Monkey Grip (26 page)

I put the cap away, too tired to contemplate using it, and fell asleep. At two in the morning Gerald came in from his gig and I backed up to his long curve and we fell asleep again together. At six a.m. Chris walked into my room. I woke up completely and instantly. She knelt on the end of my bed (Gerald slept on) and whispered,

‘Have you used all that coke?'

‘I haven't used any of it,' I replied, sitting up and putting my hands to her cheeks, a familiarity I probably would not have dared if I hadn't just leapt out of a dream. ‘Why – do you want some?'

We laughed. I scrambled out of bed, trying not to disturb Gerald's deserving slumber, and we went down the stairs, me with the cap in my hand. The kids were just beginning to stir in their room next to the front door.

‘Do you want me to hit you up?' she offered as we passed through the hall and into the living room.

‘No thanks,' I said, feeling no pull towards the proposition, but no revulsion from it either.

‘Do you ever hit up?'

‘I've never hit up anything.' I gave her the cap and we sat down at the table.

With her bony, experienced fingers she shook out half its contents and fixed herself a large hit. Her outfit was elegantly wrapped in a small piece of chamois leather.

‘Will you hold my arm?'

I remembered the night I worked on the junk movie, when she asked me to hold her arm for her: but then I was scared, and revolted; and she herself was nervous, wanting me to stay by her in case she had too much. No such fears now, nine months later. She rolled up her sleeve in her quick, matter-of-fact way, showing her thin, thin arm, spiked all over and pale from lack of sun. I took hold of her upper arm, which I could almost encircle with one hand, and squeezed it firmly. Up came the vein. I looked at her wonderfully beautiful face, boned like a princess, stripped of the flesh of normal women. Her eyes were concentrated on the action of her hand, which held the fit poised like some artist's tool, hesitating over the vein as if to catch it unawares before it could roll away and betray her. In went that fine needle, gentle steady pressure; she jacked it expertly, no blood, probed a little, tried again – ah yes, the tiny thread of red ran back into the glass tube and her intent expression relaxed a fraction. Pushed the stuff into herself with an unwavering hand.

‘Thanks, Nora,' she said, and I let go, wondering if I had really felt the pressure of her heart's force shove the small burden up her arm under my thumbs.

She put the fit down on my living room table and sat back in the chair, eyes closed, face trembling infinitesimally. I watched her, not needing to hide my curiosity. She opened her eyes and smiled at me under the wavy henna'd hair, thick silver ear-rings hanging at her jawbones under her finely shaped ears.

‘It's still happening, the flash,' she said quietly. ‘It's real good coke.'

Her eyes closed again. Silence. I sat watching her intently.

‘I think I might've had a bit too much,' she remarked. But she was completely confident and I wasn't afraid, though I saw a quick picture of her blue face dying and my attempts to revive her. We sat in a peculiar companionship. And I felt the flickering of a contact high start in my chest: the heart ticked faster, the breath came clearer and colder, the hands and stomach began to tremble with a nameless excitement. Which passed.

She made the effort to talk with me. We discussed our children. Mark, she said with a self-mocking shrug, had of course not run away, but had merely gone to a movie. She told me how Rita had come to visit them and had cleaned up the kitchen.

‘I'd have done it myself,' she said, ‘but I'd just had a hit and I kept thinking, “In a minute I'll get up and
do
it,” but somehow I just kept lying there, and then Rita came in and did it for me.'

Twenty minutes later she said,

‘Hey – will you let me use the rest of that coke, and I'll get you another one this morning?'

‘OK,' I said. I went upstairs and got it from its hiding place where I'd replaced it after her first hit. Gerald was still asleep. I could have a quick snort, I thought, looking at his long bent body under my blanket, but I'd rather wait till he wakes up and share it with him. So I took it down to the kitchen and handed it over. She made a cocktail with some immense rocks she had hidden somewhere in her voluminous torn clothing. I watched her intricate preparations, leaning against the sink in my silk nightie and red T shirt.

‘Lots of junkies don't realise,' she said as she worked, ‘that coke loses its strength if you leave it in hot places. And they say “Coke doesn't do anything for me”. The fridge is a good place for it.'

‘Yeah?' I say, listening to the dope lore. ‘It's a cold drug, all right. It always makes the inside of my head feel like it's full of cold air.'

While she worked at it, I went out to the bathroom and got into the shower. I was covered in shampoo when she came in for me to hold her arm again. I held out my hands, trying to keep the shower water from running off them on to her clothes and her butchered arm. As she felt for the vein, and I stood there somewhere between patience and boredom, I saw a small face appear, between shielding hands, outside the bathroom window: Juliet, in her cotton nightie, peering in at this mysterious ritual.

‘Shit, Nora, I'm sorry,' said Chris. She paused a second in her probing and looked up at me.

‘It's cool. I'll explain it to her later,' I said. She caught the rolling vein, dealt with it, and went back into the house. I came inside dripping and found her curled up under her velvet coat on Juliet's top bunk, grinning sleepily at me.

‘Are you all right?'

‘Yeah. I'm fine. Just having a little lie down. I'm satisfied now.'

I went upstairs to get dressed. Gerald opened his eyes and looked at me. I wondered what he thought I'd been doing: not only the flash, but a tinge of her paranoia had reached me.

‘She hit the whole lot up,' I reported, for the first time feeling incredulous at the sheer quantity of my dope she'd used.

‘
What?
The whole
lot?
' he echoed. ‘I don't care – about the coke – but shit, how much
money
must she need! Jesus!' He stared at me. ‘How long have you been up?'

‘Since six.'

‘I didn't even know you were gone.'

He rolled over and pulled a pillow over his head.

Rita went away for the weekend, and for a day I drove an old Rommel-grey Volkswagen ute between our new house and Eve's old one up in Northcote. It was hot and sunny and I was wearing a singlet and overalls. I watched my arms, very brown and marked with bruises and sunspots, working the flat steering wheel. I felt sweaty, hard and confident. We worked like dogs, we were cheerful and full of energy. At each new arrival at the house, the doors of which were wide open to the sunny wind, a sort of dance was performed: in and out we moved, the six of us, silently in our rubber shoes on the polished floors, carrying and not carrying, smiling and not smiling as we passed each other in the airy corridors. Gracie was to be seen walking quietly in and out of the immense rooms, thumb in mouth, feeling the space.

The Roaster had a double bed.

‘Hey, Grace,' he said on the first night. ‘Do you want to sleep with me tonight?'

‘Yeah!'

‘Hang on, Gracie!' says I. ‘Are all your nits gone?'

‘
Nits?
' cries the Roaster, with an instinctive gesture of rejection. ‘For-
get
about tonight!' However, as it happened, the nits had been routed, and the children did sleep together. I came by in the middle of the night and found them cast across the bed in attitudes of struggle and flight.

‘March, march, shoulder to shoulder,' sang Gracie out on the verandah, but it was election day and Labor was going to get done like a dinner. The rain stopped and I went mooching about in the Flea Market. Rita streamed in, Juliet at her heels; she greeted me affectionately. I wandered off towards the street door of that stone-floored, barn-like place. Willy, up unusually early, strode round the corner.

‘Hullo Willy,' I said, carefully keeping the irony out of my voice. ‘What are you up to?'

‘I was looking for Rita, actually,' replied the erstwhile object of my fantasies, looking over my shoulder into the dim barn as he spoke. ‘She said she wanted to go for a cup of coffee.'

‘She's back there,' I said, jerking my thumb behind me. My insides went curdly with envy, thinking of the way she turned up her face, charming, her skin smooth and polished. Sometimes I was afraid of becoming man-like, of losing softness.

And sometimes, still, I longed for Javo, just for a sight of his violently blue eyes. Maybe I always needed to love someone weaker than myself, in exactly the right degree. Maybe that was why I had already forgotten his outrages.

I dreamed: I came home and found my room had been ransacked. Papers were scattered all about. I was devastated. I was standing there looking at the torn cover of a book when Javo walked into the room. He had been in Tasmania and was off dope (understood, not spoken); he looked clean, clear-eyed, clear-skinned, sun-tanned, full of health.

‘Javo! Did you do this?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Why? Why did you do it?'

‘I just threw the stuff in the rubbish bin.'

I burst into tears. It was real grief-weeping: I sobbed and sobbed. He hugged me against his chest (clean shirt, smelling good) and held me very tightly, as if to love or comfort. I just stood and wept.

I woke up remembering the sobbing. To sob like that was a pleasure and a relief, as if finding out that I was still emotionally alive. I had no such passion in my waking life.

I rang Javo in Hobart. When I heard his voice (he croaked, ‘Hullo? – oh, good day, Nor!') my heart turned over a couple of times and beat harder than usual.

‘I have been off dope for a week,' he announced.

‘How do you spend your time?'

‘I spend a lot of time on my own. And I'm drinking a lot.'

‘Yeah? Going to the casino?'

‘Nah. Just hangin' out. Me and a woman called Jane.'

To my astonishment I felt a pang of something like
jealousy.

‘Maybe I'll come to Hobart and visit you. Maybe some time in January, when Cobby comes home from America.'

‘Is Cobby coming back? Too much! Yeah, come down, Nor.'

‘That would be great. I get a bit lonely.'

‘How are you feeling?'

‘Oh – pretty shithouse. I can't sleep at night.'

We laughed: those endless, terrible nights when he groaned and thrashed in my bed.

We said goodbye.

The jealousy, upon being scrutinised, metamorphosed into a sadness I could not shake off for a day. My heart ached whenever I thought of him. But then, somehow, the pain stopped, and I went about my business.

On Christmas Eve we had a party. I stood with Willy, leaning against the half-open window in the big kitchen.

‘What is happening between you and Rita?' I asked.

‘Well . . .' he replied, looking into his glass, ‘. . . nothing, really, because I know that if I fucked with her it would freak Angela out one hundred per cent, completely and totally. And I know only too well the reason why I've got the urge to do it – I'd be acting straight out of my conditioning.'

I thought of Rita turning her face up to him, sparkling for him as she could for a man; she shone for
me,
though, loved me loyally in the overcrowded house where we all went crazy. Poor Rita. Poor Angela, who should have seen that Rita was no threat to her, ultimately; who raged against Rita's ‘
empty-headedness,
' as she called it, and suffered tortures when she couldn't keep both Rita and Willy well within her gaze.

So, Willy continued,

‘The reason why I had to put a stop to what looked like happening between me and
you
was largely Angela's jealousy – the objective contradictions I was having to confront there – but it was also because Gracie rejected my approaches. She really hated my guts.'

‘I've always noticed,' I pointed out, swallowing a pea-sized lump of irritation, ‘that she gets on best with people who make no approach to her at all, but just let her come to
them.
'

‘Yeah, well, I guess so; but I have to have my approaches confirmed. I want – what I
really
want,' he said, rolling his eyes behind his spectacles, baring his teeth, beginning to parody himself, ‘is
total affirmation
!'

‘You mean one hundred per cent of the time?'

‘Yeah! I want someone to confirm me completely and forever! I want a SLAVE! So that's
my
biggest contradiction!'

We were both laughing.

‘Wouldn't five minutes of total affirmation, every now and then, do? Come down here whenever you like – I'll affirm you in short bursts.'

He drank. I glanced round the room, nervously thinking that Angela would not be enjoying the sight of our conversation. Indeed, there she was in a cane chair near the fridge, hands in pockets, legs thrust out in front of her, cropped head to one side against the back of the chair, eyes rolled a little in the same direction, face still and long with what looked like boredom inadequately concealed. Still, I pressed on.

‘I was really thrown by what happened between us. I know no-one can understand why I kept on with Javo, and I'm not going to explain that now – but it all happened while he was away in Thailand, and I was lonely and freaking out of my brain, and
missing
him. And you kept coming on to me sexually – '

‘I know I did! I know!'

‘ – But what threw me was the way that, whenever I made any response, you just went BLAT – stonewalled me.'

‘I
know.
But I told you the reason, that day.'