differently about him because of it, just as we feel differently about a man when we discover his secret passion is cabinet-making. There was, in Harry's stories, something of the skill of a cabinet-maker, the craftsman more than the artist. They were not usually stories at all, but incidents to which he applied himself with such dedication that, finally, the thing was like a folly or a carefully carpentered house for pigeons, a rotunda, a series of small pavillions with elegant roofs and perfect dovetail joinery.
There was something that happened to him when he told a story, a certain way he leaned back in his chairs, folding his hands in his lap, half closing his eyes. If there had been anyone alive who had known Vance Joy they could not help but be amazed at the likeness, particularly certain American pronunc-iations and the slow, confident drawl which had a soothing, almost hypnotic effect on the listeners.
The words of the story could be of no use to anyone else. The words, by themselves, were useless. The words were an instrument only he could play and they became, in the hands of others, dull and lifeless, like picked flowers or bright stones removed from underwater.
As usual the story was about and by Vance Joy. It came from the time of Vance's childhood and consisted merely of a journey undertaken by a small boy (Vance) with an old man (his grandfather) from the deep valley where they lived to the plateau country above them. It was called 'Journey to the Sunshine' and it ended with the old man and the boy arriving to see the sun set and the boy misunderstanding the nature of the world outside the valley, for he had never seen a sunset before.
Yet when it was finished the room was quiet. The candles spluttered a little on the table and you could almost hear Ken nodding his head. Honey Barbara squeezed his hand so hard she might have broken it, to let him know, silently, that she had misjudged his power to throw off devils, and asking him to forgive her for her blindness. Harry, held by the soporific power of his father's story, had become quiet and gentle.
But Lucy would not let him go so easily. She had waited out the story, just in case. She thought, perhaps, it might have had a moral, or a meaning that related to Joel. But it was just another story, and he was using it to grease away from her.
'You misuse it,' she said.
'What?'
'Your story. You use it to get away from having respons-ibility.'
'It is about responsibility,' Harry lied. 'It is about love and care, and the father puts his hand around the boy's shoulder.' But he could not look his daughter in the eye.
Lucy was a little drunk. She didn't know if what he said was true or not. He had thrown sand in her eyes. She had not meant to attack, but to clarify, to remove all doubt, but that all went with the wind and she attacked from another angle.
'But listen,' she said, and heard meanness in her voice, 'we never touched each other as a family. Aren't you being a hypocrite, telling a story like that?'
No one had ever talked about Harry's stories like that. She was shocked with what she'd done.
'Go easy... ' Ken said.
'We never did,' she insisted. 'Not like you hug Honey Barbara now. You never sat around hugging Bettina like that, or us.'
Harry held out his long arm across the table, offering his embrace.
'No,' she said.
He looked stung.
'Go easy... ' Ken said.
'No.' She did not recognize herself. 'It's too late for that... '
'What's this got to do with Joel?' David said, and Harry held out his arms towards him.
'You come to me,' David said. 'I'm not going to you.'
'You can kiss me, Harry,' Ken said. He meant to make light of it, but the effect was not well calculated.
Harry stood slowly. He was hurt but not angry. It was their nature to all hurt each other. He bid them all, individually, good night, except Honey Barbara who he kissed silently and tenderly and without ostentation.
When he had gone they were ashamed of themselves, all except Honey Barbara who was furious.
'Why did you do that to him?'
'Well, he gets up himself,' Lucy said sadly. 'But you're right. I shouldn't have.'
As became the pattern, they had another bottle of wine then, and even Honey Barbara had one more glass of Fleurie.
It was an old planter's house, designed to cool off quickly in the evening. To this end it was built on high stilts so that air circulated beneath the floor and the walls were only clad on one side, the inside, so that the uprights and cross-bracings became a decorative element in the exterior walls. As a direct result of this construction sound travelled easily from one part of the house to the other and those visitors who had been coy about the movements of their bowels had often left Palm Avenue severely constipated.
Yet, although everyone had gone to bed when Joel and Bettina arrived home, no one in the upstairs bedroom heard them, unless perhaps it was David Joy who had not yet slid into his labyrinthian dreams of Eldorado.
'Listen,' Joel said smiling, 'listen.'
'You block your dirty ears,' she said, but the creakings of the house were honeyed and erotic. 'Come to the kitchen.'
There was a murmuring, a slow sensuous stirring as if the house itself still contained, in its dry grey timbers, the sap of sexual pleasure, and it twisted, stretching against its nails, and through the huan pine ceiling came the moan of her daughter, soft as wool.
She put the kettle on and did not feel discontented. She read the note from Lucy asking her to wake them up if need be, but there was no need, and Lucy was certainly not asleep. It had been a long hard night in the casualty ward and sometimes a little frightening when the police were mentioned, but in the end Joel was bandaged, the police were not called, the knife was returned and now when Joel put his hand out on the table she covered it with hers. She had made so many decisions, hard steel decisions all locked together with little belts, cross-braced, double-checked. The easiest decision was not to fuck Joel any more because, although she loved him, it was she who was stronger. Weak men did not excite her. She had always known that.
'I am crazy in love, mooshey-mooshey.'
Bettina smiled and patted his hand.
Honey Barbara had never felt her body so exactly. It felt oiled, every part of it taken to pieces and put back together again by a master watchmaker. Perhaps it was also partly the feeling of being in the heart of enemy territory, two good beings pitted against the dangerous and seductive forces of evil, or perhaps sympathetic paranoia can act as an aphrodisiac, perhaps it was this that made them move together so perfectly. They were in a cone of darkness in the centre of the world, and Harry was past questioning the nipping tortures of Hell, although had he been granted his secret prayer to be saved from them he would have been very bored indeed.
They did not hear Lucy's murmurs or Ken's moans, although they must have felt them, like you hear the sea at night or as you hear a river when you sleep beside it and, all night, water runs beside your dreams. They must have felt the current of pleasure pick them up and sweep them gently away from the bank and into the centre of the stream where the water is deep and fast and you can drown easily without caring and all that pours into your unresisting lungs is the sensuous liquid dark.
Honey Barbara had never been hypnotized, of course, but she had never had an orgasm either and tonight, for a reason she never understood, would be the first. Possibly it was a technical matter, relating to the gentle skill with which Harry had worked his tongue, but in all likelihood it was not, and it seems much more likely that it was related to the whole erotic sway of the house which set up harmonic waves of pleasure and, the waves not quite coinciding, produced beats, which are heard like droning. But for whatever reason on that night, in that black room, she called out loud like a nightbird in the darkness, two loud musical cries and gave herself to herself, and herself to Harry Joy, and all her resistance to Palm Avenue seemed far away and she lay there afterwards, warm and wet, caught in its glistening web while Lucy's last cry fell through the house like an echo of her own: She drifted, mumbling, into sleep and began to dream of Bog Onion Road.
But when Joel shrieked, she sat upright. She was out of bed and running before Harry could stop her. She ran to the top of the stairs with visions of that pearl-handled knife, blood, mutilation, those waxy eyes, that soporific smile, the madness of his obsession.
Lucy and Ken met her on the stairs, and all of them rushed forwards, holding sheets and towels in front of
