Monkey Grip (18 page)

‘Of
course
it is. It's not a matter of jealousy – not with you, anyway, because I love you. It's just that he's given me the bum's rush. He never comes round any more. If I want the relationship to go on, I have to do all the legwork. It's all the same, to him. He reckons he's “got his own life to live”.'

‘Why are they
like
that?' I said, looking at her friendly, cheerful face as we struggled up the hill past the big flats: her cheeks were rosy in the wind, half sunk into the collar of her blue pea-jacket.

‘It's that old thing about “having room to move”,' she said. ‘They're afraid of being emotionally pressured . . . you know, the old fears of manipulation, of moral pressure – because of course for centuries women have been the conscience of the world.'

She flicked her eyebrows comically. We laughed, propping on our bikes at the lights outside the Rob Roy Hotel. I remembered Javo that last afternoon by my fire, how he had lifted his chin and opened his eyes wide, and declared,

‘Anyway, I'm never gonna get off dope.'

My hands fell apart in despair. ‘I never – I never – I never asked you to!'

Javo was at the movie. He sent me a signal, hullo. For a second I would have liked to sit with him, but he was with the prestige junkies, Chris and Mark, and I was in the front row with the straights, Bonny and Willy and Angela and Eve and Lou. So I stayed put, keeping my side of that unspoken social pact. Watching myself on the screen, my heart dived about all over the place and I shook in my seat. But it was only five minutes, and the rest of the time was crammed with the faces and voices of people I knew, and I forgot myself, staring at the moving pictures, listening to Angela sing and Willy play, amazed at the concentration of talent in this group of people with their chopped hair, rolled up pants, sceptical expressions and idiosyncratic shorthand speech.

At the end, when we were leaving, I caught up with Javo and said,

‘Hey! I've got something for you.'

I handed him a silver ear-ring which I'd found left over from a pair. He'd sold his gold one, in jail for cigarettes. ‘Here you are. If you've still got a hole left.'

‘Thanks, mate.' He took it, smiled at me, disappeared in the small crowd.

I answered the phone one morning. Someone dropped a coin, pressed the button.

‘Is Rita there?'

‘No,' I said. ‘Who's that?'

‘David,' said the voice, which I dimly knew. But I didn't know any
David.

‘Do you want to leave a message?'

‘No,' said the voice, becoming more familiar every second. ‘No . . . I'll try ringing back later.'

‘OK,' I said, and before the receiver hit the stand I had recognised the voice – Nick. I finished hanging up and went back to bed, pondering on the ruses people will employ. He must have known it was me. But perhaps he didn't know how distinctive his own voice was: flat, broad accent, sharp; pauses while he thought, then the words came out in a flat, hard clatter.

I suffered a terrible compulsion to find out what Javo was thinking. Gracie and I got to the tower before ten o'clock one morning. As we clomped up the stairs, that familiar voice croaked,

‘Uh – uhh! Hey – whazza time?'

‘Ten o'clock,' I answered. ‘Where are you?'

Not in Jack's room. I went up another flight and found him in the little bolt-hole opposite the dunny. I stuck my head round the door, and he lifted his off the pillow. He was so stoned – pin-eyed, skin breaking out again – that I involuntarily glanced at the floor for the fallen fit. None there. He grinned at me.

‘It's nearly ten,' I repeated. ‘See you.'

I went off down the hall. There I saw his journal sticking out of his calico bag. I whisked it out and into Jack's room and sat down to snoop: hands trembling, mouth watering. He had glued to the inside of the back cover an old photo of me, stolen from one of Jack's boxes of history.

‘Nora said my life was
sordid,
' I read. ‘The word is stuck like a piece of gum to the inside of my skull; in fact I'm almost getting to have a feeling for it. Rita came to see me at Easey Street, offered me a place to sleep in her studio. She's the warmest-hearted person I've met in a long time. She asked me what I thought about the fact that she had fallen in love with Nick. I felt happy about that, in a way . . . but also a bit thrown because I'd fancied the idea of some kind of scene with her myself. Well, that's that.'

I put the book back in the bag, and with one dexterous flourish I turned my jealousy against
her:
anything rather than estrange myself further from
him.
What a mechanism. With a head full of dark thoughts, I wandered miserably up again to the room where he was lying, and stood at the end of the bed.

‘I've read your book.'

He smiled, I smiled.

I said, not understanding the urge to hurt myself, ‘Why
don't
you have a scene with Rita?'

He looked at me, opened his mouth and said, shaking his head,

‘No. I don't want to.'

I stood there silently, suffering
pain in the heart.

‘Well,' I said, ‘'bye,' and stepped down the step. I heard him speak, went back. ‘What?'

‘Come here a minute.'

I went over to the side of the bed. He reached up his arm, took hold of my shoulder, pulled my face down into his neck, his face half turned away.

‘My face is cold from the wind,' I stammered, not used to him touching me. He turned his face to me and kissed me on the mouth. I stayed leaning over, held against him, for seconds. He let go and I straightened up and went away down the stairs.

Stoned, stoned, stoned again. Coke madness. Sitting up in my well-made bed, all alone on a Saturday night, my tongue numb from licking up last night's coke crumbs off the mirror, I pondered the nature of dissipation and pleasure. My nose began to bleed weakly from the left nostril, probably something to do with the quantities of coke I had absorbed into the mucous membrane the night before, first with Jessie in the tower kitchen when I was supposed to be stirring the soup for supper, and again later with Bill, in my room after the show. We were stoned when we got home; but we snorted more and lay back, and I talked compulsively for a while and then lapsed into a silence, struck dumb by the flood of fantasies which came pouring through my head. Visions of strange countries, Arab or South American; ‘urban delirium'; memories of a room where I once gave in to hepatitis in Bill's old house in Sydney. I remembered the last time I'd been so coked: the night in summer when Javo brought me some and I snorted it, and lay awake all night beside him while he came down hard after days of shooting it. His eye rolled round to me again and again, his face tried feebly to smile.

Bill and I fucked one ordinary, human fuck, and then the coke took over and we were doing something else: my head raced and plunged away into other worlds, and my body flowed on a tide of uncontrollable fantasy, singing sweet and high the while.

I slept two hours barely; and the next day I kept going only by smoking huge quantities of black hash. I went to a party at Eve's. Clive was there.

‘Come and stay the night with me, Nora!' he said, taking my hand in his callused palm; but I
couldn't,
I was so exhausted.

‘I've been fucking my arse off all night,' hissed Eve to me as she passed me a plate of food. Jessie and I made each other laugh till we were nearly sick.

Everybody was out of their heads.

And when I passed through the tower on my way home, I found Javo had left me a note pinned to the board at the top of the stairs.

‘Dear Nora, I'm sorry for trying to make you my conscience and I don't know how to go about making that any different right now – I'm just a fool with a stupid burden that I can't shake off – without lumps of it hitting other people close by. I'm a self-centred ratbag – and probably because of that ugly fact – my love for you is in short bursts with long self-engrossed advertisements in between that last so long you lose track of the story, like Hal Todd on Night Owl Theatre. And my other strong fear was for a time there losing grip on knowing emotionally I wouldn't freak out if there was no-one there beside me. It's just like reassuring yourself that you can do more than just survive, being by yourself. Things will have to change – I can't say when – but only you can say if it's too late.'

I came back from the laundry, walked in in my boots and rolled-up pants. Rita was home, standing at the stove. She turned her bright face to greet me, smiling away there with the wooden spoon in her hand.

‘What have you been doing since I last saw you?' she asked.

‘Oh – starving myself, and getting stoned, and fucking, and slugging it out with Javo – I'm exhausted, trying to work out how it all got blown.'

She nodded, stirring the food with one hand and ruffling up my hair with the other. I looked at her flushed cheeks, and without having to think about it, I suddenly threw my arms round her waist and said,

‘Give us a hug, Rita! I've been feeling badly towards you, because I thought Javo was going to fall in love with you.'

‘Oh!' she laughed, hugging me back. ‘I thought – I wondered why – how can you have thought that?'

‘I read his diary.' We both burst out laughing.

‘Oh no!' she said. ‘I went to see him because I was afraid that my attitude towards dope might have had something to do with you and him breaking up. And anyway, I saw him today in the street, and he acted as if we'd never met, he was so stoned – and I thought, poor Nora! If that's what he used to do to
her, well!
. . .'

‘I guess I feel pretty good now, though,' I said. ‘And tomorrow I'm going up the country to stay with my parents for a couple of days.'

‘Good idea. Get out of town for a while.' She banged the spoon on the edge of the saucepan. ‘Right. Food's ready. Do you want to call the kids?'

When I got up in the morning, Rita said,

‘Javo came round last night.'

‘What? I didn't hear him. What time?'

‘About three in the morning. He wanted the key to the studio; he's asleep along there now.'

My heart turned over at the thought of him passing my door and waking Rita instead. The willing prisoner. Won't this ever end? I went down to the studio and glanced in at him, still, under the blankets, his face hidden and his hair standing on end. I didn't go nearer,
fearing to be uncool
.

What
is
this, that we all do?

I was so tired.

Up in the mountains – or rather, in the winding valley at their feet – the air was thick with pollen.

I felt a freak there: short hair, dulled and anxious look, nothing comfortable to talk about. My mother showed the dam to me, and the underground spring behind the house. She had gumboots on and leaped across channels. I puddled gingerly in my city runners. Lethargy stole over me, the way Javo described smack: warm lead poured through the veins.

Gracie and I walked a mile or so to the post office. I heard a quick rustle in the grass and remarked,

‘I wonder if that was a snake.'

Gracie, city child, went completely white and clutched my hand.

I would go nuts in the country. I was already nuts in the city, but had learnt to handle it.

I was washing my hands at the basin. I imagined that the phone would ring and it would be Javo, saying in his hoarse voice,

‘Come back, will you, Nor?'

Idiot. This is not going to happen.

I should have let it all pass, but I was unwilling to. The pain of it was by no means unbearable. Sometimes I could sidestep it altogether. I remembered Anna Wulf in
The Golden Notebook
saying to her psychoanalyst,

‘I came to you so you could teach me how to feel again.'

Maybe one day it would come to that.

Meanwhile, I breathed the polleny air and waited for dark, for another twelve hours of bottomless sleep.

I woke, and the whole sky was falling in rain. It rained steadily all night, and was still raining by morning. At three in the morning my father went outside with a torch: at first I thought it was lightning, but then I heard his step crunch on the gravel as he passed my window to find the source of a leak in the spouting. The house was tight as a drum: not a drop of water came in. I lay there, protected in my bed like a child again; and at Peel Street Javo comes in in the middle of the night, up the stairs, past my door, into Rita's room, stands beside her bed till she wakes, says,

‘Let me sleep with you.'

‘No,' she says, ‘I won't because of Nora'; but she wants to, and his presence persuades her; he gets into the bed and they fuck, and he comes quickly with that gasp of breath he makes, and Rita thinks,

‘Is that the way he and Nora used to fuck? How come she was so happy with it?'

Out rolled this fantasy, smooth as butter; and I fell asleep and dreamed about the sea: my children drowning, beyond my help, my screams unheard.

My back ached and ached.

I daydreamed of an end to this pain, and of another attempt at Sydney. I sat on the grassy hump behind my parents' house, armed with a stick against the magpies which zipped mercilessly about my ears whenever I went outside. I talked out loud to myself, half crazy. I thought about Javo and his gawky limbs.

I went up to the dam in the middle of the afternoon to pick up the yabby nets. The sun was shining out of a clear sky, a cool breeze passed over the paddock and the water before it struck my skin. I took the nets in my hand and started back towards the slope that led away from the dam. But for a few minutes I stood still on the lip of the grassy slope and held the nets and stared at the countryside: mountains a couple of miles away in front of me, the dam and a sloping paddock behind me, the house down there to one side almost out of sight. At my feet wet strips of marsh grass, and in my ears the endless rhythm of the small frogs cricketing in the dam.