Bliss (25 page)

So there was nothing in her education to prepare her for the American on the bridge and although she did not remember even talking to him on that day (she remembered only the gold teeth which she had never seen before) she was to formally marry him in two years' time, almost to the day. The marriage, as it turned out, was bigamous. In fact, a great number of things turned out differently from how they appeared and from Albert Goodman she was to learn candle-making (he set up a factory in Bog Onion Road) and the hit-and-miss art of running from the police, who were looking for him constantly. At sixteen, standing on the bridge, she had never seen a city, never been to a restaurant or stayed in a hotel; she had never been a whore; she had never been in jail or in a mental home.

All she understood was why that car, now connected by a winch to a large blood wood, was slowly inching its way out of the stream. She helped her father dry off the electrics and rode in her first new car up to their house where they all got stoned and Paul made everybody laugh by climbing under the new Peugeot with a torch, lying in the warm mud, admiring the ruggedness of its construction.

They did not know then, giggling in the twilight with that damp, mildewy, warm smell that everyone lived in then, that in two years' time that Peugeot would be wrecked at the bottom of a valley and that later still Honey Barbara would strut across the bitumen with ugly high heels strapped to her beautiful feet, an expert on fear, poison and the city-life.

Harry Joy slunk across the bitumen and sat beside the kitchen gully trap where the air was redolent of grease and cabbage. Steam issued forth from the metal grating in front of him but did nothing to obscure his greasy ratty Californian Poppy hair which fell across his collar in little tails and left dark brush-strokes of oil on his silk shirt.

His ears stuck out. His once-proud nose had three pimples hovering just beneath the surface. His shoulders were hunched. His eyes bulged.

This greasy-looking spiv is examining his anger like a beggar who has found a jewel. Look at his cunning face, the way it darts sly looks at Jim and Jimmy, and at Honey Barbara who is flirting with them.

Honey Barbara thought she'd lost him for ever, and then she saw him sitting amongst the cabbage steam and her emotions were confused. She was so flustered she didn't know where to look and her smile, she knew, took on an idiot quality as she looked at Big Jimmy without even thinking what it meant and saying goodbye and walking across to Harry. She'd thought she loved him. She was not pleased with him. She had intended to punish him for his stupidity, but when she .saw his rat-face held down with guy-rope tendons, she was too upset to punish him.

'Fuck,' she hissed, 'what have you been eating?'

'Christ I missed you,' he said fiercely. 'I fucking missed you.'

'What have you done to yourself? You look revolting.'

He gave a street-rat's lift of the head, a pick-pocket's nod. 'Trying to sweet-talk her.'

She folded her arms across her chest and squeezed all the colour from her lips. 'Harry, no one's going to fuck you looking like that. You left my address in your room.' She squatted down and looked into his eyes. 'That was very uncool.'

'I should have had my suit,' he said. 'If I’d had my suit she would have been a walkover.'

'Did you hear what I said? You left
my address
in your room.'

'They came in the afternoon/ he sniffed. 'It's not my fault.'

'They only come in the morning.'

'But they came in the fucking afternoon.'

'What's the
matter
with you?' She stared at the wreckage of his irises. 'You've been eating shit. Buckets of it.'

He bent his fingers back and clicked his knuckles. 'I'm angry,' he said with self-satisfaction.

'Your muscles are knotted.'

'It's fucking fantastic,' he said, 'it's wonderful.'

'And your hair stinks.'

'I have erotic dreams about you,' he said, 'all the time. I miss you. I dream about honey and brown bread and fucking. Where have you been?'

'Here,' she said. 'Where else? Because you left my address I had to get rid of the money.'

'Why?'

'Don't
you
start.'

'You've been here all the bloody time?'

'I thought they'd come and bust me for the money. I burnt it. I started to burn it and fucking Damian called the fucking cops.' Her voice rose involuntarily and Jim and Jimmy, squatting on the other side of the yard, looked up and grinned. 'And they bloody did an involuntary admission on me, for burning money.'

Harry felt his penis grow hard and fill with blood.

'I want to fuck you, Honey Barbara. Come and fuck with me.' He wanted to kiss her nipples and eat her pussy and fuck like they had in those paradise days in the Hilton Hotel.

'I thought you wanted to fuck Dalton.'

'Only so I could get out.'

'Whose brilliant idea was that?' She was grinning.

'Nurse.'

'Nurse is crazy.'

Harry shrugged.

'If she liked you, she would have kept you, stupid. The only way to get out of here is money. M-o-n-e-y.'

'Come and fuck with me, Honey Barbara.'

'If you pay for me to get out, I'll fuck you for three years.' and she grinned a wide wonderful grin that even Harry, caught in the confusing cross-currents of anger and erotic need, could not help but echo.

'Miss Harrison,' Jimmy called across the bitumen.

'The bastards,' she hissed, 'they don't waste any time.'

'Time for your bath,' Miss Harrison.'

'I'm coming,' she called, and then in a whisper: 'That'll be the day.'

'Honey Barbara, I love you.'

She looked at him, stunned. 'I love you too,' she said, her eyes brimming with tears, 'and you've gone and made yourself look like a creep.'

'I'm not a creep.'

'Miss Harrison.'

'I've got to go. I'll see you tomorrow night. I'll come and get you.'

'O.K.' Harry said and when he saw her walk across the bitumen towards C Block and saw Jimmy saunter after her he felt jealousy, pure, undiluted, come to fuel his anger.

Later that afternoon a delegation of Christian Scientists passed Harry and Nurse in the gardens. They were not in time for the early part of the conversation in which the power of m-o-n-e-y was compared with that of sweety-talking. They arrived just in time for the end.

'I'm not a creep,' the natty-looking man with the moustache was saying to the one with the bulbous nose and long grey hair. 'On that point, she is incorrect.'

'But,' the man with the bulbous nose said, 'you are creep-like.'

It was at that point, they thought, that the fight started.

Money.

Plus Anger.

Equals success.

When you knew, it was easy, and Harry Joy did not waste a second of valuable time putting it into practice. He had bathed his cuts, washed his hair, and by the time the Christian Scientists had reached Ward L he was sitting opposite Mrs Dalton once again.

He shook her hand and looked her in the eye. No threats of Therapy. No tut-tuts about violence. It was settled. The amount was fixed. The source of the money arranged. Mrs Dalton even complimented him on his business acumen. She had no interest in the cut above his eye.

He had dirty trousers and a silk shirt spotted with hair oil but as he emerged from Mrs Dalton's office, a connoisseur might have noticed a certain jauntiness in his pick-pocket's walk, and if he'd had a coin in his pocket he would have flicked it in the air and caught it with a snap.

Gene Kelly would have danced it, all the way across the bitumen and out along the concrete path.

A creep?

No sir!

Creep-like?

Not nearly.

His hair was clean; it positively flopped up and down as he walked. He was not a lot like the Harry Joy who had come here. He had a cut above his eye, pimples on his nose, sore ribs from Nurse's knuckles. He was older, wiser. He had it worked out. He knew the game. And now he was going to be released, he was going to have a fuck, he was in love.

*

Honey Barbara traded certain favours to get a deserted staff flat from Jim and Jimmy, and other favours to buy candles, oil, bread, fruit, cheese, incense. While she waited for him she cleaned herself, cleaned her mind of their grunting red faces, washed out their simpering smiles, her stoned pretences, their moans, their cruelties, their fantasies, disfunctions, bulging eyes, the poisons exuding from their skins.

She scrubbed her skin with a hard brush and then did breathing exercises.

When it was dark she lit the candles to make a circle. Later when he arrived, he would want to know how she knew it was a magic circle, how it worked, why it was there. She wouldn't answer. She knew. She had always known how to make a magic circle.

He came into the room and brought a chill with him. It was like a cloak of cold gas. He was not a devil. He was the victim of a devil. She had met a warlock once, in the city, with a coven of seven women who served him. The warlock was as calm and relaxed as possible. He had great power. Under his power another visitor, a young man, babbled sexual fantasies and was humiliated.

'There is a devil in you,' she said.

He asked too many questions and meant none of them seriously. He wanted to touch her. She didn't know the answers and it didn't matter anyway. Was it a Christian devil? Devils were devils. They did not belong to anyone, not Christ, not the Buddha – they were devils, malevolent spirits. They existed everywhere. Devils, goblins, evil forces. People say there is no evil, but they are wrong. Honey Barbara had seen the maggots in the heads of decapitated pigs, sheep, a horse once, animals killed for the sole purpose of an evil ritual. On the spot you could feel the evil. It was not the sound (the buzzing flies), not the smell, but a damp, dark feeling in the middle of a sunny clearing and the horse she was riding (Sally Coe's George) felt it as much as she did. It was not just death. Death is everywhere. There was a ghost down in the rain forest where an old man had lived alone and it was a good ghost, nothing cold there at all.

He thought he was in Hell and he had gone looking for the devil. He had sired the devil and given birth to him and now the devil was in his guts like a parasite.

First he had to be washed. He did not understand. He tried to kiss her. She kept him away by force of will. Tonight, she had the power of incantation and knew she could heal him. She scrubbed his back hard and talked to him. She soaped him. She removed the smells from him. She was not known to be a healer.

But tonight she had a golden ball of light at the very centre of her being. She could heal.

She wasn't stoned. She was Honey Barbara, pantheist, healer, whore.

When a devil has your body he knots it, makes ropes, pulls it together, ties it up, braids it, circles you, makes you strangle yourself with your own neck muscles, cut yourself with your own tissues, burst your own organs apart.

The muscles are the devil's ropes. The Christians don't know that, but it's true.

She made him lie on the mattress on the floor in the middle of the circle of candles.

Rain was falling on the roof, ever so gently. She warmed coconut oil. He lay on his stomach on his erection. When she returned with the oil he tried to kiss her but she pushed him away. Not yet. He was grasping and his eyes still showed a dulled, ash-covered sort of anger, like the snakes you find, still alive, in the forest after fire.

Honey Barbara scented the coconut oil with a few drops of lemon.

She wished she had real words for a ritual, but she had only her hands. She sat beside him, both of them naked, and rubbed some warm oil into his back. Then she set to rattle-out the devil. She put the palm of her hand on his spine and hammered up and down. She knuckle rapped, bang, bang, bang, along his spine, and then she used the edges of her hands to hack up and down. A drum-roll. She broke up the words that came from his mouth and let them float away.

She pressed into the skin of his back with thumb and fore-finger and gently squeezed the flesh together. Then released it. A hundred small pinches in a light pattern over his back and the back of his legs.

When she turned him over he looked a little better.

She fast-stroked his knees, drained his thighs, her lips pressed determinedly together and Harry Joy exuded, like one giving up evil spirits, a gentle sigh.

She stretched his neck, and lifted his head. A beatific smile came over his face.

She lifted his arms and felt them – loose muscles.

She circled his nipple with her tongue. She rolled him over and ran that pink wet tongue along his spine, down the skin and bit him, gently, on the back of the knee. She brushed his back with her small firm breasts.

And then, kissed him.

And then, in one smooth acrobatic motion that seemed to take ten slow, oiled, minutes to achieve, like two snakes entwining, she took his penis into her and smiled as he shut his eyes and gasped softly. She nestled her lips into his ear as he entered her (lips into a shell, lips into a rose), and as the slow long strokes began she talked her spell.

The rain was on the roof.

She told him it was another roof, not this roof, Harry, my roof at home, the rain is much louder, really loud, you're with me, and there is plenty of dry wood and you can hear the creek, Harry, and the goats are in their shed and they're very quiet and the big tallow woods up the hill are bending in the wind and if you have your arms around them you can feel their power, and even the old carpet snake has stopped hunting for hen eggs, Harry I love you, and you're really happy.

'I love you,' she moaned, 'I don't know why I love you but when I take you home they'll think I'm crazy. Will you come home with me?'

'Yes,' he said, 'Oh yes, yes, yes.'

The words came in waves ( 'And be my lover, Harry' ) like rain ( 'Yes, yes, yes' ) and he was where she said he was, far away, in a tin-roofed hut with candles flickering in their safe magic circle and up the hill the tallow woods bent in the southerly wind and the water ran down to the creek which would show itself a clay yellow tomorrow and the hens and the goats and perhaps even the carpet snake lay still and in the morning the trees would glisten clean in the morning sun and the steam would rise off Bog Onion Road.