Monkey Grip (2 page)

This one was going to make me trouble.

Next time I saw him was at Ormond Hall. People lolled against the mirrored walls, or danced, or lay on the floor with their sleeping children safely bundled in nests of discarded clothing. Javo and I spread ourselves on our backs on the floor as on a large double bed. I felt hesitant to touch him, or approach.

But he came back to my house with me, and we lay on my bed and talked and liked each other, and the way it happened was, that we began to stroke each other, and to kiss, and after a long, long time of slow, gentle touching and pausing, and kissing like an idle game that turned serious (he held my head hard with his two hands, we kissed and kissed) I rolled on to him and we fucked ever so gently. ‘Wait, oh wait,' he whispered, and I waited, and he started again with the slow and steady rolling under me, his mad crooked face very sweet in front of my eyes; I felt the thin bones in his shoulders, and my heart dissolved to see him change away from abruptness to this kindness.

‘At last,' he said, ‘I've found someone who fucks soft.'

We slept together three nights in a row. In those three days I drifted pleasantly in a haze while Martin wept and Javo felt guilty.

Three nights in a row was enough to make it too late.

On the fourth morning I went about my business in the house, and came upon him later on the back doorstep. I squatted down beside him in the hot morning sunshine. I pushed my face against his jacket, warm cloth and the smell of his body. He smiled that crooked, reluctant smile, flashing at me sideways with his blue eyes. I went out on my own, leaving him there idle in the yard.

When I came back in the evening he was gone.

It was a clear night, bright high moon, smell of grass on the air.

A person might not be ashamed to wish for love.

I was not aware of having wished. I had fallen asleep, no longer listening for footsteps. At one o'clock in the morning someone pushed open my door quietly, Javo, and sat on my bed and I hugged him round his neck and he held me like anything.

We lay talking for a long time, and dozed and woke and dozed again. The moon moved across the roof. It was hot and still.

‘What's happening with Javo, Nora?' enquired our Eve, rolling one of her sneaky fags at our kitchen table. ‘You're not – you know – doin' it again, are you?'

I knew what she meant and could not control a grin of guilt. She meant
falling in love.

‘Yeah, I suppose I've done it again.'

‘I'll thump you, Nor,' she said, laughing at me kindly. I ran my thumbnail along a groove in the tabletop, feeling abashed but defiant.

‘But what can I do to change?' I cried.

‘Stop. Stop it. Stop now. You could spend more time on your
own.
'

I can't, I won't. Stop. I thought of his skin and the way I could sense out his skull, and his crazy eyes.

‘You know what you're doing, Nor. You're looking at every new one, saying – is this the one?' She squinted at me, breathing out a column of smoke.

‘No, that's not what
I'm
doing.'

‘Well then, Javo is. I don't want to sound like a mother, but what
future
is there in it?'

We both laughed.

‘I'm not all that worried about futures. I don't want to love anyone forever.'

‘Look – don't get me wrong, he may be a scoundrel, but I really dig him – apart from anything else, he's a fuckin'
junkie
.'

‘He's
not
. He's off it. He got off it in Hobart.'

‘Oh, come
on
, Nora.'

We stared at each other across the table. Everything she knew about junkies was written on her face. I knew it too, but at that moment I chose to deny it. I stared at her face, gritting my teeth against the way she loved me. I looked at her thin, long fingers and kept my eyes on them until I heard her sigh. She stood up and picked up the coffee cups and carried them to the sink.

Already too late, too late.

What harsh lives we lead.

I slept alone that night, dreamed deeply, forgot the dreams, woke to a house empty of children. Sunday morning, a cool wind, sun not shining. Eve was right, of course: more time on my own. But there was an image to shake my resolution: Javo lounging on a blue couch, drinking in some flash pub beyond our means, the sun coming through his eyes the colour of blue marbles, blue glass, how his eyes burn in his wrecked face.

He was twenty-three then and maybe, I ignorantly surmised, wouldn't get much older, because of the junk and the dangerous idleness in the bloodstream. I hadn't reckoned with the grit, nor with what would be required of me, nor with what readiness I would give it. Givin' it all away. People like Javo need people like me, steadier, to circle round for a while; and from my centre, held there by children's needs, I stare longingly outwards at his rootlessness.

On Christmas Day we woke together again. Georgie had given me a book by Diane Wakoski,
The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems
. I read a page or two, quite fast.

‘If you're going to read,' said Javo, ‘read out loud.'

I did, the one about the big snoring bikie who fell asleep beside her, drunk, and woke not knowing he carried her bullets in his back. I laughed. Lying next to Javo with the book in my hand, I remembered that in some narrow chamber of myself I knew what she was talking about. Love, it's about love.

When he left that morning, he stood in my doorway, looked at me sideways, and said,

‘I'm going home. See you when I see you.'

He caught me on the hop. But I was well-disciplined by the orthodoxy, a fast faker. I was sitting at my table. We were ten feet apart, and I grinned at him, neat, sharp and steady.

‘Yeah. See you.'

Cut!

I saw him pass my window, though, and a small death occurred. Who am I kidding?

On that dull, still morning, Georgie strode in from Woodhead Street.

‘Clive! One of your pigeons got the chopper, mate. A car ran over it.'

Clive buried it in the corner of the tomato bed near the dunny. I came past just as he was dropping the first spadeful of earth on the dead body. I saw its flattened head, its eye closed, its beak open and desperate. The dirt hit the feathers and they gave out a stiff, lively rustling.

Cut off from gritty daily contact with the world, I was floating somewhere else, my time ruled by the children's demands, my ears tuned to the tones of their voices. I slept and woke when they did, served them out of my dream; and lived a short, intense hour of every night in the dark with Javo, living privately in the sleeping house.

He slept on in my bed each morning when I got up to the children. I came back in when they had gone to play, sat at my table to write or read, was aware of him flung across my bed in a running position. I felt dispossessed. I wished he would get up and take cognizance of the world, as I had to every morning. He didn't act, but waited for the tide to lift and carry him.

Not my kind, was that it?

I was afraid of his restlessness, his idleness, his violent changes of mood, his inability to sustain himself. Being with him was sometimes like being with a child: not that he
asked
me, as Grace and the Roaster asked me, to kick things along, to keep it all running; but if I hadn't done it, I would have been at the mercy of his erratic nature – unbalanced, vague, out of sync.

‘What about this way I've got of falling in love with people and just as quickly out again?' I asked the I Ching.

‘It is not immutable fate . . . that caused the state of corruption,' it replied, ‘but rather the abuse of human freedom.'

He sat at my table just out of the shower, wet hair and his blue eyes burning.

‘Geez, you're goodlooking,' I remarked over my shoulder as I stood at the sink. His face closed up. His eyes dropped to his bitten hands and cigarette.

‘You get excruciated when I say things like that, don't you.' He nodded.

The bead fly curtain rattled and Clive stepped in from tending his pigeons. He stopped inside the door, grinning at us from under his absurd cloud of henna'd hair.

‘Wanna take the kids to the baths?' he said, inadvertently puncturing the small balloon of awkwardness. Javo sat there smoking while we rounded up Gracie and the Roaster, took their bathers (smelling, like the children themselves, strongly of chlorine) off the line, and disentangled our bikes from the heap outside the kitchen door: my thirty dollar grid, and Clive's blue and silver Coppi racer, which he called his filly. The Roaster rode on Clive's bar, Gracie on my carrier. We bumped over the gutter and on to the softening bitumen.

The kids begin to sing. We roll in unison (me upright and straight-backed with outstretched arms, Clive bent low over his handlebars with the Roaster crouching inside the curve of his body) down the wide road and into the green tunnel, the cave of the Edinburgh Gardens. No-one around, though it is ten o'clock in the morning. The hoses flick silver strings on to the drying grass. The cicadas beat a rhythm that comes in waves, like fainting or your own heartbeat. We sweep round the corner into the Belgium Lane, where the air is peppery with the scent of cut timber and even on this still day the poplars flutter over the ancient grey picket fence; they thrust up their sprouts through the cracking asphalt under our wheels. Between the posts we flash without hesitation and out of the cool we hit the road again and get down to the work of it, pedalling along Napier Street: our speed makes Gracie's legs flail behind me like oars.

‘Hang on, hang on!' I shout to Grace, and feel her fingers obediently tighten on my pants as we forge across a gap in the heedless double stream of traffic in Queen's Parade, and coast again (the Coppi ticking soothingly) the last few yards to the racks outside the Fitzroy baths.

Broken glass glitters nastily all along the top of the cream brick walls. We chain our bikes to the rack. The Roaster grabs his towel and springs over the hot concrete to the turnstile. Gracie holds my hand with her hard brown one and we pick our way between the baking bodies to the shallow pool.

The brightness of that expanse of concrete is atomic: eyes close up involuntarily, skin flinches. I lower myself gingerly on to the blazing ground and watch the kids approach the pool. The Roaster slips over the side and wades inexorably deeper; Gracie waves to me and squints, wraps her wiry arms around her belly, and sinks like a rich American lady beneath the chemicals.

‘No-one will ever understand,' I say to Clive, ‘but this is paradise.'

‘Paradise enow,' he answers, neatly laying out a towel and applying his skin to its knobbly surface. No further need to speak. The sun batters us into a coma. I pull my hat over my eyes and settle down on my elbows to the day's vigilance.

It took me months to see the junk patterns. I wished to trust, and so I trusted. When events did not please me, my dreams reworked them.

On the night of the first party, I went alone. Javo was there, but he did not greet me, and sat like some sulky adolescent with his back to the room, hunched over the record player. The room was full of people I liked: I lounged about and wisecracked pleasantly with them until midnight, when I wheeled my bike outside and coasted home downhill under the big trees in those wide empty streets, sailing through tides of warm night air. I fell asleep beside my open window, and my unconscious obligingly furnished me with a more agreeable version of the evening's happenings.

I dreamed: Javo and I left the party together. As we opened the door, we found ourselves in the country, stepping off the threshold on to blond grass, a hill sloping down in front of us with a double wheeltrack half overgrown; faint evening sunlight. We ran down the hill together, laughing and exuberant, leaping over tussocks, having to dodge small clusters of brown ducks which were waddling flatbacked through the grass.

‘Don't tread on my ducks!' shouted the farmer, appearing somewhere near. ‘I have to sell them.'

It was easy to avoid them, though we were running so fast that it was almost like flying. At the bottom of the hill we came to a wooden fence with a stile, and stopped.

At that moment Javo walked into my bedroom, and I woke up.

He sat on the bed. We hugged each other. I sat against the bedroom wall with my knees up and my head between them.

‘Oh, hey,' he said, taking hold of me by the shoulders. ‘I am a self-engrossed slob. I don't want to make you sad.'

I did not want him to see that he could. So, there I sat on my bed in the middle of a hot summer night, caught between my dream and the memory of what had really happened.

If I had enough to spare, why not share it?

He touched me tentatively, as if he wasn't quite sure where to find me.

‘Is that as good as it can be?' he asked humbly. I showed him how, and we fucked, we made love; we lay side by side.

‘I love,' he said in a quiet voice, ‘the moistureless way in which we kiss.' Exactly like that, he said it. ‘I love the relationship you have with your body. I love the way your face is showing signs of wear. I love the way you talk when you're coming – the way you become a child. Your face looks twelve years old.'

I listened in astonishment.

We slept, and Gracie woke me early, and he slept on and I got up.

I found the second party in a crowded garden, its boundaries hidden in darkness. I smoked a couple of joints and took a cup of brandy to a little pozzy I found in a dry flower-bed under some bushes. I sat in my safe place, dirty and tired and not caring what I looked like. I drank the brandy and observed the social flow. The part of this which concerned me was a peculiar triangle: Javo, Martin, and Jessie whose relationship with Javo a year before had been destroyed by his smack habit. From my position on the sidelines I could see Javo's eyes on her, how he laughed eagerly at everything she said and watched her hungrily. But Martin too kept his eyes on her face, and she remained, in her demeanour, uncommitted, floating on the force of their attention, her expression changing from laughter to a vaguely detached and discontented look, her blue eyes under her thick red fringe drifting away to some private speculation. The three of them stood in a close ring, passing joints and making a lot of theatrical noise.