Monkey Grip (7 page)

Francis sent me a note, to say he was living alone. I went to visit him. We talked as people do who know nothing about each other from other sources. He asked me to stay and I did. Hot, thin body, thin hard arms.

‘I used to be an athlete,' he said. ‘I used to run a hundred miles a week. I was sort of crazy.'

We were in the bed he had shared with Anne for four years. He was very stoned, and I was afraid for him.

I was bleeding. I bled and bled, dark red flowers on his coarse sheets. I wondered if he minded. I was used to people who didn't mind, who hardly even noticed. I couldn't find his mind. I searched for his eyes but they were closed. His body was thin, thin, thin. I think he was frightened. Once, I thought he spoke. I took his face in my hands.

‘What did you say?'

‘Nothing. I was only breathing.'

And again, later, he said the same to me:

‘What did you say?'

‘I didn't speak.'

The blood. It ran everywhere. And for her memory's sake I was afraid of not being beautiful – or, of being more weather-beaten, marked and scarred, looser than the young girl. No, not
afraid
of it, but regretting it, wishing something perfect or new; respectful of his fragility.

We slept too lightly for rest. Early in the morning I climbed over him from the wall side of the bed, pulled my clothes on over my bloody legs, and wheeled my bike out his front door. A wild yellow sky, dry grey air full of turbulence. The street surfaces were burnished, blown clean as a bone. My bike tyres, pumped up hard, whirred on the glossy bitumen. Autumn, air, air, moving in dry warm blusters.

I got home and walked into the still house and found Javo asleep in my bed. He turned over and opened his eyes. His intelligence swam up behind the daze of sleep. He said nothing, but looked.

‘I didn't know you were coming, Javo.'

He tried to smile: unhappiness blurred his face like a veil. He didn't ask me where I had been.

‘I stayed over at Francis' place.'

‘I thought you might've.'

‘What made you think that?'

‘Oh, somebody told me you'd been fucking with him lately.'

‘But I haven't! Last night was the first time. Who told you that?'

‘Oh, I dunno. Someone.' He took my hand. I sat down on the edge of the bed.

‘But I would always tell you if I fucked with anyone else! How could you think I wouldn't?'

‘I suppose . . . maybe you thought I already knew about it anyway.'

‘Oh
shit.
People's lives are just gossip fodder.'

I got into bed with him and we lay close together, not talking, held there by sadness as the day began.

It was raining, pouring warm rain. Francis and I left his house at two o'clock one afternoon and walked up to Lygon Street. We were passing the Commercial Bank when the door of the University cafe flew open and Javo and Martin stepped out, All four of us stood still. I took five steps towards Javo and without a word we turned and walked off down the street towards the city. His arm went across my shoulders. I glanced back and saw Francis grin and shrug at Martin. Together they went back into the cafe.

We walked in the Exhibition Gardens, along the dripping avenues.

‘I can't live with it. I'm too jealous,' said Javo. My left shoulder fitted exactly in the hollow of his under-arm. ‘I am going away with Martin for a couple of weeks.'

‘Where to?'

‘We are telling everyone else it is to Perth. But it is really to Asia. We want to get into Cambodia.'

Nothing surprised me any more. I knew it would be wiser not to ask how he proposed to pay for his ticket.

We sat on a wet bench in our sopping clothes, close together.

‘Let's go to my place,' he said.

We walked dully past the kids' adventure playground, across the carpark, and up the broken stairs to the series of empty rooms over the Italian grocery, where he had a mattress in a corner and a heap of things he called his. On the wall he had pinned some photos of Freycinet, where we had struggled over the mountain. We stripped off our wet clothes and lay on the bed. We held each other for comfort, and made love as we always did, in spite of trouble: falling into each other's eyes.

‘I think I'll have a sleep,' I said.

He got up. ‘I'm going downstairs to clean up the kitchen.'

I dozed off, but couldn't quite fall asleep. I went downstairs in bare feet to the dunny, through the chain of rooms. I came round the corner into the kitchen and he looked up, shocked, and backed against the bench to hide what he was doing. I said nothing, and went past him out the back door. When I came back he had the belt on his arm and the fit ready. I stood watching him curiously. He was clumsy; could not get a vein in his left arm; seemed oblivious of my presence once the ritual had begun. I saw how his face turned pale, his hands trembled most dreadfully so that all he could do was butcher his flesh, for all he wished merely to make love to himself. Blood trickled in the crook of his arm. He cursed under his breath, and took off the belt and put it on his other arm, awkwardly manoeuvring the fit with his left hand.

I didn't wait. I went back upstairs to his room and lay on the mattress under a blanket, looking at the mountain I had climbed, and the sea at its feet, and the moonpath on the water outside the motel room at Swansea. I was careful not to think. And I fell asleep.

I was sitting at the kitchen table while the rest of our house slept. Gracie stirred in her bunk in the next room. The clock ticked on the window sill. The matting was crammed with tiny scraps of food and other matter which I could feel with my bare feet. The pigeons flapped and . . . out came Javo, tousled and foul-tempered, heading for the dunny in his levis. Today he and Martin were going away, thank Christ.

My head was fat with the secret of their destination. They had a pack each. The rumour had run round that they had ordered white tropical suits to be made for the journey, which were not ready by the day of their departure. I was hard put to deny the implications of this gossip when people brought it to me.

Martin arrived. His small curly head moved impatiently as a bird's while Javo chaotically forced clean clothes into his pack. Martin was wearing a brand new pair of blue and white brogues: spiv shoes. He did not take the teasing well, being too agitated. At last Javo pulled tight the last buckle on his pack and heaved it by one strap on to his back. He accepted the farewells of our household with a nod, never having learned to be gracious.

I took that well-worn route to Tullamarine: turn right on to the thunderous freeway and slide easily into the shining flood. We were all in the front seat, Martin in the middle, Javo disdaining to fasten his seat-belt. We didn't speak, but simply barrelled out along the freeway, full of our own troublesome thoughts. My elbow was out the window into the dull warm air. Javo was biting his nails, or what was left of them. He had washed his hair, and freed from its customary mattedness, it flopped and shone. He was wearing painfully clean jeans and a denim shirt. He glanced at me across Martin, ventured a tight smile.

I brought us all to rest in the carpark. Martin was at once the organiser. His head was thrown back and behind his rectangular spectacles his green eyes darted eagerly. His voice took on a sharp, peremptory note which Javo responded to, unconsciously perhaps, by doing everything a shade more languidly than he would have otherwise. I didn't open my mouth. I felt like a mother, as if my face wore that expression of tight-lipped but amused tolerance to be seen on the faces of parents who, being tired of interfering, are letting their children slug it out between themselves.

Out there at Tullamarine the air was almost country, between the blasts of aviation fuel; and the sky was immense, with empires of blue– and pink-tinged clouds. I dawdled behind the busy heels of Martin's blue shoes, dreaming about the country. Javo waited for me, turned and put his arm around my shoulders. I got a whiff of his sweat, the sharp smell that made my heart shift.

Martin got the baggage out of the way and we were standing, suddenly forlorn, in the great shining echoing terminal, with half an hour to kill before it was time.

‘What about a brandy alexander?' I suggested.

‘They are sixty-five cents a hit now,' said Martin, dropping his schoolmasterish demeanour at the prospect of a small pleasure.

‘What the hell,' croaked Javo. ‘I'll pay. Come on.'

In a rush of belated generosity he ordered up two each, and we drank them in silence, planting our feet on the ugly carpet and avoiding each other's eyes, for fear of a compromising emotion. I looked out through the wall of windows at the great jets blundering about on the ground.

And of course I bungled the farewell, as one always does. At the ‘first and final call' we hastened to join the mob banking up at the departure lounge behind the metal detector. For a second I quailed at the thought that Javo might be carrying some absurd macho weapon as part of the fantasy: the bowie knife? Something worse? But he waited in line unperturbed. Their turn came and all in a rush I threw my arms round Javo, wanting to tell him
take care you big idiot, I
love you
but instead I instruct, ‘Write to me, eh?' and sound dry in spite of myself. He bends down to hug me but there's no time to get the fronts of our bodies together and he turns away to the colder embrace of the security guard who runs a metal bleeper up and down his lanky body and presses him forward to the little archway. I kiss Martin: it always was easier, he is my height; and he too turns and offers himself to the metal detector. I am leaning over a wooden railing, I see them being sucked away from me towards the doorway and I'm seizing them with my eyes,
oh, you are incapable!
and just before he disappears, Javo gives a glance back over his shoulder and flashes me a rueful smile. Gone! that's all. And just as well, says the little head-prefect on my shoulder, you don't need ‘em, you can get back to the proper business of your life. OK, OK.

I walked back along the bright passageway and slowly through the carpark, and got into Martin's car which was to be mine for longer than any of us had thought: and I drove home thinking about Javo's long legs driving him crazy in an economy seat all the way to Singapore.

I took to my bed for a couple of days. It was like a holiday. At night I slept clear and still, waking in the morning with the impression that I'd only just closed my eyes.

A letter came, written on the plane. ‘A love with no fade from distance in it,' he sent me.

I went to the Kingston to hear Willy's band. I drove there on my own in Martin's car and sat at a table with Paddy and Angela and Nick.

Paddy nudged me. ‘Look at Willy!'

His blue shirt was open to the waist, his eyes were closed, his blond head rolled back: the public ecstasy of musicians. I laughed, admiring and envious.

‘Isn't he beautiful!'

‘I always want to fuck him when I watch him play,' sighed Paddy, who until recently had lived with him for years. She rolled her eyes comically.

‘Wouldn't mind, myself.'

Angela, always attuned to the sound of Willy's name on other women's lips, heard this. Her face seemed to contract a fraction. She tossed back the rest of her glass of Southern Comfort and turned to me where I was sitting beside her on Nick's knee.

‘I've been wanting to say, Nora,' she began, having to lower her voice suddenly as the music stopped, ‘that I don't hate you any more, like I have been for the last six weeks.'

‘Hate me?' Nick, probably scenting trouble, gently pushed me off his lap and followed Paddy to the bar. ‘I didn't notice. I must be a bit insensitive.'

‘Yes. Well, that's part of the trouble, actually.'

I noticed she was rather drunk. I was in for something I wasn't going to like.

‘I'd been thinking,' she said, ‘that you were . . . you know . . . a kind of predator; that you assumed a certain sexual privilege when you wanted to fuck with someone, and didn't care much about the effect this would have on whoever else might be involved.'

‘Like when?'

‘Oh . . . with Martin, I guess . . . and putting it on Willy last year . . . I was thinking you had this habit of using people up and throwing them away.'

I stared at her in dismay.

‘But it's all right,' she added, ‘because I don't think that
now.
'

There was nothing to be said. The music started again. I put my head down on the laminex table and the music burst around my ears and I began to cry. Angela was alarmed, and hovered at the table, not daring to make gestures of comfort. I got up and stumbled out to the car. I cried as I drove along, and I cried when I got home to my room, and I cried till my eyes were bunged up and my chest ached. Georgie came in, and I kept on crying and trying to talk. Francis arrived and I felt ashamed of the state I was in, and foolish, and began to make jokes.

‘It is all so monumentally
boring!
' I shrieked, lying back on the pillows and blowing my nose. I almost laughed to see their two horrified faces bobbing in front of me in the flood of tears.

Francis stayed with me and was patiently kind to me; but when we were fucking I began to cry again out of weakness and fear that he was
fucking me,
as a man
does it
to a woman; or out of fear that I liked it. I couldn't find his mind, or his heart; he was away in his own travelling.

Dark rain flooded the house. Eve was out and Grace and the Roaster were asleep in her bed. Waking to the battering of the rain, I ran out to her room and found the kids doggedly huddling, still asleep, in a growing pool of water which the leaking roof poured on to the bed. I picked them up, one by one, and carried them to their room. Grace went into her bed without waking.