Bliss

others, not all of whom could be trusted to be peaceful and some of whom had armies of their own, weapons, deadly secrets, secret rituals, ritual killings. Witchcraft was practised in the bush and the head of a sheep, or a pig, writhing with maggots, lay often in the path of Honey Barbara's horse, and the night was a less innocent place than it had once been.

Yet Honey Barbara, in the Hilton, wanted only to tell Harry how it was to wake up in the morning and hear those giant tallow woods talking to each other.

He put down the phone and smiled at her.

'I'm pleased I met you,' she said, looking up at him from the synthetic floor.

'I'm pleased I met you.'

'I don't think I could hack it otherwise.'

'Likewise.'

'How about,' she said, 'we go out today, to the park, and I tell you the names of trees.'

'They're taking their time coming for me,' said Harry who could not have appreciated the difficulties a seventeen-year-old boy has in being taken seriously, especially when he is carrying five thousand dollars in cash in his back pocket and runs the risk of simply having it removed from his person.

'They'll come,' Honey Barbara said. 'Just when you think they've forgotten, they'll turn up. That's why you've got to get up early.'

'I've never been able to get up early,' he yawned. It was certainly true that he had shown a remarkable facility for ignoring alarm clocks, telephone calls and the sound of the human voice.

'The alarm goes ·off at 4 a.m. and I get up and sit in the park till seven.'

'They might come at seven thirty, just when you get home.'

'No, they never do.'

'Or seven fifteen, or lunchtime.'

'No, they only come early in the morning. Even in the country, when they have to drive hundreds of miles, they never come after seven. Your alarm clock,' she said, 'is your key to freedom.'

It was one of her expressions. The other was: 'One in every three is a spy,' a statistic she quoted with great confidence.

'I feel safer in the Hilton,' he said.

'You are safer in the park with me.'

So every morning they sat and shivered in the pre-dawn grey of the park, arriving too late for the warmest places which were inhabited by winos. They wrapped themselves in Honey Barbara's blankets. Their teeth chattered. Sometimes they made love. They were not unhappy.

Harry was more alive than he knew, and his life was filled with more delights than he could ever remember, and all of this took place in a climate of fear and watchfulness, where every waiter was a spy, every wino an informer. His eyes improved. He learned to recognize the glittering poisons the city placed in his path. Gleaming fruit had DDT lying just beneath the surface of its tempting skin.

He gave up meat, coffee, salt and anything they cooked in the Hilton kitchen. They ate fruit with spots and bread with lumps in it. He gave up everything his guide suggested except wine and it was he who introduced her to it: at the end of weeks of tuition she could truly appreciate the crushed violet nose of a 1973 Cheval Blanc.

Honey Barbara submitted to the evils of alcohol with a guilty flush. Dropping her perky little nose into a glass of Mouton Rothschild, she murmured: 'It's probably organic' before she took the precious fluid into her mouth and closed her glistening eyes with pleasure.

It was three thirty in the morning when the phone rang.

'Hello.'

'Harry, it's Alex.'

'Hello, Alex.'

'Got to talk to you, Harry.'

'Where are you?'

'Reception. Downstairs.'

'O.K., it's 2121. The twenty-first floor.'

He hung up and dressed quickly.

He turned on the light in the sitting room and opened its door a little. Then he retired to the bedroom, locked the interconnecting door, turned off its light and opened the door just a fraction so he could see out of the lift. He had his shoes on, his wallet in his pocket.

But when the lift door opened it revealed only the-large soft stumbling figure of Alex Duval.

'In here, Alex.' He turned on the light in the bedroom and held open the door.

'Sorry, Harry.'

'Don't be sorry.'

Alex had a big, pale, sick face. 'Harry I've got to talk to you. I'm drunk. I'm sorry I'm drunk,' he said belligerently as he stumbled into the room and sat heavily on the bed. Harry went into the sitting room and brought back a bottle of Scotch, a glass, and a jug of water. Alex drank greedily from the big tumbler. Harry leant against the window, waiting silently.

'You don't talk much any more, Harry.'

'Not so much.'

'You were a good talker, Harry. That's what made you, you know that? Not what you said, no.' He paused and considered this. 'It was the damn way you said it.'

'I'm learning to listen,' Harry smiled, but he was cautious.

'I'm leaving the agency.'

'Ah.'

'That all you can say? Ah?' he mimicked nastily. 'Ah.' He poured another Scotch, half Scotch, half water; the tumbler filled to the brim. While he occupied himself with this, neither of them said anything.

Alex sipped and looked up, his white face sweating alcohol.

'You're a smart-arse, Harry.' He had Chinese food spilled down his shirt. 'You're a cold fish.'

Harry appeared to lean against the window without a tight muscle in his body. He was ready to run.

'You were never cold, Harry, you were warm. You were such a warm person. You were a fool,' he lifted his finger, careful that his argument should proceed honestly, 'you were a fool, but you were warm. Now you're cold. All you care about is yourself and you've left us in the lurch. What's in there?'

'That's the sitting room.'

'Fuck it, we go there. I didn't come here to sleep with you.'

Harry followed the big man into the sitting room and watched him lower his sizeable arse on to the little Thai silk chair.

'Didn't come to sleep,' he said, arranging his bottle and his jug on the floor, 'How much does all this cost?'

'Two hundred a day.'

'Fuck you, Harry. You've left us in the lurch. You fire Krappe Chemicals. Poor Joel, poor little schmuck, poor dumb ambitious little schmuck. It's not his fault. You don't even tell him, you just talk to the client and fire him. Two million dollars. Poof. Like that. What's in there?'

'That's the passage.'

'Ah.'

'Alex,' Harry said cautiously, 'don't you remember we had a talk one Saturday morning, I promised I'd fire them for you.'

'I didn't ask you to.' Alex sprang from his chair and then forgot why he'd done it. The Scotch in his hand swayed dan-gerously. 'You decided to do it. You stole my fucking key,' he said incredulously. 'You stole my key. You interfered in my life. So I'm crazy. So what? So I write funny conference reports and never send them to anyone. Was it doing any harm? Did it hurt you?' He started to sit down but stopped. 'You are so naive, do you know that? All your life you walk around and never see anything bad. Anybody who says any-thing is bad looks like a sour grape. That's what you do to people. I say, 'Oh, so-and-so's an old cunt' and you look at me, Harry, like I'm a cunt. You don't want to hear bad about anything. The papers are full of this cancer stuff and what do you say, 'Oh, it's nothing, just a scare,' because you think they're cunts for calling Krappe cunts.