Bliss

Honey Barbara's two huge eyes.

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

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

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

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

She woke him to tell him.

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

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

'You're getting really fat, man.'

'What?'

'The whole house stinks of dead chicken.'

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

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

'Did you wake me up to have a fight? Are you so full of city shit you have to fight someone?'

'I am not full of city shit. Who's been eating Big Macs?'

'Well go to sleep.'

'I want to talk now. It's the only time we can talk.'

'Spend some time here tomorrow.'

'I've got a client.'

'Who's full of city shit then?' He smiled his big white smile and raised a guru-type eyebrow, or at least that was the intention of the eyebrow. 'Maybe that's just your projection, Honey Barbara, because you're into this bad trip fucking fat businessmen.'

'It wasn't my decision.'

'It doesn't matter whose decision it was because in the end it's your decision. It's your Dharma.'

'My client isn't fat. You'd like him, Day. He's astonishing.'

He rolled over and left her to look at his hairy back. 'You're really into a bad scene, Barb. I don't want to hear about the fucking... '

'Come on, Day,' she sat beside him. 'You know I don't feel anything...

He laughed into the pillow.

'I was hypnotised,' she yelled, 'you know I was hypnotised. It cost fifty dollars so don't you laugh.'

He stopped laughing but he lay still.

'What's happening with the dope?' she asked quietly. She waited for a while. 'Day?' He didn't move. 'You're lying here all day getting radiated with television and smoking cigarettes and eating sick chickens full of antibiotics and God knows what shit you're breathing. You're meant to be home. They need the money.'

Damian rolled on his back and stared at her. 'We got ripped off,' he said. 'They had a gun. They took it all. I can't go home.' And there, in the middle of the dead chicken carcasses and the Big Mac boxes, he started crying.

'Good old Honey Barbara,' she thought bitterly as she held his weeping body in her arms.

She always forgot the fear when she remembered the city afterwards. She did not forget its existence, but she forgot the intensity of it, its total gut-wrenching, dull-eyed, damp-handed presence. It was not the run down in the truck with the bags of dope in the back. That wasn't so bad. They dressed like farmers and drove the back roads.

It was the time of waiting to sell it that she always forgot: the fear of the police, the fear of narcs, spies, the fear of being ripped off, so that everyone they spoke to was potentially an enemy and there was no such thing as 'just a police car' or 'just a visitor'. Everyone looked like a narc. Every parked car seemed occupied by big men reading newspapers. Every public phone box contained strange clicks and faint voices. When the front door bell rang your guts went tight.

But each year when the wet ended she found herself looking forward to it again, and if she remembered the fear about the dope at all, there was no chance of her recalling that other, duller, perhaps more dreadful fear she felt in the city.

She remembered the bars and restaurants and movies and even the junk food seemed tasty in her memory and the businessmen didn't seem so bad and she remembered the good times and ones who danced. And when it was almost time to go people said, 'Look at Honey Barbara,' for she was high as a kite just at the thought of it and when they hit the wide yellow plains going south and there were no hills, just this wonderful yellow sea and huge sky her heart damn near burst with happiness, and she had forgotten.

She had forgotten how damn miserable they all looked and how dirty the air was and most of all she had forgotten the anger. They seemed knotted in anger, and the whole of the city seemed like it was about to uncoil itself in a paroxysm of fury.

She went to the movies but no longer understood the lives on the screen and she felt a lack of sympathy which would have enraged the rest of the audience who laughed or cried on cue, as expected.

'They're so fucked up,' she said. 'How can I identify with that? It's all so depressing and ugly. I can't stand all this negativity.'

To Honey Barbara the city was a force, half machine, half human, exuding poisons.

And this year it was worse. This year they had been ripped off. This year there had been a gun. This year there was no money, and a whole season's work, all those bags of manure they had carried on their backs along bush tracks, all those little plants they had nurtured, protected from wallabies, hidden from the air, all this was wasted.

This year the only money would come from Honey Barbara, lying on her back, staring at the ceiling, too doped-up to feel a thing.

She sat in the Hilton in Harry's room and not even the long blue stripes on the carpet, the turquoise Thai silk covers on the chairs, none of the carefully chosen blues or greens did anything to give her peace because they were cold and synthetic and looked poisonous to touch.

Harry was talking on the phone and lying to Adrian Clunes about the cancer map. It was probably bad Karma. They had discussed it seriously.

The map lay on the table, and somewhere, somewhere she wouldn't tell Harry, was the place where Honey Barbara lived. She looked longingly at the cool (safe) yellow of the north and the fine blue line of the unnamed creek she knew, and imagined, for it wasn't shown on the map, the rutted track that ran up to Mount Warning and the Silky Oak plantation where Bog Onion Road had once been and the smell of the mill when it worked in the winter and the good clear hard noise of the blade as it cut into a tallow wood, beside whose stump, in the bush, another tree had been planted.

And most of all she thought about those blossoms which grew through the swaying green umbrellas which made up the roof of the forest, and on which the bees feasted: the stringybark with its characteristic sharpness, the sarsaparilla which was sweet and heavy and a little dull, and the showy red flowering gums bending in the south- easterly which swept the hill above the valley.

She did not, thinking about all this, forget bad things and a number of deaths salted the memory, one in particular: the bloated body of an unknown man hanging from a casurina above the falls. Nor did she ignore the presence of neigh-bouring people who thought differently: Ananda Marga, the Orange People, the Hari Krishnas and