Monkey Grip (27 page)

‘You mean in the car?'(The clean washing between us, smelling sweetly of hot cotton and childhood.)

‘Yeah.'

‘You call that an explanation? I was really hurt by what you said.'

‘I know you were.' Laughs. ‘I was embarrassed.'

‘So you should have been.'

Long pause. He drank, I looked at my reflection in the dark, clean window, strange bare face above a small bowl out of which I had been eating fruit salad.

‘Well, I hope we get it together eventually,' I said with a sigh.

‘The day comes ever closer,' he said, quite seriously.

Me, I had my doubts.

It was Christmas and Gracie went with Jack. I tried to find clothes which would serve as a disguise when I visited my grandmother, but nothing could soften the impact of my haircut.

‘You in the Hare Krishna?' asked a friend of my brother-in-law's, rudely staring. I looked at him and he took a swig of his scotch.

My uncle, or ‘the big boss' as his sister called him with not quite enough irony, filled my grandmother's house with his ruling class confidence. I watched him from inside my peculiar head. I thought of him in boardrooms: very expensive clothes, Italian shoes; big loud laugh, the expansiveness of being able to buy the whole world. His wife, whom I had always liked and whom he called ‘Duchess', was also there, smiling her own benign version of that ineffable certainty. My father, behind her back, called her a ‘bottle blonde'. Her clothes were of stiff white cotton with huge black patterns, worn tight over her solid, overfed, packed flesh. A long string of pearls hung down to her waist. Her perfume and her sureness filled the small passageway where she paused a second at the sight of my shorn, small head and faded clothes, remembered who I was, and smiled again without a break in her stream.

‘Hul-lo, Nora!' she drawled in her breathy voice, laying her scented, firm cheek momentarily against mine. A small rush of voluptuous pleasure in her fullness stopped me in my tracks: as a child I had felt like swooning when she talked; I used to breathe her in.

I sank into a cool, fat armchair and watched my uncle, big-headed, top-heavy, seal-like, leaning with one hand against the mantelpiece, drink in the other hand as if he had been born holding it, making the family laugh with his rolling voice and irrepressible surges of humour, effortless and absolutely in his element. I watched him and thought,

‘You are the enemy, mate. What am I going to do?'

We ate wonderful food, turkey stuffed with chestnuts, oh, the fruits of the earth but I don't want them here, though I take them, from the hands of Mammon himself. I thought of Joss eating millet, I tried to imagine a feast in his meagre life, I remembered his joy which cost him only complete capitulation to some force I did not understand: love, or an immense inevitability of things.

We came out into the hot, bright sunshine and saw my uncle's silver-blue Rolls parked at the kerb.

‘Look,' said my youngest sister. ‘A Royal Children's Hospital entry sticker.'

‘Hmmph!' I muttered, half to my father who was walking beside me. ‘Just another privilege of the ruling class.'

‘All right!' said my father, half-laughing, half-protesting. ‘That's enough.' But he knew.

After the huge meal I would have helped clean up, but there was a dishwashing machine and no immediately visible kitchen system, so I stood about helplessly, unable to make myself useful. By four o'clock the men had all fallen asleep in their chairs and the children were fiddling fractiously with their toys. I got on my bike and rode off through Kew Junction, up the hill, along past the gardens of Raheen and the Catholic properties and the pine-scented dry ground of the edge of the golf course, over the hump to where Studley Park Road opened out in front of me: half a mile of steady, inexorable downhill run. I let go and flew down it in ecstasy, head thrown back, mouth open, feet at quarter to three, my bag of Christmas presents bumping against my back. The wind pushed at my front, the mudguards rattled so fiercely I thought the machine would fly apart. Down and round the wide metal curve, over the river almost invisible among humped trees, on my left the convent low down on its mediaeval banks, ancient trees shadowing its courts; and on to Johnston Street, slowing down from flight and back to legwork along the narrow road between the rows of closed factories.

Full summer in the city: chlorine and rock and roll. Burnt brown on the concrete; washed clean, shampooed and dried; sitting at the kitchen table looking out through the bead fly curtain at the sky. Nights at the Kingston: dressed like an Alabama hooker in secondhand white satin, I take the money at the door and drink scotch brought to me by Paddy: I look at her glossy hair pinned back over her ears, I like her, and when the place is full we dance together, shouldering in for a spot on the packed floor. Oh, so drunk! which I do not realise until the music stops and Philip begins to count the money in my bag and the crowd thins out and I am sitting in an abandoned posture with my legs apart, hot and sweaty and completely happy.

In the dunny I ask a passing girl,

‘I'm afraid I might've bled all over the back of my dress – have I?'

‘No!' she answers cheerfully. ‘I was a bit worried
I
might've, too, but I haven't.'

‘It is just the sweat,' I say, and we part.

Cobby came home from America: Cobby, whose wit, as Javo used to say, was ‘as dry as an eight-day-old bone'.

I headed out the freeway again, into the huge grey sky over Tullamarine. At seven o'clock I was hanging out in the departure lounge; at 7.12 the doors opened and I was watching for her blonde head. Out she came all dressed in baggy black like a Viet Cong. She dropped her wicker bag in the middle of the gateway and we flung ourselves at each other and both began to cry and laugh, and I moved the bag so people could pass, and we hugged again and again; I forgot other people were there, we were saying ‘Oh, oh!' and hugging each other like anything.

We went up to the Golden Nugget bar. I left her in the middle of the crowded room with a small island of baggage while I went to the bar and ordered. I glanced back at her and she pantomimed a wave – bent her knees and grinned with a closed mouth and waved one hand in a circle in front of her face – I burst out laughing, foolish at the bar in my flowery dress and funny haircut, holding a purse in one hand and two dollar bills in the other.

We picked up her beat-up, collapsing suitcase tied together with rope, and packed her things into the car and drove home. I mimicked her American voice: ‘uh huh', ‘do you have . . .?' and ‘far-out!' At the house we ate a meal the men had cooked. Cobby ‘took a shower'.

‘You know what they don't have over there?' she yelled through the louvre windows. ‘Methylated spirits.'

‘Don't they call it “rubbing alcohol”?' said Gerald.

‘Is that what it is?' she said vaguely, her mind already on something else.

On New Year's Eve Angela streamed drunkenly into our kitchen.

‘Well, it's finally happened,' she announced.

The ring of faces turned up to her where she stood poised dramatically on the step, one foot up, one down, hands out to balance.

‘What?'

‘They've started fucking.'

Everybody knew who she meant: Willy and Rita.

She hoisted herself on to the high bench, took a deep breath, and poured out a great flood of forbidden feelings, making us shriek with guilty laughter. We surprised ourselves by the simplicity and violence of our identification with
her
in this most ancient of situations, the one we had theorised endlessly about for the past four years: until Eve made her statement, leaning back against the bench with her arms folded:

‘Yep – there's one thing you just
don't do,
and that's take away another woman's man.'

I stared at her.

‘
Eve!
What are you
saying?
‘

She looked defensive and cross.

‘Well – you know what I mean.'

‘But – if you think
that,
what've we been agonising about all this time? All that stuff about breaking out of monogamy? Jesus, Eve!'

Angela, too miserable to care about theory, took another swig from her glass of beer.

‘I told him I wouldn't fuck with him again while he was seeing her.' She turned her eyes sideways to me with a childlike, tearful smile. ‘But . . . I'm scared he might . . .
rape
me,' she whispered hopefully. ‘He's really strong, you know.'

I started to laugh in spite of myself, thinking of Willy, the most unlikely rapist north of the Yarra. She was laughing too, or almost. I wrapped my arms round her.

‘Oh,
Ange.
You're
nuts
!'

‘
Anyway –
' recovering herself with a sniff and a shrug; ‘so I said to him, “Go ahead and get it out of your system, but you needn't think I'm gonna share you with
her
– it's just a matter of pride – just
get out
,” I told him, “and don't come back till you've finished”.'

She started to cry, rubbing the tears off her beautiful, clear-skinned face, sitting up there on the bench dangling her roxy pink shoes down against the cupboard door.

‘Oooh, I hate her, I hate her!' she sobbed, drumming her heels with such abandon that we hardly knew whether to laugh or cry; and I thought about Rita and the way she turned her face up and fluttered and shone; how she hid her own private fear and wretchedness; how she gave herself generously, without reserve, loved too loyally, without criticism; and how we all thrashed about swapping and changing partners – like a very complicated dance to which the steps had not yet been choreographed, all of us trying to move gracefully in spite of our ignorance, because though the men we knew often left plenty to be desired, at least in their company we had a little respite from the grosser indignities.

On New Year's Day Cobby and I did some acid and everyone drove down to St Kilda to the Boardwalk gig. I sat in the front of the ute with Gracie on my knee, my stomach riding airily on the movement of the big car. An assortment of foxy types in baseball caps and sun visors, and yellow-faced junkies unflattered by the clear sunlight, swarmed loosely round the old concrete stands. If you got too close to the buildings the smell of piss became overpowering: the smell of every concrete dressing shed on every civilised beach in Australia. But it was a day of rock and roll; Angela stood beside the mixer grinning proudly at Willy oblivious behind his drums; and down at the water's edge the lesbians and the unaligned women and the kids danced on the hard sand in a steady, warm wind that came ploughing in off the bay, oh, the looseness of the spine! and moving in the streaming salty air.

In the evening, when everything had quietened down, I worked with Gerald on the back yard, planting lawn seed. He was pulling the roller across the yard and I was standing on the back porch watching. I saw his thin, hard arms.

‘Hey,' I said suddenly, let's get into bed and
fuck.
'

‘What?' He looked up, smiling. I said it again.

‘OK. Let's do that.'

We finished the grass and came into my room. He lay on my bed and I wandered round the room putting clothes away. The doorbell rang. He went to open.

‘It might be Clive with the acid!' I yelled.

‘No, it's not Clive with the acid,' came back Gerald's voice from the hall.

‘It's Philip with a paper bag,' called Philip, and they walked past my door to the kitchen. I went out and sat with them at the kitchen table.

‘Do you want to go up to your room and play some stuff?' said Philip.

‘Sure,' said Gerald, and without a word to me they got up and clomped along the passage to Gerald's room.

Oh well. Back to the purdah.

I went over to Peel Street and found Rita tidying her room. Her face lit up sharply when she saw me. Quick as a flash she hit me with the news.

‘Guess who Javo is hanging out with in Hobart?'

‘Oh . . . I guess it's probably . . .' I began, but she cut across me to announce:

‘Sylvia, Mark's sister.' She wasn't looking at me, but was sorting through some papers on the table.

‘Oh yeah? Can't say I'm surprised.'

I remembered the one time I had met Sylvia, last summer in her small kitchen; how I wandered through her house while she and Javo awkwardly talked, and came upon a huge photo of him, gaunt and smacked out in some show he'd done, pinned to her bedroom wall.

I imagined him in her house, in her bed, waking up grumbling to the shouts of her children. I felt that small leakage of pain, which dissipated itself immediately.

‘I'm just going over to the tower to talk to Angela,' said Rita, pulling a comical face of apprehension.

‘What are you going to say?' I asked, quite curious.

‘Oh, I don't even know why I'm going. I'm really scared of her. I just want to say that I don't think she ought to blow it with Willy just because of what's happened. They've got something really good together.'

‘Do you think anything more is likely to happen between you and Willy?'

‘Oh . . . yeah, probably.'

Over Angela's dead body, I thought privately, noticing how in Rita's presence I forgot the image of her as nothing but a scatter-brained twit which Angela had been unscrupulously promoting in her accounts of the situation. I drove her over to the tower and felt like hugging her when she got out of the car, but dared only give her a small tousle to the hair.

Gerald and I walked over to Rathdowne Street to borrow Georgie's bike, on a sunny afternoon. The front door was opened by Lillian, also there on a visit. At the unexpected sight of her, I instantly felt she was too close to me: I wanted to take several steps backwards, instead of which, under the influence of social impetus, I stepped forward and into the house, feeling my eyes drop and constantly go past her, as if to escape the intensity of her notice. I was afraid she would touch me, and my flesh shrank at the prospect; of course, she did no such thing, but merely smiled at me from inside her mop of salty, untidy hair and said, ‘Hullo, Nora,' allowing me to be courteous.