Monkey Grip (14 page)

I turned the corner of Faraday Street and saw the big, wide-shouldered, smooth-headed figure of my friend Bill step out the front door of the tower. I whistled and caught up with him.

‘Wanna come and eat with me?' I said. ‘Just the two of us?'

‘Ooh, yes, that would be lovely.'

Between the tower and the restaurant I nicked round the corner to post a letter. I vaguely heard someone shouting. I took no notice, dropped the letter into the box, and turned back to join Bill. We'd taken two steps towards Lygon Street when Javo burst round the corner, running.

‘Oh,' I thought, ‘he's stoned.' But he stopped a yard short of me, his hair flopped back on his forehead, and I saw that his eyes were dark, not white.

‘Hullo!' I said. ‘Was that you shouting?'

He nodded, out of breath; smiled.

‘We're just going to the Shakahari for tea.'

‘Oh. Yeah – OK.' And he backed away up Elgin Street, right of his beat, smiling at me sideways over his shoulder as he turned and we parted. I'd expected him to say he'd come with us. Bill and I had crammed ourselves into a corner table at the Shaka and commenced a spirited discussion of the latest collective upheavals, before the penny dropped. Javo was being
tactful.
I remembered what he'd said to me, days earlier, after his dream about me falling in love with Mark and our conversation about Lillian:

‘I do sometimes think about fucking with other people, Nor. I'd like to fuck with Lillian, for example, and with Jessie again only she won't have a bar of me these days. Don't blame her. Who do
you
want to fuck with?'

‘Oh . . . Bill, I guess,' I said unwillingly. ‘And Mark, of course, but that's everybody's fantasy – he's such a golden boy.'

He laughed. ‘That gives me a bit of a twinge.'

‘Don't be dumb! What
is
this – some kind of game, or something?'

‘Course not. But for you to go off with Bill would be sort of – it would be about as heavy as if it was Mark.'

‘You reckon? Listen, mate – if you want to know – I've known Bill for years now, and it's been on the cards for ages that we might get round to fucking.'

‘Don't worry, Nor.' He gave me a push, grinning at my discomfiture. ‘Don't get hot under the collar. I could handle it.'

I could let my heart sink, sometimes, in spite of the way work buoys it up. It wasn't being in love, or loving, that made the difficulty: but the awful silent fear of not being loved in return.

So, an hour later I was home in my clean bed, looking after the kids while Rita went to the art school ball. And I kept wondering, what did Javo think in the street tonight? Which of us tries harder to be cool? or in control? Will he come back to sleep with me tonight? Will I care if he doesn't? Should I scramble back out to the solitary life I led when he was away in Asia? Can I live without being loved? Is it true what Lillian said once, years ago, that I've always been too good at
giving it all away?
And on a practical level, is there a supper show tomorrow night? And if there is, can Rita and I find someone to stay home with the kids so we can dance the night away?

I wanted to get stoned and forget what I looked like and dance till I was loose all over.

‘Dear Javo, you said you wondered if the trip we're supposed to be going on is worth it for such a short time. Well, I'm definitely going on Monday, and if you feel doubtful about going, please say so
now.
Know what I think? I think you see me as not much more than a lump on the other side of the bed.

I think maybe you want to fall in love.

I think you've got the look of someone who's on the make.

I think that, if I'm right about this, it's high time for us to call it a day, throw in the sponge and so on.

I am afraid of painful, long-drawn-out endings to things. I got a fright, the other day, at the gloom I experienced when we talked about Lillian; and you talked once again about Jessie in that way that makes me feel you are saying, “My relationship with Jessie was the high point, the great love of my life”, and that's OK, it really is, only I get to feel a bit like some kind of charlady keeping the home fires burning after the princess has passed by.

I want to be with you, laugh and mooch round, travel if we can. But I'm not getting anything back, I'm running out, I need love. And if you don't want to give it any more, will you please say so? I'm telling you, Javo! I'm lonely! Are you reading me?. . . over . . . Nora.'

I asked the I Ching, ‘What about my feeling that it is all hopeless with Javo?'

It replied, ‘Times change, and with them their demands. Changes ought to be undertaken only when there is nothing else to be done. A premature offensive will bring evil results.'

I left the letter for him, just the same.

He came in the middle of the night and read it downstairs while I dozed. He came up to my room again and sat on the end of my bed, pulling off his boots.

‘Did you read it?'

‘Yeah. We'll talk about it tomorrow.'

‘No, that won't do – because when I have to leave, you'll be asleep.'

He got into bed. Before he had come in, I had been fast asleep, and comfortably warm; but when he was coming down, his awful coldness drew the warmth out of my body and left me lying in a chilly envelope of discomfort. He did talk, for an hour or so. Every few minutes he'd groan and roll over, complaining of restlessness and pain. He said,

‘One trouble is, that you like me best when I'm off dope, but
I'm
always happier when I'm into it.'

‘No, no, you're quite wrong,' I said, throwing caution to the winds. ‘The times I'm most comfortable with you – and it's because of your own attitude to yourself – are when you've just started back into dope, before it gets you by the throat.'

‘Maybe I never really liked myself much,' he said, with a faint bitterness, ‘before I found dope.'

I tried to talk about needing love.

He said, ‘Sometimes, when you're giving out affection and love towards me, it's . . . missing. I don't mean
absent,
I mean . . .'

‘You mean not hitting the mark?'

‘Something like that.'

I didn't understand what he meant, and, discouraged, thought better of asking. There was a long silence. He heaved a great sigh.

‘Well . . .' I said, ‘what about going to Sydney, Javes? Will we still go?'

‘Yeah. I reckon. We both need to get out of here for a while.'

We both needed something, that was certain, but neither of us knew what it was. I wished stupidly for something steady and complete. For someone steady and complete. What's
that?
No such thing, no such person.

By nine o'clock on the morning of the big departure for Sydney, Javo was still asleep. Gracie and I fidgeted, our enthusiasm waning by the minute.

‘Are we gonna be late for Sydney?' she asked, looking up from her drawing.

‘Too right we are,' I snarled.

I stumped furiously up the stairs, and yelled at him from the doorway of my room.

‘Come on, Javo! It'll be fuckin' midnight before we get to the border!'

By eleven we were out on the highway. Not a smile out of him, scarcely a word. I was kicking myself for having forgotten the lesson of Freycinet the summer before. It rained. We ate chocolate by the packet, in a vain attempt to make the situation look less pathetic. Javo dropped the papers where he stood.

‘You bludger, Javo,' dared Gracie, smiling her evil smile. To my astonishment he burst out laughing, against his will.

A huge wheat transport picked us up as dark and cold fell just outside Holbrook. It bore down on us in the remaining light, brakes shrieking. Grace clung to my leg and screamed with fear; I stepped back in panic on to the grass verge. But Javo turned to me with a laugh of triumph.

‘Come on, Nor! It's our ride to Sydney!'

I slept a little on the hugely vibrating sleeping-shelf, which shook my bladder and gave me indigestion by disturbing a hamburger I had eaten at Gundagai.

‘I'm going to stay awake
all night,
till the morning comes!' announced Grace, sitting up like Lady Muck behind the great gear stick. Three minutes later I glanced over and saw her head droop and her eyes close.

At three o'clock in the morning the truckie dropped us at a blighted all-night cafe thirty miles out of Sydney. The girl serving us was bare-armed in a cotton dress. Two coppers stood drinking coffee in the kitchen. The fluorescent light turned us into corpses.

Gracie added up brightly at the laminex table and ate a fruito; Javo wolfed down a plate of baked beans on toast. We were not looking at each other. Outside the cafe we started walking towards Sydney. It was a bitterly cold, icily clear night, with a sky miles high and light coming from somewhere far away, the stars perhaps for there was no moon. A dog barked from a driveway. The cops stopped in a black maria and brought us to Liverpool station: in the back of the van Javo grinned at Gracie's round eyes but pretended I wasn't there. I was too cold to care. At the station he clowned with Gracie on the turnstiles while I crammed myself with my book into the ticket-puncher's booth. The first train came through at 4.20. It was full of shiftworkers huddling themselves inside what was left of their body warmth from bed. We were the most wide-awake people on board.

Outside Central Station at six o'clock. Javo foul-tempered again, Gracie tired and frightened. I have to keep us together somehow. Frozen and miserable, we trudge along the colonnades looking for a taxi. Grace whinges and at last I pick her up and lug her on my hip. Javo is always twenty steps ahead of me. I can't keep up. At 6.20 the cab drops us outside Peggy's place in Annandale. Cold sky, dark before dawn. I tap nervously on the front window. Peggy opens up, brings us in quietly, insists that we take her big bed, and moves into the spare room. In the bed still warm from her body our limbs thaw and we fall asleep, not touching.

By the next night I was homesick. I was still tired, though I had slept all afternoon while Peggy played with Gracie. Javo was behaving as if we hardly knew each other: everything was in ruins. I began to hate him.

He came and got into bed hours after I'd gone to sleep, tired and sick in the heart. He put his arms round me. I couldn't even swim up far enough from sleep to acknowledge, to turn over to him. We tried to talk to each other. He said it had hurt him that I seemed so little interested in his work on the play. I said I had never guessed that he cared one way or the other about my attitude towards his work: that if I'd known, I'd have been eager. I said it hurt me that he didn't make friends with Gracie, who called him ‘Javaroo' in her foreign accent and was just waiting for the moment, for him to open the gate and let her in. We spoke sharply, out of weary sadness.

He lifted his skinny arm and put it round me, but somehow kept his shoulder turned to me.

‘When you are cold to me,' I said, ‘it makes me feel you think I am ugly, and stupid, and boring; and I give up, and wonder why we go on bothering.'

He said something I didn't hear.

‘What? What did you say?'

‘It's all right – nothing.'

‘Please tell me what you said.'

‘I said, “Maybe you're right”.'

He went out late in the morning, to ‘visit people'. He barely said goodbye to me, didn't kiss me as he once would have done as a pleasant matter of course. A few minutes after he had left, Gracie and I set out walking to the shops. We turned the corner of the street and I saw him a hundred yards ahead of us, the red shirt collar showing between his leather jacket and his rough head. I fell in love with his long legs, saw him getting smaller in the distance, felt him pulling one of those long strings out of my heart. Nothing to be done. I held Gracie's hand tightly, for comfort.

It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter.

But in the night he began to kiss me (I've got a tooth-ache,' he warned) and I got my hands on his round belly, we fucked in the dark, I could just make out his lantern head under my eyes. When I came I was almost laughing with the ease of it.

Every day he would disappear and come back hours later, stoned, white-eyed, obsessive about washing his clothes and cleaning up after himself. Maybe, I thought, torturing myself, he is in love with somebody, with Ruth perhaps who was here with her two children and Micky while I half-slept. I heard Javo say,

‘Want to go to the zoo tomorrow, kids?'

You bastard, you holiday uncle. You never give Gracie the time of day, at home. Must be trying to impress someone.

Too much loneliness. I got so sad.

In the night we talked about splitting up.

‘But
I
can't do it,' he said.

‘Why not?'

‘Because I'm the one that's in the wrong.'

How was I going to think about
that?

What's
love
?

I mean, what
is
it?

Grace and I talked in the bathroom in the morning.

‘How did you get on at the zoo with Javo?'

‘Well . . . good . . .' she hesitated. ‘But he was a bit nervous.'

‘Nervous? What do you mean?'

‘Whenever I spoked, he'd go, “Oh,
no,
Gracie, you're
not
going to . . .”'(turning her head in mimicry of his disgust). . .'
you
know, freaking like that.'

We slept together every night. No fucking, no loving.

‘I'm confused in my head, I'm anxious,' he said. ‘I'm freaking out.'

I dared not try to comfort, scarcely dared to touch his back which was turned to me.

In the morning before it was light Gracie woke up in her floorbed and asked me for something to eat.