'I want to.'
'It's not necessary. We'll cope.'
Barbara looked desperately to Harry.
'It's different cooking,' he said.
This disclosure, his intimate and familiar knowledge of Honey Barbara's cooking, was more hurtful to Bettina than anything else that had happened. She filled a glass with water, drank half of it and threw the other half out.
'It's healthy,' he said.
'Fine,' she said. 'That'd be good.'
'What time do you like to eat dinner?'
'Eight.'
'Is there anything you don't like?'
'Nothing.'
Bettina left and slammed the door behind her and it was Honey Barbara, abandoning all principle, who made her toast with white bread, strong instant coffee with white sugar, and took it up to her room where she sat shivering on a single bed.
When David Joy came down to breakfast he found Harry and Bettina already gone and a beautiful young woman in the kitchen. She had lined up all the plastic garbage cans and was emptying the cupboards as fast as she could. Bread, sugar, cans of beans, jars of coffee, cornflakes, white flour, were all dispatched without hesitation. Only a small unopened packet of Torula Yeast seemed to have escaped her wrath.
'I'm Barbara,' the young woman said.
'David.'
'I'm a friend of your father's.'
He nodded darkly.
'Do you want breakfast?'
He nodded again and shyly regarded her firm arse which the morning sun revealed beneath her white cotton baggy pants.
She went to the dining room and came back with a big cloth bundle. From this she produced four little brown paper bags which contained unprocessed bran, wheat germ, lecithin, and raisins. She put a dessertspoonful of each in a plate, mixed them up, added milk, and passed it to David Joy who was sitting on the edge of his chair.
'What's this?'
She did not take offence at his curled lip. She told him.
'Why?' he said. 'I have cornflakes every morning.'
'I'm cooking now,' Honey Barbara said firmly. 'Today I'll make you some good bread but for the moment this is all there is. So eat it. It'll make you shit properly. It'll give you roughage and vitamins to make your intestine muscles contract. It'll make your ·shit float, you watch.' And she smiled.
David pushed his plate away in disgust. 'I don't want to talk about shit,' he said, 'and particularly not with a woman.'
Honey Barbara shrugged and went back to tidying up the cupboard.
'Did he meet you in the hospital?'
'Sure did.'
David left his bowl on the table and went upstairs, where he tried to persuade Ken and Lucy (who were meant to occupy separate beds while Bettina was in the house) to come down to the kitchen and make some kind of stand.
The woman was mad. He was scandalized by her madness, her obsession with shit, her wastefulness, her firm arse, her pubic hair. Everything about her was wild and untrammelled and he thought, passing her, that he could smell her sexual organ, and he felt weak. Madness horrified David. Yet often he felt it press upon him. He felt soft fingers touch the outside of the concrete brick walls of his bunker. He could feel mumblings, murmurings, the passage of lightning through an unseen sky.
Ordinariness pressed upon him: he invited it, needed it, embraced it. Look at this suit, so conventionally cut he might be a mere clerk. Was it a disguise, or was it the truth? Would he be too weak for the lightning? Would he be too brittle, have bones like sparrow wings? Would he simply snap?
He did not want the mad person downstairs but he could not convince them. He saw they had private jokes about him and he regretted ever having told Lucy his dreams. He was stiff and formal in his suit but had she ever told Ken that she had sucked her brother's cock and swallowed his come, or did she simply tell him that he was a clerk who wanted to be a bandit, one more pathetic Walter Mitty. Was that why they lay there like that and smiled?
Lucy and Ken were very interested in Harry's mad woman. They came downstairs the minute David left the house and they watched her throw foods into the rubbish bins as if they were poisonous substances that should not be touched, let alone eaten.
They introduced themselves and sat at the table to watch her.
'David thinks you're crazy,' Lucy said. 'He says you talk about shit like it was food and food like it was shit.'
It was an aggressive beginning but Honey Barbara liked her. Further this occurred to her: Lucy Joy was someone, not someone famous or influential or even talented, but just someone. She looked like a wild plant, something bred for a purpose now going its own sweet way. Honey Barbara did not even notice that she was overweight or worry that the whites of the eyes in that dark face were a little on the yellow side.
'He thinks you can't tell the difference.'
'Sorry,' Honey Barbara tore her eyes away from the face, 'difference between what?'
'Shit and food,' Ken said. He wore a Kentucky Fried peak cap and his curling hair rushed out beneath it, swept behind two large pixie ears, one of which held a small gold earring.
They were both smiling (when Ken smiled he showed a lot of broken teeth) and Honey Barbara smiled too.
'Everyone here is crazy,' Lucy said. 'I'll make you herbal tea.'
'You've got herbal tea? Here?'
'Been there,' Lucy said, 'done that.'
It was a long time, six months, since Honey Barbara had been around anyone as young as Lucy and she remembered what a charge you could get from fifteen-year-olds: how fresh they seemed, and confident and strong, and also, what a pain in the arse they could be.
'Why is everyone here crazy?' Honey Barbara noted that it was Ken who made the tea (with a lumpily rolled cigarette burning beneath his equally lumpy nose). He squinted down into the packet while Lucy talked.
'Bettina's crazy because she wants to be an American; Joel is crazy because he'll do anything to get sympathy; David is crazy because he wants to be a dope dealer; and Harry must he crazy because he let the others lock him up.'
Honey Barbara was charmed. She pulled up a chair. 'And why are you crazy?'
Ken brought the cups to the table and put a big bag of dope beside them.
'We're crazy because we like everything.' He said 'everyfing'. That made Honey Barbara like him more.
'We like you throwing all this stuff out,' Lucy said, 'and we like David being pissed off. We like everything. We like her-bal tea and Coca-Cola and dope. There isn't anything we disapprove of.'
Honey Barbara thought they were decadent but she liked them anyway. Not even her rather Victorian morality could censor them. What she did not know, and what they never told her, was they were on holidays. They were doing what every Party member must sometimes, in some secret corner of his of her heart, feel like doing – stopping analysing, appraising, and to hell with it all.
At this stage, however, they did not know they were on holidays. 'Afterwards,' Lucy said, 'when the world is over, no one will know that all of this was really beautiful.'
Honey Barbara closed her eyes.
'It's not heavy,' Ken said.
'We are into the late twentieth century,' Lucy said, 'and definitely not fighting against it. Enjoy it. It's incredible. The sunsets wouldn't look so beautiful if there wasn't all this shit in the air. It refracts the light and
