Monkey Grip (31 page)

He turned round and said to me, ‘I'd really like to get it on with
you.
'

‘Oh!' I said, taken aback. The familiar juice of fear trickled through my blood. I turned my head and stared blankly through the back window, desperately trying to put together a satisfactory answer. ‘Well, I guess we will, sooner or later.'

‘I mean
now,
' he insisted. He glanced back at me between the high front seats. I was afraid.

‘I only want to
crash,
right now. I'm absolutely fucked.'

We had turned into the far end of our street. He was silent. I could see the tension in his cheek and neck.

‘What's the matter?' I asked foolishly.

‘
FRUS-TRA-TION
!' he bellowed in a harsh, loud voice, thumping the empty seat beside him with his fist. At that moment we were passing another car: he pushed his foot down hard and we were rushing along in third gear on the wrong side of the road. I was sick with fear. I thought, ‘He is doing that thing men do, he's rushing to destruction, he's got me here, he's power-mad, I can't do anything.' I took a breath to call his name. I said, ‘Ger . . .' and knew there was no point. I lay back on the seat. He passed the other car and got into the left lane, crossed the tramtracks in St George's Road, and stopped in front of our house.

Trapped in the back seat, stifled by closed windows and the high head-rests of the front seats, I half sat and half lay, looking at my feet, while he tried again to argue me round to the way things once were. For fifteen minutes we shouted at each other in barely controlled fury. A silence fell. I could hardly breathe. I said, in a small quiet voice,

‘Gerald, I have to get out of this car
right now.
‘

‘All right.'

He opened the driver's door and got out and I folded the seat forward and scrambled past him. He sat down again, his legs out the door, hands between thighs, head hanging on one side, eyes downcast: his limbs, disposed in that way, made him look like a large, tired grasshopper. I realised that my reserves were empty. I had nothing to give, or say. I walked into the house.

In my bed, which I saw as a final refuge from the world but which to him was the centre of the battlefield, I took a dirty pink T shirt of Javo's under the sheet with me, to let the smell of him comfort me. I lay there with it shamefully under my stomach, flat on my face, two-dimensional like a thing steam-rolled. Gerald came into the room.

‘I've calmed down,' he said. ‘You're right.'

I wished he'd go away and let me die quietly into sleep. He sat down beside me on the bed. His movements seemed self-consciously casual. ‘Do you want a hug, or anything?' I froze up inside and lay very still.

‘If you feel like it,' I said, ‘but all I can do is just lie here.'

He began to stroke me, and to touch the side of my neck and face, in a way I dared not submit to, lest it become sexual. I lay there in a crazy panic of revulsion, half-turned away from him, disliking the smell of his breath, wishing I could dematerialise. I escaped by slowing down my breathing and pretending to be asleep. He stroked on. He said,

‘Hey – has Javo come back yet?'

Javo had not been back for two nights and two days; and the pains were small and sharp. I didn't answer. He let a moment or two pass.

‘Are you asleep?'

I didn't answer. He stopped stroking me, lay beside me, non-plussed, then got up off the bed and walked out of the room. I spread out into the cool corners of the bed. Just before I went to sleep I was half troubled by a rhythmical sound like a tap dripping in the alley outside my window. I even got up to check the bathroom taps, but they were all tightly turned off. Puzzled, I got back into bed. The sound continued. It dawned on me that it was the beating of my own blood.

I was lying on my bed reading when I heard Gerald come into the house and speak to Cobby. My door was closed. I went on reading. Scraps of the conversation filtered through to me.

‘. . . Going somewhere?' asked Cobby, in her dry, drawling voice.

‘Yeah . . . Wilson's Prom . . . three days . . . Lillian.'

A big ragged hole opened up in my stomach. The words on the page became black scratchy marks. I wondered, still on my back among the cushions with the book upright on my chest, if he would come and say goodbye to me. (Why should he?) I heard his footsteps in the hall stop outside my door, and a piece of paper was pushed under the door. He walked away. I got up quietly, picked up the note and read it.

‘Dear Nora, I'm going to Wilson's Prom with Lillian, and expect to be back Wednesday night (but you never know). Happy days to you and yours. Love, Gerald.'

I felt a shot of bleak anger which I did not trust. I sat on the bed; I thought, I should go out and speak to him before he goes. I got up and walked barefoot to his room (big bare unwelcoming space). He was standing there in white, just-washed trousers and a black velour jumper over which we once had a stupid fight, and sunglasses. I saw his favourite blanket folded neatly on a chair.

‘You'll be cold,' I remarked primly. ‘Is that all you're going to sleep in?'

‘I've put my whole
bed
in,' he said, standing there with his hands hanging down. Then I saw that his mattress was gone.

‘Where'll you put it?' I asked, curious to know how this tight fellow would envisage setting up a camp, and seeing quick visions of the crude (and thus, to me then, superior) camps I had taken part in.

‘On the floor of the tent.' The
floor?

‘Haven't you been camping before?' I asked rudely.

‘Yes. Lots of times.'

We were face to face in the doorway. It was the moment to relent and hug. I did not touch him. I stepped back. He picked up a bag and I went out the front door and got into the hammock. The wind was streaming from the southwest, as turbulent as yesterday's but colder. I lay there in my flowery dress with my feet up high, and contemplated a sick feeling which was growing in my stomach. Why couldn't I let him go and wish him well? Why did I always need a man to be concerned with, whether well or ill? Why was I afraid to be alone, as Cobby was? Why did I involuntarily pick out Lillian's least attractive characteristics, to comfort myself? I fantasised ludicrously about the two of them driving along, their large limbs disposed inside that neat, tight little car. I wondered how he would characterise me when they talked. I imagined his account of my rudeness as he was leaving, and her pulling a face as if to dismiss or sympathise.

I was actually suffering low-level
pain.

The wind kept rushing through the meagre leaves of a small gum tree in our narrow front garden. Gerald opened the wire door and shouldered his way out, carrying a bag, a pillow and his guitar. When I saw the guitar I almost laughed out loud at a small, vicious fantasy of the two of them sitting over a camp fire, him playing well and her strumming away crudely; a more pleasant picture followed, of him kindly teaching her.

He didn't come nearer to me than he needed to in going down the steps; nor did I heave myself out of the hammock. I said,

‘See you.'

So did he. He got into the car, but by that time I'd ceased to look at him and the car started and departed somewhere behind my left shoulder. I kept staring at the gum leaves. The last I saw of him was his arm lying along the top of the open car window as the car passed on the other side of the triangular, treeless park across the road from our house. See you. I hoped it would storm and drip rain for a week. I thought of them fucking on his mattress on the floor of the tent, and I did not wish them well.

I am not a kind person.

I waited, on and off, for the heavy steps of Javo to come to my door. I knew they would probably not come for several days, and that I would become used to sleeping alone without guilt or desire. I thought that, with Javo, I understood how it was possible to love the most positive and good parts of a person and to co-exist with the rest. I missed him, very much, and tried to imagine what he was feeling and thinking.

I was not very happy.

I woke in the morning and found Gracie sleeping beside me in my bed. I stumbled out through the kitchen on my way to the dunny, and wondered if Javo might have come back in the night. I felt certain that the bed in the living room would be empty, but I looked anyway, and found that it was full of his long body, his dark tousled head sticking up out of the blanket in which he was rolled. Surprised, I stood still in the doorway looking at that head. Unspectacular, gentle happiness ran smoothly through my whole body. I closed the door very quietly so that the noise of our household at breakfast would not wake him.

But when I got to the baths that morning, the old aching feeling came back to plague me. Javo was there, but was concentrating all his friendly attention upon Jean and Hank, and I felt left out and lonely. I didn't stay long. I rode home in the extreme, dry heat, puzzled and sore; picked up Gracie from school and went back to the baths. I was at pains to hide my unhappiness; I was at pains not to ask him where he had been for those nights, but he told me anyway. We were sitting on the edge of the pool at the shallow end, squinting in the glare, water drying on our shoulders.

‘Wow, it's been a weird weekend, Nor,' he said.

‘Yeah? What's been happening?'
Very nonchalant.

‘I went home with Sue on Friday night – I suppose I sort of expected that – she cornered me.' He laughed, abashed; I glanced at him and saw his awkwardness, which started it up again, ache, ache, the old ache, like music in the blood.

‘And on Saturday night I was round at Napier Street. There was only Claire home, we watched TV. And then when I got up to leave she came to the door with me, and she said, “Would you like to stay?”'

Hearing him was like watching a film.

‘So I did.'

I suffered under my cap. Not suffering I couldn't bear, but suffering none the less. He was smiling as he told me, and I smiled too, hoping it was not a grimace. Oh no, it wasn't the stabs of pain, but what you could call the subterranean homesick blues. I refrained from comment, dangling my legs in the water, keeping the peak of my cap between my eyes and his face. I was careful, careful.

When it was time to go I did not ask him to come to my place. I picked up my belongings and said casually,

‘Which way are you going?'

‘Your way,' he said, shoving his towel into his bag.

He walked and I rode slowly along beside him with Grace on the back of my bike. When we got home we found the house full of people, kids mostly, with more expected for dinner. I felt claustrophobic and angry. I said to Javo,

‘Do you want to go and have a drink? I'd really like to get out of here.'

‘OK,' he said agreeably. We set out for the tramstop. On the bench at the corner of St George's Road I started trying to explain myself.

‘I'm afraid of doing to you what Gerald is doing to me.'

‘
What?
Don't be silly. You just don't
do
it. We trust each other too much for something like that to happen.' He kept grinning at me. The tram came, we got on it. Old, comfortable situation: going into town with Javo to fill our stomachs at my expense.

Back in my room, I walked straight in.

‘Is it all right if I sleep in here?' he asked politely, standing at the bookcase.

‘Of course! I was just going to ask you.'

‘Good!'

We stretched out on the bed in the hot room full of dry, still air. We lay good-humoured and naked, stroking each other's skin. He heaved his arm to go under my neck and I smelled his good, sharp smell. I remembered the pink T shirt and blushed to myself.

‘Hey, Javes. The other night I was so freaked that I used your T shirt as a sucker rag. I slept with it all night.'

He threw back his head and laughed, incredulous. I stopped feeling foolish. I watched his face, so familiar to me and loved.

‘I'm having such a good time these days,' he said happily. ‘I like my body more and more. I'm not afraid of fucking.'

Thinking of Claire, I felt at the same moment the aching start again and the beginnings of a small stream of happiness. The aching was for the realisation that, months ago, the dope had not terminated our relationship, but interrupted and changed it; the happiness was for the mother in me, watching him gather himself and take off.

‘If it hadn't been for you, in that time after I got back from Bangkok,' he said, ‘I'd be dead by now.'

We laughed and talked the night away.

‘Who do you fuck with, Nor?' he asked me.

At three or so we went to sleep. He was still sleeping when I woke from a dream in which a group of people, including me and Rita and Willy, went to live in a redbrick house on the outskirts of Camperdown. I wept and wept about some sadness I could not remember, and Willy held me tightly in his arms, standing at the window, to comfort me.

Javo slept on, and I took the kids to school and went about my morning's business. At lunchtime I went to the baths, taking Gracie with me, early from school. Javo was there, holding court at the deep end where children may not go. I stayed at the shallow end with Gracie. He saw me, eventually, and swam and waded over to me, his brown face grinning against that electric blue water.

‘I've got a room,' he announced, as we stood thigh-deep in the water, leaning against the side of the pool, arms along the lumpy silver railing.

‘Where?'

‘At Neill Street.'

‘That's good.'

We stood for minutes in silence.

I said, ‘I'm glad you've got a place, but I'll miss you.' I didn't look at him. We stared away from each other. Long moments passed.

‘Yeah . . . well, I need a place to work. I've got a show to do.'