Peter Carey - Bliss

'Stop it. Stop taking the piss.' She pulled the sheet up over her nose.

'No, tell me. If you're Good in one life you have a better time the next one?'

'Yes,' she said cautiously. 'Right.'

'That's what I'm doing.'

She started to laugh, but when she saw he was serious, she stopped. 'But you're a businessman.'

'Advertising.'

'That's really bad Karma.'

'No,' he said, 'no, I'm being Good.'

'You can't,' she said stubbornly. (How conceited. How stu-pid.) 'How can you? How could you?' She pulled the sheet down and let him see the straight thin line of her mouth.

'I just fired a two-rnillion-dollar client because his product causes cancer,' he said. 'That's him in the next room.'

Two million dollars!

'Really three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, I get 10 per cent commission from media and 7½ per cent service fee, which is three hundred and fifty thousand on two million.'

'Christ.'

'That's Good,' he said. 'It has to be.'

'I don't know,' Honey Barbara said, 'I suppose it must be.' It was more than you got for a good dope crop.

'And I'll tell you something else.' He jumped out of bed and ran across the room on tip-toe. 'I'll tell you something else.' He picked up a brightly coloured map and brought it back to bed. 'A cancer map.'

'Shit.'

Cancer Maps were part of Honey Barbara's folk literature, just like the Dream Police (a legendary squad of psychiatrists) and the whole cast of Cosmic Conspirators, the CIA, flying saucers, multinationals with seed-patents.

She had never seen a cancer map in her life. She looked at Harry Joy with new respect. 'Where did you get it?'

'I stole it,' he decided, 'from him.' He nodded his head next door.

'You're one hell of a businessman,' she said.

He bounced his bum around the bed.

'I trusted you when you walked in,' he said. He paused. He smiled. 'It is my opinion,' he said, 'that I am living in Hell, that this, all this,' he waved his hand around the room, 'is Hell.'

And sat there, with his eyebrows arched.

Where Honey Barbara came from, people believed many different things about the nature of reality. Christopher Rocks believed in Wood Spirits, and Edith Valdora understood how flying saucers propelled themselves; she was going to build a flying saucer herself and no one thought (no one said) she was crazy. John Lane had been a fish in another life, and people believed in Jesus Christ, the Buddha, reincarnation, levitation, and feared the three 6' s on the Bankcard as a sign of the Beast of the Apocalypse. Bart Pavlovich had been Astral travelling for years and would think nothing of opening a conversation by saying, '1 was on the Moon last night.' Which, as everybody said, was his reality.

When Harry Joy told her he thought they were in Hell she did not, for an instant, think that he meant it metaphorically. She understood him perfectly.

'Far out,' she said.

'But,' he said, 'what do you think ?'

The connecting door was opening. She pulled a blanket up to hide the cancer map as the naked figure of Adrian Clunes stumbled across the room and lurched into the toilet. They waited while he vomited.

'Sorry,' he said when he emerged, 'she's using the other one.' He picked up his briefcase and walked back into the other room.

Honey Barbara threw the blanket back.

'Do you think I'm crazy?' he said.

'You're not crazy.'

'They're trying to lock me up.'

'1 bet they are.' She had never met anyone who had refused 350,000 dollars. She was more than a little impressed.

And then Honey Barbara, who knew a lot about such things, gave him his first lesson for survival in Hell, which dealt, for the most part, with psychiatrists and the police, and went under the loose heading of keeping yourself clean, by which she meant: no drugs, no funny books, no funny friends, just clean. Don't be a smart-arse with the cops, don't argue with them, don't let them search your room without a witness. Be nice to them, make them tea, don't let your voice shake when you talk to them, try to think of them as human beings. Always have money, never write down the names of lawyers but memorize their phone numbers and make sure they're up to date. If they send the Dream Police then don't fight with them because they're unhealthy and unfit and will use drug-guns on you and not their fists and you will arrive unconscious and not be able to admit yourself voluntarily (always admit yourself, always sign yourself in, and then, with luck you can sign yourself out later). Most of all, never admit that anyone is trying to threaten you, get you, attack you, hurt you, poison you, radiate you, punch you, pinch you, fuck you, or, in any way at all, do you the slightest bit of harm for these are the symptoms of paranoia and they are, Honey Barbara said, illegal and you can get locked up for showing them even though you really are being radiated by the air and poisoned by the water.

Harry was overcome with this gift. He looked at her, smil-ing, shaking his head and holding her hand.

He was in love.

He wanted to give her a present, something glistening and wonderful. He brought it out and displayed it, revealing it shyly, the way one draws back the tissue paper from around an opal to display it lying in its fragile nest.

He told her what it was like to die. When he had finished the room was totally dark and all he could see were Honey Barbara's two huge eyes.

'I'm going to leave you some honey,' she whispered at last.

It was only later that he appreciated it, what it meant; leaving the honey behind, and then he only appreciated a little of it and it would be another full year before he knew the whole truth about Honey Barbara, who may have been only an amateur whore but was more than a little knowledgeable about other things.

She became Harry’s trusted guide to Hell, and he became her client, so that every morning at around ten o'clock she would enter his room and run off a Diners Club card.

Honey Barbara lived not far from the Hilton in a small crumbling house with fifteen green plastic garbage bags of marihuana stashed above its bulging plaster ceiling. She shared the house with Damian who had come down with her and whose job it was to sell the crop, something he seemed to have stuffed up. He was immersing himself in a whole lot of city shit that Honey Barbara didn't understand. He was eating Kentucky Frieds and Big Macs and she noted with disapproval that he was starting to put on fat around his hips.

She woke him to tell him.

Maybe, she thought later, that hadn't been very nice, but he was always asleep when she got home and in the mornings, of course, they always had to get up at four a.m. and get out of the house, just in case.

He shouldn't even have been there. He should have sold the crop and been on the road home.

'You're getting really fat, man.'

'What?'

'The whole house stinks of dead chicken.'

'You woke me up to tell me that?' Damian sat up in his bed and she could see that layer of fat just sort of hanging , nothing really noticeable yet, but soon he would be covered with poisonous fat from cancered chickens and Big Macs. 'You're fucking unreal.'

'Come on, Damian. I'm doing my job. I'm working. I've got a right to know. What are you doing about the dope? Why are you eating all this shit? You should be home by now. They need the money, you know that'

'Did you wake me up to have a fight? Are you so full of city shit you have to fight someone?'

'I am not full of city shit. Who's been eating Big Macs?'

'Well go to sleep.'

'I want to talk now. It's the only time we can talk.'

'Spend some time here tomorrow.'

'I've got a client.'

'Who's full of city shit then?' He smiled his big white smile and raised a guru-type eyebrow, or at least that was the intention of the eyebrow. 'Maybe that's just your projection, Honey Barbara, because you're into this bad trip fucking fat businessmen.'