Bliss (38 page)

So as you watch Harry Joy running around his own house in panic you have the comfort of knowing he is something less than freakish. His cancer map has come to life like some deadly pin-ball machine finally (the penny dropped) activated. His skin prickles. His stomach hurts and he notices a strange coldness at the place where he imagines (incorrectly) his liver is.

And there he is, looting, going through his son's (nice boy, going to be a doctor) drawers looking for money, and yes, actually wrestling with the boy as they fight for a bundle of notes which fall from the desk top and float across the room. They scramble to pick them up. He catches his son's foot and sits on his chest, and from this position negotiates a puffing red-faced deal.

'Half. 50-50. O.K.?'

'O.K.'

But once released the scramble is on again, and there must be another fight, and the son must be subdued again, and this time with a backhanded blow which will partly deafen him and cause him great pain on the aeroplane he will shortly board.

'You won't need it,' Harry grunted, scrambling across the carpet. 'I need it. I'm leaving.'

'I'm leaving too.'

'Where going?'

'New York.'

They fought over a photograph of Bettina, and David won the bigger piece. Harry went to his room and packed a bag, cramming in silk shirts as if they were currency. He arrived downstairs just behind his partly deaf son. David had his suitcase with him.

'You think you're a real smart dude,' Ken said to David, 'but those coppers aren't dumb. They'll know you knocked off that ticket.'

'Right under their nose,' David said, but he stayed near the doorway, sitting on his case.

Harry sat at the table and let Ken pour him tea.

'You're a fool,' Lucy told her brother.

He spat at her. 'You're not so smart,' he said, 'limpet.'

'Why don't you all shut up,' Ken said quietly. He rolled a cigarette and looked at it closely while he did it. 'Our only answer is just to be calm and stick together. We haven't done anything wrong. These coppers aren't like the drug squad – they're not all bent. They just think we're terrorists and they'll find out we're not. If you geezers run away we'll all be stuffed. They'll beat the shitter out of us and they'll catch you lot. It won't matter what you say, if they think you've done something they'll frame you.'

'I know where to go,' Harry said.

'Where?'

'The country.'

'With darling Honey Barbara,' Lucy said.

'Honey Barbara thinks you're full of shit, Harry. They'd probably burn you as a witch.'

But it was obvious then that no amount of reason or logic would stop either of them and David walked away without any farewell and Harry stayed. He stayed through a silent meal of sardines on toast. He stayed through the television until after it finished. He stayed sitting in the living room when Lucy and Ken went to bed.

They lay in bed and listened for noises. Nothing moved in the house.

'He's going to go,' Ken said. 'He won't be there in the morning.'

At two o'clock they woke to a familiar noise.

'The Cadillac.'

'Fuck him. Let him take it.'

They lay and listened to him go backwards and forwards across the lawn as he manoeuvred the car out on to the drive.

'The creep,' Lucy said as the Good Bloke drove away from Palm Avenue for the last time.

The Pan Am Jumbo took off on schedule, at 8 p.m., into the waiting thunderstorm. Lightning filled the sky beside David's seat. Below him, in breaks in the clouds, he caught a glimpse of the yellow spiderweb of lighted streets which had, at last, released him.

He stood before the lightning and faced the monsters of the night.

PART SIX

Blue Bread and Sapphires

Daze walked along the ridge looking for the blood wood. It was a hot November morning and the Razorback had a slight blue haze around it and the wind from the sea made the gums throw their khaki-silver umbrellas to and fro. He had slept in. Soon it would be too hot for this sort of work. He hefted the sledgehammer on to his shoulder and shook the small bag of wedges he held in the other. Only two wedges. People were careless with wedges. He could remember when there had been five of them, perfectly graduated from small to large. It had been a lot easier splitting fence posts then, but with only two wedges it became more difficult, particularly with blood wood which often had an almost corkscrew grain. It was harder with two wedges, but two wedges were still enough. Wedges were amazing things. He stopped on the trail to think about wedges.

He was over forty but his body was hard and stringy and the brown legs beneath his tattered shorts were a young man's legs. He had a pointed chin which hid beneath a sparse, slightly fuzzy beard, and a sharp inquisitive nose either side of which were small humorous eyes. He was
stoned and kept forgetting why he had come.

The blood wood.

And he had been thinking about the wedge, the small wedge, and how amazing it was that the smallest wedge could finally split that old grey blood wood open to show its red secret heart. He did not think anything very profound, but he enjoyed his thoughts and he discovered and rediscovered things for himself all day in this manner. If he had had company he would have talked about the wedges, punctuating his meditations with 'Mmms' and 'Ahs' and his companion would be sometimes amused, sometimes bored, sometimes even enlightened by these meditations. Possibly (almost certainly) they would have explored the possibility of making new wedges and gone through the various methods by which this might be done, starting with smelting the iron, or even earlier, prospecting, perhaps on that rusty outcrop the Krishnas had on their land, and then the methods by which negotiations would have to begin with the Krishnas, perhaps sending Paul Bees or Honey Barbara first because they were permitted to place their hives in the Krishnas' ironbark forest in return, of course, for a percentage of the honey.

He nearly walked past the blood wood. It was just below the ridge, its dead grey trunk cut in ten places to show the hard red wood with the big empty pipe running up its centre.

'Mmm.' He took the mandarin from his pocket and peeled it. He admired the fine spray it released as he pulled back the peel. One day they would have a goat fence right across the bottom of the property, up here over the ridge, and almost down to the rain forest at the bottom. There was no money this year because their crop had been ripped off, but it didn't cost anything to cut the wood and split it into posts. Later they would get the wire and strain the fence, but in the meantime there was plenty of work to do. He was still thinking about the Krishnas. They were not the most friendly people in the world but somebody over there understood something about growing corn. Their corn was huge and sweet and yellow, as succulent as yellow peas joined together on a cob.

That's interesting, he thought – they have yellow robes. Yellow corn. He tried to think of other yellow things the Krishnas had. Yellow truck, he remembered, and yellow pawpaws, but their pawpaws were not so good.

As he began to split the first length of blood wood he was still naming yellow things to himself, testing the magical power of the Krishnas when it came to yellow. He tried to remember the significance of yellow in Colour Therapy but couldn't remember. He would talk to Crystal about it.

When he was working, he worked hard, hoisting the sledgehammer and using its own weight to let it drop hard. Splitting posts was more a stop-start type of thing, and not as satisfying as using a scythe which is more rhythmic, and even sharpening a scythe is a pleasure, getting the edge at once sharp but also, just slightly, jagged, so that when the grass is cut it is not so much like a razor slice but a fine rip and the grass falls softly sideways, flop.

As he worked, his mind wandered from one thing to the next like a rivulet finding its way downhill. He had to kill three billies tonight. He never got used to that, never got used to death no matter what he pretended to Heather. They swapped the goat meat for meat other people had killed. He could not kill a Billy without thinking about his second son, even now, and it was ten years since that had happened. (His tiny hands.) They buried him down in the valley and they sent out Health Inspectors who dug him up again. Now they knew not to register births. They registered nothing. There were eighty-nine children here and no one else in the world knew about them. Two had been buried. If they’d been registered they wouldn't even have been able to do that. The bastards took your own dead from you and made you put them in their holes.

Shit!

Both wedges were jammed in the wood. He should have taken the tomahawk to use as a third wedge. He had been too cocky. He turned around looking for a hard piece of rock or a piece of wood he could use instead.

He wandered down the hill a little and it was then he saw, lying across a prostrate acacia, a creamy silk shirt.

This is dangerous, he thought.

He stood and looked at it, not touching it. Then he squatted down and looked around for a while, making small sudden movements with his head. He took his worn cotton shirt off then, and lifted the silk shirt from its prickly resting place.

He slipped it on. Hasn't been worn; he thought, finding the neck button done up when he already had it over his head. Could be dangerous. He brought his hands round and undid the offending button.

A perfect fit.

He stayed squatting. There was someone around dropping silk shirts. The police did not carry silk shirts. The Health Department did not carry silk shirts.

He rested on his knees. A little honey-eater came and hung off the acacia. He did up the cuff buttons on the shirt. Perfect. He stood up, slowly screwing up his face, waiting for something to happen to him.

When nothing happened he remembered the wedge and started looking for a piece of rock. He did not wish to be accused of being irresponsible again. Many people thought he was irresponsible. They had long memories. They did not give him enough credit for his fence.

Further along he found a pair of light creamy trousers.

He took off his shorts.

'Excuse me,' he said to no one.

The trousers were too long and a little too big around the waist. He rolled up the cuffs.

These are good quality trousers, he thought. He undid them a little so that he could look at the brand name. He did not know brand names anyway, but he looked. There was none. Of course, he thought, these are tailor-made trousers. What sort of person would discard them? This could be heavy. They would have another meeting down at the Hall and accuse him of being irresponsible. He would deny being stoned. He would talk about the fence but they would not listen to him. Maybe it was some heavy-type criminal come to spy out the dope crop.

'Mooo,' he heard.

The man was almost beside him, a man with a huge mous-tache clutching a broken suitcase to his chest. He was lying next to a fallen log and his face was bruised and his tongue was swollen in his mouth. His clothes were ripped. He had one shoe. He had a tick feeding on his face, just beside his right eye. The tick had been there for some time. It was fat and bloated with blood.

Daze hopped sideways like a magpie and looked at him.

'Unny,' the man moaned, but his good eye was on the silk shirt. 'Unny.'

'Money?' Daze suggested, thinking that the man, in spite of his condition, was trying to sell him the silk shirt.

'Unny.'

'I was just trying it on.'

'Huh,' the man said with effort. 'Huh-unny.'

'You want to buy Honey?'

Neither Paul Bees nor his daughter sold honey here. Only narcs and estate agents came here trying to buy honey. Paul Bees and Honey Barbara travelled around with their bees and their van, taking the bees to the coastal ti-tree in the summer, the ironbark and stringybark in the winter, letting them on groundsel during the autumn. They sold their honey in the markets, visited other communities. Paul had become, because he had travelled for a long time, because they knew him, because he was needed by everyone, like an ambassador, a diplomat who was accepted everywhere not only by the Buddhists at Chen Rhezic, the Horse people at Lower Arm, but also by the Krishnas and the Ananda Marga who guarded their places, they now did at Bog Onion Road, with a barred gate and, sometimes, a lookout. Paul's descendants would be a travelling family and before too long they would reveal themselves as not only beekeepers but magicians, musicians, story-tellers, newsgatherers and peacemakers, never quite belonging to anyone place and treated with both respect and reserve in the places they came to.

'Unny Ba-ba.'

'Honey Barbara?'

'Unny Barba.' But the baleful eye did not leave the silk shirt and, looking down, Daze saw he had left two dirty thumb prints underneath the collar.