Peter Carey - Bliss

Lucy and Ken were very interested in Harry's mad woman. They came downstairs the minute David left the house and they watched her throw foods into the rubbish bins as if they were poisonous substances that should not be touched, let alone eaten.

They introduced themselves and sat at the table to watch her.

'David thinks you're crazy,' Lucy said. 'He says you talk about shit like it was food and food like it was shit.'

It was an aggressive beginning but Honey Barbara liked her. Further this occurred to her: Lucy Joy was someone, not someone famous or influential or even talented, but just someone. She looked like a wild plant, something bred for a purpose now going its own sweet way. Honey Barbara did not even notice that she was overweight or worry that the whites of the eyes in that dark face were a little on the yellow side.

'He thinks you can't tell the difference.'

'Sorry,' Honey Barbara tore her eyes away from the face, 'difference between what?'

'Shit and food,' Ken said. He wore a Kentucky Fried peak cap and his curling hair rushed out beneath it, swept behind two large pixie ears, one of which held a small gold earring.

They were both smiling (when Ken smiled he showed a lot of broken teeth) and Honey Barbara smiled too.

'Everyone here is crazy,' Lucy said. 'I'll make you herbal tea.'

'You've got herbal tea? Here?'

'Been there,' Lucy said, 'done that.'

It was a long time, six months, since Honey Barbara had been around anyone as young as Lucy and she remembered what a charge you could get from fifteen-year-olds: how fresh they seemed, and confident and strong, and also, what a pain in the arse they could be.

'Why is everyone here crazy?' Honey Barbara noted that it was Ken who made the tea (with a lumpily rolled cigarette burning beneath his equally lumpy nose). He squinted down into the packet while Lucy talked.

'Bettina's crazy because she wants to be an American; Joel is crazy because he'll do anything to get sympathy; David is crazy because he wants to be a dope dealer; and Harry must he crazy because he let the others lock him up.'

Honey Barbara was charmed. She pulled up a chair. 'And why are you crazy?'

Ken brought the cups to the table and put a big bag of dope beside them.

'We're crazy because we like everything.' He said 'everyfing'. That made Honey Barbara like him more.

'We like you throwing all this stuff out,' Lucy said, 'and we like David being pissed off. We like everything. We like her-bal tea and Coca-Cola and dope. There isn't anything we disapprove of.'

Honey Barbara thought they were decadent but she liked them anyway. Not even her rather Victorian morality could censor them. What she did not know, and what they never told her, was they were on holidays. They were doing what every Party member must sometimes, in some secret corner of his of her heart, feel like doing – stopping analysing, appraising, and to hell with it all.

At this stage, however, they did not know they were on holidays. 'Afterwards,' Lucy said, 'when the world is over, no one will know that all of this was really beautiful.'

Honey Barbara closed her eyes.

'It's not heavy,' Ken said.

'We are into the late twentieth century,' Lucy said, 'and definitely not fighting against it. Enjoy it. It's incredible. The sunsets wouldn't look so beautiful if there wasn't all this shit in the air. It refracts the light and makes better sunsets.'

'That seems pretty negative to me,' Honey Barbara said. 'You should be trying to change it.' An uncharitable observer may have noted a slight primness in Honey Barbara's mouth.

'It's too late,' Lucy said.

'With herbal tea?' Ken said.

'We are the last,' Lucy said. 'It was always going to end. We are the first people to come to the end of time.'

Ken .rolled the joint. He was the one whose 'Catalogue of good things about the end of the world,' an ever-expanding loose-leafed opus, had set Lucy off on her Apocalyptic Holiday.

'Our Cadillac will do ten miles to the gallon,' Lucy said. 'Dig it.'

'How do you sleep at nights?' Honey Barbara said, in no way cut by Ken's jibes about changing the world with herbal tea.

'We fuck,' Lucy grinned, 'until we can't do it any more.'

And they all laughed and Honey Barbara, in spite of her resolution not to, shared their dope with them.

'Well,' Ken said, 'why are you crazy? Why do you treat food like shit?'

He was not being unkind but he had tapped a serious flaw in Honey Barbara's character: she could not joke about food. She divided the world into people who ate shit and people who ate good food.

'This food is shit,' she said, 'and if I'm going to live here, Harry and I are going to eat good food.'

'What do you think is Good?' Lucy said, leaning over her folded arms.

'If you don't know, how can I tell you?'

'No salt? No sugar? No meat? No white flour? That sort of thing?'

'Fucking right,' Honey Barbara said, standing up and transferring her attention to the refrigerator.

'Sounds boring to me,' Lucy said. (Ken started bundling up his dope.)

Honey Barbara emptied the fridge in five quick throws, saving only the chilled alarm clock from destruction.

'Come back at dinner time, smart arse,' she said to Lucy, 'and we'll see how bored you are.'

Lucy grabbed a can of Coke from the garbage can. 'I'll be there,' she said.

She made spinach soup with spinach and potatoes and onions and spiced it with a little nutmeg. She baked potatoes in their jackets, pumpkin, onion, and stuffed mushrooms. She braised the cabbage with onion and apple and garlic and (eager not to lose her first engagement) threw in a little red wine she found in the cupboard. When challenged about the presence of wine later, she denied it all.

She steamed the sugar peas and planned to serve them in a big bowl.

I'll give you boring.

She made her famous apple and rhubarb crumble and sweetened it with the Rolls Royce of honeys. She said 'boring' out loud, like an incantation. She cooked with love and venom in almost equal quantities, the sweetness of one managing to offset the bitterness of the other.

She walked twenty-four miles and came home and baked a loaf of heavy dark bread. She cooked it in a flower pot she stole from the garden, muttering to herself while an electric drill penetrated the steel shell of the Cadillac Eldorado in the front garden.

At half-past seven she showered and washed her hair and applied a dab of Sandalwood Oil.

Everyone had assembled in the dining room except for Joel who had gone out on some errand of his own. Ken and Lucy had washed their hands in tribute to her. They had rubbed them raw with industrial soap and taken out their Swiss Army knives and cleaned under their split nails with the smaller blade. Ken shaved his battered face and attempted to penetrate his tangled hair with a comb. He put on a white shirt and even stole one of Harry's ties, which he then had to be taught how to do up. Lucy wore a clean white boiler suit. David surprised everyone by wearing an exotic shirt and Gucci sandshoes. He poured the wine, but not before he had given his father the cork to formally approve.

Not since the family lunch (which had ended less enjoyably than it had begun – the duck caught fire and David put it out with a fire extinguisher) had they spread a cloth on the table and even Bettina, her shoes kicked off her sweating feet, a strong Scotch in her hand, seemed relaxed and happy.

David engaged his father in an earnest whispered conver-sation on the subject of Argentinian cowboys, something he was exceedingly well versed on, but the details of which, it appeared, he had no wish to share with anyone but Harry.

'Tell us all,' Lucy said from the other side of the room.

But David ignored her and Harry, in any case, found it hard to listen. He was too concerned that everyone should like Honey Barbara, who throughout all this strode back and forth, her face serious, her back straight, her wet hair flat on her head, setting odd things to right on the table and in the kitchen refusing all offers of help, as if, Lucy whispered to Ken, they might contaminate the purity of what would be offered.