Monkey Grip

by Helen Garner

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK, mate. I’ve got to rehearse, though. So if I don’t come, don’t worry. I mean – don’t sleep light waiting for me, because if we work till two o’clock I’ll be fucked, I won’t feel like walking all that .. .’ Realising he was bungling it, he pulled fitfully at his cuff and tried again. ‘I want to come, but it’ll be so late.’

  I sat in Willy’s armchair nodding accommodatingly. Maybe I looked sad, though I didn’t feel it, for he came over and sat awkwardly on the arm of the chair, and kissed me with his crazy, bent face.

  I went to the bank. He went to score.

  I found his fit on the dining room table at seven o’clock in the morning. I picked it up hastily: Rita was still under the impression that he was not hitting up in the house. I held the fit in my hand. I remembered hearing how Eve got Lou off dope: she smashed his fits, jumped on them, tipped his dope down the drain. Not my job. I dismantled it and took it upstairs to the cloud room. He was lying on his back, his face contorted even in sleep with some nameless dread. His arms were half across his face, as if he had fallen asleep in the moment of raising them to ward off an attacker. His head was turned stiffly to one side. I stood watching him, sick with pity and anger. He opened his eyes with a start, threw up his arms, groaned, saw me, froze still, and relaxed.

  ‘Oh – g’day, Nor,’ he croaked, his voice thick with sleep.

  ‘Javo. You left your fit on the dining room table.’

  He jerked his head from side to side.

  ‘I left it here,’ he cried, pointing wildly at the chair beside the bed.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, mate! Do you think I fuckin’ hallucinated it? Here it is!’ I stuck out my hand like a doctor’s tray. ‘Rita doesn’t know you bring dope here. Why do you make it so hard for me?’

  ‘I told you, Nor. I left it right here!’

  I looked at him silently. War with the eyes. He capitulated. He looked down.

  ‘It’s getting too much for me, Javo. I can’t handle the dope,’ I said gently. He nodded, listening as I spoke. ‘I want you to understand – I love you a real lot, but I can’t live with you when you’re like this. So, maybe it would be better if you found somewhere else to sleep, at least till you’ve got it under control a bit.’

  He looked at me quietly.

  ‘Nor, I want to get off dope. But I can’t, now.’

  ‘When will you be able to?’

  ‘I can’t stop while the play’s on. I couldn’t perform coming down.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Nor, when the show’s finished, I’ll get off it, we’ll go away, we’ll go up north.’

  ‘How will you get off it?’

  ‘I’ll take a cure. I’ll go cold turkey. I can get off it.’

  I looked at his wrecked face, skin in great lumps and boils, eyes whited right back to pale. Where’s your bright blue, Javo? I want your blue eyes back again. I wanted to have faith in his promises, but only a fool would. I suppose.

  He got up, kissed me goodbye, and left the house.

  I heard of him wherever I went.

  ‘Javo looks terrible.’

  ‘Isn’t Javo living with you any more?’

  ‘How can you handle the dope?’

  ‘Javo was out of it when I saw him today.’

  Angela said to me, ‘Javo is quite convinced of his immediate future. He says that as soon as the Brecht show finishes, you and he are going to Queensland together and he’s going to get off dope.’

  I can’t ‘go to Queensland’. I have to look after Gracie, and I’ve got no money.

  Gracie slept with me, and in the middle of the night I woke up and put my arm round her small body. It was the first time I’d missed Javo’s body. And only a twinge.

  I came in from the laundromat with a basket of clean clothes in my arms, and met Javo on the stairs.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked, in a not particularly unfriendly tone.

  ‘Just leaving you a note.’

  The window of my room was open and a steady stream of dark air made the palm leaves rattle against the wall. He sat at my table and buried his dirty face in a newspaper. He was stoned, but not very. I read the note.

  ‘Dear Nora, I nearly banged the door down trying to get in just now. I am scared of what happens to me outside tonight in the night – I don’t know what to say. I have got to that terrifying point of looking around and seeing no-one there, just ugly reflections of my own image. I think maybe I have left it too late to come in your direction – seems like I’ve worn out abuse at your house – so here I am as usual caring for no-one but myself – using a peculiar medicine with its handsome accessories like a fat contradiction with your choice of knobs, buttons or dials. Anyway I’ll probably wait and talk. Javo.’

  I made him wash his face and hands.

  We held each other, touched and stroked, looked at each other’s faces for long, long moments. Nobody knows what I get out of Javo, or out of knowing him. I don’t know how to explain. It’s that when we fuck, or can be together quietly sometimes, we touch each other. No-one else gets that close to me. He behaves towards me, then, with tenderness, holds me when I’m half asleep, he says my name and looks into my face.

  But up, and down again.

  At Grattan Street I yelled to wake him for a message from his lawyer. I thundered on the door in the morning. He shouted back in rage, opened the front door, his face creased with sleep. He stared at me as I delivered the message in a level tone. I felt a strange smile on my face. I stopped talking. We stood looking at each other. He was sorry for yelling at me. He’d had a shave, and was holding his unbuttoned jeans up with one hand. He reached out his thin, ungainly arm, took hold of my shoulder and kissed me. I ran off.

  That night I finished reading, closed the book and fell asleep. Some time after midnight I was woken by somebody knocking at the front door and softly calling my name. Stunned with sleep, I reeled down to the door and it was Javo. I had my hands caught in the sleeves of my nightdress: I blundered into his chest and he hugged me, jerky with dope, and thrust at me some photos of Cambodia that he had printed. I was too sleepy to see. I went back to bed and he followed me there. He put his arms around me. I drifted off again just as he said,

  ‘I’m sorry about this morning, Nor.’

  When I left in the morning I said,

  ‘How about you pick me up at one o’clock and we go and have lunch?’

  ‘Great!’ he said, seeming enthusiastic.

  I worked till one, and of course he didn’t show up. I waited till one-twenty and went home. I wasn’t surprised, and for that reason I didn’t care. I found he’d thrown back the blankets, taken my clean greasywool socks, left his dirty ones on the floor, and gone.

  Well, fuck him.

  ‘Misfortune to him who does not know when to call a halt, and who restlessly seeks to press on and on.’

  – I Ching: Preponderance of the Small

  I met Javo at the University cafe. He said he was into the second day of withdrawals. ‘I feel shithouse,’ he said. However, he appeared softer, pleasanter, more gently smiling.

  ‘Let’s go up north as soon as you can, Nor,’ he said, taking my arm as we stood side by side at the high bar. ‘I need to get healthy. I’m sick of the junk scene.’

  I said nothing. I looked up into his face. His eyes were normal, almost blue again. He kept smiling at me, waiting patiently for my answer.

  ‘I’ll be able to come as soon as we’ve pasted up the next issue of the paper,’ I said. ‘But I can’t go any further than Sydney – I can’t take that much time, and Gracie’s at school. Is it worth going only that far?’

  ‘I reckon.’

  I put my hand on his shoulder. I saw us on the road with Gracie, looking like a ragged family. He took hold of my hand and we stood together comfortably, liking each other and feeling hopeful. Up north the sun will shine on us and turn us brown. I wanted to go.

  But I would have to be a mediator: between him an
d Gracie, between him and the rest of the world.

  It can’t be spring so soon, at the end of July, but the senses say otherwise: sunstreams through open windows, daffodils in yellow masses at the market; clear, deep blue skies at night, and blue moonlight; air shifting ceaselessly as at the change of season; day after day of sun, of benevolent wind, of yellow patches on the bedroom wall when I wake up in the morning.

  In this mysterious mid-winter spring I got stoned at the supper show in the back theatre and danced till two o’clock in the morning, by myself, with a head full of strange fantasies. I saw: my striped sleeves, Mark’s thin hands on his saxophone, Rita dancing with her eyes shut, Chris singing the words to herself as she danced, Javo on the other side of the theatre catching my eye to smile. We came home together. In the night he said to me, his face right up close to mine,

  ‘My love for you never seems to get any less. There is something new there, all the time.’

  And as the day began we lay together in my bed in the empty house and made love: we went into each other. I looked at his face and it opened and blossomed under my eyes.

  DO YOU WANNA DANCE?

  One afternoon, when I got home from working on the paper, I found Javo asleep in my bed, fully dressed except for his boots. He woke up and I asked him how he was.

  ‘Shithouse,’ he croaked. ‘Nauseous.’

  ‘Is it the withdrawing?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Do you want some orange juice?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I made him a drink, and a boiled egg each and some toast. He sat up in bed to eat, propped his tall back against the wall, smiled sheepishly.

  ‘The women down at the paper know about you,’ I remarked as we ate. ‘You’re a bit of a standing joke down there, actually.’

  ‘Yeah?’ He laughed. ‘What do they know?’

  ‘They know I have a date with you every Wednesday at one o’clock, and that you never turn up.’

  We finished eating and I lay on the bed, full of speed and chatter.

  ‘Lillian’s been coming to the play a few times,’ said Javo. ‘She came on to me . . . you know, she gave me the looks, it was coming off her real strong.’

  ‘What was?’ I asked, sick, knowing it already before he told.

  ‘She wanted to take me home with her.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘But I don’t like that, I can’t do it that way. I have to have a friendship with someone before I can do that.’ He laughed. ‘So I kept it all on a friendly level – you know – let’s go and have a cup of coffee, give us a lift home, that sort of thing.’

  Lillian, blight on my life. She broke into it, once, years ago, before any of us had heard of sisterhood; she looked round to see what she could take, sampled Lou and quickly put him back on the shelf, saw the weightiness of Jack and decided to take him with her. And did. And that was the end of everything, between him and me. She had it, the knack of engulfing, of making sharing impossible.

  ‘How come you two don’t get on, when you’ve known each other so many years?’ asked Javo.

  I began to tell the old, bitter story, and as I talked I felt the old, bitter turning of my stomach and heart, envy of her beauty, fear of her mockery, uncertainty at her changefulness.

  Javo was half-laughing at the way I looked when he talked about her: it made me feel upset, thinking about her. I lay curled up on the bed, miserable and afraid. He flicked the blankets back off his legs and started talking about Jessie.

  ‘Everything between us is only OK as long as I’m up,’ I said, watching the stripes of my jumper reflecting in the tiny round mirrors sewn into the cushion cover.

  ‘Yeah? What do you mean?’

  ‘Well . . . if I feel miserable, I don’t get anything from you. You seem to think, “That’s your problem, you work it out for yourself”.’

  ‘It is! When you’re talking about past stuff, anyway.’

  He’s right. I suppose.

  I asked him to pick up the kids from school. He wouldn’t. I didn’t expect him to. Why don’t I? I expect nothing, on that level, and I get nothing.

  Next day he slept all day. In the early afternoon I sat at my table patching a sheet. The wind came in at my window and I sewed neatly, green cotton on white. I heard him stir and looked over at him. He saw me look, and smiled at me like a child, from under the bend of his arm.

  ‘I’ve just had a terrible dream – a nightmare,’ he said, stretching his long limbs. ‘You had fallen in love with Mark, and you were having a scene with him.’

  ‘Yeah? Were you jealous?’

  ‘Of course. But what freaked me out was that I hit you.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘We were in a very tiny room, about as big as a phone box. And I hit you, slapped you very hard. You looked at me, with an expression of absolute amazement on your face. It was awful.’

  That night it rained. But I didn’t know till I woke up in the morning and the wooden wind chimes had stopped clacking outside my window. Still, wet morning, like England in summer. I dreamed I brazenly stole three pairs of expensive wool socks from Georges in Collins Street.

  Work, work, work.

  All alone at a rickety table on the first floor of the women’s centre, I typed long strips for the newspaper. No-one came near me. Sometimes, when I started hallucinating or getting too far into the whirring of the IBM, I stumbled downstairs for a reality check, for a bit of human contact. One of those soft, warm nights, I was up there typing in the ugly bare room, copying an article about government attitudes towards the Halfway House, when music started in the dancing studio across the lane. It was Bette Midler singing Do You Wanna Dance? They played it over and over, a dozen times or more, and as my fingers obediently typed, my imagination went soaring off into those fantasies of violins and dim lights and perfume and dresses and arms holding me, oh yes! I wanna dance! and the music came in through the dirty windows, along with the sweet night air.

  I finished work and took a bus to Carlton. On the bus stop I had to fight the housewifely urge to make things simple, to stay in the groove, to go straight home. I had an hour before the time I’d promised to be home for the kids, and I needed to be sociable.

  I turned the corner of Faraday Street and saw the big, wide-shouldered, smooth-headed figure of my friend Bill step out the front door of the tower. I whistled and caught up with him.

  ‘Wanna come and eat with me?’ I said. ‘Just the two of us?’

  ‘Ooh, yes, that would be lovely.’

  Between the tower and the restaurant I nicked round the corner to post a letter. I vaguely heard someone shouting. I took no notice, dropped the letter into the box, and turned back to join Bill. We’d taken two steps towards Lygon Street when Javo burst round the corner, running.

  ‘Oh,’ I thought, ‘he’s stoned.’ But he stopped a yard short of me, his hair flopped back on his forehead, and I saw that his eyes were dark, not white.

  ‘Hullo!’ I said. ‘Was that you shouting?’

  He nodded, out of breath; smiled.

  ‘We’re just going to the Shakahari for tea.’

  ‘Oh. Yeah – OK.’ And he backed away up Elgin Street, right of his beat, smiling at me sideways over his shoulder as he turned and we parted. I’d expected him to say he’d come with us. Bill and I had crammed ourselves into a corner table at the Shaka and commenced a spirited discussion of the latest collective upheavals, before the penny dropped. Javo was being tactful. I remembered what he’d said to me, days earlier, after his dream about me falling in love with Mark and our conversation about Lillian:

  ‘I do sometimes think about fucking with other people, Nor. I’d like to fuck with Lillian, for example, and with Jessie again only she won’t have a bar of me these days. Don’t blame her. Who do you want to fuck with?’

  ‘Oh . . . Bill, I guess,’ I said unwillingly. ‘And Mark, of course, but that’s everybody’s fantasy – he’s such a golden boy.’

  He laughed. ‘That gives me a bit
of a twinge.’

  ‘Don’t be dumb! What is this – some kind of game, or something?’

  ‘Course not. But for you to go off with Bill would be sort of – it would be about as heavy as if it was Mark.’

  ‘You reckon? Listen, mate – if you want to know – I’ve known Bill for years now, and it’s been on the cards for ages that we might get round to fucking.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Nor.’ He gave me a push, grinning at my discomfiture. ‘Don’t get hot under the collar. I could handle it.’

  I could let my heart sink, sometimes, in spite of the way work buoys it up. It wasn’t being in love, or loving, that made the difficulty: but the awful silent fear of not being loved in return.

  So, an hour later I was home in my clean bed, looking after the kids while Rita went to the art school ball. And I kept wondering, what did Javo think in the street tonight? Which of us tries harder to be cool? or in control? Will he come back to sleep with me tonight? Will I care if he doesn’t? Should I scramble back out to the solitary life I led when he was away in Asia? Can I live without being loved? Is it true what Lillian said once, years ago, that I’ve always been too good at giving it all away? And on a practical level, is there a supper show tomorrow night? And if there is, can Rita and I find someone to stay home with the kids so we can dance the night away?

  I wanted to get stoned and forget what I looked like and dance till I was loose all over.

  ‘Dear Javo, you said you wondered if the trip we’re supposed to be going on is worth it for such a short time. Well, I’m definitely going on Monday, and if you feel doubtful about going, please say so now. Know what I think? I think you see me as not much more than a lump on the other side of the bed.

  I think maybe you want to fall in love.

  I think you’ve got the look of someone who’s on the make.

  I think that, if I’m right about this, it’s high time for us to call it a day, throw in the sponge and so on.

  I am afraid of painful, long-drawn-out endings to things. I got a fright, the other day, at the gloom I experienced when we talked about Lillian; and you talked once again about Jessie in that way that makes me feel you are saying, “My relationship with Jessie was the high point, the great love of my life”, and that’s OK, it really is, only I get to feel a bit like some kind of charlady keeping the home fires burning after the princess has passed by.