Monkey Grip (28 page)

‘Do you know Gerald? This is Lillian,' I mumbled. They inspected each other with frank interest. I remembered Gerald saying once, ‘I think she's stunningly beautiful.' I watched her toss him the challenge, almost a ritual gesture: she flipped her hair back over her bare brown shoulder and glanced at him sidelong, with half a laugh, doing something indescribable with her mouth –
just like in the movies.

‘Here we go – and you'll fall for it, too, you great fucking dunce,' I thought savagely. In some peculiar mixture of relief, pain and self-disgust, I slipped off into Georgie's room and sat in his big, overstuffed armchair and listened to Steely Dan, my arms along the rests of the battered chair and my spine against its back. Ugh, Nora, you dog-in-the-manger. Not in love with Gerald, never have been, don't want to be, but so afraid of loneliness that the very cells simulate the chemical reactions of jealousy, in some primal instinct to grasp and hold against all comers.

After what I thought was a decent interval I got up and went into the kitchen, where Gerald was sitting at the table with Lillian, being charming.

‘Hey, Nora!' said Georgie, presiding at the head of the table behind a huge chocolate cake, knife in hand. I looked at his big, beaky face and bleached hair and felt better. ‘Reckon you can handle a slice of my magnum opus?'

‘I'll give it a try,' I replied, hiding my misanthropy under a rocky smile.

‘What a nice house you live in, Georgie!' said Lillian, resting her pointed chin in her hands. I felt a stab of some unidentifiable pain, something to do with Georgie and three years in that old brown house on the corner of Delbridge Street and our having lost it; and resentment of Lillian's presence, almost too deep for the rational mind.

Georgie handed me a piece of cake and I felt the sweetness of the icing hit a hole in one of my back teeth.

‘Do you want to get the bikes and split?' I said to Gerald.

He was looking up at me from his chair. I fantasised him saying, ‘. . . oh, you go, I might stay here for a while,' and me hiding my mortification and saying, ‘OK, see you later.'

‘OK.' He stood up and we said goodbye. Georgie walked to the front door with us. He put his big hand on my shoulder.

‘What's up, Nor?'

‘Oh – nothing I can feel good about admitting,' I said with a shrug. ‘It's Lillian. There's so much old bad stuff between us, I find it really hard to be in the same room with her. Sorry! Sometimes I'm just an old grouch.'

He grabbed my neck and gave it a gentle squeeze, clicking his tongue and shaking his head. ‘You're OK, mate. If
you're
not, I dunno who is.'

I glanced up and saw Gerald shrug his shoulders and raise his eyebrows, as if to say, ‘What's all the fuss about?' Georgie just grinned at him, still holding my neck in his warm hand.

A letter, painfully printed on blue paper, came from Javo in Hobart.

‘I am making a solid blow against my past. I want to come back but I won't. I am thinking a bit, falling in love with strangers – new ones every day – getting better at being me again.'

I folded up the letter and stashed it away. In the heart very little happened.

In the middle of the night I woke out of a thick and bottomless sleep. Silent house, alone in my bed. I must have fallen asleep early in the evening. I went out to the dunny and found the sky, clear and hot for two days now, had covered itself with cloud. The air was still and cool. I had no idea of the time. I stood between the new grass and the vegetable garden, in the dim air. What a strange night. I was afloat in it all by myself. I held my breath.
Something was gathering itself to happen, not now, but very soon.
I shook my head and the premonition flew away without a sound.

I went down the passage to Gerald's room. His door was propped open with a chair. For a second I thought perhaps he wasn't there, was somewhere else; but I wandered in, in the dark, and saw him doubled up under the blanket. I knelt on the bed, put my hand on his hip, and said,

‘Can I get in with you?'

‘Yes! Of course,' he replied, speaking as sleeping people sometimes do in a perfectly ordinary voice. ‘Have you had a bad dream?'

‘No. I just woke up and couldn't go back to sleep.'

He put his arm round me, and I backed up against him for warmth. I thought, the ecstasy and the tortures waste too much time. Maybe I should settle for this.

I dreamed: I went to China, in a bus, with a lot of other people. What I saw there – happy people, full of energy and life – made me weep with joy.

The next evening we went down to Southside Six to dance to Gerald's band. Grace was determined that I was not going to have a good time.

‘You've already had a
hundred
drinks,' she said as I came back to the table with my second scotch and ice. ‘You're going to get
drunk.
I don't
want
you to!'

I watched Gerald playing, and started again to understand the romantic lust that rock and roll musicians provoke. I looked at his strong arms and the way his face tightened and relaxed in concentration, working in sympathy with his hands. I was dancing with my head down, concentrating myself on letting my spine go loose. Once I glanced up and he grinned at me, hesitantly, as people do when they are not quite sure whether they are being looked at or not. I smiled back and his funny curved face split in half.

Back on our side of the river, Gracie wanted a souvlaki. I took her to the Twins in Lygon Street and we stood there among the drunken, stoned, glassy-eyed late-night crowd silently waiting for food. My ears were still ringing from the music. The vats of fat hissed. The lights were harsh and people there, customers and cooks alike, looked dirty, tired, washed out, old, pushed past the limits of fatigue.

Gracie said into my ear,

‘I'm tired, but I can't lie down in here.'

She went and squatted in a corner by the fridge, sucking her thumb and staring blankly.

A boot, a leg, a body, a head burst through the plastic fly curtain. It was Javo. He saw me and stopped in mid-flight, arms still flung out from the force of his entrance. We stood three feet apart. We smiled the same ancient, wary smile.

‘Ssssst. Hey, Javo,' I said, very softly. He said nothing, but continued to smile. Hank slid in behind him, blond hair glowing in the hard light.

‘Good day, Nora!' he said. He jerked his thumb at Javo. ‘Look who's back.'

Javo dropped his arms to his sides.

‘When did you get back?'

‘Two hours ago.' In his voice I heard the harsh grate of the dope: but even the cold neon could not leach out of his skin its new colour. He was alive again.

He lay down across the foot of my bed and I lay the length of it. He stroked my leg and we talked idly, with many pauses.

‘I am only here for a week,' he said. ‘I've got a part in a movie.'

I was wondering whether Gerald had gone off into his own room, when I slipped off to sleep and was woken, probably only seconds later, by the shock of Javo's hand on my back.

‘Do you want to sleep here with me?' I said, looking at his brown face and shiny hair.

‘Yeah.'

He took off his clothes and I watched him out of my dozing eyes: brown skin, hard body, healthier than I'd ever seen him. He came over to the bed and got in, and turned off the lamp, and our bodies moved towards each other as they had moved a hundred times before. His skin felt burning, a fever from the first hit of smack in six weeks. Our arms went round each other and I heard him whisper my name, ‘Oh, Nora!' and again my heart turned to water. I picked out in the dimness the bony lantern of his head and his eyes and teeth gleaming with that fierce smile, I came joyfully with no hesitation: but then the fact of his being stoned made itself apparent, for he did not come, and his body went on trembling and burning, cock hard and face turning again and again to my mouth in the dark, long after my energy had been exhausted and I wanted to fall away and go to sleep. At last I said,

‘I have to rest – I'm too tired to fuck any more,' and we shifted apart and fell into a restless sleep, tossing half the night. His skin seemed so hot and dry that whenever we touched, in our restless movements, I woke up and felt him burning me with his arm or hand or side: I'd wake and he'd wake too and I'd feel eagerness run off him like a charge, and I'd mumble some helpless word and slip back into the same thin, uneasy sleep, right on the edge of the bed.

Very early in the morning I felt him get up out of the bed and go out of the room. I woke up, sat up; he came back in, dressed. He sat down on the side of the bed and said,

‘I'm gonna split now, Nor.'

‘OK,' I said, thinking that I'd never seen him up and dressed before me,
ever
, in all the time I'd known him.

‘See you at the baths later, if it's swimming weather.'

‘It's going to be,' I said, glancing out my window past the brick wall to the strip of dry, lightening sky. He leaned down and kissed me goodbye. I heard the front door close and slipped away into sleep at last, properly, for an hour or so. When I woke up again I crept into Gerald's bed and hugged him and felt an immense relief – done it! Fucked in the house with someone else, liked it, managed to get through the night, parted friends, found myself still open to being with Gerald (though I felt the odd flicker of apprehension at the thought of his doing the same thing – tit for tat).

‘I almost wished,' said Gerald with a twisted grin, ‘that I could have heard a few groans or sighs, just so I'd be sure it was . . .'

‘. . . Not a matter of suffering for nothing?'

‘Something like that. The only thing I was dreading, really, was the morning – coming out and seeing him – but he's already gone, so that's not a problem.'

‘I guess he's gone to score. But also, you know . . . when he can be, he is a kind person.'

The next evening Javo and I went to Jimmy's for dinner. He made me gasp with tales of his bourgeois friends in Hobart: days on beaches, nights in the casino, falling in love with married women with rich and jealous husbands.

‘Geez, Javo, you look so well, I can't get over it.'

‘I am. Must be almost exactly a year since I was in St V's with septicaemia – remember?'

‘Do I what! You were off your brick. You pulled the drip out of your arm and nicked off. I was
spewing.
'

‘You know when you came to visit me that night, with Martin? It was a pretty . . . cool visit. I wanted to say a lot of things to you, but I couldn't, not while Martin was there.'

My heart ached a little, in retrospect, at my briskness towards him that night.

He went to the theatre and I went home. He came in later when I was lying on my bed reading.

‘Nor, is it cool if I crash in your lounge room?' he said. ‘They're having a big coke binge at Easey Street and I can't keep away from it if I hang out there.'

Surprised again at his resolution.

‘Of course.' And he slept in there and I slept in my room and Gerald slept in his, and there we all were.

In the daylight I was careful to concern myself largely with my own affairs. I was quite detached from him, or from my own feelings about him, and I thought it would never be the same again: as if I had unconsciously, over the six weeks of his absence, come to terms with the ways in which we would never be able to be harmonious. But occasionally I got caught out by his violently blue eyes, and the way he riveted me with them sometimes. The old fantasies were still hanging about . . . but I let ‘em boil away for a bit until I was left with a gritty residue, which could be rolled up in balls and stored in the bottom of my pocket.

He left our house at ten in the morning to have a turkish bath in St Kilda, and didn't come back. By seven in the evening I was lying on my bed wondering if I ought to go and fetch him.

‘Do you think I should?' I asked Eve.

‘I reckon whole groups of people can take the load of helping someone get off dope,' she said.

‘Tell him he hasn't worn out his welcome,' said Cobby.

Grace and I took the car and followed his trail from one junkie household to another. At Neill Street something mysterious was happening in the bathroom: when Micky came out he was a shade too polite for comfort. Javo had just left. I went back to Easey Street: no Javo. As a last chance I drove over to Napier Street. Gracie in the back seat asked,

‘Nora, will you tell me some stories about people dying?'

‘Why?'

‘Because I like those stories.'

‘I'll tell you some later.'

‘OK.'

At Napier Street I saw through the overgrown vegetation Javo's pink T shirt and rough head, his back turned towards the gate. I parked the car. By the time I'd got Gracie out and crossed the road and entered the garden, he had climbed up the nectarine tree with Hank: I could see his face smiling down at me from among the leaves, and yes, his eyes were pale, the china blue whited out again, and I pretended not to see and talked brightly about having come to ask him round for tea.

‘Thanks, Nor,' he said, balancing his feet in broken sandals on the crumbly grey branches, ‘but I've gotta see a bloke about this movie, and pick up my jeans.'

‘Pick up your jeans?'

‘Oh – you know – the free ones you get for the movie. But thanks anyway.' He smiled and smiled, veiling himself behind the leaves.

‘That's OK,' I hear my normal, sensible voice say. ‘I'll see you later, then.'

‘Yeah – see you, Nor.'

‘See you,' said Hank, standing an improvised ladder against the fence, and said Jean, crouching under the Hills Hoist poking in the dry lumpy soil with a trowel. Gracie and I got back in the car. We ate half a nectarine each, very big and sweet.