Monkey Grip (8 page)

‘Francis,' I said, ‘can I put the Roaster in here with you while I make his bed for him?'

Before I'd finished speaking he had thrown back the blankets and his arms were out ready for the blinking bundle.

‘How is it you're so good with children?'

‘B-because I used to be one,' he said.

Francis and I drove the VW van to Peterborough for the weekend. We parked it at the very edge of the cliff beside the Bay of Islands. I lay about, in the van and outside it on the thick turfy grass, dozing and reading and thinking and keeping my mouth shut. I woke at six in the morning and saw a red sky. The wind was mild and blustery and I walked on the clifftops with Francis' dog. The wind flattened yesterday's waves, deep green combers, into smooth bumps which worked hard to heave themselves to breaking point.

For hours neither of us might speak. I watched Francis, who sat cross-legged on the floor of the van, his eyes blank with thought, staring out the open door at the silk-coloured sea. Rain splattered lightly on the van, and the wind buffed and rocked it.

I fantasised in full detail about living in the country. I thought about how daily life might be different: the air would be cleaner, the days emptier of people, the evenings more silent and perhaps lonelier, the house uglier. But in the yard I would have a dog, and some chooks, and we would ride bikes, and the children would wander more slowly home from school.

At home again, alone in my bed and my neat room, I fell asleep at eight in the evening and woke at dawn, still in the rhythm of the weekend just past. I dreamed I was in bed with Angela: I pushed my face between her big, soft breasts. At six in the morning I heard Gracie moan in her sleep; she stumbled into my room, all broad forehead and gold earrings, and crept in beside me, to suck her thumb till breakfast time.

So, when the news came, I was not prepared.

I got a telegram from Julian, one of Martin's brothers, asking me to meet him at Tullamarine: he was passing through from Asia where he lived and where the smack was cheap. I stood at the barrier and saw him come through.

‘Hey, Jules!'

He turned his head. Even his Harris tweed jacket couldn't disguise his irrevocably bent nature, the translucent, fined-out pallor of the ex-junkie. His cheekbones protruded in his worn face, his hair was dry and bleached with sun, pulled back in a rubber band in an attempt to look straight for the customs, but escaping round his face in wisps. The coming and going of the blood in his face showed through a screen of suntan. His eyes sat deep in their rounded sockets, green as bird's eyes, very clear and steady, fringed with pale brown lashes. He put his cheek against mine.

‘Hullo Nora.'

I didn't know he had news for me. He hissed it to me as we bumped clumsily through the heavy doors into the bar.

‘They're in the pen.'

‘
What?
'

He took hold of my elbow and pushed me gently into a chair. He fixed me with the unmistakable eyes of his family: Martin's eyes.

‘They got busted in Bangkok.'

‘
What for?
'

‘Stealing a pair of sunglasses.'

My stomach started to roll.

‘Oh, come on.
Sunglasses.
It was dope, wasn't it. Come on, Jules – you can tell
me,
for Christ's sake.'

‘I
know
I can. No. I actually believe it
was
the sunglasses.'

‘What's the bail?' Incredulously I heard myself asking all the correct questions, in my sensible voice; but somewhere in the back of the world I could hear Javo's voice, or something that sounded like it, calling me: ‘
Nora!
'

‘A thousand American. Each.'

‘
Each?
You're not bullshitting me, are you?'

‘Would I? Look, Nora – anyone in jeans in South East Asia these days would cop that much bail.'

I kept grinning, with shock, and the irony.

‘What are we going to do?'

‘Is there any way you can get the money together for Javo?'

The backs of my hands started to prickle. I was laughing on the other side of my face.

‘A thousand
bucks
? Are you kidding?' Stupid tears came into my eyes.

‘OK – OK.' He held out his hand to calm me. ‘I'll ask father.'

‘Does he know?'

‘Yeah.'

‘How did he take it?'

‘Pretty cool, really. He's used to Martin.' He gave a shrug and a crooked smile.

‘But what about the junk? He can't avoid finding out about that, can he?'

‘I guess not. He got used to it, all right, when I was down there coming off, myself, a while ago. It's amazing what they can handle, if you tell them the truth.' He turned the glass of scotch in his thin, brown hands. ‘You probably won't like this much, but it's karma, you know. What you give out, you get back. It manifests itself clearer in Asia than anywhere else.'

We said goodbye at the foot of the escalators. He changed hands with his bag and I hugged him and he held me tightly with one arm. I could feel his thin body inside his too-big, respectable clothes.

From outside our back gate I could hear the music. I walked into the kitchen with the car keys in my hand, and found Georgie bopping to himself in front of the mirror. Clive was hanging over a frying pan on the stove. Eve came in and saw my face. Her gat-toothed smile of greeting faded.

‘What's happened?'

‘Javo and Martin've been busted.'

Everyone stood still. The music clamoured in the room.

‘Turn that fuckin' record down, Georgie,' said Eve. Georgie's mouth was open. Clive ran into the next room and the house was suddenly full of silence.

‘Here, Nor, sit down.' Eve put on the kettle and reached for the packet of Drum. I told them what I knew. Clive stood behind me with his hands on my shoulders. I must have looked green.

‘They've done it this time,' I kept repeating idiotically. ‘They've blown it.'

In the middle of a night Martin's phone call came. When I recognised his voice, unreachable and yet close enough to touch, I broke out in sweat all over my body.

‘Nora? How you doin'?'

‘I'm all right, mate. What the fuck have
you
been up to?'

‘Got sprung, I guess.'

I couldn't believe how casual he sounded. His laugh came crackling down the wire. But I knew that fleeting manner of Martin's, how his eyes would slide sideways to dodge the direct question. I could have screamed with the tension.

‘How's Gracie? Tell her I've got her a present.' He was maddeningly casual, almost debonair.

‘
Listen
, Martin, will you? How'd you get out? Where's Javo?'

‘Julian bailed me out. But Javo's still in.'

Bad connection: the air between us roared and hummed. His voice swam meltingly, drifting as if under water.

‘What? What? I can't hear you.'

‘I said,
Javo's still in.
'

‘Why?' I could hardly hold the receiver, for the sweat; my heart was thundering.

‘They doubled the bail. So I got out and we are still hustling the money for Javo. Also . . .'

‘
What?
'

‘. . . They've moved him to another prison.'

‘Have you seen him?'

‘Yeah. I saw him today . . .'

‘– Is he all right? Did you talk to him?'

‘Through the bars. We could just touch palms. He looked OK – they've cut his hair, though.'

Javo shorn, Javo on his knees. I couldn't open my mouth.

‘Nora?'

‘Yes. I'm still here.'

‘He gave me a note for you, Nor. I'll post it. Listen, Nor – for Christ's sake
don't worry.
Julian knows what to do. He'll be out in two days at the most. I have to go, mate – this is costing me a fortune. I'll write. OK?'

‘OK.' Hardly heard myself speak. ‘OK, Martin. Take care will you? And send him my love?'

And I hung up in a turbulence of emotions: panic, impotence, rage, fear.
I was unable
.

I
waited
. Javo's letter came: ‘I need strong love,' he wrote from prison, so I started to give it, writing to him every day. He didn't write back.

At last Julian wrote to me from Bangkok:

‘I have bailed them both out. I threw Martin's fit out the window of the hotel a couple of times, but I don't suppose that did much good.'

Martin wrote to me:

‘Javo was pretty stoned before we got picked up. But that time has passed for both of us now.'

Liar.

I ought to weed out the whole fantasy from my mind. But I couldn't help remembering Javo, his thin limbs and wild face and blue eyes. He had been out of jail for ten days, and I had not heard a word from him. Junkies like other junkies. But I went on writing anyway.

I went to Anglesea with Paddy. On the Point Roadknight beach the tide was in and the air was full of salt and sharpness. I was eating dried figs.

‘Do you want a dried fig, Paddy?'

‘Look,' she said, ‘I've got such a mad eating binge on that I'd eat a turd if you sprinkled it with sugar.'

We lounged on the beds, talking about junk and our households, speculating and exchanging anecdotes about broken resolutions and night-time freakouts and lies told and tears shed and love refused.

In Melbourne, every morning I went running with Rita in the Edinburgh Gardens. The yellow leaves were coming down, lying in drifts along the gutters. Javo waited in some hotel room in Bangkok for his trial; I wrote him dozens of letters. Scared to write; lonely not to.

I remarked to Georgie,

‘I miss Javo, you know.'

He laughed incredulously. ‘You miss him like you miss a piece of glass in your foot!'

I wished for him as he had been, occasionally, in the past. I wished there were no such thing as junk. I didn't wish I'd never known him. I wished there were some way for us to love each other. And I wished he were out of trouble so my mind could rest.

There was a life to be made.

At last he wrote to me. The letter came on one of an endless succession of empty mornings.

‘I am thinking of your room, Nora. It was the hole in the arm that brought me undone – I am in this trouble just because I wanted something to hide being stoned behind. I wish you were here then we could go down to the sea and walk and talk. I just wish I was standing beside you sharing some sights of things peculiar and things funny – smiling and talking and laughing and getting sunburnt – then having a shower, getting cleaned up and eating and fucking resting together like those two spoons in a drawer.'

I went to salvage his possessions from his house over the grocery store, which other junkies and cops had plundered and wrecked. In Javo's room I found: his photos of Freycinet, still pinned to the wall; a bottle of eucalyptus oil; his greasywool socks from Hobart; the mattress where we had fucked together, in hopeless sadness, the day it rained and rained and I surprised him in the kitchen with the belt on his arm.

In another room I found an exercise book of Gracie's, in which Martin had written at her dictation:

I walked round his house, tired and dull. Tears kept filling my eyes; my stomach was weak with sadness.

It was still all an absurd fantasy. I remembered only the good and lovable things about him, and not the wretchedness he caused me, and the dope and the resentments and silences and the half-crazy outbursts. I remembered his smell and the colour of his eyes and his head thrown back to laugh; these things were a second away, in time, but the others I dredged up dutifully, knowing I must, for the sake of truth and sanity, try to keep the balance.

I dreamed: Javo was back in town and the word was out, but for some reason it was appropriate to stay cool. I came out the front door of a small house with Paddy, going somewhere in a business-like manner. I saw Javo lying back with his feet up on some kind of chaise longue in the front yard, which was concrete with nothing growing. We passed him and under the influence of this social cool I didn't speak to him but gave him a salute as I passed his chair. He raised his arm to say goodbye, just as cool. Paddy and I were halfway down the street before I realised that what had happened was not enough for either of us.

‘Wait for me; I want to say something to Javo,' I said, and ran back to the yard. He was still there in his long chair. I ran up to him and flung my arms round him, got my face in his neck and smelled his skin, and we held each other tightly, and
were both very happy.

When I woke up I stumbled out to the kitchen, found it was the middle of the afternoon and that I had been dozing with the book still in my hand. On the table was another letter from him, ten pages toilsomely printed. I read it greedily.

By May Day they were still in Bangkok. The sun shone that afternoon in Melbourne, and I made an insignia in red letters for the back of my shirt, saying HO CITY for the Vietnamese and the liberation of Saigon. It was like being stoned all afternoon, marching to the river and singing. Somebody quoted Ho Chi Minh:

‘What could be more natural? After sorrow comes joy.'

But in my own life it was the other way around. Our house was sold and we had to go. Some wept, some raged, some shrugged and went off searching. Like a fool I did some acid in the last week. I lay on my bed for a long time, listening peacefully to the strange orchestration of conversation in other rooms. I gazed at the yellow curtains which were rippling in the breeze from the open window, and they became the yellow wall, and I became part of the room and the curtains were my fine yellow skin rippling smoothly like ribs of sand on the Sahara. When I left that house, ragged ends of myself would be left hanging. I was the last one of the household left to sleep there, in the empty shell. I wished I had someone to love.