Monkey Grip (10 page)

In the morning I got up and went about my business. I got home from the market at half past eleven. There was a pack and a red and yellow string bag on the doorstep. I stared at the bag, my arms full of shopping, Gracie and Juliet jostling at my legs. Through the weave of the bag I saw packets of Lucky Strike, and a big book bulging with paper and covered with Asian stamps. There could be no doubt. The children peered curiously at me.

‘Your face has gone all red!' squeaked Juliet.

‘If it's Javo, I know!' said Gracie. ‘You're going to cry of happiness!'

He was nowhere in the house.

I faked calm and climbed the stairs to my room, but my dry heart was swelling up fat. I was standing in my room doing nothing when I heard the knock at the door, and I was halfway down the stairs when the kids opened it, and I was so close to him in the small white hallway that I'd hardly had a chance to see him before we had our arms round each other without missing a beat.

That night when our skins touched, for the first time in months I felt perfectly sure that I wanted to be with the person I was with. We kissed, I remembered him, he looked straight into my face, and my heart and body were in tune with each other. What
is
it about him? I want to align myself with him, be his ally.

He was weak, half ill, terribly thin, only five or six days off a big habit. He came just from touching and kissing. My heart, hollow and dry for months, slowly filled up.

‘My heart's full for you,' I whispered, ashamed of the words but having to say them.

He smiled at me out of his lantern head, his eyes shone way back in their caverns:

‘I don't ever want to stop loving you.'

He fell asleep, but started twitching and groaning and crying out, and thrashing hard in the bed. I didn't know how to comfort him and take away his fear.

Five days, he lasted.

When he came back, all the splinters of my life started to make sense again. But straight away we misunderstood each other. Driving in the afternoon, we saw a man and a woman in the street stop and kiss. We all smiled and I said,

‘Oh, ooh! They must be in love!'

Gracie writhed with laughter. ‘I hate love! I'm never going to be in love!'

‘Good on you, Grace,' said Javo, grinning. ‘Love's shithouse. It makes you forget your friends.'

‘Oh, go on, you old grouch,' I protested, to hide that idiotic flinching of the heart. ‘Do you think that's what's happened to you? You're on your way to see your friends right now!'

‘No! What I meant was – it makes you forget you
are
friends!'

I drove him to Easey Street, his old junkie haunt, and Gracie and I came in with him for a moment. The ring of white faces looked up from the fire at Javo who stood grinning in the doorway with Grace and me hovering behind him.

‘Javo! Where did
you
spring from?'

‘Bangkok, mate.' He gave out a gust of nervous laughter, tossing back his shorn head. Mark shifted to make room for him at the fire.

‘Plenty of cheap dope over there, eh?' They all laughed the conspirators' knowing laugh.

‘Yeah. But I'm off it.'

‘You got off?' Mark's face sobered in surprise. ‘
Well done!
' There was genuine respect in his voice. I couldn't help grinning at his tone. He saw this and turned away with a smile. ‘G'day, Nora.'

‘Hullo Mark. Well – I'm going, Javo.' I took Gracie's hand. ‘See you later on.'

‘OK. See you, mate.' He touched my shoulder. ‘Thanks for the lift.'

In my room I made a fire of wood. The window was open only a crack but a thin wind was edging through. Gone again, already.

He came back with a Stevie Wonder record, and played the same song over and over:
They Won't Go When I Go
, crouching desperately over the fire trying to warm the frozen marrow of his bones. No matter where I went in the house, I couldn't escape that voice, its attenuated weeping, the shameless moan of its straining after holiness.

I didn't want to hold him, or stop him from hitting up, or be with him twenty-four hours a day. There were times in those five days when I was ready to beat my head with the rage of not being able to make myself clear to him: stupid, bloody tears kept rolling out of my eyes, it was
so hard.
But when we looked at each other sometimes, or he put his hand on my back in the street, or his arms round me in the night, everything fell simply and momentarily into place.

On the fifth day, (days thick with difficulty and his sickness and his cold bones), he came out with it:

‘Every time I go to Easey Street,' he said, ‘I suppose I'm hoping there'll be a hit waiting for me on the table. If there'd been dope, these last few days, I'd have been into it . . . so how can I have an honest relationship with you, when that desire's still there? You said you wanted
me,
not me and a bunch of fuckin' chemicals.'

I was paralysed: what he was saying filled me with uncertainty, I could barely make sense of it. He was in a chair facing away from me, and I was sitting on the floor in front of the fire looking at his back and side.

‘I have to go and pick up Gracie from school.'

He was still sitting in the chair, with an empty plate on his lap. I pushed my head into his neck, I said,

‘I love you, Javo.'

Tears ran off my face on to his blue jumper. He put his arms round my shoulders and started to cry too.

‘I love you too,' he said. I was bent over him, the plate was resting on his thin thighs; I had to stand up and leave.

When I got back he had fallen asleep on my bed. He woke up bad-tempered, sick in the bowels; he asked me to drive him to Easey Street. I did it, I drove him there, no social visit this time but the purpose in it; I drove off feeling as if I'd delivered him to the lion's den.

Alone in my house. Javo did not come back. I might have gone looking for him the night after, but I had the children to look after, and I read them a story and put them to bed with a plate of cut-up apple, and no-one else came home, so I went to bed myself. I comforted myself with the thought that his things were still in the house – oh, but what if he comes for them while I'm out and I come home and they're gone, no word?

I shall see what I shall see.

In the morning I ran into him accidentally in the tower, where he had just woken up. I could see the dope still in him, but we'd been together in the car for twenty minutes before he said,

‘I got stoned last night.'

We both laughed.

He was being scrupulously courteous and pleasant to me; but gradually he became offhand, in a way he had, until I ceased to exist. He picked up his camera from my house so he could walk down to Russell Street and hock it.

‘I might see you later on tonight,' he said, kissing me goodbye. I was sitting at the living room table. He went to the front door without looking back. I said,

‘Do you mean you'll come back here?'

‘If I can get a lift. It's such a fuckin' long way!' he said, invisible behind the front door. ‘Jack's invited me to the tower for lunch – isn't that nice of him!' His laugh was almost a sneer.

I heard him but I sat there and said nothing.

‘See you,' he sang out, and banged the door behind him.

Oh well, oh well.

No more tears in me for him, not yet a while.

The fire was drying the towels. I ironed my shirt and tidied my room. I was happy in the quiet house. I felt as strong as a horse. A person would need to, to try and go on loving a junkie. Javo: the rolling eye, the head rearing back, the smile which is a ritual gesture tinged with fright. Rubbing the crook of his arm.

I saw him at the tower – or rather, he heard my voice in the middle of the morning and called to me from the little room at the top of the stairs, where he had slept. Lifts his pale, dry head from the pillow. Croaks to me,

‘Nor!' Puts up his arms to me like sticks of kindling. He is not stoned.

I go out on an errand, and when I come back fifteen minutes later he's had the first hit of the day and is cooking something in the kitchen. I hear Willy shout, and Javo answer, also shouting.

‘You're doing it to
yourself
, mate!'

‘What? What?'

‘You're
stoned!
'

‘Yeah – well, so what?'

The rest I can't hear from Jack's room where I am playing with Gracie. I go out again to the shop and come back up the stairs. He hears my voice.

‘If you're lookin' for me, Nor, I'm up here.'

I climb the creaking stairs to the bedroom where he is lying in his crumpled clothes, boots on, eyes rolling up under half-closed lids. I sit in the curve of his body. His arms are like the forelegs of a praying mantis, seeming oddly jointed and moving at random. He takes my hand, I take his between both of mine and feel the weight of his thin arm. His sleeves are rolled down past his elbows.

He nods off, wakes again, launches himself on a perfectly coherent explanation of his feelings towards me. Whenever he pauses, his eyes roll up and close and his breathing becomes noisy for one in-out; then he opens his eyes, focuses on me, and continues to talk, slowly and deliberately, as if the pause had not happened.

‘I can't promise to give up junk . . .'

‘I never asked you to.'

‘I know you didn't. But . . . I've been using shit for two years now, and I can't cut off the past . . . because there are good things connected with it too, you know. It keeps me warm on cold nights, and it makes me feel young again . . . you know, physically.'

I listen. How did I teach myself to listen to this kind of thing without those small spasms of death in the heart?

Our faces are very close together. The pupils of his eyes, tiny from the dope, have receded like tides from their immediate surrounds, leaving a ring of almost white between the black centre and the blue, blue iris.

‘That's why my eyes look mad,' he says.

This close, we smile at each other with the flesh of our faces.

‘You
are
beautiful, Nor. What a good face you've got.'

He kisses me, we start to kiss.

I can, I can taste the dope on his mouth. It is like medicine, faint and poisonous, but not unpleasant.

‘I can taste it on you.'

‘
Can
you?'

I lie next to him, we kiss, I stroke his belly on which the skin is smooth and winter-white. His nipple stands up hard.

‘Unfortunately,' I say, ‘you are the only person I want to fuck with at the moment.'

He laughs. ‘“Unfortunately” is right!'

‘It makes my sex life pretty spartan.'

‘It'd be spartan whether I came over or not.'('Too wasted to fuck,' he'd told me in my bed.)

We are laughing, right up close to each other. Now we kiss again, it is easy for him now because he is stoned and loose in the body, not afraid. I can feel him go loose, he lets his breathing change and his voice travels gently on his breath.

Jessie calls out to me from the hallway and I have to go. I sit up and feel my cheeks warm from his unusual tenderness. He holds me in his curve. His face is soft too, even his white eyes.

‘I feel better now,' he says. ‘I feel good about our touching. I didn't, before. When I first came back, I didn't feel right.'

Because you weren't stoned, Javo; and the rest is not enough.

Outside the tower I buttoned my jacket and strode down Elgin Street with Jessie.

‘How's it going with Javes, Nora?' she asked, grinning at me under her woollen cap with its earflaps.

‘Ah shit, I don't know, Jess,' I said with a twist of the shoulder. ‘Bloody dope. You know what it's like.'

‘You're not kidding.' She laughed.

‘How did
you
manage it?'

‘I didn't! I was so sick, trying to keep up with him – he was way ahead of me. Even snorting it used to make me spew, afterwards.'

‘I wish there was no such thing as smack,' I grunted into my collar.

She laughed. ‘But the reasons for it would still be there.'

‘Yeah. I s'pose you're right. Well, fuck it.'

We paced along, hands in pockets.

He won't come tonight, because he is too far away and he wants the dope, and he won't come near me when he's stoned. Not yet, anyway. And he says he won't come over while he's coming down. If he sticks to these resolutions, I'll never see him. He talks about ‘keeping it under control', which means using it when it's around and talking bravely about his freedom from it when it's not.

And when he did come round, he was stoned, but still in the honeymoon phase: it hadn't got him by the throat. He got into my bed in the middle of the night and wrapped his thin limbs around me, and we fucked with a joy so intense and peaceful that our hearts were in our faces and we gave them to each other without a word. I came three, four times; once we rolled apart and I lay with my back to him in the curve of his body, but before I could doze away, he turned me back to him with a hand on my shoulder, brought me round to face him, insisted gently against my sleepiness until I came up out of it to join him, and thought,

‘Oh, I will fuck you till I die.'

That was the terrible trick of the dope: one more step into its kingdom and Javo would be lost to me. But now we swayed dizzily on its borders, each in our own ecstasy.

Next day I spent an hour with Javo in a restaurant at lunch-time. He said he hadn't had a hit since the afternoon before; but he was cheerful and good humoured, and we laughed and chattered like real people, not like a junkie and a woman with a puzzled attitude towards his obsession.

I said to him as we walked along Lygon Street to the car,