Monkey Grip (24 page)

‘I feel terrible. There is some awful lump inside me. I've been downstairs. I was lying on the floor crying.'

Crying! He told me once he never cried. Wide awake now. I took hold of his shoulders, held him very hard and listened to small sounds he made, gasps almost of relief.

‘But! What's wrong? What can I do for you?'

‘Oh, this is what I need,' he whispered, head back on the pillow, submitting to hard hugs and cradling. My heart filled up with a puzzled love for him, and my head stayed quite steady, thinking,

‘This is going to be harder than I thought: but I can do it.'

‘Come on, talk, talk,' I urged.

‘Well – I was – lying down there thinking – Why are you sick? And why do you go on bleating about Gracie coming home – when
I
need something from you?'

Small shock waves, at the injustice of what he is asking, while I still held and rocked him, wanting to soothe. Does he want a mother? Can I be that to him? Ought I to be? I began to sense myself as something very balanced and steady, and him as a dark mass yawing wildly and out of control. Got to let him pass through and round me, keep my centre, not let his disorder pull me askew.

It seemed we lay for some time with our arms round each other. He got calmer.

‘Let me move a bit.' He shifted his body. I turned over and fitted my back into his curve. It was more peaceful.

‘I thought about you a lot today,' I said, ‘when I was reading. ‘I thought about fucking with you.'

‘I masturbated three times last night,' he said.

‘Did you? What were you thinking about?'

‘About this girl who was at our gig on Saturday night.'

‘Yeah? What happened?'

‘She was sitting at the table with us, paying us a lot of attention. And when we'd finished playing, she invited us to this party. By the time we got there it was nearly over, people were picking up bottles and cleaning up . . . there were lots of rooms, and I couldn't see her anywhere. And when we were leaving I went looking for Philip to get a lift home. I found him in a room I hadn't been in. I went in and said, “Can I get a lift with you?” – and then I saw the girl, she'd been in there all along.

‘So I went and sat down with her, and talked, but before I could work out if anything was likely to happen, Philip came over and said, “Are we going, then?”

‘So nothing did happen.

‘I went home, and masturbated, and went to sleep, and woke up, and masturbated, and went to sleep – and there was one more time that I wasn't sure about . . . I was all in a flutter.'

All the time he was talking my heart was turning over. I stared in the almost-dark at the corner of the bookshelf where my black jacket hung. I remembered him saying once, with just enough self-mockery to make it true, ‘I want to be a rock and roll star'. I saw myself in a house, alone and still and old enough to be alone and still, while he rotated like a rhythmic planet, somewhere in the world outside.

‘How do you think it makes me feel, hearing you tell that story?' I asked, very carefully.

‘In terms of jealousy, you mean?'

‘Something like that – jealousy, or whatever.'

‘I don't think you need to be jealous. Because it was just a groupie thing – she was all, you know, dressed up – silver boots, tight top, dark red lips – and it's not that I regret it not happening.'

‘You don't?'

‘I didn't even start to get to
know
her. And I don't think she ever would have lost that smile. Why . . . how
does
it make you feel?'

‘Awful. Sort of left out.'

He hugged me. ‘If I hadn't got to know
you,
I'd regret it a real lot,' he said.

I said nothing. He went on,

‘Does it worry you that I might get more sexually excited by people like her than by you?'

‘Of course it does.'(Remembering him saying, ‘Do you feel horny? Because
I don't.
' Bang, the door slammed in my face.)

‘But,' he said, ‘I think our fucking is really good. Even if . . . technically . . . we don't . . . the feeling is still there, and that's what it's all about, I reckon. Don't you?'

‘Yeah.'(His face always turned aside, away from my eyes; how rarely what I do can make him gasp, cry out, lose himself.)

‘You talk a lot,' he said, ‘about other people you've fucked with as being more compatible with you.' Long-ago people.

‘Oh, I . . .' I give a groan, unable to dredge up words.
Oh Javo, how your face would turn tender, how you would say my
name softly, how I would come just watching the sweetness flow into your face.

He hugs me again, I'm comforted by his body all down my back. I get out of bed and take off my nightdress, thinking partly of fucking, partly of the foolishness of our skins not touching through all the layers of my sickness. I turn my front to him, we lie along each other close and comfortable.

‘Oooh, I must go to sleep,' he says. His tone is tinged with warning. I move aside from him, into the cooler space.

‘Did you think we would fuck?' he asks.

‘I guess I thought we might.'

‘I am too miserable to fuck. I can only fuck when I'm happy.'

‘That's all right.' My back is turned to him again. I'm lonely out there on the edge of the bed; but I'm sick, sick, sick, everything I think or say is made drab through my sickness.

‘I can't get over,' I say, hearing again that careful note in my voice, ‘the way you turn off.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘One minute you're asking me for love, and the next you are pushing me away, get away, arms'length.'

A pause.

‘I get scared,' he says, ‘when someone wants to fuck me and I don't want to.'

We do fall asleep; and wake at the same moment to a room full of sun, eight o'clock in the morning and I have been dreaming:

I am in a kitchen. Its walls are peeling drastically. I take a knife, insert its blade behind a peeling section, and turn it as if to strip off the layer; it loosens easily, but I see that the area which will fall is very large, that it will make a mess on the floor which I will have to clean up, and that I don't know whether the condition of the wall underneath it is good enough to be exposed. I change my mind, remove the knife and put it back on the bench. I decide to let the peeling sections fall off in their own good time.

‘I think,' I said to Gerald, ‘it would be a good idea if we didn't see each other till the end of the week.'

Instantly he backed off, withdrew, turned a black face away from me.

‘That's a bit rough,' he said. ‘When you're sick you want to have me round – but as soon as you start to get well you say you don't want to see me.'

‘Oh, that's so
unfair
!' A man, a man. He doesn't let the feelings show but snaps up that steel screen of
reason.

He clammed up on me, slammed shut. His face was tight and accusing.

‘It would be better,' I suggested, ‘if you said, “That makes me feel bad”, instead of putting up a reason why I'm wrong.'

We battled it out. It was like having my foot in the door and him pushing it shut. He let it open a small crack, then a crack more, and I reached round it and grabbed his hand; and he let me touch him but kept his face turned away.

‘All right,' he said. ‘I made a mistake –
don't let's go any further into it.
'

I let it drop, but I thought, listen mate, one day we'll go so far into it that you won't
want
to turn back. And I'll shove you off the cliff and you'll fly away.

After seven days of illness I could still hardly breathe, and waves of weakness came over me whenever I stood up. I wished to be out in the windy sunshine, but I lay flat in my bed, staring at my red curtain flying against the white wall. In the afternoon Javo thundered in. Seeing me in my glory, he turned and bellowed down the stairs,

‘Hey, Hank! Come up here!'

And Hank, either not stoned or not as stoned as Javo, comes in and sits on my chair smiling. Hank's face is so streaked with car grease that for a second I think he is wearing stage makeup. They start talking about some freaked-out non-junkie crim they know called Kenny.

‘He's
right
off ‘is brick,' declares Javo.

‘He kept asking me for a hit,' says Hank, ‘but I didn't
have
any. I kept
telling
him, “Mate, I haven't
got
any!”' Spreads his hands and laughs, showing his broken teeth.

‘Yeah,' opines the king of beasts, loafing back against my wall with his great boots on my bedspread, red styes gleaming on his eyelid, hair matted like straw or rope – ‘I reckon junk'd be that guy's saving grace. I really reckon it's just what he needs. It'd calm him right down.'

My jaw drops. I steal a look at Hank and see him watching Javo sideways, smiling a small smile. Oblivious, Javo rants on, gesturing expansively, enjoying himself. Hank turns and catches my eye and we both burst out laughing. Javo is unabashed.

Hank leaves, Javo stays. We begin to talk.

‘Who do you fuck with?' I enquire, folding my hands on my chest.

‘No-one.'

‘Do you miss it?'

‘No – oh, sometimes.'

‘I miss
you
sometimes,' I admit.

From this moment we are friends again. He smiles at me, hugs me clumsily. He nods off, comes back, apologises:

‘I shouldn't come here when I'm this stoned.'

‘That's OK,' I say, and lie back on my pillows, restfully regarding his battered face. I'll love that wrecked bastard forever, along with all the other people under whose influence I've had
my
hard shell cracked.

He leaves. On his way out he says, ‘Give us a kiss, Nor.'

Willingly I put my mouth against his blackened junkie lips.

That night everyone was out but me.

Doing my washing in the rickety machine in the bathroom. While the machine toils and shrieks, I crouch on the Minnie Mouse chair outside the back door, looking quietly up at the half moon which rolls stubbornly in the narrow gap of sky between our house and the shop next door. The air is deep, deep blue, one star, I feel a hot day coming when this night is over. I'm full of restlessness. Not lonely, exactly – my head is racing with ideas. But it is that old treacherous feeling that real life is happening somewhere else, and I'm left out. The air stirs a little, Rita's newly planted herbs move their small leaves. I finish hanging out a dozen hankies from my flu, which is almost over; and I close the back door behind me and go upstairs.

In the morning, light and air wake me. I go outside and see the sky a thousand miles high, covered with a fine net of almost invisible cloud. My head begins to turn, it fills with unspoken words, I don't try to seize them but let them run unchecked. They seem to slip into my veins and my limbs and the capillaries of my skin. It is just convalescence, and the summer morning. ‘The universe resounds with the joyful cry “I am!”'

I waited for Gracie, thinking of her intelligent, ready face, her wiry legs, and her secret, thumb-sucking smile. But I knew that, as soon as she came back, the house would be too small again and we would all go crazy.

It wasn't that I didn't
love
Rita and Juliet: on the contrary, I suffered from some painful emotion towards them, something to do with Rita's daily struggle to live, and the fact that I had been through this struggle myself with Gracie, years before: hating her because her existence marked the exact limits of my freedom; hating myself for hating her; loving her, all the while, gut-deep and inexpressibly; and beginning each day with the dogged shouldering of a burden too heavy for one person: the responsibility for the life of another human being. I had been rescued from this bind by Eve and Georgie and Clive, back in the old house: they had prised us apart patiently, lovingly tinkering and forcing. It takes more than one person to perform this most delicate operation, and, trapped there in the tiny, beautiful house with Rita and her battle, I knew I didn't have it in me. All I could think of was to escape. For weeks I thought treacherously of getting away: I lay in bed at night and racked my brains for an honourable solution.

When Gracie did arrive from Perth, she came down with measles within half a day. I was still weak from the flu, and stayed with her all day, lying beside her in my hot room, a blanket over the window to protect her sore eyes from the light, and tickled her traumatised skin with the corner of the newspaper. She recovered more quickly than I did. When I was still sick and weak, she played downstairs by herself, singing and drawing and reading aloud great tracts of
Baby
and Child Care
by Doctor Spock. She came up occasionally to say hullo.

‘Grace,' I said, ‘you are good company when I'm sick.'‘I try my best,' she said with a stoical expression.

Eve and Georgie came to visit, the two of them radiating goodness and humour, and we lay on my bed in the warm night room, swigging capfuls of cointreau (my birthday present from Paddy) and laughing together about the follies of the world. They went out to their bikes. The three of us stood there in the narrow alleyway, a million miles of sky overhead and a moon shining somewhere nearby; Eve squeezed me with her thin, strong arms.

‘Wish we were livin' together again, eh, Nor?' she sighed, rolling her eyes. ‘Life's a fuckin' struggle, ain't it!'

‘You are not kidding, mate.'

Georgie kissed me goodbye. His teeth flashed in the dark. I watched them pedal away and I felt small and lonely for a few seconds. It was sexual loneliness, I supposed, but it was also the loneliness of remembering summer-night bicycle rides, rolling home to the big house with a full heart, sailing through floods of warm air, the tyres whirring on the bitumen, then over the gutter and into the park, and feeling the temperature drop under the big green leafy balloons.