food, mate. Yes,' he said, 'that's right.'
He buried his face in a quarter of pawpaw and didn't emerge until he had only thick skin left in his hand.
'Your shirts won't fit a man,' he said, 'but we'll take them anyway, for our trouble, for saving your life, and when Honey Barbara's daddy goes around with his honey he'll sell them and we'll have some pretty little Krishnas sneaking into town in your lovely suit, looking so straight everyone will think they're narcs like you.'
It was the worst possible introduction to Bog Onion Road, but Harry Joy did not know that. All he knew was that he was going to be sick. He managed to turn his head sideways before he threw up water and bile.
Later he was being carried down a steep track in near darkness. He was on some kind of stretcher. His head was jolted with every step. When they put him down there were sharp rocks digging into his back. He was delirious. He could smell damp, rotting, a smell of berries like sweat, eucalypt, a richer, muskier smell like death itself.
Above him there were giant trees crowding over the narrow track, their upper branches crossing the sky like clenched fingers joined in prayer.
Paul Bees had wanted Harry Joy. Now he could sit in the comer of his hut with his back against the wall and watch him like a treasure, a puzzle, a book, a number of books, expensive books with leather covers and gold embossing, containing information he had never thought to enquire about, as arcane as the social organization of armadillos and the crystalline structure of aluminium.
It is the nature, he thought, of bee-keepers that they will end up hopelessly addicted to stories, gossip, odd bits of information; a thirst that the local markets can never properly satisfy so that, after all these years, he was working over old diggings, being made jubilant by some pitiful spot of colour panned from the worked-over clay, the mullock heaps made by local life.
They had not been able to lift Harry up on to the sleeping platform, and Honey Barbara had been too angry to really try. She did not appreciate this visit from her friend, and it was true, her father reflected, that it did not help her reputation, but, as usual, they would forgive her, even if they would not forget. She had only stayed long enough to make a bed for him on the floor and to bend over his swollen face in the candlelight and look at it for a long quiet moment.
'You wouldn't believe his life,' she said with both disap-proval and awe, and that was as much as Paul managed to gather about his daughter's relationship with the stranger.
It was a small hut, one of the smallest in the community, and he had built it for himself in the rain forest, because he had always wished to live in rain forest, and also (the admission was painful to him) because Crystal at forty-eight still had the disturbing and hurtful habit of adopting new lovers and he thought he would be better away from her for a while. He retreated into the rain forest and built this small hut with a sleeping platform at one end, below which was a small book-enclosed alcove which opened on to a tiny verandah. It was here that he placed Harry Joy, and here that he sat, a scrawny little man with a large black beard who gave the contradictory impression of great frailty (and be called Little Paul) but also not inconsiderable strength so that people felt compelled to remark on it admiringly with such expressions as 'he's a strong little bugger.'
They admired, respected, and pitied Paul Bees, holed up in his rain forest while Crystal lived in the old house up the hill, bathed in bright sunlight, conducting a peculiar affair with a woodcutter from the Ananda Marga who had been seen, at night, slipping through the moonlit bush with his axe still in his hand.
On the other side of this little alcove, now illuminated with a soft yellow kerosene light, was a wood stove, a sink, and some cupboards. You could admire the way he had whittled cedar to make the handle for a drawer and the patient search he must have conducted to find the quandong branch which now made the curved banister of the stair to the sleeping platform.
The stove was alight and the kettle hissed gently. He rose and walked softly on his surprisingly large (huge toes) feet to the sink where he took a pair of scissors and began cutting lemon grass into three-inch lengths. When he had done this he stuffed them into a large brown teapot and poured boiling water over them. He carried the teapot, two cups, and a jar of stringybark honey, into the alcove where Harry Joy watched him from one good eye, the other being reduced to a mongoloid slit by a swelling, the legacy of the bloated tick.
'Bulk tea,' he announced.
'Thank you.' The gratitude in the man's voice was almost embarrassing. He had stopped him making speeches but he could not stop this excess of appreciation.
Harry had heard the things that Paul Bees had said in his defence. They had drifted to him through the ether of his delirium. It had not been a formal meeting at the Hall, no night procession of lanterns and blanket-bundled children, but an impromptu deputation as the story of the hunted terrorist came into Bog Onion Road by radio, spread through the valley and up the ridge. No one had criticized directly, not at first. That was not the way things were done. They talked instead, about American Albert, and in doing so, of course, criticized Honey Barbara for threatening their safety by bringing criminals into their midst.
Garry had already found the Cadillac on Paddy Melon Road and he and Margot had gone to jump-start it and hide it in the bush for the night. It was not, they reflected, even a useful make for spare parts and they talked about the Peugot Albert had rolled into the valley off the hairpin bend.
Crystal said that the pattern of two new cars, two criminals, was not just a coincidence and must have wider meaning and it was Honey Barbara, who had endured all the comments in a hot prickling silence, who spoke up and said that this was bullshit because the Cadillac was not new and that she hadn't brought American Albert into the valley, that he had come here by himself, and he had been welcomed by everyone and that her romance with him had been actively encouraged by certain people who were old enough, at the time, to know better, but may well have been too stoned to know what was happening in front of their noses. Further, she said, she had not invited this man with the silk shirts to Bog Onion Road, but had left him behind in the city because he was fucked.
But it was Paul who reminded them that it was Harry Joy's American Express cards which had provided them with some money after the dope crop was ripped off and it was Paul who offered to take responsibility for his welfare.
'They won't find him here,' Paul said, and finally he was allowed to stay because the rain forest was reckoned a safe place, guarded on its edges by lantana under whose barbed and secret arches leaf-paved paths led to Paul's house, and even from the air, it was thought, the dark roof of the hut would be invisible. The visitor was forbidden to leave the rain forest.
As it turned out, the visitor would have to be, finally, ordered out of it. He would not wish to leave. He understood the protection of the rain forest only too well and when Paul began to go out on the van again and help Honey Barbara with the hives and the spinning, Harry was more than happy to be left behind. He would, in time, left to his own devices, have become some slinking little animal, a furtive wingless bird of a drab colour and monotonous cry, a noise, rustling in the lantana·on the edge of the forest, a disturbance amongst the dead leaves.
He ventured out of the hut, cautiously at first, amidst this twilight forest with the air festooned with creeper like some deserted vegetable telephone exchange. Even the creek below the hut was full of arm-thick roots and creepers, lying in the water like tangled pipes. The ground was soft and leaf-covered, littered with moss-green stones and laced with fine vine trip-wires which were best proceeded through without haste. And into this dark spongy world came slices of sunlight as sharp and clear as the cries of whip-birds and caught such jewels as the multicoloured pitta bird turning over a leaf, Harry Joy wearing the white baggy clothes Paul had made for him, the splendid green cat bird high in a palm, the unlikely owner of such a forlorn cry.
And Paul Bees, a month from this night, would not understand why Harry (who would sweep the floor, dust the hooks, collect kindling, split wood, collect water from the creek, bake vegetables for dinner, have warm water for Paul's shower) could not be persuaded to go to the open paddock fifty yards from the edge of the rain forest to collect eggs or fetch wood or release a bleating goat from its tangled tether.
Once he had gone to the edge of the lantana, at the top of the rise above the spring and, seeing the wide grassed paddock and open sky, felt almost faint. He scurried backwards, dragging sharp lantana across his heedless skin. The beginning of real agoraphobia.
But all of this, on the second night, was yet to come. The fever was leaving him and he could, at last, eat without vomiting. He did not know what the rain forest even looked like. He did not know the feeling that would come to him from trees, the dizzy ecstasy, the swoon almost as he looked up at the green canopy above him and felt these allies keep him safe from harm.
Paul Bees put stringy bark honey in his cup and grinned at his guest. He saw the stories. He was the first one to even guess at them.
