Monkey Grip (19 page)

Just in that moment when the senses' intake, hearing and seeing, began to melt into one impression, Gracie called me from the house and it all broke apart again into its separate categories. But for a few seconds there it was like Joni Mitchell's song:

Home, home, home.

We drove forty miles down the Hume and my back stopped aching.

No-one home. I walked into my room and looked at my face in the mirror and was surprised to see that I had a slight suntan, and that my hair had grown, not just longer, but thicker.

Javo had been in my room. A lump of cigarette ash lay on my table between the opened letters: no-one else would have dared.

That night I had a terrible dream: I came into the house and found it full of the dense feeling of two people sexually involved with each other: Rita and Javo had been fucking, and I was totally excluded. I could
not
break through. I was dreadfully upset. I tried to talk to Javo, half-crying, full of grief, but he adopted an airy tone and brushed my questions aside.

‘Is it that you just aren't interested any more?' I asked, almost pleading.

‘Yes, that's about it,' he replied, not looking at me.

There was no communication between me and Rita in the dream, only my wretchedness and jealousy. The atmosphere of it was thick with misery. I woke up out of it and found it was the very early hours of the morning, and the house still, but I could not fight my way out of the thickness of that dream. I lay there wide awake, battling with it and with my feeling of shame, and very slowly it began to dissipate itself, and release me. But the room was full of his presence, and of my fears. What
was
I afraid of? Nothing much, by the time daylight came, and I began to use my brain.

Lunchtime in Pulcinella: me, Rita, Bill and Willy grumbling over a mediocre pasta.

‘Ah – there he goes, the star of stage and screen,' remarked Willy nastily. I looked up and saw Javo, white-faced and rough-headed, stumble past the window, heading east down Elgin Street, looking for a hit.

No pain.

At one o'clock in the morning he loomed in my doorway, hesitating till I woke up properly and said hullo. Both on our best behaviour, ‘being friends', we talked awkwardly for a while. When conversation flagged, he mooched round the room and picked up his Bangkok journal off the bottom shelf. He sat on my chair and read over what he had written months ago, when he had been frightened and even more strung out than he was now.

I lay there watching him, saying nothing. He was a bit stoned, I observed. I looked at his face, which changed as he read. His hair had grown out from the prison haircut, and looked thick and dry and matted.

‘I'm keeping you up,' he offered absent-mindedly as he turned a page.

‘No, it's all right,' I said politely.

At last he got up, his head nearly touching the low ceiling. ‘It's getting late. I think I'll go to bed.' He turned off the light, and was hesitating between me and the door, about to start off for the studio.

‘Give us a hug,' I said, because I wanted to touch him. He sat down on the edge of the bed and put one gangly arm around me. We hugged each other, and I began to stroke his face and hair, for the pleasure of feeling him again. He flopped his lantern head on to my shoulder, and let me go on stroking. I thought, no-one has touched him since he left me in Sydney. His eyes were closed in the dark, and I stroked him over and over, while my head filled with fantasies of what might happen in the morning if I asked him to stay with me.

He sat up, rested his elbows on his knees, and stared doggedly in front of him in the dark room.

‘I would like to ask you to stay, but I don't want to get kicked in the teeth again in the morning.'

He sat silent.

‘Do you want to stay?'

‘I don't know, mate. I just don't know.'

I put my hand on his thigh and began to stroke his leg, both because I liked the feel of it and because in some perverse way I wanted to make him stay with me, to seduce him to stay, perfectly benevolently, to coax him to drop his pride, or fear, or whatever it was around his neck like an albatross.

‘Get in here.'

He started to pull off his boots. He took off his clothes, awkwardly, and got in beside me. When I pulled off my shirt and we lay down together, I was glad. No anxiety.

But he was inscrutable. I heard him give a small sigh at the moment when our skins met, but after that no sign from him; and I tuned myself to his inscrutability, and myself became opaque. I did not say a word. Our wariness and politeness extended itself into the way we fucked, though our bodies remembered each other without strain.

And finally we turned aside from each other to sleep, and I folded myself round his long back for a minute, put my knees in the curve of his knees.

‘Goodnight,' we said, the only word we spoke. We even kissed goodnight, as we always used to do, and it was a gesture of goodwill.

He slept till three in the afternoon. When he got up to leave, well into the sick part of his day, he came across to my chair and hugged my face clumsily against his hip, meaning goodbye.

Two days passed. Claire came to visit, and we lay on the cloudbed in the afternoon and talked about our parents. In the evening I was eating a meal at the dining room table with Rita and the kids when the front door burst open and Javo came pounding in, ready to use the studio to make some posters.

‘Gimme a rapidograph, and a pencil, and a ruler, will you, Nor?' he croaked. I got them for him, and began to feel bad-tempered. He refused food and thundered away to the studio. Rita and I gave each other a look. We put the kids to bed. I cleaned the living room, swept the floors, decided to stay home and let Rita go out on her own; collapsed in a chair; and remembered Javo saying in Sydney, ‘You never take any interest in the work I do.' So, in the warm evening, I wandered along the street to see what he was doing in the studio.

The roller door was wide open, light streamed out on to the pavement. He was sitting at the table in the bare white concrete room, working neatly and cleverly at a drawing.

‘You're good at it, aren't you?' I remarked, impressed.

‘I'm a good copier.'

I stood beside him, watching.

‘Hey, Nor – will you do us a favour?'

‘Depends what it is.' We were smiling at each other.

‘I think I left my packet of Marlboro at the house – get ‘em for me, will you?'

‘You lazy bastard!' I cried in amazement. ‘Why don't you get ‘em yourself?'

‘Oh, get fucked!' he said, laughing too and tossing his head about. ‘I'm
working
!'

‘Well, what do you think
I've
been doing for the last two hours? Don't you call that work?'

‘Yeah, I know it's work, but . . .'

I was already on my way out the door, conned once again by his laughter and his
damned hide,
actually heading for the Marlboro I was, until my foot hit the pavement outside, and at that second the feminist rage struck, and my intention changed to its precise opposite. I walked back to the house, very steadily past the living room where no doubt the small red object was lying, up the stairs and into my room. I lay on the bed and picked up
After Leaving Mr McKenzie
and read until I fell asleep.

Javo came into the house at four the next afternoon, having slept the day away in the studio. I went downstairs and stood around the kitchen while he helped himself to a meal. I even cooked him an egg. We talked: it was a close parody of the way we used to talk when we loved each other. But . . . we walked together over to Carlton, and by the time we reached the big roundabout we had ceased to
be
with each other: just striding along parallel paths, three feet apart, silent; him for real, me faking. When we got to the tower, he disappeared. And I left again, in haste to catch up with Jack and Gracie. I jumped into a cab and chased them down Russell Street to Jimmy's in the city. I ran in, eager for a sight of their familiarity. They were sitting at a table with Willy and Paddy, who had their backs to the door. I put my hands on their shoulders, and said,

‘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.

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

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.