where the night was blackest.
He was shocked to recognize the sour stale smell of the bed he had once shared with Bettina. He had lived with that smell and never thought about it. Its smell must have once been comforting to him and he must have wrapped himself in it happily. But tonight it was unpleasant.
He could not find a place to lie and his head filled with won't-stay-still thoughts: Joel's blubbery body, his burnt suit, Bettina's ads, his son's tears, Lucy's unknown boyfriend and – sharp, so painful he sucked in his breath – Honey Barbara getting out the door of the Jaguar.
His thoughts were a merry-go-round. He tried to be definite, to pin down his problems and ideas and dissect them coldly, to adopt a plan, have an aim against which he could measure himself.
But he had never, it seemed, believed in anything but his comfort and even these silk shirts hanging in the cupboard were enough to seduce him away from Honey Barbara.
He could not sleep. He could not escape himself. He saw himself as worthless, so loathsome, shallow, hollow, as to be worth nothing. The idea of suicide whirled past him but he did not even look at it. Those unseen gods would simply send him back in for another round.
He rolled over, swaddling himself in his sheet. In the room across the hall he could hear his son talking in his sleep. When he was younger the boy had been troubled by nightmares. They sometimes found him sleepwalking, talking as he went. 'I didn't do it,' he told them. 'I didn't do it.' They had never asked him what it was.
He knew how the deal had looked to Honey Barbara. And now it looked the same to him. He could not claim ignorance. He had seen the cancer map. It glowed malignantly in his mind's eye. He had chosen not to see the subjects of Bettina's ads, but how could he ignore them? He had made the agreement with Bettina, he told himself, to get Honey Barbara out of hospital. But then why hadn't he gone to consult her about the deal when it was made?
What would he do? Was a promise worth anything? Hadn't he promised Bettina? And didn't he, anyway, owe her something for having stopped her in another life when doing ads was an innocent thing.
He went to sleep and dreamed about green ants.
When he woke it was ten minutes to three. He knew he would have to find Honey Barbara and leave the city. He could not live here.
The rooster crowing in the dim dark four o'clock did not sound like a real rooster but something more sinister, some mutilated thing with the top half of its call sliced off, an electric warning device which wouldn't start.
If he stayed in Palm Avenue he could be safe. If he could not find Honey Barbara he could, at least, protect himself. He got up and went down to the kitchen where he began to do profit projections. The big round noughts began to soothe him, to give him pleasure, like the crinkling sound of tissue paper around an expensive present.
When (at four twenty) he went out on to the verandah he was thinking of the uses of wealth, no longer merely relating them to the colours of wine and the quality of crystal. He had never wanted to be rich before. He had never quite seen the need. But now he thought of high brick walls they built around themselves, the grates, grills, jagged glass, Alsatian dogs, alarms, patrols and so on. Those were things that might be necessary.
Lucy's car sat beneath him, its great rococo shape a reminder of a more ignorant and optimistic time. He was curious about the car and walked down the steps wishing to touch it. He had hardly talked to Lucy. He did not know what she wanted or why she wanted it. He did not know how she was being hurt, who she was hurting. All he had seen was that she was carrying a dream and the car was part of it.
They were all carrying a dream except him. He had no dream. He wanted only safety. Why was he so empty? Why should everyone else have these passions and he have none. He stroked the car absently.
Inside the Cadillac, Honey Barbara stirred in her watchdog sleep. The dope had hung curtains in her mind and she was not quite sure what was happening. Someone, she knew, was walking around the car and mumbling. She could not see if it was a man or a woman. She could only see the shape, and occasionally it would move and blend with other shapes, blackness on blackness, the shapes of witches transmogrifying. She breathed in the petrol fumes and felt damp with terror.
'Curious,' Harry Joy said out loud, 'Very curious.'
He was talking to her. He knew she was in there. He was saying – she understood him with dazzling clarity – it is curious that you are lying there and I am standing here.
He turned on his heel and she slipped out of the Cadillac and followed him into the house. She was a little more stoned than she knew.
There are times when the lips seem to sleep, to abandon their role as the signifiers of happiness, while the eyes become almost electric and not only the lips but every other organ must be subservient to them in this, their most splendid and spectacular moment.
Thus: Honey Barbara, standing in the doorway at four thirty-two a.m.
Her mouth was pale pink and sleep-soft when they kissed and all the world around them assumed an impressionistic softness and everything they looked at was coloured with dusty pastels which gave no sharp edges to forms, and even the white refrigerator they embraced beside seemed as mellow as pearl shell.
When she was an old woman with crinkled skin, Honey Barbara would still remember this moment and how the refrigerator looked and how perfectly happy she was, to hold her lover in her arms in the midst of enemy territory and how his eyes had been as soft as those of an animal, a foal, something slim and strong and gentle, looking at her with such emotion.
He could not stop stroking her. He stroked her face, her arms, her shoulders. She knew it was right to have come back because she too had made her promise.
(He was ready to tell her. He had made up his mind. He would have gone with her then at that moment, not saying goodbye to anyone. He would have walked out the door and left those advertisements where they lay, in a great pile beside Joel's bed. But it was Honey Barbara who spoke first.)
'I will stay three months,' she said.
'I will cook,' she said, thus protecting them further.
Harry considered it for hardly an instant. The silk shirts won.
Later Honey Barbara was to think about how innocent she had been. To imagine she could hold him against the forces around her. Surrounded by the smells of animal fat, Baygon, Silicone, Fluorozene, Rancid Butter, Stale Beer, Cigarette Smoke, Ash, and even Oil and Petrol, bombarded by fluorescent light, enveloped by aggressive red walls, she had not been daunted.
Then he took her briefly into the living room to show her the advertisements he had promised to sell. They sat in a long room where a man with battery-fed hips slept on a mattress on the floor.
'Her lover?'
'Used to.'
They carried the advertisements back into the kitchen where he made her sit amongst the remains of Big Macs while he tried to explain them to her. She was shocked. She knew there was something magical about these things to him and she sensed their power. Yet she imagined herself equal to it. She was young and strong and confident. Later she would think she had also been naive.
They put the advertisements away and stayed at the table holding each other's hands, kissing, confessing their angers and their doubts or, in Harry's case, some of them.
In Honey Barbara's mind Bettina was a witch: powdered, smooth, white-skinned, dressed in black. So when she came out to the kitchen at six thirty in a pink dressing gown with puffy eyes, an olive skin, and a throaty sleep- stuck voice, Honey Barbara didn't even recognize her and only knew it was her because it had to be. She was shorter too, without her stiletto heels, and she shuffled into the kitchen and saw, immediately, that they had been looking at her advertisements. It seemed more important to her than any other fact.
'Did you like them?' she asked. Honey Barbara saw how vulnerable she would be to any criticism.
'They're very nice,' she lied. Bettina was a witch, but she felt sorry for her. Her lover was fat and slept on the floor. Her husband was holding hands with another woman. It hurt her badly, it was obvious: she swallowed and looked away and went to fuss about things over the kitchen sink.
Honey Barbara followed her and embraced her. It was an awkward embrace, not just because Bettina was considerably shorter, but it was not rejected.
'I would like to do the cooking for you.'
'No, no, it's not necessary.' Bettina turned and started fossicking in the sink.
