Monkey Grip

by Helen Garner

  Every day Rita came and we bandaged our heads with scarves and painted and chipped at the old walls, and ate absent-mindedly, standing in the bare kitchen with handfuls of bread and sausage.

  I was starting to notice that I hadn’t fucked for a long time. It wasn’t the fucking I missed: I wanted love. I felt sad and hungry, or greedy rather, wishing to comfort myself. I ate small snacks all morning, felt disgusted with myself, and returned to my room upstairs to pick away at the walls hour after hour. Lou came to visit me. He worked with me all one afternoon. He kept dropping his scraper and dashing over to me and hugging me ferociously, kissing me and hugging me and making much of me, saying,

  ‘Ooh, isn’t this sexy work!’

  He stopped me from feeling sad in the flesh.

  ‘I haven’t fucked for weeks,’ I remarked. ‘I dream all the time about fucking with guys I know.’

  ‘What’ll you do?’ asked Lou, interested, pausing in his scraping and shuffling his Adidas runners in the mess of crumbling plaster we were standing in.

  ‘Oh,’ I said with a laugh, ‘something will fall in my path sooner or later.’

  The only thing that fell in my path was a trick parcel: but I was too lonely to tell it from the real thing. One night I was watching television at the tower with Willy. Everyone else had gone out. And something odd happened. Willy had a way of talking largely in political generalisations, then of suddenly saying something intensely personal in the same tone of voice, which always had a rather shocking effect. This night he delivered himself of some opinions on the nature of romantic love and its damaging effects. I listened placidly, silently agreeing, staring at the screen: then he dropped his head over the back of his armchair and said, looking at the ceiling,

  ‘What I feel for you isn’t romantic love. But it isn’t just sex, either. I’m finding it really exciting being in this room with you, and I’m going to be ex-treme-ly pissed off when the others start coming back in.’

  Immediately he sat up again and looked at the television, without a direct glance at me. I stared at the side of his head, too surprised to speak.

  People did start coming back in, but when it got late and they had all gone and I stood up to go home, he said,

  ‘Why don’t you stay here?’

  He was half-laughing, the caricature of the European student, all silvery and golden in gleaming spectacles, his short blond hair precisely cut, one wrist still bandaged from his eternal karate injury.

  ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I’d bleed all over you. And anyway, if Angela came in in the morning it’d freak me right out.’

  He laughed. ‘She won’t.’

  ‘Of course, you could come to my place – but you wouldn’t be able to stand the early rising.’ We kept looking at each other, laughing. ‘I bet we’d really have to slug it out,’ I said. ‘For example, you wouldn’t come to my place tonight because if you did you’d be admitting I’d won the first round.’

  He said nothing, laughing so his regular teeth showed, looking me right in the eyes. I got up and stood between his knees. We smiled at each other because it simply didn’t matter if we stayed together then, or later, or never. I leaned over and kissed him goodbye: slight prickle of his short blond beard, his mouth surprisingly soft. I put my hand under his jacket, under his arm, accidentally on the curve of a muscle.

  One evening, a week later, I was driving up Elgin Street in Martin’s car and caught sight of Willy in the laundromat. I stopped the car, parked it, and walked into the humming fluorescent brightness. He looked up from his newspaper and nodded.

  ‘Want a lift home?’

  ‘Yeah. My stuff’s in the dryer. Can you wait five minutes?’

  I waited while he sorted his clothes; he concentrated completely on the task, working quickly and neatly, folding his lips together in a line.

  In the car I remarked, ‘I have so many dreams and fantasies about you, I can hardly tell which is which any more.’

  He glanced at me with a half-smile. ‘Easy. Dreams are when you’re asleep, fantasies when you’re awake.’

  ‘Yeah – well, I don’t quite know what to do about ’em.’

  ‘Nothing – if you want them realised. Because then they wouldn’t be fantasies any more.’

  I felt as if I’d been given a push in the face. The car was full of the smell of his clean washing, warm and homely. I drove on in silence. Aware of overkill, he said, probably thinking he was changing the subject,

  ‘I’m really digging getting good at karate. Now, whenever anyone starts anything, I just adopt a half-fighting stance, and they drop back.’

  I dropped back.

  I dreamed: Javo and I were walking along a beach. There was no-one else in sight. We walked side by side for miles. I was talking to him. I was saying very fulsome emotional things. I said,

  ‘I love you so much that if I thought you didn’t love me, I’d want to die.’

  We trod and trod together through the sand, heavy going. I stopped talking. He said nothing. I looked sideways at him, waiting for him to speak, but he remained silent and did not look at me. I realised that he didn’t love me like that, that he was confused and embarrassed and didn’t know what to say.

  I lent Willy my car and he drove me home to Peel Street. We talked awkwardly for half an hour beside my cold fire. He was sick, I was tired. I kept thinking of my bed and getting into it to go to sleep. At last I said,

  ‘I’m going to bed, Willy. You could come with me if you liked.’

  A pause.

  ‘No . . . I think I’ll go home.’

  ‘OK.’

  A pause. He was standing next to my chair. We both stared at the fire.

  ‘I hope you get well,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah. I’ll take lots of that white stuff tomorrow, and try to get better.’

  ‘You ought to fast.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, but it’s so hard. Hunger’s like a disease: it has to be tended.’

  So is loneliness.

  He bent over, both hands in the pockets of his thick blue coat, and – I would say kissed – put his mouth against mine. His lips felt cold.

  ‘You’re not pissed off with me, are you?’ he said.

  ‘No. Of course I’m not.’

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. Probably.’

  ‘OK.’

  He went out my broken front door, having to slam it hard to make the lock catch. I went straight away into my room. I turned on the lamp and knelt on the bed to move the cushions aside. Tears came almost to my eyes.

  ‘I’m lonely. I’m lonely.’

  I thought perhaps he would get as far as the car, and come back.

  Men never come back.

  He didn’t.

  I lay in my bed in the empty house. I thought, when Javo comes back, his presence in my house might be just as dif-ficult, painful and wrong as Willy’s. Oh no! I imagined him behind me in the room, like Willy, pretending to read Rolling Stone while I stared at the fire and fiddled with briquettes, wondering how to ask him to stay, and whether I really wanted him to, and whether he would refuse with grace or hurtfully. But I wished for him. Maybe he had gone over the river into Laos, maybe he would end up in jail in Bangkok for six months, or longer. I wished for him, with his great lanky limbs and thin face and bright, bright blue eyes.

  WAS THAT SOMEBODY KNOCKING?

  Where are you, Javo?

  I kept feeling he would walk in any day. Sometimes I swore I could feel it in my bones.

  I was tired out. I worked like a dog on my room. As I scrubbed vigorously at the skirting boards I thought, I’ve never cared this much before about doing the job properly: why do I care so much now? Javo’s face flashed in the corner of my eye every now and then as I worked. I would like to bring him into my room, make him lie down, listen to him talk, look at his bony face.

  ‘Let’s go to the tower,’ said Gracie.

  ‘OK. What for?’

  ‘To see Jack. And because round there they always buy the Sunda
y papers, and they have in them carturns, and horse racing, and stories about girls who fuck with men to get money.’

  ‘You mean cartoons, dingbat.’

  At the tower Gracie went into her father’s room, and in the hallway I met Jessie, just back from Europe. Her face was pale and thin, under her straight fringe of red, red hair. She put her hand gently on my arm and smiled right into my eyes. No wonder people love her forever. Jessie and Javo together: a bed full of blue eyes.

  I dreamed: Javo was back. Everywhere I went people were telling me,

  ‘Hey, Javo is back, Nora, and he’s looking for you!’

  I didn’t know whether to stay where I was (on a farm, up a sandy road) and wait for him to come to me, or to set out myself and start searching for him round the households. I was full of joy and anticipation. As the dream progressed, this joy drained away and I realised that it was a dream. I woke up desolate.

  Martin and Javo were in Kuala Lumpur. Julian had got them out. I knew my feeling was right. I kept dreaming drunk-enly about seeing them come back through that airport door I’d watched them disappear into two months before. The day I met Martin’s father there, and we kissed cheeks, I bumped his spectacles; when I met Julian he trod on my toes; when I see Javo we will wrap ourselves around each other effortlessly.

  This was a fantasy.

  I had to be ready for anything: he would be traumatised, and so would I.

  Come home, Javo, and let me work it out from there.

  Days passed, days passed.

  It rained, and the long autumn was over. Rita and Juliet came to the house. I dreamed that Rita had the power of altering, by sheer willpower, the cellular structure of my moral fabric.

  Javo and Martin had been granted travel papers and could leave Kuala Lumpur. Martin, his father told me, was going to Europe; and so was Javo. My heart turned over. But how, I said, can he afford to travel in Europe? I lent him the money, said Martin’s father. The old familiar rage crept out of its lair.

  O, o, you bastard, if you can afford to go to Europe you can afford to send me a cable. Death, death in the crook of his arm – what’s a cable here or there?

  ‘Javo, I could say you owed me a letter. I wish I could stop the flow. I have leaked myself away towards you for nearly two months now. I ought to put the plug back in, fill up the tub again for myself and other people; and I try, but all the time there’s this stubborn little trickle running away, running away towards some unknown place where you are killing yourself. Where are you? What’ll I do with this letter?’

  In the evening I was washing the dishes and talking with Rita who was sitting by the fire.

  ‘Was that somebody knocking?’ she said.

  She got up and went to the door. My heart leaped up into my mouth. It’s Javo, would he knock so quietly? At the old house he always walked straight in. She was opening the door.

  ‘Oh – hullo!’ she said.

  My memory brought his scraping voice so vividly to mind that it grated in my ears. My heart was not beating. I leaned back from the sink to see and it wasn’t Javo. It was somebody else.

  I must be going crazy.

  No word from him. We live and don’t learn. Maybe he’ll shoot himself to death in K.L. Maybe he’s gone to Europe. What a nasty flight, coming down off a habit that big. If he’d walked in at that moment, I’d have moved over and made room for him. What’s love? Being a sucker, I suppose.

  I dreamed: I moved with Gracie into a new house in a swanky part of town. I was walking along the street. I saw an expensively dressed couple, glossy like Bunuel’s bourgeois, playing with their two groomed children on their front lawn. I introduced myself as a new neighbour. They appeared to be Belgian diplomats. We were chatting politely when a telephone rang beside the woman in the grass. She answered it, listened, registered surprise and pleasure. She took notes on a piece of paper, spoke briefly, hung up.

  ‘Who was that?’ I asked.

  ‘It was Javo!’

  What! and she hadn’t told him I was there, and he hadn’t asked! I was dumbfounded. She showed me her notes.

  ‘He’s started school in America,’ she said. I looked at her scrawly writing and couldn’t decide if it said Michigan or Canada.

  Clive came rushing into our house and thrust a postcard into my hand.

  ‘From the old house,’ he panted, just off his bike.

  I turned it over and saw an English postmark. ‘Darling Nora . . .'– what! Javo would never write such a thing. I looked at it properly and saw that it was from his mother. What a trick of fate. I hid my disappointment. I fell back into my state of aimless waiting. I couldn’t get free of it. Every morning I woke up empty.

  Life was getting thin and sick. I lay on the floor in front of the fire and listened to the litany of gossip sung by my friends. The loneliness was drying me out. I reached the bottom one Friday night. I lit a fire in my room, for animal comfort, got into my bed, turned off the lamp, looked at the fire. Dry, dry and aching.

  In the morning I got up and went about my business. I got home from the market at half past eleven. There was a pack and a red and yellow string bag on the doorstep. I stared at the bag, my arms full of shopping, Gracie and Juliet jostling at my legs. Through the weave of the bag I saw packets of Lucky Strike, and a big book bulging with paper and covered with Asian stamps. There could be no doubt. The children peered curiously at me.

  ‘Your face has gone all red!’ squeaked Juliet.

  ‘If it’s Javo, I know!’ said Gracie. ‘You’re going to cry of happiness!’

  He was nowhere in the house.

  I faked calm and climbed the stairs to my room, but my dry heart was swelling up fat. I was standing in my room doing nothing when I heard the knock at the door, and I was halfway down the stairs when the kids opened it, and I was so close to him in the small white hallway that I’d hardly had a chance to see him before we had our arms round each other without missing a beat.

  IT MAKES YOU FORGET YOUR FRIENDS

  That night when our skins touched, for the first time in months I felt perfectly sure that I wanted to be with the person I was with. We kissed, I remembered him, he looked straight into my face, and my heart and body were in tune with each other. What is it about him? I want to align myself with him, be his ally.

  He was weak, half ill, terribly thin, only five or six days off a big habit. He came just from touching and kissing. My heart, hollow and dry for months, slowly filled up.

  ‘My heart’s full for you,’ I whispered, ashamed of the words but having to say them.

  He smiled at me out of his lantern head, his eyes shone way back in their caverns:

  ‘I don’t ever want to stop loving you.’

  He fell asleep, but started twitching and groaning and crying out, and thrashing hard in the bed. I didn’t know how to comfort him and take away his fear.

  Five days, he lasted.

  When he came back, all the splinters of my life started to make sense again. But straight away we misunderstood each other. Driving in the afternoon, we saw a man and a woman in the street stop and kiss. We all smiled and I said,

  ‘Oh, ooh! They must be in love!’

  Gracie writhed with laughter. ‘I hate love! I’m never going to be in love!’

  ‘Good on you, Grace,’ said Javo, grinning. ‘Love’s shithouse. It makes you forget your friends.’

  ‘Oh, go on, you old grouch,’ I protested, to hide that idiotic flinching of the heart. ‘Do you think that’s what’s happened to you? You’re on your way to see your friends right now!’

  ‘No! What I meant was – it makes you forget you are friends!’

  I drove him to Easey Street, his old junkie haunt, and Gracie and I came in with him for a moment. The ring of white faces looked up from the fire at Javo who stood grinning in the doorway with Grace and me hovering behind him.

  ‘Javo! Where did you spring from?’

  ‘Bangkok, mate.’ He gave out a gust of nervous laughter, tossing back hi
s shorn head. Mark shifted to make room for him at the fire.

  ‘Plenty of cheap dope over there, eh?’ They all laughed the conspirators’ knowing laugh.

  ‘Yeah. But I’m off it.’

  ‘You got off?’ Mark’s face sobered in surprise. ‘Well done!’ There was genuine respect in his voice. I couldn’t help grinning at his tone. He saw this and turned away with a smile. ‘G’day, Nora.’

  ‘Hullo Mark. Well – I’m going, Javo.’ I took Gracie’s hand. ‘See you later on.’

  ‘OK. See you, mate.’ He touched my shoulder. ‘Thanks for the lift.’

  In my room I made a fire of wood. The window was open only a crack but a thin wind was edging through. Gone again, already.

  He came back with a Stevie Wonder record, and played the same song over and over: They Won’t Go When I Go, crouching desperately over the fire trying to warm the frozen marrow of his bones. No matter where I went in the house, I couldn’t escape that voice, its attenuated weeping, the shameless moan of its straining after holiness.

  I didn’t want to hold him, or stop him from hitting up, or be with him twenty-four hours a day. There were times in those five days when I was ready to beat my head with the rage of not being able to make myself clear to him: stupid, bloody tears kept rolling out of my eyes, it was so hard. But when we looked at each other sometimes, or he put his hand on my back in the street, or his arms round me in the night, everything fell simply and momentarily into place.

  On the fifth day, (days thick with difficulty and his sickness and his cold bones), he came out with it:

  ‘Every time I go to Easey Street,’ he said, ‘I suppose I’m hoping there’ll be a hit waiting for me on the table. If there’d been dope, these last few days, I’d have been into it . . . so how can I have an honest relationship with you, when that desire’s still there? You said you wanted me, not me and a bunch of fuckin’ chemicals.’