Monkey Grip

by Helen Garner

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that.’

  I am not quite honest, not quite fair.

  DOG DAY

  I sat in my room, weary and sore, feeling that familiar creeping sensation of being made use of by Javo . . . how many times before? I wrote a card to tell him this: You are giving me a use, you can get your things out of my house, give a woman a break, mate. I rode my bike round to Napier Street where I supposed he might be. Claire’s tape deck was playing loudly that Joni Mitchell song,

  ‘And the song that he sang her

  to soothe her to sleep

  runs all through her circuits

  like a heartbeat. . .

  which I had sung to myself early that hot morning a year ago after I’d worked all night on the junk movie and was walking home in white clothes across the crackling park towards my bed where I would find him waiting for me, a junkie, sick, needing me. I knocked on Claire’s door, went in, saw his red and black shiny journal on the bed in the empty room. Unerring I went for it.

  ‘In the bed of a new friend . . .’ and there it was, about how they were together, when they fucked. The last two lines were like a knife inserted neatly between my ribs:

  ‘“Where am I?” I asked in my body.

  “You’re here,” she said with her eyes.’

  I deserve it, I deserve it, whined my guilt for snooping. I slipped the card I’d written into his book and sat down at the table to write a note to Claire. Four biros, one after another, refused to work for me. I sat there hopelessly staring out the window. Claire’s dog ran in, recognised me and sprang on to my lap, and was followed into the room by Claire herself who was carrying a pink plastic bowl full of cut-up dog’s meat. She saw me and stopped in the doorway with a look of uncertainty.

  I said, ‘Good day.’

  ‘Hullo. How’s things?’

  ‘OK. A bit difficult.’

  ‘I got your letter.’

  ‘I got yours too. On the same day.’ We gave the same painful laugh.

  ‘We must have been thinking about each other at the same . . .’

  I nodded. We were still looking at each other’s eyes. I began to notice that a gigantic wall of some terrible emotion was swelling up inside me; it was being held back, barely, by a dull sense that this was not the place to let it go, lest I scare Claire out of her wits, give her cause to think that all of it was due to her new relationship with Javo, and make a scene which he might arrive to witness. Still, I sat there, dogged, mulish, unable to stand up and gracefully get myself out. I dropped my head on to my arms. There was a pause. Her hand touched the back of my hair, and began to stroke me tentatively. The dog crawled from my lap on to the table and offered her furry, trembling body for comfort. Claire stroked and stroked, and I grimly held back what I already knew was going to be a flood of tears if I let it. I butted my head against her thin hip, wanting to thank her for her gentleness. Finally I struggled to my feet.

  ‘I’d better go. It’ll be all right.’

  My face must have looked terrible. She looked at me without speaking. Then she said, ‘See you, Nora.’ I nodded and ran out the door to my bike. Hank was at the gate, about to fix one of his endless cars. I managed to force out some normal-sounding words, and rode off down Napier Street.

  I thought I would go and find a neutral bed in a neutral house and lie on it until the tears had finished: they’d already started to leak out and I could hardly see where I was going. No-one home at Bell Street, or at Brunswick Street, or at Percy Street. So I turned my bike round in St George’s Road among the peak hour traffic and rode up to Rathdowne Street, which I had wanted to avoid for fear of running into Lillian. From the open front door I smelled a meal cooking. I dropped my bike and headed for the kitchen. Georgie was standing at the table, awkwardly pouring olive oil out of a baking dish into a yogurt jar. I saw his familiar fair head and big ungainly face turned towards me, and I thought,

  ‘That’s where I’m heading and I can only just make it that far.’

  ‘Good day, Nor!’ he said, looking shocked but ready for me. ‘How are you doin’?’

  ‘No good!’ I wailed, knowing I was now in the place where I could let go. I ran up against his chest, he put his free arm round me, and out it came: tears simply poured off my face. He put down the dish and got both arms round me and I could at last let it rip.

  ‘Come in my room, Nor,’ he said, and led me back along the passageway into his front room with the blinds down against the traffic noise from Rathdowne Street. He brought me down next to him on the bed and held me tightly, and I wept and wept, amazed at the floods of tears that were leaking and running out of me. I turned over on to my back and began painfully to talk, while the tears ran and ran off the sides of my face, soaking the pillow, the way the water runs down the big glass panes at the gallery. Surely they couldn’t keep coming, but they did, and I stammered out the story about Claire and Javo and the diary and Gerald and Lillian. He listened, clicking his tongue to show attentiveness and sympathy. All the while I talked, my eyes remained fixed on a cardboard box over his fireplace with big silver letters on it: F2, it read, thick enough to run a line with a textacolour between the black and the silver if one should wish to, in an idle moment.

  Georgie went out to turn off the stove under what he was cooking. I was sitting up on the end of the bed, with tears still dripping off my chin, when Lillian came in. When she saw me her face changed. She hesitated for a second, then squatted down on the floor in front of me and put her arms round my shoulders. ‘I can’t stop crying,’ I said, and went on letting the tears run. She made that ‘oh, oh,’ sound of wordless comfort which mothers utter. I thought, she is kind, how foolish of me to talk of hating her.

  I’d been there an hour when I found I had stopped crying, and got up to go home. I was a bit afraid that Lillian might think I’d left because she’d come in, but I was so drained out and hollow that I couldn’t make any further explanation. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw, to my surprise, that my eyes were neither red nor swollen. I got on my bike and rode home. I parked my bike on the verandah. Eve was calling the kids in for tea. Something in her glance and smile let me know that Javo was in the house. I came down the hall and there he was in my room, sitting at my table toiling over a note.

  I looked at his big suntanned face and tousled hair. I came in and closed the door behind me, moved my bag off the low stool, and sat down. I could feel my cheeks hot, but I didn’t care. I read his half-written note and took my courage in both hands and went at it like a bull at a gate.

  He seemed upset, all his confusion thick in his face, angry at the tone I’d taken in the card I’d left for him at Claire’s place.

  ‘Giving you a use is the furthest thing from my mind!’ he cried.

  ‘It’s – you don’t need me like you needed me before. Now you only use my things.’

  He stared at me.

  ‘Remember that day in the bank? You just stuck out your hand, mate, and fuckin’ took the money. You didn’t even look at me.’

  He smiled, shame-faced. ‘I know. I’m insensitive sometimes. I do things like that because I’m guilty about always asking you for things.’

  ‘But it’s not just that you do things like that. It’s other stuff too, that isn’t your fault. Since you got off dope you’re a different person. I guess I got used to you needing me to keep going . . . now I feel like I’m watching my kid grow up and take off – in a lot of ways it makes me really happy – do you understand what I’m saying? But it’s so fucking painful! Sometimes I get the feeling you don’t give a shit about me any more, now that you don’t need me.’

  ‘But Nor! How can you think that? Our relationship is permanent!’

  I laughed. It almost felt like relief, a great rush of it.

  ‘And Nor – what you read in the journal, about fucking with Claire –’

  ‘Oh, it is all right!’ I burst in. ‘I really mean it – it is all right about you fucking with her!’

&nb
sp; ‘No, it’s not just that – but Nor, she fucks . . . with her eyes shut.’

  A pause.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means –’ he wrestled with the awkwardness of it – ‘fucking just isn’t so much fun.’

  I thought in a flash of her reserved, full-mouthed face, how beautiful she is and somehow pale and delicate; I thought of his eyes gleaming with that fierce smile when I was coming; and I understood in my bones that ‘fun’ was not what he meant, that perhaps he wished to affirm to me that infinitely deep and precise contact we made when we fucked, while not belittling what he had found with Claire. My heart spread out and escaped from its hard battlements.

  ‘Maybe we ought to go out and get drunk, Nor,’ he suggested, lowering his tentative smile over his hands on the table.

  ‘Righto. Let’s.’

  We sat grinning at each other.

  ‘I’d like to say I’d shout you, Nor,’ he said; he stood up and started going through his pockets. ‘But I’ve only got about five bucks.’

  ‘That’s OK. I’ve got enough for both of us.’

  Out in the street the kids were playing kiss chasey. Gracie ran up to say goodbye, in her long purple skirt. She was all sweaty and tousled.

  ‘Guess how many times the Roaster got caught!’ she panted. ‘About a hundred!’

  I kissed her hot forehead and she ran off. Javo was waiting for me between the tree and the fence. He dropped his arm over my shoulder and the fear slithered off me and dropped behind like a discarded skin.

  We went to see Dog Day Afternoon. We laughed a lot and exchanged glances. I couldn’t get over how easy it had become: instead of feeling like a half-drowned rat, bedraggled and pathetic, as I’d expected, I found myself cheerful, quick to laugh and talk, comfortable in his familiar company. We came home on the tram.

  In my room he was standing between my bed and the bookshelf on his very long legs. I looked up at him. I said,

  ‘You could sleep in here if you liked. Or in the other room. I’d like you to sleep with me – but I just want to make it clear that it’s cool if you don’t. I wouldn’t freak out if you didn’t.’

  Too many words; but he laughed, and said,

  ‘I think I’ll just go out and take a piss, Nor.’

  He came back and undressed and got into bed beside me. He sniffed under his arm.

  ‘Phew! I stink!’

  We lay there side by side.

  ‘I couldn’t fuck, Nor,’ he said.

  ‘Neither could I.’

  ‘I’m worn out, with all this.’

  ‘Had enough shocks for one night, eh?’

  ‘Yep. I’m really fucked.’

  It crossed my mind: tomorrow night he’ll probably be fucking with Claire again. This is the last time I’ll sleep with him for a while: last chance. But I found I didn’t care about anything else except the fact that we were lying together, skins bare, in a harmony we had had to fight to get through to. I put my arm round his back and my stomach against his bum: two spoons in a drawer.

  ‘I wonder,’ I remarked, thinking, in this exhaustion, of our parents, ‘whether it’s possible for people who get married and stay together for years to keep on liking fucking with each other.’

  ‘I dunno. What do you reckon?’

  ‘I doubt it. I was married for six years and I was sick of it by then.’

  ‘Jessie’s parents are still in love with each other; but I don’t know if they fuck. I suppose they do,’ he said.

  ‘The longest time that fucking with one person stayed good, for me, was two and a half years.’

  He laughed. ‘We’ll outlast the lot of ‘em, Nor!’ I lay there soaking up his warm skin. A long time later we fell asleep.

  Gracie woke me at some unearthly hour and I staggered into her room and got into bed with her. She kicked mercilessly in her sleep, and I was too stunned with sleep myself to do anything about moving until the Roaster started yelling in some dream he was having. I decided not to go back to my own bed but to creep out to the living room where Javo used to sleep. I put an extra rug on the spare bed and sank into it, exhausted. It must have been nearly daylight when I was woken by someone crashing round in the kitchen. I knew it would be Gerald. I dragged myself out to the door and peered round it.

  ‘What are you doing in there?’ he asked in a slightly peeved tone. The last thing I needed was an argument. I blundered down to his room and crawled, stupefied, under his blankets. He hugged me till I fell asleep, comfortable but beyond anything else. It was 5.30 in the morning. At 7.30 the children woke up and the day began.

  A WOMAN OF MY AGE

  Javo woke up hours after Cobby and I had rollicked round the market with the rucksacks and baskets. He was standing at the kitchen bench when I came in. We set off to the bank with his dole cheque. For a change he rode my bike and I walked along beside. At the bank, once again, the teller checked and double-checked my records: we were kept waiting for over ten minutes.

  ‘They must think we look like crims,’ I commented idly. ‘This always happens here. I guess you do look a bit of a ratbag.’

  ‘Me!’ he cried with a laugh. ‘It’s you, mate, with that fuckin’ crewcut you’ve got!’

  We waited patiently for the money.

  ‘When’ll we go out to dinner, Nor?’ said Javo.

  ‘Whenever you like,’ I said. ‘But I’m going to Anglesea on Monday, so it’ll have to be –’

  I had meant to say ‘sometime after that’, but he jumped in and said, ‘What about tomorrow night?’

  ‘Yep, that’d be great,’ I say with fine composure, beneath which I’m astounded at his pace. We agree on the restaurant. We walk out of the bank, folding our money and stashing it.

  ‘Here comes my tram,’ he shouts as it trundles out of the terminal. ‘See you tomorrow night, about 7.30.’

  ‘OK,’ I say. He takes three steps towards the tramstop, then two back towards me, leans forward and thrusts out his lips for a kiss, eyes comically squeezed shut like a cartoon character. I get that run of insane laughter he provokes in me sometimes. I step forward and kiss him goodbye. He flashes me a grin and leaps off towards the middle of the road. I unchain my bike, wheel it around, cruise along on one pedal to the corner of Scotchmer Street, watch his gangly figure in blue denim stride across to the tram and disappear inside. See you, Javo. I am still smiling.

  Gerald was sitting in the kitchen when I got home.

  ‘I just had another weird night, that’s all,’ he explained. ‘I have to get it through my thick skull that it might be a long time before you sleep with me again, and that you’ll be sleeping with other people between now and then.’

  I think of the warmth he gave me out of his body in the early hours of the morning, and get a small kick of pleasure at the thought of lying with him again in his hard, comfortable bed.

  ‘How about we sleep together tonight, then?’ I suggest.

  We agree. He goes out. I hang out with the kids in the sunny kitchen, drawing and talking and listening to Skyhooks.

  Later, while I was reading in my room, Hank came in and out of the house. I called out hullo when I heard his voice in the kitchen. He stuck his head round my door.

  ‘Good day, Hank! How’s it all going?’

  ‘All the better for seein’ you, Nor,’ he gallantly replied, and went off grinning.

  When I was serving up the dinner I tripped over Javo’s calico bag and hurled it round the corner into the living room. I understood then why Hank had been around: all Javo’s things had gone. Everything stopped, lurched, and started again with a regular beat.

  ‘Javo has his film call tonight,’ said Cobby.

  I slept with Gerald, and surprised myself with the pleasure of it; but in the morning my disobedient mind was on the subject of Javo again, wondering if he would show up for dinner in the evening, wondering whether I was in any way a duty to him, if the excitement of touching new flesh and skin made our familiarity tiresome. But I was scou
red out like an old saucepan, and the pain had gone, or become nothing to speak of.

  The day was a hot one. At five o’clock I got home from the baths and found a note on my bed in Eve’s writing:

  ‘Nora – Javo called. He’s at the beach – be here for dinner about 9-9.30.’

  I said out loud to myself, ‘I thought this might happen.’ I put my bag down and went about the business of getting comfortable on a hot afternoon. Cobby came in and I showed her the note. We looked at each other in silence for a few seconds.

  ‘Wanna come to the Kingston, then?’ she said.

  ‘Sure. I’m not going to sit round waiting.’

  The anger took the pain away. See you round, mate.

  Just the same, I threw the Ching. I got Conflict:

  ‘Your only salvation lies in being so clear-headed and inwardly strong that you are ready to come to terms by meeting the opponent halfway . . . You are sincere / and are being obstructed.’

  Obstructed is right!

  I went to the Kingston to hear Jo Jo Zep and danced till the floor was too packed for me to move, and then I danced on a chair. I went to a party, ate some sausage rolls with tomato sauce, drank a plastic glass of punch, came home, made myself a glass of Tia Maria and cream; fell into bed.

  Javo, it appeared, had not been to my house. I guessed he was in love, for all his protestations to the contrary, and I was anaesthetised against this painful fact by the amount I’d drunk and the looseness of my bones from the dancing.

  Next day I went to the baths again with the children and lay in the sun with Cobby’s Berger paints cap on my head. It was a long, hot day. As it progressed, people we knew gathered in dribs and drabs at the kids’end of the pool, until we made up an encampment of thirty or forty people. At four o’clock I saw, from under the peak of my cap, Javo walk in. I turned my head away resolutely. I didn’t know how I was going to behave towards him, and I didn’t want to be the one to make the first move. I pretended not to have noticed him, and stepped into the water and sank in up to my neck.