Peter Carey - Bliss

'Curious,' Harry Joy said out loud, 'Very curious.'

He was talking to her. He knew she was in there. He was saying – she understood him with dazzling clarity – it is curious that you are lying there and I am standing here.

He turned on his heel and she slipped out of the Cadillac and followed him into the house. She was a little more stoned than she knew.

There are times when the lips seem to sleep, to abandon their role as the signifiers of happiness, while the eyes become almost electric and not only the lips but every other organ must be subservient to them in this, their most splendid and spectacular moment.

Thus: Honey Barbara, standing in the doorway at four thirty-two a.m.

Her mouth was pale pink and sleep-soft when they kissed and all the world around them assumed an impressionistic softness and everything they looked at was coloured with dusty pastels which gave no sharp edges to forms, and even the white refrigerator they embraced beside seemed as mellow as pearl shell.

When she was an old woman with crinkled skin, Honey Barbara would still remember this moment and how the refrigerator looked and how perfectly happy she was, to hold her lover in her arms in the midst of enemy territory and how his eyes had been as soft as those of an animal, a foal, something slim and strong and gentle, looking at her with such emotion.

He could not stop stroking her. He stroked her face, her arms, her shoulders. She knew it was right to have come back because she too had made her promise.

(He was ready to tell her. He had made up his mind. He would have gone with her then at that moment, not saying goodbye to anyone. He would have walked out the door and left those advertisements where they lay, in a great pile beside Joel's bed. But it was Honey Barbara who spoke first.)

'I will stay three months,' she said.

'I will cook,' she said, thus protecting them further.

Harry considered it for hardly an instant. The silk shirts won.

Later Honey Barbara was to think about how innocent she had been. To imagine she could hold him against the forces around her. Surrounded by the smells of animal fat, Baygon, Silicone, Fluorozene, Rancid Butter, Stale Beer, Cigarette Smoke, Ash, and even Oil and Petrol, bombarded by fluorescent light, enveloped by aggressive red walls, she had not been daunted.

Then he took her briefly into the living room to show her the advertisements he had promised to sell. They sat in a long room where a man with battery-fed hips slept on a mattress on the floor.

'Her lover?'

'Used to.'

They carried the advertisements back into the kitchen where he made her sit amongst the remains of Big Macs while he tried to explain them to her. She was shocked. She knew there was something magical about these things to him and she sensed their power. Yet she imagined herself equal to it. She was young and strong and confident. Later she would think she had also been naive.

They put the advertisements away and stayed at the table holding each other's hands, kissing, confessing their angers and their doubts or, in Harry's case, some of them.

In Honey Barbara's mind Bettina was a witch: powdered, smooth, white-skinned, dressed in black. So when she came out to the kitchen at six thirty in a pink dressing gown with puffy eyes, an olive skin, and a throaty sleep-stuck voice, Honey Barbara didn't even recognize her and only knew it was her because it had to be. She was shorter too, without her stiletto heels, and she shuffled into the kitchen and saw, immediately, that they had been looking at her advertisements. It seemed more important to her than any other fact.

'Did you like them?' she asked. Honey Barbara saw how vulnerable she would be to any criticism.

'They're very nice,' she lied. Bettina was a witch, but she felt sorry for her. Her lover was fat and slept on the floor. Her husband was holding hands with another woman. It hurt her badly, it was obvious: she swallowed and looked away and went to fuss about things over the kitchen sink.

Honey Barbara followed her and embraced her. It was an awkward embrace, not just because Bettina was considerably shorter, but it was not rejected.

'I would like to do the cooking for you.'

'No, no, it's not necessary.' Bettina turned and started fossicking in the sink.

'I want to.'

'It's not necessary. We'll cope.'

Barbara looked desperately to Harry.

'It's different cooking,' he said.

This disclosure, his intimate and familiar knowledge of Honey Barbara's cooking, was more hurtful to Bettina than anything else that had happened. She filled a glass with water, drank half of it and threw the other half out.

'It's healthy,' he said.

'Fine,' she said. 'That'd be good.'

'What time do you like to eat dinner?'

'Eight.'

'Is there anything you don't like?'

'Nothing.'

Bettina left and slammed the door behind her and it was Honey Barbara, abandoning all principle, who made her toast with white bread, strong instant coffee with white sugar, and took it up to her room where she sat shivering on a single bed.

When David Joy came down to breakfast he found Harry and Bettina already gone and a beautiful young woman in the kitchen. She had lined up all the plastic garbage cans and was emptying the cupboards as fast as she could. Bread, sugar, cans of beans, jars of coffee, cornflakes, white flour, were all dispatched without hesitation. Only a small unopened packet of Torula Yeast seemed to have escaped her wrath.

'I'm Barbara,' the young woman said.

'David.'

'I'm a friend of your father's.'

He nodded darkly.

'Do you want breakfast?'

He nodded again and shyly regarded her firm arse which the morning sun revealed beneath her white cotton baggy pants.

She went to the dining room and came back with a big cloth bundle. From this she produced four little brown paper bags which contained unprocessed bran, wheat germ, lecithin, and raisins. She put a dessertspoonful of each in a plate, mixed them up, added milk, and passed it to David Joy who was sitting on the edge of his chair.

'What's this?'

She did not take offence at his curled lip. She told him.

'Why?' he said. 'I have cornflakes every morning.'

'I'm cooking now,' Honey Barbara said firmly. 'Today I'll make you some good bread but for the moment this is all there is. So eat it. It'll make you shit properly. It'll give you roughage and vitamins to make your intestine muscles contract. It'll make your ·shit float, you watch.' And she smiled.

David pushed his plate away in disgust. 'I don't want to talk about shit,' he said, 'and particularly not with a woman.'

Honey Barbara shrugged and went back to tidying up the cupboard.

'Did he meet you in the hospital?'

'Sure did.'

David left his bowl on the table and went upstairs, where he tried to persuade Ken and Lucy (who were meant to occupy separate beds while Bettina was in the house) to come down to the kitchen and make some kind of stand.

The woman was mad. He was scandalized by her madness, her obsession with shit, her wastefulness, her firm arse, her pubic hair. Everything about her was wild and untrammelled and he thought, passing her, that he could smell her sexual organ, and he felt weak. Madness horrified David. Yet often he felt it press upon him. He felt soft fingers touch the outside of the concrete brick walls of his bunker. He could feel mumblings, murmurings, the passage of lightning through an unseen sky.

Ordinariness pressed upon him: he invited it, needed it, embraced it. Look at this suit, so conventionally cut he might be a mere clerk. Was it a disguise, or was it the truth? Would he be too weak for the lightning? Would he be too brittle, have bones like sparrow wings? Would he simply snap?

He did not want the mad person downstairs but he could not convince them. He saw they had private jokes about him and he regretted ever having told Lucy his dreams. He was stiff and formal in his suit but had she ever told Ken that she had sucked her brother's cock and swallowed his come, or did she simply tell him that he was a clerk who wanted to be a bandit, one more pathetic Walter Mitty. Was that why they lay there like that and smiled?