Monkey Grip (32 page)

Eager to agree, I hastened, ‘You could never work at our place – I know.'

A pause. Gracie came dog-paddling up to me. ‘Watch me! Watch me!' I watched, and in the corner of my eye his long dark body launched itself out into the water and he swam away.

Turkey, cold turkey.

But two days later he came into our kitchen in the morning while I was ironing my blue and white spotted dress. He wanted me to put his dole cheque through my bank account. In the bank he sat on a chair waiting for the teller to call my name. I leaned on the shelf beside him.

‘Hey Nor,' he said, ‘have you got forty cents change to lend me for the tram?'

I looked in my purse and found the money. I held it out to him: he put out his hand, palm upwards, his face turned away towards the street. I dropped the coins into his hand and he made no acknowledgement. My insides performed a little dance of anger and sadness. No, no, said my resolution, the small voice of reason, he asked and you gave. You didn't have to give, and he didn't have to be grateful. Giving is not bartering. I handed him the ten dollar bills.

While the teller fiddled with my passbook, Javo wandered out on to the street. He tapped on the window and mouthed, ‘Here comes my tram. See you.'

I nodded and waved. We were smiling at each other, our faces less than a foot apart, but there was a sheet of plate glass between us. I watched him walk away in his pink T shirt and overalls. I turned back to the counter, picked up my passbook, and walked out to meet Eve, sitting straddled on her bike waiting for me, half-stunned from a valium she had taken to help her stop smoking.

We pedalled off towards the city, to the art gallery. We walked around arm in arm.

‘What'll we look at?' I asked.

‘Oh, I dunno,' she replied. ‘You just lead me round and show me things.'

So I did. I showed her my secret picture,
The French Window,
two women sitting at a circular table having a cup of tea; beside them a long window opens to let in a strip of bright garden, the hard lovely light of summer; in the middle of the lawn sticks up a polished brass tap, and on the verandah you can see half a deck chair.

‘That's you,' remarked Eve.

I said, ‘That's
us.
'

Sometimes I wished old age would hasten upon me.

In the street in Carlton I met Angela.

‘Where's that junkie ex-lover of yours?' she asked, looking distracted. She was carrying a large exercise book.

‘I don't know.'

‘Well, you're more likely to see him than I am. Here's his call for the movie.' She scribbled the information on a piece of paper in her extravagant, unformed handwriting. I took it reluctantly, not knowing how to make it clear to her that I didn't expect to see him again before the time she wanted him. I rode away with Eve. We took the good, fast run along Rathdowne Street, playing at racing and rolling neck and neck, and parted at the corner of Richardson Street. As soon as we separated, the old ache sneaked back again. I came home to the empty house and rang Angela. I told her I didn't know where Javo was and would prefer not to have to go looking for him. She took the task away from me, and immediately the ache stopped.

I lay on my bed reading for most of the afternoon. I fell asleep. I woke up at 3.20 precisely and in that neutral moment between full sleep and full awareness my mind involuntarily conjured up a series of images: Javo and Claire standing facing each other, reaching out their arms and stepping forward and embracing each other tightly, her face pressed hard against his chest. The rapidity and vividness of these uncalled-for visions astonished me; and so did the fact that they did not bring back the ache. I lay there listening to the quiet falling of warm rain in the alley outside my window. Gracie pushed open my door and came in dripping and smiling, with a bag full of ‘work' from school and her reader
Ronno the Clown.

Half an hour later I heard Eve call out,

‘Want a cup of tea, Gerald?'

I got up in my red underpants and wandered out to the kitchen. ‘Is Gerald back?'

Eve nodded and pointed to the room with the TV in it. I pushed open the door and saw his long legs in stained white trousers sticking out from the couch. I was delighted to see him and went to hug him. Gracie sucked her thumb and watched us greet each other.

We drove to the Southern Cross for a drink and an escape from the house. He told me about his trip to the Prom with Lillian. I was very tense and defensive, and talked between clenched teeth about Lillian and what she could do with her opinions of my personality; but then I calmed down and told Gerald everything I could about Javo and the way I was feeling about him. He was attentive and kind, and listened patiently.

‘And on top of everything else,' I said, getting into my stride and beginning to orate, ‘I've got this thing in my ear which I think might be a
pimple.
Will you have a look later and tell me what it is?'

‘I'll do anything you ask,' he replied.

I looked up sharply, thinking he was getting at me, but he was smiling at me with an open face; there was a layer of laughter behind everything he said. I relaxed.

I woke up before anyone else in the house. A dull, heavy morning, weighed down with yesterday's rain. I got up, shoved my feet into my sandals, walked quietly out to the kitchen, and noticed that the living room door was shut: this usually meant that Javo was asleep inside. My heart didn't even turn over. It ticked away as it should. I picked my way across our bomb-site of a back yard, past the gnawed, holey broccoli which Gerald swore would survive the cabbage moths, and into the dunny. For the time being, I'd lost the ache. I sat on the dunny, gazing bucolically out at the side wall of the garage, the bricks under the back wheels of the half-mended van, and the low wet thick sky. Small, non-specific visions of Claire and Javo in each other's arms flickered in the corners wherever I looked, but nothing registered on the pain metre. I was alive to the knowledge that they may have begun to love each other, that was all.

(
Gracie:
‘Three boys chased me in the yard and said they loved me. So'– demonstrating vicious punches to the solar plexus – ‘I bashed them all up.')

Javo was not in the living room.

I took the kids to school and my washing to the laundromat. When I came home I got in the shower.

‘Javaroo was here,' called Eve.

‘Oh, yeah?' I was scrubbing my face and hair and talking to her through the louvre windows. ‘Where'd he go?'

‘To the dole office.'

‘Did he shift his stuff out?' I jerked my head towards the living room. We grinned wryly at each other. Valium'd, she stood arms akimbo, one hand pointing the hose into a yellow plastic bucket.

‘Nup. I think he was more like shifting it back in.' I laughed. She shrugged.

‘I was thinking I'd get him to move it out. It makes it harder for me, the way he comes and goes.'

She nodded.

‘But at the same time, I guess I don't want to let him see how much . . .
pain
. . . he can cause me.' The word came effortfully off my lips; afraid of exaggerating, of sounding melodramatic. Eve gazed at me, eyes dull with the drug but with a spark miles behind of knowing what I was talking about.

Gerald walked in the front door as I was on my way out with the shopping bag over my shoulder. Javo's calico bag was lying in the corner next to the front door. I gave it a casual poke with my foot.

‘Bloody Javo,' I remarked without venom. ‘Looks like he's still leaving his stuff lying round.'

Gerald instantly warmed to the subject. ‘Yes! He came in this morning while you were out, and set up the ironing board, and stuff – I thought to myself, oh no! he's moving back in. I almost said something to him then.'

‘What would you have said?'

‘Oh, something about how you and I were having enough trouble living here with each other – and him being the third person was making it even
more
difficult, being here – and maybe he ought to go.'

I felt a rush of horror at the idea of him standing there and saying all that to Javo, like a husband protecting a wife who was battling with feelings too strong for her. I walked quickly away from him down the passage towards my room.

‘Hey.' He said it uncertainly, on two notes, but with the unambiguous meaning:
stop.
I went on into my room. I stood in front of the mirror on the dressing table; I looked at myself helplessly. He followed me into the room.

‘What do you think of that?' he asked.

‘It's OK,' I replied in a neutral voice.

‘But at least you could tell me what you
think
of it.' He was insisting. I picked up the eyedrops and squeezed them into my eyes, one after the other.

It's up to you to say what you think. But . . . as long as you don't give the impression that what you say is the result of a conversation with
me.
' Ugh, the revulsion I felt at being spoken for, or at being thought to be spoken for.

‘Oh, I wouldn't do
that.
'

I am not quite honest, not quite fair.

I sat in my room, weary and sore, feeling that familiar creeping sensation of being made use of by Javo . . . how many times before? I wrote a card to tell him this: You are giving me a use, you can get your things out of my house, give a woman a break, mate. I rode my bike round to Napier Street where I supposed he might be. Claire's tape deck was playing loudly that Joni Mitchell song,

which I had sung to myself early that hot morning a year ago after I'd worked all night on the junk movie and was walking home in white clothes across the crackling park towards my bed where I would find him waiting for me, a junkie, sick, needing me. I knocked on Claire's door, went in, saw his red and black shiny journal on the bed in the empty room. Unerring I went for it.

‘In the bed of a new friend . . .' and there it was, about how they were together, when they fucked. The last two lines were like a knife inserted neatly between my ribs:

‘“Where am I?” I asked in my body.

“You're here,” she said with her eyes.'

I deserve it, I deserve it, whined my guilt for snooping. I slipped the card I'd written into his book and sat down at the table to write a note to Claire. Four biros, one after another, refused to work for me. I sat there hopelessly staring out the window. Claire's dog ran in, recognised me and sprang on to my lap, and was followed into the room by Claire herself who was carrying a pink plastic bowl full of cut-up dog's meat. She saw me and stopped in the doorway with a look of uncertainty.

I said, ‘Good day.'

‘Hullo. How's things?'

‘OK. A bit difficult.'

‘I got your letter.'

‘I got yours too. On the same day.' We gave the same painful laugh.

‘We must have been thinking about each other at the same . . .'

I nodded. We were still looking at each other's eyes. I began to notice that a gigantic wall of some terrible emotion was swelling up inside me; it was being held back, barely, by a dull sense that this was not the place to let it go, lest I scare Claire out of her wits, give her cause to think that all of it was due to her new relationship with Javo, and make a scene which he might arrive to witness. Still, I sat there, dogged, mulish, unable to stand up and gracefully get myself out. I dropped my head on to my arms. There was a pause. Her hand touched the back of my hair, and began to stroke me tentatively. The dog crawled from my lap on to the table and offered her furry, trembling body for comfort. Claire stroked and stroked, and I grimly held back what I already knew was going to be a flood of tears if I let it. I butted my head against her thin hip, wanting to thank her for her gentleness. Finally I struggled to my feet.

‘I'd better go. It'll be all right.'

My face must have looked terrible. She looked at me without speaking. Then she said, ‘See you, Nora.' I nodded and ran out the door to my bike. Hank was at the gate, about to fix one of his endless cars. I managed to force out some normal-sounding words, and rode off down Napier Street.

I thought I would go and find a neutral bed in a neutral house and lie on it until the tears had finished: they'd already started to leak out and I could hardly see where I was going. No-one home at Bell Street, or at Brunswick Street, or at Percy Street. So I turned my bike round in St George's Road among the peak hour traffic and rode up to Rathdowne Street, which I had wanted to avoid for fear of running into Lillian. From the open front door I smelled a meal cooking. I dropped my bike and headed for the kitchen. Georgie was standing at the table, awkwardly pouring olive oil out of a baking dish into a yogurt jar. I saw his familiar fair head and big ungainly face turned towards me, and I thought,

‘That's where I'm heading and I can only just make it that far.'

‘Good day, Nor!' he said, looking shocked but ready for me. ‘How are you doin'?'

‘No good!' I wailed, knowing I was now in the place where I could let go. I ran up against his chest, he put his free arm round me, and out it came: tears simply poured off my face. He put down the dish and got both arms round me and I could at last let it rip.

‘Come in my room, Nor,' he said, and led me back along the passageway into his front room with the blinds down against the traffic noise from Rathdowne Street. He brought me down next to him on the bed and held me tightly, and I wept and wept, amazed at the floods of tears that were leaking and running out of me. I turned over on to my back and began painfully to talk, while the tears ran and ran off the sides of my face, soaking the pillow, the way the water runs down the big glass panes at the gallery. Surely they couldn't keep coming, but they did, and I stammered out the story about Claire and Javo and the diary and Gerald and Lillian. He listened, clicking his tongue to show attentiveness and sympathy. All the while I talked, my eyes remained fixed on a cardboard box over his fireplace with big silver letters on it: F2, it read, thick enough to run a line with a textacolour between the black and the silver if one should wish to, in an idle moment.