'But who am I? Why do you ask me?'
'You are
'I am a businessman,' he said hopelessly. 'I am only inter-ested in money.'
'But we have no money, you see,' the man said.
'But it is dangerous. It is illegal.'
'Of course,' he smiled as if he were making fun of himself, ducking his head and raising his eyebrows.
'You have no money?'
'We have no money.'
'You could be a spy. A policeman.'
'If I were a spy I would have offered you money. A spy would not expect a man to do it for nothing. They don't understand such things.'
'And I do?'
'Yes. Of course.'
'But I am a businessman,' he said for the last time.
When he had accepted the offer the man left and he realized he did not even know his name.
That night he could not sleep. He tossed and turned and Anna became bad tempered and swore at him in a language he did not understand. He went and stood in the living room and looked at himself in the mirror. He was aware of the striking contrast between his appearance and the reality of his life. He looked dashing, interesting, even exotic, yet faced with local gangsters he had lacked the courage for anything more dangerous than being a waiter. There had been no rivers to cross and when the lightning played around the hills it brought only dampness and a nasty fungus which grew down the long back of his beautiful wife.
Now he was thrilled to think that someone, through a misunderstanding, might think him brave.
Standing in Bogota, on the edge of his story, he composed one more letter to Harry Joy. Dear Daddy, he began.
It was not the walk of city women, who, even when released from the hobble of high heels, still walk with invisible silk sashes tied between their ankles.
Honey Barbara strode.
She strode like women who can cross a creek by walking along a fallen log fifteen feet above the water, and do it with-out hesitation or any apparent thought. She walked as one accustomed to dirt tracks. The whistles of panel beaters did not affect her. She slung her saffron yellow bundle over her shoulder and strode down the street and they, seeing her, thought her haughty: her back straight, her head thrown back, her arms swinging. But she was not being haughty, she was merely walking.
Walking was the best thing when you hurt. It was better than dope and better than eating. It was better than fucking and better than sleeping. You just emptied your mind of everything so that the inside of your head was like an empty terracotta jar and no matter what happened you kept it empty. You guarded its emptiness with your eyes and your ears and you did not even stop to consider where you were going. In this way you always arrived at the right place.
She strode through streets filled with used-car yards, and others full of warehouses. She walked through department stores, a fish market, and along the wide rich streets at the bottom of Sugar Loaf. It was a fast walk, possibly six miles an hour. It brought her up those early gravel streets at the back of Sugar Loaf, where the rich houses end and where the crash of a famous developer left half-finished houses and unsewered blocks full of tall thistles and strangled with morning glory.
Her feet welcomed the gravel. The gravel was like rain on the roof and she felt it and tried not to think about it, but she knew she was going up Sugar Loaf. She had known from the beginning. But she had tried not to know. She pitted her muscles against the mountain and felt them ache. Her feet were soft. Not soft by comparison with the panel beaters, for instance, but soft in comparison with their normal condition. The great pads of callus on her feet had gone white and spongey during her stay in the city. They were big feet, but perfectly proportioned, with high arches and curved heels. They hurt a little already, but it was not real hurt, not the hurt she really felt.
She carried her bundle slung across her back. Her bundle contained a blanket, an alarm clock, a pair of baggies, two T shirts, an old sweater and a separate brown paper parcel full of her whoring clothes.
She did not need anything else. She did not need to think where she would go, where she would sleep. She rose up above the coastal plain perhaps six inches in every step, a little higher, above the mangroves, the big brown ill-used river, the sapphire bay, and walked the unnamed streets on Sugar Loaf where the unemployed, hippies, junkies, and even the respectable poor lived amongst the smell of unsewered drains, half-buried shit, uncollected garbage, jasmine, honeysuckle and frangipani. Bananas grew untended and made their own jungles. Green plastic garbage bags lay in the grass with their guts spilling out. Morning glory tangled itself over rusting cars.
Once there had been beds here to welcome her, but today the humpies were either gone or empty or filled with strangers who eyed her with suspicion. She had not been looking for them anyway. She had been looking for no one. She was merely walking, her head as empty of desire as a terracotta bowl.
She strode through a paddock of tall grass, crossed the face of a small cliff wet with seepage, found a new road and began to walk downhill. She was breathing regularly but her eyes were slits.
Down at the place where the bitumen began, she sat. She examined her feet: they were cut, but not badly. Her legs ached, but she welcomed that. The real pain was elsewhere and she didn't know what to do with it.
She walked three miles to the Zen Inn and ordered an alfalfa tea. And although she should have felt soothed and at home in the Zen Inn, she did not. She was edgy and irritable when she should have been relaxed. They were her people. They had clear skins and good eyes. If she had wanted a fuck or just some warmth this was the place to be, yet it was nothing. She wanted to groan out loud. She could not even talk about her problem. How could anyone-understand that she loved an advertising man named Harry Joy.
She bought some baked veggies and ate them slowly. She willed herself to taste them, to be thankful she was not eating shit anymore.
When she left the Zen Inn she would have denied that she had made up her mind, but not that her mind had made up itself. She simply denied all knowledge of what her mind was up to. She wished merely to let it sort itself out and she would follow.
In the city square she found a phone box. There was only one Joy in Palm Avenue and she memorized the street number.
She crossed the square as it struck eleven. She stood in front of the huge glass-fronted street directory and turned the knobs casually at first, as if merely looking at what streets the city had to offer. Finally she found Palm Avenue: another three miles.
She did not stride so rapidly because this was a different sort of walking now. There was a drag in her steps which was produced not by tiredness but by knowing her destination and being frightened of it.
Cars cruised beside her and tooted their horns as if wishing to escort her to Bettina's side:
She did not approve of grass. It was a poison like any other poison, but she could not have been a whore without grass and she could not get her legs to Palm Avenue without grass. She dragged in rough lungfuls of the stuff, judging it to be very strong indeed. In the middle of the park her joint spluttered and glowed like a beacon.
The streets she then walked along reminded her of a row of mausoleums she had once seen in a city cemetery, row after row of structures devoid of life. Even the trees seemed heavy and dull and she felt, as her bare feet fell softly on the concrete footpath, as if she was the only one alive.
She turned the comer of Palm Avenue with a heavy heart. She had no plan. Dark house after dark house was bathed in the negative radiation of fluorescent street lights. She did not need Wilhelm Reich to tell her about Deadly Orgone Radi-ation. He might be the master of the theory but she knew what it really
She stood in front of 25 Palm Avenue. There was no sign of life. But the Jaguar was in the driveway and she knew it was the car she had driven in and that Harry Joy was inside sleeping.
She saw the Cadillac on the front lawn. It was, she reflected, more her style. She crawled into the back seat and there, surrounded by the dangerous perfumes of oil and petrol, she made a bed with her single blanket. She put her whore's clothes under her head and set her alarm clock for four a.m. Then she lay there, looking at the place
