Monkey Grip (11 page)

‘Some days I love you, some days I hate you, but today I
like
you.'

He laughed. ‘That's best!'

‘Oh, no – they're all good. But I like you; I think you're terrific.'

I drove him to Easey Street and he kissed me goodbye, affectionate and half-laughing.

What'll happen next?

I found his fit in his shirt pocket: in fact, going through his pockets before throwing his shirt in with my washing, I withdrew my hand with the fit hanging painlessly from one fingertip, where it had imbedded itself.

He got up in the middle of the night for a hit. I was afraid (next morning, when I found the fit and pieced the time-fragments together to account for my bone-knowledge, in sleep, of his condition) that Rita or one of the girls might have gone downstairs in the night and found him hitting up in the kitchen. I was guarding them all from each other.

White eyes.

But we loved each other. In the night we touched, or held each other warm. I wanted to make him cry out, for love or pleasure. I heard his voice through his breathing.

At the film festival I met Francis again. I sat beside him on the carpeted stairs of the Palais, and while we were talking he suddenly kissed me. He drove me back across the river and I might, had circumstances allowed, have stayed with him; but the jaw-faced sailor in
Sweet Movie
had made me think of Javo and his hot, bony face, and all evening I was moving back towards him, thinking of him as my man.

He told me about a woman he was working with, in a play he had begun to rehearse.

‘I would like to fuck with her,' he remarked.

She was a junkie too: I saw her once: thin, white, with red plaits on top of her fine head.

‘I would be jealous, I suppose,' I said unwillingly.

‘I know. But that wouldn't stop me,' he said, without the harshness the words might have carried. ‘Though I would
think
of that; I would
think
of it.'

The fact that
he
might be jealous wouldn't stop
me,
either. I wish . . .

I wish it would, but only if it would stop him, too. As it is, I must learn not to need him, because when I need him he will have nothing to give.

I ask the Ching: ‘What about him and junk and me?'

It replies: ‘Only through having the courage to marshal one's armies against oneself will something forceful really be achieved. One should submit to the bad time and remain quiet. It is impossible to counteract these conditions of the time. Hence it is not cowardice but wisdom to submit and avoid action.'

‘What is it that each of us desires? This morning I got up filled with happiness and confidence . . . but I walked round the city on my own and stared at the strange faces and received my own fair share of mocking or puzzled looks . . . splinters stuck in the memory: how you glanced up at me as your fingers threaded the beads, and you gave me a crooked smile which made me suddenly afraid that you were at that moment leaving my house for HER, the OTHER who exists (faceless yet more beautiful, ghostly yet more fleshed out, outside time and yet more temporally real than ME) in the cobwebby corners of my mind and imagination which are not illuminated by my confidence in you. This is not your fault! Or rather – the lit areas are confined, or limited, by my fear, and my need (born of old scepticism and pain) to protect my flank from your thoughtless kick or the rot of neglect and forgetfulness.

‘Javo I will live for now and not read between the lines.'

Night again, cold again. We saw
Lenny.
I kept remembering what his wife said about him, with tears in her eyes:

‘He was just so goddamn
funny!
'

He OD'd in a bathroom. Oh Javo! One day I'll find you on the bathroom floor. I don't know how to talk about that unless I make a joke of it.

But we fucked, we held each other in the night, we made love. In the night whenever we half-woke we turned to each other and felt that old electric charge. If we acted on each one, we would never rest. That night, he said to me when we were all but dissolved into one another,

‘Where do we go from here?'

Further, deeper. Somehow.

‘I love you
very much!
' I said to him.

‘But what happens when that stops?'

I drove the kids to Anglesea, sang to them, told them endless stories, my invention never flagging as I drove and they hung, open-mouthed, over the back of my seat. When I left Melbourne, Javo was still asleep. When I came back that night, the bed was cold and messy, and I found a big splattering of blood on the concrete floor of the dunny.

‘
Red water in the bathroom sink,
' I sang absent-mindedly. I sponged up the blood. I got a fire burning in my room and roasted my back; I was going to mend my shirt, but I was too tired to think of using a needle and thread. I ought to sleep, ought to. The children are already silent in their bunks. I think about him, as we dozed off in my bed, turning me towards him and mumbling,

‘Kiss. Kiss before sleep.'

Will he come back? Not worrying me, but I think of him and wonder ‘where in the city can that boy be?'

He came back days later; I was asleep. He was coming down pretty hard, but waiting on two sleeping pills he'd taken before he left Carlton. He lay next to me, stiff and straight.

‘You don't seem very happy,' he said. I turned away from him, sick in the heart. I was afraid to talk about loving him when he was in that cold, rational frame of mind, because I didn't want to be . . . left behind, or something.

There was no bodily warmth between us. The withdrawing seemed to take everything away.

But he actually rang me up and said,

‘Nor, my rehearsal doesn't start till eight – do you want to do something between now and then?'

I said yes, by all means. Good grief! An invitation, an acceptance, courtesy, like ordinary people! I went to Easey Street and stood by the fire with him. He had had a shower, washed his hair, put on clean clothes. Prison haircut growing out elegantly in two points at his cheekbones. His face was open, cheerful, his eyes sparkling. He was always pleasant on methadone, the worst poison of them all.

I said, ‘You freaked me out the other night, talking about how unhappy you think I am.'

We laughed.

‘Well,' he said, ‘you sometimes seem pretty . . . gloomy, when I come in late at night.'

‘Gloomy, do I! But what about when we're fucking? Do I seem gloomy then?'

‘No!'

‘Well – it's only one, two . . .
three
nights we haven't been fucking.'

‘Is it? It seems like weeks.'

I wondered how he meant that.
I
missed the fucking: it had stopped when he started to withdraw.

I went to visit Francis, and talked merrily with him in his cramped, woody house. His two big dogs clamoured round our legs. Dogs at his place, children at mine. I wished I could see clearly into his in-turned, mysterious, determined mind.

Javo, eating a slice of orange in bed, wedges the peel between his teeth and lips and mumbles,

‘Do you love me? Just like
Planet of the Apes
!'

In the night we laugh so much that I am always saying,

‘Shhoosh! You'll wake up the whole house!'

‘Keep talking!' he says. ‘I love gossip!'

Javo's play was ready and I arrived at the back theatre for the supper show at eleven o'clock. I paid my two dollars and went in. I heard straight away from behind the set Javo's voice raving his lines in the loud hysterical tone I'd heard him use only once before: the day I did the acid and he hit up more and more until by nightfall he was blackened round the mouth, blazing-eyed, manic in his speech –
that voice
! with a note of maniac laughter in it, his face grinning madly. I dared not go near him, for fear of a swipe from his swung arm, an accident but proceeding out of his absolutely
not caring.
Once at the old house he pushed me aside in the hallway, staring past me with pale eyes; he went two steps further and remembered who I was and that there were social forms which people expect to be observed. He came back and hugged me perfunctorily, his limbs trembling and stiff, eyes still going past me.

So it was in the theatre. He either didn't see me, or wasn't going to meet my eyes. Turned from my eyes. You bastard, Javo.

I didn't wait for the show. I got in a cab and came home. Not unhappy, but tired in the heart. When I got home, it was like having escaped from a stricken city. I sat by the fire and talked with Clive who had been with the children, and as we talked, the thought formed itself in my head,

‘Time coming in which I must survive without a lover.'

If I can do it.

But he actually came back in the middle of the night. What'm I going to do? He is out of the human phase, is like a black-lipped spectre which eats, sleeps and groans.

My own modest crumbs of coke I hoarded for solitary moments. I crept upstairs with the mirror and the razor and the rolled-up banknote and snorted it secretly in the stuffy little attic room where the children kept their toys. Up I flew. Wasn't it already the shortest day of the year? Winter solstice. The coldest days and nights were still ahead of us. My brown gloves smelled leathery and perfumy, like the inside of my nanna's handbag. In my pockets I found scraps of paper with lines of songs scribbled on them: ‘everybody's cryin' mercy', my head raced ahead of itself and my mucous membrane became fat, but it was worth it! Fickle stuff, though, specially when mixed with fatigue. I sailed off to the film festival, chilled in the hands but full of warmth for the human race and all material things . . . I was early and called in to visit Paddy, who was crouched on the floor over a poster she was designing. She turned her thin face up to me, smiled her dry, absent smile, her eyes behind the spectacles still preoccupied.

‘Nora. What are you up to?'

‘I've just had a huge snort of coke,' I cheerfully announced.

‘Ooh, you lucky thing! Haven't got any more, have you?'

‘No,' I lied, sitting there in her room with an envelope of it in my back pocket.

What's
happening
to me?

But, as if in revenge for my greed, as I left her house the coke turned around, gave a twist and a wriggle, and fled away, dumping me unceremoniously in a limbo, skew-whiff and desolate. I drifted through the rest of the afternoon in a puzzled dream.

And when I came home I decided not to waste another snort, but to wait till my body was clear. I sat down at the table to transfer the coke to an uncrushed wrapper, and idly sniffed up the residue as I worked. How thoughtlessly you can persuade yourself that what you're doing at any particular moment is not
actually
getting into dope, or eating, or smoking, or whatever it is you've rationally decided not to do; that it's just a small aberration, or to make sure something is not wasted – or it's not anything at all because your mind has slipped its moorings, disconnected itself for that moment from your body. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

So! I shortly found myself feeling
fantastic,
and went on feeling that way till ten o'clock, when I got into bed and fell asleep. I dreamed that I opened up a cut I had in waking life in the biggest finger of my right hand, and took out a shining white fish-bone, three quarters of an inch long.

Trouble.

Javo the monster. I don't know him when he's like this. I wish he would go away. He barely gives me the time of day. He blunders into my room at night, drops his great boots from waist height and crawls into bed beside me. This is
not Javo.
I know he doesn't care, and somehow neither do I. But I want him back, the way we used to be, when we loved each other with open hearts.

‘Have you noticed,' I said, ‘that we never see each other in daylight any more?'

‘Yeah – it used to be like that with me and Jessie, when she was working on a show and I wasn't,' he said. ‘It'll be different when the season's over.'

My mind ceased momentarily to compute, out of sheer amazement. I realised that I
never looked ahead,
with Javo, more than half a day.

He kissed me goodbye in the street outside the tower.

Rita told me she had seen him with a ‘red-headed girl'. In my imagination I erected instantaneously a great castle of paranoia with glittering towers and battlements. I examined it. I dismantled it brick by brick, and left it in a corner of the yard.

We slept together every night.

In the street, on a sunny, windy day, I ran into Javo on his knees outside the film co-op chalking up a footpath sign for that night's supper show. He was stoned but sparkly-eyed; incredibly dirty, grey-skinned, black-lipped.

I said, ‘Wanna come for a cup of coffee in Tamani's when you've finished that?'

‘OK,' he replied. ‘See you over there in a few minutes.'

He came in, sat down at the table, and somehow he was with me but not with me. He kept looking over my shoulder, and I hesitated to start talking because I got the impression, halfway through a sentence, that I was talking into the phone long after the other person had hung up.

He asked me what gnocchi was, and if I'd buy him some. I said yes, and he went to get a cigarette off Lillian at the other end of the restaurant, and sat down with her for ten minutes; and I sat on my own at my table feeling my heart go heavy and sink, feeling used again, paying for a meal I'd invited him to and ending up sitting with my chin in my hand staring out at the street while he talked with someone else – and to make it worse, with Lillian, long-legged good-looking Lillian in her ragged fur coat, who shared with me a past of such bitterness that it was all we could do to greet each other without a grimace, the rigours and theories of feminism notwithstanding. I was about to leave the price of the as yet unserved gnocchi in his box of chalk and go off quietly when he came back to the table and sat down opposite me, smiling with his bright eyes in his filthy face.