Monkey Grip

by Helen Garner

  She laughed, striding with her loose strides beside me down Faraday Street. ‘He talks like that about you, too,’ she said. My anxiety and envy simply disintegrated in her reasonableness.

  ‘Juliet said something funny this morning,’ I said. ‘She said, “Javo is always lazy. He should busily work”.’

  We burst out laughing.

  ‘You can imagine Javo manically working,’ said Jessie, ‘but busily! Never!’

  In the evening when the children had gone to sleep and the house was quiet, I sat in my room and stared at the fire. I could hear Stevie Wonder singing somewhere outside. I opened the window. Someone in our street was playing very loudly Fulfllingness’ First Finale. The music made me lonely. I remembered Javo when he first came back from Thailand, sick and cold and thin as sticks, fighting himself to stay off dope, and as it got closer and closer to the moment when he couldn’t hold off any longer, he got more and more nervous, and we wept helplessly next to the cold fire, and I drove him round to Easey Street and left him there.

  No use, no use. Gone now.

  The lawyer rang with an urgent message for Javo. I hadn’t seen him for days but I knew he would be at Easey Street waiting to score so I walked round there just after dark. Micky and Ruth were standing on the doorstep as I approached and we all knocked together. Chris opened the door and we went in. In the living room were Javo, Mark and the baby Nina, a large crowd of us in the small room. Mark said hullo to me in his friendly way. I squatted down next to Javo, noticing his round belly, his jeans too tight from his scrounger’s diet of bread and cereal. I told him the message.

  ‘You have to be in court tomorrow.’

  ‘What! Dressed? Fuck, I haven’t got a suit to wear. Oh, fuck it.’

  ‘You can wear my suit,’ said Mark calmly, peeling apples by the fire.

  I got up to go, wondering why Javo’s eyes were so blue and his pupils so big.

  ‘Thanks for the message, mate,’ said Javo hastily; he wasn’t looking at me. I headed for the door. Mark glanced up.

  ‘Is that all you came for?’ he said, and grinned.

  ‘Well, it’s like this,’ I said. ‘Javo and I aren’t on very good terms, so I don’t feel comfortable, you know, hanging round.’ As I spoke I backed out into the hallway: Javo’s face was hidden from me behind the door. From the hall I saw Mark’s face turned up towards me from his seat: he had a wry, still smile on his face. I backed away towards the front door, raising my voice as I moved: the words just rolled out, not willed by my conscious mind:

  ‘I’m on good terms with him, but he’s not on good terms with me.’

  I was out the door, had closed it behind me, was out in the dark street.

  ‘Hoo, hoo!’ crowed Micky, who had followed me out. ‘You really laid it on him!’

  I didn’t want the commentary. ‘Fuck him,’ I snarled, ‘he gives me the shits.’ But I couldn’t help laughing, to think that he was almost certainly saying the same thing about me at that very moment.

  Lou was going to come and stay with me, but he didn’t show up, and I woke in the morning surprised and a little relieved to find myself alone. He walked in at lunchtime, when Gracie and I were sitting at the table eating an artichoke. He came straight over to me and kissed me on the mouth, and hugged me. He said nothing about not having come round the night before. I didn’t care at all. There’s a warning in there somewhere.

  He shared our lunch, pleasant as always, but distracted. He had a rehearsal and made to leave. I darted beside him to the door. He stood on the step outside, I stood on the carpet inside.

  ‘Hang on, Lou!’ I touched his arm. ‘Is everything all right?’

  He gave an odd smile and looked away over the brick wall, hands in his jacket pockets.

  ‘Ye-e-es . . . except for one thing . . .’

  ‘If it’s not turning up last night, that’s all right,’ I jumped in, too thoughtless to wait for him to speak. He ignored what I’d said, and went on,

  ‘Selena’s got to go and see a doctor on Monday.’

  ‘What’s she got?’

  ‘She’s pregnant. And she can’t keep it because of the hep.’

  ‘How do you feel about it?’ I said, thinking instantly that he would hate it because he was a romantic.

  ‘Ohh . . .’ he shrugged.

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘She couldn’t keep it, anyway.’

  ‘Well, then. She’ll be needing . . .’

  ‘Support. Yeah. She will.’

  ‘OK. Well – will you give her my love?’

  ‘I sure will. I’m going to rehearsal now. I’ll call round afterwards, maybe for tea. Hey, Gracie! Learn a new vegetable by teatime. Zucchini? See you!’

  And he went off over the uneven bricks.

  I wished that we would have the grace to fall back without endless explanations.

  Gracie and I went to the theatre and stayed there from seven in the evening until two in the morning. I danced, very stoned, by myself and with Gracie who kicked up her stringy legs in black tights and did not need me for her partner. Through the crowd I could glimpse Bill way up at the other end of the theatre, juggling three silver balls, his shorn dark head dipping and bobbing gracefully.

  ‘Hey, Nora,’ said Clive, sidling up with a grin. ‘Want to sleep with me tonight?’

  ‘Sure do.’

  Early in the evening my unhappiness about Javo had got on top of me, and I’d had to drag my heart round after me like a tin tied to my ankle; but now I was flooded with the possibilities, the theatre was full of people I liked and loved and whose work was joyful to me. Child beside me, friend to sleep with, body loose from dancing and laughing. Coasting! for a while.

  I came home with Clive and Gracie. She went to sleep in her bunk, and we fucked in the silent house, and fell asleep peacefully, tenacious old lovers, friends forever perhaps. In the morning we drank orange juice and talked about everything.

  In Lygon Street we passed Willy: spiky silvery-yellow head, blue and white striped jumper, a hard-edge image, absolutely distinct from his environment. He looked at us with his smart-arse grin.

  ‘Are you two in love again?’

  ‘Never been out of it,’ I lied for the sake of laughter. ‘But it’s funny you should say that, Willy, because when I saw you coming up the street I thought to myself, “I bet Willy will say – Are you two in love again?” And so you did.’

  TWO BOB EACH WAY ON EVERYTHING

  Javo came to my house a few afternoons later. He had been in court all day and was wearing Mark’s brown suit. His eyes were bright blue, and his hair had grown. We talked quietly, but some terrible things were said.

  He said, ‘You said one thing, the other morning, which made me think, well, that’s it.’

  ‘What did I say?’

  ‘You described my life as sordid.’

  We looked at each other steadily and defiantly.

  ‘I do think that.’

  ‘Well – that’s what I mean. It’s not sordid.’

  ‘Do you think I meant morally sordid, or sort of materially?’

  ‘Just sordid. It’s got a meaning!’

  ‘Yes, but what do you think it means?’

  ‘Just sordid!’

  Had to drop that tack.

  He said, ‘When I came back from Sydney and started spending more time by myself, I also started using a lot less dope. And I realised it was because my life, away from you, was much less complicated. I reckon if I’d had a place to live over the last few months, I’d have been hitting up a lot less.’

  Probably true.

  ‘I find my life a lot simpler, too, when I’m on my own,’ I said. ‘But I want to say – I miss you, and I miss fucking with you; because even when things were really difficult, I always felt we made real emotional contact when we fucked.’

  ‘Yeah . . . but you’ve got to realise that the dope had a lot to do with that.’

  ‘I know! You don’t understand my attitude towards dope.’


  ‘Yes I do. It can be summed up in four words: YOU DON’T LIKE IT.’

  ‘It’s not that simple. How do you think we kept going so long, if I felt that simply about it?’

  ‘Well – with the feelings you’ve got about dope, it’s a wonder you didn’t stop it a long time ago – you should have.’

  I was struck dumb. I felt my face change as under a blow. Tears would have come to my eyes but for my dry stare. He looked defiant, pugnacious almost. I got up and walked out of the room, needing care on the stairs to preserve an equilibrium inside my head. In my room I stood and stared at nothing. I thought that if I didn’t go down again he would leave without telling me, or saying goodbye.

  I went down again. He was still sitting there.

  ‘What makes me saddest,’ I said, ‘is the way you’re physically closed to me. It’s not just that I want to fuck with you. It’s that in the ordinary daily run of things it’s not possible for me to touch you. You do this to me' – shielding my face behind my arms – ‘so I end up with nothing – not the passionate stuff, and not the friendly touching either, that people feel comfortable about doing ordinarily.’

  He looked exasperated, and smiled.

  ‘But, Nor – maybe that’s the way it has to be, when things finish between people: that blank-out.’

  ‘How can you say that? You believe in change, don’t you?’

  ‘Look – before you, the last person I was really involved with was Jessie. That’s over a year ago. The other night after her show I went up to her and hugged her, and she flinched back – still, now, she wonders “What the fuck’s going on?” when I touch her.’

  Resign, resign myself.

  ‘You’ve got all the cards.’

  ‘I just don’t think about it like that,’ he said.

  You mightn’t, my old lover, but that’s the way it is.

  I went out to the kitchen and put the kettle on. When I came back, he had fallen asleep in the chair beside the fire. I set up the board and began to do the ironing, glancing back at him over my shoulder from time to time. I saw the way his head fell a little to one side, his hands stayed clasped between his thighs. In spite of myself I filled up with helpless tenderness. He half-woke and crept down on to the floor, and Rita came in and put one of the children’s eiderdowns over him. He slept for several hours. We did our housework, the children came in from school, we drank our tea and clattered our plates, he didn’t stir. At seven o’clock Willy came to pick us all up to go to Paddy’s party. Javo woke up, struggled to his feet.

  ‘Can you give us a lift to the tower?’ he croaked to Willy.

  He came that far with us, sitting silently hunched in the middle of the front seat. We stopped, he got out, glanced at me.

  ‘See ya.’

  ‘’Bye.’

  At the party I got stoned very methodically. Willy and Angela turned on one of their appallingly funny arguments about the state of their relationship, and I laughed till my face was stiff with it. Bill came home with me, and we sat together in the car with the sleepy children babbling on our knees. Gracie told us how to remove a tic from your skin.

  ‘You don’t do it way of clock-ticking,’ she explained. ‘You do it wrong way of clock-ticking.’

  Being ignorant of tics, and too stoned to understand, I thought she was talking about the two words tic and tick. But Bill looked at me, astonished, and translated,

  ‘She means anti-clockwise.’

  In my room we were so stoned we could not stop laughing. But at last we did stop, and gently fucked, very easy and simple, the outcome of six or seven years of friendship. He flowed along under me, beside me, a kindly lover. When he came he sighed and his voice was soft. We woke in the morning to gossip pleasantly about the world and our small, intense part of it.

  ‘Dear Javo, by sordid I meant something quite particular: the way it has become necessary for you to live with an eye to the main chance, two bob each way on everything, wild swings and lurches in the twinkling of an eye, losing your centre as you do it. I think perhaps you mistake this lurching for flexibility. Things you said to me yesterday made me feel really terrible. You jerked the rug out from under me. But it’s good that it was all said. I wouldn’t want to go on thinking that my illusion was the reality. You’ve given me some frights, and at the same time I believe you have misrepresented some things which were good and true and which did happen between us. Also I don’t think my attitude towards dope is as moralistic as you make out, but that’s really academic, because we are forever divided on that score. I want to say, I love you, and wish you well, and like you, and firmly believe that it is ALL WORTH IT and always was. Nora.’

  I really thought it was the end.

  ‘In times of adversity it is important to be strong within and sparing of words.’

  – I Ching: Oppression (Exhaustion)

  Paddy came to visit, and stretched out her thin legs by the fire. I told her about the awful conversation I’d had with Javo. When I repeated his comment about my ‘moralistic’ attitude towards dope, she clicked her tongue in disgust.

  ‘That’s absurd,’ she said. ‘You’re the only one who’s stuck by him.’

  I had never thought about it like that.

  Last time he was in my house, he walked down the stairs in front of me; as he turned at the landing I saw the angle of his cheek, and the tousled back of his head, and a double feeling of tenderness and revulsion ran over me. There would never be an end to it, because I couldn’t hate him as I had (for a while, at the end) hated other people who had hurt me. He was too helpless to be hated wholeheartedly.

  And besides, I loved him.

  It wasn’t that I ached for a sight of him, or wished to seek him out. I’d just made a place for him in myself, and he needed it in spite of himself, and I needed someone exactly his size and shape to fill it.

  Rita moved a bed into her studio along the street.

  ‘Listen, Nora,’ she said. ‘What would you think if I told Javo he could crash there? He’s got nowhere to live.’

  ‘He’d come along here all the time and eat our food. You’ll regret it,’ I said, thinking of his long body in that bed over the cold stone floor. Warm yourself at my fire, Javo; I’ve got enough for both of us, if you were not too proud to share.

  TEACH ME HOW TO FEEL AGAIN

  I went with Bonny to a screening of the junk movie I’d worked on the summer before. We rode our bikes up Brunswick Street in a cold and gritty wind.

  ‘Did Bill tell you he stayed with me that night after Paddy’s party?’ I asked, wondering why it still required a moment of force for me to be honest. ‘I hope it’s all right.’

  ‘Of course it is. It’s not a matter of jealousy – not with you, anyway, because I love you. It’s just that he’s given me the bum’s rush. He never comes round any more. If I want the relationship to go on, I have to do all the legwork. It’s all the same, to him. He reckons he’s “got his own life to live”.’

  ‘Why are they like that?’ I said, looking at her friendly, cheerful face as we struggled up the hill past the big flats: her cheeks were rosy in the wind, half sunk into the collar of her blue pea-jacket.

  ‘It’s that old thing about “having room to move”,’ she said. ‘They’re afraid of being emotionally pressured . . . you know, the old fears of manipulation, of moral pressure – because of course for centuries women have been the conscience of the world.’

  She flicked her eyebrows comically. We laughed, propping on our bikes at the lights outside the Rob Roy Hotel. I remembered Javo that last afternoon by my fire, how he had lifted his chin and opened his eyes wide, and declared,

  ‘Anyway, I’m never gonna get off dope.’

  My hands fell apart in despair. ‘I never – I never – I never asked you to!’

  Javo was at the movie. He sent me a signal, hullo. For a second I would have liked to sit with him, but he was with the prestige junkies, Chris and Mark, and I was in the front row with the straights, Bonn
y and Willy and Angela and Eve and Lou. So I stayed put, keeping my side of that unspoken social pact. Watching myself on the screen, my heart dived about all over the place and I shook in my seat. But it was only five minutes, and the rest of the time was crammed with the faces and voices of people I knew, and I forgot myself, staring at the moving pictures, listening to Angela sing and Willy play, amazed at the concentration of talent in this group of people with their chopped hair, rolled up pants, sceptical expressions and idiosyncratic shorthand speech.

  At the end, when we were leaving, I caught up with Javo and said,

  ‘Hey! I’ve got something for you.’

  I handed him a silver ear-ring which I’d found left over from a pair. He’d sold his gold one, in jail for cigarettes. ‘Here you are. If you’ve still got a hole left.’

  ‘Thanks, mate.’ He took it, smiled at me, disappeared in the small crowd.

  I answered the phone one morning. Someone dropped a coin, pressed the button.

  ‘Is Rita there?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘David,’ said the voice, which I dimly knew. But I didn’t know any David.

  ‘Do you want to leave a message?’

  ‘No,’ said the voice, becoming more familiar every second. ‘No . . . I’ll try ringing back later.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, and before the receiver hit the stand I had recognised the voice – Nick. I finished hanging up and went back to bed, pondering on the ruses people will employ. He must have known it was me. But perhaps he didn’t know how distinctive his own voice was: flat, broad accent, sharp; pauses while he thought, then the words came out in a flat, hard clatter.

  I suffered a terrible compulsion to find out what Javo was thinking. Gracie and I got to the tower before ten o’clock one morning. As we clomped up the stairs, that familiar voice croaked,

  ‘Uh – uhh! Hey – whazza time?’

  ‘Ten o’clock,’ I answered. ‘Where are you?’

  Not in Jack’s room. I went up another flight and found him in the little bolt-hole opposite the dunny. I stuck my head round the door, and he lifted his off the pillow. He was so stoned – pin-eyed, skin breaking out again – that I involuntarily glanced at the floor for the fallen fit. None there. He grinned at me.