Monkey Grip (6 page)

I dreamed of a bust in a house full of people: a political bust, where nasty clever police efficiently checked and filed, and escape from their knowledge was impossible.

I went to the film co-op to see the rushes of the junk movie. The lights went out and the rushes began and the door opened and in the light from the screen I saw Francis come in. He was wearing small hippy spectacles. I took my courage and crept over to him in the dark, against the wall where the latecomers were crouching. He touched my arm, looked me full in the face, without fear.

He drove me home on his way to the night's shooting. There was something very sweet and whimsical in his thin face.

‘If I get any thinner than this,' he said, ‘I'll just disappear. It is this bloody movie. It is driving me insane. But it will be over by the end of this week, and then I'll be able to relate to you properly.' He was talking out of a tired face, almost waxen, the fine veins showing under his eyes. He had a way of trapping my eyes, holding my gaze for longer than my speedy head was used to, or could bear.

‘I'm not complaining,' I replied, sitting placidly at the kitchen table. ‘I think there's enough happening now to make it worthwhile, don't you?'

‘Yes,' he said, with a smile in his eyes that narrowed them kindly. ‘But – I don't know what happens in your life.'

I began to talk about Gracie and Javo, and the night in the Swansea hotel, not knowing why I chose that as the first story about myself.

He suddenly laughed and said,

‘You've got amazing eyebrows!'

I laughed too. My hand went involuntarily to my face.

‘Don't cover them up!' he cried.

I had lost the thread of thought.

‘I'm sorry!' he said. ‘Go on.'

When he went off to the shooting, I walked out with him to the VW van full of equipment.

‘I'm going to give you a hug,' he said, and we were standing in the road holding each other, faces in necks and shoulders, breathing each other in. He
was
thin. Like Javo, he was twenty-three.

That night I slept alone, and badly, dreaming bad dreams and feeling the night to be endless.

When I got home the next afternoon, Francis was in our kitchen. He was
so tired.
He sat on my bed and I mended my jeans and he talked, as twenty-three-year-olds will, about what love means and where sex fits in and so on. It was years since I'd heard someone going through the basics so painstakingly and seriously.

‘Why did you ask me my age, the other day?' he wanted to know.

‘I was just interested.'

‘But – this is something
I
‘ve learnt so I don't know if I ought to try and force it on some-one else – I don't think people can get to know each other by
asking
things. I think they should do it through – holding each other, and being together.'

Oh, you little hippy! I caught the feeling on my face of a mocking look – heaven forbid.

‘Yes, I'm sure that's true,' I said. ‘But a bit of factual information never went astray.'

He looked at me. There was a pause.

‘It's rather relaxing, being with you,' he remarked, as I stitched away, cross-legged on my bed.

‘Funny you should say that. Usually people find me too speedy. I seem to spend half my time trying to slow myself down.'

‘So do I! Maybe we could slow ourselves down together.'

Outside at the van, he sat in the driver's seat and I stood between him and the door, holding it open with my bum. He was wearing faded old Yakka overalls; through the side slit I could see his thin, thin flank naked under the worn cotton. We talked comfortably.

‘I'm sorry you have to go,' I said, ‘but come round and see me again soon, will you? Because I can't really come to you, can I?'

‘No, not really. Anne just couldn't . . .
understand
it.'

He took me by the shoulders, and we hugged, and kissed.

‘Oh, it's strange!' he exclaimed, with his hands on my upper arms. ‘I haven't
really
kissed or hugged anyone but one person for four years!'

‘Have you been married?' I asked, half joking.

‘No! Well, sort of.' He grinned. ‘But she is going to India in a week.'

I shut the door and he drove off. Waved.

He must think I'm sharp, or hard, I thought. I might be. When I talked, sometimes he let a silence fall after I'd spoken, and looked at me quizzically for a long time, his face smiling kindly with crinkled eyes and a speculative expression.

On the last day of the junk movie shooting, I rode down to the location at the National Gallery, with Georgie. There I ran into Francis, agitated beyond endurance, stammering. He looked like an angry mouse: a frown seemed out of place on his gentle, pale face. Sweat was shining across the bridge of his nose. He smiled at me distractedly and hurried past along the empty passageway.

There was plenty of good dope around. Gracie was at school. The sun shone every day. I rode my bike everywhere. I went to the library. I was reading two novels a day. When Gracie came home from school we would doze off on my bed in the hot afternoon. For days at a time there was no sign of Javo. One night Georgie and Gracie and I went to the Pram Factory to see a play, and didn't come home till two in the morning. We rode home, speeding along, Gracie on the back of my bike like a quiet monkey. The moon hung in the deep, deep blue sky; the air was dotty with stars. We sailed serenely through floods of warm autumn air. Gracie sang a song:

Oh, that Gracie, who feigned deafness, and stole dress-ups from school, and smeared her face with makeup stolen by some junkie in a chemist bust, and wore a gold lame cape with a glittering G on the back, and who said to me when we met unexpectedly in the street,

‘Oh, you look
beautiful!
I wish I wuz as beautiful as you.' Whenever I worried about her irregular life, I remembered Noel Coward's poem about his childhood:

Javo had not been near me for a week, when Martin ran in my back gate one afternoon, with news.

‘Nora,' he said, ‘I've driven Javo down to St Vincent's. He was screaming with pain, he thought he was dying. I think it's septicaemia, from a dirty hit.'

Martin and I went down to casualty. We found Javo asleep in a cubicle, dressed in hospital whites with blue stitching. One arm dangled out from under the stiff sheets. He woke: those blue eyes in his battered face. His skin was still erupting in huge pus-y sores.

Martin stood at the end of the bed and I crammed myself between the bed and the metal chest of drawers.

‘I want you to bring me another set of clothes, in case they hide these,' said Javo, pointing at a supermarket bag beside the chair.

‘Why would they do that?'

‘They might want to keep me here longer than I want to stay.'

He was raving, slightly.

Martin sulked, pursing his small lips, arms folded, looking at the floor. I felt like the mother of two headstrong, opinionated boys. My bones flooded with weakness. I stared at the metal bed. No-one spoke. I stopped caring about seeming straight, or motherly.

‘I think you ought to stay here as long as they make you. They won't keep you any longer than necessary – people are out there clamouring for beds.'

‘But I'm better already. They didn't give me nothin'. My body's beaten it.'

His skin was burning and dry, his eyes were pale with fever.

‘Anyway,' he continued recklessly, ‘I know people who've had it, and who only needed to stay in for a day.'

‘Who?'

‘Schultzy. A guy called Schultz.'

I couldn't even laugh.

‘I'll come in tomorrow and bring you some fruit, and something to read.'

Martin and I got up to leave.

‘Yeah – go,' urged Javo, meaning
Don't think I need you, I'm all right here, I don't need you.

Martin went out first. I paused, turned back, put my hand on Javo's arm, kissed his hot forehead. Out of Martin's sight, his face changed. He rolled on to his side, looked up at me, tried to smile, cast his anxious eyes up to me sideways.

‘Sorry, mate,' he whispered.

‘You don't have to say that!' I cried in confusion, pushing my way between the foot of the bed and the curtain.

Next day I rang the hospital. They told me he was ‘satisfactory' but that only his next of kin might visit him. Forced to be his mother, sister, wife. But of course when I got there in the evening no-one questioned me and I walked straight into the ward. I gave him a joint and he smoked it behind the
Herald.
He had a drip in his arm, sticky-taped on to his punctured inner elbow. His fever had gone down. He was restless, complained of the people in nearby beds – a hopelessly spastic boy beside him, who groaned without respite, and an old man dying in the bed opposite. Martin came in and they conducted a staccato conversation about a house they were going to rent when Javo came out. I stood leaning against the cream-painted metal bed and stared at the clean, clean lino tiles. My impatience rose up in my throat to choke me. When I kissed him goodbye, Martin was waiting for me, and it was a cold farewell.

I went home in despair, unable to wish him well.

The next evening I was riding home for tea before going to see him at the hospital. At the bottom of our street I met Eve going in the other direction.

‘Hey, Nora!' she shouted as she passed. ‘Javo's there, in your room.'

‘
What?
'

‘He just got there. He's waiting for you.' She sailed past, raising her eyebrows and turning down the corners of her mouth.

My heart beat so hard it blinded me with rage. I dropped my bike outside the back door and went into the bathroom to hide from him. I was eating my anger. But he came in there after me. I was sitting on the edge of the bath. I looked up at him. I would have opened my mouth to berate him, but I saw the great scabs healing on his face, and I saw the way he looked at me, dumbly; looking into his eyes was like looking down some hollow, echoing passageway straight into his brain. He said nothing. He stood there in front of me with his hands dangling down. My anger evaporated.

I put him into my bed.

‘What happened, Javo?' I took his hand.

‘When you came to see me last night, I didn't know how to start telling you how good it was that you were there. I'd been waiting all day for you to come. And when you left, I started feeling really shithouse. It got to be nine o'clock, and all that night ahead of me, and that fuckin' kid moaning. So I got up and got dressed and nicked off.'

I started to shake, imagining him pulling the drip out of his arm in the dark ward. My stomach clenched up hard.

‘And I came straight round here,' he went on, his skinny arms lying out upon my purple sheets, ‘but there was no-one home. I went to Nicholson Street, and Queensberry Street, but no-one was around anywhere. And at the tower there was only Jessie home, and she didn't want to know about me.'

‘Well? What did you do then?'

‘I went back.'

‘To the
hospital?
'

‘They didn't even notice I'd gone. I just got back into bed.'

‘But how'd you get out this time?'

‘I told them I had people to look after me. They said OK, if I could get a doctor to say he'd take responsibility, so I rang Mac, and he said he'd do it. They gave me a script for some penicillin. Mac will come round later and teach you how to give me a shot.'

O will he indeed. Must I be your mother? This house was the only place he could go for proper looking after; and yet, I couldn't resist:

‘I thought you said you didn't like it here. You told me it was “too homely”.'

He said nothing. His eyes were dark. He looked desperate in his soul. I was sorry I'd spoken, because I did . . . love him, was that it?

I went out and cleaned the fridge to keep calm. I finished the job, scrubbing the old yellow enamel with Ajax and polishing it with the warm dishcloth. Then I smoked a joint in the kitchen with Georgie, who was carefully not making any comment, and crept back into the bedroom to look at Javo. He was almost asleep. I lay on the bed beside him, flat on my face with my arms at my sides. The hash had done the trick: I found I could direct my imagination with my will. I saw a painted blue sky with scallopy clouds, and I soared up into it, borne up effortlessly and not too high by tides of warm air. Slow, easy flight. I fell asleep on the wing. Javo too slept still and deep, with no thrashing or groaning. Whenever I woke, I put my arm around his skinny body.

He stayed home, in my bed, all next day. Impatient at my tentative fiddlings with the syringe, he hit himself up with the penicillin: tossed the fit into his own bum like a dart into a dartboard. He barely flinched. The rest of us stood round him in a ring, reluctantly respectful of his nonchalance, except for Gracie, who sang out in warning,

‘
Don't do it, Javo!
You'll want more and more!'

It was the first time any of us had laughed in two days.

When I came home I found he had written me a poem and fallen asleep: