Monkey Grip

by Helen Garner

  I lay awake beside him through nights full of groaning and half-sleep. Once he saved me some coke, and brought it round. I snorted it and it got me through his worst night: I lay there serenely, observing dispassionately his contortions as he came down. I would have done anything I could to help him, but nothing could be done, so I lay next to him while he sweated and heaved, and the night passed.

  He was off it again, but weak and fighting against depression. When I came home, days later, I found another of his letters on my table. When he wrote, he pressed so hard that the table itself bore the imprint of what he said to me:

  ‘Came to gather some of that calming potion you manage to carry round – I had a rotten day, travelling around and fighting –

  so I thought I was never quite sure

  or never quite sure

  not really ever quite sure

  straining, but then again gently

  trying,

  never or maybe not quite bleeding,

  but then again not talking

  to anyone,

  saying what I mean

  is always a mean way of saying

  that I like a lot of you

  or I like you a lot more than

  ever what I’m saying

  or maybe your body meets mine

  a lot more politely than shaking hands.’

  I DIDN’T KNOW WHERE I WAS

  Our house was full again, people home from holidays, but the summer still standing over us. We climbed the apricot tree in the back yard and handed down great baskets full of the small, imperfectly shaped fruits. Georgie made jam. Javo and I sat in the sun on the concrete outside the back door, cracking the apricot stones with half bricks to get the kernels out. I was learning how to reach him without talking, though sometimes I was afraid he hadn’t understood. We talked about this, lying on my bed with our bare legs under and over.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I like the way you love me. I feel comfortable in it.’

  But I needed bursts of other people, steady ones who didn’t use junk. Georgie and I drove down through Geelong to Ocean Grove where I had lived as a child. On the road between Barwon Heads and Thirteenth Beach, as the sun disappeared completely into the ocean and the evening air turned grey and cold on our sunburnt skins, I was flooded through with an indescribable desolation, travelling across that low, scrubby coastline. I stared out the truck window, holding my arms against my chest. Georgie, out of his element, shuddered and said,

  ‘Human beings shouldn’t live this far south.’

  I got work on a movie about junkies. The little speed I got hold of sent me flying recklessly through the days and nights. I flung myself right into it. When I smoked a joint during the day, I could quite clearly sense the speed and the hash slugging it out in my blood: sometimes one got the upper hand, sometimes the other, and me only a battleground.

  At the script meeting for my night’s shooting, I was so stoned that, when I tilted my head back to drink a glass of water, my neck muscles seemed to be in spasm. I was berserk with it, jangling with paranoia, watching people on the nod in the middle of the meeting, feeling how junk in a house oozes into the very air.

  In my disorientation I seized upon a small smile flashed to me across the room by a bloke with a clipboard on his knee: childishly thin, a gentle face with a big hippy beard, fine dusty freckles across his nose, skin so pale as to let the light through, and down his back a skimpy little tail of hair pulled back in a rubber band. I had lost my ability to pick a straight among the junkies.

  ‘Who’s that?’ I whispered to Jessie, my only other counterpart, who was crouching beside my chair.

  ‘That’s Francis.’

  ‘Is he a junkie?’

  ‘No. At least, I don’t think so.’ She looked up sideways and winked at me.

  ‘He looks nice.’

  ‘He is. He’s lovely.’

  When I left the meeting to get a bus home, I stepped out of the house and for a few seconds I didn’t know where I was.

  ‘Where am I?’ I asked helplessly.

  ‘Punt Road is just at the end of this street,’ said Francis who was leaning against the fence. ‘The bus goes straight up to Clifton Hill.’

  I walked to the end of the street, saw Punt Road, and felt the world swing and drop back into place around me.

  I was sitting at the kitchen table after tea when Javo came around the corner to the back door. He couldn’t, didn’t try to hide it: stoned again, eyes staring, mouth dry and brown-scummed and cracked.

  ‘Oh, but!’ cried that silent, slow-thinking, straight person inside my head, ‘yesterday you said, “Tomorrow I’ll be better from junk.” Why have you done it again?’

  I said nothing. He’ll always do it again.

  But he came in and walked up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders, kindly, and glad to see me. I smiled at him. When I stood up, he clumsily took hold of me and bent his mad face down sideways and kissed me on the mouth.

  I remembered him when he lay next to me in my bed, withdrawing while I looked calmly on, full of coke, my head singing sweetly with it: our heads were side by side on the pillows, and every now and then out of his discomfort and pain he would turn his eyes to try and smile at me. Round rolled his eye nearest to me, white and frantic like the maddened eye of a steer caught in a bog.

  This time I needed comfort from him. He gave it willingly, held and cuddled me, listened to my waning speedraves. I told him about the junk movie. Looking at his stoned, pale eyes, all their blue sucked out of them by chemicals, I started to want to get out of the movie, realising how little I knew about what it was trying to say.

  ‘I’m thinking of going down to Tasmania,’ he said, ‘and I was going to ask you if you wanted to come.’

  I thought of him in clean air, brown and hot. A week earlier I might have imagined that dope would cease to matter to him, away from Melbourne, but already I knew that was a fantasy. The day he’d said, ‘Tomorrow I’ll be better from junk,’ I’d almost asked him, out of sheer curiosity, ‘And what will you do then?’

  ‘Yes, I’ll come with you,’ I said.

  Oh, you steer in a bog, there’s not a thing I can do to help you. Love is not enough, and you are often unwilling to take it.

  Our preparations were erratic. I had to learn to manipulate him, or get round him.

  ‘Oh shit,’ he’d croak, ‘we don’t need mosquito coils, all that shit. I’d rather let the mozzies bite me than take all that stuff. We’ll have to carry it, too, and it costs money.’

  I had to go out of the room when he started to talk like that. I thought I must have been crazy to think of going to some distant place with him. But I plugged on with it, and somehow we got together what we needed.

  In the night plane between Melbourne and Hobart, speed, grass and brandy alexanders combined to produce a thick layer of paranoia through which all impressions of the world outside myself had to force their way. I stared at my reflection in the dark window: bumpy head, wide forehead, small mouth held tightly with fear, skin spotty from speed and coffee, eyes drooping downwards at the outer corners. I felt small, tight and ugly. I looked as desperate as I felt. I felt that he didn’t like me, that he was wishing we hadn’t come. Did I wish that? I watched him reading his newspaper. I had seen how pale his face was at the airport. I was frightened.

  I was afraid of his moods.

  I was afraid of my own.

  I was afraid of being afraid.

  And yet on a bus in Hobart I sat opposite him and idly let my mind roll on a fantasy so idiotic and insane that it scared me out of my wits. I thought: what I will do is, when we get home I will go to the gynaecologist and have my loop taken out; and I won’t say anything to Javo, and we’ll go on fucking and I’ll get pregnant and I will have a child, and it will have blue eyes like his but he won’t be interested in living with me and it, and I won’t care, so I will just go away happily to some other town, a sunny one, with Gracie and this little piece of Javo w
hich I can love right from scratch, the way it’s too late for me to love him, because of some irreparable damage that’s been done to him long ago.

  The fact that I was unable to speak to him even in jest about this fantasy made it double in strength. I absolutely wallowed in it for the whole of that bus ride. I had to think very hard about things I knew to be true before I could get myself back into line.

  Night. Waiting for the ferry on the wharf at Bellerive. I was freezing and I crouched on the edge above the dark water slapping, trying to keep warm by making myself smaller; and he paced up and down, his boots clomping on the boards. Could this be summer? He came and sat down beside me and put his arm round me. A short-lived pleasure: away he clomped again in his inadequate jacket, and separately we froze and cursed.

  In the casino Javo turned pale and trembled. He wrestled with the fates at the tables, and I drank by myself at the bar. Drunk by midnight, we stumbled out twelve dollars up and took a cab to his mother’s studio where we slept on two hard couches and breathed air scented pleasantly with oil paints and turpentine.

  Next day we took the road to Freycinet Peninsula. I had imagined that Javo would leave me behind in the walking, but I had forgotten the strength of my bike-riding muscles, and the debilitated condition he was in. He made me laugh helplessly.

  ‘’E needs a fuckin’ good kickin’,’ he would remark viciously when a car passed us on the road without stopping. The top of his body bent over horizontal from the weight of his pack, he yelled to me at a crossroads in the coast town of Swansea,

  ‘We could stop here tonight! Last night of civilisation.’

  He dumped his pack on the motel doorstep and went in to the reception desk to negotiate. He stuck his head and hand out the door and croaked,

  ‘Gimme seventeen dollars.’

  What a whacker. I kept laughing insanely at the very thought of him. He was such a pig: he strewed lolly papers around him on the ground without a qualm, and raised pained eyebrows when I clicked my tongue and picked up after him.

  In the motel room we collapsed on the beds. He flung back the bedspread and got under it fully dressed with his immense boots on.

  ‘Why don’t you take your boots off?’ I suggested politely.

  ‘Can’t be fucked,’ he grunted. ‘I’m rooted.’

  I started that helpless private giggling. ‘Goodnight, then,’ I said.

  A pause.

  ‘It’s still early,’ he mumbled, heaving himself off the bed. ‘I’m going for a stroll around.’

  I went on reading. He lurched out the door, leaving it wide open.

  ‘Shut the bloody door, will you?’

  He was halfway to the stairs, but came back and banged it shut. When he’d gone I looked up from my book. The Herald was all over the floor, the packs had been desecrated and their contents scattered higgledy piggledy. A packet of cashew nuts, burst open, was strewn across the table, and the camera stood dangerously on its telephoto lens, from being pointed erratically at some horizon or other.

  I started grinning again. My mouth got out of control. I picked up the newspaper, tidied the flat surfaces, laid the camera down on its side. Why didn’t his thoughtlessness enrage me as it would have done in any other man? Must be love. Better get rid of that one. Meanwhile, I was a sucker for some kind of awkward charm he had. I liked the way he cheerfully exchanged cliches with the drivers who picked us up. I liked the way he leaned on me from his gangly height when boredom and impatience made us clown by the roadside. I couldn’t resist his nonsensical claim to have the essential and definitive piece of information on every subject that came up. I liked the way he took being teased. I liked the way he used the word ‘tragic’. I liked to watch for the flash from his blue eyes.

  While he was out, I got up too and wandered round. In the driveway of the motel I saw a tiny baby mouse. It crouched trembling among the yellow lumps of gravel. Its coat shone in the evening sun. I could see its heart beat. I stopped to look and without warning it darted away on to the dirt and grass beside the drive.

  I went back inside and lay on my bed. Two seagulls flew past the window, lit from beneath by the remains of the day’s sunshine. The air was perfectly clear, the sky behind the mountains was flushed pink. Whenever a gust of wind struck the window, it made a very faint sprinkling, as if loaded with drops of sea. The timber building heaved a little and whistled in the wind.

  He came back later on, after dark, when I was almost asleep. We lay in the clean sheets. The moon came through the window and the small waves hissed. We began to kiss. I took his cock in my mouth and saw the moon darken and lighten his skin, and he said my name and I felt him start to come in my mouth; I heard him groan and my heart moved for joy.

  But he left me stranded, somehow – not that I expected to fuck, but he fell asleep and left my heart stranded. I needed something I didn’t understand – words, perhaps. I was crying out to him silently, and he didn’t answer, didn’t even hear me. I got up, full of loneliness and panic, and threw myself on the other bed. The radio was going quietly, jazz on the ABC and the reasonable voice of the announcer. I shoved my head under the pillow, sick with fright; got up again and squatted next to the open window and stared at the wide moonpath on the water and told myself I ought to know how to make myself calm.

  I flung myself down next to him.

  ‘Help me, will you?’

  He woke up and rolled over and put me under the bedclothes and took my arm and made it go round his chest.

  ‘Sorry mate,’ he mumbled. ‘I’m fucked.’

  ‘It’s not that I’m angry.’

  ‘If you start feeling really terrible, you can wake me up.’

  He fell back to sleep straight away, and finally so did I, but in the other bed and not till well after midnight.

  Somehow we made it through that hot country. The worst part was a curved beach, two miles of soft sand into which our feet sank at every step. Cranky and black-faced, he plunged along in front of me in his stolen Paddy Pallins. What’m I doing here? Nuts. I must be nuts. I squinted out to sea and tried to dissociate myself from the toil of my legs. At the other end was Cook’s Beach and a stone hut with a water tank. We dumped our packs and guzzled till we were nearly sick. Other hikers had left a logbook full of jolly comments about marauding possums and rats:

  ‘Don’t worry if the possum eats your food. He is quite clean, he has just eaten my toothpaste.’

  It was all so hearty that I started to laugh. Javo did not feel like joking. He tore up great armfuls of bracken and made a big bed, upon which he flung himself, his face resolutely turned away from me. I shrugged to myself. Too tired to care.

  But it got to me. By nightfall he was sitting, elbows on knees, staring into the fire. Unnerved by his silence, I wandered off along the dim track towards the beach. Someone called,

  ‘Hey! Want a drink?’

  Three kids were sitting on the ground round a fire. They handed me a bottle of Stone’s Green Ginger. I took a big, withering suck of it: sickly warmth. Nobody asked any questions. The bottle passed from hand to hand until it was empty. When I got back to the hut, candlelight shone out the empty window frames and Javo was bent over in the same posture; but when he heard my step in the doorway he looked up with a start. I stopped a yard short of him, wary of asking even for courtesy, but he put out his arms to me in a child-like gesture.

  ‘Nor – help me. I’m freaking out.’

  Surprised, I stood still, then stepped forward. He hugged me round my waist, pushed his face against my stomach. I sat down next to him on the bench, but he withdrew again: his face closed like a fist, jaws clenched, eyes swung back to the flames. I knew better than to interfere between him and his sickness. I rested my arms along my bare brown thighs, imitating his posture, and stared at my thick socks and runners. He sprang up, blundered around the candlelit hut in some half-crazy distraction, moving jerkily like a puppet. I sat impassive.

  On the bracken bed he turned his back to me and gro
aned in his sleep all night.

  Next day we came from Cook’s Beach over the mountain and down the other side to Wineglass Bay. It was hard walking but, because I’d learnt not to try and keep up with the manic long legs of Javo, I made my own pace and was alone almost all day, in a trance of hard work and pleasure. I raved to myself, singing and laughing and telling stories. There were times when, Javo being literally miles ahead of me, I sat down on the track to rest and fell into a waking dream, forgetting his existence and the existence of time, gazing at the water miles below and feeling the wind. I was a bit crazy. I lay on huge rocks dreaming of ancient Greece: I thought berserkly of Perseus, the wine-dark sea, the shield of Pallas Athene, the winged shoes of Hermes, the rocky coast of Thessaly – a leap in the blue.

  That night we camped again, between a stagnant creek and the sea.

  The only time I stopped thinking about him was early in the morning, just after dawn, when I crawled out of the tent and left him there in his sleeping bag, and walked along the beach on my own. Two sailing boats were riding at anchor. I spiked my feet on the rocks, I waded calf-deep in the incoming tide, I glimpsed a fish a foot long lurking in the still water under the rocks. I lost the time and the situation. I was singing wildly and sweetly in my head.

  By ten o’clock I was standing miserably on the sandhill. No sooner had I decided that I’d had enough, that I’d bear it as cheerfully as I could till I could get away from him, than he came up behind me to where I was looking at the sea. I turned round and he smiled, a hard-worked smile, only barely a smile, but I gave him one back and he put his arm round my shoulders and in spite of myself I was with him again.

  Back in Hobart I was ironing my overalls in his mother’s kitchen. Hazel and Javo were in the living room watching the cricket on television. They began to argue about politics. Instantly their voices rose to full volume and intensity. Javo’s voice was almost breaking with the vehemence of his case: it was like being battered about the ears with clubs. When Hazel tried to speak, he raised his voice to an insane bellow: