Monkey Grip (23 page)

‘Bring the phone up here, will you Nora?' she called. ‘I couldn't stagger down the stairs again, and the others won't be home till dinnertime.'

She settled down among the pillows with the latest
Rolling Stone,
still white-faced but almost cheerful.

‘Maybe this time I've found a contraceptive I can live with,' she said. ‘Or maybe I haven't.'

I laughed. ‘Give it a chance, Angela. Well – I'll see you soon, I guess.'

‘Thanks, Nora!' she sang out after me. ‘You've been terrific.'

‘For you, anything. You're welcome.'

Between her bed and the door I spotted a small photo propped against the mirror: a performance photo, all black but for one glittering lower corner: I peered closer and saw Willy's shining head among his cymbals, sticks raised, eyes closed in that mysterious musical transport – is that how he looks when he fucks? face hard with concentration and yet at the same time utterly melting? No wonder she loves him. I passed by quickly and thumped down the steep, narrow stairs.

Nick rang up.

‘Is Gerald there?'

‘No, he didn't stay here last night,' I said. ‘Where are you?'

‘At his place. He is supposed to be meeting me here.'

‘I don't know where he could be.'

I didn't know anything about the parts of his life that I was not in. We existed outside his daily round, though well inside the domestic part of mine. I liked it that way, but I wasn't sure that he did. I wondered what he wanted. I mean, what did he wish for. It seemed a bleak life, sometimes. I could only guess.

‘I never get jealous,' he said, and I believed him. Sometimes I wished to fade through his inscrutable skin and see what there was inside him.

‘I'd like to crack you,' I said.

‘The only way that could happen would be if I burst into tears,' he replied, not wanting it to happen.

What was this urge? I could have left him closed. But the sneaking little wish was always there, to worm my way past him and into him and make him split open and cease to guard himself. I did not like it: it was for the conquest.

He said, one day, that he felt himself to be softening, a process which he liked. Driving in the red truck, while the town filled up with warm rain, he remarked,

‘I've never said I loved anyone, except you, and the kids.'

When he did open out, in his particular way, I was always too surprised to speak. Once, in the middle of the night, lying beside me with his arms round me, he asked,

‘Do you feel loved?'

In my astonishment, I said, ‘Yes,' but in such a tone that he may have felt dismissed.

Often in the evenings when the house was still he would play his guitar and I would lie in bed reading: strangely peaceful interludes in a cranky relationship. Once, I felt the waves of sleep coming, and put the book down.

‘Don't stop playing,' I said. ‘I love hearing it when I'm falling asleep.'

And then I
was
asleep.

When he came to bed he put his arms round me and said,

‘You give me whole lots of confidence, you know.'

‘Whaddayamean?' I mumbled out of my pillow.

‘I never thought anyone would like falling asleep while I was playing.'

Gerald stayed with me two nights. I was ill-tempered and snapped at him.

‘There's a limit,' he remarked, ‘to the amount of time I can spend in your house without becoming a threat.'

So I slept alone in my low bed. Juliet fell asleep downstairs, and Rita went out visiting, to try and stop her heart from aching after the careless heels of Nick.

I dreamed I was trying on my mother's clothes: everything was either too big for me or not attractive enough. I woke to another dull, warmish, rainy morning. I remembered how many mornings I had spent on my own in that house, when we first moved in and Javo was in jail in Thailand. I liked it: but became dried out with loneliness.

I went out with Rita, drinking brandy alexanders at the Southern Cross, eating at Jimmy's, visiting Easey Street. I saw Javo there: smiled at each other. He looked white and unbuttoned, his hair standing on end. At home again I sat up in my bed, feet sore from walking. I was wondering if Gerald would come around. How many times have I lain in my bed waiting for footsteps or the sound of a car? Too many.

No more.

Maybe.

I was sound asleep when he came down our side lane and pushed at the locked front door. I was on my feet and down the stairs before he had time to go round the back. Glad to see him back from his gig, lugging his huge flat case and grinning at me in the rainy doorway.

I was lying with my back into his curve, when he began to hug me, and stroke me, and to kiss my neck and ear. As any human being would, I turned to face him.

‘Are you really horny?' he suddenly asked. What a word!

Caught unawares, I made a surprised joke,

‘I dunno – want me to consult my metre?' We laughed, up close with our arms round each other.

‘It's just that I'm
not,
particularly,' he said.

I felt as if I'd shrunk, instantaneously, to the size of a pea. I must have gone stiff, or made some move, because he said with half a laugh, as if at his own bluntness,

‘Well, that certainly put a stop to
that
! Some nice things were happening.'

‘It's all right,' I said, wanting to say, ‘It's
not
all right, you bloody great oaf,' but obeying some unwritten law, blood-deep, too deep to be fished up at that moment to the light of rational scrutiny.

‘Do you know what?' he remarked conversationally after a small pause, as if nothing untoward had happened; ‘I think Willy and Angela actually still fuck.'

He
can't
be that cool.

I had an irresistible urge to punch and pummel Gerald; sometimes I hurt him and he yelled, with more annoyance than anger. In a shop, between the shelves, he teasingly bent my arm up my back, keeping it carefully this side of real pain. I laughed as if at a clever mimicry.

Javo, trying to be helpful or to ingratiate himself, went to the school to pick up Juliet without asking Rita first. The teacher refused to hand her over; he came into our house cursing, filthy, stained with paint and pin-eyed.

Juliet told me,

‘When Javo came into our classroom, he had red stuff all over his hands, and the other kids thought he'd killed someone.'

He went into Rita's room to watch TV. When I thought of going in there, I knew he would move over on her bed to make room, and I'd lie alongside him, and it would seem natural for him to put his arm under me, and I'd lean against his shoulder, and it would all seem as if nothing had ever happened to wreck everything.

So I stayed where I was.

I slept so still that the bed was undisturbed. When I got up I just had to tuck it in. Rita was not in the house. She must have stayed at Nick's. She would
not
give up on that man. It looked crazy to me, wanting to run herself again and again into the wall of his indifference. Juliet cried when she found Rita's bed empty in the morning, but she was easily comforted.

‘Why don't you and Gerald sleep together these days?' she asked when she came in in the morning.

‘We do,' I replied, ‘but we like to take a break from each other every now and then.'

I was missing Grace.

Rita came home. I sat, disgruntled, on my bed ploughing through the last eighth of
War and Peace
which I already knew I would never finish. The rain came down, and came down. I got dressed and thought of walking across the market to the bookshops, but looked out at the rain and lost heart.

I stood in the kitchen drinking a cup of tea with Rita. I was all curdled with irritation at her. She wanted to tell me what had happened with Nick the night before.

‘He promised me he'd go a week without having a hit,' she said, ‘but when I got there he was stoned.'

‘Rita – that crusading stuff is
not on
! The junk's
his
problem –
you
can't get him off it.'

‘It's not just the smack, though,' she said. ‘He says I never trusted him.'

‘You had no reason to,' I retorted. My voice sounded curt. I didn't care. I wanted to push the point home, force her to see what she was doing to herself.

‘It was so sad, Nora! He says it tortures him, the way I torture myself.'

‘You are certainly a tiger for punishment,' I said. ‘I just couldn't believe it when you didn't come home last night. You go on and on bashing your head against the wall.'

Oh Nora. Butter would not melt in your mouth.

Rita crouched there on Gracie's Minnie Mouse chair, staring at the floor. Which comes first, her masochism or my sadism? I want to force her, shake her, give her the righteous blows which people deal out to hysterics. I put my tea down and stumped up the stairs to my room.

I came down an hour later and found her sitting on the stairs, bag on shoulder, pants rolled up for the bike, head in hands, sobbing. I knelt on the step below her and put my arms round her and rocked her. She accepted comfort.

‘I can't work when I'm like this,' she wept. ‘I go into the studio and I just keep knocking things over.'

No work, no love from where she wants it.

It was my thirty-third birthday. I was sick. Thick head, lungs full of yellow stuff, eyes only half-seeing. I was bleeding, and aching, and bleeding, and aching. When I lay down and tried to go to sleep, it got worse in my head.

The rain had stopped, the air was clear and very dark blue. I took two codiphen in the hope that the aching in my face and neck might lessen enough to let me sleep, but I was wide awake, on my birthday, in the silent house, head full of mucus and ideas. In a room by yourself, at that hour of night, you can beam your mind out on the ether. I felt berserk, mind on the surge. For a second at a time I could hallucinate the sound of waves breaking outside our house. I wondered what time of the day I was born.

In the daylight I lay stupefied. Javo thumped up the stairs and into my room. I took one look at him and felt a great rush of love and sadness: he looked wrecked, filthy, dressed in ragged jeans. Through two horizontal tears in the front of the jeans I could see his thighs, their white skin. His hair was matted, his right eye was all red and swollen with styes, he scratched constantly. I wanted to pierce his bravado, ask him for the truth, but these days his ego was invested in keeping that brave smokescreen well in place. I felt like crying.

He sat at my table and read the new
Digger.
I lay under the blankets, breathing through my mouth and watching him. He had a glass of coca cola beside him: when he picked it up and tilted his head back to drink, I saw his throat, that vulnerable and seldom-exposed part of his body. At Freycinet, the day we walked out of the bush at Coles Bay and stuffed ourselves with lollies and soft drinks, I had seen him in the same way, guzzling eagerly, head back in that same position, showing his throat and the flat underside of his bony jaw. A kind of weak sadness oozed out of my thoughts and I turned over on my side and began to read. I fell towards sleep, stopped myself for a second to wonder if it was safe, remembered it was Javo in the room whose presence if nothing else I could trust, and let myself slip away. I couldn't have slept more than a few minutes. He had finished the newspaper, and was getting his things together to leave. I woke up and looked at him. He smiled at me in the way I remembered, without defensiveness, standing next to my bed looming up to the ceiling. I put out my hand and touched his leg. He took my hand, and we smiled at each other and I said,

‘Are you all right, Javes?'

‘What?'

‘Are you – is everything all right?'

‘Yep – yeah! I'm OK.'

‘See you soon.'

‘Yeah – see you, Nor.'

And crashed off down the stairs and out the front door.

Gerald came, in the evening.

‘Want to go for a drive?' he said. ‘It might do you good to get out of the house.'

I got up and struggled into my clothes.

‘One thing, though,' I said, ‘can I have a window open? I feel as if I'll suffocate, otherwise.'

‘But my
neck
will get cold.'

‘Wear a
scarf.
‘

He tossed the keys at me and said, half angry, half joking,

‘Here – take the keys and go for a drive by yourself.'

I was pulling my jumper over my head. It fell in saggy folds and I stood still, unable to gauge his tone. He threw me a sideways glance. No-one spoke. I went over and lay on the unmade bed, kicked off my shoes and curled up in a ball. I could hear my own noisy, sick breathing. I wished I could dematerialise, simply cease to be there. I didn't care what he did. I just felt
awful.

We drove down the bay. I thought for the first ten minutes that I was going to be sick, or faint. I couldn't get used to the motion of the car and my ears were dead. My head was stuffed with cottonwool. But under everything describable, there was something else wrong with me – not depressed, just
bad.

‘You ought to go to the doctor,' said Gerald, looking at me with the mixture of resentment and concern people feel when they begin to realise you are not malingering.

It was a terrible night.

I fell asleep at 11.30, dozed while Gerald quietly played his guitar, heard him get in beside me, remembered nothing else until a sudden wakening in the dark, turning in time to see him fully dressed sliding out the door. Going! where? to the dunny? I put my head back on the pillow and must have fallen asleep again: next thing I knew, he was getting back into bed. I woke up and turned over.

‘Are you all right?'

‘No . . . not really.'

‘What's wrong? Where have you been?'