Bliss

Part Five. Drunk in Palm Avenue

The house was in disarray. Harry had always liked it neat: the grass trim, the floors polished, the magazines in their rack, but today he was pleased to see it looking different. At least there was some external sign of change. There was a mattress on the floor in the living room (Joel – he won't go home) and another upstairs folded against the wall (friend of Lucy's). There were empty tins everywhere and, on the front lawn, an ancient Cadillac with a crumpled tail fin (some nonsense Lucy's going on with: tell her to shift it). The back garden was high with weeds (had to fire the gardener) and Bettina glowed.

She was a hot-shot.

'Let me show you ads,' she said. 'Let me show you ads.'

'Where do I sleep?' he asked, looking around the blanket-strewn living room.

'You have our old room.'

'What about you?'

'Don't worry, don't worry, it'll be alright. Come on, Harry, look at my ads.'

He sat down at the table, his heart heavy with thoughts of Honey Barbara, while his wife stood up near the fireplace and presented him with some forty comped-up magazine advertisements.

A comped-up ad is not a final ad. It is, technically, a rough. It is the sort of rough that is done when a client has no imagination or, more often, when the person doing the ad is too much in love with it to show it in any way that is really rough and does everything to make it appear finished, taking 'rough' photography and getting colour prints, ordering headline type and sticking down body copy in the exact type face (if not the correct words), carefully cut to give the appearance of the final paragraphs. And over all of this is placed a cell overlay, so that a comp ad, framed with white, mounted on heavy board, covered with its glistening cell overlay, looks more precious to its maker than it ever will again.

But as Bettina said, presenting her work to Harry, 'It's only a rough.'

For a moment Harry forgot his pain. 'Who did these?'

'I did. I told you.'

'I mean, who did the art direction?'

'I did it all. I wrote them. I laid them out. I ordered the type.'

He was silent for a long time, rubbing his moustache.

Bettina stood at the end of the table, holding an ad upright.

'You did it all?'

'Yes,' she said.

'Oh Bettina,' he said, 'I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.'

She had dreamed of this moment for years and still she was shocked to hear the pain and remorse in her husband's voice. He was like a dead man's friend speaking to the dead man's widow.

She did not need to ask him why he was sorry. It was damned right that he be sorry. But it was shocking. And embarrassing. She could not look him in the eye. She became frightened he might display weakness and weep. But it was right, he should weep for all those wasted years when he wouldn't listen to her.

She did not regret the years. She valued them. She valued the strength they had given her. If she had spent the years working with him she would, probably, have had her skill blunted, her perfectionism tainted with pragmatism. There were no greater teachers than the Advertising Annuals she studied, no harsher critic than herself. If she had worked with him, she would have been good. But now she was not just good: she was great.

'Don't be sorry,' she said. A cold, polished consolation she gave him, a hard-starched handkerchief for his tears. And anyway, she did not want to veil his eyes with tears or remorse and blubbering about the past. She wanted nothing to come between his eyes and the crystal clarity of the images in the advertisement. There was nothing in the past to discuss, only the future.

'I'm really sorry,' he said slowly.

'Don't be sorry.' She lined up three cardboard-mounted ads on the mantelpiece. 'Are they great ads or are they great ads?'

She arranged them around him in a magic circle, along the couch, propped on chairs, along the skirting board. She did not intend a ritual. She was merely being practical. He stood in the middle of the circle and blew his nose.

What he saw in those advertisements, in their shimmering reflections, was the possibility of safety. With advertisements like that you could make a lot of money. You could be rich and even, in a limited way, famous. You would be undeniably Harry Joy and there would be no one to take it from you. No one was going to steal your shirts or suits or shoes. If anyone tried to give you Therapy you could give them money. The principle was so simple, it delighted him.

He did not, for an instant, forget Honey Barbara. He would find her. He would bring her here. She could be safe too. There were so many silk shirts here, so many suits.

'When do these appear?' he asked Bettina.

'They've been rejected. We can't sell them.'

'We?'

'Joel, me,' she still had the vulnerable air of the amateur. 'We.'

The cretins couldn't sell them. Other morons couldn't buy them. He (money plus anger equals success) would sell them: He, Harry Joy.

From nowhere, for no reason, an erection forced itself up sideways along his leg and he eased it upright, secretly smiling at Bettina. He wanted to fuck her, to celebrate their life, their power, their joys of freedom, fame, riches, safety, no Therapy, anything and everything.

'I'll sell them for you, Bettina. They're beautiful ads.' He knew how to survive here. He stood up to hold her, to forgive her, to be forgiven, to congratulate her, to push his hard cock against her little stomach.

But she made it a stranger’s embrace: all angles, bones and stiff hard lips.

'Thank you,' she said.

Honey Barbara would have understood this ceremony: the powerful circle of advertisements surrounding him.

Had the neighbours been able to see the advertisements the way Bettina did they would have been in no way surprised. They knew that something decadent was going on in number 25 Palm Avenue and the only firm sign they had of it was this great derelict Cadillac parked in the middle of the nice neat lawn. Around this Cadillac they had watched Lucy and her new boyfriend dance with wrenches and electric drills, but they did not see that as the problem, more as a symbol.

It was a straight-laced suburb where people brought home alcohol in special little cases. And only the clink of two bottles as they went through their front gates gave them away. The children, what few there were, all had clean nails and in many houses they still said grace.

Perhaps if they had stumbled into number 25 on this night at half-past six and found the stove unlit, the fireplace full of cold ashes and only two lights turned on in this big empty room where Harry and Bettina (madman and wife) stared at these cellophane covered mock-ups of advertisements, they might have guessed at their black magical powers, but they would not have seen. Few people in the world could see, perhaps fifty in England, eighty in America. Most of the people who made advertisements for a living could not see.

Even Harry could not see what Bettina saw: the combination of all the complexities of a product, a market, competing forces, the position, the image, this writhing, fluxing, strug-gling collection of worms all finally stilled, distilled and expressed in its most perfect form, which, to Bettina's taste, was in one big picture and one single line of type running underneath it.

But the neighbours could not see this witchcraft, nor could they ever understand what these advertisements meant to Bettina who sought, as the apotheosis of her endeavours, something as unbearably perfect as the English Benson and Hedges advertisements, which had, against all possibility of government regulation, produced a totally new language with no words, only pictures.

As English society had broken slowly apart it had produced these wonderful flowers which grew amongst the rubble. But Bettina had never seen the rubble, merely these flowers, as exotic as anything stolen from a landscape by Rousseau.

Bettina had known how to see advertisements since she was Billy McPhee's daughter living in her vibrating little room above the air compressor, which switched itself on and off throughout the long hot afternoons. And she had known then that one day she would be a hot-shot and this afternoon, at half-past six, she could not get the smile off her face. Her eyes crinkled and her large mouth could not keep in its place. Even Joel's arrival could not take the shine off her happiness. He, poor man, could not see advertisements, and failure had done bad things to him. She felt sorry for him. It was her fault, her bad judgement, that had brought him unstuck. She had given him a chance too big for him. Bettina was amazed at what fragile props held up some personalities, tiny twigs, a frail hope, an almost possible conceit, not enough, you would think, to hold the whole structure together until you pulled it out and you not only snapped the twig, you brought everything down around your ears.

'Harry.'

'Joel.'

She watched them for animosity. She saw the glint in Harry's eye, a slight squint almost. She was not to know that when he squeezed Joel's hand he did it with a punishing viciousness, so she did not understand the red '0' of surprise Joel formed with his fleshy lips.

'You look well, Harry.'

'You too.'

'Hospital doesn't seem to have hurt you.'

'Done me good.'

'You're feeling better?'

'Yes, much.'

'That's good.'

But in the middle of this awkward exchange Harry noticed Joel's damaged suit. He had always admired the effort Joel put into his suits. Joel had an excellent tailor and he followed the most conservative lines and used only the best material. His suits were like his business card and people who did not really trust him still, somehow, could let themselves trust him because of his suits. For a man blessed with no natural taste, his suits were a triumph.

Harry had already stooped down. 'What in Christ's name have you done to your suit?' The burnt fabric crumpled in his inquisitive fingers. It was pure wool and still it had burnt, right up one trouser leg, one arm, and half across one breast. It was a dark material, or he would have noticed immediately.

'It's nothing, nothing.' Joel shook his head. 'Come on, stand up. Tell me your news.' And he walked away and drew up a chair at the table, shifting one of Bettina's ads to make room.

Bettina winced. She winced for shame, not at Joel, but at herself. She knew about this burn. She did not know its details, but she knew. It was as if she'd been left to look after someone's cat and let it be run over or savaged by rats. She had not acquitted herself well with Joel.

'What happened, snooky?' she asked softly.

Harry heard the word and saw how Joel liked Bettina. He looked out of his tiny eyes as if he adored her. His fleshy face lit up when he talked to her. 'Ah,' he said gruffly, 'it was nothing.' It was obviously 'something' and Harry against his will, coaxed the story from him. He was worried that it would make Joel appear in too good a light.

Harry moved another ad and sat down opposite him and Bettina, equally reluctant, did the same.

'Well,' Joel said, lighting a cigarette, moving an ashtray close to him, offering Harry a cigarette, closing the packet and standing it neatly beside the ashtray. 'I was just crossing the road near the office, Harry. (Really it's nothing, don't worry) and this little kid, must have been about three, came running out of that big brown block of flats and an old man you often see him there sweeping the footpath – well not so old, a bit older than you, came out and this woman... '

He stopped to draw on his cigarette and Harry noticed Bettina shift uncomfortably in her chair. She caught his eye. He didn't know why. He looked back at Joel.

' ...had one of those plastic buckets and she threw the bucket full of... I thought it was water but it wasn't...over the little kid. Ask me why?'

He was staring at Harry challengingly.

'Why?'

'I don't know why,' Joel said. 'That's the terrible thing, but she did, and the old man starts yelling out in Greek. He must have been saying, it's petrol, it's petrol. He dashed over to pick the kid up and you see, he'd forgotten. He had... '

Joel held up the cigarette.

Harry hit his hand down on the table. 'No.'

'Yes. Cigarette. In his mouth. They both went up.'

'Shit.'

'Burst into flames.'

Harry shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut to eliminate the vision.

'But it's alright,' Joel said, 'because I threw myself on top .of them and put out the flames.'

There was a silence. Harry stared at his partner.

He heard Bettina's voice say: 'Joel, that's bullshit.'

He saw Joel look down at the table.

He looked at Bettina who was now staring at Joel.

'Joel?' she said.

'Alright,' he said, 'it's bullshit. You don't have to say it's bullshit. I know it's bullshit, but Harry didn't know it was bullshit.'

Harry got up to have another look at the suit. It was really burnt. This beautiful English pure wool was burnt. Behind the burnt wool he could see Joel's red flesh.

'You've burnt yourself,' he said.

'What the fuck. Who cares?' Joel said.

Heard steps, running and suddenly he was being hugged.

'Daddy.' It was Lucy, clinging to him, apologizing for not having visited him. She smelt like her grandfather, the late Billy McPhee. 'Daddy, welcome home.'

Joel was taking off his burnt suit and dropping it on the floor. He looked tired and dejected, an artist scraping down a failed canvas.

'Get out,' Bettina yelled at Lucy. 'Get out. I can't stand that damn petrol smell.'

'This is my father,' Lucy said to a young man with broken teeth and a wizened face, wearing greasy overalls. 'Kenneth McLaren, this is my father Harry.'

'Mr Joy,' said Ken.

'Out,' said Bettina, gathering up her precious advertisements and removing them from this contamination. 'Outside.'

Joel sat on his mattress in his underpants and rubbed antiseptic cream on his burns. It was getting cold. He gave his suit to Lucy.

'Use it for rags,' he said. 'It's no good any more.'

'Thanks, Joel,' Lucy said.

'You bring that suit back here.' Bettina dropped a pile of comped-up ads on the floor and ran across the room to grab the dark woollen bundle from her daughter's greasy hands. She stood in the middle of the room smoothing the suit out against her body. She lay the trousers carefully across the back of one chair and hung the coat on another.

She walked across to Joel and sat down beside him on his mattress. 'Now,' she said, 'let's see what you've done with yourself.'

Harry didn't know what to feel. It was like the aftermath of a war: everything shattered but people going about their lives with a certain optimism. He went up to his room and found his suits and shirts. He changed without showering and came down to find his wife sitting on the living room floor rubbing analgesic cream into the naked, shining, battery-fed body of his partner, well – not quite naked – his joke underpants were down around his pudgy hips and his burnt body gleamed in oil.

Harry stroked the collar of his silk shirt and marvelled at the richness and variety of life in Hell.

Bettina, as she explained to Harry later, no longer found Joel sexually desirable. (Harry didn't listen. He found it painful that she ever had.)

Joel was no longer admirable and it was admiration (she called it love) that made her want to fuck people. It was a cold brilliant sort of emotion, this admiration, and was backed up, invariably, with the unpalatable tastes of self-doubt and inferiority. She had worried all her life that she was cold. She had never felt for her children what a mother is meant to feel. She had despaired at this coldness and criticized herself for it while at the same time she hated (literally) mothers who dis-played their maternal qualities in too obvious a way.

But now, although she would never have used the word, and would have denied it vigorously if anyone had dared to suggest it, she loved Joel. She had not begun to love him until he had begun to fail and then, she believed, he became automatically sexually uninteresting to her. But it was only after he crashed, after he began to do these stupid, dangerous bizarre things to gain her respect, that she actually began to love him.

He was her responsibility. She had pushed him too far and now she would have to look after him. She rubbed the analgesic cream across his back. The burns were not too bad:

'Ah, Betty, you think I'm a schmuck.'

'You try too hard, baby.' Physically they were alike, stocky people from peasant stock.

'You didn't have to say it was bullshit.'

'No, no, I know. I'm sorry.'

'Fucking suit. My best suit too.'

'Never mind, never mind.'

Harry watched this and felt jealous. It was the sort of jeal-ousy a man can feel towards a child at a woman's breast. Sitting at the table by himself he was able to see the emotion clearly and know exactly what it was.

When David Joy arrived home with his two Big Macs at eight o'clock, his father was sitting by the fire. The sight of Joel's blubbery body stretched out at Harry's feet was as disgusting and terrible a reproach as any he had encountered in his nightmares. It was David's fault that Palm Avenue was like this. It was because he had paid money to have his father committed.

Yet he was struck with contradictory desires about his crime, for although he was remorseful he was also proud. He wanted to confess, be forgiven, chastized, admired, under-stood, sympathized with, everything at once. He-wanted his father to see how grown-up he was but also to forgive him as only a father could.

He was hurt, immediately, by Harry's lack of effusion in the greeting.

'Which one is mine?' his father asked, leading the way to the kitchen table.

'Both,' he said, although he had bought one for himself. He was starving.

David imagined his father looked at him suspiciously. Certainly he was opening the Big Mac box distrustfully. But now he lifted the hamburger to his mouth, bit it, and, 'Oh, Christ!' spat half-masticated food all over the table.

He was madder than when he went. There he was, his mouth half-full of old food, trying to smile at him.

'It's poisoned. I nearly ate it.' Harry tried to explain. How could he tell his son that he had thought of Honey Barbara.

'I didn't.'

'It's not your fault.'

'I didn't poison it,' David yelled, that dark hurt look all over his face.

'I didn't say you did,' Harry yelled back and started laughing.

'But I wouldn't do it to you,' David screamed. 'Don't you understand? I'll never do anything to you again. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.'

Joel shut the door.

It was after the war. It was a strange time. People's nerves were all shot to pieces. Harry stood and embraced his son who wept ecstatically on his chest.

'Oh God,' he said. This was not an Actor. This was his son, in pain. He could feel the pain as keenly as any he had felt in Mrs Dalton's hospital. And he knew something like jagged glass was slicing at his son and hurting him, not some little boy's cut finger, but some great gaping wound. 'I didn't think you were poisoning me,' he said.

'I didn't. I didn't.'

'No, no, I know.'

Everywhere the world seemed full of wounded.

'I had you put away. I had you committed. It was me.'

Harry heard him and believed him but it no longer mattered. It was the nature of Hell that Captives were made to hurt each other.

'It doesn't matter,' he said, 'I don't mind. I forgive you.'

Somehow the forgiveness seemed too off-hand to David who had yearned for something stronger. His father under-estimated him. He would not imagine, for a second, that his son had spent five thousand dollars of his own money, had taken risks, been more businesslike than Joel. His father did not know him.

'So tell me,' Harry was saying, 'about this job.'

'You're disappointed?'

'No, not at all.' And it was true. He was even pleased that his son would not be a doctor. Doctors in Hell did evil work. He was pleased that his son wore a well-cut suit and that he could choose a maroon tie like that and wear it with a soft blue shirt. He liked the way his son held a wine glass and when he poured wine, as he did now, that he turned the bottle in his hand as he finished pouring so that it would not drip. His son was emotional, too full of pain, but that was probably a good thing too and it seemed more honourable to be like Nurse than to be like Mrs Dalton.

David did not know how to tell him about the job. Looked at in one way the job did not sound very splendid at all. The idea of a Sales Representative for the Hughes Poker Machine Company did not exactly glitter in anybody's mind. It involved driving around the suburbs in a car and learning how to drink and not get drunk. But it was also a foot in the door of the da Silva organization. They had marked him, they hinted, for something big and it did not occur to him that what they had in mind was training for management in the organization's legitimate businesses. It still hadn't.

It was the bigness he wanted to talk about, the ill-defined promised land of his future where he would not be afraid any more and where there was South America, New York, wide rivers, a future as dazzling and complicated as a Persian rug. And in its magical pattern there was now a new element, a new glow, a cast of a golden colour which suffused everything, the source of which was a character in a book he had read half of and would never finish. He was not interested in what happened to Jay Gatsby. He was only interested that Jay Gatsby should exist. And in all his dreams about the future he had added this element of Gatsby with his big house, alone, looking across the bay at night to the island of East Egg and the woman he loved. Yet in his dream, in its pinkest most sensitive comer, there was not a woman across the water at all: it was Harry Joy.

'So tell me,' Harry said again, 'tell me about the great job. Do they give you a car?'

To his eternal chagrin David told his father all about the car. He told him all the boring, predictable everyday details about the car. He even described the damned upholstery. And he talked about his salary, his boss, the machines he sold.

'Wonderful,' Harry said, 'wonderful.'

It was difficult not to be cross with him for being so excited at all the most banal things. This was nothing to be proud of. This was a car. A fucking Ford. These were things to be dis-gusted with, reasons to throw him out of the house. These were not reasons to be sitting there smiling and nodding.

This was dross, dreck, brown paper camouflage.

Yet they talked about this damned job for two hours, through two bottles of wine and now, as the second bottle finished, David teetered on the brink of telling him.

'Well,' Harry said. He yawned and leaned back.

It was not yet too late.

'I think I'll go to bed.'

'O.K.,' David said clenching his fist, 'Goodnight.'

And sat alone with all those old dreams of Vance Joy's which have become such tawdry baubles that you might expect him, shortly, to abandon them completely. Yet he isn't going to give them up (these eyeless teddy bears) and they will finally lead him on to the Espreso de Sol and up to Bogotá, to a job as a waiter, to a wife called Anna, to his wife's brother's red Dodge truck, to the unlikely occupation of truck driver, which he will accept disdainfully, acting out his disdain by driving the muddy mountain roads from Bogota dressed in an immaculate white suit.

Unknown to himself he became the romantic figure he had always wished to be, someone to swagger through one of Vance's stories with a cane beneath his arm.

On the road of crippled trucks and miserable towns, his perfect cleanliness seemed almost magical.

'What will happen,' they asked, 'if he has a flat tyre?'

'He never has one.'

There were no saints' medallions inside his truck. They looked to see. Perhaps he was a Communist. One day in the town of Armenia two nuns, coming upon him suddenly, crossed themselves.

Then one night in the wet time of the year the long chain of stories he had so innocently begun brought a visitor to his door. His wife, now six months pregnant, was in bed asleep and he received the visitor alone.

The man at his door was short and dark, a man with such a dark beard shadow that David felt immediately sorry for him and, had he been receiving him in a restaurant, would have put him in a back table with his back to the window. The man had a long droll-looking jaw, small wire-framed spectacles on an almost Semitic nose, and very short hair. He had broad shoulders but he shrugged them humbly.

He would not conduct his business in the doorway and forced, with a curious mixture of will and humility, David to invite him in. They sat in the kitchen. He refused a beer but accepted a coffee, holding his square hands around the tiny cup and speaking with a thin voice.

David Joy found himself being asked to smuggle arms into the mountains. It was not put so clearly. It was circled around, prodded at, kicked, and in the end there was no doubt that the bulky wrapped unnamed thing their conversation kept brushing against was that.

He began by adopting a superior air with the man but could not, for some reason, maintain it. Even the shrugging humility of his visitor seemed, at the same time, arrogant.

Was he a spy? A provocateur.

'Why do you come to me?'

'That is your truck downstairs? You wear a white suit?'

'Yes.'

'We have no money,' the man said it softly as if this might be a compliment, an inducement, an advantage. It was ludicrous.

'I'm a businessman. I only work for monei'

The man smiled and shrugged. 'We have no money.'

'I work for money.'

He dipped his head. 'We have none.' And smiled.

'You wish me to work for nothing?'

'We did not think you would let us down.'

'But who am I? Why do you ask me?'

'You are el Hombre en el Traje Blanco -the man with the white suit.'

'I am a businessman,' he said hopelessly. 'I am only inter-ested in money.'

'But we have no money, you see,' the man said.

'But it is dangerous. It is illegal.'

'Of course,' he smiled as if he were making fun of himself, ducking his head and raising his eyebrows.

'You have no money?'

'We have no money.'

'You could be a spy. A policeman.'

'If I were a spy I would have offered you money. A spy would not expect a man to do it for nothing. They don't understand such things.'

'And I do?'

'Yes. Of course.'

'But I am a businessman,' he said for the last time.

When he had accepted the offer the man left and he realized he did not even know his name.

That night he could not sleep. He tossed and turned and Anna became bad tempered and swore at him in a language he did not understand. He went and stood in the living room and looked at himself in the mirror. He was aware of the striking contrast between his appearance and the reality of his life. He looked dashing, interesting, even exotic, yet faced with local gangsters he had lacked the courage for anything more dangerous than being a waiter. There had been no rivers to cross and when the lightning played around the hills it brought only dampness and a nasty fungus which grew down the long back of his beautiful wife.

Now he was thrilled to think that someone, through a misunderstanding, might think him brave.

Standing in Bogotá, on the edge of his story, he composed one more letter to Harry Joy. Dear Daddy, he began.

It was not the walk of city women, who, even when released from the hobble of high heels, still walk with invisible silk sashes tied between their ankles.

Honey Barbara strode.

She strode like women who can cross a creek by walking along a fallen log fifteen feet above the water, and do it with-out hesitation or any apparent thought. She walked as one accustomed to dirt tracks. The whistles of panel beaters did not affect her. She slung her saffron yellow bundle over her shoulder and strode down the street and they, seeing her, thought her haughty: her back straight, her head thrown back, her arms swinging. But she was not being haughty, she was merely walking.

Walking was the best thing when you hurt. It was better than dope and better than eating. It was better than fucking and better than sleeping. You just emptied your mind of everything so that the inside of your head was like an empty terracotta jar and no matter what happened you kept it empty. You guarded its emptiness with your eyes and your ears and you did not even stop to consider where you were going. In this way you always arrived at the right place.

She strode through streets filled with used-car yards, and others full of warehouses. She walked through department stores, a fish market, and along the wide rich streets at the bottom of Sugar Loaf. It was a fast walk, possibly six miles an hour. It brought her up those early gravel streets at the back of Sugar Loaf, where the rich houses end and where the crash of a famous developer left half-finished houses and unsewered blocks full of tall thistles and strangled with morning glory.

Her feet welcomed the gravel. The gravel was like rain on the roof and she felt it and tried not to think about it, but she knew she was going up Sugar Loaf. She had known from the beginning. But she had tried not to know. She pitted her muscles against the mountain and felt them ache. Her feet were soft. Not soft by comparison with the panel beaters, for instance, but soft in comparison with their normal condition. The great pads of callus on her feet had gone white and spongey during her stay in the city. They were big feet, but perfectly proportioned, with high arches and curved heels. They hurt a little already, but it was not real hurt, not the hurt she really felt.

She carried her bundle slung across her back. Her bundle contained a blanket, an alarm clock, a pair of baggies, two T shirts, an old sweater and a separate brown paper parcel full of her whoring clothes.

She did not need anything else. She did not need to think where she would go, where she would sleep. She rose up above the coastal plain perhaps six inches in every step, a little higher, above the mangroves, the big brown ill-used river, the sapphire bay, and walked the unnamed streets on Sugar Loaf where the unemployed, hippies, junkies, and even the respectable poor lived amongst the smell of unsewered drains, half-buried shit, uncollected garbage, jasmine, honeysuckle and frangipani. Bananas grew untended and made their own jungles. Green plastic garbage bags lay in the grass with their guts spilling out. Morning glory tangled itself over rusting cars.

Once there had been beds here to welcome her, but today the humpies were either gone or empty or filled with strangers who eyed her with suspicion. She had not been looking for them anyway. She had been looking for no one. She was merely walking, her head as empty of desire as a terracotta bowl.

She strode through a paddock of tall grass, crossed the face of a small cliff wet with seepage, found a new road and began to walk downhill. She was breathing regularly but her eyes were slits.

Down at the place where the bitumen began, she sat. She examined her feet: they were cut, but not badly. Her legs ached, but she welcomed that. The real pain was elsewhere and she didn't know what to do with it.

She walked three miles to the Zen Inn and ordered an alfalfa tea. And although she should have felt soothed and at home in the Zen Inn, she did not. She was edgy and irritable when she should have been relaxed. They were her people. They had clear skins and good eyes. If she had wanted a fuck or just some warmth this was the place to be, yet it was nothing. She wanted to groan out loud. She could not even talk about her problem. How could anyone-understand that she loved an advertising man named Harry Joy.

She bought some baked veggies and ate them slowly. She willed herself to taste them, to be thankful she was not eating shit anymore.

When she left the Zen Inn she would have denied that she had made up her mind, but not that her mind had made up itself. She simply denied all knowledge of what her mind was up to. She wished merely to let it sort itself out and she would follow.

In the city square she found a phone box. There was only one Joy in Palm Avenue and she memorized the street number.

She crossed the square as it struck eleven. She stood in front of the huge glass-fronted street directory and turned the knobs casually at first, as if merely looking at what streets the city had to offer. Finally she found Palm Avenue: another three miles.

She did not stride so rapidly because this was a different sort of walking now. There was a drag in her steps which was produced not by tiredness but by knowing her destination and being frightened of it.

Cars cruised beside her and tooted their horns as if wishing to escort her to Bettina's side:

She did not approve of grass. It was a poison like any other poison, but she could not have been a whore without grass and she could not get her legs to Palm Avenue without grass. She dragged in rough lungfuls of the stuff, judging it to be very strong indeed. In the middle of the park her joint spluttered and glowed like a beacon.

The streets she then walked along reminded her of a row of mausoleums she had once seen in a city cemetery, row after row of structures devoid of life. Even the trees seemed heavy and dull and she felt, as her bare feet fell softly on the concrete footpath, as if she was the only one alive.

She turned the comer of Palm Avenue with a heavy heart. She had no plan. Dark house after dark house was bathed in the negative radiation of fluorescent street lights. She did not need Wilhelm Reich to tell her about Deadly Orgone Radi-ation. He might be the master of the theory but she knew what it really felt like. She nearly panicked and turned. She should not have been there. Her heart beat fast. She should have been heading back north, walking dirt tracks, have hard hands and clear eyes and be out at five every morning smelling the high flowers in the towering eucalypts.

She stood in front of 25 Palm Avenue. There was no sign of life. But the Jaguar was in the driveway and she knew it was the car she had driven in and that Harry Joy was inside sleeping.

She saw the Cadillac on the front lawn. It was, she reflected, more her style. She crawled into the back seat and there, surrounded by the dangerous perfumes of oil and petrol, she made a bed with her single blanket. She put her whore's clothes under her head and set her alarm clock for four a.m. Then she lay there, looking at the place where the night was blackest.

He was shocked to recognize the sour stale smell of the bed he had once shared with Bettina. He had lived with that smell and never thought about it. Its smell must have once been comforting to him and he must have wrapped himself in it happily. But tonight it was unpleasant.

He could not find a place to lie and his head filled with won't-stay-still thoughts: Joel's blubbery body, his burnt suit, Bettina's ads, his son's tears, Lucy's unknown boyfriend and – sharp, so painful he sucked in his breath – Honey Barbara getting out the door of the Jaguar.

His thoughts were a merry-go-round. He tried to be definite, to pin down his problems and ideas and dissect them coldly, to adopt a plan, have an aim against which he could measure himself.

But he had never, it seemed, believed in anything but his comfort and even these silk shirts hanging in the cupboard were enough to seduce him away from Honey Barbara.

He could not sleep. He could not escape himself. He saw himself as worthless, so loathsome, shallow, hollow, as to be worth nothing. The idea of suicide whirled past him but he did not even look at it. Those unseen gods would simply send him back in for another round.

He rolled over, swaddling himself in his sheet. In the room across the hall he could hear his son talking in his sleep. When he was younger the boy had been troubled by nightmares. They sometimes found him sleepwalking, talking as he went. 'I didn't do it,' he told them. 'I didn't do it.' They had never asked him what it was.

He knew how the deal had looked to Honey Barbara. And now it looked the same to him. He could not claim ignorance. He had seen the cancer map. It glowed malignantly in his mind's eye. He had chosen not to see the subjects of Bettina's ads, but how could he ignore them? He had made the agreement with Bettina, he told himself, to get Honey Barbara out of hospital. But then why hadn't he gone to consult her about the deal when it was made?

What would he do? Was a promise worth anything? Hadn't he promised Bettina? And didn't he, anyway, owe her something for having stopped her in another life when doing ads was an innocent thing.

He went to sleep and dreamed about green ants.

When he woke it was ten minutes to three. He knew he would have to find Honey Barbara and leave the city. He could not live here.

The rooster crowing in the dim dark four o'clock did not sound like a real rooster but something more sinister, some mutilated thing with the top half of its call sliced off, an electric warning device which wouldn't start.

If he stayed in Palm Avenue he could be safe. If he could not find Honey Barbara he could, at least, protect himself. He got up and went down to the kitchen where he began to do profit projections. The big round noughts began to soothe him, to give him pleasure, like the crinkling sound of tissue paper around an expensive present.

When (at four twenty) he went out on to the verandah he was thinking of the uses of wealth, no longer merely relating them to the colours of wine and the quality of crystal. He had never wanted to be rich before. He had never quite seen the need. But now he thought of high brick walls they built around themselves, the grates, grills, jagged glass, Alsatian dogs, alarms, patrols and so on. Those were things that might be necessary.

Lucy's car sat beneath him, its great rococo shape a reminder of a more ignorant and optimistic time. He was curious about the car and walked down the steps wishing to touch it. He had hardly talked to Lucy. He did not know what she wanted or why she wanted it. He did not know how she was being hurt, who she was hurting. All he had seen was that she was carrying a dream and the car was part of it.

They were all carrying a dream except him. He had no dream. He wanted only safety. Why was he so empty? Why should everyone else have these passions and he have none. He stroked the car absently.

Inside the Cadillac, Honey Barbara stirred in her watchdog sleep. The dope had hung curtains in her mind and she was not quite sure what was happening. Someone, she knew, was walking around the car and mumbling. She could not see if it was a man or a woman. She could only see the shape, and occasionally it would move and blend with other shapes, blackness on blackness, the shapes of witches transmogrifying. She breathed in the petrol fumes and felt damp with terror.

'Curious,' Harry Joy said out loud, 'Very curious.'

He was talking to her. He knew she was in there. He was saying – she understood him with dazzling clarity – it is curious that you are lying there and I am standing here.

He turned on his heel and she slipped out of the Cadillac and followed him into the house. She was a little more stoned than she knew.

There are times when the lips seem to sleep, to abandon their role as the signifiers of happiness, while the eyes become almost electric and not only the lips but every other organ must be subservient to them in this, their most splendid and spectacular moment.

Thus: Honey Barbara, standing in the doorway at four thirty-two a.m.

Her mouth was pale pink and sleep-soft when they kissed and all the world around them assumed an impressionistic softness and everything they looked at was coloured with dusty pastels which gave no sharp edges to forms, and even the white refrigerator they embraced beside seemed as mellow as pearl shell.

When she was an old woman with crinkled skin, Honey Barbara would still remember this moment and how the refrigerator looked and how perfectly happy she was, to hold her lover in her arms in the midst of enemy territory and how his eyes had been as soft as those of an animal, a foal, something slim and strong and gentle, looking at her with such emotion.

He could not stop stroking her. He stroked her face, her arms, her shoulders. She knew it was right to have come back because she too had made her promise.

(He was ready to tell her. He had made up his mind. He would have gone with her then at that moment, not saying goodbye to anyone. He would have walked out the door and left those advertisements where they lay, in a great pile beside Joel's bed. But it was Honey Barbara who spoke first.)

'I will stay three months,' she said.

'I will cook,' she said, thus protecting them further.

Harry considered it for hardly an instant. The silk shirts won.

Later Honey Barbara was to think about how innocent she had been. To imagine she could hold him against the forces around her. Surrounded by the smells of animal fat, Baygon, Silicone, Fluorozene, Rancid Butter, Stale Beer, Cigarette Smoke, Ash, and even Oil and Petrol, bombarded by fluorescent light, enveloped by aggressive red walls, she had not been daunted.

Then he took her briefly into the living room to show her the advertisements he had promised to sell. They sat in a long room where a man with battery-fed hips slept on a mattress on the floor.

'Her lover?'

'Used to.'

They carried the advertisements back into the kitchen where he made her sit amongst the remains of Big Macs while he tried to explain them to her. She was shocked. She knew there was something magical about these things to him and she sensed their power. Yet she imagined herself equal to it. She was young and strong and confident. Later she would think she had also been naive.

They put the advertisements away and stayed at the table holding each other's hands, kissing, confessing their angers and their doubts or, in Harry's case, some of them.

In Honey Barbara's mind Bettina was a witch: powdered, smooth, white-skinned, dressed in black. So when she came out to the kitchen at six thirty in a pink dressing gown with puffy eyes, an olive skin, and a throaty sleep-stuck voice, Honey Barbara didn't even recognize her and only knew it was her because it had to be. She was shorter too, without her stiletto heels, and she shuffled into the kitchen and saw, immediately, that they had been looking at her advertisements. It seemed more important to her than any other fact.

'Did you like them?' she asked. Honey Barbara saw how vulnerable she would be to any criticism.

'They're very nice,' she lied. Bettina was a witch, but she felt sorry for her. Her lover was fat and slept on the floor. Her husband was holding hands with another woman. It hurt her badly, it was obvious: she swallowed and looked away and went to fuss about things over the kitchen sink.

Honey Barbara followed her and embraced her. It was an awkward embrace, not just because Bettina was considerably shorter, but it was not rejected.

'I would like to do the cooking for you.'

'No, no, it's not necessary.' Bettina turned and started fossicking in the sink.

'I want to.'

'It's not necessary. We'll cope.'

Barbara looked desperately to Harry.

'It's different cooking,' he said.

This disclosure, his intimate and familiar knowledge of Honey Barbara's cooking, was more hurtful to Bettina than anything else that had happened. She filled a glass with water, drank half of it and threw the other half out.

'It's healthy,' he said.

'Fine,' she said. 'That'd be good.'

'What time do you like to eat dinner?'

'Eight.'

'Is there anything you don't like?'

'Nothing.'

Bettina left and slammed the door behind her and it was Honey Barbara, abandoning all principle, who made her toast with white bread, strong instant coffee with white sugar, and took it up to her room where she sat shivering on a single bed.

When David Joy came down to breakfast he found Harry and Bettina already gone and a beautiful young woman in the kitchen. She had lined up all the plastic garbage cans and was emptying the cupboards as fast as she could. Bread, sugar, cans of beans, jars of coffee, cornflakes, white flour, were all dispatched without hesitation. Only a small unopened packet of Torula Yeast seemed to have escaped her wrath.

'I'm Barbara,' the young woman said.

'David.'

'I'm a friend of your father's.'

He nodded darkly.

'Do you want breakfast?'

He nodded again and shyly regarded her firm arse which the morning sun revealed beneath her white cotton baggy pants.

She went to the dining room and came back with a big cloth bundle. From this she produced four little brown paper bags which contained unprocessed bran, wheat germ, lecithin, and raisins. She put a dessertspoonful of each in a plate, mixed them up, added milk, and passed it to David Joy who was sitting on the edge of his chair.

'What's this?'

She did not take offence at his curled lip. She told him.

'Why?' he said. 'I have cornflakes every morning.'

'I'm cooking now,' Honey Barbara said firmly. 'Today I'll make you some good bread but for the moment this is all there is. So eat it. It'll make you shit properly. It'll give you roughage and vitamins to make your intestine muscles contract. It'll make your ·shit float, you watch.' And she smiled.

David pushed his plate away in disgust. 'I don't want to talk about shit,' he said, 'and particularly not with a woman.'

Honey Barbara shrugged and went back to tidying up the cupboard.

'Did he meet you in the hospital?'

'Sure did.'

David left his bowl on the table and went upstairs, where he tried to persuade Ken and Lucy (who were meant to occupy separate beds while Bettina was in the house) to come down to the kitchen and make some kind of stand.

The woman was mad. He was scandalized by her madness, her obsession with shit, her wastefulness, her firm arse, her pubic hair. Everything about her was wild and untrammelled and he thought, passing her, that he could smell her sexual organ, and he felt weak. Madness horrified David. Yet often he felt it press upon him. He felt soft fingers touch the outside of the concrete brick walls of his bunker. He could feel mumblings, murmurings, the passage of lightning through an unseen sky.

Ordinariness pressed upon him: he invited it, needed it, embraced it. Look at this suit, so conventionally cut he might be a mere clerk. Was it a disguise, or was it the truth? Would he be too weak for the lightning? Would he be too brittle, have bones like sparrow wings? Would he simply snap?

He did not want the mad person downstairs but he could not convince them. He saw they had private jokes about him and he regretted ever having told Lucy his dreams. He was stiff and formal in his suit but had she ever told Ken that she had sucked her brother's cock and swallowed his come, or did she simply tell him that he was a clerk who wanted to be a bandit, one more pathetic Walter Mitty. Was that why they lay there like that and smiled?

Lucy and Ken were very interested in Harry's mad woman. They came downstairs the minute David left the house and they watched her throw foods into the rubbish bins as if they were poisonous substances that should not be touched, let alone eaten.

They introduced themselves and sat at the table to watch her.

'David thinks you're crazy,' Lucy said. 'He says you talk about shit like it was food and food like it was shit.'

It was an aggressive beginning but Honey Barbara liked her. Further this occurred to her: Lucy Joy was someone, not someone famous or influential or even talented, but just someone. She looked like a wild plant, something bred for a purpose now going its own sweet way. Honey Barbara did not even notice that she was overweight or worry that the whites of the eyes in that dark face were a little on the yellow side.

'He thinks you can't tell the difference.'

'Sorry,' Honey Barbara tore her eyes away from the face, 'difference between what?'

'Shit and food,' Ken said. He wore a Kentucky Fried peak cap and his curling hair rushed out beneath it, swept behind two large pixie ears, one of which held a small gold earring.

They were both smiling (when Ken smiled he showed a lot of broken teeth) and Honey Barbara smiled too.

'Everyone here is crazy,' Lucy said. 'I'll make you herbal tea.'

'You've got herbal tea? Here?'

'Been there,' Lucy said, 'done that.'

It was a long time, six months, since Honey Barbara had been around anyone as young as Lucy and she remembered what a charge you could get from fifteen-year-olds: how fresh they seemed, and confident and strong, and also, what a pain in the arse they could be.

'Why is everyone here crazy?' Honey Barbara noted that it was Ken who made the tea (with a lumpily rolled cigarette burning beneath his equally lumpy nose). He squinted down into the packet while Lucy talked.

'Bettina's crazy because she wants to be an American; Joel is crazy because he'll do anything to get sympathy; David is crazy because he wants to be a dope dealer; and Harry must he crazy because he let the others lock him up.'

Honey Barbara was charmed. She pulled up a chair. 'And why are you crazy?'

Ken brought the cups to the table and put a big bag of dope beside them.

'We're crazy because we like everything.' He said 'everyfing'. That made Honey Barbara like him more.

'We like you throwing all this stuff out,' Lucy said, 'and we like David being pissed off. We like everything. We like her-bal tea and Coca-Cola and dope. There isn't anything we disapprove of.'

Honey Barbara thought they were decadent but she liked them anyway. Not even her rather Victorian morality could censor them. What she did not know, and what they never told her, was they were on holidays. They were doing what every Party member must sometimes, in some secret corner of his of her heart, feel like doing – stopping analysing, appraising, and to hell with it all.

At this stage, however, they did not know they were on holidays. 'Afterwards,' Lucy said, 'when the world is over, no one will know that all of this was really beautiful.'

Honey Barbara closed her eyes.

'It's not heavy,' Ken said.

'We are into the late twentieth century,' Lucy said, 'and definitely not fighting against it. Enjoy it. It's incredible. The sunsets wouldn't look so beautiful if there wasn't all this shit in the air. It refracts the light and makes better sunsets.'

'That seems pretty negative to me,' Honey Barbara said. 'You should be trying to change it.' An uncharitable observer may have noted a slight primness in Honey Barbara's mouth.

'It's too late,' Lucy said.

'With herbal tea?' Ken said.

'We are the last,' Lucy said. 'It was always going to end. We are the first people to come to the end of time.'

Ken .rolled the joint. He was the one whose 'Catalogue of good things about the end of the world,' an ever-expanding loose-leafed opus, had set Lucy off on her Apocalyptic Holiday.

'Our Cadillac will do ten miles to the gallon,' Lucy said. 'Dig it.'

'How do you sleep at nights?' Honey Barbara said, in no way cut by Ken's jibes about changing the world with herbal tea.

'We fuck,' Lucy grinned, 'until we can't do it any more.'

And they all laughed and Honey Barbara, in spite of her resolution not to, shared their dope with them.

'Well,' Ken said, 'why are you crazy? Why do you treat food like shit?'

He was not being unkind but he had tapped a serious flaw in Honey Barbara's character: she could not joke about food. She divided the world into people who ate shit and people who ate good food.

'This food is shit,' she said, 'and if I'm going to live here, Harry and I are going to eat good food.'

'What do you think is Good?' Lucy said, leaning over her folded arms.

'If you don't know, how can I tell you?'

'No salt? No sugar? No meat? No white flour? That sort of thing?'

'Fucking right,' Honey Barbara said, standing up and transferring her attention to the refrigerator.

'Sounds boring to me,' Lucy said. (Ken started bundling up his dope.)

Honey Barbara emptied the fridge in five quick throws, saving only the chilled alarm clock from destruction.

'Come back at dinner time, smart arse,' she said to Lucy, 'and we'll see how bored you are.'

Lucy grabbed a can of Coke from the garbage can. 'I'll be there,' she said.

She made spinach soup with spinach and potatoes and onions and spiced it with a little nutmeg. She baked potatoes in their jackets, pumpkin, onion, and stuffed mushrooms. She braised the cabbage with onion and apple and garlic and (eager not to lose her first engagement) threw in a little red wine she found in the cupboard. When challenged about the presence of wine later, she denied it all.

She steamed the sugar peas and planned to serve them in a big bowl.

I'll give you boring.

She made her famous apple and rhubarb crumble and sweetened it with the Rolls Royce of honeys. She said 'boring' out loud, like an incantation. She cooked with love and venom in almost equal quantities, the sweetness of one managing to offset the bitterness of the other.

She walked twenty-four miles and came home and baked a loaf of heavy dark bread. She cooked it in a flower pot she stole from the garden, muttering to herself while an electric drill penetrated the steel shell of the Cadillac Eldorado in the front garden.

At half-past seven she showered and washed her hair and applied a dab of Sandalwood Oil.

Everyone had assembled in the dining room except for Joel who had gone out on some errand of his own. Ken and Lucy had washed their hands in tribute to her. They had rubbed them raw with industrial soap and taken out their Swiss Army knives and cleaned under their split nails with the smaller blade. Ken shaved his battered face and attempted to penetrate his tangled hair with a comb. He put on a white shirt and even stole one of Harry's ties, which he then had to be taught how to do up. Lucy wore a clean white boiler suit. David surprised everyone by wearing an exotic shirt and Gucci sandshoes. He poured the wine, but not before he had given his father the cork to formally approve.

Not since the family lunch (which had ended less enjoyably than it had begun – the duck caught fire and David put it out with a fire extinguisher) had they spread a cloth on the table and even Bettina, her shoes kicked off her sweating feet, a strong Scotch in her hand, seemed relaxed and happy.

David engaged his father in an earnest whispered conver-sation on the subject of Argentinian cowboys, something he was exceedingly well versed on, but the details of which, it appeared, he had no wish to share with anyone but Harry.

'Tell us all,' Lucy said from the other side of the room.

But David ignored her and Harry, in any case, found it hard to listen. He was too concerned that everyone should like Honey Barbara, who throughout all this strode back and forth, her face serious, her back straight, her wet hair flat on her head, setting odd things to right on the table and in the kitchen refusing all offers of help, as if, Lucy whispered to Ken, they might contaminate the purity of what would be offered.

There were marigolds in little jars on the table, and a small glass bowl of water with frangipanis floating in it. The wholemeal bread sat on a big piece of tallow-wood off-cut she had stolen from a building site, and around the table, in egg cups, she had placed, as a peace offering, sea salt.

Bettina was not displeased to see Honey Barbara in the kitchen. She suggested, in a quiet moment when the girl was absent, that Harry turn bisexual and get a chauffeur as well. The joke did not go down well. She drank a solitary toast to the death of humour. She did not like the moony way Harry followed Honey Barbara with his eyes, but she sat herself where she would not have to look at him.

She liked the way the table had been set. It had, in a naive way, style.

The Scotch was Bettina's first drink of the day and she let it evaporate somewhere at the back of her throat. She felt good. She had felt good all day, a tight, hard, relentless sort of good feeling, like a well-tuned guitar string. The feeling started after she had delivered Harry to their new offices: cheap warehouse space down by the river which she and Joel had personally painted in long evenings on high ladders until her back had ached and poor Joel, sweating away beside her, had gone to work in the mornings with his hair speckled pink. She had bought the desks from army disposals for eight dollars each and they had sanded and oiled each one. They laid black Pirelli tiles on the floor and painted the walls pink and the window frames Indian Red. The lights were second-hand creamy spheres which hung at regular intervals and even the couches were from a junk shop, re-covered with remnant fabric in an opulent cream.

It was her first business decision. She had sub-let the old premises with all their expensive old fittings and furniture for a considerable profit. The profit from the old lease would pay all the rent for this one.

And into this stylish, elegant space she introduced Harry and sat him at his swivel chair behind his army disposal desk. He complained when oil from the desk spotted his suit, but by three o'clock that afternoon he had sold his first campaign and he had something about him, a vitality, an edge, an aggressiveness she had never seen in him before.

Imagine this: a colour poster thirty inches long and eight inches deep. A photograph of a match, very large, occupies almost the entire length of the poster. Beneath it, in Franklin Gothic type, these words:

All the wood you need to burn this winter, and beneath that, the logo: Mobil LP Gas.

All this for stores in country areas, to stick on walls for flies to shit on, for mutants to stare at. But look at it there, lying against the pink wall with its cell overlay: a thing of great beauty destined to take its place in the One Show in New York with these credits:

Copywriter: Bettina Joy

Art Director: Bettina Joy

Typographer: Bettina Joy

Agency: Day, Kerlewis and Joy

Client: Mobil.

All the client had asked for was something cheap and nasty to shut up the country dealers who were complaining about a lack of promotional support. He had not asked for this pristine piece of art lying against the pink wall. It would cost five times as much to print, and there was no reason to spend the extra money, except that the damn poster looked so good.

It was not an easy sale for Harry Joy. The client had already rejected the poster twice and here he was, being presented with it a third time, and he was already shifting in his seat and unfolding his arms and tapping his pencil when Harry's total reserves of charm, good fellowness and cunning began to work on him and he saw (when it was expressed like that – why didn't they say so before?) the reason for the poster being like it was.

Bettina, watching this performance, felt ambivalent. She gave him credit for the skill but felt it was a shallow nasty sort of skill and did not really admire him for it. It was a skill like being born beautiful is a skill, in other words not a skill at all. She had never seen him at work before and so could not assess the enormous impact Hell had made on his technique. Gone was that dozy lethargic Harry Joy, the old tell-us-what-you-want-and-I'll-get-it-for-you pragmatist. In his place was a man who felt he must not fail, a cunning, slightly angry personality who hid his aggression behind the natural blanket of his charm.

Bettina resented all the years he had squashed her and resented the fact that he was now to share her triumph. Yet resentment was nothing new to her and this resentment was of a low-enough order for her to accept, just as she accepted exhaust fumes in the air. She was happy. She sat alone and warmed herself with her Scotch and her triumph.

'Will we wait for Joel?'

David was asking her, in that particularly petulant manner that he adopted for all matters relating to Joel.

'No,' she said, 'start.'

It was Joel who had stood on ladders and carried boxes of tiles up three flights of stairs, who had worked on a high plank until 3 a.m. Who else would have done that for her? Who else, if it came to that, cared about her?

Honey Barbara sat next to Harry. Bettina watched them and knew their legs were touching under the table. She felt too tense to taste the soup. Anybody could see that they were touching under the table and his stupid moony face was pathetic. Obviously everybody else was embarrassed too. Why else would they talk about food? Why else would anybody discuss a soup? They took the soup to pieces as if it were a child's puzzle and held up each component and talked about it.

The woman was a looney.

She was explaiiling that she'd walked 'six miles' to get spinach from someone who didn't spray it, for Christ's sake.

Bettina was pleased to see that Lucy was taking the piss out of her with some subtlety.

'And demineralized water,' Lucy said to Honey Barbara. 'You mean distilled water, with nothing in it but water.'

'Yes.'

'You'll still get cancer,' Lucy grinned, 'just like the rest of us.'

'Shut up,' Bettina said. Once a year she had a complete check for cancer. Her appointment was automatic. She was advised by mail on the week before and the rest of the year she did not think about it.

There was a silence. Everybody thought about cancer.

'I like your food,' Lucy said to Honey Barbara, 'and it isn't boring.'

'Thank you.'

'It's very good,' said Ken. 'I used to live wiv a lady who used to make soup like this and this is better soup and hers was very good.'

It was a long specch for Ken and possibly it would have been longer except that Joel arrived and a fuss was made to make sure he had his soup and his place opposite Bettina.

He sat down and smiled a calm shiny smile.

'Joel... ' Bettina said.

Joel beamed. Sometimes, Harry thought, he looked like a flesh-coloured frog.

'Are you alright, Joel?'

Or a waxy image of a Buddha. A marzipan Buddha, Harry thought, nodding politely at his junior partner.

'Pretty good,' Joel said to Bettina.

Lucy was looking at him sharply, her dark eyes narrowed, and Ken, as if waiting for something, held his soup spoon in the air. David rested his censorious eyes on Joel's face. Only Honey Barbara, engrossed in the problem of finding a clean soup bowl for him, paid no attention.

'What happened?' David said.

'Nothing Davey.'

Joel began to eat his soup and everyone gave up and began to worry about other things. As was the rule in Palm Avenue it was always easy to get two people to agree on any subject, but never three, so that whatever was mentioned there was always plenty of room for discussion and sometimes enough for a brawl.

Nobody noticed whether Joel and Bettina actually spoke to one another, whether an interrogation took place and Joel divulged, reluctantly, his secret. They were too busy talking about demineralized water and the high incidence of kidney stones caused, Honey Barbara claimed, by the current craze for mineral water and the high levels of sodium caused pri-marily by excess salt, when they heard Bettina scream.

It is possible she had asked Joel nothing. It is even likely that when the others became engrossed in the problems of mineral water he had simply smiled a sad resigned doggy smile and opened his suit coat for Bettina to see. The smile would have had an apologetic edge to it, as if he was sorry for causing the trouble, but something, obviously, had to be done.

For there, protruding at ninety degrees from his blood-stained shirt, was a pearl-handled pocket knife.

'You fool,' Bettina screamed. 'You damned fool.'

'They won't be back again,' Joel said. 'I saw to that.'

Honey Barbara watched with her mouth open.

'Don't worry,' Lucy told her, 'he does it all the time.' But she did not sound casual.

'It's your fault,' Bettina screamed at Harry. 'You're such a rock-'n'-roll star, flouncing about the office, you never think how he feels...'

She would not have an ambulance for him. Ken and David lifted him up and carried him down to the Jaguar. Bettina insisted on taking him to the hospital alone.

Honey Barbara knew they were going to turn on Harry. She sat and waited for it. They took their time. They complimented her some more on the cooking and she waited.

Bettina was a powerful witch.

'Poor Joel,' Lucy said.

'You've got to hand it to him, he works hard,' Ken said.

'What did you do to him?' David asked Harry.

'I didn't do anything,' Harry said.

Honey Barbara watched, but what was happening was worse than she thought. She did not know that Harry had been, all his life, a protected species. He had not been nipped like this before. He had not been held accountable for anything.

Yet this was the way it was going to be at Palm Avenue for as long as they all lived there, not just nipping like goldfish in an-overcrowded tank, although that would be common enough, but arguing, shouting, laughing, vomiting, attacking, counter-attacking, all too loud, too late, too abrasively. There was an irritable peevish excitement as if they were only a lie or a conceit away from some big discovery and once it was lanced or cauterized everything would become clear, but what revealed itself was never any more than the hungover morning of another day.

Tonight Harry would be 'it'. He would not accept any responsibility for Joel and Lucy wasn't going to let him get away with it. She didn't want him to be totally responsible. She just wanted to admit he was partly responsible like they all were. She felt irritated with him, as if he might be a hypocrite, and although it was a strength of her character to allow others to be weak, and flawed without judging them, she now found it difficult to extend this to her own father.

She only wanted him to admit a little responsibility, then she would leave him alone.

But Harry didn't see it like this. All he saw was an attack and he sought to defend himself in the best way he knew, the way he always had.

'I'll tell you a story,' he said and they should have seen that slight lack in confidence, the nervous flick of his eyes around the table as he tested their reaction to the idea.

Barbara and Ken had never heard one of Harry's stories before and they were, each in their own way, astonished by it, not so much by the content of the story, but rather the way it was approached, and they felt differently about him because of it, just as we feel differently about a man when we discover his secret passion is cabinet-making. There was, in Harry's stories, something of the skill of a cabinet-maker, the craftsman more than the artist. They were not usually stories at all, but incidents to which he applied himself with such dedication that, finally, the thing was like a folly or a carefully carpentered house for pigeons, a rotunda, a series of small pavillions with elegant roofs and perfect dovetail joinery.

There was something that happened to him when he told a story, a certain way he leaned back in his chairs, folding his hands in his lap, half closing his eyes. If there had been anyone alive who had known Vance Joy they could not help but be amazed at the likeness, particularly certain American pronunc-iations and the slow, confident drawl which had a soothing, almost hypnotic effect on the listeners.

The words of the story could be of no use to anyone else. The words, by themselves, were useless. The words were an instrument only he could play and they became, in the hands of others, dull and lifeless, like picked flowers or bright stones removed from underwater.

As usual the story was about and by Vance Joy. It came from the time of Vance's childhood and consisted merely of a journey undertaken by a small boy (Vance) with an old man (his grandfather) from the deep valley where they lived to the plateau country above them. It was called 'Journey to the Sunshine' and it ended with the old man and the boy arriving to see the sun set and the boy misunderstanding the nature of the world outside the valley, for he had never seen a sunset before.

Yet when it was finished the room was quiet. The candles spluttered a little on the table and you could almost hear Ken nodding his head. Honey Barbara squeezed his hand so hard she might have broken it, to let him know, silently, that she had misjudged his power to throw off devils, and asking him to forgive her for her blindness. Harry, held by the soporific power of his father's story, had become quiet and gentle.

But Lucy would not let him go so easily. She had waited out the story, just in case. She thought, perhaps, it might have had a moral, or a meaning that related to Joel. But it was just another story, and he was using it to grease away from her.

'You misuse it,' she said.

'What?'

'Your story. You use it to get away from having respons-ibility.'

'It is about responsibility,' Harry lied. 'It is about love and care, and the father puts his hand around the boy's shoulder.' But he could not look his daughter in the eye.

Lucy was a little drunk. She didn't know if what he said was true or not. He had thrown sand in her eyes. She had not meant to attack, but to clarify, to remove all doubt, but that all went with the wind and she attacked from another angle.

'But listen,' she said, and heard meanness in her voice, 'we never touched each other as a family. Aren't you being a hypocrite, telling a story like that?'

No one had ever talked about Harry's stories like that. She was shocked with what she'd done.

'Go easy... ' Ken said.

'We never did,' she insisted. 'Not like you hug Honey Barbara now. You never sat around hugging Bettina like that, or us.'

Harry held out his long arm across the table, offering his embrace.

'No,' she said.

He looked stung.

'Go easy... ' Ken said.

'No.' She did not recognize herself. 'It's too late for that... '

'What's this got to do with Joel?' David said, and Harry held out his arms towards him.

'You come to me,' David said. 'I'm not going to you.'

'You can kiss me, Harry,' Ken said. He meant to make light of it, but the effect was not well calculated.

Harry stood slowly. He was hurt but not angry. It was their nature to all hurt each other. He bid them all, individually, good night, except Honey Barbara who he kissed silently and tenderly and without ostentation.

When he had gone they were ashamed of themselves, all except Honey Barbara who was furious.

'Why did you do that to him?'

'Well, he gets up himself,' Lucy said sadly. 'But you're right. I shouldn't have.'

As became the pattern, they had another bottle of wine then, and even Honey Barbara had one more glass of Fleurie.

It was an old planter's house, designed to cool off quickly in the evening. To this end it was built on high stilts so that air circulated beneath the floor and the walls were only clad on one side, the inside, so that the uprights and cross-bracings became a decorative element in the exterior walls. As a direct result of this construction sound travelled easily from one part of the house to the other and those visitors who had been coy about the movements of their bowels had often left Palm Avenue severely constipated.

Yet, although everyone had gone to bed when Joel and Bettina arrived home, no one in the upstairs bedroom heard them, unless perhaps it was David Joy who had not yet slid into his labyrinthian dreams of Eldorado.

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

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

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

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

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

Bettina smiled and patted his hand.

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

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

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

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

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

God knows what they expected.

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'It's lies,' Bettina said.

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

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

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

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

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

'No one knows,' Harry said proudly.

'We know,' Ken said.

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

'Lived.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Within the Senate House why is there such inaction?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'I can smell petrol,' Bettina said.

'I washed,' Lucy said.

'I washed too,' Ken said.

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

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

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

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

'You never told me,' Lucy grinned.

'Please-get a job,' Bettina said.

'I don't want to be a boss.'

'Be a worker.'

'I don't want to be a slave.'

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

'You are spoilt children.'

'We are waiting for the Barbarians.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'How?'

'With love.'

He laughed.

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

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

'Of course I know it's shit.'

She compressed her lips.

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

She didn't answer.

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

'I'd rather not.'

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

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

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

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

'A lot of money.'

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

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

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

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

A silence.

'Come home with me,' she said.

He stopped stroking her hair. More silence.

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

'It doesn't sound safe to me.'

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

'It is very beautiful,' she said gently. 'There is no shit at all.'

'But not safe.'

How could he sound triumphant?

'Yes, safe.'

'But you're the one who's been to jail. I haven't been to jail. I haven't spent half my life worried about the police. They don't come here harassing us. My kids didn't grow up setting their alarm clocks for four in the morning.'

'Maybe they should learn.'

And it was, of course, with retorts like this, that she allowed herself to be drawn into it. He had become like a racehorse, or a dog bred for fighting.

'You are making this into Hell,' she said. 'You've decided that's what it is and that's what you're making it.'

He shook his head and looked at the black night window. He would not discuss Hell with her.

'Whose Hell are you in?' she would say, trying to play his game. 'Someone must be running it.'

But that sort of talk only made things worse.

'You tell me,' he'd say nastily.

'I don't know.'

'How interesting.'

And so on.

But just as there are dry days when even the rustiest roof can't leak, there were times when life felt very pleasant. There were miles of wide beaches both north and south of the town and at weekends they could surf and swim naked and let the sea tumble their bodies and rattle out their devils and deliver them on a blanket of white froth to the yellow sand. They lit huge fires on the empty beach and lay there at night watching the stars.

But it was, as she told him one Sunday night, only 2/7 of a life. The other 5/7 were devoted to fear and anger.

Once she had been silly and young, and she had seen Albert on the flooded creek with his Peugeot and not known about hotels and restaurants and the city life. It was long ago. Even the creek was different then and everyone was naive enough to uncritically welcome its raging strength in the monsoon and it meant nothing to them but life. But two seasons later a twenty-two-month-old girl had been swept away and drowned just near that spot and the creek always sounded different after that and no one could cross the ford without thinking of that little girl and how, that cold July morning, they had waded the creek in the high dangerous water hoping they would not find her body and that, glancing into the undergrowth beside the creek, they would glimpse her making her way back home.

But they did find her and two weeks later Albert's Peugeot was at the bottom of a gully and Honey Barbara was on her first aeroplane, high on cocaine, wearing high-heeled shoes. She didn't know what she was doing, or where she was going, but now, with another ten years gone, she had no such excuse.

Then what kept her at Palm Avenue? She confessed one morning, to the bathroom mirror: 'Orgasms,' she told her grin-ning face, 'and flushing toilets.'

David Joy was lying in bed in his room. He heard her laughter through the wall.

Bettina was burning brightly. She was consuming herself. She lost half a stone and had to buy new clothes. She could not sleep. She woke at 4 a.m. considering options, redoing ads, mentally rewriting letters to Americans about her future. Her mind was attuned to problems and she could not stand to see them unsolved, even for a moment, so that when the wine was opened in a restaurant she could not wait for the waiter to begin filling glasses, she pointed: there. This too was her responsibility, this problem of the bottle of wine and empty glass with the glaringly simple solution.

She wasn't even aware that she did it, so she would certainly never have guessed that she was known to the wine-waiters of one restaurant as 'The Glass-pointer' and Harry as 'Mr Glass-pointer'.

And if she had known? 'Well,' she would have said, 'I only do it to save time.'

Perhaps one of the secrets of Bettina's success was that she applied herself as earnestly to trivial details as she did to big ideas. It was seven o'clock in the morning and Honey Barbara was sitting on the grassed edge of the vegetable garden with a glass of demineralized water. 'Do you want to hear what happened last night?'

It was now near the end of Honey Barbara's third month in Palm Avenue (her deadline, and still she stayed!) and the dining room table had all but been abandoned as Harry and Bettina became (for business reasons, so they said) involved in the social life of the town. Bettina had produced a much-admired advertising campaign for the State Gallery (Art Schmart, she said, it's mouldy junk) and as a result of this Harry (Harry!) had been nominated and then elected as a trustee. In less than six months they had moved up that impossible last rung of the ladder and entered the very inner circle of society.

'Formal. No lovers.' Bettina would announce when the invitations came. She would grin, and the lovers, laughing, did not always successfully hide their resentment.

'What happened? Nothing happened. The arseholes! Jesus, I'll be pleased to be out of this town. They all think it's Harry who does the ads. They automatically assume it's him. Oh, what a clever husband you have,' she whined in imitation. 'What a brilliant man. And what do you do, Mrs Joy?'

Then would come the latest bulletin in the campaign to get to New York. A letter from the famous Ed McCabe com-plimenting her on her work (she'd brought it to his notice, of course). A telegram from Mary Wells. She kept up a fast, furious correspondence with anyone who would answer her and her letters were tough, funny, and skilfully self-promoting. She wrote press releases for the New York trade press. She adopted Americanisms in her speech, remembering to say 'Garage' instead of 'Car Park,' and 'out back' instead of 'out the back'.

As she reminded Honey Barbara on this crisp, sunny morning: 'This is only a stopping place for me. Another six months and I'm taking my samples and half the profits and setting up in New York.

'But let me warn you, he is starting to like it.' He, in this case, was Harry. Joel was not liking it. Joel was waiting to go to New York. 'They all think he's an intellectual. The less he says the more brilliant they think he is. That's always been Harry's goddamned talent. When you talk to him he looks at you as if you're saying the most interesting and original things he's ever heard in his life. No wonder everyone likes him. No wonder we all think he's intelligent.'

'He is intelligent,' Honey Barbara said sharply.

'Yes,' Bettina said quickly. 'He is, but you know what I mean. He's in his element. It's true. You should spray those cabbages. They're getting eaten alive. I'll get someone to pick up a good spray for you.'

'Bettina... '

'I know, I know, but what's the point of growing them if you let something else eat them?'

'There's plenty left for us.'

'Mmmm,' Bettina said, thoughtfully. She stared at the cabbages. 'I've got to go,' she said.

She tip-toed off across the lawn so as not to dig her heels into the grass. She found Harry shaving.

'You remember,' she said, leaning in the doorway, 'how Monsanto said they'd talk to us if we could think of a new product they liked.'

'Mmm.'

'I've got it.'

'What?'

'Organic Poison.'

He left Honey Barbara on her metal chair with her glass of water, sitting perched in the backyard like a muddy flamingo. She was like an exotic flower picked by a thoughtless child. He thought of bedraggled polar bears pacing their concrete-floored cages, their lukewarm water dotted with the soggy wrappers of confectionery.

Even the cabbages would not grow properly. They were poor and dwarfed, struggling to survive in the heavy clay soil. The compost heap, her pledge of hope for the future, had begun to smell. Rats came at night to raid it and possums gorged themselves as if it were a colossal pudding.

Harry sat back in the passenger seat of the Jaguar and felt depressed. Bettina, her seat pushed forward, hunched over the wheel and drove with damp-handed bravado, abusing the innocent through the safety of shut windows. The air conditioner made hardly a sound. It was seventy degrees Fahrenheit.

'Look at the mutants!'

They had stopped at traffic lights. Pedestrians streamed around the car, their faces marked by dull punishments. Harry was surprised at the intensity of her hatred for these Captives.

'Ugly,' she chanted. 'Ugly, ugly, ugly.'

Bettina was not particularly beautiful. He mentally placed her in the midst of the crowd. He stole a drab overcoat from one woman, a string bag from another, and then, having dressed her with these secretly, let her walk in front of the Jaguar.

'It'll be the same in New York,' he said. 'Ordinary people in the street.'

'Rubbish. They're so damned dull.'

'What will happen,' he asked, 'if you can't get into America?'

'Cretin,' she shouted, swerving in front of a truck and applying her horn as two men with a ladder jumped out of the way. 'I'll get into America, don't worry.'

'But if you can't.'

'I will.'

'What if something goes wrong?'

'Do you want something to go wrong?'

He didn't answer immediately. He was the Managing Dir-ector of a business whose growth and success was now based solely on Bettina.

'Come with me,' she said.

He looked up, biting his lip. 'Where?'

'New York.' She gave those two words all their due. There was not a fleck of dust on them.

The bitten lip could not help but form a smile, and she could almost see the pictures in his mind, those idealized .towers of glass, Vance Joy's magic, but also more recent dreams, as elegantly tooled as 'The Talk of the Town' in the New Yorker.

'No,' he said, and shifted his body a little so he could look out his side window.

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

'So.'

'You'll hate living in the bush.'

'The hut is built.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Sure we can.'

'Our name will stink.'

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

'They'll hate us,' Harry said.

'I hate them,' she said simply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She yawned. He didn't notice.

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

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

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

'Goodnight, Joel.'

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

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

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

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

She felt his hand and pulled away.

'No, Joel, go away.'

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

'Here.' It was a handkerchief.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'O.K.'

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

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

'Take your baggies off.'

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

'It's O.K.'

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

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

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

Through all the lovemaking her eyes were shut, and what-ever she saw or thought she kept secret from herself. She felt him quiver and come before she was ready, but he did not stop thrusting and it was then she looked up into the eyes and saw specks of brown, almost gold, gleaming like cats' eyes in sunlight. He asked so desperately for her pleasure that she acted it for him and she dug her hands hard into his back and gave him, in a place that would not show, a bite that would glow sullenly for weeks.

Then she saw – just as, in a milling crowd, one might see a flash of a knife moving from pocket to pocket, just a glimpse the small glint as it catches the sun – a look in his eyes. It was triumph, a cold hard thing, like a spring on the lid of a box. She understood in an instant, that she was a dream he had caught in a net.

Damn you and your dreams. She carefully wiped his penis with the yellow handkerchief then placed the damp silk between her legs lest the marks of her infidelity show on the eiderdown.

She had come to this, this seedy betrayal, and she knew it was time to leave these people, who had such trunk-loads of dreams, ideas and ambitions but never anything in the present, only what would happen one day, and it was time to get away from it and face whatever might be waiting for her at home and hope that it might be as it had been: better and deeper pleasures with smaller, more ordinary things, pleasures so everyday that these people would never see anything in them but tiredness, repetition, discomfort, and no originality at all. The light in the room had always been bad, a sad little twenty-five-watt globe which produced an unrelieved cast of middle grey, from which nothing stood out except the tip of a yellow handkerchief which would, in a happier moment, have looked like the fallen petal of a jonquil between her legs.

It had stopped raining but, at three in the afternoon on that day in the unimagined future, a low mist still hung around the sides of the mountains and when David Joy descended from his truck he was careful not to muddy his suit. He lit a long thin cigar, and, when he put his matches back in his pocket, left his hand there with them.

The truck was just beyond the bridge where tourists took photographs and where truck drivers went to defecate. They had been stopped by the army on the Armenia side of the bridge and his passenger, the modest, infuriating man with the broad-shouldered shrug and the dark shadow on his face, had been shot dead as he ran towards the shelter of the round tanks, which turned out (Fabricá de Sulfato Amontaco) to be a fertilizer factory.

The local newspaper came out to take photographs of the man where he lay with his face in a puddle. The Major was too proud to indulge in any of this tomfoolery and when he spoke to the reporter he adopted a haughty air. His name was Major Miguel Fernandez. He was thirty-three years old. He had olive skin, a small mouth with unusually well-defined bow-shaped lips and hooded, soulful eyes. He walked with a slump of the shoulders, not a defeated slump, but the disguise of an athletic man who wishes, for some reason, to disclaim any special prowess. His love was not the army. His love was the literature of England.

'Now,' he said, 'perhaps we might go and drink coffee. Then we can discuss this.'

Together they dodged the puddles.

It was a modern cafe built by its German owner to take money from the truck drivers and the bus passengers and in this he had been quite successful. He was a thin dried-out walnut of a man, who sat, in his white apron, on a special perch he had built for himself and his cash register. Here he spiked the bills, gave change, and surveyed the white and gold speckled floor, the neon lights (three different colours), the jet black laminex tables, the pinball machines and, through a system of mirrors, could check on anyone who might be considering leaving without paying.

But when David Joy and the Major entered his establish-ment he descended from his pulpit and, with a rare smile, escorted them personally to a booth at the window.

Miguel Fernandez sat where he could watch his men unload the truck. He was beguiled by what he saw as David Joy's Englishness. He liked the cool way he had climbed from his truck and lit his cigar, not exactly like David Niven, but like somebody, somebody English. He asked him questions about his place of birth, date of arrival in Colombia, papers and so on, but he managed to do it as one man of culture addressing another, and so supplied details of his own education and family history. But when he saw one of his men hold up machine guns from a crate, his stomach tightened, because there were simple orders to be carried out in circumstances such as these (officially a state of emergency) and he no longer had the appetite for them. In a year he would be out of the army. He would open a bookshop near the university at Medelin and sell Stevenson in translation but also in English.

'Mr Joy, what were you carrying in your truck?'

'Motor-cycle parts.'

'If I told you they were guns, not motor-cycle parts?'

David Joy sipped his coffee. 'I took the job,' he said, 'like any other. I can't spend my time opening crates.'

Miguel Fernandez nodded in encouragement. 'And he gave you money. You gave him a receipt perhaps.'

'No, he gave me no money.'

'It could be most important to you, Mr Joy, that he gave you money.'

David Joy was not unaware of the respect being accorded him. He drew it into himself. He felt slow and lazy and he answered after a yawn. 'He was to give me the money later,' he smiled. 'When the parts were delivered.' He felt no fear, none at all. His head was perfectly clear, perhaps exaggeratedly clear, as if he was under the influence of a mild hallucinogen.

'But he had money.' Miguel Fernandez had small pink-nailed hands which he had the habit of playing with, bringing the fingertips together, then twisting them on an imaginary axis and so on. It would have been a more acceptable habit, David Joy thought, in someone with longer fingers.

'I trusted him,' David said, edging out further on some imaginary tightrope.

'No,' the Major said sadly, 'you did not trust him. You do not drive for ten hours for a poor man who says he will pay you later.'

David signalled the waiter for more coffee. The movement of his hand conveyed perfect authority.

'If you are a businessman, you take money. You are a con-tractor. Perhaps the receipt has slipped your mind. Perhaps he paid you and you kept the receipt in your book.'

'No,' David Joy smiled. (This is not ordinary. I am not ordinary.) 'I have no receipt.'

'But you are not a Communist.'

'Do I look like a Communist?' Now, in captivity, he felt freer than he had ever felt. '

'Then in God's name write a receipt, Mr Joy.'

'I cannot write a receipt because the man gave me no money.'

'Then you are a Communist,'

'You know I am not a Communist. The man asked me to carry goods for him.'

'You are a very stupid man. Stay here.'

David Joy was left alone at the table where he took pleasure in observing himself.

Major Fernandez was talking to Bogotá on the telephone. The line was bad. He pleaded for David Joy's life while David Joy sat by the window smoking a long thin cigar and drinking black coffee. Children came and stood in the doorway. He smiled at them and they hid. It was like a dream and it was, in some way, perfect. It was not the disgrace with the two knife-wielding spivs who had sent him scurrying back to the safety of his waiter's uniform. Everything he did was elegant, and proud. His movements were, just so. He lit another cigar with a flourish.

When the Major returned, David Joy observed the exotic nature of his uniform, the romantic quality of his face, his refined movements, the crumpled packet of cigarettes he placed on the table. It was like a film. It was as if he had never been in Colombia and had been dumped, just now, into this seat.

'You are trying to make me kill you,' the Major said. 'It would be simpler for you to just jump off the bridge.'

David bowed his head and smiled. He appreciated the style of the Major's comment. He 'offered him a cigar and was pleasantly surprised when he accepted it.

'You have my word I am not a Communist.' The Major looked at him with renewed hope. 'You did not know about the guns?' For a moment David allowed himself to despise the man's pleading eyes.

'I guessed,' he said, 'yes.'

'I am not going to shoot you,' Major Fernandez told him, 'no matter how much you desire me to.' And the rules of the game were thus, finally, stated.

Night came and they were still there. The soldiers crowded into the cafe and sat at the tables drinking coffee and playing cards. The German looked unhappy but did not complain. It appeared however that none of this was bad for business at all. Quite the opposite. Locals came to see the man in the white suit and they, of course, bought coffee and one or two purchased cigarettes. When the Major talked to Bogotá (who would pay?) the cafe went quiet as they listened to him plead for the life of the man in the white suit. The foreigner, the Major said, was not a Communist. He was a madman. He should be deported, perhaps, or locked up in an asylum, but not shot.

David Joy bought wine for the soldiers. The soldiers passed the bottles to the people from the town. David bought more wine. The German did not smile but his pen was kept busy and occasionally, behind the' shelter of a ledger, he took out a small electronic calculator and fiddled with it before returning it to its place.

Major Fernandez was trying to communicate the essential quality of David Joy to the blockheads in Bogotá but he was only making a fool of himself doing it. He had family in the military. He irritated valuable contacts throughout the night trying to save David Joy, who played cards with the soldiers, danced (once, but to much applause) with a girl from the town, and answered questions which were translated back and forth by a throaty-voiced fifteen-year-old boy.

'Aren't you afraid?' they asked him.

'I was born in a lightning storm,' he said.

A woman gave him a shawl to sit on in case the cafe chairs should soil his suit. He accepted it graciously, as his due. In return he told them stories which were translated a sentence at a time.

At about three o'dock in the morning Miguel Fernandez joined the table, a glass of wine in his hand, his uniform unbuttoned.

'David,' he said, 'you will only have to say where you were taking the guns.' He was smiling, 'That is all.'

Some of the townspeople had gone home. But the fifteen-year-old boy was still awake to translate this for the audience. They waited. They looked at David Joy, their laughter ready, like pigeons, to fly around the room.

'No,' David Joy said.

'Non,' the fifteen-year-old translated needlessly.

They did not know that he could not have provided the information anyway. But even if he had known it is doubtful if he would have weakened. He could not soil the perfection of this, this pure white perfect thing. The only perfect thing.

It is likely that the audience would have stayed to the bitter end, trooped out into the cold dawn and gone down under the bridge where the execution was to be carried out. But the Major cleared them out in a fury, screaming abuse at them.

'Carrion,' he told them, 'vermin. Go before it is too late.'

So when the time came there was only the German to join the procession and he locked the cafe before following the party down the muddy embankment. It occurred to him, watching the Major and the man in the white suit, that it was the Major who looked as if he would be shot and the other who would do the shooting.

It was cold. David's balls retracted into his stomach and he knew his scrotum was a tough tight little purse. He wanted a piss. Would he piss himself after he died, as he died? He shivered. He stopped and turned his back to piss. The party halted. The men watched him. His penis had shrivelled in the cold. He turned his back because he did not want them to doubt his manhood. He watched the steam rise as his warm urine hit the ground. He felt like he had as a child on Sunday nights watching the highway full of cars returning home after a weekend.

He was not frightened at all. There had been no fear since the episode started. It had all been so easy. If he had known it would be this easy he would not have worried about it.

He was more distressed when, going down the embankment, he slipped and muddied the back of his suit.

'Fuck,' he said.

But when he saw Miguel Fernandez's sick melancholy face it relieved him even of that pain.

'Cheer up,' he told him, and felt again some of the bravado he had felt in the warm of the cafe with the soldiers gathered around him and the jukebox playing and that girl he had danced with, he had missed her name. 'Cheer up, Miguel. You can have a big breakfast.'

'You're a fool,' the Major said bitterly.

'Possibly.'

'It is unnecessary. Please, David... '

For a moment he hesitated. For an instant panic fluttered its wings in his ears.

'No,' he said, 'it is necessary.'

And he went to stand against the embankment with his hands behind his back. He stood before the unhappy soldiers like a man posing for the photographer in the square of a tourist town. The mud was not visible to the camera.

'Come on,' he said, 'hurry up.'

Miguel Fernandez did not wish to look at the body, but it was expected. As he walked towards the crumpled thing that had been a man he was not ready for the look of ugly surprise he would see on the dead man's face, nor did he know that one night nearly twenty years later, his son's wife would tell him the story of The Man with the White Suit. It was not quite the real story; it had become mixed with other stories David Joy had told that night.

The story of the man with the white suit ends formally, always the same, with the sun coming out as he falls, and they say Pero era sólo una mariposa (but it was only a butterfly) que se volaba (flying away).

The wrapper of a sweet confection delivered fifty-five years through time. But not even Miguel Fernandez knew that.

Harry Joy found Honey Barbara in the morning, one hundred miles up Highway One, and had he been two minutes earlier or ten minutes later, he would probably never have found her at all.

He brought the Jaguar to a stop in front of her and watched her run towards the car. At the passenger door, she recognized him.

'I'm not coming back,' she said.

'I know.'

'I'm going home.'

'I'll take you.'

She opened the door and looked at him, hesitating with her bundle resting on the seat.

'It's four hundred miles.'

'That's O.K.'

'Not all the way.' She threw her bundle into the back seat and closed the door.

It was a difficult journey for both of them but at least they both knew there was nothing to say.

'I don't like you soft,' she said once, touching the cuff of his sleeve.

He didn't understand and smiled painfully.

'I like you hard. Not all this silk.' She clenched her fist and smiled.

'What are you saying?'

'We had nice times, Harry.'

'Yes.'

'We had some nice fucks.'

'Yes.'

They drove through Sunday traffic past giant fibreglass pineapples and bananas surrounded by buses and people with secret pimples on their arses.

'Can I come and see you here?'

'They'd think you were a spy.'

'Who are they?'

'Realists,' she said and sunk into her seat and watched the wipers slurp at the rain on the window.

It was five o'clock and getting dark when she made him stop at the turn off to Paddy Melon Road just on the curve of the bitumen where Paddy Melon Road goes downhill through the casurinas, a collection of puddles in a hard ribbon of mustard clay.

It. had stopped raining for the moment but there were heavy inky blue clouds behind Mount Warning.

'It'll rain,' he said.

'I don't mind the rain,' she said. 'They'll be waiting for it now. We have droughts in winter.'

'Will you write to me?'

She bit her lip and they kissed uncomfortably, their bodies spanning the bucket seats and instruments of the Jaguar.

She took the bundle and closed the door without looking at him, and he stayed in the car with the engine running and watched her walk down the gravel road. He noticed that she flinched from time to time when a sharp rock bit into her soft bare feet.

It was noon on a Friday and the city was crowded. People stopped to look at Bettina, and it was not because of her cleverly cut black dress or the silk scarf with the signature of the famous designer she wrapped around her black bag, nor was it because of the strut, the prance (almost) of her plump legs, but the sheer quality of anger she contained. Her cheeks had flattened, almost hollowed, as they did when she was very drunk or very angry, and she was not drunk.

She bumped into people and did not look around.

She stopped at a traffic light and a whiskery old woman winked at her.

'Cheer-up, dearie.'

'Mutant!' she said. Her dress was by Cardin, her shoes by Gucci.

She had so much anger she did not know what to do with it, no, not anger – rage. They had made a fool (what a fool, what an idiot) of Bettina Joy.

She walked into the corner pub opposite the railway station. It was the public bar. They made way for her and served her immediately. She ordered a double Scotch, drank it in a gulp, ordered another one and drank that.

Fifty-six men watched her in silence.

'That's it, girly.'

Bettina curled her whole face into such a display of ugly contempt that the whole bar erupted into laughter. She threw money on the bar and left.

Until today life had been nearly perfect. In the three months since Honey Barbara had gone Harry had settled into work, they had all settled into work. Now there was no real reason to come home early, or even come home at all. They had heated soup in an electric jug, drank a little (but not a lot) of white wine. They made toast. Whoever had the time would make the toast, it didn't matter. They changed the name to Joy, Joy & Davis, and that's what they were: a team.

There was such a sense of excitement, of comradeship, and it was nothing (it was everything!) to work till three in the morning, or even, as they'd done on the second Mobil presentation, till dawn. They typed their own reports and bound them. There was nothing they couldn't do: she was good with ads, Harry was good with strategies, and Joel had revealed, finally, that he had a better eye for detail than either of them. Joel wrote the conference reports. He dotted i's and crossed t's with an enthusiasm that sometimes drove her crazy.

Just two weeks ago they had opened a letter and found they had sixteen entries accepted in the New York One Show. Copywriter: Bettina Joy, Art Director: Bettina Joy, etc.

Their profit projection for the calendar year was three hundred thousand dollars.

The New York trade press printed one of Bettina's press releases.

And then, this morning, in that grey dull little room with the wrought-iron balcony, that stale imitation of Paris with its waiting room stinking of meths, she had sat with no more trepidation than at the dentist's while he clipped the x-ray on to the screen and read a report.

'Mrs Joy,' he said, 'have you ever been exposed to petrol over a... '

'Tell me,' she said.

He was tall and handsome and had a slightly roguish eye. She liked him even if she hated his business.

'This is something,' he stopped and looked again. 'This is something we normally only find in people who are exposed to petrol fumes over a very long period. Mechanics, service station attendants... ' he faded away, smiling apologetically at such comparisons.

'Tell me.'

'We'll get another opinion,' he said, 'of course.'

'It's something nasty.'

'Have you been exposed to petrol a lot?' He managed a smile. 'Hardly.' Then, avoiding her eye for a second, using the time to look down at her card: 'It's a malignancy, I'm afraid. A rather nasty one.'

'Yes.' She could be very normal. She would be. In all the times she had imagined this ·scene she had gone to pieces. 'Yes, it's alright. I think I knew.' This was not true. SHE HADN'T KNOWN. SHE HADN'T EVEN GUESSED.

She had to find out the truth.

'It is a particular malignancy normally caused by petrol.'

'Petrol causes cancer?'

He clicked his tongue sadly and pulled his lips back side-ways against his teeth. 'The benzine in petrol, to be precise.'

'You'd think they'd tell people,' she said wryly. She was proud of herself. She had style. They told her she had cancer and she was being sardonic. But he still hadn't told her.

'How long have I got?' she said the clichéd words. She said it to have it unsaid. He was going to say, oh, it's not lethal. That was the plan.

She tricked him only too well.

'Oh,' he said, 'you could have a year.'

And only when the sentence was finished did he realize what a terrible mistake he had made, for he saw her face collapse and twist; defeat and rage battled with each other for control of her features, but both lost to the sheer force of her will.

'I need more than a year,' she said.

'Mrs Joy... '

'You're ridiculous!' she said. 'I need three years to make it in New York. I can't do it in a year.'

He folded his hands and when they rubbed across each other they sounded dry and papery.

'Why don't they tell people?' she said.

'I'm sorry...?' He fiddled in his drawer where he had a 10-ml ampule of Valium.

'Petrol causes cancer. They were right.'

He was ashamed of himself. He had bungled it. 'Who was right, Mrs Joy?'

'The silly hippy was right. She said petrol causes cancer... '

'There are many carcinogens in common use.'

'Saccharin? PVC? ... '

'Yes,' he said, surprised.

'Well why don't they tell us?'

He filled the hypodermic. 'I'm going to give you a shot of this.'

'What is it?' and her eyes were momentarily bright with hope.

'Valium,' he said, his eyes downcast.

'Forget it,' she said.

'It'll make you feel better.'

'Nothing can make you feel better,' she said, 'when you have been made a fool of.'

Her whole life had been built on bullshit.

Later, Harry was to think that if she had had more time to think it over she would not have done what she did, if Lucy had been home, if Honey Barbara had still been there, if Joel had not been driving out to Krappe and if he had not been lunching with Adrian Clunes.

He was wrong. Her actions were carefully thought out.

He remembered coming back from lunch and staring with disbelief at the torn-up Mobil story boards outside her door.

'What happened?' he asked Joel, who was sitting at his desk.

'Changed her mind.'

'Good,' he remembered saying. Bettina's best work always happened like that, rejecting a good campaign and then doing a brilliant one. 'Good.'

That night they had all meant to go to the Krappe sales convention for 'Sweet-tooth' but Bettina begged off because her ads were not finished. She put a note in Harry's diary saying the time for the Mobil presentation had been put for-ward till eleven, and that she would meet him downstairs in the coffee shop at 10.45.

When Harry came home she was asleep. When Bettina got up Harry was asleep. She must have gone straight to the office.

As the tea lady remembered it, the whole thing had been very light-hearted. Everyone in the boardroom had been very relaxed and it seemed as if they were looking forward to the meeting. She heard Mrs Joy apologize for her husband's absence and Mr Jones, the Marketing Director, had suggested that they postponed the meeting but Mrs Joy had said: 'No, no need. You're stuck with me.'

They had laughed.

Mrs Joy had asked for a strong black coffee and when it was pointed out to her that all the coffee was one strength she asked for two cups. She had looked very smart, in a white linen suit with a large white hat. She did not normally wear hats, the tea lady thought, but it was very attractive, and the Chairman had commented on it. Bettina had coloured a little, pleased with the compliment.

They were short one cup, because Mrs Joy had had two, and the tea lady had returned to the meeting temporarily with a cup for Mr Bernstein just as Bettina was unpacking a large cardboard box. On the table she placed three large bottles of petrol.

Mr Cleveland said something about getting close to the product.

It seems unlikely that Bettina ever found time to present her campaign. Perhaps her natural impatience got the better of her. But one can imagine her standing at the head of the table and the men leaning back and smiling, enjoying the little theatre that comes from a good presentation.

'This,' she might have said, 'is petrol.'

A joke, the sheer obviousness of it.

And if the wicks were not already in the bottles she might well have enjoyed the suspense as she put them in. She must have kept their interest – no one left the room just yet.

Did she say anything at all about her cancer?

If so, one imagines she would have had to do it quickly, as a curse almost, and there would have been no time for questions.

Miss Dobson, whose desk is outside the boardroom, beside the Managing Director's office, thought she heard Mrs Joy shout the word 'Mucus' and then there was that terrible explosion, followed by two more in sharp succession and all at once the overhead sprinklers poured down, drenching the eighth floor and Mr Cleveland ran out of the boardroom and collapsed screaming in front of her. She had not recognized him. He rolled into the curtains and set them on fire.

Only one advertisement survived that inferno (certainly no people did) and beneath its bubbled cell overlay one could read the headline, set in Goudy caps and lower case: 'Petrol killed me,' it said and it is an interesting reflection on the art of advertising that it was four hours before anyone bothered to read the body copy and learned that the death in the headline was a death by cancer.

So when the police interrogated Harry for the first time, on the shocked grey ghastly day in that dull little office in the Mobil Research Department, there was only one motive he could think of.

'They must have rejected her ads,' he said.

The faces at Palm Avenue had a grey waxy look. They were numbed and did not question the search but admired, in a vague distracted way, the style in which the police seemed not so much to search as to caress pieces of clothing, stroke objects, and when they slid their big blunt hands behind couches there was a deftness, almost a tenderness, that con-tradicted their gruff masculine manner. They stood on chairs and peered at the dead insects inside light shades; they worked their way along bookshelves and removed books with a gentleness that could be taken for respect.

There were only two of them, Macdonald and Herpes – whose red inflamed face suggested some connection with his unfortunate name – and although they were both titled Detective, it was Macdonald who appeared to be in charge. They were both big men but broad rather than tall, a physical type that is sometimes compared, often with admiration, to a brick lavatory. They wore shorts and long white socks. They carried clipboards.

It was Herpes who ushered everyone into the kitchen and Macdonald who began to interview them, one at a time, in the dining room. There was little conversation in the kitchen and what there was centred on such problems as whether a person wanted coffee or tea and such prosaic details as names and dates and places of birth. To all this, they submitted meekly.

The more serious work took place next door and from time to time the smooth murmuring in the dining room would be broken by the lump of a sob as someone collided with some painful flotsam of memory.

It was the thirteenth of September, that time of the year when one night can be hot and steamy and the next bitterly cold, as if there were forces still arguing for a continuation of winter and others for the beginning of summer and summer would win one night, and winter the next.

The forces of winter were in control on the night after Bettina's death.

Breath hung in the air in the kitchen as they sat around the table like effigies of themselves with only their suspended breath to suggest that they were flesh and blood.

They were not yet told how or why Bettina had died. The police had only just read Bettina's body copy, and deliberately said nothing of her cancer. The questioning, they said, was routine.

The following interview with Joel was not atypical, although it could hardly be judged to be routine. Imagine then, the policeman sitting at the head of the dining-room table (how far away those lunatic nights seemed now), a radiator at his feet and some thirty books, mostly paperbacks, stacked neatly on the table. The titles of these books might suggest a house with a far more serious political bent than it had. Kropotkin's revolutionary pamphlets, Ernest Mandel on Trotsky, an Everyman edition of Das Kapital in two volumes, Social Banditry, and so on. These books were Lucy's, but the book that interested Macdonald most of all was The Politics of Cancer by Samuel S. Epstein, which Honey Barbara had bought and abandoned after its fifth depressing page.

'Do you have any particular theory about the cause of cancer?'

'No, not really.'

'Do you think cancer is political?'

'I don't know.'

'Is it someone’s fault?'

'I suppose so.'

'What do you mean exactly?'

'Well I've heard people say it's caused by chemicals, but I don't... '

'Which people were these?'

'There was a woman, I don't know her real name, called Honey Barbara.'

'Were there many meetings where this was discussed?'

'No, not meetings. Everybody just got drunk.'

'Have you ever seen this book before?'

'No.'

'But that is where you sleep, on that mattress?'

'That's right. I told you already.'

'This book was under that mattress.'

'Many people used the bed, all the time.'

'Many people? You said you slept only with Mrs Joy!'

'Many people, during the day, to sit on, like a chair.'

'And although you've slept on top of this book, you've never seen it?'

'No.'

'How thick would you say it was?'

'Two inches.'

'You slept on top of a two-inch-thick book and never felt it?'

'No.'

'Do you think people who cause cancer should be killed?'

'I’ve never thought about it. Is that what Bettina did?'

'How tall are you?'

'Why do you want to know?'

'How tall are you?'

'Five foot six and a half.'

And so on.

They saved Harry till last. He entered the room with every intention of co-operating, of being perfectly polite. In return he hoped to have some clarification of his wife's death. There was a feeling of shame in the kitchen. As if they had all done something wrong and would; in due course, be punished.

But Macdonald was soon asking him about Honey Barbara.

'I don't know.'

'They said she was your girlfriend.'

'No.'

Macdonald looked at him and sucked his teeth. He had a big face with small ears like delicate handles on an ugly hand-made pot.

'Look here, fellow... ' he began.

He went no further. Harry had heard that tone before. It was the sound of a policeman who thinks he can get away with murder and he was not going to have it.

'Do you know who I am?' Harry said, pushing his face close to Macdonald's. 'Do you know who my friends are? Do you realize,' he stood up and it would have been ridiculous for Macdonald to stand up too so that Harry remained towering over him, 'that the Chairman of Mobil was a close friend of mine. Not only my wife... ' he hesitated, 'is dead, but also my colleagues. Now if you wish to harass me, to cause me and my family trouble tonight I will be on the telephone and I shall have your arse kicked so hard you'll spit your teeth out.'

Macdonald hesitated.

It is a measure of Harry's confidence in his safe position in Hell that his slow anger at the behaviour of the police, his grief, his irritation that Macdonald had commandeered the dining room rather than the kitchen, that no one was going to light the fire if he didn't, came forth in such a controlled silk-gowned display of rage.

Macdonald, having seen the house to be expensive but not of the first rank, was as surprised – more surprised – than the people in the kitchen who stirred expectantly and waited.

When Macdonald gave in it was not because Harry's face was red and his eyes yellow, nor that he was a widower, possibly an innocent one, nor was it the quality of his hand-stitched suit, whose expensive subtleties were lost on Mac-donald, but that Harry said 'shall' have your arse kicked so hard you'll spit your teeth out.

There was something in this combination of correctness and violence which he instinctively reacted to, and he decided to give him, at least for the moment, the benefit of the doubt.

'We have an unpleasant job to do,' he said stiffly, lining up some pieces of paper on his clipboard, 'and we try to do it as pleasantly as possible. I understand that you're upset.'

Harry nodded and stepped back to allow the man to stand.

On this sort of night (wind rattling the tall windows in the dining room, the big fig scratching itself against the western wall) they would have eaten pea soup from big white bowls, baked vegetables and Honey Barbara's apple pie. They would have opened a magnum of Raussan Segla. Bettina would have sat in her wing-back chair, her face tired, a glass in her hand, while Joel nestled at her feet and gently rubbed her generous calves. And everyone would have been momentarily caught in a honeyed silence accompanied only by the oboe of the wind, the brush of the fig and the low percussive thump of the door.

Ah, Honey Barbara would have thought, all those dreams! And seen behind all those flame-flickered eyes the shimmering shades of decadent utopias.

But tonight the room was dark and the street light threw down a blue sheen, like a spilled light globe trapped beneath the wax of the polished floor, and there was a deadness in their eyes that even the lights, once turned on, did nothing to change.

Only Joel burned bright and it occurred to no one that the energy he brought to lighting the fire and preparing the meal which no one had the stomach to eat (bacon, eggs, pancakes, maple syrup) was not fuelled by inexhaustible supplies of life but was more like that expended by blow-flies caught against the glass.

They admired his optimism and were irritated by it at the same time. They wanted a warm place to weep freely without shame but he placed sensible, practical things in their laps.

Yet nothing could prevent the mental image they all secretly carried: blackened, bubbling, Bettina's unseen corpse, this turd floating insistently before them, showing itself; unfolding, parading even before their open eyes.

Among the practical things they discussed, huddled around the fire on blankets and mattresses, was the need to remain silent about Honey Barbara. It was Harry's suggestion and they all supported it, except Joel who could not see that it was so important.

'I told them already,' Joel said, 'but they weren't interested.'

'They were interested,' Harry said, 'they asked me. If they ask you again say you made a mistake.'

'Why?'

'Because,' Harry hissed, 'she's poor. That's how it works, isn't it. We're rich, they leave us alone. We've bought our safety.'

'You were fantastic,' Lucy said, 'you were wonderful.'

'But we haven't done anything wrong,' David said.

'Don't matter,' Ken said. 'I was busted once by the cops for dope and it couldn't have been my stash because it was in the teapot, a great big lump of hash, and they were drinking tea out of it. The stuff they busted me for, they planted on me, but I couldn't say that in court. Harry's right. They bust poor people.'

'But we haven't done anything,' Joel said.

'They don't need a reason,' Harry said.

'Because Bettina has killed a lot of rich people,' Ken said. 'And rich people don't like to see other rich people get killed. It makes them go crazy.'

They shared out tranquillizers solemnly and drank them with cognac to make them work better and then they built up the fire and bedded down beside it, without even discussing why they might do such an unusual thing. They huddled together on an odd assortment of mattresses, lumpy shapes under blue blankets and pale eiderdowns, like travellers in a waiting room in a foreign country.

Only Joel stayed awake, feeding the fire. At one o'clock Harry heard him cooking potato chips in the kitchen.

*

The noise was insistent and irritating, a continual bump, bump, bump. It was Lucy who wrapped a blanket around herself and went down the wet steps on that grey overcast morning.

The noise came from underneath the verandah and was caused, she later discovered, by Ken's electric drill which was hanging from its cord and being blown against one of the house's high wooden stumps: bump, bump, bump.

It was not the drill she saw, however, it was Joel, who had used its strong black cord to hang himself. His shining shoes were just an inch from the ground and the smell, the horrible stench of his shit, made it perfectly clear that, this time at least, he was not playing a joke.

There was no sympathy from the police. They put everyone back in the kitchen and started all over again, but this time there was a pale excitement in their faces and when Harry saw the thin impatient set of Macdonald's lips he knew that there was no safety for him in Hell. He was persona non grata with Those in Charge.

They yarded them like cattle, dragging them out for ques-tioning one at a time, sometimes just for one question, for ten seconds, then back into the yard.

'In here.' Lucy was called into the dining room where Harry stood.

'Say that in front of her,' Macdonald said to Harry.

'I've never seen that map before,' Harry said.

'O.K., take her back.'

It was unnerving. Like standing in front of one of those machines that throw tennis balls.

'How tall are you?'

'Five foot eleven.'

'When did you first meet Joel?'

No one was nice any more. Herpes did not show the photo of his holiday house. Macdonald told no jokes. Other policemen with beards and long hair began a search of the house which was neither stylish nor gentle. In the garage outside they used a rattling power tool to dismantle the Jaguar.

'You fink Joel was in on it, don't you?' Ken asked Herpes.

Herpes pointed a thick finger and narrowed his red-lidded eyes. Ken was quiet.

The police found passports, air tickets to New York, a can-, cer map. They did not doubt that Joel was in on it.

When everyone had been interrogated once, Macdonald came and leant against the doorway in the kitchen.

'This family,' he said, 'has been harbouring at least two terrorists, possibly more. I have had the unpleasant duty to spend most of last night in those homes where fathers and husbands have been murdered by two people from this house. So today,' he bit the inside of his cheek and looked thoughtfully at Harry, 'we won't be having any shouting or threats. At least,' he smiled, 'not from you.' It was a pleasant smile, and more frightening because of it.

Finally, after one more round of interrogation, the police departed, leaving behind them a book-strewn house with a dismantled Jaguar still in the garage, its body panels stacked on the lawn.

'She had cancer,' Harry said slowly, 'She damn-well had cancer.'

No one was listening to him. They had other things on their minds. They turned up the radio to protect themselves from bugs. They turned on taps and had whispered conversations. They still wore big pullovers and thick socks although the afternoon had become suddenly hot. They prickled under wool.

Ken and Lucy were arguing with David. Ken was pushing a dirty finger at David's cashmere chest. David was looking frightened but he stood his ground.

'She had cancer,' Harry said. 'From this house, living with us.'

David had stolen an air ticket from under Macdonald's nose, sliding it off the table while he looked the policeman in the eye. Ken was backing him against the refrigerator.

'It's my ticket,' David was saying.

'I don't want your ticket, sonny,' Ken said.

'You can't have it.'

Ken closed his eyes in pain. He went to the kitchen table and sat down:

'The middle class are fucking disgusting.'

'You can't stop me,' David said, but he didn't move from where he had been pushed. 'I was the one who hid his passport. If I want to go, I go.'

'And leave us in the shit,' Lucy said. 'Typical.'

'What shit? We haven't done anything.'

'She had cancer,' Harry said, but no one was interested. The radio played the traffic reports. The bridges were blocked. David and Lucy forgot about the suspected bugs and started shouting at each other. Ken sat with his head in his hands at the kitchen table.

Harry could feel the cancer in the air. It had been here all the time. It was impregnated in the walls, like spores, like a mould, invisible but always there in what they breathed, what they ate. He could feel the cells in his own body rising, multiplying, marshalling against him, to make him beg for mercy, for death, for release, slowly, agonizingly over an eternity of pain that they would call, euphemistically, A Long Illness.

What was about to begin was possibly the lowest, most shameful period of his life, five hours of panic in which he would abandon Ken and Lucy to the Special Branch and fight his son for money.

But his behaviour was not so different, in fact much milder, than the panic that was to run through the Western world (and parts of the industrialized East) ten years later when the cancer epidemic really arrived, and then it came at a time of deep recession, material shortages, unemployment and threatening nuclear war, and it proved the last straw for the West which had, until then, still managed to tie its broken pieces together with cotton threads of material optimism which served instead of the older social fabric of religion and established custom. Then the angry cancer victims could no longer be contained by devices as simple as Alice Dalton's Ward L, and took to the streets in what began as demonstrations and ended in half-organized bands, looting for heroin first, and then everything else, and Bettina's act in the Mobil office was no more than a brief eddy before the whirlwind of their rage.

So as you watch Harry Joy running around his own house in panic you have the comfort of knowing he is something less than freakish. His cancer map has come to life like some deadly pin-ball machine finally (the penny dropped) activated. His skin prickles. His stomach hurts and he notices a strange coldness at the place where he imagines (incorrectly) his liver is.

And there he is, looting, going through his son's (nice boy, going to be a doctor) drawers looking for money, and yes, actually wrestling with the boy as they fight for a bundle of notes which fall from the desk top and float across the room. They scramble to pick them up. He catches his son's foot and sits on his chest, and from this position negotiates a puffing red-faced deal.

'Half. 50-50. O.K.?'

'O.K.'

But once released the scramble is on again, and there must be another fight, and the son must be subdued again, and this time with a backhanded blow which will partly deafen him and cause him great pain on the aeroplane he will shortly board.

'You won't need it,' Harry grunted, scrambling across the carpet. 'I need it. I'm leaving.'

'I'm leaving too.'

'Where going?'

'New York.'

They fought over a photograph of Bettina, and David won the bigger piece. Harry went to his room and packed a bag, cramming in silk shirts as if they were currency. He arrived downstairs just behind his partly deaf son. David had his suitcase with him.

'You think you're a real smart dude,' Ken said to David, 'but those coppers aren't dumb. They'll know you knocked off that ticket.'

'Right under their nose,' David said, but he stayed near the doorway, sitting on his case.

Harry sat at the table and let Ken pour him tea.

'You're a fool,' Lucy told her brother.

He spat at her. 'You're not so smart,' he said, 'limpet.'

'Why don't you all shut up,' Ken said quietly. He rolled a cigarette and looked at it closely while he did it. 'Our only answer is just to be calm and stick together. We haven't done anything wrong. These coppers aren't like the drug squad – they're not all bent. They just think we're terrorists and they'll find out we're not. If you geezers run away we'll all be stuffed. They'll beat the shitter out of us and they'll catch you lot. It won't matter what you say, if they think you've done something they'll frame you.'

'I know where to go,' Harry said.

'Where?'

'The country.'

'With darling Honey Barbara,' Lucy said.

'Honey Barbara thinks you're full of shit, Harry. They'd probably burn you as a witch.'

But it was obvious then that no amount of reason or logic would stop either of them and David walked away without any farewell and Harry stayed. He stayed through a silent meal of sardines on toast. He stayed through the television until after it finished. He stayed sitting in the living room when Lucy and Ken went to bed.

They lay in bed and listened for noises. Nothing moved in the house.

'He's going to go,' Ken said. 'He won't be there in the morning.'

At two o'clock they woke to a familiar noise.

'The Cadillac.'

'Fuck him. Let him take it.'

They lay and listened to him go backwards and forwards across the lawn as he manoeuvred the car out on to the drive.

'The creep,' Lucy said as the Good Bloke drove away from Palm Avenue for the last time.

The Pan Am Jumbo took off on schedule, at 8 p.m., into the waiting thunderstorm. Lightning filled the sky beside David's seat. Below him, in breaks in the clouds, he caught a glimpse of the yellow spiderweb of lighted streets which had, at last, released him.

He stood before the lightning and faced the monsters of the night.