Monkey Grip

by Helen Garner

  I waited for Gracie, thinking of her intelligent, ready face, her wiry legs, and her secret, thumb-sucking smile. But I knew that, as soon as she came back, the house would be too small again and we would all go crazy.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t love Rita and Juliet: on the contrary, I suffered from some painful emotion towards them, something to do with Rita’s daily struggle to live, and the fact that I had been through this struggle myself with Gracie, years before: hating her because her existence marked the exact limits of my freedom; hating myself for hating her; loving her, all the while, gut-deep and inexpressibly; and beginning each day with the dogged shouldering of a burden too heavy for one person: the responsibility for the life of another human being. I had been rescued from this bind by Eve and Georgie and Clive, back in the old house: they had prised us apart patiently, lovingly tinkering and forcing. It takes more than one person to perform this most delicate operation, and, trapped there in the tiny, beautiful house with Rita and her battle, I knew I didn’t have it in me. All I could think of was to escape. For weeks I thought treacherously of getting away: I lay in bed at night and racked my brains for an honourable solution.

  When Gracie did arrive from Perth, she came down with measles within half a day. I was still weak from the flu, and stayed with her all day, lying beside her in my hot room, a blanket over the window to protect her sore eyes from the light, and tickled her traumatised skin with the corner of the newspaper. She recovered more quickly than I did. When I was still sick and weak, she played downstairs by herself, singing and drawing and reading aloud great tracts of Baby and Child Care by Doctor Spock. She came up occasionally to say hullo.

  ‘Grace,’ I said, ‘you are good company when I’m sick.’‘I try my best,’ she said with a stoical expression.

  Eve and Georgie came to visit, the two of them radiating goodness and humour, and we lay on my bed in the warm night room, swigging capfuls of cointreau (my birthday present from Paddy) and laughing together about the follies of the world. They went out to their bikes. The three of us stood there in the narrow alleyway, a million miles of sky overhead and a moon shining somewhere nearby; Eve squeezed me with her thin, strong arms.

  ‘Wish we were livin’ together again, eh, Nor?’ she sighed, rolling her eyes. ‘Life’s a fuckin’ struggle, ain’t it!’

  ‘You are not kidding, mate.’

  Georgie kissed me goodbye. His teeth flashed in the dark. I watched them pedal away and I felt small and lonely for a few seconds. It was sexual loneliness, I supposed, but it was also the loneliness of remembering summer-night bicycle rides, rolling home to the big house with a full heart, sailing through floods of warm air, the tyres whirring on the bitumen, then over the gutter and into the park, and feeling the temperature drop under the big green leafy balloons.

  Oh well. Times past.

  Bored, still half-sick and dismal, I went wandering up and down Lygon Street, in and out of Readings and Professor Longhair’s. I succumbed to a sudden urge to sit in front of one glass of strong alcohol. I walked into Jimmy Watson’s (a businessman held the door open for me, with a faded smile) and ordered a glass of port. Ten cents. Ten cents! and I paid a dollar a hit for brandy alexanders at the Southern Cross and did not grudge the wild expenditure. I sat down at a small round brown table, unloaded my books, and drank the port rather fast, gazing blindly at the floor. Which, I knew from memory if no other way, was made of dark red tiles or bricks, very smooth and cool.

  Disgruntled.

  I felt as if I were being drained through very tiny puncture holes.

  When I got home, Javo was wheeling his bike down our side alley towards the street. I hugged him as he stood there, grinning, holding the bike, one trouser leg tucked into his thick dark blue sock.

  ‘Gotta go, Nor,’ he croaked. ‘I left you a note. Wanna go out and eat tomorrow night?’

  ‘I sure do.’

  He pedalled off and I ran upstairs.

  ‘Dear Nora, things are hot and sticky – preoccupied with this welt I’ve got in the guts. How come you never said to me I was a self-engrossed slob? Anyway it’s turn away and laugh some more. Listening to Taj Mahal thinking of last summer funny how things were lying on Georgie’s bed shying away it’s just a matter of try a bit harder eh Nor, a little no a lot more courage on my part – so easy to talk – me with my big mouth and big foot they fit each other like a glove.’

  I went into Myers to buy myself a pair of bathers. I began to see my body as an object, and an unsatisfactory one at that. The fluorescent lights in the fitting room emphasised the looseness of my skin; the elastic of the bikini pressed unattractively into my flesh which would probably never be really firm again. In my heart I started to grieve over my body. In the next cubicle I heard a woman saying to the saleswoman,

  ‘No – not that one; all the stretch marks show.’

  I remembered hearing another woman, on another day, saying to another saleswoman,

  ‘I can’t seem to lose weight any more, since I turned forty.’

  She spoke with humorous regret in her voice, appealing to the womanly sympathies of the shop assistant, but underneath it I heard the fear and sadness that I felt myself, today, in small measure.

  Javo arrived on time, white-eyed but friendly. He had a bottle of methadone in his jacket pocket. We walked into town in the stifling dry air. The cool change came racing up Bourke Street behind us, out of a dirty yellow sky. We ate a meal, pushed our way through Friday night crowds, came back to Peel Street to watch Shoulder to Shoulder on TV, lying comfortably on Rita’s bed. Javo left to go to the supper show, and I dozed off under the eiderdown.

  Very early in the morning Rita came home from Carlton and into my room where I was lying half-awake. She stroked my treacherous head for an hour while we gossiped companion-ably; told me stories of what had been going on without me east of Lygon Street.

  ‘What’s happening with Gerald?’ she asked, pushing her fingers through my hair.

  ‘Everything’s sort of OK. He’s been sleeping at his place a bit lately – also he’s fucking with someone over that side of the river.’

  ‘The bastard! Is he really?’

  I laughed and shrugged. ‘I don’t care. It’s all right with me.’

  She gave me a sharp look: she didn’t believe me: she thought I was acting cool. For that moment she experienced on my behalf, in her generous heart, all the rage and hurt feelings she imagined I ought to feel.

  ‘I’d better go to sleep now,’ I said. ‘I’m still so damned weak.’

  ‘OK, Nor.’ She was smiling again. She kissed me goodnight on my cheek, like a mother or a sister. At the door she stopped, standing against the cracked frame in her black T shirt and white airtex knickers.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘Nick used to say, “Why do you wear those terrible pants? My mother wears those! Why don’t you wear those little sexy ones?” ’

  I laughed. ‘Once, back at Delbridge Street, I was hanging my knickers on the line, and Nick said, “I love those white pants”.’

  We exchanged knowing looks.

  ‘Oh, men!’ she said. ‘They are so fucked up! And yet we keep on hanging round them.’

  ‘Well – goodnight, Rita.’

  She gave me the salute and disappeared.

  A moth had blundered in at my window and was beating itself to death against the lampshade.

  ‘Nora. Come in here.’

  I went across the landing to Rita’s room. She was standing at the fireplace. In one hand was the lid of the many-sided Chinese jar that always stood on her mantelpiece with a picture of Chairman Mao leaning against it.

  ‘When was Javo last here?’

  ‘Last night after tea. Why?’

  ‘Because – there was eighty dollars in here at lunchtime yesterday. It was the rent for the studio. And it’s gone.’

  ‘Gone,’ I repeated stupidly.

  ‘Javo, you reckon?’

  ‘Who else?’

  She clicked the
lid back into place, and twisted her mouth in a grimace of disgust. I felt sick.

  ‘He won’t get away with this one,’ she said. ‘I’m going over there now.’

  ‘I’ll stay here with the kids.’

  She got on her bike and rode away. I remembered uncomfortably what she’d said when we first decided to try living together: ‘There’s only one thing bothering me, and that’s your junkie mates.’ Well, she’d found her own junkie mates by now; but what had I started? An hour later I heard the bike clatter against the wall and she stamped in, pulling off her jacket.

  ‘What’d he say?’

  ‘Oh, I know it was him, the fucking bastard. I went straight to Easey Street – he’d just left there, Chris said she’d sold him a cap for forty dollars. So I went to his house and put it on him. He denied it. He was so stoned he could hardly see me.’

  She stared at me, biting her lips, her eyes full of furious tears.

  ‘Let me have a go, Rita. Maybe he’ll talk to me.’

  I walked in at his kitchen door and found him slumped in an armchair watching television.

  ‘We know it was you, Javo.’ I had to yell over the gunshots and thundering hooves. He stared up at me dully, chewing the insides of his cheeks. A frown formed slowly on his dirty face.

  ‘I don’t fuckin’ care what youse think,’ he shouted, voice thick with dope. ‘I never touched the fuckin’ money! Every time something disappears you try and pin it on me.’ His hands dangled between his thighs.

  ‘Mark says you’re going down to Hobart.’ I could hardly hear myself.

  ‘Yeah. I’m gonna get a job. And get off dope.’ Defiant stare: go on, call my bluff. I put one hand on the television set to steady my shaking, and bent over, putting my face near his.

  ’ Well, don’t you come near me again,’ I hissed. ‘You’ve done it this time, mate.’

  I pushed past Hank on my way out the door.

  ‘How’d you get on?’ asked Rita when I got home. She was grinning by this time, raising one eyebrow with that ironic resignation which was going to be the saving of her.

  ‘Hopeless.’ I dumped my bag on the chair and looked at her helplessly, my hands hanging at my sides.

  ‘Well, get a load of this.’ She jerked her thumb at the table. Next to the vase of flowers lay the meat cleaver.

  ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘Remember, it disappeared about six weeks ago? Well, I went along to the studio just now to pull Javo’s bed apart, and I found it between the two mattresses.’

  We stood looking at each other.

  ‘What do you suppose he’s scared of?’ she whispered.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  We put our arms round each other.

  ‘The poor fucking bastard,’ said Rita.

  And though I didn’t know it at the time, Javo was already forgiven.

  ATTITUDES OF STRUGGLE AND FLIGHT

  Whether Rita would forgive me so readily was by no means certain. It was a betrayal, of sorts, when I found the big house in Rowe Street, rounded up as many of the old householders as I could muster, and made one of those insane leaps of faith, brushing aside undeniable truths for the sake of a clean break.

  ‘Are you worried about our living in the same house?’ asked Gerald.

  ‘Not exactly worried,’ I said, still suffering from a bout of mindless optimism. ‘But I want you to understand, though – I’ve done this before, and it was disastrous. I don’t want us to move into this house as a couple – in fact the very thought of it gives me the horrors.’

  Gerald raised his eyebrows. ‘That’s a bit strong, isn’t it?’

  We laughed.

  ‘No, mate! I mean it. It’s nothing to do with personalities. I just can’t do it any more.’

  ‘Well – we’ll have our own rooms – I guess that will establish us separately.’

  As if to warn of intention were enough! The forms are too strong to be simply talked away. But in I leaped, feet first, eyes shut.

  ‘Do you feel guilty about leaving Rita and Juliet behind when you move?’ asked Gerald.

  ‘Do you think I have anything to feel guilty about?’ I asked, trying to control my tone.

  ‘Oh . . . I don’t know . . .’ he said in his maddeningly casual voice. ‘If you can do it and not feel guilty about it, that’s really good. I’ve never done it, that’s all.’

  ‘Done what?‘

  ‘Walked out on someone who needed me.’

  A great rush of distress and its protective accompaniment, anger, filled me.

  ‘But I’m not married to her. If she needs me, then that means I can never leave her. Isn’t that true?’

  Pause.

  ‘Yeah . . . I suppose it is.’

  I groaned and put my head in my hands, more out of weariness than anything else. But he seemed to take it for anger. He got off the bed and said,

  ‘Where’s the car key?’

  He searched my room while I sat at my table staring out the window. Seeing me sitting glumly there, he said in a mocking tone,

  ‘Oh! Snooty, snooty!’

  I looked up in surprise. ‘I’m not snooty – really I’m not!’

  He looked over his shoulder at me on his way out the door. He had a sceptical smile on his face; he said nothing and disappeared down the stairs.

  ‘Oh, shit.’ I put my head on the table, exasperated and sad, wondering why we bothered to keep going together when it seemed so passionless, and difficult. I grabbed my bag and ran downstairs, caught up with him on my bike as he was about to start the car.

  ‘It’s not snootiness,’ I said, upset again as I looked at his closed, dark face. ‘I was miserable. Why not have another look?’

  His eyes turned soft. He put his hand on my arm through the car window, and nodded, saying nothing.

  When at last I did break my guilty silence, Rita stood in my doorway, trying to smile.

  ‘Nora – why didn’t you give me the choice of coming with you?’

  I was sitting at the table, scribbling on a piece of paper. I drove the point of the pencil into the pitted table surface, unable to look at her.

  ‘I can’t handle your relationship with Juliet – I don’t seem to be able to help you with it, and I can’t bear it the way it is.’

  ‘I know. I thought that’s what it was.’

  I glanced up and saw her cheeks flushed with unhappiness, her eyes lowered.

  ‘I have been going crazy here,’ I muttered, ashamed of my meagre loyalty. She walked out of the room without another word. I sat on, thinking miserably of my willingness to commit myself domestically to a man who was still all but closed to me, while Rita, who had never held back, would be left behind. I thought all this, and yet I went ahead.

  At eleven o’clock that night Chris walked in with some coke. I woke up and we talked a bit.

  ‘I hear Javo ripped you off,’ she remarked as I fumbled in my bag for the price of the deal.

  ‘It was Rita, actually. He took eighty bucks off her mantelpiece – the rent for her studio where he’s been crashing for months, the fucking rat.’

  ‘Well, he’s gone to Hobart. He left this afternoon.’

  ‘Good riddance.’ We exchanged a flick of the eyebrows. ‘Well . . . is the coke any good, mate?’

  By way of reply she showed me her arms, which were horrible: a row of manically neat, evenly spaced tracks all down the veins in her fore-arms, the crooks of her elbows bruised and swollen, her hands dotted with the marks of that greed. She was hollow-faced with coke-paranoia:

  ‘The cops know all about me,’ she declared, resigned and final. ‘They’ll do a series of big busts before Christmas to get their paperwork cleaned up. I can’t stay,’ she went on, half getting up off the bed where she was sitting in her ragged lace blouse and long green velvet coat. ‘I don’t know where Mark is – I’m scared he’s run away.’

  ‘Run away?’

  ‘Yeah – taken Nina and gone to Tasmania. He said to me the other day that he�
��d go, and take her with him, if I didn’t stop dealing. I have to deal to get my shit – and people come round all the time, which makes it really hard for him to get off. He wants to get off – he’s so strong-willed.’

  ‘But surely he wouldn’t have gone,’ I said, trying to think of him standing at the airline ticket counter, Nina on his hip, his thin fingers on the shining counter and his messy fair hair green in the fluorescence.

  ‘He might’ve. He might’ve gone to his sister’s – or somewhere else, where I couldn’t find him.’

  She got up suddenly, took a step towards the bedroom door, paused with her hand on the door and her face blank, then flashed me a nod and a vacant smile, and disappeared in one fast movement.

  I put the cap away, too tired to contemplate using it, and fell asleep. At two in the morning Gerald came in from his gig and I backed up to his long curve and we fell asleep again together. At six a.m. Chris walked into my room. I woke up completely and instantly. She knelt on the end of my bed (Gerald slept on) and whispered,

  ‘Have you used all that coke?’

  ‘I haven’t used any of it,’ I replied, sitting up and putting my hands to her cheeks, a familiarity I probably would not have dared if I hadn’t just leapt out of a dream. ‘Why – do you want some?’

  We laughed. I scrambled out of bed, trying not to disturb Gerald’s deserving slumber, and we went down the stairs, me with the cap in my hand. The kids were just beginning to stir in their room next to the front door.

  ‘Do you want me to hit you up?’ she offered as we passed through the hall and into the living room.

  ‘No thanks,’ I said, feeling no pull towards the proposition, but no revulsion from it either.

  ‘Do you ever hit up?’

  ‘I’ve never hit up anything.’ I gave her the cap and we sat down at the table.

  With her bony, experienced fingers she shook out half its contents and fixed herself a large hit. Her outfit was elegantly wrapped in a small piece of chamois leather.