Monkey Grip

by Helen Garner

  ‘Wanna take the kids to the baths?’ he said, inadvertently puncturing the small balloon of awkwardness. Javo sat there smoking while we rounded up Gracie and the Roaster, took their bathers (smelling, like the children themselves, strongly of chlorine) off the line, and disentangled our bikes from the heap outside the kitchen door: my thirty dollar grid, and Clive’s blue and silver Coppi racer, which he called his filly. The Roaster rode on Clive’s bar, Gracie on my carrier. We bumped over the gutter and on to the softening bitumen.

  The kids begin to sing. We roll in unison (me upright and straight-backed with outstretched arms, Clive bent low over his handlebars with the Roaster crouching inside the curve of his body) down the wide road and into the green tunnel, the cave of the Edinburgh Gardens. No-one around, though it is ten o’clock in the morning. The hoses flick silver strings on to the drying grass. The cicadas beat a rhythm that comes in waves, like fainting or your own heartbeat. We sweep round the corner into the Belgium Lane, where the air is peppery with the scent of cut timber and even on this still day the poplars flutter over the ancient grey picket fence; they thrust up their sprouts through the cracking asphalt under our wheels. Between the posts we flash without hesitation and out of the cool we hit the road again and get down to the work of it, pedalling along Napier Street: our speed makes Gracie’s legs flail behind me like oars.

  ‘Hang on, hang on!’ I shout to Grace, and feel her fingers obediently tighten on my pants as we forge across a gap in the heedless double stream of traffic in Queen’s Parade, and coast again (the Coppi ticking soothingly) the last few yards to the racks outside the Fitzroy baths.

  Broken glass glitters nastily all along the top of the cream brick walls. We chain our bikes to the rack. The Roaster grabs his towel and springs over the hot concrete to the turnstile. Gracie holds my hand with her hard brown one and we pick our way between the baking bodies to the shallow pool.

  The brightness of that expanse of concrete is atomic: eyes close up involuntarily, skin flinches. I lower myself gingerly on to the blazing ground and watch the kids approach the pool. The Roaster slips over the side and wades inexorably deeper; Gracie waves to me and squints, wraps her wiry arms around her belly, and sinks like a rich American lady beneath the chemicals.

  ‘No-one will ever understand,’ I say to Clive, ‘but this is paradise.’

  ‘Paradise enow,’ he answers, neatly laying out a towel and applying his skin to its knobbly surface. No further need to speak. The sun batters us into a coma. I pull my hat over my eyes and settle down on my elbows to the day’s vigilance.

  MORE POLITELY THAN SHAKING HANDS

  It took me months to see the junk patterns. I wished to trust, and so I trusted. When events did not please me, my dreams reworked them.

  On the night of the first party, I went alone. Javo was there, but he did not greet me, and sat like some sulky adolescent with his back to the room, hunched over the record player. The room was full of people I liked: I lounged about and wisecracked pleasantly with them until midnight, when I wheeled my bike outside and coasted home downhill under the big trees in those wide empty streets, sailing through tides of warm night air. I fell asleep beside my open window, and my unconscious obligingly furnished me with a more agreeable version of the evening’s happenings.

  I dreamed: Javo and I left the party together. As we opened the door, we found ourselves in the country, stepping off the threshold on to blond grass, a hill sloping down in front of us with a double wheeltrack half overgrown; faint evening sunlight. We ran down the hill together, laughing and exuberant, leaping over tussocks, having to dodge small clusters of brown ducks which were waddling flatbacked through the grass.

  ‘Don’t tread on my ducks!’ shouted the farmer, appearing somewhere near. ‘I have to sell them.’

  It was easy to avoid them, though we were running so fast that it was almost like flying. At the bottom of the hill we came to a wooden fence with a stile, and stopped.

  At that moment Javo walked into my bedroom, and I woke up.

  He sat on the bed. We hugged each other. I sat against the bedroom wall with my knees up and my head between them.

  ‘Oh, hey,’ he said, taking hold of me by the shoulders. ‘I am a self-engrossed slob. I don’t want to make you sad.’

  I did not want him to see that he could. So, there I sat on my bed in the middle of a hot summer night, caught between my dream and the memory of what had really happened.

  If I had enough to spare, why not share it?

  He touched me tentatively, as if he wasn’t quite sure where to find me.

  ‘Is that as good as it can be?’ he asked humbly. I showed him how, and we fucked, we made love; we lay side by side.

  ‘I love,’ he said in a quiet voice, ‘the moistureless way in which we kiss.’ Exactly like that, he said it. ‘I love the relationship you have with your body. I love the way your face is showing signs of wear. I love the way you talk when you’re coming – the way you become a child. Your face looks twelve years old.’

  I listened in astonishment.

  We slept, and Gracie woke me early, and he slept on and I got up.

  I found the second party in a crowded garden, its boundaries hidden in darkness. I smoked a couple of joints and took a cup of brandy to a little pozzy I found in a dry flower-bed under some bushes. I sat in my safe place, dirty and tired and not caring what I looked like. I drank the brandy and observed the social flow. The part of this which concerned me was a peculiar triangle: Javo, Martin, and Jessie whose relationship with Javo a year before had been destroyed by his smack habit. From my position on the sidelines I could see Javo’s eyes on her, how he laughed eagerly at everything she said and watched her hungrily. But Martin too kept his eyes on her face, and she remained, in her demeanour, uncommitted, floating on the force of their attention, her expression changing from laughter to a vaguely detached and discontented look, her blue eyes under her thick red fringe drifting away to some private speculation. The three of them stood in a close ring, passing joints and making a lot of theatrical noise.

  It was so much like watching a movie that my tired brain simply observed, and feelings scarcely registered.

  I saw them move uneasily apart, together, apart again; I sensed their preoccupation with each other as clearly as if threads had connected them across the dark, leafy garden.

  Javo retired to a hammock near where I was sitting with my brandy and my half-closed eyes. I got off the twiggy ground and went over to him.

  ‘Hullo.’

  He looked up with a start. His face looked strange to me, in a way I could not determine. I supposed it was because of his churned-up feelings.

  ‘Good day, mate,’ he said.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ Surely an odd, painful look crossed my face.

  ‘Yeah. I’m really stoned,’ he said in a tone which I took for an apology for his indifference. A shiver of irritation ran over me. Don’t excuse yourself, bloody teenager, bloody child. Give or don’t give. I’m not going to fight you for it.

  I walked off and passed a woman I vaguely knew, my age, with the Eltham gloss on her, expensively dressed, too sophisticated and throaty-voiced to go smoothly amongst this bunch of desperadoes. A young man grinned passively under her attentions. I blushed in shame for us women whose guns are too big these days, who learned ten years ago to conduct great sexual campaigns with permanency in mind, while today it is a matter of skirmishes, fast and deft.

  Spare us from indignity.

  I saw the three of them drive away in Martin’s car. Javo was looking straight ahead, his face set like a mask.

  I came home alone, and mooched ill-temperedly around my room. I found his bowie knife where I’d hidden it behind the bookcase, safe from the children. I held its solid weight for a few seconds, wildly fantasising plunging it into the famous handsome picture of him in Cinema Papers. Instead, I dropped the knife and wrote him a letter.

  ‘Dear Javo, there’s a few things you ough
t to know, mostly involving things like elementary courtesy. Eh? like saying hullo; like not making that ludicrous adolescent gap between how you behave towards me at night when we sleep together and how you act in public as if we hardly knew each other. Don’t get me wrong: I can recognise a desperate man when I see one. I don’t want a flood of attention. Just hullo would do, so I don’t have to wonder if I’ve been hallucinating other times we’ve been together. Good luck to you, Javo, I like you, but you give me a hard time. Still like to see you, sometime.’

  I took it to his house next morning, expecting not to find him there – but he was there, asleep in his tidied room. I put the letter down beside his bed. He woke up, stared at me as if I were a stranger, his eyes blank with sleep, empty of comprehension, with a pinpoint of panic far inside his skull.

  ‘I brought you a note. I didn’t think you’d be here.’

  He lay there, rigid, still staring.

  ‘. . . But now I’m here, I feel very uncomfortable, so I think I’ll go.’

  He nodded, clearly incapable of anything more. I stood up, and as I walked out I heard him rip open the envelope.

  I went into Martin’s room and woke him. We talked cheerfully. I was aware that our laughing voices were audible to Javo. We went out to the kitchen and made some coffee. Javo stumped out, hair on end, face tight. He came to the table and Martin and I chattered on, our elbows resting among the mess of newspapers and orange peels. Gradually Javo’s face softened, he smiled at the talk, listened with his face, spoke.

  When I went to leave, I stopped in the back yard for a last word with Martin. Javo went past us and out the gate without saying anything. I said goodbye to Martin and wheeled my bike out the gate, put my foot on the pedal – and saw him leaning against a car two doors down the lane.

  Adolescent!

  I rolled up beside him, balanced my bike with both feet on the ground. He gave me the rueful flash with his very bright blue eyes.

  ‘Last night,’ he said, ‘I was sure I didn’t want to see you again. But I don’t feel like that now.’

  ‘You are not courteous to me . . . but I understand why you do it,’ I said too hastily, because it wasn’t even quite true. He leaped in eagerly:

  ‘Do you? Well, I wish you’d tell me, because I don’t know why I do it.’

  ‘You don’t want me to need you, even for a second.’

  ‘No – no! That’s not it!’

  And we began the battle, warmed to it, ceased to stammer, started to flow.

  ‘I find it really hard,’ he said, ‘to express emotion in public. And you didn’t understand. When I said I was stoned, I meant smack.’

  Heart did not sink. I thought this meant a slight lessening of my naivety. I was wrong.

  I looked at his cheeks, hollow before their time, lines from nose to mouth like a forty-year-old. Once he’d said to me, ‘The harder you live, the better-looking you get.’ Once, he’d told me, his mother had said to him, ‘Don’t worry, son – looks aren’t everything.’ People stared at him in the street, because of the way his eyes burned blue, and the scar hacked into the bridge of his nose, and because he looked wild. He couldn’t believe me when I said, ‘You’re beautiful.’

  By this time we were laughing, and I rode slowly beside him along the footpath till we came to Paddy’s house. We walked into her kitchen. Martin was already there. We smoked a joint at her kitchen table. She put on an old Dylan record. He sang, and everyone laughed. But I laughed more, because they didn’t know what I was laughing at.

  ‘I got a friend

  he spends his life

  stabbin’ my picture

  with a bowie knife . . .

  I got a mean friend’

  He would disappear for a day or two at a time. Often I’d come home at some odd hour and find him sitting at my table toiling over an explanatory note in his painstaking printing.

  ‘Today I gave junk a nudge,’ he’d write, ‘like an idiot that I am and being stoned I shouldn’t be here. I just managed to look the nightmare in the face that’s my face today. And I decided to stop. And I decided to stop. And I decided to stop.’

  When he was stoned he would usually keep out of my way. I never talked about the dope, much, being wary of crusading. I was interested in the phenomenon of his being stoned, and watched him curiously. I began to understand it through my eyes: I caught his face showing strange, mad planes which were not familiar to me, ugly in their strangeness. It wasn’t dope as a spectre or a rival that frightened me, but the way it turned him into a stranger.

  Late one night when I was asleep in my bed, he burst in at my door, wildly stoned, raving about some shirt he’d been given, tearing his clothes off, hurling himself into bed beside me. I kept dozing, full of confusion and sleep. All night long he threw himself about the bed, scratched manically, groaned, breathed loud and shallow. At last I crept out and into Clive’s empty bed and dropped off by myself until morning came.

  He came loping round the corner of the house to the kitchen a few mornings later. I was washing the breakfast dishes and dreamily staring at the children who were hosing the tomatoes. He was stoned – thinner cheeks, eyes wide open, pupils whited out as if the pinpoints at their centres had sucked the blue colour back into the brain. He hugged me with his gangly arms. I stood there holding the dish-mop and leaning against him. He gave me a much-folded note:

  ‘Just writing you cause I’m going away to Hobart for the night tonite – to let you know I’ve been thinking of you today mate. I might stay there for a few more days seeing I’ve got a week of heavy thinking and working things out to myself. I might go and have a bet tonight and get a bit drunk and have a loud externalised time for a while. So I’ll see you when I see you. Just to tell you I love your body cause it’s really you there (no give) when I touch you and you bounce back which is the most important thing of all – and when we kiss I can feel the shape of your lips. Love you. Javo.’

  Away he rushed to Tasmania, and my tension was reduced by half, and my nights were undisturbed. But I missed him, and missed his thin warm body in my bed; and thought about his dreadful cramps from the sweating, and his life with nothing much in it.

  He came back in the middle of a night, woke me by striking a match at the door of my room, sat on my bed quiet and not stoned, told me how he’d hated Hobart except for seeing his mother and winning forty dollars at the casino.

  Oh Javo, your frantic life. I looked at him with no emotion except weariness and a small tinge of fear, or distaste – not for him, but for the eddying pointlessness of his battle with each day.

  ‘You could get in here with me, if you liked,’ I said, wanting him to. He got in beside me, and hugged me, and I felt that slow rush of pleasure, or love, at the touch of his dry, hot skin. I laid my face against his bony one and clumsily dared to love him.

  ‘What about this junk all around me?’ I asked the I Ching.

  ‘Darkening of the Light,’ it replied. ‘In such times one ought not to fall in with the practices of others, neither should one drag them censoriously into the light. In social intercourse one should not try to be all-knowing. One should let many things pass, without being duped.’

  Next morning we went by tram to St Kilda for the ritual turkish bath and massage, which he paid for with his winnings. We parted at the door. I took off my dress and pants and sank into the hot sea bath. I lay back and began to think about the nature of corruption, and the drift I was in, and the problem of whether there is a bottom to these things. I decided not, and immediately felt an urge to kick upwards, back towards light and order.

  When we emerged from our segregated luxuries, hours later, he took me to lunch at Tolarno’s, which must have cost thirty dollars. My protests he brushed magnanimously aside.

  ‘No, no – you are always paying for me – go on, let me!’

  I let him. But halfway through the meal I felt his mind disengage from mine; it veered off and wandered. I said nothing. We took a cab home. He sat comfortably
beside me with his hand on my leg. At my house he said,

  ‘I’ll go on home – be back in half an hour.’

  Time for a hit.

  He didn’t come back, that day or that night either.

  So I began to root out of myself two tendencies: to romanticise dope, and to treat junkies with an exaggerated respect.

  One sunny evening I called at Javo’s house on my way to eat with Paddy. I called out: no answer, no-one home. The house was open, evening sun coming in the back door. It seemed still and hastily deserted. I walked down the passage to Javo’s room. I wrote a note to say hullo. I was looking at myself in his mirror, studying my haircut, when the fatal urge to snoop overcame me.

  I picked up an envelope that was leaning against the mirror. I turned it over. On the back of it was scrawled, in a travesty of Javo’s handwriting,

  ‘Sorry, Martin, my hands are shaking, I’m going crazy with this coke, yours is in the spoon, I nearly shot it all up but stopped myself just in time.’

  There was a moment when my heart slithered about in my chest. I put the note back where it had been, and opened the top drawer. Right on top of his clothes was a fit, casually dropped, no attempt made to conceal it. Even a kitchen spoon, its handle bent. A small nest of evil treasure.

  I closed the drawer and tried to breathe.

  Terminal naivety was my disease.

  I went out the back door into the six o’clock sun, past the disused car up on blocks. I got on my bike and rode away. The part of my brain which constantly and forever observes myself was reduced by shock to a very tiny pinpoint in the back of my head, as it had been when I was in labour. I heard myself gasp, and sob, and groan. The thought flicked across the black screen: one day I will find that treasure in Gracie’s drawer.

  At such moments, all the love in your body and mind and heart and blood and cells ceases to be enough. Evil manifests itself.