Monkey Grip Read Free Page A

THAN SHAKING HANDS
    It took me months to see the junk patterns. I wished to trust, and so I trusted. When events did not please me, my dreams reworked them.
    On the night of the first party, I went alone. Javo was there, but he did not greet me, and sat like some sulky adolescent with his back to the room, hunched over the record player. The room was full of people I liked: I lounged about and wisecracked pleasantly with them until midnight, when I wheeled my bike outside and coasted home downhill under the big trees in those wide empty streets, sailing through tides of warm night air. I fell asleep beside my open window, and my unconscious obligingly furnished me with a more agreeable version of the evening’s happenings.
    I dreamed: Javo and I left the party together. As we opened the door, we found ourselves in the country, stepping off the threshold on to blond grass, a hill sloping down in front of us with a double wheeltrack half overgrown; faint evening sunlight. We ran down the hill together, laughing and exuberant, leaping over tussocks, having to dodge small clusters of brown ducks which were waddling flatbacked through the grass.
    â€˜Don’t tread on my ducks!’ shouted the farmer, appearing somewhere near. ‘I have to sell them.’
    It was easy to avoid them, though we were running so fast that it was almost like flying. At the bottom of the hill we came to a wooden fence with a stile, and stopped.
    At that moment Javo walked into my bedroom, and I woke up.
    He sat on the bed. We hugged each other. I sat against the bedroom wall with my knees up and my head between them.
    â€˜Oh, hey,’ he said, taking hold of me by the shoulders. ‘I am a self-engrossed slob. I don’t want to make you sad.’
    I did not want him to see that he could. So, there I sat on my bed in the middle of a hot summer night, caught between my dream and the memory of what had really happened.
    If I had enough to spare, why not share it?
    He touched me tentatively, as if he wasn’t quite sure where to find me.
    â€˜Is that as good as it can be?’ he asked humbly. I showed him how, and we fucked, we made love; we lay side by side.
    â€˜I love,’ he said in a quiet voice, ‘the moistureless way in which we kiss.’ Exactly like that, he said it. ‘I love the relationship you have with your body. I love the way your face is showing signs of wear. I love the way you talk when you’re coming – the way you become a child. Your face looks twelve years old.’
    I listened in astonishment.
    We slept, and Gracie woke me early, and he slept on and I got up.
    I found the second party in a crowded garden, its boundaries hidden in darkness. I smoked a couple of joints and took a cup of brandy to a little pozzy I found in a dry flower-bed under some bushes. I sat in my safe place, dirty and tired and not caring what I looked like. I drank the brandy and observed the social flow. The part of this which concerned me was a peculiar triangle: Javo, Martin, and Jessie whose relationship with Javo a year before had been destroyed by his smack habit. From my position on the sidelines I could see Javo’s eyes on her, how he laughed eagerly at everything she said and watched her hungrily. But Martin too kept his eyes on her face, and she remained, in her demeanour, uncommitted, floating on the force of their attention, her expression changing from laughter to a vaguely detached and discontented look, her blue eyes under her thick red fringe drifting away to some private speculation. The three of them stood in a close ring, passing joints and making a lot of theatrical noise.
    It was so much like watching a movie that my tired brain simply observed, and feelings scarcely registered.
    I saw them move uneasily apart, together, apart again; I sensed their preoccupation with each other as clearly as if threads had connected them across the dark, leafy garden.
    Javo retired to a hammock near