here.'
'Thank you, Mr Harrison.'
'You're welcome any time.'
'Can you find your own way down?'
'Yes, I think so.' But he had only retreated by one branch when he stopped. 'Mr Joy?'
'Yes.'
'I must discuss the fence with you sometime. We are going to have to replace it.'
'I'll drop in, Mr Harrison.'
'No hurry.'
He crashed his way through the lower branches and just when Harry judged him safely down, there was a sharp crack followed by a soft thud and a yelp of pain.
'Are you alright?' he called.
There was no answer, but he thought he saw the shadow of the Miner limping along the darker shadow of the fence and then saw it slide inside the still-dark screen door.
Harry, already, was doubting the wisdom of his final test and the Miner had reminded him, had let him see himself as he must be seen: Harry Joy was crazy. He fervently hoped he had been. His theory, so cleverly arrived at (if they are Actors they will reveal themselves when they think their audience is absent) seemed puerile to him, more affected by champagne than common sense.
So there he was, considering leaving his tree, climbing down, finding a bottle of wine, removing himself from that uncomfortable, undignified position, when Joel's blue BMW pulled up outside, and it was only the fear of being thought mad that stopped him climbing down and saying: here I am.
He waited, and, with no real interest, watched.
He heard Joel turn off his blaring radio. He saw Bettina lurch from the car. The clink of bottles. Bettina saying: 'You open the door for me again and I'll break your bloody arm.' Laughter. Joel locking the door and having trouble with his keys.
His partner kissing his wife. His partner's leg jammed hard between his wife's legs, in the glow of the street light, against the hedge, beside the footpath.
No.
Harry retreated up the tree in pain.
Joel, far below, said: 'We should have gone to my place.'
He did not want to hear anything. He came to escape pain, not find it.
But Bettina's voice insisted on reaching him: 'I can't stand your bloody brass any more. If I have to look at your brass any more, I'll puke.'
Eastern brass artifacts in Joel's bedroom. He had bought a crate-load of them in a market in Kabul and a woman was paid to polish them every week. In the living room there were books he had bought by the metre.
Harry kept climbing, away from voices.
He wanted normality and peace so badly that he could still deny he had seen this torture. He could have erased it from his memory. He wanted normality and warmth. Instinctively, seeking comfort, he put his eye to the chink in his son's bedroom curtain. Show me my son.
There: David Joy, his trousers around his knees and Lucy, her skirt beside her on the floor, sucking his son's pale-skinned penis.
Harry Joy at the windows of Hell.
He moaned and staggered on his branch like a man pole-axed. He began to descend, forgetting that trees should not be left in a hurry, but slowly, carefully, one leg at a time, even by those practised in the art.
But Harry, hurrying, left his branch too quickly and barely held the next branch for a second before he was on his way further down the tree. He crashed ten feet, was wrenched, and held.
The sharp end of the branch the Miner had broken in his fall now held Harry securely like a butcher's hook in the trousers of his suit.
He stayed there, suspended, and swung a little in front of one more vista. For in front of his eyes, the curtains properly parted, was a window where he was presented with one last glimpse of his partner's pudgy little hand disappearing up his wife's dress.
Bettina Joy looked up and saw her husband's head staring in the window, upside down.
Harry saw her mouth open wide and her eyes bulge a little. He thought of fish eyes in shop windows and Billy McPhee screaming about a dollar's worth of petrol.
Bettina Joy hit Joel Davis who misunderstood and would not stop.
Harry saw Joel Davis turn and saw his mouth wide open. Joel Davis wiped his hand on his handkerchief before he made a move towards the window.
'I put you on the plane,' he said. And, indeed, he looked up into the sky as if Harry might have dropped out.
'Just cut my trousers.'
They were there in a second: all the cast of tormentors: the partner, the faithful wife, the good neighbour, the loving children. They fooled around with him on the broken branch, claiming to lack strength and height. He felt them circle beneath his blood-filled head like a congregation of Satanic dwarves come to perform magic rituals.
They discussed ladders. They made it a protracted affair.
He begged them to cut his trousers.
But, no: 'I'll get the aluminium ladder.'
'No, the wooden one will be better.'
'Alright, you get the wooden one.' Which was further away, next door.
Then, with the ladder, they fooled around some more and claimed they should not lift him off. He lifted his head upwards, trying not to black out.
Joel Davis knelt so he could look into his senior partner's bloodshot eye: 'We're going to have to cut you down.' He held up a rusty old razor blade. 'O.K.?'
Harry closed his eyes. He felt them cut and then, suddenly, there was a loud rip and he fell into an untidy nest of elbows and arms with fingers poking out the top of it. Bettina poked a finger in his eye. David put an elbow in his throat.
When he had vomited, he spat sedately on the lawn and looked at them. They had all gathered in a little group beside the house, like people posed for a photograph, each one looking a little self-consciously into the lens, no one quite sure what expression to adopt.
The Final Test.
'I curse you,' he said, and the anachronistic sound of the word impressed him with its power. 'I curse you all, for all time, without exception.'
They stood before him silently, giving him the respect awarded the holy and the insane.
Part Three. The Rolls Royce of Honeys
It was like a holiday. Everything seemed bigger than life: nice wine, dramas, whispered conversations, madness, maybe even love. The Joys' house at Palm Avenue felt like the head-quarters of some ecstatic campaign in which madness played a vital role, but whether as an ally or assailant was not always clear.
Harry had retreated to a suite on the twenty-first floor of the Hilton, from which privileged position he managed to charm the doctors who were sent to commit him. They savoured the champagne, letting its acidity take away the feeling that they had almost been associated with something unclean.
They had disliked Joel and had found his cufflinks offensive.
The beluga caviar Harry Joy offered them helped erase the last of this vulgarity and they chatted about the Hiltons they remembered from other countries and other times. They remembered lost luggage at airports, cancelled flights, and bored each other a little until the champagne was drunk and they departed smiling, a little unsteady on their feet.
