and blunt and totally lacking in elegance.

Yet she played games with Alex Duval more cruelly elegant than anything her critics could have dreamed of, and had this 'dull' woman applied herself to something more public in life she may well have been called a genius.

It is impossible to describe the games she played with Alex Duval: they could centre around something as everyday as a torn postage stamp, a crumpled piece of paper, a blue towel and proceed by a series of moves as imperceptible as the hands of a clock. (‘Did I move?' says the clock. 'Look at me.' 'Yes, you moved.' 'I am perfectly still,' the clock insists, 'you're crazy. You're imagining things.’)

A game concerning odd socks took two days of moves and counter-moves to reach its conclusion. At which point Alex Duval would explode with rage and fury.

But this is not the end of the game. Now, for this brief time, this is the whole point. Here one needs skill. Now he is dangerous. He can walk out the door. He may kill her with a blow.

Martha Duval's great slow face closes down and in the slitted eyes one might glimpse passion, fear, and as her shoulders finally relax, triumph.

Time after time, game after game, he was trapped, cornered, and could only turn his anger on himself.

She watched him break a dainty piece of china he had collected or stab the nib of his beloved pen into the wall where the blue ink mark would be, could be, if needed, the introduction to another game.

She had devoted her life to paying him back for having left her once. The scales would not balance. No amount of pain she inflicted on him could balance the hurt and terror of those thirteen days, ten years before. He could not leave her. She would not let him. She played him as if he were a ten pound trout on a three-pound line.

And into this life, by mistake, without meaning well, doc-tors Cornelius and Hennessy had come.

Alex Duval wasn't even a fraction mad. They wanted him to be Harry Joy, he would be. To the whisker. He made notes on Harry Joy: his manner of speech, the quality of his voice, his eyebrow habits, his floating walk, his folding limbs. He sloughed off his Pascal and his Rousseau and felt a great lightness.

He immersed himself in the part and nothing gave him more pleasure than finding some mannerism, a gesture of the hand, a flick of the head, that made him more perfectly Harry Joy. He laughed and told stories. He made stories up. Better stories. He sat in quiet corners inventing Harry Joy-type stories.

He had assiduously paid court to Mrs Dalton, had even made himself pretend he liked her. It was Mrs Dalton who decided on who got Electro-Convulsive Therapy (the only the-rapy available) and who did not. They discussed her Clarice Cliff collection together, taking out the little triangular-handled cups and cooing over them.

And then he had his illicit pleasures, those books Alex Duval loved which Harry Joy would never have thought to open: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Flaubert, Chekhov. These had to be read in secret, but this only increased his pleasure. In public he flicked through Reader's Digest impatiently, only showing an interest in the ads. He sat in the television room and told anyone who would listen how TV commercials were made and how much they cost. He did it so realistically, so charmingly, that he was more popular than the programmes.

And now the real Harry Joy had come to interfere with his happiness. He would not succeed. This time Alex Duval would turn all the resources of his considerable mind to the problem of this parvenu Joy, a problem which was to become more pressing when the two Harry Joys were noticed by the Social Welfare's computer.

No matter what Honey Barbara had told him about mental hospitals, he had not been ready for the depression and boredom. There was nothing to do. There was no tennis court, no swimming pool, no dart boards. There wasn't even any basket weaving. There was a library which was controlled by some racket he didn't even try to understand. Alex, he noticed, always had books under his pillow.

There was only television and that was made difficult by the bad state of the sets, which would break down and then take weeks to be repaired. There was nothing to do but walk up and down in the midst of mad people. In the mornings the Electro-Convulsive Therapy patients were wheeled, some protesting, some passive, to the place where they were 'done'. This procession of trolleys along the concrete paths was watched with morbid curiosity and had something of the attraction of a public hanging, although the ceremony itself was private.

One old man with long grey hair and a big bulbous nose always seemed to be there, grimly riding the trolley to this much-feared therapy. His name was Nurse and Harry was to meet him later.

Not even the meals provided any relief. The food was wheeled out into the echoing dining room in big electrically-heated aluminium trolleys, inside which, in cylindrical con-tainers like bulk ice-cream drums, would be mashed potato, mashed pumpkin, minced meat in watery gravy, and an endless variety of custards, all concocted in the belief that they were not only mad but also toothless. For breakfast they would have reheated fried eggs with hard centres. For an extra five cents you could purchase a sweet orange cordial to take away the taste.

And Alex was always at his elbow waiting for him to share some mindless enthusiasm.

'Isn't this a wonderful trifle?'

'Look at that tree. Must be a hundred years old.'

'Look at that fellow play chess. They say he beat Granscy in Poland.'

Harry saw no logical reason to deny Alex the happiness that came from being Harry Joy, and yet it ate at him. It upset him to see the changes that had come over Alex as he grew into the part. It upset him in puzzling, contradictory ways.

Alex had grown a creditable moustache which might, in time, develop the authentic droop. And even now one might have believed, if one had been charitable, that he was an uncle of the first Harry Joy, fatter, older, slightly slower, but also (and this was one of the things that hurt) more authoritative, less passive. He had managed to adopt certain mannerisms of the original character so that, like a good actor called upon to play a famous man he does not physically resemble, he managed to give an unnerving impression of being Harry Joy. The original Harry Joy found even this disconcerting, like being endlessly mocked and criticized by an ageing child. He watched the second Harry Joy laugh and joke with Jim and Jimmy and Mrs Dalton, watched as an outsider excluded from a favoured circle, watched the familiarity with which he patted Mrs Dalton's arm, the confidence with which he jabbed Jimmy's chest with his finger, the expansive, jolly way he laughed. There was a largeness, a warmth, a freedom in his movements which seemed to indicate that the second Harry Joy was genuinely happy and this brought nothing to Harry but irritation.

Was Alex totally blind? Couldn't he see that his bumbling stupid optimism was out of place? It showed no sensitivity, no regard for the feelings of people here. When he saw him strut in that white suit or laugh with Mrs Dalton he was reminded of a film he had seen about Nazi collaborators.

Alex did not talk to the patients. He talked at them. Harry could hear his loud booming voice across the courtyard, intoning some interminable story with a self-satisfied air. He began to hide from Alex, to seek out odd corners of the grounds where he would not be found. He became furtive, and developed a habit of walking close to walls.

He was escaping from Alex's 'Harry Joy' voice one morning when he saw Nurse, a wiry, bony sixty-eight-year-old with enormous strength in his limbs, holding himself rigidly against the jamb of a doorway while Jim and Jimmy pummelled him to get him out. He said not a word. He did not even grunt. He stood there, like a Christ in a doorway, and when he collapsed and went limp it was because he chose to.

The next day Harry found him in the dining room. He sat next to him. They talked about E.C.T. It was not an uncom-mon topic of conversation.

'You don't get breakfast the morning they come,' he said. 'They don't give you nothing. That's how you know, see. Then they come and try and get you before you can struggle. They get you anyway, doesn't matter what you do. I don't fight them to win, because you can't win. I fight them because they're bastards, see.' He ran his hand through his great mane of grey hair and flicked it jauntily out of his eye. He jutted his jaw. 'Then they take you to the shock table and they put these two bits of tin, bits of metal, on your head. Here. And then the doctor turns on the juice.' He had stopped eating, held his hands together, as if they might have contained dice, and beat them up and down. 'It is a darkness you can't imagine. A blackness. Cold black ink. Like death.'

Across the other side of the dining room, the other Harry Joy was laughing.

'They steal your memories from you,' said Nurse, mixing his mashed potato with his gravy. 'They take away all your faces, all your pictures.'

He must have liked Harry Joy. He took him outside and showed him his book. He was writing down all the memories he had left. He wrapped them up in plastic bags and buried them in the garden when they were full. Later Harry was to find out that Nurse told everyone his secret and thus even his notebook memories would be stolen from him.

Harry developed pains across his chest and he began to stoop. His shoulders rounded and his chest hollowed, and it may have been because Alex was breaking him down or it could have been that the pain he felt was not his pain, but the pain of the people he moved amongst, and he adopted it with a sympathy quite new to him. In any case, his shoes had been stolen. They had given him slippers instead.

Alex came and sat on his bed one night just after cocoa time. He was flushed and exuberant. He had just beaten the so-called Intellectuals in French Scrabble. He talked about it happily for a quarter of an hour and became irritable when Harry would not share his triumph.

'It's irritating,' he said, 'both of us having the same name and the same moustache, and now,' he smoothed his baggy white trousers, 'we have the same suit.'

'Yes,' Harry agreed, 'very irritating.'

'So,' the big man said, his legs dangling loosely from his bed, 'you could be Alex.'

Harry felt as if someone was sitting on his chest.

'Alex is a schmuck,' he said truculently and felt his chest tighten another notch. There was a silence, He had hurt. He was pleased he'd hurt.

'He suits you,' Alex said coldly. 'He's worried about good and bad and doing the right thing. For Christ's sake,' he said, 'be reasonable.'

'What's so great about being Harry Joy?' He was bitter and confused. He did not like the Harry Joy that Alex portrayed. He could not imagine anyone wanting it. But Harry Joy was his name. He was Harry Joy and no one else and he squeezed himself in some mental doorway, resisting having the name pulled from him.

Alex poured himself a glass of water and added a drop of his 'privilege,' a little blackcurrant cordial, superior to the orange type. 'I'm a successful advertising man who's gone crazy. I've got power and money and I don't have to prove a thing.'

'I know,' Harry said. 'I've bloody well seen you.'

'But it wouldn't suit you any more,' Alex said oilily. 'Can't you see it should be repulsive to you? I think it is repulsive to you ... isn't it?'

What a crawling voice it was. 'Alex,' Harry said, 'for Christ-sakes... '

He didn't even put the glass down. 'You call me Alex again,' he said, taking a sip of blackcurrant, 'and I'll hit you.' He said it so quietly that Harry would never make the same mistake again. 'It's not just for me. Mrs Dalton asked me to talk to you.'

'Why can't she talk to me herself?'

This wasn't like Alex, this driving insistence. They were going to steal his name and leave him with the name of a flop and failure.

'There are two Harry Joys on the Social Welfare computer,' Alex said, 'and they want to reject one of us as fraudulent. So I suppose you could say, the hour has come.'

'That's you. You're fraudulent.' But you could hear the weakness in the voice. You could hear, already, the surrender.

'Mrs Dalton thinks you're being difficult.' There was no nastier threat that could be made in the hospital. There was only one thing that happened to difficult patients. Alex, some of his old humanitarian principles still weakly showing, felt momentarily guilty. 'Come on, Harry,' he said, 'please, for old times' sake.'

Harry!

There was a silent lake around the island of the mistake. Had they been dogs they would have scratched themselves and looked at the ceiling.

'I'll think about it,' Harry said, but he was already beginning to embrace the pale, shuffling unhappiness of an Alex.

There was considerable pressure on him to shave his mous-tache and adopt a different style of dress but he made excuses. He had made a silly decision and as time went on he resented it more and more. Only rich men seek salvation by giving away the trappings of power. If a poor man has a car, he clings on to it. If he has a penny he doesn't throw it from him. He dreams of making a fortune, having a good name. And here, he had given away the privilege of being Harry Joy, and the minute it was done, signed and sealed and tucked away in the computer, he was sorry. While he had still been the legitimate Harry Joy some power was attached to him and even if they had given him the Therapy he would still have been Harry Joy.

But once he was an Alex everyone knew he was a crumpled thing, a failure, defenceless. Three silk shirts were stolen from him and were worn, brazenly, in his presence.

He sat in the sunshine with Nurse and took over the pen for him when his fingers were cramped.

'A dog is a funny thing the way it trots along,' Nurse would say, and Harry would write it in the book. 'It could put its head up high and its tail, too. Then there are other dogs who walk with their noses down and they make me laugh too. I was in Cooktown and there was a fellow there with a black dog I used to feed scraps. I forget its name. Now, cats... ' and he would move on to the next subject and Harry Joy, wearing his pyjama jacket, would bend over the notebook and write as neatly as he could.

In the afternoons, on the days when Nurse had not been 'done,' they would go the rounds of the traps, as Nurse called it, checking on what memories had been stolen. One day they found someone had written 3/10 in a book, and then reburied it.

The new Harry Joy conferred with Alice in her office and ordered the old men about. The new Alex heard him and was jealous. He envied his loud happy laugh, the way he threw back his big balding head and just laughed, laughed and laughed as if there was nothing in the world to worry about, no pain, no agony, no indecision, no one stealing Nurse's memory from his head and his holes in the ground.

They had authority over him. They made him sweep the concrete paths and he did it. They tried to feed him like an Alex. They did it for sport. For their amusement. They brought him big doughnuts and laughed at him when he pulled faces. He told Nurse the food was full of poisons. He told him everything he had learned from Honey Barbara and Nurse insisted it be written in the book even though it wasn't a memory because it would be, should be, a memory the next day, and therefore should be entered. He did not tell the new Harry Joy about the poisoned food in case they decided to give him Therapy. He wrote Honey Barbara's rules in Nurse's book, paying particular attention to her thoughts on paranoia.

Hunger, lethargy, and the anger he had not yet recognized came to be his constant companions. His shoulders were permanently rounded, his chest hollowed, and when he walked down the concrete paths beside the wings he shuffled in his slippers like a defeated man.

Seeing him shuffle around the place his enemies made the mistake of thinking him permanently defeated. Yet a small revolution was brewing inside the stooped man known as Alex, and depression and lethargy were probably as important for its proper conclusion as optimism might be at a later time.

The change which would, anyway, have come, was accelerated by the arrival of the formidable Mrs Martha Duval, who was not to be denied her husband by something as ineffectual as a bribed Social Welfare clerk. She arrived on a Wednesday morning and was, shortly after lunch, introduced to a person Mrs Dalton claimed was her husband. She declared this person to be none other than Harry Joy.

More officers of the Department of Social Welfare were called. Interviews were conducted. And finally, from the far corner of the garden, the real Alex Duval was somehow unearthed and presented to his wife in the bitumen courtyard in front of Alice Dalton's office.

Social Security men stood around holding their clipboards and Mrs Dalton attempted to usher various select people into her office, but they all stood their ground, watching in terrible fascination as the false Harry Joy began to moan. He pulled at his moustache and gnashed his teeth. He sat on top of one of the old men and pissed in his pants. He rolled across the bitumen and bit Jimmy on the ankle. He curled into a ball and wailed.

All he could see was a great grey cat with a crayfish clamped on his back. There was a loud crack as he broke a claw from the body. The crayfish felt like steel pins. He rolled up beneath the kitchen window and moaned, while the crayfish shrieked into his ear.

There was no getting away from the fact that he was an imposter. Jim and Jimmy lifted him up and carried him to the building known as 'The Foyer' where he was declared sane and returned to the custody of the large motherly woman who was his wife.

Harry Joy returned to the room he had shared with the imposter. He lay in the small bed and ate an apple. His eyes were dark with hurts and cunning: envy, fear, jealousy, rage, all showed their colours.

Alice Dalton arranged the vases on the table. Normally she kept the vases separate from the cups, saucers, bowls, teapots, coffee-pots and so on, but tonight, she put them all together as if she wished to concentrate their power, to intensify their colour. There was a gayness, a girlishness about the work of Clarice Cliff with its bright colours, its stylized little houses and trees and, also, an optimism about the mechanical future suggested by those strange triangular handles and spouts which had first been marketed under the 'Bizarre' name as early as 1929. Now, perhaps the optimism did not appear to be well founded and was, therefore, all the more appreciated.

It was Mr Harry Joy who had pointed all this out to her, and he had been able to talk for hours about those triangular handles and their significance. They had sat here, in this very room, their knees almost touching, and there had been a sense of almost breathless discovery, and while they had not become lovers everything was laid out, like a feast, and they were merely arranging the table decorations and putting out the place names, the final little touches, so that when the feast began it would have been a splendid thing, not only satisfying to the baser appetites but to the higher senses.

But he was gone, snatched from her, and she was bereft. She knew it was, in one way, her fault and that she had been unprofessional. She had tried to cheat the computer. She was ashamed as well as angry. It was unthinkable that she should be so unprofessional. It would be spoken of. Mr da Silva might hear of it, and although he would not and could not do anything, or even say anything, his unsaid criticism, his disappointment, would cause her pain.

For Alice Dalton's great pride was in her business abilities, her talent for facing unpleasant facts. No one knew what it was like to run a place like this. Those who criticized could not have done it. In sheer administrative terms, it was as complex as a large hotel. They criticized her for her lack of feelings, but they did not see her feelings, not her real feelings, and so they could be surprised on those rare occasions when sentiment gushed forth from Alice Dalton in a great wave as she wept and held some unfortunate whose mind was filled with shards of madness.

Twenty years ago, as a young nurse, she had been very different. She had tried to believe that there was no insanity, merely a lack of love or understanding, and this could be remedied, her love given, her love returned. Perhaps para-doxically she also believed the world of the mad to be at once more intense and more beautiful and therefore, romantically, envied it.

She had had a lonely youth. She had read poetry and novels and when she learned to drive had avoided squashing the cane toads that gathered on the roads at night. She had released blow-flies trapped against the glass and was attracted to psychiatric nursing as soon as she knew such a thing existed.

And yet it was to prove too much for her: this dull, grey piss-soaked world of the mad where people did not get better or worse and where no amount of moist-eyed love seemed to do anything but invite rejection and derision.

At twenty-one she had a complete breakdown and was admitted to hospital. It was here, at last, that she was to develop her attitudes towards mental illness, her list of unpleasant facts. She grasped the nettle of commerce. She felt herself grow strong, and when she returned to nursing her superiors felt her to be mercifully free of the romanticism that had afflicted her before.'

Alice Dalton had become objective.

She had never been a feminist. She was too much of an authoritarian to believe in any sort of equality. And while those around her came to regard her as strong, while they stepped out of her way, as she gathered power and influence, she craved to be recognized as a poor weak woman by a strong and sensitive man.

Yet such men rarely came her way. Mad people, she dis-covered, were not normally very bright, were more likely to be poor than rich, and were less likely to be sensitive (in her definition of the term) than sane people. Her marriage to the schizophrenic Henry Dalton lasted two weeks, and while she cried at his funeral, something inside her had acknowledged his suicide as beneficial to both of them.

The nights then were long and lonely and she felt it was not unreasonable for her to have Mr Harry Joy and she had expected more sympathy from the Department of Social Welfare. She arranged the Clarice Cliff and wiped the slightly dusty lid of the 'Bizarre' sugar bowl. She wished she had been alive in 1929, working for Clarice Cliff and her girls at the pottery, painting gay scenes, travelling to London to promote their wares, wearing artists' smocks and smiling at the' camera.

Did they meet men on their visits to the capital? Or were they too left alone as she was, at eleven o'clock at night, with this... itch. She did not wish to ring for Jim or Jimmy. With her finger, she began, but in the end it was always the same no matter what the feminists said about masturbation and the clitoris, had always been the same, always would be. There was a hole. A damn hole. An aching emptiness that had not yet revealed itself, not yet, and for the moment, this moment, she could always delude herself into thinking that the final humiliating need to press the buzzer for Jim or Jimmy could be avoided. In her mind Alice Dalton had a mental picture of herself as something quivering, vulnerable, glisteningly pink: a garden snail without its shell.

Harry Joy watched Nurse walk towards him. He was a dis-tinctive figure. He had no hips and no arse. He kept his trousers done up tightly with a rope belt but it still looked as if his backside had been stolen from him and when he arrived at the bench and turned to sit down there would be a big empty sack of material hanging from the back of his belt.

Nurse called Harry by the name of Mo because, as he said, 'Anyone with a mo like yours is called Mo, always have been and always will be.'

'Good news for Mo,' he announced and placed a crinkled brown paper parcel on the bench between them. He made no invitation to open the parcel. Harry stared at it and looked away.

'Mo is getting out,' Nurse said provocatively.

'How?'

When it came to answering questions, Nurse always liked to take the Scenic Route rather than the Freeway. 'To survive in this place,' he said, 'you've got to be mad as a spider on a thirty-dollar note. Are you mad?'

'No.'

'No, you're not mad. You won't survive. See,' he indicated the garden with outstretched hands, 'this is my job here. It's my work. I've got my notebooks, all my memories. This garden is like my brain, full of memories. All my little rabbit burrows, full of memories. But look at you!'

Harry's trousers had food stains on them. His pyjama coat was filthy. The left-hand slipper had been stolen and replaced by an odd one. He looked cowed and rat-like.

'You've got your buttons in the wrong holes.'

Harry redid his buttons.

'There. That's better. You're a good-looking fellow.'

Harry grinned coyly.

'Sit up straight. There you are. A good-looking fellow.'

'You should have seen me when I had my suit.'

'Forget your suit. Why are you always talking about your suit? You don't need a suit.' Nurse was shaking his cupped hands up and down. 'She's a lonely woman,' he said, 'and you're a good-looking fellah.'

Harry didn't understand. 'You sweety-talk her and... ' he raised his eyebrows and grinned lasciviously. 'You know what to do.'

'She won't.'

'Yes she will. Look,' Nurse dropped his voice to a whisper although there was no one nearby, 'they steal your slippers and your shirts. I can't look after you all the time. I'm too busy. You wait, they'll come and give you Therapy next time you lose your slippers. They'll take your faces and your pictures.'

'Don't talk about the black.'

'Alright then, but... '

'She'd never look twice at me,' Harry said, 'she hates me.'

But Nurse was grinning and shifting around inside his trousers. He thrust the brown paper parcel into Harry's lap. 'There,' he said, 'open it.'

The parcel contained one pair of shoes, one silk shirt, toothpaste, aftershave and hair oil.

'Californian Poppy,' Nurse said holding the bottle of hair oil with a tenderness that Harry Joy had once displayed towards bottles of French wine.

Harry's trousers were smudged with his attempts to use soap on them, but his shirt was magnificent, silk without blemish. His shoes shone. His teeth sparkled. And yet she had chosen that the interview should be across the desk and not in the comfortable armchairs that surrounded the flower-burdened coffee table. She was still in mourning for the imposter. She rocked back and forth in her squeaking chair while fish swam in the aquarium behind her head and she played churches and steeples with her short-fingered hands.

He sat on the edge of his chair and smiled and nodded, raised his eyebrows, inclined his head politely and, when his nose ran, had a pressed handkerchief to wipe it with.

'You will never be the real Mr Joy,' she said. 'I'm sorry. I know that's unfair, but it's true.'

There was a silence. Harry gave her a sly grin.

'There is something, don't you think, about successful men that is immensely attractive, a certain lack of desperation.'

He pushed his shoulders back and let his arm hang loosely.

'I have been reading my back issues of Financial Review, and look, here he is.' She pushed a tom piece of newspaper across the desk (there was no chance for fingers to touch) and withdrew to be closer to her fish. 'Not a good likeness though. Some people take good photographs,' she said. 'My late husband never had a good photograph taken. I regret it now. I always meant to commission a portrait. If you're trying to butter me up with that silly grin you might as well forget it. I can't afford to let you out.'

He rubbed his face, as if slapped.

'And don't try running away.' She took off her pink spec-tacles and cleaned the lenses with a yellow cloth. 'If you try, Jim and Jimmy will bring you back.'

'The boys in white,' he joked weakly.

'Sometimes they wear white, sometimes they wear grey,' she said contrarily. 'Sometimes they wear shorts and white socks and sometimes, should you try in the ·middle of the night, I must warn you, they wear nothing at all. Mr Duval,' she sighed, and while Harry Joy was still flinching from this insult, repeated it: 'Mr Duval, I try not to have favourites. I try not to have personal dislikes, but I'm afraid I do not take to you.'

'I'm sorry.' Surely many romances grew from such unpromising beginnings.

'It is not your fault. You have an unfortunate manner and you are, of course, sick, so it would not have occurred to you how inconsiderate your request is.'

'I'm sorry.' He would begin again, on the right foot this time.

'You don't have to apologize all the time. That's exactly the sort of thing I mean. If you apologized less you might listen more. Then you would ask me why your request was inconsiderate and then I would have told you.'

'Please tell me.'

'I'm not sure that I want to any more.'

'Please, Mrs Dalton.' He summoned up all his reserves of confidence. He had once been told he looked like the God Krishna.

'The nature of growth industries,' she sighed, 'is often cyc-lical. There is under-supply and then, next thing you know, everyone is on the band waggon and there is over-supply. So from a shortage of beds we go to a surplus of beds and people like myself, pioneers in the business, are the first to suffer.'

'But in time,' Harry said (here was his chance to establish himself as a man of intelligence), 'it is bound to pick up.'

'Ah, in time!' she said bitterly. 'In time. But will I still be in business 'in time'? Those nasty little worms in Social Welfare expel my patients or put their clients into the cheapest place they can find. And believe me, there are some very cheap beds being offered, not the luxury we have here. Even the cancer patients don't make up the shortfall.'

'Cancer patients? Here?' he asked. She was softening. He raised his eyebrows with great interest. Ah, he told himself, you greasy genius!

'They become quite upset poor dears. I advis~ you, by the way, to stay well away from L Block. They can become very violent while they've still got their strength, although as anyone knows, it's their own fault.'

'Sorry. I don't follow you.'

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

'Ah, cigarettes.'

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

Liar! Fart-face!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Are you a Communist, Mr Duval?'

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

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

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

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

He stared at her, his eyes bulging.

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

Harry Joy clasped and unclasped his hands.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'They only come in the morning.'

'But they came in the fucking afternoon.'

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

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

'Your muscles are knotted.'

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

'And your hair stinks.'

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

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

'Why?'

'Don't you start.'

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

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

Harry felt his penis grow hard and fill with blood.

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

'I thought you wanted to fuck Dalton.'

'Only so I could get out.'

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

'Nurse.'

'Nurse is crazy.'

Harry shrugged.

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

'Come and fuck with me, Honey Barbara.'

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

'Miss Harrison,' Jimmy called across the bitumen.

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

'Time for your bath,' Miss Harrison.'

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

'Honey Barbara, I love you.'

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

'I'm not a creep.'

'Miss Harrison.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

Money.

Plus Anger.

Equals success.

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

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

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

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

A creep?

No sir!

Creep-like?

Not nearly.

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

*

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

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

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

He came into the room and brought a chill with him. It was like a cloak of cold gas. He was not a devil. He was the victim of a devil. She had met a warlock once, in the city, with a coven of seven women who served him. The warlock was as calm and relaxed as possible. He had great power. Under his power another visitor, a young man, babbled sexual fantasies and was humiliated.

'There is a devil in you,' she said.

He asked too many questions and meant none of them seriously. He wanted to touch her. She didn't know the answers and it didn't matter anyway. Was it a Christian devil? Devils were devils. They did not belong to anyone, not Christ, not the Buddha – they were devils, malevolent spirits. They existed everywhere. Devils, goblins, evil forces. People say there is no evil, but they are wrong. Honey Barbara had seen the maggots in the heads of decapitated pigs, sheep, a horse once, animals killed for the sole purpose of an evil ritual. On the spot you could feel the evil. It was not the sound (the buzzing flies), not the smell, but a damp, dark feeling in the middle of a sunny clearing and the horse she was riding (Sally Coe's George) felt it as much as she did. It was not just death. Death is everywhere. There was a ghost down in the rain forest where an old man had lived alone and it was a good ghost, nothing cold there at all.

He thought he was in Hell and he had gone looking for the devil. He had sired the devil and given birth to him and now the devil was in his guts like a parasite.

First he had to be washed. He did not understand. He tried to kiss her. She kept him away by force of will. Tonight, she had the power of incantation and knew she could heal him. She scrubbed his back hard and talked to him. She soaped him. She removed the smells from him. She was not known to be a healer.

But tonight she had a golden ball of light at the very centre of her being. She could heal.

She wasn't stoned. She was Honey Barbara, pantheist, healer, whore.

When a devil has your body he knots it, makes ropes, pulls it together, ties it up, braids it, circles you, makes you strangle yourself with your own neck muscles, cut yourself with your own tissues, burst your own organs apart.

The muscles are the devil's ropes. The Christians don't know that, but it's true.

She made him lie on the mattress on the floor in the middle of the circle of candles.

Rain was falling on the roof, ever so gently. She warmed coconut oil. He lay on his stomach on his erection. When she returned with the oil he tried to kiss her but she pushed him away. Not yet. He was grasping and his eyes still showed a dulled, ash-covered sort of anger, like the snakes you find, still alive, in the forest after fire.

Honey Barbara scented the coconut oil with a few drops of lemon.

She wished she had real words for a ritual, but she had only her hands. She sat beside him, both of them naked, and rubbed some warm oil into his back. Then she set to rattle-out the devil. She put the palm of her hand on his spine and hammered up and down. She knuckle rapped, bang, bang, bang, along his spine, and then she used the edges of her hands to hack up and down. A drum-roll. She broke up the words that came from his mouth and let them float away.

She pressed into the skin of his back with thumb and fore-finger and gently squeezed the flesh together. Then released it. A hundred small pinches in a light pattern over his back and the back of his legs.

When she turned him over he looked a little better.

She fast-stroked his knees, drained his thighs, her lips pressed determinedly together and Harry Joy exuded, like one giving up evil spirits, a gentle sigh.

She stretched his neck, and lifted his head. A beatific smile came over his face.

She lifted his arms and felt them – loose muscles.

She circled his nipple with her tongue. She rolled him over and ran that pink wet tongue along his spine, down the skin and bit him, gently, on the back of the knee. She brushed his back with her small firm breasts.

And then, kissed him.

And then, in one smooth acrobatic motion that seemed to take ten slow, oiled, minutes to achieve, like two snakes entwining, she took his penis into her and smiled as he shut his eyes and gasped softly. She nestled her lips into his ear as he entered her (lips into a shell, lips into a rose), and as the slow long strokes began she talked her spell.

The rain was on the roof.

She told him it was another roof, not this roof, Harry, my roof at home, the rain is much louder, really loud, you're with me, and there is plenty of dry wood and you can hear the creek, Harry, and the goats are in their shed and they're very quiet and the big tallow woods up the hill are bending in the wind and if you have your arms around them you can feel their power, and even the old carpet snake has stopped hunting for hen eggs, Harry I love you, and you're really happy.

'I love you,' she moaned, 'I don't know why I love you but when I take you home they'll think I'm crazy. Will you come home with me?'

'Yes,' he said, 'Oh yes, yes, yes.'

The words came in waves ( 'And be my lover, Harry' ) like rain ( 'Yes, yes, yes' ) and he was where she said he was, far away, in a tin-roofed hut with candles flickering in their safe magic circle and up the hill the tallow woods bent in the southerly wind and the water ran down to the creek which would show itself a clay yellow tomorrow and the hens and the goats and perhaps even the carpet snake lay still and in the morning the trees would glisten clean in the morning sun and the steam would rise off Bog Onion Road.

For the rest of his life he would remember the night when Honey Barbara drove out his devil. Then he thought it was gone for good and she was the rain on the roof, the trees he had never seen, the river he had never tasted.

Later, washed by candle light, she said, 'Now we can drink wine.'

They sat on the mattress. She put on the white silk gown she had bought in the Op Shop. It was embroidered with two large golden flowers and one small bee. She had bought it because of the bee, which was executed in the most faithful detail.

They sniffed their Cheval Blanc and entwined their legs together.

'Will you really come home with me when we get out?'

'Of course,' he said.

'Why?'

'I love you. I've missed you. I've got nowhere else to go.'

'When do you get the money?'

'Tomorrow.'

'On your credit card?'

'She won't take credit cards. She wants cash.'

'Have you got that much cash?'

'My wife's bringing it.'

He felt her stiffen.

'Does that upset you?'

'No,' she said, 'that's fine.'

But when he looked at her she was frowning.

'It's alright,' he said, 'really.'

'What does she want?'

'Nothing.'

'Did you tell her about me?'

'Yes.'

'What did she say?'

'Nothing. She's bringing the money.'

'And she knows about me?'

'Yes,' he kissed her ear. 'Yes, yes, yes.'

He was shocked to see Bettina: her face was puffy, her cheeks collapsed, her eyes rimmed, her skin a bad colour. When they kissed, her lips were tight and hard. A peck, quite literally. She smelt of stale tobacco.

'Christ,' she said, 'you look terrible.'

And it was true that he had a scab above his eyes and pimples on his nose and that there was, in his eyes, a quiet glow of anger that had not been properly extinguished by Honey Barbara's magic, and was lying there, waiting for the first little touch of wind to set it sparking again.

Yet he felt wonderful. All night long he had stayed awake, tossing and turning with the sheer excitement of his life, re-living his fight with Nurse, the rain on Honey Barbara's roof, the future on Bog Onion Road. He was a child on the day before school holidays begin.

They sat in the small sunless room in the building called 'The Foyer,' although it was a detached building and used for nothing but admissions.

'Well,' she said.

'Well,' he said.

She wore black: a jacket, skirt. She had always distrusted pretty colours although they suited her very well. In black she could look at once severe and beautiful, but today she merely looked severe and unattractive and if you'd seen her in the street you might have thought her newly widowed.

She sat on an ugly red chair and fidgeted with her hands. He sat opposite on a couch upholstered so tightly it had no inclination to receive his body.

I don't apologize for what I did,' she said, 'so don't try and punish me.'

He hadn't expected this tone. On the telephone she had been different.

'I wasn't trying to punish you.'

She pointed a finger. 'Not silently, not in words, not with distance, not any way. I won't be punished. Do you understand me?'

'Yes,' he said nastily. 'I understand you, Bettina. I won't punish you.' He imagined, vividly, slapping her hard across the face.

'And not that either.'

'Not what?'

'Not that nasty shit you got in your voice then. I don't know where you learnt it, but I won't pay money unless you stop it.'

On the telephone she had been tearful and full of remorse. Now she sounded as if she'd consulted a lawyer. She was hostile, wary.

'Bettina, Bettina,' the Good Bloke said and held out his hand. Her hand was damp. 'Bettina, it's O.K.'

Her chin wobbled uncertainly and then firmed. She took her hand back.

'I am going to do a deal.'

'Sure,' he said, but now it was his turn to be wary. She had said nothing about any deal on the phone.

'I want to do ads,' she said. He held her chin up.

He rolled his eyes.

'I'm not joking.'

'O.K.,' he said, 'do ads.'

Advertising seemed to him completely alien. He had seen advertisements while he was in hospital and he had found it astonishing that he had once thought they were important. Now all he could think of was the rain on the roof, Bog Onion Road, Honey Barbara, wholemeal bread. He wanted to be safe. He did not care about his house, his business, his car.

'O.K.,' he said again, 'I agree. I accept. You do ads.' He was impatient. Honey Barbara was waiting behind the kitchen with her bundle.

'And you sell them for me.'

She was smiling. He stared at her with his mouth open.

'If you don't come back to the business I won't give you the money.'

'You didn't say anything about this on the phone.'

'I'm sorry.'

'I can't. I've made a promise. It's not on.'

'I'm sorry Harry. But that's the deal.'

'Fuck you,' he snarled. He clenched his fist and curled his lip. 'Fuck you.'

'You want me to leave?' She stood up.

'No, no, sit down. Bettina,' the Good Bloke said, 'what's got into you?'

'It was always in me,' she said. 'Always, from the beginning. I was never a sweet little wifey. I was a hard ambitious bitch.'

'It's because of the girl. You're pissed off at that.'

'No.'

'Well what the fuck is it?' he shouted and she looked with amazement at his twisted face.

'You're good at selling ads,' she said, 'and I'm good at making them.'

'You've never done an ad in your life.'

'You don't know what I've done,' she said. 'Now that's the deal. It's the only deal. And if you start going crazy again I'll get you locked up for a long time.'

'Christ Almighty,' he said to his wife.

'Come on, Harry.' Now it was her turn to hold out a hand to him. There was a glitter of excitement in her poker player's eyes. 'We'll kill them, Harry. We'll clean up.'

She felt she was back at the place when their hands had first touched, ready to be washed with vodka. She was going to be a hot-shot.

She took the bundle from Honey Barbara. It was wrapped in yellow crushed velvet and tied up with a burgundy-coloured strap. She threw it on to the front passenger seat of the Jag and thus, in one casual move, eliminated any indecision about who was to sit where.

She was not unkind to the girl. She had smiled at her and shaken her hand. She had found out everything she needed to know on the phone.

'Do you love her?' she had asked.

'Yes,' he had said. He did not even pause. Just: 'Yes.'

Something happened then, something she had been almost planning, and by now everything was O.K. and she had it all worked out, she did not think it unreasonable that Harry should have fallen in love. But there was a deal about that one, too. The deal was that it was not unreasonable for Harry to do what he had done as long as it was not unreasonable for her to have Harry (Good Bloke) committed. She was not unreason-able. She was not bad. She had thought a lot about whether she was bad or not and most of the time, sober, early in the morning, she knew she wasn't bad.

So the girl was all right. She had, at least, some style: a funny, not particularly acceptable, sort of style, but it was style (California, 1968) at least and even if she reeked of drugs, she had something.

Bettina gave her eight out of ten.

Honey Barbara had never been in a Jaguar before and she was not ready for it. She didn't understand what was going on. She tried to ask Harry questions with her eyes. They sat together in the back seat and held hands. There was something strange going on. There was something she could only describe as 'off'.

'I've hijacked you,' Bettina said to Harry and laughed into the rear-view mirror. 'After all these years, I've shanghaied you.'

A game was being played. Honey Barbara didn't understand it. She was simply shocked at how old and unhealthy Harry's wife was. She was laughing. Honey Barbara couldn't imagine why. She should go on a fast.

'Barbara,' Bettina said, 'I have finally shanghaied my hus-band so that I can work with him. I had to buy him back to work with me.' She turned her head to smile and Barbara wondered if her thyroid might be slightly overdeveloped.

'Oh,' she said. 'What work?'

'To do ads.'

Honey Barbara looked blankly at Harry who was chewing his moustache.

'Advertisements,' he said. Everything felt horrible. There was shit in the air.

'He never let me do ads,' Bettina explained. 'But while he's been in hospital I've been doing them, and now he's going to sell them for me.'

'I'm sorry,' Honey Barbara said, and leaned forward in her seat, 'but you've lost me.'

She smiled, to show she meant no harm.

'I did a deal with his highness. I do the ads. He sells them.'

'That was the deal,' Harry said and squeezed her hand. She could feel how guilty he was. 'I'm sorry but it was the only way we could get the money.'

'What was what deal?' Honey Barbara's voice was rising. She looked from one to the other. 'I don't know what you're talking about. I can't even understand your language. I don't even know what your words mean.'

'I'm going to work again, selling Bettina's ads to clients,' Harry said mournfully.

'You said you were coming home with me.'

'I can't. Not yet.'

'I've kidnapped him,' Bettina said. 'But you can come home too. I don't want him for anything but work.'

Honey Barbara could smell evil in the air. She had been around witches before, people who practised magic, black and white. She had felt wills like this before, wills you could not resist. She had lived amongst them. She had gone riding in the mornings and found the heads of pigs writhing with maggots. The poisons from the freeway flooded into the car. She felt the lead take up its place, the carbon monoxide do its work.

'You mean,' she said to Harry, 'you're going to stay in the city.'

He would not look at her.

'That's right, isn't it? You're not coming with me. You're staying here.'

'You can... '

'Well fuck you.'

She dragged the bundle from the front seat and jammed it tight on her knees. For a moment Harry thought she only wanted the bundle to cuddle. She held it tight and rested her weeping eyes in it. He knew she was crying. He could see the wet spots on the crushed velvet when she moved her head. She held out her hand to him without looking up. She squeezed his hand. She squeezed it hard.

When the car stopped at the next light she opened the door and got out. She walked back the way they had come, against the traffic.

When the lights changed, Bettina hesitated. The cars behind tooted, first one, then all of them. She was watching Harry, to see what he wanted. But he sat there stunned, not moving, and finally she applied her foot to the accelerator, very slowly, and when she moved off he did not protest. Thank Christ, she thought, one less complication.

But after a while he said: 'She was right. I broke my promise.'

There was nothing to say to that. All Bettina could ask was the question that had been in her mind since she met the girl. She knew it was the wrong question even when she was half-way through it.

'Was that smell,' she asked, 'was it marihuana?'

'It was Sandalwood Oil,' he said at last.

'I always thought that smell was marihuana.'

'Well it's fucking well not marihuana.'

She was surprised by his tone. She looked into the rear-view mirror.

'You think I'm a creep, don't you?'

'No,' he said tiredly, 'I don't.'

'You think I'm a conniving bitch?'

'No.' He wasn't even interested in the conversation any more. He wasn't interested in Bettina's projections.

Projections!

Even the way he thought belonged to Honey Barbara. He had never known the word before he met her. He had broken his promise. She had walked out the door. He was full of shit. He should have just run away, run away with her.

'Harry, I'm not a bad person.'

'Bettina, I don't give a fuck if you are.'

'But I'm not.'

'Alright, you're not.'

'We had to lock you up.'

'Thank you.' He had decided how to find Honey Barbara. She would go to the house where Damian lived. He had memorized the address. Not the street number, but the name of the street.

'Harry, will you look at my ads?'

'Yes,' he said. 'Yes, I will look at your ads.'

'Harry, we're going to kill them.'

'Good.'

He wondered how bad the ads would be.

'Do you want me to go back and find... Barbara?'

'Thank you,' he said, sitting forward, 'thank you.'

As she turned the car Bettina knew that no one would understand her, turning around to look for the woman her husband liked fucking. But no one ever did understand that Bettina would sacrifice everything for this deal. They had never understood her ambition, not her bug-eyed father, not her languid husband, not even Joel had understood what it meant to her. No one later on would understand either. They would never know what weight she had put on it. They never saw an advertisement the way she did, nor did they have her glittering visions of capitalism which she merely called by the pet name of New York.

She would rather not have the complication of Harry's girl, but it was only a detail so she did not mind looking for her either. She had decided not to be jealous and when she had decided something like that she always had the strength to stick to it. She could isolate whole areas of the brain and mentally amputate whole organs if that was what was needed to achieve what she wanted.

She had decided she did not want to fuck Harry or Joel. She had decided that she had no need to fuck anybody. She did not fuck Harry because it was now impossible, and Joel because he was too mediocre to consider, and no one else because life would become too complicated and it would only get in the way. So she had disconnected herself, and it was detectable already in the way she kissed Harry and even in the way she walked: the signs of celibacy, subtle, delicate, would show themselves to people who shook her hand or passed her in the street.

She did not mind looking for the girl. Which is not to say that she was totally free of jealousy or that she wasn't hurt by Harry’s anger and irritation. But as she prowled up and down the factory-lined streets, while Harry questioned rows of workmen having sandwiches on the footpath, she was as conscientious as she could be. In the end, however, she could not stop herself from suggesting they give up and go home. It wasn't that she was frightened of finding Honey Barbara, or even that she was bored.

She just wanted to show Harry her ads.