Monkey Grip

by Helen Garner

  ‘Oohoo!’

  They were glad to see me. My heart inflated again to a comfortable buoyancy and I sat down with them to eat. When we left the restaurant we walked up Russell Street, strung across the pavement, Gracie riding on Jack’s shoulders. I put my arm round Willy’s waist and he laid his over my shoulder – o sweet companionableness! I felt his hard healthy body under my hand. No fears, no hopes. Simply what was there. Our boots beat the footpath in rhythm, and we walked back to Carlton in the cold spring night: air dark blue and sharp, a faint scent of things growing.

  At the tower I borrowed the Falcon and headed for Peel Street, but the radio was playing the kind of music that made me want to turn right out Royal Parade and head for Sydney, or just along a fast clear road. I didn’t want to go home, not because being alone there was distasteful to me, but because I wanted to share the fizzing inside my head. I drove down to Napier Street, thinking to see Jean’s brown Queensland face and hear stories of travel. Nobody home; but I was not discouraged. On the way out the gate I passed Claire coming in, her cap of silky fair hair flopping round her face, flushed and chilly from the bike ride home in that clear spring night. She was laughing and sparkling at me in the darkness, dressed in a cape and boots like a young cavalier, arms forward to the handlebars. We greeted and parted and I drove home, content to be elated on my own.

  Now, how can I ever sleep, in this exhilaration? The spring air comes cleanly through my window, I’m in love with the air and the city and Rita sleeping in her brass bed across the landing and the kids stacked in their bunks and the cat curled in Gracie’s waist and Paddy’s black hair and Willy’s blond and Jack’s pointed chin and my hair growing and the wrinkled skin on my writing fingers and my sister Cobby far away in another country.

  Enough of you, Javo, and your death. I’ve had enough. Now, if only I can live that out. Enough. I will gather my strength.

  ‘Doubt not.

  You gather friends around you

  As a hair clasp gathers the hair.’

  – I Ching: Enthusiasm

  There’s hope for all of us, I swear.

  IN SUCH A HOUSE OF DREAMS

  On Gracie’s sixth birthday I did not want to go to the circus. The others ran off to the car with shrieks of excitement. I lay disconsolately on my bed. It was a muggy day, dull and clouded. But in the late afternoon the sky cleared and my spirits did the same. The sun went down; the bath heater was roaring away downstairs, Nick was playing with the kids (thumps, screeches, laughter), and Bill came into my room after the circus and stroked my head and put his warm hand on my arm. It wasn’t that I was lonely for Javo, but that my body was lonely.

  ‘Stay with me, Bill.’

  He did. When I slept next to him (he was as massive as a whale and twice as placid), I never dropped clear into the well, but rose and fell on the river currents.

  For nights, then, I slept alone. I was so restless that it seemed I woke and turned over in despair every five minutes. I thought I must be going crazy. It was the loneliness, and the fantasies. Maudlin songs drove me to distraction. I had an adolescent longing to be absolutely enfolded by someone. The fantasies were out of control. They were indescribably delightful. The most trivial word or image would trigger off a bout of them. And every time, when I could no longer ignore their total lack of connection with, or meaning in, the real world, the bad moments followed, as reliably as the thump at the end of a coke flash.

  Into the hollow left by Javo dropped an unexpected stone.

  Nick took me with him to a gig. I got drunk and danced merrily all on my own. The band finished working and came down off the stage. Angela and I were horsing about amiably. People were arranging lifts home.

  ‘What about you?’ said Nick to Gerald. He looked up from where he was sitting at the table, leaning his dark, expressionless face on one fist, and said in a casual voice,

  ‘I want to go home with Nora.’

  I thought he was teasing me, and laughed. He shrugged and smiled: his face, propped motionless over his drink, was perfectly inscrutable. He drew back his long thin legs to let me pass.

  ‘See you round, then,’ he said, by way of farewell.

  ‘Funny Gerald should have said that,’ I remarked to Nick on the way home. ‘I always kind of liked him, actually.’

  ‘Well, why didn’t you go with him?’ shouted Nick, the fast worker, laughing incredulously.

  ‘Don’t be dumb! He was only teasing me!’

  ‘Listen, dummy, it would have taken him a real lot of nerve to say that to you.’

  We laughed at the ludicrous irony of it.

  Next day Nick said, ‘I told Gerald what you said about last night. He said, “Yeah, I should have made it clear that I wasn’t joking”.’

  Nick was lounging on Rita’s bed with the curtains drawn, idly staring into space. I said,

  ‘What do you reckon my chances are of – you know – racing him off?’

  ‘I’d say pret-ty fuckin’ good,’ replies Mr Cool, one hand under his head, grinning wickedly. ‘Why don’t you let me be the go-between?’

  ‘Shutup, shithead. You’d love that, wouldn’t you.’

  ‘I reckon. I already told him you said you liked him.’

  ‘Did you, indeed. What did he say?’

  ‘He said, “I bet she only told you so you’d tell me”.’

  We were rolling with laughter on the bed.

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’ I said, trying to calm down.

  ‘Nothing! Nothing. He asked me where you lived, but I –’

  ‘– But you’d forgotten the address. Oh, you useless shit!’

  ‘And then he said, “Why doesn’t she just come round here and hop into bed with me?”’

  I couldn’t keep up this adolescent game. It always ended up showing its fundamental brutality, and I found myself suddenly depressed, and frightened by the gap between a remark like that and my fantasies, which were of love.

  Idiotic.

  I dreamed again and again of houses, always big airy open houses, always beside the sea, wind flowing freely through the rooms, people pleasantly disposed or working quietly, and miles and miles of ocean out every window. In such a house of dreams I spoke with Gerald, this unknown figure: though our heads were close together, his voice was indistinct, hard to hear, like a bad telephone connection.

  I woke up and my room was full of sunny wind, red curtain flying and the noise of the market battering away out there past the Ah Chang Trading Company.

  Nick and Javo were in my room.

  ‘Lend us your rapidograph, will you, Nora?’ asked Nick.

  I said, to tease Javo, ‘Well, it’s kind of special, because Javo gave it to me for a present, but now it’s OK for you to use it, because I don’t love him any more.’

  ‘Good on ya!’ cried Javo with a laugh. He meant it. I did not mean it. But at that moment I realised I had better start meaning it. Any kind of love for him was no longer appropriate, if I wanted to stay in one piece. The day before, he and I had been eating lunch at Jimmy’s, enjoying ourselves until he brought up the endless subject of our relationship.

  ‘Since my old man left,’ he said, ‘and my old lady tried to make up for it by smothering me with affection, I’ve always valued my friendships with men more than my relationships with women. Maybe that had something to do with what happened between you and me – I’ve always had plenty of female love, but not enough male.’

  My face must have dropped, for he became all attention, fixing me with his blue eyes only a fraction whited out. I had a few bad minutes . . . and what man, I thought bitterly, would take what I’ve taken from you?. . . but we left the restaurant and in the sunny street my dismay jumped off my shoulders and simply flew away.

  ‘Ah, come on, Javes,’ I said in a burst of good feeling. ‘I don’t want to talk like this. Let’s just be friends. Let me take your arm – can I take your arm?’ I squeezed and prodded his skinny elbow, to tease him. He grinned, and said,

&n
bsp; ‘Yeah. I like it.’

  And we walked back to Peel Street in the best spirit we could manage, which was a rough companionableness. I must make that do.

  HOLY IN THE ORCHARD

  At Tullamarine, waiting at the barrier for someone I’d never seen, Martin’s elder brother Joss. T shirts, denim jackets, no, no, that’s not right, but then I see him, couldn’t be anyone but the owner of that soft voice on the telephone – small, he’s small and he’s wearing a jacket with ties instead of buttons, and a cap pulled down over his dry, untidy, bleached-out hair. He comes towards me where I stand uncertainly, holding Gracie’s hand.

  ‘I’m Joss.’

  We shake hands. I never shake hands.

  ‘I am not used to this flying,’ he said. ‘I can’t handle planes and cars. I am used to driving bullock carts.’ His voice was faintly tinged with American.

  ‘You are so unlike Martin,’ I said. ‘You are not speedy. I suppose it’s because you don’t live in a big city.’

  He laughed shortly. ‘I’ve lived in much bigger cities than Martin ever has,’ he retorted. It was the only egotistical remark I ever heard him make. I remembered Martin saying, ‘He was burning cars in Paris in ‘68.’

  I steered the big beat-up Falcon back down the freeway in the dark. The night air streamed in, vaguely sweetened with grassy scents. I glanced sideways at his hooked profile blurred by thoughtless hair. He was quite still. The desire to chatter left me. I was very, very tired. I was in a trance of fatigue. He sensed the looseness in the fabric usually drawn so tight, and without a word he came flooding in.

  In our house he sat quietly at the table. The children moved unerringly to his side.

  ‘Tell us about up in India,’ begged Grace. ‘Is there any cars?’

  Up in India, up in India.

  He drew for them. He told them stories of few words. They stood beside him with their mouths open.

  After they had gone to bed, I made a fire in my room. He came in and we sat on the floor for a long time, not speaking, hypnotised by the flames. He slept on the floor and I crept under my blankets on the bed. When the fire went out and it became cold, we woke up at the same moment.

  ‘I’ll go upstairs and get a blanket, or . . .’ He got up.

  ‘You could sleep in here,’ I offered, afraid of being misinterpreted; all I wanted was for this peacefulness to continue. He took off his clothes: he bent over and I saw the weather-beaten skin of his belly: you are as old as I am. He got into my bed. We held each other, not speaking, and he sent out his beams of warmth.

  In the morning when the children went to school, I was standing at the sink.

  ‘I am going down to Hobart today,’ he said. I turned to look at him. Don’t go away. I didn’t think but opened my mouth.

  ‘Can we come with you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I began to understand the dreams of houses near the sea. In Hobart, Gracie slept beside me in a comfortable room. The windows were shut against the cold night, but out there somewhere water was heaving gently against a shore, and a full moon was covered with cloud. I was in a state of fatigue so extreme, and so harmonious, that it had become ecstatic. No drugs. No sleep.

  It was a morning with clouds. I sat on the bed. Gracie was painting. Joss came in with his clothes full of cold air from the beach. He turned around in the room and the air flew out of his clothes and went past my face.

  ‘Joss, Joss, where’s Joss?’ says Gracie every three minutes.

  ‘I was down on the beach,’ he replies.

  ‘Next time will you take me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Joss!’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Joss! Are you gone again, Joss?’

  She wants to be with him all the time. So do I.

  When we got to Franklin on the bus it was dark and cold. We walked along the road, expecting to meet Charlie as he drove down from the orchard to pick us up. Gracie was riding on Joss’s shoulders, wearing his cap. Again and again I felt her agitation. There was water somewhere to our left, its dampness rising in the silence.

  ‘I want to go back to the pub,’ Gracie kept saying, in a voice she strove to make conversational. At a bend in the road we realised we had come too far, and turned back. The light was yellow through the glass of the pub door, and Gracie sighed with relief, and Charlie was waiting in the bar.

  We came in the dark to the house in the apple orchard. The three of us slept in the double bed. A big fire, a lamp, a candle.

  ‘How are you doin'?’ asks Joss. ‘You are sighing a lot.’

  ‘Am I? I’ve been thinking about Martin.’

  The radio was on faintly in the next room. The pips went for the news, and we heard voices shouting.

  ‘A rebellion, a revolution,’ I said. By the time we reached the radio we could hear the hysterical sirens.

  She missed, she missed.

  A 45-year-old woman with one child raised a gun and fired at President Ford. The second go they’d had at him in California in seventeen days.

  Rain like the small rain of Ireland. Across the lumpy fields you can see it thicken and move.

  The way he conducted himself made my normal life seem raucous. And yet . . . What is it? I’m out of sync, here. No grip, clutch slipping. I’m not frightened. I know when he goes back to India I won’t miss him. He gives me nothing, and yet at the same time everything. The way I usually talk has no purchase on the surface of his life, or on its surfacelessness. At the point where I realise this, the point at which frustration or annoyance would normally push me past such a situation, my mind quietly slips a cog and I float away.

  It’s all right.

  The big clean pale logs hiss on the fire. I am the only one awake in the house. Grace has been asleep for hours in the front bedroom. Joss has fallen asleep, half curled up with his back to me, on the other side of the fireplace. Rain sprinkles softly. A small rabbit which was saved from the dogs this morning stirs in its brown cardboard box.

  Joss has spectacular scars, on his arms and feet in particular.

  ‘A scorpion bit me,’ he explains, showing me a livid mauve scar three inches long on his left fore-arm. ‘It was a trip.’

  I look up sharply.

  ‘A real pain trip,’ he continues placidly, smiling at me with his brother’s eyes: goldish-green, rimmed finely with a brown line. ‘My hands were clenched, like this –’ showing me bent, tight fingers.

  What am I doing here?

  He assumes, not asking me but discussing it in my presence, that Gracie and I will go with him on Thursday down to Dover. If any other man I know had made such an assumption, I would have been furious.

  Why aren’t I, with him?

  I’m too spaced. I am tentative. I do not take initiatives.

  When he talks about India, I don’t understand what he says.

  Sometimes he looks me in the eyes, intently, for such a long time that I have to look away.

  He is still asleep.

  I can never slow down to his placidness.

  It was a morning.

  I was lying on my back on a raft on the deep dam, dreaming of nothing while Joss and Gracie attempted to extract papyrus from the rushes on the verge. The sun was beaming down and I was in a state resembling sleep. The air was still, except for the sound of the stream rushing, further over. Suddenly there was a tremendous hissing and pushing in the air. I looked up with a start and saw a whirlwind come spiralling down from the gumtrees to the surface of the dam about fifteen feet from me. The water there boiled violently for a few seconds over a round area as big as a dinner table. The disturbance vanished as suddenly as it had come, the trees settled again, there was nothing left on the water but a line of bubbles.

  ‘Did you see that?’ I called to Joss.

  ‘It was a spirit!’ He was laughing on the bank.

  I stood up on the raft and picked up the pole, because for no apparent reason I had begun to drift, slowly but decidedly, towards the patch of water where
the willy willy had been. Then I thought, well, if it’s a spirit as he says it’s almost certainly a benevolent one, and there’s no harm in drifting; so I lay down again and let my mind fly away, and the raft drifted exactly to the whirlwind place, and stopped, and I lay there in a kind of somnolent trance.

  It seemed hours later when I came to, sat up, saw Gracie and Joss had disappeared, poled my raft back to shore, moored it to the tree, and reeled down the track in a dream. Back at the house Joss was cutting up vegetables.

  ‘What about that whirlwind,’ says I.

  Says he, looking up like a grandfather from his carrots, ‘If you’d known what to do with that whirlwind, you might have gone into another world. It was a doorway. It was specially for you, that one.’

  When he makes these cosmic remarks, I get a double response: firstly, a stillness, in which I accept the comment along with a steady look he gives me; and simultaneously but somehow secondarily, a flash of scepticism, expressed purely in a visual image: Willy’s face and his mocking smile.

  Sitting in the kitchen, I remember I had arranged to go out with Paddy tonight. A small fantasy slips across the screen: I send her a telegram saying ‘Never coming back.’ At this I give a snort of laughter. Joss hears me, smiles, asks,

  ‘Pourquoi ris-tu?’

  Not really a need to reply; nor a chance to, through Gracie’s exuberance. I modify the message to ‘Not coming back.’