Monkey Grip

by Helen Garner

  I was paralysed: what he was saying filled me with uncertainty, I could barely make sense of it. He was in a chair facing away from me, and I was sitting on the floor in front of the fire looking at his back and side.

  ‘I have to go and pick up Gracie from school.’

  He was still sitting in the chair, with an empty plate on his lap. I pushed my head into his neck, I said,

  ‘I love you, Javo.’

  Tears ran off my face on to his blue jumper. He put his arms round my shoulders and started to cry too.

  ‘I love you too,’ he said. I was bent over him, the plate was resting on his thin thighs; I had to stand up and leave.

  When I got back he had fallen asleep on my bed. He woke up bad-tempered, sick in the bowels; he asked me to drive him to Easey Street. I did it, I drove him there, no social visit this time but the purpose in it; I drove off feeling as if I’d delivered him to the lion’s den.

  Alone in my house. Javo did not come back. I might have gone looking for him the night after, but I had the children to look after, and I read them a story and put them to bed with a plate of cut-up apple, and no-one else came home, so I went to bed myself. I comforted myself with the thought that his things were still in the house – oh, but what if he comes for them while I’m out and I come home and they’re gone, no word?

  I shall see what I shall see.

  In the morning I ran into him accidentally in the tower, where he had just woken up. I could see the dope still in him, but we’d been together in the car for twenty minutes before he said,

  ‘I got stoned last night.’

  We both laughed.

  He was being scrupulously courteous and pleasant to me; but gradually he became offhand, in a way he had, until I ceased to exist. He picked up his camera from my house so he could walk down to Russell Street and hock it.

  ‘I might see you later on tonight,’ he said, kissing me goodbye. I was sitting at the living room table. He went to the front door without looking back. I said,

  ‘Do you mean you’ll come back here?’

  ‘If I can get a lift. It’s such a fuckin’ long way!’ he said, invisible behind the front door. ‘Jack’s invited me to the tower for lunch – isn’t that nice of him!’ His laugh was almost a sneer.

  I heard him but I sat there and said nothing.

  ‘See you,’ he sang out, and banged the door behind him.

  Oh well, oh well.

  No more tears in me for him, not yet a while.

  The fire was drying the towels. I ironed my shirt and tidied my room. I was happy in the quiet house. I felt as strong as a horse. A person would need to, to try and go on loving a junkie. Javo: the rolling eye, the head rearing back, the smile which is a ritual gesture tinged with fright. Rubbing the crook of his arm.

  I saw him at the tower – or rather, he heard my voice in the middle of the morning and called to me from the little room at the top of the stairs, where he had slept. Lifts his pale, dry head from the pillow. Croaks to me,

  ‘Nor!’ Puts up his arms to me like sticks of kindling. He is not stoned.

  I go out on an errand, and when I come back fifteen minutes later he’s had the first hit of the day and is cooking something in the kitchen. I hear Willy shout, and Javo answer, also shouting.

  ‘You’re doing it to yourself, mate!’

  ‘What? What?’

  ‘You’re stoned!’

  ‘Yeah – well, so what?’

  The rest I can’t hear from Jack’s room where I am playing with Gracie. I go out again to the shop and come back up the stairs. He hears my voice.

  ‘If you’re lookin’ for me, Nor, I’m up here.’

  I climb the creaking stairs to the bedroom where he is lying in his crumpled clothes, boots on, eyes rolling up under half-closed lids. I sit in the curve of his body. His arms are like the forelegs of a praying mantis, seeming oddly jointed and moving at random. He takes my hand, I take his between both of mine and feel the weight of his thin arm. His sleeves are rolled down past his elbows.

  He nods off, wakes again, launches himself on a perfectly coherent explanation of his feelings towards me. Whenever he pauses, his eyes roll up and close and his breathing becomes noisy for one in-out; then he opens his eyes, focuses on me, and continues to talk, slowly and deliberately, as if the pause had not happened.

  ‘I can’t promise to give up junk . . .’

  ‘I never asked you to.’

  ‘I know you didn’t. But . . . I’ve been using shit for two years now, and I can’t cut off the past . . . because there are good things connected with it too, you know. It keeps me warm on cold nights, and it makes me feel young again . . . you know, physically.’

  I listen. How did I teach myself to listen to this kind of thing without those small spasms of death in the heart?

  Our faces are very close together. The pupils of his eyes, tiny from the dope, have receded like tides from their immediate surrounds, leaving a ring of almost white between the black centre and the blue, blue iris.

  ‘That’s why my eyes look mad,’ he says.

  This close, we smile at each other with the flesh of our faces.

  ‘You are beautiful, Nor. What a good face you’ve got.’

  He kisses me, we start to kiss.

  I can, I can taste the dope on his mouth. It is like medicine, faint and poisonous, but not unpleasant.

  ‘I can taste it on you.’

  ‘Can you?’

  I lie next to him, we kiss, I stroke his belly on which the skin is smooth and winter-white. His nipple stands up hard.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ I say, ‘you are the only person I want to fuck with at the moment.’

  He laughs. ‘“Unfortunately” is right!’

  ‘It makes my sex life pretty spartan.’

  ‘It’d be spartan whether I came over or not.'('Too wasted to fuck,’ he’d told me in my bed.)

  We are laughing, right up close to each other. Now we kiss again, it is easy for him now because he is stoned and loose in the body, not afraid. I can feel him go loose, he lets his breathing change and his voice travels gently on his breath.

  Jessie calls out to me from the hallway and I have to go. I sit up and feel my cheeks warm from his unusual tenderness. He holds me in his curve. His face is soft too, even his white eyes.

  ‘I feel better now,’ he says. ‘I feel good about our touching. I didn’t, before. When I first came back, I didn’t feel right.’

  Because you weren’t stoned, Javo; and the rest is not enough.

  Outside the tower I buttoned my jacket and strode down Elgin Street with Jessie.

  ‘How’s it going with Javes, Nora?’ she asked, grinning at me under her woollen cap with its earflaps.

  ‘Ah shit, I don’t know, Jess,’ I said with a twist of the shoulder. ‘Bloody dope. You know what it’s like.’

  ‘You’re not kidding.’ She laughed.

  ‘How did you manage it?’

  ‘I didn’t! I was so sick, trying to keep up with him – he was way ahead of me. Even snorting it used to make me spew, afterwards.’

  ‘I wish there was no such thing as smack,’ I grunted into my collar.

  She laughed. ‘But the reasons for it would still be there.’

  ‘Yeah. I s’pose you’re right. Well, fuck it.’

  We paced along, hands in pockets.

  He won’t come tonight, because he is too far away and he wants the dope, and he won’t come near me when he’s stoned. Not yet, anyway. And he says he won’t come over while he’s coming down. If he sticks to these resolutions, I’ll never see him. He talks about ‘keeping it under control’, which means using it when it’s around and talking bravely about his freedom from it when it’s not.

  And when he did come round, he was stoned, but still in the honeymoon phase: it hadn’t got him by the throat. He got into my bed in the middle of the night and wrapped his thin limbs around me, and we fucked with a joy so intense and peaceful that our hearts were in
our faces and we gave them to each other without a word. I came three, four times; once we rolled apart and I lay with my back to him in the curve of his body, but before I could doze away, he turned me back to him with a hand on my shoulder, brought me round to face him, insisted gently against my sleepiness until I came up out of it to join him, and thought,

  ‘Oh, I will fuck you till I die.’

  That was the terrible trick of the dope: one more step into its kingdom and Javo would be lost to me. But now we swayed dizzily on its borders, each in our own ecstasy.

  Next day I spent an hour with Javo in a restaurant at lunch-time. He said he hadn’t had a hit since the afternoon before; but he was cheerful and good humoured, and we laughed and chattered like real people, not like a junkie and a woman with a puzzled attitude towards his obsession.

  I said to him as we walked along Lygon Street to the car,

  ‘Some days I love you, some days I hate you, but today I like you.’

  He laughed. ‘That’s best!’

  ‘Oh, no – they’re all good. But I like you; I think you’re terrific.’

  I drove him to Easey Street and he kissed me goodbye, affectionate and half-laughing.

  What’ll happen next?

  I found his fit in his shirt pocket: in fact, going through his pockets before throwing his shirt in with my washing, I withdrew my hand with the fit hanging painlessly from one fingertip, where it had imbedded itself.

  He got up in the middle of the night for a hit. I was afraid (next morning, when I found the fit and pieced the time-fragments together to account for my bone-knowledge, in sleep, of his condition) that Rita or one of the girls might have gone downstairs in the night and found him hitting up in the kitchen. I was guarding them all from each other.

  White eyes.

  But we loved each other. In the night we touched, or held each other warm. I wanted to make him cry out, for love or pleasure. I heard his voice through his breathing.

  At the film festival I met Francis again. I sat beside him on the carpeted stairs of the Palais, and while we were talking he suddenly kissed me. He drove me back across the river and I might, had circumstances allowed, have stayed with him; but the jaw-faced sailor in Sweet Movie had made me think of Javo and his hot, bony face, and all evening I was moving back towards him, thinking of him as my man.

  He told me about a woman he was working with, in a play he had begun to rehearse.

  ‘I would like to fuck with her,’ he remarked.

  She was a junkie too: I saw her once: thin, white, with red plaits on top of her fine head.

  ‘I would be jealous, I suppose,’ I said unwillingly.

  ‘I know. But that wouldn’t stop me,’ he said, without the harshness the words might have carried. ‘Though I would think of that; I would think of it.’

  The fact that he might be jealous wouldn’t stop me, either. I wish . . .

  I wish it would, but only if it would stop him, too. As it is, I must learn not to need him, because when I need him he will have nothing to give.

  I ask the Ching: ‘What about him and junk and me?’

  It replies: ‘Only through having the courage to marshal one’s armies against oneself will something forceful really be achieved. One should submit to the bad time and remain quiet. It is impossible to counteract these conditions of the time. Hence it is not cowardice but wisdom to submit and avoid action.’

  ‘What is it that each of us desires? This morning I got up filled with happiness and confidence . . . but I walked round the city on my own and stared at the strange faces and received my own fair share of mocking or puzzled looks . . . splinters stuck in the memory: how you glanced up at me as your fingers threaded the beads, and you gave me a crooked smile which made me suddenly afraid that you were at that moment leaving my house for HER, the OTHER who exists (faceless yet more beautiful, ghostly yet more fleshed out, outside time and yet more temporally real than ME) in the cobwebby corners of my mind and imagination which are not illuminated by my confidence in you. This is not your fault! Or rather – the lit areas are confined, or limited, by my fear, and my need (born of old scepticism and pain) to protect my flank from your thoughtless kick or the rot of neglect and forgetfulness.

  ‘Javo I will live for now and not read between the lines.’

  Night again, cold again. We saw Lenny. I kept remembering what his wife said about him, with tears in her eyes:

  ‘He was just so goddamn funny!’

  He OD’d in a bathroom. Oh Javo! One day I’ll find you on the bathroom floor. I don’t know how to talk about that unless I make a joke of it.

  But we fucked, we held each other in the night, we made love. In the night whenever we half-woke we turned to each other and felt that old electric charge. If we acted on each one, we would never rest. That night, he said to me when we were all but dissolved into one another,

  ‘Where do we go from here?’

  Further, deeper. Somehow.

  ‘I love you very much!’ I said to him.

  ‘But what happens when that stops?’

  I drove the kids to Anglesea, sang to them, told them endless stories, my invention never flagging as I drove and they hung, open-mouthed, over the back of my seat. When I left Melbourne, Javo was still asleep. When I came back that night, the bed was cold and messy, and I found a big splattering of blood on the concrete floor of the dunny.

  ‘Red water in the bathroom sink,’ I sang absent-mindedly. I sponged up the blood. I got a fire burning in my room and roasted my back; I was going to mend my shirt, but I was too tired to think of using a needle and thread. I ought to sleep, ought to. The children are already silent in their bunks. I think about him, as we dozed off in my bed, turning me towards him and mumbling,

  ‘Kiss. Kiss before sleep.’

  Will he come back? Not worrying me, but I think of him and wonder ‘where in the city can that boy be?’

  He came back days later; I was asleep. He was coming down pretty hard, but waiting on two sleeping pills he’d taken before he left Carlton. He lay next to me, stiff and straight.

  ‘You don’t seem very happy,’ he said. I turned away from him, sick in the heart. I was afraid to talk about loving him when he was in that cold, rational frame of mind, because I didn’t want to be . . . left behind, or something.

  There was no bodily warmth between us. The withdrawing seemed to take everything away.

  But he actually rang me up and said,

  ‘Nor, my rehearsal doesn’t start till eight – do you want to do something between now and then?’

  I said yes, by all means. Good grief! An invitation, an acceptance, courtesy, like ordinary people! I went to Easey Street and stood by the fire with him. He had had a shower, washed his hair, put on clean clothes. Prison haircut growing out elegantly in two points at his cheekbones. His face was open, cheerful, his eyes sparkling. He was always pleasant on methadone, the worst poison of them all.

  I said, ‘You freaked me out the other night, talking about how unhappy you think I am.’

  We laughed.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you sometimes seem pretty . . . gloomy, when I come in late at night.’

  ‘Gloomy, do I! But what about when we’re fucking? Do I seem gloomy then?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Well – it’s only one, two . . .three nights we haven’t been fucking.’

  ‘Is it? It seems like weeks.’

  I wondered how he meant that. I missed the fucking: it had stopped when he started to withdraw.

  I went to visit Francis, and talked merrily with him in his cramped, woody house. His two big dogs clamoured round our legs. Dogs at his place, children at mine. I wished I could see clearly into his in-turned, mysterious, determined mind.

  Javo, eating a slice of orange in bed, wedges the peel between his teeth and lips and mumbles,

  ‘Do you love me? Just like Planet of the Apes!’

  In the night we laugh so much that I am always saying,

&nb
sp; ‘Shhoosh! You’ll wake up the whole house!’

  ‘Keep talking!’ he says. ‘I love gossip!’

  Javo’s play was ready and I arrived at the back theatre for the supper show at eleven o’clock. I paid my two dollars and went in. I heard straight away from behind the set Javo’s voice raving his lines in the loud hysterical tone I’d heard him use only once before: the day I did the acid and he hit up more and more until by nightfall he was blackened round the mouth, blazing-eyed, manic in his speech – that voice! with a note of maniac laughter in it, his face grinning madly. I dared not go near him, for fear of a swipe from his swung arm, an accident but proceeding out of his absolutely not caring. Once at the old house he pushed me aside in the hallway, staring past me with pale eyes; he went two steps further and remembered who I was and that there were social forms which people expect to be observed. He came back and hugged me perfunctorily, his limbs trembling and stiff, eyes still going past me.

  So it was in the theatre. He either didn’t see me, or wasn’t going to meet my eyes. Turned from my eyes. You bastard, Javo.

  I didn’t wait for the show. I got in a cab and came home. Not unhappy, but tired in the heart. When I got home, it was like having escaped from a stricken city. I sat by the fire and talked with Clive who had been with the children, and as we talked, the thought formed itself in my head,

  ‘Time coming in which I must survive without a lover.’

  If I can do it.

  But he actually came back in the middle of the night. What’m I going to do? He is out of the human phase, is like a black-lipped spectre which eats, sleeps and groans.

  WHAT A WONDERFUL GUY

  My own modest crumbs of coke I hoarded for solitary moments. I crept upstairs with the mirror and the razor and the rolled-up banknote and snorted it secretly in the stuffy little attic room where the children kept their toys. Up I flew. Wasn’t it already the shortest day of the year? Winter solstice. The coldest days and nights were still ahead of us. My brown gloves smelled leathery and perfumy, like the inside of my nanna’s handbag. In my pockets I found scraps of paper with lines of songs scribbled on them: ‘everybody’s cryin’ mercy’, my head raced ahead of itself and my mucous membrane became fat, but it was worth it! Fickle stuff, though, specially when mixed with fatigue. I sailed off to the film festival, chilled in the hands but full of warmth for the human race and all material things . . . I was early and called in to visit Paddy, who was crouched on the floor over a poster she was designing. She turned her thin face up to me, smiled her dry, absent smile, her eyes behind the spectacles still preoccupied.