a racehorse, or a dog bred for fighting.
'You are making this into Hell,' she said. 'You've decided that's what it is and that's what you're making it.'
He shook his head and looked at the black night window. He would not discuss Hell with her.
'Whose Hell are you in?' she would say, trying to play his game. 'Someone must be running it.'
But that sort of talk only made things worse.
'You tell me,' he'd say nastily.
'I don't know.'
'How interesting.'
And so on.
But just as there are dry days when even the rustiest roof can't leak, there were times when life felt very pleasant. There were miles of wide beaches both north and south of the town and at weekends they could surf and swim naked and let the sea tumble their bodies and rattle out their devils and deliver them on a blanket of white froth to the yellow sand. They lit huge fires on the empty beach and lay there at night watching the stars.
But it was, as she told him one Sunday night, only 2/7 of a life. The other 5/7 were devoted to fear and anger.
Once she had been silly and young, and she had seen Albert on the flooded creek with his Peugeot and not known about hotels and restaurants and the city life. It was long ago. Even the creek was different then and everyone was naive enough to uncritically welcome its raging strength in the monsoon and it meant nothing to them but life. But two seasons later a twenty-two-month-old girl had been swept away and drowned just near that spot and the creek always sounded different after that and no one could cross the ford without thinking of that little girl and how, that cold July morning, they had waded the creek in the high dangerous water hoping they would not find her body and that, glancing into the undergrowth beside the creek, they would glimpse her making her way back home.
But they did find her and two weeks later Albert's Peugeot was at the bottom of a gully and Honey Barbara was on her first aeroplane, high on cocaine, wearing high-heeled shoes. She didn't know what she was doing, or where she was going, but now, with another ten years gone, she had no such excuse.
Then what kept her at Palm Avenue? She confessed one morning, to the bathroom mirror: 'Orgasms,' she told her grin-ning face, 'and flushing toilets.'
David Joy was lying in bed in his room. He heard her laughter through the wall.
Bettina was burning brightly. She was consuming herself. She lost half a stone and had to buy new clothes. She could not sleep. She woke at 4 a.m. considering options, redoing ads, mentally rewriting letters to Americans about her future. Her mind was attuned to problems and she could not stand to see them unsolved, even for a moment, so that when the wine was opened in a restaurant she could not wait for the waiter to begin filling glasses, she pointed: there. This too was her responsibility, this problem of the bottle of wine and empty glass with the glaringly simple solution.
She wasn't even aware that she did it, so she would certainly never have guessed that she was known to the wine-waiters of one restaurant as 'The Glass-pointer' and Harry as 'Mr Glass-pointer'.
And if she had known? 'Well,' she would have said, 'I only do it to save time.'
Perhaps one of the secrets of Bettina's success was that she applied herself as earnestly to trivial details as she did to big ideas. It was seven o'clock in the morning and Honey Barbara was sitting on the grassed edge of the vegetable garden with a glass of demineralized water. 'Do you want to hear what happened last night?'
It was now near the end of Honey Barbara's third month in Palm Avenue (her deadline, and still she stayed!) and the dining room table had all but been abandoned as Harry and Bettina became (for business reasons, so they said) involved in the social life of the town. Bettina had produced a much-admired advertising campaign for the State Gallery (Art Schmart, she said, it's mouldy junk) and as a result of this Harry (Harry!) had been nominated and then elected as a trustee. In less than six months they had moved up that impossible last rung of the ladder and entered the very inner circle of society.
'Formal. No lovers.' Bettina would announce when the invitations came. She would grin, and the lovers, laughing, did not always successfully hide their resentment.
'What happened? Nothing happened. The arseholes! Jesus, I'll be pleased to be out of this town. They all think it's Harry who does the ads. They automatically assume it's him. Oh, what a clever husband you have,' she whined in imitation. 'What a brilliant man. And what do
Then would come the latest bulletin in the campaign to get to New York. A letter from the famous Ed McCabe com-plimenting her on her work (she'd brought it to his notice, of course). A telegram from Mary Wells. She kept up a fast, furious correspondence with anyone who would answer her and her letters were tough, funny, and skilfully self-promoting. She wrote press releases for the New York trade press. She adopted Americanisms in her speech, remembering to say 'Garage' instead of 'Car Park,' and 'out back' instead of 'out the back'.
As she reminded Honey Barbara on this crisp, sunny morning: 'This is only a stopping place for me. Another six months and I'm taking my samples and half the profits and setting up in New York.
'But let me warn you, he is starting to like it.' He, in this case, was Harry. Joel was not liking it. Joel was waiting to go to New York. 'They all think he's an intellectual. The less he says the more brilliant they think he is. That's always been Harry's goddamned talent. When you talk to him he looks at you as if you're saying the most interesting and original things he's ever heard in his life. No wonder everyone likes him. No wonder we all think he's intelligent.'
'He is intelligent,' Honey Barbara said sharply.
'Yes,' Bettina said quickly. 'He is, but you know what I mean. He's in his element. It's true. You should spray those cabbages. They're getting eaten alive. I'll get someone to pick up a good spray for you.'
'Bettina... '
'I know, I know, but what's the point of growing them if you let something else eat them?'
'There's plenty left for us.'
'Mmmm,' Bettina said, thoughtfully. She stared at the cabbages. 'I've got to go,' she said.
She tip-toed off across the lawn so as not to dig her heels into the grass. She found Harry shaving.
'You remember,' she said, leaning in the doorway, 'how Monsanto said they'd talk to us if we could think of a new product they liked.'
'Mmm.'
'I've got it.'
'What?'
'Organic Poison.'
He left Honey Barbara on her metal chair with her glass of water, sitting perched in the backyard like a muddy flamingo. She was like an exotic flower picked by a thoughtless child. He thought of bedraggled polar bears pacing their concrete-floored cages, their lukewarm water dotted with the soggy wrappers of confectionery.
Even the cabbages would not grow properly. They were poor and dwarfed, struggling to survive in the heavy clay soil. The compost heap, her pledge of hope for the future, had begun to smell. Rats came at night to raid it and possums gorged themselves as if it were a colossal pudding.
Harry sat back in the passenger seat of the Jaguar and felt depressed. Bettina, her seat pushed forward, hunched over the wheel and drove with damp-handed bravado, abusing the innocent through the safety of shut windows. The air conditioner made hardly a sound. It was seventy degrees Fahrenheit.
'Look at the mutants!'
They had stopped at traffic lights. Pedestrians streamed around the car, their faces marked by dull punishments. Harry was surprised at the intensity of her hatred for these Captives.
'Ugly,' she chanted. 'Ugly, ugly, ugly.'
Bettina was not particularly beautiful. He mentally placed her in the midst of the crowd. He stole a drab overcoat from one woman, a string bag from another, and then, having dressed her with these secretly, let her walk in front of the Jaguar.
'It'll be the same in New York,' he said. 'Ordinary people in the street.'
'Rubbish. They're so damned dull.'
'What will happen,' he asked, 'if you can't get into America?'
'Cretin,' she shouted, swerving in front of a truck and applying her horn as two men with a ladder jumped out
