Bliss

Part Six. Blue Bread and Sapphires

Daze walked along the ridge looking for the blood wood. It was a hot November morning and the Razorback had a slight blue haze around it and the wind from the sea made the gums throw their khaki-silver umbrellas to and fro. He had slept in. Soon it would be too hot for this sort of work. He hefted the sledgehammer on to his shoulder and shook the small bag of wedges he held in the other. Only two wedges. People were careless with wedges. He could remember when there had been five of them, perfectly graduated from small to large. It had been a lot easier splitting fence posts then, but with only two wedges it became more difficult, particularly with blood wood which often had an almost corkscrew grain. It was harder with two wedges, but two wedges were still enough. Wedges were amazing things. He stopped on the trail to think about wedges.

He was over forty but his body was hard and stringy and the brown legs beneath his tattered shorts were a young man's legs. He had a pointed chin which hid beneath a sparse, slightly fuzzy beard, and a sharp inquisitive nose either side of which were small humorous eyes. He was stoned and kept forgetting why he had come.

The blood wood.

And he had been thinking about the wedge, the small wedge, and how amazing it was that the smallest wedge could finally split that old grey blood wood open to show its red secret heart. He did not think anything very profound, but he enjoyed his thoughts and he discovered and rediscovered things for himself all day in this manner. If he had had company he would have talked about the wedges, punctuating his meditations with 'Mmms' and 'Ahs' and his companion would be sometimes amused, sometimes bored, sometimes even enlightened by these meditations. Possibly (almost certainly) they would have explored the possibility of making new wedges and gone through the various methods by which this might be done, starting with smelting the iron, or even earlier, prospecting, perhaps on that rusty outcrop the Krishnas had on their land, and then the methods by which negotiations would have to begin with the Krishnas, perhaps sending Paul Bees or Honey Barbara first because they were permitted to place their hives in the Krishnas' ironbark forest in return, of course, for a percentage of the honey.

He nearly walked past the blood wood. It was just below the ridge, its dead grey trunk cut in ten places to show the hard red wood with the big empty pipe running up its centre.

'Mmm.' He took the mandarin from his pocket and peeled it. He admired the fine spray it released as he pulled back the peel. One day they would have a goat fence right across the bottom of the property, up here over the ridge, and almost down to the rain forest at the bottom. There was no money this year because their crop had been ripped off, but it didn't cost anything to cut the wood and split it into posts. Later they would get the wire and strain the fence, but in the meantime there was plenty of work to do. He was still thinking about the Krishnas. They were not the most friendly people in the world but somebody over there understood something about growing corn. Their corn was huge and sweet and yellow, as succulent as yellow peas joined together on a cob.

That's interesting, he thought – they have yellow robes. Yellow corn. He tried to think of other yellow things the Krishnas had. Yellow truck, he remembered, and yellow pawpaws, but their pawpaws were not so good.

As he began to split the first length of blood wood he was still naming yellow things to himself, testing the magical power of the Krishnas when it came to yellow. He tried to remember the significance of yellow in Colour Therapy but couldn't remember. He would talk to Crystal about it.

When he was working, he worked hard, hoisting the sledgehammer and using its own weight to let it drop hard. Splitting posts was more a stop-start type of thing, and not as satisfying as using a scythe which is more rhythmic, and even sharpening a scythe is a pleasure, getting the edge at once sharp but also, just slightly, jagged, so that when the grass is cut it is not so much like a razor slice but a fine rip and the grass falls softly sideways, flop.

As he worked, his mind wandered from one thing to the next like a rivulet finding its way downhill. He had to kill three billies tonight. He never got used to that, never got used to death no matter what he pretended to Heather. They swapped the goat meat for meat other people had killed. He could not kill a Billy without thinking about his second son, even now, and it was ten years since that had happened. (His tiny hands.) They buried him down in the valley and they sent out Health Inspectors who dug him up again. Now they knew not to register births. They registered nothing. There were eighty-nine children here and no one else in the world knew about them. Two had been buried. If they’d been registered they wouldn't even have been able to do that. The bastards took your own dead from you and made you put them in their holes.

Shit!

Both wedges were jammed in the wood. He should have taken the tomahawk to use as a third wedge. He had been too cocky. He turned around looking for a hard piece of rock or a piece of wood he could use instead.

He wandered down the hill a little and it was then he saw, lying across a prostrate acacia, a creamy silk shirt.

This is dangerous, he thought.

He stood and looked at it, not touching it. Then he squatted down and looked around for a while, making small sudden movements with his head. He took his worn cotton shirt off then, and lifted the silk shirt from its prickly resting place.

He slipped it on. Hasn't been worn; he thought, finding the neck button done up when he already had it over his head. Could be dangerous. He brought his hands round and undid the offending button.

A perfect fit.

He stayed squatting. There was someone around dropping silk shirts. The police did not carry silk shirts. The Health Department did not carry silk shirts.

He rested on his knees. A little honey-eater came and hung off the acacia. He did up the cuff buttons on the shirt. Perfect. He stood up, slowly screwing up his face, waiting for something to happen to him.

When nothing happened he remembered the wedge and started looking for a piece of rock. He did not wish to be accused of being irresponsible again. Many people thought he was irresponsible. They had long memories. They did not give him enough credit for his fence.

Further along he found a pair of light creamy trousers.

He took off his shorts.

'Excuse me,' he said to no one.

The trousers were too long and a little too big around the waist. He rolled up the cuffs.

These are good quality trousers, he thought. He undid them a little so that he could look at the brand name. He did not know brand names anyway, but he looked. There was none. Of course, he thought, these are tailor-made trousers. What sort of person would discard them? This could be heavy. They would have another meeting down at the Hall and accuse him of being irresponsible. He would deny being stoned. He would talk about the fence but they would not listen to him. Maybe it was some heavy-type criminal come to spy out the dope crop.

'Mooo,' he heard.

The man was almost beside him, a man with a huge mous-tache clutching a broken suitcase to his chest. He was lying next to a fallen log and his face was bruised and his tongue was swollen in his mouth. His clothes were ripped. He had one shoe. He had a tick feeding on his face, just beside his right eye. The tick had been there for some time. It was fat and bloated with blood.

Daze hopped sideways like a magpie and looked at him.

'Unny,' the man moaned, but his good eye was on the silk shirt. 'Unny.'

'Money?' Daze suggested, thinking that the man, in spite of his condition, was trying to sell him the silk shirt.

'Unny.'

'I was just trying it on.'

'Huh,' the man said with effort. 'Huh-unny.'

'You want to buy Honey?'

Neither Paul Bees nor his daughter sold honey here. Only narcs and estate agents came here trying to buy honey. Paul Bees and Honey Barbara travelled around with their bees and their van, taking the bees to the coastal ti-tree in the summer, the ironbark and stringybark in the winter, letting them on groundsel during the autumn. They sold their honey in the markets, visited other communities. Paul had become, because he had travelled for a long time, because they knew him, because he was needed by everyone, like an ambassador, a diplomat who was accepted everywhere not only by the Buddhists at Chen Rhezic, the Horse people at Lower Arm, but also by the Krishnas and the Ananda Marga who guarded their places, they now did at Bog Onion Road, with a barred gate and, sometimes, a lookout. Paul's descendants would be a travelling family and before too long they would reveal themselves as not only beekeepers but magicians, musicians, story-tellers, newsgatherers and peacemakers, never quite belonging to anyone place and treated with both respect and reserve in the places they came to.

'Unny Ba-ba.'

'Honey Barbara?'

'Unny Barba.' But the baleful eye did not leave the silk shirt and, looking down, Daze saw he had left two dirty thumb prints underneath the collar.

'Ah,' he said, 'Honey Barbara. You're a friend of Honey Barbara's.'

He did not have a high opinion of friends of Honey Bar-bara's. He had not forgiven her for Albert, her most famous friend and even though they had got many useful parts from his crashed Peugeot he had also brought the police and the newspapers to Bog Onion Road.

'I'll just take this tick out for you,' he said, 'and then I'll try and carry you down as far as Clive's.'

It took him a while to pack, fitting the sledgehammer and wedges into the broken case, but in the end, after a few false starts, he managed to, carrying both the man and the suitcase, and they made their way back down the ridge with rests every two hundred yards or so.

It was cooler in the·brick house, and the dirt floor they lay him on felt softer than anywhere he had lain for days. They put him on his back and he could see, through his good eye, that the naked man named Clive was too big for his silk shirts. He was barrel-chested and hipless, broader rather than taller. He pulled the shirt on, but his arms filled the sleeves.

'This is a little boy's shirt,' he said. 'It is just a little boy's shirt.' The shirt hung open across his furry chest, hanging like a curtain beside his uncircumcised penis, which looked like a decoration for the window ledge.

Daze was sitting out of Harry's vision. He still wore the shirt and trousers. Clive was trying to look at the back of the shirt with a round shaving mirror. 'Do you think Heather would split this down the back for me,' he said, 'and put a patch down the back, and widen the arms?'

'You better ask him first.'

'He's a spy,' Clive said. 'Anyway, we gave him water. We saved his life.'

'He's a friend of Honey Barbara's.'

'Honey Barbara's got too many friends. Do you think Heather would do that for me? I'll swap her two hours' work.'

'You already owe her a day's work,' Daze said tentatively.

Harry saw Clive lift his head and jut his jaw and let his gapped rabbity teeth show for a moment. 'I pay my debts,' he said.

'I'm going to get Honey Barbara.'

Harry saw that Daze, when he crossed his field of vision, had taken off the tailored trousers. He was wearing the silk shirt hanging over the shorts. 'I'll just wear this,' he said to Harry, 'until I come back. O.K.?'

'Take him with you.'

'I'm not walking down the hill with him. I'll get Honey Barbara and come back.'

Harry's mind was wandering. His throat was parched. He could hardly breathe. Sometimes he felt he had to make himself breathe or his body would forget to do it for him.

Some time later Clive's face, very big, loomed in front of his.

'If you turn out to be a spy,' Clive said, 'I'll hang you up by your left foot on that beam over there.'

Harry could see the beams above his head. They were huge tree trunks.

'And I'll get my brush hook and I'll run a little line down your lovely soft tummy and then I'll open you up and wind your guts out on to a jam jar.'

He smiled at Harry. He pushed his gap-toothed smile very close. He had a square head with a short, bristly hair cut.

'I bet you don't even know what a brush hook is,' he said.

He held up a long-handled tool with a curved blade on the end.

'This is a brush hook,' he said, and then he sat down on the floor and began to sharpen it with a file. While he did this, he talked.

'All sorts of vermin come looking out here,' he said. 'You understand? You know what a vermin is. A vermin is a rat, or a louse, or anything that carries diseases with it. All sorts of vermin, yes,' he nodded his head, 'that's right.'

Harry could hear the file on the brush-hook blade. His head ached. He wanted to vomit.

'I'll use a file on this first and then when I've got it really sharp I'll get a stone, yes, and make it ...'

Harry was frightened that if he vomited he'd choke.

'You ask anyone,' Clive said, 'about my brush hook.'

Harry passed out. When he woke he could hear cooking. He could smell fat frying. The minute his eyes opened Clive was talking again. 'You people think you can just come here. You see that concrete tank. You can't see that concrete tank because you're too weak, but if you could see it you'd know what work is. You look at those beams, mate. That's work. You look at that stone. You know how long it takes to lay that stone, to carry it? and all you buggers sitting in the city, sitting on yours arses laughing, and when you finally realise what's happening you come running along to mummy. Mummy, mummy,' Clive called, piling potato chips on to his plate and sitting on a cushion near Harry's head.

'No use you eating,' he said. 'You'd only chuck it up.'

'You see those bolts there. No, there. You can see them, near the window.' It hurt Harry to even move his eye, but he did not want to upset Clive. He looked at the bolts. He didn't know where he was. He knew it couldn't be Bog Onion Road.

'That's right. See, you can do it if you try. Well that's a machine-gun mounting. That's right,' he laughed with his mouth full. 'That's right, a machine gun. Yes. And if any of your vermin friends come running up the hill, I'll be here, mate. And when I run out of bullets I’ve got a lovely brush hook. I can take off into the bush and I won't die. You'll die. I won't. You can't even pull your own ticks out.'

'Won't be long now,' Clive said, 'Any day now, next year, the year after, they'll come running up here, but you can't drive in your little motor car, can you?'

'I've got a dam down there,' he said, 'with five million gallons of unpolluted water. Perfect water. I've got fish in it, big fat bass. I won't starve. You'd sit down there and starve because you wouldn't know how to catch them.'

Clive ate his last potato chip with regret and relish.

'You want some water? Don't fucking glutton it.' He snatched the water back. 'That's enough.'

'Years ago,' he said, sitting down on the cushion again and cutting up a large pawpaw, 'when I was on the dole, there was a bloke just like you who used to interrogate me.'

'"Mr Boswell," he'd say, "we can't have this. You've been on our files for five years without a job.'"

Clive jabbed the knife at Harry's nose.

'"Well you tell me," I’d say, "what have you done to get me a job? How much do they pay?" I'd say. "It's your job," I'd say, "to get me a job, and you are incompetent."

"What do you do out there all day, Mr Boswell?"

'"Well," I’d say, I haven't got a car and I’m just trying to feed myself, but since you people have been harassing me I've been trying to teach myself to read so I can get a job."

'"Very good," he'd say, "very good, Mr Boswell."

'''But,'' I'd say, "I only had a Bible and a friend came over and told me how it ended, in the Apocalypse, and when I heard that, I couldn't see the point."

'I said that,' he told Harry, 'because I thought was a fucking Christian.'

'"What have you done?" they'd say.'

"'What have you offered me?" I'd say.'

'They couldn't handle me, mate. I was on the dole longer than anyone in this district until they kicked us all off. I built this place on the dole.

'I don't need anything. You need everything. I don't smoke. I don't drink. I don't take drugs. I don't eat meat. I have fruit and vegetables. You look at that pawpaw. That pawpaw is fucking nectar. Look at this pumpkin. That's food, mate. Yes,' he said, 'that's right.'

He buried his face in a quarter of pawpaw and didn't emerge until he had only thick skin left in his hand.

'Your shirts won't fit a man,' he said, 'but we'll take them anyway, for our trouble, for saving your life, and when Honey Barbara's daddy goes around with his honey he'll sell them and we'll have some pretty little Krishnas sneaking into town in your lovely suit, looking so straight everyone will think they're narcs like you.'

It was the worst possible introduction to Bog Onion Road, but Harry Joy did not know that. All he knew was that he was going to be sick. He managed to turn his head sideways before he threw up water and bile.

Later he was being carried down a steep track in near darkness. He was on some kind of stretcher. His head was jolted with every step. When they put him down there were sharp rocks digging into his back. He was delirious. He could smell damp, rotting, a smell of berries like sweat, eucalypt, a richer, muskier smell like death itself.

Above him there were giant trees crowding over the narrow track, their upper branches crossing the sky like clenched fingers joined in prayer.

Paul Bees had wanted Harry Joy. Now he could sit in the comer of his hut with his back against the wall and watch him like a treasure, a puzzle, a book, a number of books, expensive books with leather covers and gold embossing, containing information he had never thought to enquire about, as arcane as the social organization of armadillos and the crystalline structure of aluminium.

It is the nature, he thought, of bee-keepers that they will end up hopelessly addicted to stories, gossip, odd bits of information; a thirst that the local markets can never properly satisfy so that, after all these years, he was working over old diggings, being made jubilant by some pitiful spot of colour panned from the worked-over clay, the mullock heaps made by local life.

They had not been able to lift Harry up on to the sleeping platform, and Honey Barbara had been too angry to really try. She did not appreciate this visit from her friend, and it was true, her father reflected, that it did not help her reputation, but, as usual, they would forgive her, even if they would not forget. She had only stayed long enough to make a bed for him on the floor and to bend over his swollen face in the candlelight and look at it for a long quiet moment.

'You wouldn't believe his life,' she said with both disap-proval and awe, and that was as much as Paul managed to gather about his daughter's relationship with the stranger.

It was a small hut, one of the smallest in the community, and he had built it for himself in the rain forest, because he had always wished to live in rain forest, and also (the admission was painful to him) because Crystal at forty-eight still had the disturbing and hurtful habit of adopting new lovers and he thought he would be better away from her for a while. He retreated into the rain forest and built this small hut with a sleeping platform at one end, below which was a small book-enclosed alcove which opened on to a tiny verandah. It was here that he placed Harry Joy, and here that he sat, a scrawny little man with a large black beard who gave the contradictory impression of great frailty (and be called Little Paul) but also not inconsiderable strength so that people felt compelled to remark on it admiringly with such expressions as 'he's a strong little bugger.'

They admired, respected, and pitied Paul Bees, holed up in his rain forest while Crystal lived in the old house up the hill, bathed in bright sunlight, conducting a peculiar affair with a woodcutter from the Ananda Marga who had been seen, at night, slipping through the moonlit bush with his axe still in his hand.

On the other side of this little alcove, now illuminated with a soft yellow kerosene light, was a wood stove, a sink, and some cupboards. You could admire the way he had whittled cedar to make the handle for a drawer and the patient search he must have conducted to find the quandong branch which now made the curved banister of the stair to the sleeping platform.

The stove was alight and the kettle hissed gently. He rose and walked softly on his surprisingly large (huge toes) feet to the sink where he took a pair of scissors and began cutting lemon grass into three-inch lengths. When he had done this he stuffed them into a large brown teapot and poured boiling water over them. He carried the teapot, two cups, and a jar of stringybark honey, into the alcove where Harry Joy watched him from one good eye, the other being reduced to a mongoloid slit by a swelling, the legacy of the bloated tick.

'Bulk tea,' he announced.

'Thank you.' The gratitude in the man's voice was almost embarrassing. He had stopped him making speeches but he could not stop this excess of appreciation.

Harry had heard the things that Paul Bees had said in his defence. They had drifted to him through the ether of his delirium. It had not been a formal meeting at the Hall, no night procession of lanterns and blanket-bundled children, but an impromptu deputation as the story of the hunted terrorist came into Bog Onion Road by radio, spread through the valley and up the ridge. No one had criticized directly, not at first. That was not the way things were done. They talked instead, about American Albert, and in doing so, of course, criticized Honey Barbara for threatening their safety by bringing criminals into their midst.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'He's not my friend.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And there he was.

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

'Tallow wood,' she said, 'typical.'

'It's good timber,' he said.

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

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

Repeating what he had been told.

'You planted one over there,' she said.

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

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

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

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

'Hear you're building a place.'

'Yes.'

'Good one.'

'Yes, should be good.'

'Bush poles?'

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

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

'Might try anyway.'

'Yeah, you should try.'

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

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

'I miss you,' he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'When you talk about trees,' Paul Bees said, pouring water into the pot, 'it sounds like you want a fuck.'

Which, in a rough and ready bush-carpentered sort of way, described Harry Joy's tone rather well.

He chose a certain route up the ridge so that he skirted the edge of Paul's small banana plantation which was still too young to bear any fruit. Then into some scrubby untidy bush which gave way to more lantana scrub and it was here, below Crystal's house, amongst the rusting Peugots, that the Cadillac waited for him, like a great dull beast, a stinking stranded whale he could not forget no matter how much he might like to ignore this painful reminder of his disgraceful past.

He had a new happiness at Bog Onion Road but he also had a new burden: he had done bad things in Hell. The guilt he felt about his past was the worst of the pains he now carried, but not the only one, for he had, if not daily, at least weekly, the reminder of Honey Barbara's hostility towards him. The Cadillac also reminded him of that pain.

'You stole it, didn't you?' she said to him on the day he came to her door.

'Stole what?'

'That car. That American thing.' She stood at the door naked but there was no invitation. Behind her he could see the shape of a body lying in her bed.

'Yes,' he said.

'How could I ever trust you?' she said.

There were dry leaves around the ground below her step. He touched them with his toe – the dry leaves and hard woody cases that had once held blossom – and he turned away without looking up. He had gone back to his holes in the road even though it was a rest day.

He had gained his burdens so quickly that the load was sometimes almost too much and he could physically stagger beneath them as if someone had dumped a bag of fertilizer too heavily on to his back. He felt some guilt, some remorse, about almost everybody he had known in Palm Avenue and although his work with the trees had begun as Honey Barbara had correctly guessed as a fearful response to his new environ-ment, it had slowly become different, and from his fear, through his fear, he had discovered love and with his love he was trying to make amends.

He skirted around Crystal's house (where, living alone, she was making plans for the return of Paul Bees) and entered the big bush beyond it. On the edge of this bush there was only a little scrub, some groundsel, odd straggling lantana (yellow-flowered here) and then a patch of bracken, and beyond that: tallow wood, blood wood, red stringybark, blackbutt, and the forest floor luxuriant with great black-boys, their thick black trunks hidden by their shining tussock-like crowns. This hillside had been cleared some thirty or forty years before but there were still a few giants left behind, trees so noble, Harry imagined, that no man could bring himself to cut them down, great gnarled old creatures which could harbour possums in their scarred wounds, white ants, insects, grubs and fungi, and still have the strength to draw water and nutrients into their tough old roots, suck them right up the enormous height of their sapwood, hold their leaves out to the sunshine and exchange gases with the world.

There was no wind. It was a perfect day for dropping trees, but he was not ready to start. There was something to do before the others arrived. Something to be done without rush. He leant his axe against the trunk of a young stringybark and went around gathering rocks which poked out here and there from the ground-cover of deep dead leaves. They were not the sort of rocks he would have preferred. He had imagined (that long time ago) something grey with a touch of some sparkling mineral (mica? anthracite?) which would later catch the sun. These rocks which littered the hillside were soft and red and looked like broken housebricks.

As he gathered the rocks the forest seemed to become very quiet. A solitary honey-eater set up a sharp chatter down in the gully below him as he carried the rocks to the first tree which would provide him with stumps for his hut. It was already scarred, a small mark made by his own axe. Its base was half hidden by a tangled pile of twigs and leaves. He began talking, but not before he had looked around.

'I'm sorry,' he said, 'we have to do this. I need a house to live in. That's why we put the mark on you yesterday.'

His voice sounded very thin and insignificant in the forest. He was not unaware of how he might look to people but was more aware of how he stood in comparison to an eighty-foot-high tree. If he was shy, it was not because of people. He was shy in the presence of the tree. He did not use the full words.

'I'm putting these stones here,' he said, 'as a promise. I will plant another tree here tonight, another tallow wood. I will dig a hole here beside you and plant it where these rocks are.'

Daze sat quietly on the edge of the circle made by the trees they planned to drop. He had come down to tell Harry that Clive would be late with the horse. He had heard Harry's voice come through the forest and he had stopped to listen. He was going to roll a joint, but he decided not to. As he listened to what Harry had to say he was very moved. This was no bullshit story. This was a man saying something that he felt. It was not the silky voice that Harry Joy had used in his city life, but something at once coarser and softer.

When Harry had done the first tree Daze gathered some rocks and came and stood behind him. He nodded his sharp, inquisitive face and offered Harry two rocks.

'Go on,' he said.

Harry began to shake his head, stepping backwards, colouring.

'Go on,' Daze said.

Harry nodded. This time he used the proper words, the formal words, as they are known. His face burned bright red, but his eyes were bright.

'You have grown large and powerful. I have to cut you. I know you have knowledge in you from what happens around you. I am sorry, but I need your strength and power. I will give you these stones, but I must cut you down. These stones and my thoughts will make sure another tree will take your place:

Thus, with their stones, they moved from tree to tree. A small wind came and stirred the upper branches. Clive arrived with the old Clydesdale. Paul Bees came rubbing sleep from his eyes and yawning. Margot arrived too, and then Honey Barbara who remained standing at a distance with her arms folded across her chest.

'Stand around the tree,' Daze suggested.

They joined hands around the tree and Daze said some of the words with Harry.

When it was time to chop the first tree they were all very quiet and it seemed to Harry that when he began to chop, the wood, famous for its hardness, was soft and yielding. Huge chips flew through the bush. (Later, when the logs had been snigged down to the site, Harry barked the logs and the flesh of the wood was yellow and slippery like a skinned animal.)

When the first tree fell, Daze walked back to where Honey Barbara was standing.

'Well... ' he said.

'Well what?' Honey Barbara said.

'That was really amazing.'

'I came to work,' Honey Barbara said, 'not to get involved in this Hippy mumbo-jumbo.'

And to show she meant business she took one end of the cross-cut saw that Margot had placed across the fallen tree. 'Come on, Margot,' she said, 'or did you only come for the mumbo-jumbo too.'

Honey Barbara worked hard all day. She did not talk to Harry once and every time he passed her, she looked the other way.

The man with the clenched whiskered face wore suit trousers and a suit jacket which could never, in even the most bizarre time, have been part of the same suit. Heavy work boots showed beneath the trousers and there was string where once there may have been proper black laces. Above the right-hand boot was a white sockless ankle that something, perhaps a bush rat, had gnawed at before passing on to something else. This man (Jerusalem John by name) was lying in the sunlight on Daze's open verandah. A cheap thriller was sticking out of his jacket pocket. A couple of flies laid their eggs on his gnawed ankle and he was, of course, perfectly dead.

It was still early enough in the day for one half of the valley to be in sunlight and the other in shadow, but up here on the ridge there was no shortage of sunshine. The trees, incorrectly known as wattles, glistened and two big king parrots swung around the branches of the one that grew over Daze's forever unfinished house, noisily eating the blossoms and dropping the hard wood casings on to the tin roof.

Honey Barbara, sitting with the others beside the rusting metal pipe which Daze had converted into a fireplace and boiler, did not need to be told what those small pinging noises on the roof were and, in her mind's eyes, she could see the red and green birds clearly against the bright blue sky. It had not been a good year for honey. Perhaps she might get a bit of a flow out of these wattles.

Daze was there, of course, fussing about washing cups. Paul Bees squatted on his big heels with his back to the fire and Crystal had moved a small three-legged child's stool to be close to him. She wore a long crushed-velvet dress on to which she had fastidiously stitched tiny shells. She wore wooden beads around her neck (the remnants of Paul's failed abacus) and the crystals from which she took her name were arranged, just two of them, in her jet-black hair.

Clive was there wearing, as usual, nothing but his boots. Richard was there, and Dani. Assorted children were sent outside occasionally where they could be seen squatting around the dead man. No meeting had been called. The gathering was prompted by the mysterious workings of the bush telegraph.

'What does he know about trees anyway?' Honey Barbara said to Daze. 'He doesn't know anything. You don't know him like I know him. He's only into saving his neck. He doesn't believe in anything.'

Daze didn't say anything, which irritated her even more.

'He knows good stories,' Paul Bees said, 'that's the point.'

'You call yourself an anarchist!' she said to her father. 'You people will follow anyone. You're all so bored that when someone new comes along you practically rape them. So the man's got nice stories. They're not his stories anyway. They're his father's. He even stole his stories.'

'I don't see that that matters,' Richard said.

'I think,' Dani said, 'that it's O.K., so long as he wants to tell a story.'

Honey Barbara groaned quietly.

Clive was leaning against a bushpole with his arms folded above his furry bear's belly. 'I don't see why we don't do what we did for little Billy.'

'What was that?' Crystal asked.

'We dug a fucking big hole: Clive said, and it was difficult not to believe that he was relishing it. 'We dug a fucking big hole and we buried the bugger.'

'We dig a hole for a person the same way we dig a hole for a shit bucket,' Paul said.

'Well, that's right, isn't it?' Clive said. 'It's the same. All goes back into the soil. I don't want any of you lot doing OMs over me.'

'I think we should do something better for Jerusalem John than we'd do for a bucket of shit,' Paul insisted.

'He's dead, mate,' Clive said. 'It won't worry him one way or the other.'

Jerusalem John was not really their responsibility at all. He had made it his business in life to be no one's responsibility. He was an old hermit, a loner, who lived at the bottom of the gully that ran between Bog Onion and the Ananda Marga. He shot wallabies and read thrillers and the only thing that flushed him out were bushfires where, suddenly, you would find him stumbling out of the smoke to stand beside you with his wet sack or his hoe. No one would have found him but Richard had heard his fox terrier howling.

'You should have left him in the hut,' Clive said, 'and we could have just burnt it all down. Nothing in the place worth saving. The tin's rotted.'

'I think we should get Harry to tell a story.'

'You people are full of shit,' Honey Barbara said, standing up and rubbing her bee-keeper's biceps angrily. 'You're going to let him get control of you. You elevate him into something he's not.'

'We're not elevating him into anything. He knows stories. He knows stories for trees…'

'He doesn't know shit about trees,' Honey Barbara said. 'You ask him to tell you the difference between a red stringy and a yellow, get him to show you a narrow-leaved ironbark, get him to tell you how old the buds on any of them are. He doesn't know. He can't do it.'

But she knew she had made too much noise, gone on too long, and the only effect her speech was having was to annoy everyone except Clive who looked like he agreed with her. She was being negative, uncool, ungenerous, and there was no doubt that she had made them decide to ask Harry Joy to tell the story for the burial of Jerusalem John.

The next five years should have been the richest and happiest period of Harry's life, not only in Hell, but in any life he could remember. He built his hut above the creek on high stumps of tallow wood. He learned how to use a saw and chisel, and hammer in a six-inch nail. He built a fireplace from rocks and suspended a wide verandah over the creek and inside this new house you could tell, the way his silk shirts had become cushions around the walls, that this dry-looking man still loved his comfort.

He had many friends. He was not only liked, he was also necessary. He could dig a decent-sized hole for a tree; he could tell a story for a funeral and a story for a birth. When they sat around the fire at night he could tell a long story just for fun, in the same way Richard might play his old accordion and Dani her Jew's harp. He never thought of what he did as original. It wasn't either. He told Vance's old stories, but told them better because he now understood them. He retold the stories of Bog Onion Road. And when he told stories about the trees and the spirits of the forest he was only dramatizing things that people already knew, shaping them just as you pick up rocks scattered on the ground to make a cairn. He was merely sewing together the bright patchworks of lives, legends, myths, beliefs, hearsay into a splendid cloak that gave a richer glow to all their lives. He knew when it was right to tell one story and not another. He knew how a story could give strength or hope. He knew stories, important stories, so sad he could hardly tell them for weeping.

And also he gave value to a story so that it was something of worth, as important, in its way, as a strong house or a good dam. He insisted that the story was not his, and not theirs either. You must give something, he told the children, a sapphire or blue bread made from cedar ash. And what began as a game ended as a ritual.

They were the refugees of a broken culture who had only the flotsam of belief and ceremony to cling to or, sometimes, the looted relics from other people's temples. Harry cut new wood grown on their soil and built something solid they all felt comfortable with. They were hungry for ceremony and story. There was no embarrassment in these new constructions.

He did not become a leader or a strange man with a long white robe, not a shaman, a magician or a priest. He was a bushman. He was a bushman in the way he stood with one leg out and the back of his wrist propped on his hip. He dug holes, used flooded gum trees to out-grow and conquer the groundsel weed; he won Clive's respect by the energy with which he helped at the mill, where they cut packing-case timber from blackbutt and sold it to pineapple farmers in the world outside.

Yet the more he gained pleasure from his relationship with the people of Bog Onion (and the more he came to appreciate that Hell was a place of the most subtle construction which, on balance, he preferred to his other life), the more Honey Barbara's coldness towards him ate at his heart.

It came to dominate both their lives like a yellow cloud of smog that lay across an otherwise unpolluted sky.

Perhaps if they had been left alone, if well-meaning people who loved them both had not continually tried to help them, had not carried their not-quite-accurate messages from Honey Barbara's hut in the morning sunlight to Harry's hut in the shaded east, perhaps if they had just left it alone it would have sorted itself out in its own good time. But it was like a mosquito bite which is scratched and then scratched again until some organism hidden in otherwise benevolent soil can enter the broken skin and turn that mild irritation into a raging tropical ulcer with an inch-wide pus-filled centre reaching down as far as the bone, and there is no natural way to heal it, and only a trip into town to the hospital with all the attendant antibiotics and expense will effect a cure.

She had begun by being irritated at his lack of consideration in arriving at Bog Onion without being asked, but his own guilty confessions to Paul Bees had naturally leaked out on to the gossip circuit and they had come to fuel her indignation. She painted a big sign on the Cadillac which read: STOLEN BY HARRY JOY FROM HIS 'FRIENDS'.

She did herself a disservice. For, as anybody could see, Harry Joy was pretty much like anybody else, having his fair share of stupidities and conceits but also some reserves of kindness and love. For the most part he talked about the same things anyone else did: the state of the vegetable garden, how well the hens were laying, whether there would be a good wet and, although Honey Barbara mightn't like it, he could now tell the state of development of a swamp mahogany bud, whether it was one or two or even three years from blossoming, and by a series of questions and cross-questions and simple observ-ation he had learned as much about trees as anyone in Bog Onion.

It is also possible that the sore might have cured faster if Harry Joy had not continued to love Honey Barbara, but he did, and she knew he did because he kept telling people that he did. No matter what she said about him, no matter what gossip reached his ears (and she made sure that there was plenty to gossip about) he refused to speak badly of her. He spoke of her only with admiration and when she heard about it, it made her angry – it seemed a trick, to make people side with him against her. When Daze came to discuss 'these negative feelings you keep projecting on to Harry' she told him to fuck off and get out.

Sometimes she found Harry standing quietly on the edge of the clearing where her hut stood, the same hut which was still portrayed on the wall of the bedroom in the deserted house at Palm Avenue. She tried to ignore him. He would leave some infantile present: a pumpkin, a wallaby, a handful of ironbark blossom he may or may not have climbed a tall tree to pick.

'You make it worse,' she told him once, and then regretted it because he drew strength and confidence from anything she said to him.

There was a story she had heard that he had killed Bettina. He made her nervous. He skulked around in the bush by her hut. She heard him thumping around out there. 'A man who believes he is in Hell,' she told Crystal, 'is capable of any-thing.' She went down to Jerusalem John's and took the lock from the door. She fitted it to her own door (the only lock in Bog Onion) and kept it snibbed at night.

It is curious, but hardly surprising, that Honey Barbara, who spent the greater part of her time outdoors, on the road, her head out the window looking for new blossoms, carrying hives with aching arms through the bush, never walked a hundred yards into the bush around her own house. Sometimes her bees ventured in there when the blood wood were on, but the blood wood were not on in April. The only thing on in April was the groundsel weed which produced an inferior grade of honey of use for nothing much but the rather medicinal mead that Paul made each year. But then, one April, the bees began returning heavy laden and the hives were filling; not a heavy flow, but it was good honey, not groundsel.

Investigating this discrepancy she walked through the bush behind her house and found it planted densely with silver-leaved ironbark which was now in blossom. But there was also yellow box, a famous honey tree, and bottle brush and ti-tree and, if she had cared to walk amongst the so-called timber trees in the bottom thirty acres she would have found amongst the tallow woods and blood woods, stands of young trees carefully planned to provide blossom all year round.

It did not happen as Harry Joy had often (so very often) imagined it. Because there is his beloved Honey Barbara, her two hands around an ironbark trying to uproot it, whilst all the time her bees (whom one might guess, fancifully, to be in some confusion about their mistress's behaviour) feasted on a nectar which was far too good to be wasted making Paul Bees drunk at night.

He was sitting out on his verandah catching the late sunshine when she came into his house. He knew who it was. He had been waiting for two weeks. There was no one in the world who walked like Honey Barbara and when she strode across the bare boards of the living room he imagined he could hear the talcum dust of Bog Onion Road on her beautiful feet and that the whole of his house vibrated subtly with the rhythm of her body. He did not dare stand up. He rubbed his palms together as farmers sometimes do when they have to shake hands with people they imagine to be somehow cleaner.

He was clean-shaven that year and his face showed all the lines of his forty-five years, many lines around the eyes, and around the comers of the mouth. His brown eyes looked up towards the doorway and he brushed his bare chest on which the scar of his initiation still stood, a pink ridge across a honey-brown terrain.

She stood at the doorway. She wore an old pair of khaki shorts and a loose white shirt tied at the waist. Her hair was short, cut as gracelessly as his. She was five years older than when he had known her and the only marring of her beauty was the suggestion of a tightness in the comers of her pale lips and for this scar he recognized his own responsibility.

'I am not going to waste my whole life,' she began and his heart sank so sickeningly he had a sensation not dissimilar to suddenly losing sight. 'I am not going to waste my whole life hating you.'

He stopped breathing, waiting.

She also began to brush. She brushed her knee. She smoothed her cheeks. She squatted on the floor by the door jamb.

'You are forty-five,' she said. 'I am thirty-two. We're getting too old for this nonsense.'

She leaned forward and held out her hand and took his, loosening it, releasing his palm from the closed trap of his nails.

'If you ever steal my Cadillac,' she smiled (her moist eyes searching his face for signs), 'I'll cut your bloody balls off.'

It was so quiet they could hear a pitta bird down in the rain forest, rustling its bright feathers through the rotting leaves.

And now there is not much more to say about these lives, not, at least, in a book that will be sold mainly in cities and to strangers at that. There were days, nights, meals, storms, fires, trees, bees, many things that were tedious, repetitive, as expected as peas uncurling through red soil.

There were stories, of course, in the natural course of things, which came to be told more slowly, with greater humour and with a pride that could not be mistaken for arrogance. Harry often seemed as happy to talk about the clay he dug, or the trees he planted (and a man who makes a forest has reason to speak about it with a little pride). In short he began to talk like a farmer and became the sort of character who makes city people laugh, drawling slow directions, complaining about rain or the lack of it, believing improbable (unscientific) things that more advanced people have discarded a century before, suspicious of new chemicals and things in packets, gazing off into the distance before answering easy questions, discussing a piece of fencing as if it were important.

He lived through thirty more wet seasons, seven droughts and two cyclones which happened, coincidentally, to have the same names as his new children.

So now there are only two stories left to tell, or rather two halves of the one story, and then it will all be done.

On the day of Harry Joy's death he was seventy-five years and two days old. He looked fifty. His face was deeply lined, you could even say creased, and it had been likened, by his children, to an old handbag. He walked with a slight limp, the result of a fall he suffered fighting a fire below the ridge at Clive's place. It was as close to a perfect day as might be possible, a warm sunny day in late October with the yellow box in flower and the 'Yard' bees travelling out from their racks (necessary to protect them from cane toad) out through the canyons and canopies of Harry Joy's forest.

He had only come out to look at the blossom, nothing more, but he walked amongst the trees like a true gardener and even removed a piece of groundsel weed he judged had no right to be there. Down below in the valley he could hear Dani singing.

Nothing will happen in this story, nothing but a death. It is as inconsequential as anything Vance told. Soon the branch of a tree will fall on him. A branch of a tree he has planted himself, one of his precious yellow boxes, a variety prized by bee-keepers but known to forest workers as widow-makers (widder-makers) because of their habit, on quiet, windless days like this one, of dropping heavy limbs.

Any moment this thirty-year-old tree is going to perform the treacherous act of falling on to the man who planted it, while bees continue to gather their honey uninterrupted on the outer branches.

There – it is done.

There is nothing pretty in this last death, this split head, this broken life: There was nothing beautiful in the cracking cry of Honey Barbara as it later resounded around the valley, swept and swooped like a great panicked crow in a glass cage, like jet-black dove wings, the flapping overhead of flying foxes in the night.

But now the last story, and the last story is our story, the story of the children of Harry Joy and Honey Barbara, and for this story, like all stories, you must give something, a sapphire, or blue bread made from cedar ash.

He was dead, the yellow box branch across his head and arm, bees still collecting from the scanty blossom. He felt perfectly calm, and as he rose higher he could see Daze bringing the Clydesdale down the valley to where his grown-up children were dropping logs. He could see trees, trees he could name, and touch. Their leaves stroked him like feathers, eucalypt graced with mint, rose, honey, violet, musk, smells, came to him. He was in a place he had been in before. His nostrils were assailed with the smell of things growing and dying, a sweet fecund smell like the valleys of rain forests. He did not wish to return to his body and instead he spread himself thinner, and thinner, as thin as a gas, and when he had made himself thin enough he sighed, and the trees, those tough-barked giants exchanging one gas for another, pumping water, making food, were not too busy to take this sigh back in through their leaves (it took only an instant) and they made no great fuss, no echoing sigh, no whispering of branches, simply took the sigh into themselves so that, in time, it became part of their tough old heart wood and there are those in Bog Onion who insist you can see it there, on the thirty-fifth ring or thereabouts of the trees he planted: a fine blue line, they insist, that even a city person could see.

He was Harry Joy.

He talked to the lightning, the trees, the fire, gained authority over bees and blossoms, told stories, conducted ceremonies, was the lover of Honey Barbara, husband of Bettina, father of David and Lucy, and of us, the children of Honey Barbara and Harry Joy.