Monkey Grip (34 page)

‘Have you?'

I looked at him a bit longer. I saw that his face had somehow darkened, lost its glow, become opaque again. I did not know the reason, and saw no way in which I might enquire after it. No more conversation seemed forthcoming, so I waded off. I felt unsatisfied.

Ten minutes later I encountered him again in the middle of the crowded pool. I called out to him. He turned round, up to his shoulders in the water.

‘Look, Javo,' I said. ‘I'd rather that . . . if you didn't feel like keeping an arrangement . . . it'd be better if you didn't make it in the first place.' I sounded so blunt. All I wanted to do was state my mind. His face clouded, he turned his head stiffly from side to side, as he did when he felt himself attacked.

‘I
told
you,' he said angrily, ‘there were other circumstances. We didn't get back from the beach until eleven o'clock – there were four other people whose wishes had to be taken into account.'

It rose to my lips to point out in a teacherish tone that if he'd known he had to be back by seven, he shouldn't have gone (Hank had told me they hadn't even left Melbourne till five); but I heard myself arguing the unarguable, and disliked the prospect; so I turned and swam away before I had time to open my mouth. I climbed out of the water and wandered back to the crowd; get out, get out, came the sensible message, loud and clear. I packed up my things and slung my bag over my shoulder. I'd taken two steps when Lou put his hand on my arm and said,

‘Hey, Nora! You're not leaving, are you?'

‘Yep. I am not very comfortable here.'

‘Come up the other end of the pool,' he said. ‘I wanted to have a word with you.'

‘OK.' I dumped my bag and sandals and walked up the hot concrete to the big steps. As we walked I gave him a quick account of what had been going on.

‘But you're absolutely number one to Javo!' he protested. ‘He's always saying that. And you are to me, too.'

Cold comfort.

‘You've got to see it from his point of view,' Lou went on, predictably enough. ‘He's got to see what it's like, living without you.'

Lou was right about that. I stared at a small, pale-green bobble which was hanging from his ear-ring and moved against his fine, unshaven jaw as he spoke. He seemed faintly agitated by what I'd been saying, and it struck me that he'd taken me aside in order to find out what my attitude was towards
him.
And this turned out to be the case.

‘I've been wondering,' he hazarded, ‘how you were feeling about spending some time with
me
.'

‘Good!' I replied brightly. I thought, ‘I must always seem maddeningly vague when he brings up this subject.' ‘I'd like that,' I added encouragingly. He gave a small, uncertain smile, and slid his green eyes sideways to examine my face. Which was probably dead-pan.

‘Of course,' he said, ‘now we've moved over to Prahran, things will be a bit different.'

‘But you'll be getting a phone, won't you?'

‘Yeah.' I privately thought that not one of his household, hippies that they were, would be efficient enough to get a telephone organised. Lou laid a bony arm across my shoulders and glanced sidelong at me again.

‘Nora, you get sexier the older you get!' he declared, apparently meaning it. I burst out laughing. ‘No – I know that sounds clumsy,' he protested, laughing too, ‘but I mean it! It's true!'

I looked down at the sparkling, chemical-blue water with its herd of jostling bodies. I thought, yes, down here I am older and sexier and in some untouchable way freer than I am anywhere else. The summer was coming to an end and with it a unique and inexplicable sense of perfectness. I stood up and said,

‘I have to split now, Lou. Got to go out at five o'clock. I guess I'll see you when I come back from Anglesea.'

‘OK,' he said, still looking faintly dissatisfied as if there were something left unsaid. He went down the steps behind me. I went to kiss him goodbye but the peak of my cap knocked him gently on the forehead and kept our faces apart. He dived in and I walked back to the gypsy encampment at the shallow end. As I approached it, I saw Javo sitting disconsolately on the brick edge of the plantation, elbows on knees, face downturned, in a posture of weariness and disillusionment. Funny: my heart just simply softened, all the anger ran away. I went up to him and sat beside him on the hot bricks. He sensed straight away the ending of hostilities. He turned to me with a small smile and put his arm round me. At that moment I noticed Claire: she had removed herself from the big group and was lying on her towel on the top level of the concrete steps, reading under her straw hat. I understood without a word being spoken that everything would not be easy between them.

Javo said, ‘I've had a terrible time today, Nor!'

We laughed.

‘What happened?'

‘It'd take too long to explain – hours.'

‘Oh, come on.'

‘Nah – I'll tell you about it next time we see each other.'

‘It'll never happen. You'll promise to come round and then not show,' I said without venom. He shook his head. I gave up the pursuit of knowledge. We sat in silence for a moment. I got up and said,

‘I'm going home. I'm going out later.'

‘Who with?'

‘Georgie.'

‘Georgie the Pick, eh?' He smiled at me, crooked.

‘Yep. That's the one.' I picked up my bag again. ‘I'm going up to say hullo to Claire.' I sprang up the hot steps towards where she was lying on her own. She either didn't see me coming, or pretended not to. I was dancing from foot to foot on the burning concrete.

‘Good day!' I said. She looked up. She was reading a book I had lent her a couple of days before she had started fucking with Javo:
A Woman of My Age
by Nina Bawden. She squinted at me in the sunlight.

‘Oh – hullo.'

I burst out: ‘Why don't you come and see me?'

She looked puzzled and slightly shocked. ‘You mean – at your house?'

‘Yeah. Come around and see me.'

I wanted to say, ‘Why
haven't
you been to see me? We were friends before all this, weren't we? Why don't you come? Why haven't you come?' But I just looked at her face, wrinkled up against the sun, her tinted glasses down over the bridge of her nose, and waited for her reply.

‘All right,' she said, still uncertain. I took the wheel:

‘That's a good novel, isn't it.'

‘Yes,' she said, probably relieved to be off contentious ground. ‘Jack took it away before I could read it; when he brought it back to me he said, “You've got to read this – it's terrific”.'

The concrete was too hot for me to stand still. I danced from foot to foot. ‘Gotta go – can't stand the
heat!
See you later.'

‘See you.'

I skipped down again. I went back to where Javo was sitting.

‘I'll see you later, mate.'

He looked up at me, and surprised me by putting his hands on my bare skin, at the waist. He lifted up his face and we kissed goodbye. I walked away.

I picked my way between the reclining bodies of my friends. As I passed Rita, she turned up to me and asked in a stage whisper,

‘
What'd he say?
'

I shivered with embarrassment.

‘I don't want to talk about it. See you.'

I was comforted by Javo's gentleness; but I knew the gentleness of the departing to the one left behind. Still plenty of hard times coming.

I dragged myself off to Anglesea to try and get sane again. In the car on the way down the highway we smoked a joint which gave me a very bad twenty minutes, fear and sickness. I was too afraid to speak. I saved myself by poking a hole in the top of an orange and sucking the juice.

No-one talked much, in the ugly house. I had forgotten the endless peaceful hours, unpunctuated by duty, of life without children. Selena played her guitar quietly; I slept on my bed all afternoon, and felt my hard shell start to soften. Convalescence.

‘It's happened so quickly this time!' said Selena. ‘Usually it takes me days to slow down.'

I went to the beach by myself in the late afternoon. I rolled up my jeans and stood on the wet sand where the waves barely reached. I stared at my brown feet. I just stood there. I only stayed on the beach for about twenty minutes. Then I climbed back up the ramp and walked very slowly back to the house.

The waves hissed all night.

I was balancing myself out nicely, there, in the quietness. When the existence of Javo, and of Gerald, and of Gracie crossed my mind, it had no edge or sharpness. It was merely a series of blurred, dull facts. Whenever I woke from dozing, I found the sky as grey, the surf noise as steady, the house as peaceful as they had been when I lay down hours before. I had no idea what the others were doing, nor what time it was. Selena began to shift things in the kitchen, preparing to cook a meal. I knew when she passed my door because I heard the brushing of her long skirt, the faintest clack of the silver bangles she wore. I picked up
Washington Square.
By the time I looked up from it, I had read half of it.

I had a bath. I looked at myself in the mirror. I thought that my body was carrying too much flesh. In the bath I lay looking at my brown skin with its white summer stripes. My belly looked soft. I wished for it to be hard, as it had once been. I heard as if in a trance the merry voices in the kitchen: the others were exchanging stories of long-ago school experiences.

I came and lay on the bed between courses of the meal: I wanted very eagerly to know whether Catherine Sloper would marry Morris Townsend. I was lying on my stomach, reading fast and absorbed, when Selena came in.

‘Hey, Nora. Why don't you stay a bit longer?' She was holding a cigarette between her fingers. ‘It's good here; and you need a rest.'

‘I might stay,' I said, looking at her gentle face and the way her hair straggled at her round cheeks. ‘I'll ring up Eve tomorrow.'

We smiled at each other and she went out of the room. I wondered if I seemed very unhappy. No-one was pressuring me. I was alone a lot, and not engaged in conversation. But when I looked in the mirror, I saw a preoccupied face, a worried head, a body out of sync with the mind. When I thought of staying on, small splinters of irrational fear prickled in my mind: Gracie will die, she will get sick and die without me. Also, disconnected fragments tumbled about: if I keep out of his way for longer than he is expecting, Javo will be surprised, and miss me. I remembered longing for his cracked voice, last winter when I went to my parents' house: ‘It's me, Javo. Come back.'

I realised I had a stream of thoughts about him which ran for the most part below conscious level. I noticed jets spurting up from this stream: comparisons with other relationships I knew of which had weathered massive changes and shifts of balance; small crumbs of hope that he would find he missed the familiarity of my company, or that his gestures of comfort had meant more than a gentle goodbye. I grieved for these hopes, and their hopelessness.

I slept, and slept. When I was not asleep I was reading. I finished the book, and rather than lie there doing nothing but stare in front of me at the ugly fan-shaped light on the bare white wall, I instantly took up
To the Lighthouse
and plunged into it. I read half a page and put it down and stared at the light on the wall. In some indescribable way, staring at it was very peaceful. After a little while I went on reading, and soon I fell asleep. The others were out in the kitchen. Once I woke up to an extra loud burst of laughter. I lay in my blanket half-stunned, wondering how it was that I'd lost all my customary social urges. For a few moments I felt a small ache of loneliness. I wished for Claire to be with me as we had been before all this went wrong. I thought about her reticent, pale face. But she wasn't there and she wasn't coming, so I shifted in the bed and fell asleep again.

In the morning I rolled over and opened my eyes. Selena was a hump in the other bed; along the window sill she had laid her rings and ear-rings in a row. The sky was still cloudy, but the sun was fighting through that clear line at horizon level, laying a strip of light, uninterfered with, across the tops of the ti-tree scrub. Right across the low, determined ti-tree I could see a line of marram grass, vaguely shadowed within the curve of the dunes, and at its roots that cold, greyish-yellow sand, so familiar to my feet from my earliest childhood that in my imagination I felt it then – cold, cold, silken, both firm and yielding.

I walked on my own round the beach to the river mouth and along the road to the township. I looked curiously at my strong brown calves with their familiar scars, and newer marks from this year's summer. I tied my blue jumper round my waist and attached my sandals to its sleeves to leave my hands free. I walked along in the difficult sand, squinting under my cap peak. It was the first time I had felt cheerful in days. I sang to myself. I thought about the night Javo and Martin and Gracie and I had arrived at Disaster Bay. I picked my way across pointed rocks, hearing my own panting and exclamations as I toiled. I glanced down at my shoulders which the march flies were busily attacking, and which were covered with brown sunspots of various sizes. I walked steadily. I did not get tired.

In the town I rang Eve.

‘I am going to stay one more night. Is that all right?'

‘It sure is. Grace is terrific when you aren't here.' I would have liked to ask if anyone had seen Javo, but it didn't seem appropriate, and I hung up with my question unanswered.

On the beach I lay naked in the meagre sunlight with Selena, peering out comfortably under the peak of my cap, and talked about Javo. I laughed wholeheartedly about it for the first time.

That evening Cobby arrived in Claire's car. She brought no news of Javo. Finally I asked,