Monkey Grip

by Helen Garner

‘. . . Not a matter of suffering for nothing?’

  ‘Something like that. The only thing I was dreading, really, was the morning – coming out and seeing him – but he’s already gone, so that’s not a problem.’

  ‘I guess he’s gone to score. But also, you know . . . when he can be, he is a kind person.’

  The next evening Javo and I went to Jimmy’s for dinner. He made me gasp with tales of his bourgeois friends in Hobart: days on beaches, nights in the casino, falling in love with married women with rich and jealous husbands.

  ‘Geez, Javo, you look so well, I can’t get over it.’

  ‘I am. Must be almost exactly a year since I was in St V’s with septicaemia – remember?’

  ‘Do I what! You were off your brick. You pulled the drip out of your arm and nicked off. I was spewing.’

  ‘You know when you came to visit me that night, with Martin? It was a pretty . . . cool visit. I wanted to say a lot of things to you, but I couldn’t, not while Martin was there.’

  My heart ached a little, in retrospect, at my briskness towards him that night.

  He went to the theatre and I went home. He came in later when I was lying on my bed reading.

  ‘Nor, is it cool if I crash in your lounge room?’ he said. ‘They’re having a big coke binge at Easey Street and I can’t keep away from it if I hang out there.’

  Surprised again at his resolution.

  ‘Of course.’ And he slept in there and I slept in my room and Gerald slept in his, and there we all were.

  In the daylight I was careful to concern myself largely with my own affairs. I was quite detached from him, or from my own feelings about him, and I thought it would never be the same again: as if I had unconsciously, over the six weeks of his absence, come to terms with the ways in which we would never be able to be harmonious. But occasionally I got caught out by his violently blue eyes, and the way he riveted me with them sometimes. The old fantasies were still hanging about . . . but I let ‘em boil away for a bit until I was left with a gritty residue, which could be rolled up in balls and stored in the bottom of my pocket.

  He left our house at ten in the morning to have a turkish bath in St Kilda, and didn’t come back. By seven in the evening I was lying on my bed wondering if I ought to go and fetch him.

  ‘Do you think I should?’ I asked Eve.

  ‘I reckon whole groups of people can take the load of helping someone get off dope,’ she said.

  ‘Tell him he hasn’t worn out his welcome,’ said Cobby.

  Grace and I took the car and followed his trail from one junkie household to another. At Neill Street something mysterious was happening in the bathroom: when Micky came out he was a shade too polite for comfort. Javo had just left. I went back to Easey Street: no Javo. As a last chance I drove over to Napier Street. Gracie in the back seat asked,

  ‘Nora, will you tell me some stories about people dying?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I like those stories.’

  ‘I’ll tell you some later.’

  ‘OK.’

  At Napier Street I saw through the overgrown vegetation Javo’s pink T shirt and rough head, his back turned towards the gate. I parked the car. By the time I’d got Gracie out and crossed the road and entered the garden, he had climbed up the nectarine tree with Hank: I could see his face smiling down at me from among the leaves, and yes, his eyes were pale, the china blue whited out again, and I pretended not to see and talked brightly about having come to ask him round for tea.

  ‘Thanks, Nor,’ he said, balancing his feet in broken sandals on the crumbly grey branches, ‘but I’ve gotta see a bloke about this movie, and pick up my jeans.’

  ‘Pick up your jeans?’

  ‘Oh – you know – the free ones you get for the movie. But thanks anyway.’ He smiled and smiled, veiling himself behind the leaves.

  ‘That’s OK,’ I hear my normal, sensible voice say. ‘I’ll see you later, then.’

  ‘Yeah – see you, Nor.’

  ‘See you,’ said Hank, standing an improvised ladder against the fence, and said Jean, crouching under the Hills Hoist poking in the dry lumpy soil with a trowel. Gracie and I got back in the car. We ate half a nectarine each, very big and sweet.

  ‘Is he stoned?’ she asked me, chewing over my shoulder as I put the car in gear.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, I dunno. I guess he feels better that way.’

  ‘Do you feel sad?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘I wonder if he will ever stop being a junkie?’

  We pondered this in silence, rolling home down the Napier Street hill. Home from seeking him out, I felt quite bad, and sad, my heart and stomach mixing themselves up together. At dinnertime I couldn’t stand the noise, which was increased by the presence of the whole Rathdowne Street household.

  Gerald was unhappy.

  ‘It’s not your relationship with Javo I mind,’ he said. ‘I just feel so neglected.’

  I tried to reassure him, in his bed after midnight; but my words were hollow, banging around in that empty chamber of my head in which I waited treacherously for the thump of Javo’s familiar step; and, as sometimes happens during late-night talks of this kind, I was dismayed to find myself continually almost overwhelmed by great floods of sleep. I battled to stay awake, but at last through a fog I dimly heard him say,

  ‘. . . Don’t you think that’s true?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ashamed of myself. ‘I just can’t help falling asleep. I didn’t hear what you said.’

  ‘OK,’ he said, patiently enough but turning his back. ‘It’s all right.’

  I said over my shoulder, ‘Goodnight’; we turned to kiss, and suddenly we were in each other’s arms, rushed through with that surge of desire that comes sometimes at the hopeless point of any argument.

  FLAPPING LIKE A BLOODY BANDAGE

  At the baths I lay back on my elbows on a towel, Rita on one side of me and Claire on the other. We surveyed the antics of the children and gossiped benevolently, straw hats pulled down over our eyes.

  ‘You look like the three wise women,’ remarked Gerald on his way past.

  Claire let him get out of earshot and asked me,

  ‘How is it with Javo back at your place?’

  ‘Oh, OK. A bit weird. But good.’

  ‘Geez he makes me laugh. Yesterday Gracie wanted to light his cigarette for him – but he said in that croaky voice'– she mimicked him – ‘“Come off it, mate – you’d take a week!” I think he’s great!’

  Something about Claire always made me work hard in conversation. I riffled through my recent reading for titbits to relate to her, and told her some things I’d read about Dorothy Parker in Lillian Hellman’s autobiography. She kept letting her head fall back in paroxysms of silent laughter.

  Gracie came to ask me for some money. She leaned right over me in her sopping bikini, and put her face almost against mine to speak. I gave her the money and she trotted off with the Roaster.

  ‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she,’ said Claire. ‘She’s got a mist around her eyes.’

  After the baths, Paddy showed up at my place. I washed myself and put on a clean cotton dress and we went to the Southern Cross. Paddy looked like someone in a war film. I stared and stared at her thin, elegant face with its thick flop of black hair pushed to one side of her forehead. We laughed so much that it made a scandal in the quiet bar.

  At six in the summer morning the wind got up and woke me by banging a window and blowing something off the kitchen table.

  I crawled out of thick sleep and stumbled out to the dunny. The air moved from the north and the sky was clear. All our swimming things were hanging on the old church pew in the back yard. The wind rustled in the bamboo leaves over the next-doors’brick fence, and in the sky I saw a faint streak of pink, low down in the no-colour of six o’clock. I began to pick up the towels and fling them back over my shoulder, standing barefoot in the tan
bark which was still soaked from the kids’evening games with the hose. As the dry, stiff cotton flicked past my cheek, I heard the bead curtain rattle. Javo was standing there, tired and hunched, dirty, his hair on end. I looked at him, my arms full of dry towels. He gave me half a smile. Blue eyes burning.

  ‘Do you want a cup of coffee?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Please. Mate.’

  When I took Gracie to school that morning she screamed and wept in the yard, and clung to me. I tore myself away, and staggered home in tears of guilt and misery, back into our kitchen where Gerald and Eve and Javo were sitting at the table smoking and drinking coffee. I saw myself in a great rush of impotent rage seize the back of a chair, with someone’s bathers hanging on it, and hurl it half out the open back door. It missed the glass. The bead fly curtain clattered loudly. No-one said anything. I sat on the bench with my head in my hands. Eve came and stood beside me and took my head against her hip and stroked me. Everyone helped me. Within minutes I was prancing round, the tears barely dry on my cheeks, doing imitations of my own discomfiture, and we were all laughing. Meanwhile, Gracie was squatting in her classroom, bored into a trance, singing ‘Baa baa black shee’, while she might have been reading whole books or learning to dance or drawing her beautiful ‘lady’s’.

  Javo that morning was in his mooching mood. He wandered round the house with a closed face, the bib of his overalls unbuttoned and hanging down. After the postie came and did not bring his dole cheque, he packed up his possessions in his calico bag, put on his denim jacket, and made as if to leave. I met him on the step of the kitchen.

  ‘You off?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He tried to smile. Still a deep sleep-crease down one side of his face. Where had he slept? I didn’t ask, for fear of knowing.

  ‘Give us a hug, you mingy bastard.’

  He laughed, and put his arms round me. I was still on the step, so that his face was in my shoulder and my arms around his neck. We hugged each other very hard. I felt sad and puzzled, but tried not to show it, and stepped back to let him pass. Out he went, banging the front door behind him. I cast my eye round the kitchen to see if he’d taken everything with him: he had, except his old brown journal, which had been on the bench behind the table. Gone! I couldn’t find the spirit to do anything except lie on my bed under my dressing-gown and try to read myself to sleep.

  I dreamed:

  The beginning a confusion. The first clear event was Javo leaving the place where I was, and next, the arrival of Hank with the news that he was dead, killed in a motorbike accident. I was frantic, at first with disbelief, then, as the news was somehow substantiated, with terrible pain and grief. I couldn’t go to Gerald for comfort, not because it would be hurtful to him, but because he would not be able to understand how someone from that group of desperadoes could provoke that much love in a person like me. Hank was there again, and I turned to him and flung myself on him: suddenly we were in a driverless car, being propelled along a country road. We were lying in the back seat and I was on top of him and we were fucking; but I was also weeping most bitterly, sobbing my heart out, knowing that Hank was understanding this appalling grief I was feeling; and somehow the weeping and the fucking were mixed up together in a powerful sensation of ecstasy and pain, pain, pain.

  But the shock waves of this awful ecstasy receded, leaving me in a kitchen, standing behind Jean who was peeling vegetables over the sink with her back to me. I put my arms round her from behind and hugged her and said,

  ‘Jean – I’ve been fucking with Hank – I hope you’ll understand.’

  ‘Yes, I do – it’s OK,’ she said, without turning round. The rush of grief started again and I walked blindly round the kitchen, blundering into the table and putting my hands desperately upon its flat surface. I could barely speak, but stammered,

  ‘Has anyone told his mother?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jean, still with her back turned to me. ‘Chris has told her.’

  The telephone rang and I dragged myself out of gluey sleep and staggered off the bed. It took me an hour to fight my way out of that dream. Cobby came home.

  ‘I can’t find my sunglasses,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that Javo might’ve stolen them.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘It just all fits together. Yesterday he looked at that old red scarf I was wearing and said how much he liked it. Last time I saw the glasses, they were with the scarf and the Berger paints cap. Today the cap’s here but the glasses and the scarf are gone, and Javo has gone too, taking his bag. What can I think?’

  My heart simply wriggled with horror. I didn’t know how to confront the suggestion. I didn’t know why he’d gone, but he’d gone. So we rode our bikes round to Napier Street, me with the tatters of the dream still flapping round my head like a bloody bandage. Claire was watering the garden. In the kitchen we found Jean and Hank cheerfully cooking themselves a meal.

  ‘Has Javo been here?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, he was here,’ said Hank, ‘but he’s gone round to Easey Street, to hang out there.’

  I told them about the dream, and we all laughed, because I dared not tell them about that grief. When I got to the part about fucking with Hank, he mimed a little parody of pleasure, clattering his feet on the floor and racing with his arms. There were weird overtones of the dream itself in the telling: Jean was standing at the sink with her back to me, working; but she turned her face to me and laughed as I talked, her sturdy little body firmly planted, feet apart, laughing and working. Claire came in just as I was saying,

  ‘And Hank and I were in the back of this car, fucking . . .’

  She glanced at me in amazement and I said hastily,

  ‘It’s a dream I had when I was asleep this arvo.’

  ‘You dreamed you were asleep?’ she said, bewildered.

  ‘No! I was asleep and I had a dream!’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘Have you actually seen Javo today?’ I asked. ‘He’s not dead, is he?’

  ‘No, he’s not dead,’ said Hank. ‘He’s not even stoned.’

  I knew he wouldn’t have mentioned that unless it were true. We rode home. Half an hour later Javo walked into my room, clear-eyed and smiling, carrying his calico bag over his shoulder.

  ‘Boy, am I glad to see you!’ I cried. I told him about the dream. He sat sideways on my chair, listening with half a smile flickering across his face as I knelt up on the bed, pantomiming out the story.

  ‘So,’ I concluded, ‘I went to Napier Street to see if you were still alive.’

  He laughed.

  ‘I freaked out this morning when you left,’ I said. ‘No – that’s sloppy talk – I didn’t “freak out”. I was upset, because I thought you’d gone for good, and you hadn’t said anything. I was torturing myself with stuff like “I haven’t done enough, he’s gone out to get stoned, it’s all over, what more could I have done?”’

  Again he laughed. ‘Why did you think I’d gone for good?’

  ‘You were in such a strange mood this morning, mooching round, not talking or anything.’

  ‘I was just vacant.’

  ‘Oh – by the way – you haven’t got Cobby’s sunglasses, have you? She can’t find them.’

  ‘No.’ He looked directly at me, slightly puzzled by the question. I remembered his hysterical denials the day before he left for Hobart. All my doubts flew away.

  NO LOGIC

  I knew I wouldn’t have to go searching for acid. It arrived with Clive in time for the second Boardwalk show. I was tripping again by myself. The sun was thundering down on my back as I sat under my torn hat on the scrubby grass, peering out at the world. I watched Selena walk slowly down to the water with Juliet trotting along beside her. Selena was wearing a large blue hat and a white lawn skirt to her feet. As she walked, the wind swayed the skirt in wide, deliberate sweeps around her strong ankles. She placed her feet in a leisurely but definite rhythm. When she reached the water she hitched up her skirt and
tucked it into the legs of her knickers, exactly as we used to do when we were children. I gazed and gazed. I noticed that tears were running down my cheeks.

  Later in the day the wind swung round to the south and came tearing up the slope from the sea. Sand whipped in our faces. The children in the water panicked, thinking it was a storm: Gracie, sandy and dripping, flung herself on my lap, gibbering and snivelling. Javo came up to me. I looked up to greet him and saw his red-brown Indian face and faded blue overalls and fierce blue eyes against the metal clouds which were gathering. I gaped up at him, struck dumb by the beauty of his colours.

  There must have been speed in the acid, because I couldn’t go to sleep till long after midnight. I talked with Gerald on the front verandah for a long time after everyone else had gone to bed. I lay in the hammock and the rain started and dripped on me in my cotton dressing gown. Gerald was kind. He said,

  ‘Why don’t you ask Javo what he’d like you to do – if he wants you to help him stay off dope?’

  ‘I will.’

  But I didn’t.

  It seemed, then, that I could do nothing with Gerald but hurt him. I slept with him in his bed, under the open window through which the new cool wind streamed, raising with difficulty the heavy silver curtains; but I went straight to sleep, and did not want to fuck in the morning either. He was hurt, and offended. I felt nothing but a rising tide of anger. When I spoke, my voice sounded harsh, though I did not want it to be.

  ‘It is all one-sided at the moment,’ he said. ‘It’s coming from you, your fear of me.’

  ‘Nothing is ever one-sided,’ I wearily replied. I tried to summon up a memory of how I used to argue for my life against the cold face of someone I was in love with. I couldn’t remember. There is no logic in feelings. No logic. I said,

  ‘Maybe this is something you just have to go through. I have, and I didn’t like it either.’

  ‘You’re probably right. I don’t suppose I’ve had to go through much, in my life. But please understand – I’d give anything not to be putting you through all this.’