Monkey Grip

by Helen Garner

  ‘Does this outcome satisfy you?’

  I shrugged, not daring to speak until I could fight down the weeping. I wanted to turn to her and throw myself on her thin shoulder and her surprised kindness – help me! I’m so sad – but I was afraid of crying out of control.

  I whispered, ‘I can’t talk right now.’

  ‘Oh!. . . yes – all right,’ she said, perhaps not daring to follow an urge to comfort.

  Somehow, with that kind of grief, the moment for weeping passes, and after it, to weep would require a small forcing. The meal was served, and in the clatter and conviviality I perceived an oblique kindness, for which I was grateful. I went to bed with Gracie, who slept, and outside the closed door of the bedroom people were laughing and clashing plates.

  In the morning it didn’t seem so bad. When I woke up, beside Gracie, in the sunny room, it occurred to me that this was the first morning in three months, give or take the odd dope binge, I hadn’t woken up next to Javo. I felt a bit empty, staring out the window and wondering where he was and what was going to happen when we got home. Then I remembered what I had dreamed:

  Javo and I were in a very expensive women’s clothing store on the upper floor of a building. I was flicking through the dresses on a rack, while Javo, good-humoured and courteous, wandered over to the window and waited for me. While he stood at the window, somebody shot him, out of one of the slit-like upper windows of the building opposite. The bullet entered his neck. He was not killed.

  RESPECT

  Peg took Gracie out for the day and I went off by myself. The sun was shining and I travelled on the top deck of the bus and I was afraid of the openness of myself – as if, one lover gone, I was opening up in the search for an immediate replacement. Smack habit, love habit – what’s the difference? They can both kill you. For the bus journey I fell in love with a woman who smiled at me. The motion of the bus made her thick mop of fair curls tremble. We talked about desperadoes.

  ‘I am fatally attracted to them,’ I said. ‘In fact, I probably am one.’ The idea had never occurred to me before.

  I thought I was going to veer in and out of tearfulness all day. I got myself out to Bondi, where Tom lived, but when I reached his door and knocked and no-one answered, I sat down defeated on the concrete and would have liked to throw back my head like a dog and howl with unhappiness.

  The door opened. There stood Tom, naked except for a towel.

  ‘Oh, it’s you!’ he cried. ‘I was asleep. Come in.’

  We sat at his kitchen table. He went about the room awkwardly making coffee. I looked round the small white room lined with weatherboard. He had pinned a Matisse print on the wall. My trembling insides began to settle; I sat there accepting his shy hostliness.

  ‘If you look out that window,’ he said, ‘there is the sea. I am going to have a shower. Will you mind waiting?’

  ‘No.’

  I stepped over to the window and, indeed, the sea was there: the bungalow was only yards from the cliff edge. It was the ocean. I stood weakly at the sink and pressed my face against the small sealed window with its four panes. I stared. I felt my breath go in and out.

  He led me down to the cliff path. We lay on our fronts on the bare rocks, staring dizzily down at the water smashing itself underneath us. We must have lain there for hours, talking drunkenly about what we knew of the world. When we stood up, the sun had moved across behind us and we were chilled right through.

  ‘We must be the last of the big-time ravers,’ said Tom. ‘Let’s go to the movies.’

  We saw Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympiad. Tom sat beside me hissing irreverent remarks. I pointed out that the German runner had not made a showing in the marathon.

  ‘He’s probably picked up the vibe of the whole event and headed for the border,’ said Tom. We snorted and giggled behind our hands in the front row.

  The sun was shining after a night of rain. I sat on the back doorstep of Peggy’s house, the sun warming my right side; I squinted my wrinkly eyes in the light and tried to read a magazine.

  ‘What are you thinking of, up there?’ inquired Peg affectionately from the yard where she was hanging out wet clothes.

  ‘I was thinking,’ I replied, ‘that I have got right over Javo leaving.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘And I was also thinking about something Tom quoted once, from Reich –“love and work”, he said, that’s what it’s all about.’

  ‘Do you want to work?’

  ‘I’ll go back to Melbourne and work on the women’s paper.’

  With Javo gone, I had had sweet sleeping at night, slow thinking as the light came in in the morning, and the company of people who liked me. It was time to go south, home again. I booked a sleeper for me and Gracie, and I kept thinking about: her asleep, me looking out that cold glass at the moon passing, the ground rushing, remembering for the thousandth time that poem of Judith Wright’s, Train Journey – ‘glassed with cold sleep and dazzled by the moon’.

  On the phone I said to the railways booking clerk,

  ‘Can we get anything to eat on this train?’

  A shocked pause.

  ‘This is the Southern Aurora – it’s one of the best trains in the country, woman!’

  ‘Us poor people don’t get around much, you know,’ I retorted. We laughed.

  I fantasised again and again our street with its centre parking meters, the green carpet in the hall, the flattened square of sunlight that hit the wall of the first landing of the stairs, and my room with its blue floor and thin red curtain, oh the joy of going home, it choked me in the throat.

  Not a person.

  A place.

  But alas! I was too poor to afford the Southern Aurora. I spread the contents of my purse on the booking office counter. A hard-faced clerk inspected the ceiling. I stood helplessly, my eyes filled with foolish tears. I should have known that the ‘best train in the country’ was not for the likes of us. Condemned by poverty to sit bolt upright for fourteen hours on the Spirit of Progress. Gracie took my hand.

  ‘Come on, Nora,’ she said. ‘Let’s go. That’s the way life is.’

  And indeed, she charmed me with conversation and drawings, while she was awake, and slept peacefully across my knees as we rattled southwards all night long. While she slept I stared at myself in the dark window. I thought, when I get home I will have all my hair cut off. All, all.

  The sun rose up in the morning and shot its beams horizontally through the dining car where we sat eating greasy bacon and eggs at $2.25 a hit. The gum trees turned pink in the new light: mist rose off the tree-filled water. We slid past farms and towns. In Melbourne it was raining. We came home in a taxi and crawled into my bed at ten o’clock in the morning. I backed up to the small burr of warmth coming off Gracie’s foot, and for a second I longed for it to be Javo behind me, big, so I could back into his curve and be warmed. But it passed. I slept.

  I went to an expensive hairdresser in Little Collins Street. I sat in the chair, pointed to my hair, and said,

  ‘I want it all off. Short all over. Understand?’

  ‘OK,’ replied the imperturbable technician. And he took it all off, and left me with a crewcut and a pointed tail at the back of my neck. I looked like a pre-war German scientist. It was not a matter of liking or disliking it: I saw the bumpy shape of my skull, I saw myself shorn and revealed. I wandered in a dream around the city, glimpsing in shop windows a strange creature with my face. I was alarmed. My neck was bare. My ear-rings gleamed publicly. I crossed a road. An oaf in a big transport yelled at me,

  ‘Hey, spunky! Do you fuck?’

  ‘Not with the likes of you, shithead,’ I snarled under my breath, maintaining an outward composure.

  In Flinders Street I met Paddy. She laughed and made me turn round and said,

  ‘Oh, it makes you look delicious!’

  We went to sit in the dark and watch The Godfather Part 2. I kept running my hand across my skull, disbeliev-ingly. We caught a
tram to my house. We charged merrily up the stairs, talking loudly about the film. Just as I was pulling my left boot off, the door of my room was shoved open, and Javo walked in.

  Not stoned. Plenty of colour in the eyes.

  Instantly my mind jumped out of my body into his to look at my shorn head. I started to feel awkward about his being there. Paddy went out to put the kettle on. He sat on my chair and I looked right at him. He looked dirty and was wearing a slightly hangdog grin. I fronted up, straddled his knee, hugged him. He turned his face away, didn’t take his hands out of his pockets.

  ‘Just come for the TV, have you?’ I couldn’t help asking, but laughing in spite of the cynicism. I stepped away from him, registering ‘He thinks I’m ugly’. I wanted to ask him directly, ‘What are you here for?’ I tried to phrase the question a little more tactfully.

  ‘Oh . . .’ he shrugged. ‘I just thought I’d come and see you.’

  Small fantasies of being in bed with him popped on and off my screen. Oops! Wrong way to go. But I made a joke:

  ‘Been getting any fucks?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Neither have I.’

  ‘But I fell in love with Jessie again for a couple of days.’

  My heart began to ache.

  ‘What does she think about that?’ I asked.

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘Does she know, when that happens?’

  ‘I dunno. Anyway, it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Because it’s all fantasy.’

  We went downstairs and drank the tea. Paddy left. We sat in silence, me facing him, him turned in his chair to one side.

  ‘Did you get into dope a lot when you came back?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What’s the situation now?’

  ‘I’m comin’ down today.’

  ‘No dope around?’

  ‘I’m broke. Worn out all my friendships.’

  We laughed.

  I said, ‘I’ve got to go down to Spencer Street. Want to walk down with me?’

  ‘Jeez, mate, it’s a fuckin’ long way. I’d be worn out before we got that far.’

  I said, ‘I am going upstairs to see what I need to take with me.’

  I went upstairs, feeling plain and awkward, and instead of going on with the enterprise I lay disconsolately on my unmade bed and read a dozen pages of Murder on the Orient Express. Half an hour later I went downstairs to have a shower. He’d gone, leaving the radiator blazing away in the empty room.

  I went out by myself to the theatre to see the new show. It was two weeks since I’d been there, to the heart of this particular ghetto, and it was like a homecoming: people stroked my furry head, laughed, hugged me, made much of me.

  ‘Oh, oh, oh!’ said Bill, seizing my head in his big hands and tousling me against his chest.

  Javo was there. He sat up on the mezzanine, hunched over, staring down at the floor where the play was happening. I was so engrossed by the performance that it only crossed my mind once or twice to glance round for a look at him. But when the puppet play began, he walked over and sat down beside me and we watched the show together. When it ended, I said,

  ‘I’m just going to the dunny,’ and ran off.

  When I came back, he’d gone.

  Well.

  Lou drove me home and would have liked to stay, but I said no, too tired, and we parted friends. The truth was, I was afraid of not wanting it enough. And I slept with Gracie, my daughter, who stroked my face in the morning.

  I spent a day on my own in the empty house. In the afternoon I mended a dress and listened to the ABC news and some baroque music. I was cold, and went down into the back yard to chop some wood for a fire. Tentatively I stood a great lump of wood on the chopping block and brought the axe down on it. It flew into two perfect halves. Such was my elation that I ran inside, put on our ancient cracked record of Aretha Franklin singing Respect and danced all by myself for half an hour in our living room, without inhibition, almost crying with jubilation – not just about the wood, but because I could live competently some of the time, and because that day I liked myself.

  I was asleep in the night. Someone knocked at the front door and woke me, just a quiet knock but my heart jumped about in my body like a cracker and I went down the stairs on trembling legs.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Javo.’

  I let him in and stumbled back towards my bed.

  ‘I’ve come for a talk,’ he explained. It must have been, I thought, because I had taken his belongings over to the tower that day and left them there with a note. I got into bed, wearing the big socks he had once given me and holding a hot water bottle against my stomach. He sat on the side of the bed and we talked. Everything in his life seemed dull and pointless. He was anxious about the fact that he owed fifty dollars to Chris and had no way of paying it back.

  ‘Did you come over hoping I might lend you the money?’ I asked politely, feeling polite.

  ‘Oh, come on.’

  ‘Where are you going to get it from?’

  ‘I dunno.’ He stared at the floor between his thighs. ‘I might as well go out and shoot myself.’

  A pause.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘How come you acted so cold the other day, when I went to hug you?’

  ‘I wasn’t sure about anything,’ he said, ‘about who I am or why I was here – and you reacted with this incredible burst of emotion. I didn’t know what I thought.’

  ‘What do you feel towards me?’ I asked, by this time wide awake. ‘I want to know.’

  ‘Well . . .’ He hesitated for such a long time that I thought he was struck dumb, and remembered someone I’d been in love with once asking me in exasperation, ‘What do you like about me?’ If I’d been perfectly honest, I’d have said, ‘At this precise moment, nothing.’

  At last Javo replied, ‘I like you when you teach me things.’

  ‘Yeah? Like what?’

  ‘I liked it in Sydney when you made me read that French book out loud; lying on the bed. That was great.’

  ‘I liked that, too.’

  ‘And I like you when we walk round the city.’

  Riding drunk up Bourke Street last summer; drinking in the Southern Cross; strolling up Russell Street to Sam Bear’s to buy the last pair of Lee overalls in Melbourne.

  These things won’t happen again.

  ‘Do you want to sleep here?’

  ‘I can’t, mate! I’ve got to go out and hustle that money.’

  But we talked on, and he decided to stay, and I made him have a shower because he hadn’t washed for a week and he stank. He got into my bed, put his damp head on the pillow; and we lay sides touching, and fell asleep.

  In the morning when he woke up, we had a strange conversation. I sat on the chair fully dressed, my head caked with henna under a towel; he lay in bed, his face hidden by the hump of the blankets. I said, with a sense of daring, what I thought about dope. I told him he was living a sordid life, which he tried to make dramatic by saying things like ‘I might as well go out and shoot myself’; that he was cutting off his options one after another, and so on.

  He thought.

  He said, ‘Do you know what you’re doing, Nor, even if you don’t realise it? You’re prodding me in the chest and saying, “Say you don’t love me, go on, tell me you don’t love me any more”.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ I admitted. ‘In fact, that’s probably the most perceptive remark I’ve ever heard you make. Well –why don’t you tell me?’

  Of course, he didn’t in so many words.

  ‘Before,’ he said, ‘we had something to lose. We didn’t go to extremes because we had something to lose.’

  ‘You think there’s nothing to lose, now?’

  ‘Yeah, and so do you; because you never would have said all those things to me three weeks ago, before we went to Sydney. I nearly got up and left.’
<
br />   ‘All the time I was saying them, I was thinking, “I never would’ve said these things three weeks ago”.’

  He went downstairs. I was making the bed and I heard him pick up the phone and dial a number. I eavesdropped.

  ‘Can I speak to Jessie, please?’

  ‘Good day, mate. It’s Javo. Listen, I’m ringing to ask you to do me a favour . . . please. Yeah. I need to borrow some money. Yeah? Great. Thanks very much. OK. I’ll see you. ’Bye.’

  He came upstairs again smiling, looking a bit triumphant. ‘Well, that’s settled that!’

  I felt mean. I am not mean.

  I glanced up at him as I pulled the blankets together, and on my face I felt a wry, unpleasant smile. Our eyes met, and held. He was half-smiling. He went out of the room again, and I sat down, feeling unhappy and upset, at my table. I read on in Murder on the Orient Express. When I went down later, I found he had gone along the street to help Rita paint her studio.

  My hair meanwhile had turned bright red. I walked to Spencer Street on my own. People stared. I cared, a bit. I was too unhappy to feel ugly as well. When I came home, Javo had gone.

  I stepped out the door of Tamani’s with Jessie, and saw Angela coming up Lygon Street from the newsagent, forging along in her lairy crocheted coat. She took one look at my red, short hair and let out a great shriek,

  ‘WOO, WOO, Nora! It looks fantastic! – but I’d uncover the ears.’

  She ran up and seized my head in both gloved hands and buffed it from side to side, cackling quietly to herself.

  ‘You’re blushing, you are, you’re blushing! You look fuckin’amazing. Well, I’m going in here for a spaghetti. See ya, baldy!’ She pinched my cheek and vanished into Tamani’s in a cloud of perfume and flying sleeves.

  Jessie and I paced along together for a block.

  ‘I’ve been wanting to say something,’ I said to her. ‘It’s something that really shits me about Javo. He has this way of presenting you to me as a wondrous love affair, and hugely talented, so I feel hopelessly drab by comparison.’