Peter Carey - Bliss

Paul took him back and bandaged his hands and it was another two weeks before he could work again.

He still dug big holes. That was admired. A person who dug big holes for a tree and did not take short cuts was much admired here. 'It looks like he'll be a good worker,' they said.

But she knew. She didn't say, but she knew. He was digging those holes big so that the trees would grow and cover him. He was digging with negative energy, because he was afraid of the sky and the sun and he was chicken shit. He thought he was in Hell, and that was why he was digging big holes. He was driven by fear and did not love trees except for the wrong selfish reasons.'

'Your friend,' they said when referring to Harry Joy.

'He's not my friend.'

And while they learned to accept him they continued to distrust her, she thought, because she had brought him there. If not, how come no one had said anything to her about going down with the dope crop this year? She did not want to go; she would certainly have refused but there was no doubt in her mind that she should be asked, and her advice sought on the disposal of the crop and now, it seemed, Damian was to go (God help us, she thought) and no one actually told her this but she found out by things half said and others unsaid.

'He is not my friend,' she said out loud, straddling a par-ticularly deep wash-away with the Commer and praying she would not slip in. He was not her friend. She had no friend. And although she had felt contented with her celibacy before Harry arrived, other things had happened which now made her lonely.

She had enjoyed her visits to Paul. She hadn't gone often, maybe once a week, but they had talked long into the night and even when she was alone in her hut she knew it was something she could do if she wanted to, but now she would walk down the little ridge above the rain forest at night and hear their voices (The Old Codgers) coming up from the dark of the valley floor and the damp fecund odours of the rain forest no longer seemed welcome to her and she would not enter. She was hurt that Paul had ditched her so easily in favour of a stranger.

Crystal was worse. She had adopted her new lover's polit-ics, religion and dietary habits with an enthusiasm which Honey Barbara found unprincipled. She saw her mother adopting the mental wardrobe of the Ananda Marga just as she had with everything from Sufi dancing to Buddhism and Pentecostal Christianity, pecking at any idea with coloured beads or tinsel paper.

'You have the spiritual life of a crow,' she told her mother.

She had been bad-tempered with everyone. Crystal, even now, sat on the hillside waiting for her daughter's apology. It was not forthcoming. Everywhere she went she heard bits and pieces of Harry Joy and his stories and that only made it worse. He had been, in every way, inconsiderate, and it had not even occurred to him that he should come and apologize to her.

He was down there. She had seen him when she drove out and now she would see him again in two bends' time. He was digging fucking holes and when she came round the corner he would be standing there naked with his crowbar or his shovel, standing back from his giant hole, waiting for a compliment.

Oh, they just loved the way Harry Joy dug holes.

She felt herself becoming angrier and angrier as she crossed the Saddleback and then back up a creek bed for ten yards and then sharply down. It was all unnecessary, this ridiculous complicated entry into the property, but it amused Clive and the other paranoids. If the cops wanted anything important, they'd do a helicopter bust. They didn't need roads.

And there he was.

She slid the Commer to a halt even though it was a steep and stony hill. He was planting out the junction with old Billy Road, or that, at least, was what they had called it on the forestry maps. He had three planted.

'Tallow wood,' she said, 'typical.'

'It's good timber,' he said.

Who was he to be suddenly such an expert on the timber at Bog Onion Road? What did he know?

'It's hundred-year timber,' he said.

Repeating what he had been told.

'You planted one over there,' she said.

'Yes,' he said, 'to make a pair, one on either side of the road.'

She turned off the engine. 'Do you realize,' she said, 'that when these two trees grow, in a hundred years, you won't be able to get a van this wide through or,' she said, anticipating the words ready to emerge from his opening mouth, 'or a horse and cart.'

The big moustache had now been joined by a beard and his long lank hair had been cut brutally short. He had some funny looking bumps on the back of his head. His naked body had taken the light honey colour typical of people who live with the sun so much that they do not seek it for pleasure.

He looked at her and smiled. 'Yes,' he said, 's'pose I better shift it.'

'Hear you're building a place.'

'Yes.'

'Good one.'

'Yes, should be good.'

'Bush poles?'

'Yeah, bush poles. I'm going to try shingles.'

'Hard to cut,' she said, squinting at him.

'Might try anyway.'

'Yeah, you should try.'

'We should have a talk sometime,' he said. 'You should come over.'

She started the engine. 'Yeah,' she said vaguely.

'I miss you,' he said.

But she was already concentrating on the next section of road, trying to keep the speed down so she wouldn't crack the sump on the crossing at the bottom. She did not have time to think about her feelings, but the bees knew, as they always did, and droned unhappily around the entrance to their hives.

It is a measure of how well Harry had adapted to life at Bog Onion that the hut which was planned for the late spring did not finally get under way until after the wet. There was no desperate rush and the subject of the hut, its design, materials, siting and so on, became the medium through which he came to know his neighbours and make new friendships.

He had become used to waking early, but on the morning he was to drop the five tallow woods he had marked out for his house, he got up even earlier. There was something he wanted to do before Daze and Clive arrived with the horse to snig the logs out of the forest. He did not make tea. He did not fill the bush shower on the verandah, or do anything to make a noise because the thing he wanted to do was something he felt shy about, a small thing perhaps, but more important than he would have cared to admit; he might so easily have been laughed at.

He slipped into his shorts and pulled a dirty singlet on. Then he took the dirty singlet off and rummaged in the canvas bag which contained his few things. He took out a clean white singlet and put it on.

The axe was already sharp. He had sharpened it last night while he and Paul had sat on the verandah. He had sharpened it slowly, enjoying the sound. You could shave your arm with that axe and Paul, having examined it, declared it too sharp. Harry was learning confidence in his own ways. He left it sharp.

He did not wear shoes. There were none to be had and his feet had made up for the lack and grown their own thick soles. It is not hard to see the changes six months of hard work, clean air and less food have made to the man. It is a pleasure to watch him as he descends the steps of the hut and walks into the rain forest, a svelte shadow amongst the tangled roots and creepers. He had never ceased to see where he lived and, having begun with the aesthetic of a whip bird to whom the rain forest is shelter and cannot be left except nervously, he had, as the months passed, developed a more relaxed view in which gratitude to the trees and people of Bog Onion was not his sole emotion but had become blended with wonder and made volatile with some lighter spirit.

He nodded briefly (no one was there to see him) to the monsteriosa. No one could tell him with any confidence whether the monsteriosa was a native of the rain forest or an interloper but he felt he understood the way it wrapped its roots around the white blotched trunk of a cedar. Each morn-ing when he passed through the rain forest he nodded his head briefly and compressed his lips and sometimes you might hear a small tsk of appreciation, a sound as light as a twig dropping, signifying, perhaps, the surprise he felt in being there at all.