Monkey Grip
Authors: Helen Garner
ContentsMore Politely than Shaking Hands
It Makes You Forget Your Friends
Two Bob Each Way on Everything
A Fate She had believed Implacable
Attitudes of Struggle and Flight
Flapping like a Bloody Bandage
PENGUIN BOOKS
Helen Garner was born in Geelong in 1942, and has been writing and publishing since her first book,
Monkey Grip
, came out in 1977.
ALSO BY HELEN GARNER IN PENGUIN
In the old brown house on the corner, a mile from the middle of the city, we ate bacon for breakfast every morning of our lives. There were never enough chairs for us all to sit up at the meal table; one or two of us always sat on the floor or on the kitchen step, plate on knee. It never occurred to us to teach the children to eat with a knife and fork. It was hunger and all sheer function: the noise, and clashing of plates, and people chewing with their mouths open, and talking, and laughing. Oh, I was happy then. At night our back yard smelt like the country.
It was early summer.
And everything, as it always does, began to heave and change.
It wasn't as if I didn't already have somebody to love. There was Martin, teetering as many were that summer on the dizzy edge of smack, but who was as much a part of our household as any outsider could be. He slept very still in my bed, jumped up with the kids in the early morning, bore with my crankiness and fits of wandering heart. But he went up north for a fortnight and idly, at the turning of the year, I fell in love with our friend Javo, the bludger, just back from getting off dope in Hobart: I looked at his burnt skin and scarred nose and violently blue eyes. We sat together in the theatre, Gracie on my knee. He put his hand to the back of my head. We looked at each other, and would have gone home together without a word being spoken; but on our way out of the theatre we met Martin rushing in, back from Disaster Bay. Decorously, Javo got on his bike and rode home.
Not a matter of decorum, though, with Martin, who said to me shyly, knowing perhaps in his bones that nothing would be the same again,
âI wish I could â you know â
turn you on.
' And he did, and somehow we loved each other: I held his sharp, curly little head very tightly in my arms. We slept peacefully, knowing each other well enough not to need to touch.
I woke in the morning and heard at the same moment a rooster crow in a back yard and a clock strike in a house in Woodhead Street. I walked through our house. In the rooms people slept singly in double beds, nothing over them but a sheet, brown faces on still pillows. Gracie and Eve's boy the Roaster sprawled in their bunks. A glass fish tinked at their window.
I put the kettle on to make the coffee, stared out the louvres of the kitchen window at the rough grass and the sky already hot blue.
At the Fitzroy baths, Martin and Javo lolled on the burning concrete. I clowned in the water at the deep end where the sign read ACQUA PROFONDA.
âThe others are waiting for me up at Disaster Bay,' said Martin. âI'm going back today. Why don't youse two come with me?'
âOK,' said Javo, who had nothing else to do, his life being a messy holiday of living off his friends.
âNora?'
I rolled and rolled in the water, deafening my ears while I thought of, and discarded, all the reasons why I shouldn't go. I popped up, hanging on to the rail, hair streaming on my neck.
âOK. I'll come.'
Javo was looking at me.
So, afterwards, it is possible to see the beginning of things, the point at which you had already plunged in, while at the time you thought you were only testing the water with your toe.
We picked Gracie up from her kinder and left Melbourne that afternoon. By the time we had crossed the border into New South Wales it was well into night. The camp where the others were waiting for the supplies Martin had brought was a mile from the end of the track, round a rocky beach. It was dark and the tide was right in against the rocks. I picked up Gracie, who was too scared to speak, and waded blindly after Martin's voice. I was soon wet to the thighs. Whenever a wave withdrew, invisible crabs clattered round my feet on the spiky rocks. I could dimly see Javo ahead of me with his boots over his shoulder. My ears were full of confusion and the sea thumping. Martin helped me scramble up the last slope, Gracie clinging like a monkey to my back, and in the sudden quiet between waves I saw the gleam of the tent in a small hollow. We stumbled in. The others woke in a mass of rugs and sleeping bags.
âDid you bring anything to eat?' I recognised Lou's voice.
âI couldn't carry it over the rocks,' lied Martin, who had forgotten it in his haste to bring us to the place.
âWe expected you yesterday, mate,' complained Lou gently. âAll we've got left is fuckin' flour. Where have you been?'
People were sitting up among the blankets. We got used to the dark.
âI got held up,' said Martin, already having forgotten the problem, and pulling his jeans off ready to sleep on his full stomach.
âYou are a little weasel,' Lou sighed. He turned over and went back to sleep.
In a shop window in Merimbula I saw my face reflected and gave myself a fright: my hair was wild and stiff with salt, standing on end all over my head. My face was burnt almost back to paleness and my eyes stared out of dirty skin. I liked myself: I looked strong and healthy.
But Martin was unhappy, and to my shame I was not concerned with kindness.
One morning when the others had gone into Eden to buy food, I squatted on the wet sand between two boulders and rolled sandballs with the children. We rolled and rolled, hypnotised, thrusting the sandballs into the ancient pitted surface of the rocks, singing private songs to ourselves. The sun struck the backs of our necks and shoulders, burnt already brown as leather. We sang and rolled and sang, naked and sweaty. Up on top of the rock sat Lou with his leather-bound
Oxford English Verse.
He declaimed softly to the elements, a small smile of emotion trembling on and off his narrow, mournful face:
â. . . and the huge shipwreck of my own esteem . . .'
I went up and over the dried-out rocks to find my hat, and found instead Javo sprawled on a rug in the springy grass, not naked like the rest of us, but pouring sweat in the fierce sun, his hair matted with it, his skin greasy with coconut oil. I lay down next to him and our hot skins touched. Up close, his face was crooked, wrecked and wild. His eyes were as blue as blue stones or as water coloured by some violent chemical. I put my dry, hot arm across his oiled back. He moved like a boy, hard and gentle by turns. I heard him breathing.
A hundred yards away the children's laughter evaporated into the blue, blue air.
When the ranger came in his long white socks, Selena and Lou had come down with hepatitis, and we broke camp in the afternoon, escaping with the scraps of our dignity and our hastily packed possessions. Javo had never learned to drive, and Lou and Selena were too sick; they propped themselves with pillows in the front seat, white and trying not to complain. Thus it was left to me and Martin to ferry the load down south round the coast highway. At first we were all frantic with temper, jealousy and illness. When it was Martin's turn to drive, I sat in the back with Javo. I held both children on my knee, and told them a long hypnotic story about how they gobbled up the world and then each other. The others listened through the roar of the car, and laughed. Javo sat with his long legs stretched out, touching my knee, sometimes stroking my leg with his bitten fingertips.
In the front the others sang and sang. Selena's sweet voice rose finely, illness momentarily forgotten in the steady movement south as dark fell. Javo croaked,
âHey â remember
Sixteen Tons
?' He began to sing, âSome people say a man's made outa mud / A poor man's made outa muscle and blood . . .'
I looked out the window at the moon the shape of a slab of gouda cheese, I smelled the warm grassy air, I felt the bony limbs and soft flesh of the children, I thought, oh, nothing can be as sweet as this: to have two children on my knee and a man beside me and the singing and the summer travelling.
To think this, I needed to forget the unhappiness of Martin who was two feet away from me, driving. And to forget that not one of us would ever have a life that simple, because we were already too far off the track to think about turning back.
That night we forced ourselves past exhaustion and kept going. By the time we reached Melbourne we were beyond speech, too tired to be cordial to each other. I stopped the car outside Gold Street. The sleeping bodies stirred. Lou sat up.
âI see it,' he said, looking at his house, âbut I don't believe it.'
Javo and Martin dropped me and Grace at Delbridge Street. We fell into bed.