Bliss

of the way. 'I'll get into America, don't worry.'

'But if you can't.'

'I will.'

'What if something goes wrong?'

'Do you want something to go wrong?'

He didn't answer immediately. He was the Managing Dir-ector of a business whose growth and success was now based solely on Bettina.

'Come with me,' she said.

He looked up, biting his lip. 'Where?'

'New York.' She gave those two words all their due. There was not a fleck of dust on them.

The bitten lip could not help but form a smile, and she could almost see the pictures in his mind, those idealized .towers of glass, Vance Joy's magic, but also more recent dreams, as elegantly tooled as 'The Talk of the Town' in the New Yorker.

'No,' he said, and shifted his body a little so he could look out his side window.

'You can't even hammer a nail in straight.'

'So.'

'You'll hate living in the bush.'

'The hut is built.'

'You won't go,' she said swinging on to the freeway. 'You're a city boy. You like soft things.'

Like an expert jeweller she tapped the flaw, the long thin fault that ran through his character: he loved comfort, soft things, silk, velvet, words you could also use about wine.

'No,' he said again. 'I can't.'

He was not prepared for what would happen when Bettina finally went. He chose to believe she would not go.

'I think we'll get a brand from British Tobacco,' he said to change the subject. 'Adrian says it'll be a two million dollar launch.'

'I'll be gone by then. Come on, Harry, come to New York. We'll bring everyone with us.'

He winced, thinking of his poor bedraggled Honey Barbara in New York.

'We can't walk out on the business, just when we've built it up.'

'Sure we can.'

'Our name will stink.'

'Who cares? We won't be back.'

'They'll hate us,' Harry said.

'I hate them,' she said simply.

The town had never taken Bettina seriously, which she felt might have been justifiable in the past, but not now. They gave her no credit. They treated her like a fool and sometimes at night she invented extravagant ways to punish them. She did not ask much from them, only credit for what she had done. But to the town she was no one: Mrs Harry Joy.

'Look at the fucking mutants.' They had come off the freeway and were waiting at the lights.

Harry huddled into his seat. He liked the smell of leather. He felt protected in this large rich car. He did not want blis-tering heat, mud, leeches and hard work. He could not hammer a nail straight, it was true. When Honey Barbara told him stories about Bog Onion Road she did not mean to terrify him, but how could snakes and police and bushfires and a hanging man ever be attractive to him? He pushed the Cancer Map away into the darkness and sought his safety here, under the protection of Those in Charge. They liked him, or, if not liked, at least valued him. He was in favour, in fashion, and his days were dedicated to staying there, his nights to dreaming about a fall. They patted him on the back and asked him to stay for drinks. They made assumptions about his beliefs which were incorrect. He smiled and nodded and pretended he didn't know what it was like to be inside a police station or walk the corridors of Mrs Dalton's Free Enterprise Hospital and see the trolleys carrying captives to their therapy. He looked them in the eye and they found him both courageous and intelligent. He loathed them.

He was a prisoner with special privileges making his captors tea, coffee, folding their socks, telling them funny stories for their amusement, ironing their sheets, warming their beds as they saw fit.

His soul stank of Californian Poppy hair oil: a weasling cunning little thing.

Honey Barbara and Ken and Lucy had taught him a lot about the structure of Hell. When he listened to the trustees of the State Gallery with their silky talcumed talk he could see exactly where they stood in the scheme of things. It was they who trafficked in poisons, controlled the distribution of safety, the purity of water and air, or, more probably, the lack of it. Not for them the nipping little tortures one Captive might inflict on another. It was their privilege to inflict many special diseases and even death, to withhold treatment from the sick, to beat the brave, and torture the poor.

The very smoothness of their skin frightened him, the per-fection of their fingernails, the sharp white lines along which they parted their perfectly cut hair.

When he sat across the desk from the local Managing Director of Helena Rubenstein he could easily imagine that this smiling cultured man ('You've never read Conrad? We must remedy that.'), that this urbane man could very easily torture him, not mentally, but physically, in an ordinary pale blue room on a sunny afternoon while the rest of the world went about its business. He saw fissures in their smooth exteriors and glimpsed the rage reserved for those who disobeyed.

'New York,' Bettina said, 'Imagine.'

He did not imagine New York. He imagined Honey Bar-bara. Holding her, he was destroying her. All the things he loved about her were slowly fading: her strength, her con-fidence, her belief in herself, her food, her body, her mind. They made fun of her beliefs and called them mumbo-jumbo. They doubted the power of an OM. Her calloused feet had grown white and soft and where they once had been hard and strong they had now become big and ugly, city feet with flaking skin.

Bettina screeched the Jaguar down into the basement car park, skidded across an oil slick, and arrived in her spot. 'What about it?' she said.

'Maybe,' Harry said thus removing the subject from his mind.

'Maybe Baby,' Bettina sang, and then stopped when she realized where Buddy Holly's words were leading her.

Honey Barbara drank Scotch with Joel. She didn't like the taste of Scotch; she mixed it with dry ginger.

While Bettina was away Joel became an expert on every-thing. He lay on his mattress eating Ken and Lucy's dinner and told Honey Barbara the best way to grow vegetables. He polished his glasses, rubbed his belly, wiped his ketchuped mouth with a napkin while she sat at the table and made patterns with the spilled dry ginger. She listed, for her own amusement, the things that Joel claimed to have done. He had edited a newspaper in Texas, run a trucking company and later a bus service, managed a rock-'n'-roll band, owned a travel agency, worked for McCann Erickson in Los Angeles and Caracas, imported brass goods from Pakistan, been a disc jockey, written a radio play which was performed by Orson Welles and spent five years at Day, Kerlewis & Joy. Although he was only twenty-six, Honey Barbara was prepared to believe him, but when he started to tell her how to grow cabbages she knew he was a fraud.

She yawned. He didn't notice.

The television was playing and he managed to look at this while he talked, occasionally pausing mid-sentence to let some hack comedian deliver a punch line and to join in the canned laughter. Harry and Bettina were hours away from rescuing her, and Ken and Lucy were out compiling their 'Directory of Positive Things about The End of the World'. She wished they would come home. She would rather argue with them.

The only things that kept her alive were the things she hated most: argument, discord, acrimony, noise. She was disgusted with herself. She was disgusted to sit here and listen to this battery fed man patronize her.

She was drunk when she stood up and that disgusted her too.

'Goodnight, Joel.'

'Kiss,' he demanded offering his lips like rose petals to be admired. Kissing was the social custom. When the others were out Joel would normally include a little fondling on his own account.

'Not tonight,' she said. She stumbled going out the door and he called out something which might not have been intended spitefully.