Monkey Grip

by Helen Garner

  He went into Rita’s room to watch TV. When I thought of going in there, I knew he would move over on her bed to make room, and I’d lie alongside him, and it would seem natural for him to put his arm under me, and I’d lean against his shoulder, and it would all seem as if nothing had ever happened to wreck everything.

  So I stayed where I was.

  I slept so still that the bed was undisturbed. When I got up I just had to tuck it in. Rita was not in the house. She must have stayed at Nick’s. She would not give up on that man. It looked crazy to me, wanting to run herself again and again into the wall of his indifference. Juliet cried when she found Rita’s bed empty in the morning, but she was easily comforted.

  ‘Why don’t you and Gerald sleep together these days?’ she asked when she came in in the morning.

  ‘We do,’ I replied, ‘but we like to take a break from each other every now and then.’

  I was missing Grace.

  Rita came home. I sat, disgruntled, on my bed ploughing through the last eighth of War and Peace which I already knew I would never finish. The rain came down, and came down. I got dressed and thought of walking across the market to the bookshops, but looked out at the rain and lost heart.

  I stood in the kitchen drinking a cup of tea with Rita. I was all curdled with irritation at her. She wanted to tell me what had happened with Nick the night before.

  ‘He promised me he’d go a week without having a hit,’ she said, ‘but when I got there he was stoned.’

  ‘Rita – that crusading stuff is not on! The junk’s his problem – you can’t get him off it.’

  ‘It’s not just the smack, though,’ she said. ‘He says I never trusted him.’

  ‘You had no reason to,’ I retorted. My voice sounded curt. I didn’t care. I wanted to push the point home, force her to see what she was doing to herself.

  ‘It was so sad, Nora! He says it tortures him, the way I torture myself.’

  ‘You are certainly a tiger for punishment,’ I said. ‘I just couldn’t believe it when you didn’t come home last night. You go on and on bashing your head against the wall.’

  Oh Nora. Butter would not melt in your mouth.

  Rita crouched there on Gracie’s Minnie Mouse chair, staring at the floor. Which comes first, her masochism or my sadism? I want to force her, shake her, give her the righteous blows which people deal out to hysterics. I put my tea down and stumped up the stairs to my room.

  I came down an hour later and found her sitting on the stairs, bag on shoulder, pants rolled up for the bike, head in hands, sobbing. I knelt on the step below her and put my arms round her and rocked her. She accepted comfort.

  ‘I can’t work when I’m like this,’ she wept. ‘I go into the studio and I just keep knocking things over.’

  No work, no love from where she wants it.

  It was my thirty-third birthday. I was sick. Thick head, lungs full of yellow stuff, eyes only half-seeing. I was bleeding, and aching, and bleeding, and aching. When I lay down and tried to go to sleep, it got worse in my head.

  The rain had stopped, the air was clear and very dark blue. I took two codiphen in the hope that the aching in my face and neck might lessen enough to let me sleep, but I was wide awake, on my birthday, in the silent house, head full of mucus and ideas. In a room by yourself, at that hour of night, you can beam your mind out on the ether. I felt berserk, mind on the surge. For a second at a time I could hallucinate the sound of waves breaking outside our house. I wondered what time of the day I was born.

  In the daylight I lay stupefied. Javo thumped up the stairs and into my room. I took one look at him and felt a great rush of love and sadness: he looked wrecked, filthy, dressed in ragged jeans. Through two horizontal tears in the front of the jeans I could see his thighs, their white skin. His hair was matted, his right eye was all red and swollen with styes, he scratched constantly. I wanted to pierce his bravado, ask him for the truth, but these days his ego was invested in keeping that brave smokescreen well in place. I felt like crying.

  He sat at my table and read the new Digger. I lay under the blankets, breathing through my mouth and watching him. He had a glass of coca cola beside him: when he picked it up and tilted his head back to drink, I saw his throat, that vulnerable and seldom-exposed part of his body. At Freycinet, the day we walked out of the bush at Coles Bay and stuffed ourselves with lollies and soft drinks, I had seen him in the same way, guzzling eagerly, head back in that same position, showing his throat and the flat underside of his bony jaw. A kind of weak sadness oozed out of my thoughts and I turned over on my side and began to read. I fell towards sleep, stopped myself for a second to wonder if it was safe, remembered it was Javo in the room whose presence if nothing else I could trust, and let myself slip away. I couldn’t have slept more than a few minutes. He had finished the newspaper, and was getting his things together to leave. I woke up and looked at him. He smiled at me in the way I remembered, without defensiveness, standing next to my bed looming up to the ceiling. I put out my hand and touched his leg. He took my hand, and we smiled at each other and I said,

  ‘Are you all right, Javes?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are you – is everything all right?’

  ‘Yep – yeah! I’m OK.’

  ‘See you soon.’

  ‘Yeah – see you, Nor.’

  And crashed off down the stairs and out the front door.

  Gerald came, in the evening.

  ‘Want to go for a drive?’ he said. ‘It might do you good to get out of the house.’

  I got up and struggled into my clothes.

  ‘One thing, though,’ I said, ‘can I have a window open? I feel as if I’ll suffocate, otherwise.’

  ‘But my neck will get cold.’

  ‘Wear a scarf.‘

  He tossed the keys at me and said, half angry, half joking,

  ‘Here – take the keys and go for a drive by yourself.’

  I was pulling my jumper over my head. It fell in saggy folds and I stood still, unable to gauge his tone. He threw me a sideways glance. No-one spoke. I went over and lay on the unmade bed, kicked off my shoes and curled up in a ball. I could hear my own noisy, sick breathing. I wished I could dematerialise, simply cease to be there. I didn’t care what he did. I just felt awful.

  We drove down the bay. I thought for the first ten minutes that I was going to be sick, or faint. I couldn’t get used to the motion of the car and my ears were dead. My head was stuffed with cottonwool. But under everything describable, there was something else wrong with me – not depressed, just bad.

  ‘You ought to go to the doctor,’ said Gerald, looking at me with the mixture of resentment and concern people feel when they begin to realise you are not malingering.

  It was a terrible night.

  I fell asleep at 11.30, dozed while Gerald quietly played his guitar, heard him get in beside me, remembered nothing else until a sudden wakening in the dark, turning in time to see him fully dressed sliding out the door. Going! where? to the dunny? I put my head back on the pillow and must have fallen asleep again: next thing I knew, he was getting back into bed. I woke up and turned over.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘No . . . not really.’

  ‘What’s wrong? Where have you been?’

  ‘I feel terrible. There is some awful lump inside me. I’ve been downstairs. I was lying on the floor crying.’

  Crying! He told me once he never cried. Wide awake now. I took hold of his shoulders, held him very hard and listened to small sounds he made, gasps almost of relief.

  ‘But! What’s wrong? What can I do for you?’

  ‘Oh, this is what I need,’ he whispered, head back on the pillow, submitting to hard hugs and cradling. My heart filled up with a puzzled love for him, and my head stayed quite steady, thinking,

  ‘This is going to be harder than I thought: but I can do it.’

  ‘Come on, talk, talk,’ I urged.

  ‘Well – I wa
s – lying down there thinking – Why are you sick? And why do you go on bleating about Gracie coming home – when I need something from you?’

  Small shock waves, at the injustice of what he is asking, while I still held and rocked him, wanting to soothe. Does he want a mother? Can I be that to him? Ought I to be? I began to sense myself as something very balanced and steady, and him as a dark mass yawing wildly and out of control. Got to let him pass through and round me, keep my centre, not let his disorder pull me askew.

  It seemed we lay for some time with our arms round each other. He got calmer.

  ‘Let me move a bit.’ He shifted his body. I turned over and fitted my back into his curve. It was more peaceful.

  ‘I thought about you a lot today,’ I said, ‘when I was reading. ‘I thought about fucking with you.’

  ‘I masturbated three times last night,’ he said.

  ‘Did you? What were you thinking about?’

  ‘About this girl who was at our gig on Saturday night.’

  ‘Yeah? What happened?’

  ‘She was sitting at the table with us, paying us a lot of attention. And when we’d finished playing, she invited us to this party. By the time we got there it was nearly over, people were picking up bottles and cleaning up . . . there were lots of rooms, and I couldn’t see her anywhere. And when we were leaving I went looking for Philip to get a lift home. I found him in a room I hadn’t been in. I went in and said, “Can I get a lift with you?” – and then I saw the girl, she’d been in there all along.

  ‘So I went and sat down with her, and talked, but before I could work out if anything was likely to happen, Philip came over and said, “Are we going, then?”

  ‘So nothing did happen.

  ‘I went home, and masturbated, and went to sleep, and woke up, and masturbated, and went to sleep – and there was one more time that I wasn’t sure about . . . I was all in a flutter.’

  All the time he was talking my heart was turning over. I stared in the almost-dark at the corner of the bookshelf where my black jacket hung. I remembered him saying once, with just enough self-mockery to make it true, ‘I want to be a rock and roll star’. I saw myself in a house, alone and still and old enough to be alone and still, while he rotated like a rhythmic planet, somewhere in the world outside.

  ‘How do you think it makes me feel, hearing you tell that story?’ I asked, very carefully.

  ‘In terms of jealousy, you mean?’

  ‘Something like that – jealousy, or whatever.’

  ‘I don’t think you need to be jealous. Because it was just a groupie thing – she was all, you know, dressed up – silver boots, tight top, dark red lips – and it’s not that I regret it not happening.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘I didn’t even start to get to know her. And I don’t think she ever would have lost that smile. Why . . . how does it make you feel?’

  ‘Awful. Sort of left out.’

  He hugged me. ‘If I hadn’t got to know you, I’d regret it a real lot,’ he said.

  I said nothing. He went on,

  ‘Does it worry you that I might get more sexually excited by people like her than by you?’

  ‘Of course it does.'(Remembering him saying, ‘Do you feel horny? Because I don’t.’ Bang, the door slammed in my face.)

  ‘But,’ he said, ‘I think our fucking is really good. Even if . . . technically . . . we don’t . . . the feeling is still there, and that’s what it’s all about, I reckon. Don’t you?’

  ‘Yeah.'(His face always turned aside, away from my eyes; how rarely what I do can make him gasp, cry out, lose himself.)

  ‘You talk a lot,’ he said, ‘about other people you’ve fucked with as being more compatible with you.’ Long-ago people.

  ‘Oh, I . . .’ I give a groan, unable to dredge up words. Oh Javo, how your face would turn tender, how you would say my name softly, how I would come just watching the sweetness flow into your face.

  He hugs me again, I’m comforted by his body all down my back. I get out of bed and take off my nightdress, thinking partly of fucking, partly of the foolishness of our skins not touching through all the layers of my sickness. I turn my front to him, we lie along each other close and comfortable.

  ‘Oooh, I must go to sleep,’ he says. His tone is tinged with warning. I move aside from him, into the cooler space.

  ‘Did you think we would fuck?’ he asks.

  ‘I guess I thought we might.’

  ‘I am too miserable to fuck. I can only fuck when I’m happy.’

  ‘That’s all right.’ My back is turned to him again. I’m lonely out there on the edge of the bed; but I’m sick, sick, sick, everything I think or say is made drab through my sickness.

  ‘I can’t get over,’ I say, hearing again that careful note in my voice, ‘the way you turn off.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘One minute you’re asking me for love, and the next you are pushing me away, get away, arms’length.’

  A pause.

  ‘I get scared,’ he says, ‘when someone wants to fuck me and I don’t want to.’

  We do fall asleep; and wake at the same moment to a room full of sun, eight o’clock in the morning and I have been dreaming:

  I am in a kitchen. Its walls are peeling drastically. I take a knife, insert its blade behind a peeling section, and turn it as if to strip off the layer; it loosens easily, but I see that the area which will fall is very large, that it will make a mess on the floor which I will have to clean up, and that I don’t know whether the condition of the wall underneath it is good enough to be exposed. I change my mind, remove the knife and put it back on the bench. I decide to let the peeling sections fall off in their own good time.

  ‘I think,’ I said to Gerald, ‘it would be a good idea if we didn’t see each other till the end of the week.’

  Instantly he backed off, withdrew, turned a black face away from me.

  ‘That’s a bit rough,’ he said. ‘When you’re sick you want to have me round – but as soon as you start to get well you say you don’t want to see me.’

  ‘Oh, that’s so unfair!’ A man, a man. He doesn’t let the feelings show but snaps up that steel screen of reason.

  He clammed up on me, slammed shut. His face was tight and accusing.

  ‘It would be better,’ I suggested, ‘if you said, “That makes me feel bad”, instead of putting up a reason why I’m wrong.’

  We battled it out. It was like having my foot in the door and him pushing it shut. He let it open a small crack, then a crack more, and I reached round it and grabbed his hand; and he let me touch him but kept his face turned away.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I made a mistake – don’t let’s go any further into it.’

  I let it drop, but I thought, listen mate, one day we’ll go so far into it that you won’t want to turn back. And I’ll shove you off the cliff and you’ll fly away.

  TINY PUNCTURE HOLES

  After seven days of illness I could still hardly breathe, and waves of weakness came over me whenever I stood up. I wished to be out in the windy sunshine, but I lay flat in my bed, staring at my red curtain flying against the white wall. In the afternoon Javo thundered in. Seeing me in my glory, he turned and bellowed down the stairs,

  ‘Hey, Hank! Come up here!’

  And Hank, either not stoned or not as stoned as Javo, comes in and sits on my chair smiling. Hank’s face is so streaked with car grease that for a second I think he is wearing stage makeup. They start talking about some freaked-out non-junkie crim they know called Kenny.

  ‘He’s right off ‘is brick,’ declares Javo.

  ‘He kept asking me for a hit,’ says Hank, ‘but I didn’t have any. I kept telling him, “Mate, I haven’t got any!”’ Spreads his hands and laughs, showing his broken teeth.

  ‘Yeah,’ opines the king of beasts, loafing back against my wall with his great boots on my bedspread, red styes gleaming on his eyelid, hair matted like straw or
rope – ‘I reckon junk’d be that guy’s saving grace. I really reckon it’s just what he needs. It’d calm him right down.’

  My jaw drops. I steal a look at Hank and see him watching Javo sideways, smiling a small smile. Oblivious, Javo rants on, gesturing expansively, enjoying himself. Hank turns and catches my eye and we both burst out laughing. Javo is unabashed.

  Hank leaves, Javo stays. We begin to talk.

  ‘Who do you fuck with?’ I enquire, folding my hands on my chest.

  ‘No-one.’

  ‘Do you miss it?’

  ‘No – oh, sometimes.’

  ‘I miss you sometimes,’ I admit.

  From this moment we are friends again. He smiles at me, hugs me clumsily. He nods off, comes back, apologises:

  ‘I shouldn’t come here when I’m this stoned.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ I say, and lie back on my pillows, restfully regarding his battered face. I’ll love that wrecked bastard forever, along with all the other people under whose influence I’ve had my hard shell cracked.

  He leaves. On his way out he says, ‘Give us a kiss, Nor.’

  Willingly I put my mouth against his blackened junkie lips.

  That night everyone was out but me.

  Doing my washing in the rickety machine in the bathroom. While the machine toils and shrieks, I crouch on the Minnie Mouse chair outside the back door, looking quietly up at the half moon which rolls stubbornly in the narrow gap of sky between our house and the shop next door. The air is deep, deep blue, one star, I feel a hot day coming when this night is over. I’m full of restlessness. Not lonely, exactly – my head is racing with ideas. But it is that old treacherous feeling that real life is happening somewhere else, and I’m left out. The air stirs a little, Rita’s newly planted herbs move their small leaves. I finish hanging out a dozen hankies from my flu, which is almost over; and I close the back door behind me and go upstairs.

  In the morning, light and air wake me. I go outside and see the sky a thousand miles high, covered with a fine net of almost invisible cloud. My head begins to turn, it fills with unspoken words, I don’t try to seize them but let them run unchecked. They seem to slip into my veins and my limbs and the capillaries of my skin. It is just convalescence, and the summer morning. ‘The universe resounds with the joyful cry “I am!”’