Monkey Grip (3 page)

It was so much like watching a movie that my tired brain simply observed, and feelings scarcely registered.

I saw them move uneasily apart, together, apart again; I sensed their preoccupation with each other as clearly as if threads had connected them across the dark, leafy garden.

Javo retired to a hammock near where I was sitting with my brandy and my half-closed eyes. I got off the twiggy ground and went over to him.

‘Hullo.'

He looked up with a start. His face looked strange to me, in a way I could not determine. I supposed it was because of his churned-up feelings.

‘Good day, mate,' he said.

‘Is everything all right?' Surely an odd, painful look crossed my face.

‘Yeah. I'm really stoned,' he said in a tone which I took for an apology for his indifference. A shiver of irritation ran over me. Don't excuse yourself, bloody teenager, bloody child. Give or don't give. I'm not going to fight you for it.

I walked off and passed a woman I vaguely knew, my age, with the Eltham gloss on her, expensively dressed, too sophisticated and throaty-voiced to go smoothly amongst this bunch of desperadoes. A young man grinned passively under her attentions. I blushed in shame for us women whose guns are too big these days, who learned ten years ago to conduct great sexual campaigns with permanency in mind, while today it is a matter of skirmishes, fast and deft.

Spare us from indignity.

I saw the three of them drive away in Martin's car. Javo was looking straight ahead, his face set like a mask.

I came home alone, and mooched ill-temperedly around my room. I found his bowie knife where I'd hidden it behind the bookcase, safe from the children. I held its solid weight for a few seconds, wildly fantasising plunging it into the famous handsome picture of him in
Cinema Papers.
Instead, I dropped the knife and wrote him a letter.

‘Dear Javo, there's a few things you ought to know, mostly involving things like elementary courtesy. Eh? like saying hullo; like not making that ludicrous adolescent gap between how you behave towards me at night when we sleep together and how you act in public as if we hardly knew each other. Don't get me wrong: I can recognise a desperate man when I see one. I don't want a flood of attention. Just hullo would do, so I don't have to wonder if I've been hallucinating other times we've been together. Good luck to you, Javo, I like you, but you give me a hard time. Still like to see you, sometime.'

I took it to his house next morning, expecting not to find him there – but he was there, asleep in his tidied room. I put the letter down beside his bed. He woke up, stared at me as if I were a stranger, his eyes blank with sleep, empty of comprehension, with a pinpoint of panic far inside his skull.

‘I brought you a note. I didn't think you'd be here.'

He lay there, rigid, still staring.

‘. . . But now I'm here, I feel very uncomfortable, so I think I'll go.'

He nodded, clearly incapable of anything more. I stood up, and as I walked out I heard him rip open the envelope.

I went into Martin's room and woke him. We talked cheerfully. I was aware that our laughing voices were audible to Javo. We went out to the kitchen and made some coffee. Javo stumped out, hair on end, face tight. He came to the table and Martin and I chattered on, our elbows resting among the mess of newspapers and orange peels. Gradually Javo's face softened, he smiled at the talk, listened with his face, spoke.

When I went to leave, I stopped in the back yard for a last word with Martin. Javo went past us and out the gate without saying anything. I said goodbye to Martin and wheeled my bike out the gate, put my foot on the pedal – and saw him leaning against a car two doors down the lane.

Adolescent!

I rolled up beside him, balanced my bike with both feet on the ground. He gave me the rueful flash with his very bright blue eyes.

‘Last night,' he said, ‘I was sure I didn't want to see you again. But I don't feel like that now.'

‘You are not courteous to me . . . but I understand why you do it,' I said too hastily, because it wasn't even quite true. He leaped in eagerly:

‘
Do
you? Well, I wish you'd tell me, because I don't know why I do it.'

‘You don't want me to need you, even for a second.'

‘No – no! That's not it!'

And we began the battle, warmed to it, ceased to stammer, started to flow.

‘I find it really hard,' he said, ‘to express emotion in public. And you didn't understand. When I said I was stoned, I meant
smack.
'

Heart did not sink. I thought this meant a slight lessening of my naivety. I was wrong.

I looked at his cheeks, hollow before their time, lines from nose to mouth like a forty-year-old. Once he'd said to me, ‘The harder you live, the better-looking you get.' Once, he'd told me, his mother had said to him, ‘Don't worry, son – looks aren't everything.' People stared at him in the street, because of the way his eyes burned blue, and the scar hacked into the bridge of his nose, and because he looked wild. He couldn't believe me when I said, ‘You're beautiful.'

By this time we were laughing, and I rode slowly beside him along the footpath till we came to Paddy's house. We walked into her kitchen. Martin was already there. We smoked a joint at her kitchen table. She put on an old Dylan record. He sang, and everyone laughed. But I laughed more, because they didn't know what I was laughing at.

He would disappear for a day or two at a time. Often I'd come home at some odd hour and find him sitting at my table toiling over an explanatory note in his painstaking printing.

‘Today I gave junk a nudge,' he'd write, ‘like an idiot that I am and being stoned I shouldn't be here. I just managed to look the nightmare in the face that's my face today. And I decided to stop. And I decided to stop. And I decided to stop.'

When he was stoned he would usually keep out of my way. I never talked about the dope, much, being wary of crusading. I was interested in the phenomenon of his
being stoned,
and watched him curiously. I began to understand it through my eyes: I caught his face showing strange, mad planes which were not familiar to me, ugly in their strangeness. It wasn't dope as a spectre or a rival that frightened me, but the way it turned him into a stranger.

Late one night when I was asleep in my bed, he burst in at my door, wildly stoned, raving about some shirt he'd been given, tearing his clothes off, hurling himself into bed beside me. I kept dozing, full of confusion and sleep. All night long he threw himself about the bed, scratched manically, groaned, breathed loud and shallow. At last I crept out and into Clive's empty bed and dropped off by myself until morning came.

He came loping round the corner of the house to the kitchen a few mornings later. I was washing the breakfast dishes and dreamily staring at the children who were hosing the tomatoes. He was stoned – thinner cheeks, eyes wide open, pupils whited out as if the pinpoints at their centres had sucked the blue colour back into the brain. He hugged me with his gangly arms. I stood there holding the dish-mop and leaning against him. He gave me a much-folded note:

‘Just writing you cause I'm going away to Hobart for the night tonite – to let you know I've been thinking of you today mate. I might stay there for a few more days seeing I've got a week of heavy thinking and working things out to myself. I might go and have a bet tonight and get a bit drunk and have a loud
externalised
time for a while. So I'll see you when I see you. Just to tell you I love your body cause it's really you there (no give) when I touch you and you bounce back which is the most important thing of all – and when we kiss I can feel the shape of your lips. Love you. Javo.'

Away he rushed to Tasmania, and my tension was reduced by half, and my nights were undisturbed. But I missed him, and missed his thin warm body in my bed; and thought about his dreadful cramps from the sweating, and his life with nothing much in it.

He came back in the middle of a night, woke me by striking a match at the door of my room, sat on my bed quiet and not stoned, told me how he'd hated Hobart except for seeing his mother and winning forty dollars at the casino.

Oh Javo, your frantic life. I looked at him with no emotion except weariness and a small tinge of fear, or distaste – not for
him,
but for the eddying pointlessness of his battle with each day.

‘You could get in here with me, if you liked,' I said, wanting him to. He got in beside me, and hugged me, and I felt that slow rush of pleasure, or love, at the touch of his dry, hot skin. I laid my face against his bony one and clumsily dared to love him.

‘What about this junk all around me?' I asked the I Ching.

‘Darkening of the Light,' it replied. ‘In such times one ought not to fall in with the practices of others, neither should one drag them censoriously into the light. In social intercourse one should not try to be all-knowing. One should let many things pass, without being duped.'

Next morning we went by tram to St Kilda for the ritual turkish bath and massage, which he paid for with his winnings. We parted at the door. I took off my dress and pants and sank into the hot sea bath. I lay back and began to think about the nature of corruption, and the drift I was in, and the problem of whether there is a bottom to these things. I decided not, and immediately felt an urge to kick upwards, back towards light and order.

When we emerged from our segregated luxuries, hours later, he took me to lunch at Tolarno's, which must have cost thirty dollars. My protests he brushed magnanimously aside.

‘No, no – you are always paying for me – go on, let me!'

I let him. But halfway through the meal I felt his mind disengage from mine; it veered off and wandered. I said nothing. We took a cab home. He sat comfortably beside me with his hand on my leg. At my house he said,

‘I'll go on home – be back in half an hour.'

Time for a hit.

He didn't come back, that day or that night either.

So I began to root out of myself two tendencies: to romanticise dope, and to treat junkies with an exaggerated respect.

One sunny evening I called at Javo's house on my way to eat with Paddy. I called out: no answer, no-one home. The house was open, evening sun coming in the back door. It seemed still and hastily deserted. I walked down the passage to Javo's room. I wrote a note to say hullo. I was looking at myself in his mirror, studying my haircut, when the fatal urge to snoop overcame me.

I picked up an envelope that was leaning against the mirror. I turned it over. On the back of it was scrawled, in a travesty of Javo's handwriting,

‘Sorry, Martin, my hands are shaking, I'm going crazy with this coke, yours is in the spoon, I nearly shot it all up but stopped myself just in time.'

There was a moment when my heart slithered about in my chest. I put the note back where it had been, and opened the top drawer. Right on top of his clothes was a fit, casually dropped, no attempt made to conceal it. Even a kitchen spoon, its handle bent. A small nest of evil treasure.

I closed the drawer and tried to breathe.

Terminal naivety was my disease.

I went out the back door into the six o'clock sun, past the disused car up on blocks. I got on my bike and rode away. The part of my brain which constantly and forever observes myself was reduced by shock to a very tiny pinpoint in the back of my head, as it had been when I was in labour. I heard myself gasp, and sob, and groan. The thought flicked across the black screen: one day I will find that treasure in Gracie's drawer.

At such moments, all the love in your body and mind and heart and blood and cells ceases to be enough. Evil manifests itself.

I lay awake beside him through nights full of groaning and half-sleep. Once he saved me some coke, and brought it round. I snorted it and it got me through his worst night: I lay there serenely, observing dispassionately his contortions as he came down. I would have done anything I could to help him, but nothing could be done, so I lay next to him while he sweated and heaved, and the night passed.

He was off it again, but weak and fighting against depression. When I came home, days later, I found another of his letters on my table. When he wrote, he pressed so hard that the table itself bore the imprint of what he said to me:

‘Came to gather some of that calming potion you manage to carry round – I had a rotten day, travelling around and fighting –

Our house was full again, people home from holidays, but the summer still standing over us. We climbed the apricot tree in the back yard and handed down great baskets full of the small, imperfectly shaped fruits. Georgie made jam. Javo and I sat in the sun on the concrete outside the back door, cracking the apricot stones with half bricks to get the kernels out. I was learning how to reach him without talking, though sometimes I was afraid he hadn't understood. We talked about this, lying on my bed with our bare legs under and over.