Monkey Grip

by Helen Garner

  ‘It’s nearly ten,’ I repeated. ‘See you.’

  I went off down the hall. There I saw his journal sticking out of his calico bag. I whisked it out and into Jack’s room and sat down to snoop: hands trembling, mouth watering. He had glued to the inside of the back cover an old photo of me, stolen from one of Jack’s boxes of history.

  ‘Nora said my life was sordid,’ I read. ‘The word is stuck like a piece of gum to the inside of my skull; in fact I’m almost getting to have a feeling for it. Rita came to see me at Easey Street, offered me a place to sleep in her studio. She’s the warmest-hearted person I’ve met in a long time. She asked me what I thought about the fact that she had fallen in love with Nick. I felt happy about that, in a way . . . but also a bit thrown because I’d fancied the idea of some kind of scene with her myself. Well, that’s that.’

  I put the book back in the bag, and with one dexterous flourish I turned my jealousy against her: anything rather than estrange myself further from him. What a mechanism. With a head full of dark thoughts, I wandered miserably up again to the room where he was lying, and stood at the end of the bed.

  ‘I’ve read your book.’

  He smiled, I smiled.

  I said, not understanding the urge to hurt myself, ‘Why don’t you have a scene with Rita?’

  He looked at me, opened his mouth and said, shaking his head,

  ‘No. I don’t want to.’

  I stood there silently, suffering pain in the heart.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘’bye,’ and stepped down the step. I heard him speak, went back. ‘What?’

  ‘Come here a minute.’

  I went over to the side of the bed. He reached up his arm, took hold of my shoulder, pulled my face down into his neck, his face half turned away.

  ‘My face is cold from the wind,’ I stammered, not used to him touching me. He turned his face to me and kissed me on the mouth. I stayed leaning over, held against him, for seconds. He let go and I straightened up and went away down the stairs.

  Stoned, stoned, stoned again. Coke madness. Sitting up in my well-made bed, all alone on a Saturday night, my tongue numb from licking up last night’s coke crumbs off the mirror, I pondered the nature of dissipation and pleasure. My nose began to bleed weakly from the left nostril, probably something to do with the quantities of coke I had absorbed into the mucous membrane the night before, first with Jessie in the tower kitchen when I was supposed to be stirring the soup for supper, and again later with Bill, in my room after the show. We were stoned when we got home; but we snorted more and lay back, and I talked compulsively for a while and then lapsed into a silence, struck dumb by the flood of fantasies which came pouring through my head. Visions of strange countries, Arab or South American; ‘urban delirium'; memories of a room where I once gave in to hepatitis in Bill’s old house in Sydney. I remembered the last time I’d been so coked: the night in summer when Javo brought me some and I snorted it, and lay awake all night beside him while he came down hard after days of shooting it. His eye rolled round to me again and again, his face tried feebly to smile.

  Bill and I fucked one ordinary, human fuck, and then the coke took over and we were doing something else: my head raced and plunged away into other worlds, and my body flowed on a tide of uncontrollable fantasy, singing sweet and high the while.

  I slept two hours barely; and the next day I kept going only by smoking huge quantities of black hash. I went to a party at Eve’s. Clive was there.

  ‘Come and stay the night with me, Nora!’ he said, taking my hand in his callused palm; but I couldn’t, I was so exhausted.

  ‘I’ve been fucking my arse off all night,’ hissed Eve to me as she passed me a plate of food. Jessie and I made each other laugh till we were nearly sick.

  Everybody was out of their heads.

  And when I passed through the tower on my way home, I found Javo had left me a note pinned to the board at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Dear Nora, I’m sorry for trying to make you my conscience and I don’t know how to go about making that any different right now – I’m just a fool with a stupid burden that I can’t shake off – without lumps of it hitting other people close by. I’m a self-centred ratbag – and probably because of that ugly fact – my love for you is in short bursts with long self-engrossed advertisements in between that last so long you lose track of the story, like Hal Todd on Night Owl Theatre. And my other strong fear was for a time there losing grip on knowing emotionally I wouldn’t freak out if there was no-one there beside me. It’s just like reassuring yourself that you can do more than just survive, being by yourself. Things will have to change – I can’t say when – but only you can say if it’s too late.’

  I came back from the laundry, walked in in my boots and rolled-up pants. Rita was home, standing at the stove. She turned her bright face to greet me, smiling away there with the wooden spoon in her hand.

  ‘What have you been doing since I last saw you?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh – starving myself, and getting stoned, and fucking, and slugging it out with Javo – I’m exhausted, trying to work out how it all got blown.’

  She nodded, stirring the food with one hand and ruffling up my hair with the other. I looked at her flushed cheeks, and without having to think about it, I suddenly threw my arms round her waist and said,

  ‘Give us a hug, Rita! I’ve been feeling badly towards you, because I thought Javo was going to fall in love with you.’

  ‘Oh!’ she laughed, hugging me back. ‘I thought – I wondered why – how can you have thought that?’

  ‘I read his diary.’ We both burst out laughing.

  ‘Oh no!’ she said. ‘I went to see him because I was afraid that my attitude towards dope might have had something to do with you and him breaking up. And anyway, I saw him today in the street, and he acted as if we’d never met, he was so stoned – and I thought, poor Nora! If that’s what he used to do to her, well!. . .’

  ‘I guess I feel pretty good now, though,’ I said. ‘And tomorrow I’m going up the country to stay with my parents for a couple of days.’

  ‘Good idea. Get out of town for a while.’ She banged the spoon on the edge of the saucepan. ‘Right. Food’s ready. Do you want to call the kids?’

  When I got up in the morning, Rita said,

  ‘Javo came round last night.’

  ‘What? I didn’t hear him. What time?’

  ‘About three in the morning. He wanted the key to the studio; he’s asleep along there now.’

  My heart turned over at the thought of him passing my door and waking Rita instead. The willing prisoner. Won’t this ever end? I went down to the studio and glanced in at him, still, under the blankets, his face hidden and his hair standing on end. I didn’t go nearer, fearing to be uncool.

  What is this, that we all do?

  I was so tired.

  Up in the mountains – or rather, in the winding valley at their feet – the air was thick with pollen.

  I felt a freak there: short hair, dulled and anxious look, nothing comfortable to talk about. My mother showed the dam to me, and the underground spring behind the house. She had gumboots on and leaped across channels. I puddled gingerly in my city runners. Lethargy stole over me, the way Javo described smack: warm lead poured through the veins.

  Gracie and I walked a mile or so to the post office. I heard a quick rustle in the grass and remarked,

  ‘I wonder if that was a snake.’

  Gracie, city child, went completely white and clutched my hand.

  I would go nuts in the country. I was already nuts in the city, but had learnt to handle it.

  I was washing my hands at the basin. I imagined that the phone would ring and it would be Javo, saying in his hoarse voice,

  ‘Come back, will you, Nor?’

  Idiot. This is not going to happen.

  I should have let it all pass, but I was unwilling to. The pain of it was by no means unbearable. Sometimes I could sidestep it altoge
ther. I remembered Anna Wulf in The Golden Notebook saying to her psychoanalyst,

  ‘I came to you so you could teach me how to feel again.’

  Maybe one day it would come to that.

  Meanwhile, I breathed the polleny air and waited for dark, for another twelve hours of bottomless sleep.

  I woke, and the whole sky was falling in rain. It rained steadily all night, and was still raining by morning. At three in the morning my father went outside with a torch: at first I thought it was lightning, but then I heard his step crunch on the gravel as he passed my window to find the source of a leak in the spouting. The house was tight as a drum: not a drop of water came in. I lay there, protected in my bed like a child again; and at Peel Street Javo comes in in the middle of the night, up the stairs, past my door, into Rita’s room, stands beside her bed till she wakes, says,

  ‘Let me sleep with you.’

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘I won’t because of Nora'; but she wants to, and his presence persuades her; he gets into the bed and they fuck, and he comes quickly with that gasp of breath he makes, and Rita thinks,

  ‘Is that the way he and Nora used to fuck? How come she was so happy with it?’

  Out rolled this fantasy, smooth as butter; and I fell asleep and dreamed about the sea: my children drowning, beyond my help, my screams unheard.

  My back ached and ached.

  I daydreamed of an end to this pain, and of another attempt at Sydney. I sat on the grassy hump behind my parents’ house, armed with a stick against the magpies which zipped mercilessly about my ears whenever I went outside. I talked out loud to myself, half crazy. I thought about Javo and his gawky limbs.

  I went up to the dam in the middle of the afternoon to pick up the yabby nets. The sun was shining out of a clear sky, a cool breeze passed over the paddock and the water before it struck my skin. I took the nets in my hand and started back towards the slope that led away from the dam. But for a few minutes I stood still on the lip of the grassy slope and held the nets and stared at the countryside: mountains a couple of miles away in front of me, the dam and a sloping paddock behind me, the house down there to one side almost out of sight. At my feet wet strips of marsh grass, and in my ears the endless rhythm of the small frogs cricketing in the dam.

  Just in that moment when the senses’ intake, hearing and seeing, began to melt into one impression, Gracie called me from the house and it all broke apart again into its separate categories. But for a few seconds there it was like Joni Mitchell’s song:

  ‘And you want to keep moving

  and you want to stay still

  but lost in the moment

  some longing gets filled. . .’

  Home, home, home.

  We drove forty miles down the Hume and my back stopped aching.

  No-one home. I walked into my room and looked at my face in the mirror and was surprised to see that I had a slight suntan, and that my hair had grown, not just longer, but thicker.

  Javo had been in my room. A lump of cigarette ash lay on my table between the opened letters: no-one else would have dared.

  That night I had a terrible dream: I came into the house and found it full of the dense feeling of two people sexually involved with each other: Rita and Javo had been fucking, and I was totally excluded. I could not break through. I was dreadfully upset. I tried to talk to Javo, half-crying, full of grief, but he adopted an airy tone and brushed my questions aside.

  ‘Is it that you just aren’t interested any more?’ I asked, almost pleading.

  ‘Yes, that’s about it,’ he replied, not looking at me.

  There was no communication between me and Rita in the dream, only my wretchedness and jealousy. The atmosphere of it was thick with misery. I woke up out of it and found it was the very early hours of the morning, and the house still, but I could not fight my way out of the thickness of that dream. I lay there wide awake, battling with it and with my feeling of shame, and very slowly it began to dissipate itself, and release me. But the room was full of his presence, and of my fears. What was I afraid of? Nothing much, by the time daylight came, and I began to use my brain.

  DAMNED HIDE

  Lunchtime in Pulcinella: me, Rita, Bill and Willy grumbling over a mediocre pasta.

  ‘Ah – there he goes, the star of stage and screen,’ remarked Willy nastily. I looked up and saw Javo, white-faced and rough-headed, stumble past the window, heading east down Elgin Street, looking for a hit.

  No pain.

  At one o’clock in the morning he loomed in my doorway, hesitating till I woke up properly and said hullo. Both on our best behaviour, ‘being friends’, we talked awkwardly for a while. When conversation flagged, he mooched round the room and picked up his Bangkok journal off the bottom shelf. He sat on my chair and read over what he had written months ago, when he had been frightened and even more strung out than he was now.

  I lay there watching him, saying nothing. He was a bit stoned, I observed. I looked at his face, which changed as he read. His hair had grown out from the prison haircut, and looked thick and dry and matted.

  ‘I’m keeping you up,’ he offered absent-mindedly as he turned a page.

  ‘No, it’s all right,’ I said politely.

  At last he got up, his head nearly touching the low ceiling. ‘It’s getting late. I think I’ll go to bed.’ He turned off the light, and was hesitating between me and the door, about to start off for the studio.

  ‘Give us a hug,’ I said, because I wanted to touch him. He sat down on the edge of the bed and put one gangly arm around me. We hugged each other, and I began to stroke his face and hair, for the pleasure of feeling him again. He flopped his lantern head on to my shoulder, and let me go on stroking. I thought, no-one has touched him since he left me in Sydney. His eyes were closed in the dark, and I stroked him over and over, while my head filled with fantasies of what might happen in the morning if I asked him to stay with me.

  He sat up, rested his elbows on his knees, and stared doggedly in front of him in the dark room.

  ‘I would like to ask you to stay, but I don’t want to get kicked in the teeth again in the morning.’

  He sat silent.

  ‘Do you want to stay?’

  ‘I don’t know, mate. I just don’t know.’

  I put my hand on his thigh and began to stroke his leg, both because I liked the feel of it and because in some perverse way I wanted to make him stay with me, to seduce him to stay, perfectly benevolently, to coax him to drop his pride, or fear, or whatever it was around his neck like an albatross.

  ‘Get in here.’

  He started to pull off his boots. He took off his clothes, awkwardly, and got in beside me. When I pulled off my shirt and we lay down together, I was glad. No anxiety.

  But he was inscrutable. I heard him give a small sigh at the moment when our skins met, but after that no sign from him; and I tuned myself to his inscrutability, and myself became opaque. I did not say a word. Our wariness and politeness extended itself into the way we fucked, though our bodies remembered each other without strain.

  And finally we turned aside from each other to sleep, and I folded myself round his long back for a minute, put my knees in the curve of his knees.

  ‘Goodnight,’ we said, the only word we spoke. We even kissed goodnight, as we always used to do, and it was a gesture of goodwill.

  He slept till three in the afternoon. When he got up to leave, well into the sick part of his day, he came across to my chair and hugged my face clumsily against his hip, meaning goodbye.

  Two days passed. Claire came to visit, and we lay on the cloudbed in the afternoon and talked about our parents. In the evening I was eating a meal at the dining room table with Rita and the kids when the front door burst open and Javo came pounding in, ready to use the studio to make some posters.

  ‘Gimme a rapidograph, and a pencil, and a ruler, will you, Nor?’ he croaked. I got them for him, and began to feel bad-tempered. He refused food and thundered away to
the studio. Rita and I gave each other a look. We put the kids to bed. I cleaned the living room, swept the floors, decided to stay home and let Rita go out on her own; collapsed in a chair; and remembered Javo saying in Sydney, ‘You never take any interest in the work I do.’ So, in the warm evening, I wandered along the street to see what he was doing in the studio.

  The roller door was wide open, light streamed out on to the pavement. He was sitting at the table in the bare white concrete room, working neatly and cleverly at a drawing.

  ‘You’re good at it, aren’t you?’ I remarked, impressed.

  ‘I’m a good copier.’

  I stood beside him, watching.

  ‘Hey, Nor – will you do us a favour?’

  ‘Depends what it is.’ We were smiling at each other.

  ‘I think I left my packet of Marlboro at the house – get ‘em for me, will you?’

  ‘You lazy bastard!’ I cried in amazement. ‘Why don’t you get ‘em yourself?’

  ‘Oh, get fucked!’ he said, laughing too and tossing his head about. ‘I’m working!’

  ‘Well, what do you think I’ve been doing for the last two hours? Don’t you call that work?’

  ‘Yeah, I know it’s work, but . . .’

  I was already on my way out the door, conned once again by his laughter and his damned hide, actually heading for the Marlboro I was, until my foot hit the pavement outside, and at that second the feminist rage struck, and my intention changed to its precise opposite. I walked back to the house, very steadily past the living room where no doubt the small red object was lying, up the stairs and into my room. I lay on the bed and picked up After Leaving Mr McKenzie and read until I fell asleep.

  Javo came into the house at four the next afternoon, having slept the day away in the studio. I went downstairs and stood around the kitchen while he helped himself to a meal. I even cooked him an egg. We talked: it was a close parody of the way we used to talk when we loved each other. But . . . we walked together over to Carlton, and by the time we reached the big roundabout we had ceased to be with each other: just striding along parallel paths, three feet apart, silent; him for real, me faking. When we got to the tower, he disappeared. And I left again, in haste to catch up with Jack and Gracie. I jumped into a cab and chased them down Russell Street to Jimmy’s in the city. I ran in, eager for a sight of their familiarity. They were sitting at a table with Willy and Paddy, who had their backs to the door. I put my hands on their shoulders, and said,