by Helen Garner
Javo had not been near me for a week, when Martin ran in my back gate one afternoon, with news.
‘Nora,’ he said, ‘I’ve driven Javo down to St Vincent’s. He was screaming with pain, he thought he was dying. I think it’s septicaemia, from a dirty hit.’
Martin and I went down to casualty. We found Javo asleep in a cubicle, dressed in hospital whites with blue stitching. One arm dangled out from under the stiff sheets. He woke: those blue eyes in his battered face. His skin was still erupting in huge pus-y sores.
Martin stood at the end of the bed and I crammed myself between the bed and the metal chest of drawers.
‘I want you to bring me another set of clothes, in case they hide these,’ said Javo, pointing at a supermarket bag beside the chair.
‘Why would they do that?’
‘They might want to keep me here longer than I want to stay.’
He was raving, slightly.
Martin sulked, pursing his small lips, arms folded, looking at the floor. I felt like the mother of two headstrong, opinionated boys. My bones flooded with weakness. I stared at the metal bed. No-one spoke. I stopped caring about seeming straight, or motherly.
‘I think you ought to stay here as long as they make you. They won’t keep you any longer than necessary – people are out there clamouring for beds.’
‘But I’m better already. They didn’t give me nothin’. My body’s beaten it.’
His skin was burning and dry, his eyes were pale with fever.
‘Anyway,’ he continued recklessly, ‘I know people who’ve had it, and who only needed to stay in for a day.’
‘Who?’
‘Schultzy. A guy called Schultz.’
I couldn’t even laugh.
‘I’ll come in tomorrow and bring you some fruit, and something to read.’
Martin and I got up to leave.
‘Yeah – go,’ urged Javo, meaning Don’t think I need you, I’m all right here, I don’t need you.
Martin went out first. I paused, turned back, put my hand on Javo’s arm, kissed his hot forehead. Out of Martin’s sight, his face changed. He rolled on to his side, looked up at me, tried to smile, cast his anxious eyes up to me sideways.
‘Sorry, mate,’ he whispered.
‘You don’t have to say that!’ I cried in confusion, pushing my way between the foot of the bed and the curtain.
Next day I rang the hospital. They told me he was ‘satisfactory’ but that only his next of kin might visit him. Forced to be his mother, sister, wife. But of course when I got there in the evening no-one questioned me and I walked straight into the ward. I gave him a joint and he smoked it behind the Herald. He had a drip in his arm, sticky-taped on to his punctured inner elbow. His fever had gone down. He was restless, complained of the people in nearby beds – a hopelessly spastic boy beside him, who groaned without respite, and an old man dying in the bed opposite. Martin came in and they conducted a staccato conversation about a house they were going to rent when Javo came out. I stood leaning against the cream-painted metal bed and stared at the clean, clean lino tiles. My impatience rose up in my throat to choke me. When I kissed him goodbye, Martin was waiting for me, and it was a cold farewell.
I went home in despair, unable to wish him well.
The next evening I was riding home for tea before going to see him at the hospital. At the bottom of our street I met Eve going in the other direction.
‘Hey, Nora!’ she shouted as she passed. ‘Javo’s there, in your room.’
‘What?’
‘He just got there. He’s waiting for you.’ She sailed past, raising her eyebrows and turning down the corners of her mouth.
My heart beat so hard it blinded me with rage. I dropped my bike outside the back door and went into the bathroom to hide from him. I was eating my anger. But he came in there after me. I was sitting on the edge of the bath. I looked up at him. I would have opened my mouth to berate him, but I saw the great scabs healing on his face, and I saw the way he looked at me, dumbly; looking into his eyes was like looking down some hollow, echoing passageway straight into his brain. He said nothing. He stood there in front of me with his hands dangling down. My anger evaporated.
I put him into my bed.
‘What happened, Javo?’ I took his hand.
‘When you came to see me last night, I didn’t know how to start telling you how good it was that you were there. I’d been waiting all day for you to come. And when you left, I started feeling really shithouse. It got to be nine o’clock, and all that night ahead of me, and that fuckin’ kid moaning. So I got up and got dressed and nicked off.’
I started to shake, imagining him pulling the drip out of his arm in the dark ward. My stomach clenched up hard.
‘And I came straight round here,’ he went on, his skinny arms lying out upon my purple sheets, ‘but there was no-one home. I went to Nicholson Street, and Queensberry Street, but no-one was around anywhere. And at the tower there was only Jessie home, and she didn’t want to know about me.’
‘Well? What did you do then?’
‘I went back.’
‘To the hospital?’
‘They didn’t even notice I’d gone. I just got back into bed.’
‘But how’d you get out this time?’
‘I told them I had people to look after me. They said OK, if I could get a doctor to say he’d take responsibility, so I rang Mac, and he said he’d do it. They gave me a script for some penicillin. Mac will come round later and teach you how to give me a shot.’
O will he indeed. Must I be your mother? This house was the only place he could go for proper looking after; and yet, I couldn’t resist:
‘I thought you said you didn’t like it here. You told me it was “too homely”.’
He said nothing. His eyes were dark. He looked desperate in his soul. I was sorry I’d spoken, because I did . . . love him, was that it?
I went out and cleaned the fridge to keep calm. I finished the job, scrubbing the old yellow enamel with Ajax and polishing it with the warm dishcloth. Then I smoked a joint in the kitchen with Georgie, who was carefully not making any comment, and crept back into the bedroom to look at Javo. He was almost asleep. I lay on the bed beside him, flat on my face with my arms at my sides. The hash had done the trick: I found I could direct my imagination with my will. I saw a painted blue sky with scallopy clouds, and I soared up into it, borne up effortlessly and not too high by tides of warm air. Slow, easy flight. I fell asleep on the wing. Javo too slept still and deep, with no thrashing or groaning. Whenever I woke, I put my arm around his skinny body.
He stayed home, in my bed, all next day. Impatient at my tentative fiddlings with the syringe, he hit himself up with the penicillin: tossed the fit into his own bum like a dart into a dartboard. He barely flinched. The rest of us stood round him in a ring, reluctantly respectful of his nonchalance, except for Gracie, who sang out in warning,
‘Don’t do it, Javo! You’ll want more and more!’
It was the first time any of us had laughed in two days.
When I came home I found he had written me a poem and fallen asleep:
‘Let me be just that other wall
cause there’s no need to try breathing gentle
near me
just to look at your respect
contains me – happy –
not my mother – your body warmth
is there – can feel it with just looking
it’s just a matter of looking. . .
from anything other than blowfly
with a pin between his wings –
can try being anywhere right now –
except back in that specimen jar –
you just keep teaching
without telling
keep loving
without expectation
maybe that thing you call clinging at your dress mother –
is just me staring
almost blinding gaze
at �
��STRONG”
I’m learning something new
all the time
all the time getting better at liking this flesh of mine.’
RESPECTFUL OF HIS FRAGILITY
Francis sent me a note, to say he was living alone. I went to visit him. We talked as people do who know nothing about each other from other sources. He asked me to stay and I did. Hot, thin body, thin hard arms.
‘I used to be an athlete,’ he said. ‘I used to run a hundred miles a week. I was sort of crazy.’
We were in the bed he had shared with Anne for four years. He was very stoned, and I was afraid for him.
I was bleeding. I bled and bled, dark red flowers on his coarse sheets. I wondered if he minded. I was used to people who didn’t mind, who hardly even noticed. I couldn’t find his mind. I searched for his eyes but they were closed. His body was thin, thin, thin. I think he was frightened. Once, I thought he spoke. I took his face in my hands.
‘What did you say?’
‘Nothing. I was only breathing.’
And again, later, he said the same to me:
‘What did you say?’
‘I didn’t speak.’
The blood. It ran everywhere. And for her memory’s sake I was afraid of not being beautiful – or, of being more weather-beaten, marked and scarred, looser than the young girl. No, not afraid of it, but regretting it, wishing something perfect or new; respectful of his fragility.
We slept too lightly for rest. Early in the morning I climbed over him from the wall side of the bed, pulled my clothes on over my bloody legs, and wheeled my bike out his front door. A wild yellow sky, dry grey air full of turbulence. The street surfaces were burnished, blown clean as a bone. My bike tyres, pumped up hard, whirred on the glossy bitumen. Autumn, air, air, moving in dry warm blusters.
I got home and walked into the still house and found Javo asleep in my bed. He turned over and opened his eyes. His intelligence swam up behind the daze of sleep. He said nothing, but looked.
‘I didn’t know you were coming, Javo.’
He tried to smile: unhappiness blurred his face like a veil. He didn’t ask me where I had been.
‘I stayed over at Francis’ place.’
‘I thought you might’ve.’
‘What made you think that?’
‘Oh, somebody told me you’d been fucking with him lately.’
‘But I haven’t! Last night was the first time. Who told you that?’
‘Oh, I dunno. Someone.’ He took my hand. I sat down on the edge of the bed.
‘But I would always tell you if I fucked with anyone else! How could you think I wouldn’t?’
‘I suppose . . . maybe you thought I already knew about it anyway.’
‘Oh shit. People’s lives are just gossip fodder.’
I got into bed with him and we lay close together, not talking, held there by sadness as the day began.
It was raining, pouring warm rain. Francis and I left his house at two o’clock one afternoon and walked up to Lygon Street. We were passing the Commercial Bank when the door of the University cafe flew open and Javo and Martin stepped out, All four of us stood still. I took five steps towards Javo and without a word we turned and walked off down the street towards the city. His arm went across my shoulders. I glanced back and saw Francis grin and shrug at Martin. Together they went back into the cafe.
We walked in the Exhibition Gardens, along the dripping avenues.
‘I can’t live with it. I’m too jealous,’ said Javo. My left shoulder fitted exactly in the hollow of his under-arm. ‘I am going away with Martin for a couple of weeks.’
‘Where to?’
‘We are telling everyone else it is to Perth. But it is really to Asia. We want to get into Cambodia.’
Nothing surprised me any more. I knew it would be wiser not to ask how he proposed to pay for his ticket.
We sat on a wet bench in our sopping clothes, close together.
‘Let’s go to my place,’ he said.
We walked dully past the kids’ adventure playground, across the carpark, and up the broken stairs to the series of empty rooms over the Italian grocery, where he had a mattress in a corner and a heap of things he called his. On the wall he had pinned some photos of Freycinet, where we had struggled over the mountain. We stripped off our wet clothes and lay on the bed. We held each other for comfort, and made love as we always did, in spite of trouble: falling into each other’s eyes.
‘I think I’ll have a sleep,’ I said.
He got up. ‘I’m going downstairs to clean up the kitchen.’
I dozed off, but couldn’t quite fall asleep. I went downstairs in bare feet to the dunny, through the chain of rooms. I came round the corner into the kitchen and he looked up, shocked, and backed against the bench to hide what he was doing. I said nothing, and went past him out the back door. When I came back he had the belt on his arm and the fit ready. I stood watching him curiously. He was clumsy; could not get a vein in his left arm; seemed oblivious of my presence once the ritual had begun. I saw how his face turned pale, his hands trembled most dreadfully so that all he could do was butcher his flesh, for all he wished merely to make love to himself. Blood trickled in the crook of his arm. He cursed under his breath, and took off the belt and put it on his other arm, awkwardly manoeuvring the fit with his left hand.
I didn’t wait. I went back upstairs to his room and lay on the mattress under a blanket, looking at the mountain I had climbed, and the sea at its feet, and the moonpath on the water outside the motel room at Swansea. I was careful not to think. And I fell asleep.
NO FADE FROM DISTANCE
I was sitting at the kitchen table while the rest of our house slept. Gracie stirred in her bunk in the next room. The clock ticked on the window sill. The matting was crammed with tiny scraps of food and other matter which I could feel with my bare feet. The pigeons flapped and . . . out came Javo, tousled and foul-tempered, heading for the dunny in his levis. Today he and Martin were going away, thank Christ.
My head was fat with the secret of their destination. They had a pack each. The rumour had run round that they had ordered white tropical suits to be made for the journey, which were not ready by the day of their departure. I was hard put to deny the implications of this gossip when people brought it to me.
Martin arrived. His small curly head moved impatiently as a bird’s while Javo chaotically forced clean clothes into his pack. Martin was wearing a brand new pair of blue and white brogues: spiv shoes. He did not take the teasing well, being too agitated. At last Javo pulled tight the last buckle on his pack and heaved it by one strap on to his back. He accepted the farewells of our household with a nod, never having learned to be gracious.
I took that well-worn route to Tullamarine: turn right on to the thunderous freeway and slide easily into the shining flood. We were all in the front seat, Martin in the middle, Javo disdaining to fasten his seat-belt. We didn’t speak, but simply barrelled out along the freeway, full of our own troublesome thoughts. My elbow was out the window into the dull warm air. Javo was biting his nails, or what was left of them. He had washed his hair, and freed from its customary mattedness, it flopped and shone. He was wearing painfully clean jeans and a denim shirt. He glanced at me across Martin, ventured a tight smile.
I brought us all to rest in the carpark. Martin was at once the organiser. His head was thrown back and behind his rectangular spectacles his green eyes darted eagerly. His voice took on a sharp, peremptory note which Javo responded to, unconsciously perhaps, by doing everything a shade more languidly than he would have otherwise. I didn’t open my mouth. I felt like a mother, as if my face wore that expression of tight-lipped but amused tolerance to be seen on the faces of parents who, being tired of interfering, are letting their children slug it out between themselves.
Out there at Tullamarine the air was almost country, between the blasts of aviation fuel; and the sky was immense, with empires of blue– and pink-tinged clouds
. I dawdled behind the busy heels of Martin’s blue shoes, dreaming about the country. Javo waited for me, turned and put his arm around my shoulders. I got a whiff of his sweat, the sharp smell that made my heart shift.
Martin got the baggage out of the way and we were standing, suddenly forlorn, in the great shining echoing terminal, with half an hour to kill before it was time.
‘What about a brandy alexander?’ I suggested.
‘They are sixty-five cents a hit now,’ said Martin, dropping his schoolmasterish demeanour at the prospect of a small pleasure.
‘What the hell,’ croaked Javo. ‘I’ll pay. Come on.’
In a rush of belated generosity he ordered up two each, and we drank them in silence, planting our feet on the ugly carpet and avoiding each other’s eyes, for fear of a compromising emotion. I looked out through the wall of windows at the great jets blundering about on the ground.
And of course I bungled the farewell, as one always does. At the ‘first and final call’ we hastened to join the mob banking up at the departure lounge behind the metal detector. For a second I quailed at the thought that Javo might be carrying some absurd macho weapon as part of the fantasy: the bowie knife? Something worse? But he waited in line unperturbed. Their turn came and all in a rush I threw my arms round Javo, wanting to tell him take care you big idiot, I love you but instead I instruct, ‘Write to me, eh?’ and sound dry in spite of myself. He bends down to hug me but there’s no time to get the fronts of our bodies together and he turns away to the colder embrace of the security guard who runs a metal bleeper up and down his lanky body and presses him forward to the little archway. I kiss Martin: it always was easier, he is my height; and he too turns and offers himself to the metal detector. I am leaning over a wooden railing, I see them being sucked away from me towards the doorway and I’m seizing them with my eyes, oh, you are incapable! and just before he disappears, Javo gives a glance back over his shoulder and flashes me a rueful smile. Gone! that’s all. And just as well, says the little head-prefect on my shoulder, you don’t need ‘em, you can get back to the proper business of your life. OK, OK.
I walked back along the bright passageway and slowly through the carpark, and got into Martin’s car which was to be mine for longer than any of us had thought: and I drove home thinking about Javo’s long legs driving him crazy in an economy seat all the way to Singapore.
