'But they came in the fucking afternoon.'
'What's the
He bent his fingers back and clicked his knuckles. 'I'm angry,' he said with self-satisfaction.
'Your muscles are knotted.'
'It's fucking fantastic,' he said, 'it's wonderful.'
'And your hair stinks.'
'I have erotic dreams about you,' he said, 'all the time. I miss you. I dream about honey and brown bread and fucking. Where have you been?'
'Here,' she said. 'Where else? Because you left my address I had to get rid of the money.'
'Why?'
'Don't
'You've been here all the bloody time?'
'I thought they'd come and bust me for the money. I burnt it. I started to burn it and fucking Damian called the fucking cops.' Her voice rose involuntarily and Jim and Jimmy, squatting on the other side of the yard, looked up and grinned. 'And they bloody did an involuntary admission on me, for burning money.'
Harry felt his penis grow hard and fill with blood.
'I want to fuck you, Honey Barbara. Come and fuck with me.' He wanted to kiss her nipples and eat her pussy and fuck like they had in those paradise days in the Hilton Hotel.
'I thought you wanted to fuck Dalton.'
'Only so I could get out.'
'Whose brilliant idea was that?' She was grinning.
'Nurse.'
'Nurse is crazy.'
Harry shrugged.
'If she liked you, she would have kept you, stupid. The only way to get out of here is money. M-o-n-e-y.'
'Come and fuck with me, Honey Barbara.'
'If you pay for me to get out, I'll fuck you for three years.' and she grinned a wide wonderful grin that even Harry, caught in the confusing cross-currents of anger and erotic need, could not help but echo.
'Miss Harrison,' Jimmy called across the bitumen.
'The bastards,' she hissed, 'they don't waste any time.'
'Time for your bath,' Miss Harrison.'
'I'm coming,' she called, and then in a whisper: 'That'll be the day.'
'Honey Barbara, I love you.'
She looked at him, stunned. 'I love you too,' she said, her eyes brimming with tears, 'and you've gone and made yourself look like a creep.'
'I'm not a creep.'
'Miss Harrison.'
'I've got to go. I'll see you tomorrow night. I'll come and get you.'
'O.K.' Harry said and when he saw her walk across the bitumen towards C Block and saw Jimmy saunter after her he felt jealousy, pure, undiluted, come to fuel his anger.
Later that afternoon a delegation of Christian Scientists passed Harry and Nurse in the gardens. They were not in time for the early part of the conversation in which the power of m-o-n-e-y was compared with that of sweety-talking. They arrived just in time for the end.
'I'm not a creep,' the natty-looking man with the moustache was saying to the one with the bulbous nose and long grey hair. 'On that point, she is incorrect.'
'But,' the man with the bulbous nose said, 'you are creep-like.'
It was at that point, they thought, that the fight started.
Money.
Plus Anger.
Equals success.
When you knew, it was easy, and Harry Joy did not waste a second of valuable time putting it into practice. He had bathed his cuts, washed his hair, and by the time the Christian Scientists had reached Ward L he was sitting opposite Mrs Dalton once again.
He shook her hand and looked her in the eye. No threats of Therapy. No tut-tuts about violence. It was settled. The amount was fixed. The source of the money arranged. Mrs Dalton even complimented him on his business acumen. She had no interest in the cut above his eye.
He had dirty trousers and a silk shirt spotted with hair oil but as he emerged from Mrs Dalton's office, a connoisseur might have noticed a certain jauntiness in his pick-pocket's walk, and if he'd had a coin in his pocket he would have flicked it in the air and caught it with a snap.
Gene Kelly would have danced it, all the way across the bitumen and out along the concrete path.
A creep?
No sir!
Creep-like?
Not nearly.
His hair was clean; it positively flopped up and down as he walked. He was not a lot like the Harry Joy who had come here. He had a cut above his eye, pimples on his nose, sore ribs from Nurse's knuckles. He was older, wiser. He had it worked out. He knew the game. And now he was going to be released, he was going to have a fuck, he was in love.
*
Honey Barbara traded certain favours to get a deserted staff flat from Jim and Jimmy, and other favours to buy candles, oil, bread, fruit, cheese, incense. While she waited for him she cleaned herself, cleaned her mind of their grunting red faces, washed out their simpering smiles, her stoned pretences, their moans, their cruelties, their fantasies, disfunctions, bulging eyes, the poisons exuding from their skins.
She scrubbed her skin with a hard brush and then did breathing exercises.
When it was dark she lit the candles to make a circle. Later when he arrived, he would want to know how she knew it was a magic circle, how it worked, why it was there. She wouldn't answer. She knew. She had always known how to make a magic circle.
He came into the room and brought a chill with him. It was like a cloak of cold gas. He was not a devil. He was the victim of a devil. She had met a warlock once, in the city, with a coven of seven women who served him. The warlock was as calm and relaxed as possible. He had great power. Under his power another visitor, a young man, babbled sexual fantasies and was humiliated.
'There is a devil in you,' she said.
He asked too many questions and meant none of them seriously. He wanted to touch her. She didn't know the answers and it didn't matter anyway. Was it a Christian devil? Devils were devils. They did not belong to anyone, not Christ, not the Buddha – they were devils, malevolent spirits. They existed everywhere. Devils, goblins, evil forces. People say there is no evil, but they are wrong. Honey Barbara had seen the maggots in the heads of decapitated pigs, sheep, a horse once, animals killed for the sole purpose of an evil ritual. On the spot you could feel the evil. It was not the sound (the buzzing flies), not the smell, but a damp, dark feeling in the middle of a sunny clearing and the horse she was riding (Sally Coe's George) felt it as much as she did. It was not just death. Death is everywhere. There was a ghost down in the rain forest where an old man had lived alone and it was a good ghost, nothing cold there at all.
He thought he was in Hell and he had gone looking for the devil. He had sired the devil and given birth to him and now the devil was in his guts like a parasite.
First he had to be washed. He did not understand. He tried to kiss her. She kept him away by force of will. Tonight, she had the power of incantation and knew she could heal him. She scrubbed his back hard and talked to him. She soaped him. She removed the smells from him. She was not known to be a healer.
But tonight she had a golden ball of light at the very centre of her being. She could heal.
She wasn't stoned. She was Honey Barbara, pantheist, healer, whore.
