Monkey Grip (9 page)

Gracie and I went with Rita and Juliet to an old house near the Victoria market, small and square as a sailor's cottage, bare of furniture. Rita had two weeks of her old lease to fulfil; Gracie and I camped in the cottage in the beginnings of winter. Used to a big clashing household, we stared round us in the night silence, huddled in my bed with our clipboards and the big tin of textacolours.

‘Draw wit' me, Nora – draw wit' me,' she'd say, every morning before it got light. When we woke, those mornings, I'd gallop up the wooden stairs to the second storey attic room and hang out the window, hands on the crumbling sandstone of the sill, and peer eastwards to the yellow face of the brewery clock. Quarter to seven on the knocker every time. I'd turn to the south, lean out a foot further, and right at my elbow would loom the dark towers of the inner city, towers of Mammon, picked out against the infinitesimally lightening sky by hundreds of tiny squares of light: windows behind which cleaners were already at work.

Every day Rita came and we bandaged our heads with scarves and painted and chipped at the old walls, and ate absent-mindedly, standing in the bare kitchen with handfuls of bread and sausage.

I was starting to notice that I hadn't fucked for a long time. It wasn't the fucking I missed: I wanted
love
. I felt sad and hungry, or greedy rather, wishing to comfort myself. I ate small snacks all morning, felt disgusted with myself, and returned to my room upstairs to pick away at the walls hour after hour. Lou came to visit me. He worked with me all one afternoon. He kept dropping his scraper and dashing over to me and hugging me ferociously, kissing me and hugging me and making much of me, saying,

‘Ooh, isn't this sexy work!'

He stopped me from feeling sad in the flesh.

‘I haven't fucked for weeks,' I remarked. ‘I dream all the time about fucking with guys I know.'

‘What'll you do?' asked Lou, interested, pausing in his scraping and shuffling his Adidas runners in the mess of crumbling plaster we were standing in.

‘Oh,' I said with a laugh, ‘something will fall in my path sooner or later.'

The only thing that fell in my path was a trick parcel: but I was too lonely to tell it from the real thing. One night I was watching television at the tower with Willy. Everyone else had gone out. And something odd happened. Willy had a way of talking largely in political generalisations, then of suddenly saying something intensely personal in the same tone of voice, which always had a rather shocking effect. This night he delivered himself of some opinions on the nature of romantic love and its damaging effects. I listened placidly, silently agreeing, staring at the screen: then he dropped his head over the back of his armchair and said, looking at the ceiling,

‘What I feel for
you
isn't romantic love. But it isn't just sex, either. I'm finding it really exciting being in this room with you, and I'm going to be ex-treme-ly pissed off when the others start coming back in.'

Immediately he sat up again and looked at the television, without a direct glance at me. I stared at the side of his head, too surprised to speak.

People did start coming back in, but when it got late and they had all gone and I stood up to go home, he said,

‘Why don't you stay here?'

He was half-laughing, the caricature of the European student, all silvery and golden in gleaming spectacles, his short blond hair precisely cut, one wrist still bandaged from his eternal karate injury.

‘I can't,' I said. ‘I'd bleed all over you. And anyway, if Angela came in in the morning it'd freak me right out.'

He laughed. ‘She won't.'

‘Of course, you could come to
my
place – but you wouldn't be able to stand the early rising.' We kept looking at each other, laughing. ‘I bet we'd really have to slug it out,' I said. ‘For example, you wouldn't come to my place tonight because if you did you'd be admitting I'd won the first round.'

He said nothing, laughing so his regular teeth showed, looking me right in the eyes. I got up and stood between his knees. We smiled at each other because it simply didn't matter if we stayed together then, or later, or never. I leaned over and kissed him goodbye: slight prickle of his short blond beard, his mouth surprisingly soft. I put my hand under his jacket, under his arm, accidentally on the curve of a muscle.

One evening, a week later, I was driving up Elgin Street in Martin's car and caught sight of Willy in the laundromat. I stopped the car, parked it, and walked into the humming fluorescent brightness. He looked up from his newspaper and nodded.

‘Want a lift home?'

‘Yeah. My stuff's in the dryer. Can you wait five minutes?'

I waited while he sorted his clothes; he concentrated completely on the task, working quickly and neatly, folding his lips together in a line.

In the car I remarked, ‘I have so many dreams and fantasies about you, I can hardly tell which is which any more.'

He glanced at me with a half-smile. ‘Easy. Dreams are when you're asleep, fantasies when you're awake.'

‘Yeah – well, I don't quite know what to do about 'em.'

‘Nothing – if you want them realised. Because then they wouldn't be fantasies any more.'

I felt as if I'd been given a push in the face. The car was full of the smell of his clean washing, warm and homely. I drove on in silence. Aware of overkill, he said, probably thinking he was changing the subject,

‘I'm really digging getting good at karate. Now, whenever anyone starts anything, I just adopt a half-fighting stance, and they drop back.'

I dropped back.

I dreamed: Javo and I were walking along a beach. There was no-one else in sight. We walked side by side for miles. I was talking to him. I was saying very fulsome emotional things. I said,

‘I love you so much that if I thought you didn't love me, I'd want to die.'

We trod and trod together through the sand, heavy going. I stopped talking. He said nothing. I looked sideways at him, waiting for him to speak, but he remained silent and did not look at me. I realised that he didn't love me like that, that he was confused and embarrassed and didn't know what to say.

I lent Willy my car and he drove me home to Peel Street. We talked awkwardly for half an hour beside my cold fire. He was sick, I was tired. I kept thinking of my bed and getting into it to go to sleep. At last I said,

‘I'm going to bed, Willy. You could come with me if you liked.'

A pause.

‘No . . . I think I'll go home.'

‘OK.'

A pause. He was standing next to my chair. We both stared at the fire.

‘I hope you get well,' I said.

‘Yeah. I'll take lots of that white stuff tomorrow, and try to get better.'

‘You ought to fast.'

‘Yeah, I know, but it's so hard. Hunger's like a disease: it has to be tended.'

So is loneliness.

He bent over, both hands in the pockets of his thick blue coat, and – I would say kissed – put his mouth against mine. His lips felt cold.

‘You're not pissed off with me, are you?' he said.

‘No. Of course I'm not.'

‘I'll see you tomorrow. Probably.'

‘OK.'

He went out my broken front door, having to slam it hard to make the lock catch. I went straight away into my room. I turned on the lamp and knelt on the bed to move the cushions aside. Tears came almost to my eyes.

‘I'm lonely. I'm lonely.'

I thought perhaps he would get as far as the car, and come back.

Men never come back.

He didn't.

I lay in my bed in the empty house. I thought, when Javo comes back, his presence in my house might be just as dif-ficult, painful and
wrong as
Willy's. Oh no! I imagined him behind me in the room, like Willy, pretending to read
Rolling Stone
while I stared at the fire and fiddled with briquettes, wondering how to ask him to stay, and whether I really wanted him to, and whether he would refuse with grace or hurtfully. But I wished for him. Maybe he had gone over the river into Laos, maybe he would end up in jail in Bangkok for six months, or longer. I wished for him, with his great lanky limbs and thin face and bright, bright blue eyes.

Where are you, Javo?

I kept feeling he would walk in any day. Sometimes I swore I could feel it in my bones.

I was tired out. I worked like a dog on my room. As I scrubbed vigorously at the skirting boards I thought, I've never cared this much before about doing the job properly: why do I care so much now? Javo's face flashed in the corner of my eye every now and then as I worked. I would like to bring him into my room, make him lie down, listen to him talk, look at his bony face.

‘Let's go to the tower,' said Gracie.

‘OK. What for?'

‘To see Jack. And because round there they always buy the Sunday papers, and they have in them carturns, and horse racing, and stories about girls who fuck with men to get money.'

‘You mean car
toons,
dingbat.'

At the tower Gracie went into her father's room, and in the hallway I met Jessie, just back from Europe. Her face was pale and thin, under her straight fringe of red, red hair. She put her hand gently on my arm and smiled right into my eyes. No wonder people love her forever. Jessie and Javo together: a bed full of blue eyes.

I dreamed: Javo was back. Everywhere I went people were telling me,

‘Hey, Javo is back, Nora, and he's looking for you!'

I didn't know whether to stay where I was (on a farm, up a sandy road) and wait for him to come to me, or to set out myself and start searching for him round the households. I was full of joy and anticipation. As the dream progressed, this joy drained away and I realised that it
was
a dream. I woke up desolate.

Martin and Javo were in Kuala Lumpur. Julian had got them out. I knew my feeling was right. I kept dreaming drunk-enly about seeing them come back through that airport door I'd watched them disappear into two months before. The day I met Martin's father there, and we kissed cheeks, I bumped his spectacles; when I met Julian he trod on my toes; when I see Javo we will wrap ourselves around each other effortlessly.

This was a fantasy.

I had to be ready for anything: he would be traumatised, and so would I.

Come home, Javo, and let me work it out from there.

Days passed, days passed.

It rained, and the long autumn was over. Rita and Juliet came to the house. I dreamed that Rita had the power of altering, by sheer willpower, the cellular structure of my moral fabric.

Javo and Martin had been granted travel papers and could leave Kuala Lumpur. Martin, his father told me, was going to Europe;
and so was Javo.
My heart turned over. But how, I said, can he afford to travel in Europe? I lent him the money, said Martin's father. The old familiar rage crept out of its lair.

O, o, you bastard, if you can afford to go to Europe you can afford to send me a cable. Death, death in the crook of his arm – what's a cable here or there?

‘Javo, I could say you owed me a letter. I wish I could stop the flow. I have leaked myself away towards you for nearly two months now. I ought to put the plug back in, fill up the tub again for myself and other people; and I try, but all the time there's this stubborn little trickle running away, running away towards some unknown place where you are killing yourself. Where are you? What'll I do with this letter?'

In the evening I was washing the dishes and talking with Rita who was sitting by the fire.

‘Was that somebody knocking?' she said.

She got up and went to the door. My heart leaped up into my mouth. It's Javo, would he knock so quietly? At the old house he always walked straight in. She was opening the door.

‘Oh – hullo!' she said.

My memory brought his scraping voice so vividly to mind that it grated in my ears. My heart was not beating. I leaned back from the sink to see and it wasn't Javo. It was somebody else.

I must be going crazy.

No word from him. We live and don't learn. Maybe he'll shoot himself to death in K.L. Maybe he's gone to Europe. What a nasty flight, coming down off a habit that big. If he'd walked in at that moment, I'd have moved over and made room for him. What's love? Being a sucker, I suppose.

I dreamed: I moved with Gracie into a new house in a swanky part of town. I was walking along the street. I saw an expensively dressed couple, glossy like Bunuel's bourgeois, playing with their two groomed children on their front lawn. I introduced myself as a new neighbour. They appeared to be Belgian diplomats. We were chatting politely when a telephone rang beside the woman in the grass. She answered it, listened, registered surprise and pleasure. She took notes on a piece of paper, spoke briefly, hung up.

‘Who was that?' I asked.

‘It was Javo!'

What!
and she hadn't told him I was there, and he hadn't asked! I was dumbfounded. She showed me her notes.

‘He's started school in America,' she said. I looked at her scrawly writing and couldn't decide if it said
Michigan
or
Canada
.

Clive came rushing into our house and thrust a postcard into my hand.

‘From the old house,' he panted, just off his bike.

I turned it over and saw an English postmark. ‘Darling Nora . . .'– what! Javo would never write such a thing. I looked at it properly and saw that it was from his
mother.
What a trick of fate. I hid my disappointment. I fell back into my state of aimless waiting. I couldn't get free of it. Every morning I woke up empty.

Life was getting thin and sick. I lay on the floor in front of the fire and listened to the litany of gossip sung by my friends. The loneliness was drying me out. I reached the bottom one Friday night. I lit a fire in my room, for animal comfort, got into my bed, turned off the lamp, looked at the fire. Dry, dry and aching.