Young Adam

by Alexander Trocchi

  When Ella spoke, I gave up trying to find the connection. When I looked at her she had raised the cup to her lips and they were touching the surface of the tea tentatively, pushing away and sucking at the same time. She was looking straight in front of her.

  “I’ll stay aboard if you’d like to go,” I said easily.

  I knew she was going to refuse but I wanted to remind her I was there, in case she had forgotten; but somehow I was afraid to touch her under the table. There was a wall between us, inexplicably there suddenly. Her passion for me had evidently, unaccountably, staled.

  “I’ve no time,” she said. “You can go too.”

  “OK. We’ll go,” Leslie said enthusiastically, and conscious perhaps that my enthusiasm didn’t match his, he added: “We don’t need to stay too long, Joe. Just stretch our legs.”

  “Sure,” I said. And it occurred to me that this way Ella would be alone on the barge.

  The ring of coloured lights was turning. A man was speaking through a megaphone. The stalls opened like bright yellow mouths laughing. The hurdy-gurdy music formed a ceiling over the jutting squares of electric light bulbs. The timbers of the switchback were high over on the left. Leslie led the way, pushing through the crowd, turned, grinned back at me over Jim’s head and then moved on through the crowd.

  Then at one stall the penny rolled down the chute and landed on a square marked “4d”. The woman tossed four pennies flatly across the squared cloth. Leslie retrieved them.

  “Always win,” he said.

  Above, above everything, the night was dark blue. The board at the upper rim of the stall read “Abbott Bros”. It was scored with mud and paint. A man on my left was pressing against me, a weight of shoulder, smelling of brilliantine and tobacco. Leslie had lost. His last penny landed on the dividing line between two numbers. He was calling for change. The moon face of the woman with crinkling blonde hair seemed to swim across the stall at me. The man beside her, a thin little man with a pencil-thin, black moustache, in shirtsleeves and a greasy black soft hat, was looking at a roundabout: her husband.

  “Fivepence,” Leslie said, pointing.

  It was raining. I had been aware of it for the last few minutes.

  “Sorry! Just touching the line as you can well see! Coins must not touch the line!”

  “It’s raining, Les.”

  “Bloody highway robber,” Leslie muttered. He saw now that none of his coins had landed properly.

  “I’ve still got fourpence,” Jim said.

  The shoulder dunted me. “Excuse me,” it said.

  “It’s raining, Les.”

  Somebody was making a commotion at the back of the crowd. I leant forward under the roof of the stall to be out of the rain which spat coldly in. I was thinking of Ella. Jim had won three-pence. The pennies came back to him. Clunk, clunk, clunk. The roundabout had stopped. People, turning up collars, were dismounting hurriedly.

  “It’s raining, Les.”

  “What?”

  “Rain,” I said, exposing it like a magician in the palm of my hand.

  At that moment the commotion touched my shoulder. I turned round. A black face and white teeth, one gold one, was smiling. “Sorry, you with him?” Pointing over my shoulder. “Leslie!”

  Leslie turned.

  “Bob! Bob Mabuski! What the hell are you doing here!”

  They shook hands over Jim’s head.

  “I quit. I’m living here now,” Mabuski said.

  The rain was getting heavier.

  “Won’t last,” someone was saying.

  “I’ve got sevenpence,” Jim said.

  “On the canal. We move off tomorrow morning,” Leslie was saying.

  People were hurrying away under umbrellas. A crush of three rushed past under one mackintosh.

  “Come somewhere where it’s dry.”

  His friend, Mabuski, led the way. We reached shelter under the tall skeleton of the switchback. Leslie introduced me to Bob. They had worked for the same company though they had never served on the same ship. They reminisced about some eastern port, Miki or Kiki, a coaling port where every house was a brothel. After a few minutes the fairground was deserted except for people who had preferred to take shelter here and there amongst the stalls. The rain became heavier still, forming quick puddles on the grass. The music had been turned off. We listened to the noise of the rain.

  “It can’t last,” Leslie said.

  Jim was despondent.

  “Never mind, son, we’ll come back another time.”

  “I don’t want to go back yet,” Jim whimpered.

  “How’s the wife, Leslie?” Mabuski said.

  The wetness rose damply with its smell and the smell of the grass and circulated round our trouser legs.

  “Fine, Bob. How’s yours?”

  “She’s expecting.”

  “Ha!”

  “We’re looking for a house. Got a flat but it won’t be big enough now with the kid.”

  “Sure,” Leslie said. He stared into the curtain of rain. “We’ll make a dash for it in a minute. Would they let the nipper into a pub?”

  Bob shook his head. In the dim light his hair had a grisly appearance and the raindrops moved downwards slowly from his temples to his cheeks. Walls with rain on them, I felt for a moment.

  “Where could we go then?”

  Bob shook his head again. “I’d ask you to my place but the missus is in bed. She’s resting.”

  “I don’t want to go home,” Jim said.

  “Hell, what a night!” Leslie said.

  “You could take him to the pictures,” Bob said. “There’s two of them in town.”

  “Would you like to go to the pictures?”

  Jim said yes, that he didn’t want to go home. Leslie asked me if I would go along. The lights of the roundabout were switched off suddenly, and it stood there, off at a distance, cornet-shaped, ghostly, still. A voice said: “Where’s that bloody tarpaulin?” Evidently they had decided to close down for the night.

  “Better get going soon,” Leslie said. “What d’you think, Joe? You come along?”

  “To the cinema?”

  “Aye.”

  “No thanks,” I said. I lit a cigarette, shielding the match in my hands. The palms, close to my eyes, were the same palms which would raise Ella’s body, causing her to fall apart like an open book pressed upwards at the spine. That gave me a strange feeling. The match went out and I lowered my hands.

  “What’ll you do then?”

  Did he suspect? I didn’t think so.

  “Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’ll walk you into town, have one drink with you and get back to the barge. I’ve got a good book.”

  The rain was slackening, going off, very suddenly, as though some weatherman in the sky had turned off a tap.

  “Don’t know how you can read them things,” Leslie grunted.

  “Come on now,” Bob said. “It might come on again. We’ll make a run for it.”

  We moved out from under the switchback. Everything was dripping, ropes, beams, trees, and the sodden turf squelched underfoot.

  “Watch where you put your dogs,” Bob was saying. “It’s not far. This way. Follow me.”

  His voice might have been that of a professional guide. We walked between two rows of stalls. The lights were going out, one by one. The whole place was closing for the night.

  “Tough on them,” Leslie was saying.

  “Up this road now,” Bob said. “It’s not far.”

  He was walking in front, quickly. Leslie and the kid followed. I tailed along. The air after the rain was pleasant, like air blown in off the sea at night, and the rustling hedges on either side of the road dripped softly.

  “Is there a pub near the picture house?” Leslie said.

  I didn’t catch Bob’s answer. At the end of the road lights were showing, a high light standard and windows like square eyes.

  “Not far now,” Bob said, moving one dark finger across his putty-c
oloured throat. It was like the underside of a tortoise. His grey suede shoes were black with rain.

  I was walking back along the main street, which was nearly deserted. The canal bank would be deserted too. Gravel and rain. The deck of the barge would be slippery. I felt free for the first time since early morning. For me there had been a nightmare aspect about the fair, a private melodrama; I had been contained without being caught up in something which had nothing to do with me, and, being so involved, was cut off from myself, my own direction. And now suddenly, as soon as I left the others, I was conscious of being coerced no longer, and the world came to exist for me again, not as a foreign element to be looked at, but as a climate in which I could become immersed, whose parts were merely an extension of myself, or, the same thing, were continuous with me and I with them.

  It had got colder. I buttoned up my jacket as I walked. I remembered the crinkling blonde hair of the woman who had stood opposite me inside the stall and then the birdlike jerk of the tramp. It was then that it occurred to me it was the dead woman he reminded me of. Something missing. And what remained implied what was missing.

  The rain was still off. I passed the public urinal. I felt somehow a hostility in the glances of the few loungers who hung about it. It struck me as strange how they chose to stand there, alone or in small groups, smoking, idling away the time. One of them laughed. He had made some comment or other which I didn’t catch. A policeman passed me on a bicycle. Funny – I always notice policemen. The tyres swished on the wet road, sending up sprinkles of dirty water, and his cloak blew out like a tent behind him. I supposed he was going home.

  Then I was returning down the road between the hedges. Hawthorn, I think. I could hear them dripping on the grass and bracken at either side of me. A cat rose from the ditch, darted across the road, and went through the hedge at the other side. Someone was walking in front of me, going in the same direction. I knew that because his footsteps didn’t get any louder. I wondered who it was. I slowed down until he had passed out of earshot. Not far then. I passed the fairground. Of course. That was where he was going. A few lights were still burning. I heard a woman’s laugh. It was not unlike Ella’s, flung and uncontrolled, the laughter of the slums. Farther on, I heard two men talking quietly behind the hedge. By the time I reached the canal everything was silent except for the ambiguous presence of the canal itself. There is a noise that is peculiar to inland water at night, a kind of radiation that is not exactly sound and not exactly smell; it is closer to touch; its being touches one at the pores. There was no one on the footpaths. I walked carefully along the path and boarded the barge.

  It was dark in the cabin and deadly quiet except for the tick of the clock over their bunk. She had gone to bed.

  I moved with my hands in front of me like a blind man. I found a chair and sat down on it. As my eyes became accustomed to the dark I became aware of Ella’s breathing. She was in the big bunk and somehow I was convinced she was not asleep. She must have known it was I. She must have heard me come down through the companionway.

  “Ella!” My voice wasn’t loud.

  She didn’t answer. Dimly the clock face reflected what seemed to be an eternity behind the glass, as though there were a tunnel there leading into an obscure distance. I saw Ella’s shape under the blanket, the edge of the table, the paraffin lamp, dark masses of varying densities at my elbows and at my feet and at the other side of the cabin. A shaft of lesser darkness came down through the companionway.

  “Ella!” Louder this time.

  I put out my hand and touched her shoulder. It was only then that I realized she was crying, not loudly, but softly into the pillow. I could not see why. My fingers, conscious of their own awkwardness now, were still on her shoulder.

  At that moment she moved her arm.

  “Go away, Joe! I don’t want to see you!”

  “You’re mad,” I said uncertainly. I was mystified.

  “Go away, Joe!”

  “For God’s sake!”

  As I said it I stepped backwards and my arm caught the long globe of the oil lamp which tilted and fell over. The glass splintered as it crashed on to the deck.

  “Now look what you’ve done!” She sat up.

  “I can’t see a bloody thing,” I said. “Wait till I strike a match.”

  Ella swung herself off the bunk.

  “Give them to me,” she said sharply, “and stand back out of the way until I clear it up.”

  I felt her snatch the matchbox from my hand and a fraction of a second later a match splurted into flame between her fingers. In the sudden, brief eruption of the match I could see her clearly, her shadow on the woodwork, and the clock with its brass ring. At that moment it struck nine, its small, brassy chime magnified by the artificiality of the situation. The match went out and she lit another. She was bending, trying to see where the lamp had fallen. The cabin smelled overpoweringly of paraffin.

  “It’s leaking,” she said.

  “Have you not got a candle?”

  “Jim used the last one. I meant to get some.”

  She didn’t appear to be aware I was watching her. She was wearing a very loose white slip which hung on loose strings from her shoulders so that I could see the rise of her breasts and their corkish nipples clearly in the match light. The slip clung tightly about her relaxed belly and stopped just short of her knees like a badly-fitting curtain. Her thick, fleshy legs were planted firmly on broad feet on the wooden planks of the deck and her heavy upper arm slewed from side to side as she cupped her hands round the match to direct its beam downwards. I noticed that she had a mole on her side, almost under the armpit where the hairs grew thickly and twisted into wisps. She smelled warm, of sleep-sweat, of the bed.

  “Watch your feet,” I said gently. “You’ll get them cut.”

  She located the lamp.

  “Can you see where the brush is?” she said, turning towards me.

  I was barring her way.

  “Joe...”

  “They won’t be back for a couple of hours at least,” I said. “I left them in a cinema.”

  She was going to protest but when I moved against her she drew in her breath instead. I held her firmly against me, my thumbs under her armpits, massaging the damp hairs, my fingers like claws at the soft flesh of her shoulders. She didn’t resist. My hands dropped to her haunches, pulling her to me, so that her thick abdomen came hard against my own clothed body. She buried her head at my shoulder.

  Afterwards, as we lay in each other’s arms beneath the rough blanket (she wouldn’t hear of our going between the sheets), the sides of her abdomen and her flanks were covered in a thin lather of sweat. We breathed in and out together, deeply, so that our bodies met together and fell away again, leaving a slight prickle on the skin.

  Outside, it began to rain. We could hear its hushed fall on the water, the gravel, the wood. It was there with our breathing, a curtain of sound, something beyond us to which we both listened as, with our eyes open, and with our own thoughts, we looked at one another in the dark.

  Part Two

  1

  GO BACK TO THE BEGINNING.

  It’s an odd thing, or rather it was an odd thing. Thank God it’s not likely to happen again.

  I wanted to talk about Ella, about how she suddenly came to me, like a brainwave, on the very day we dragged the dead woman from the river. For that reason, and not to complicate the issue, I said nothing about Cathie. At least I didn’t show where she fitted into the picture. She was there all the time of course, but you didn’t know it. She was the corpse.

  I nearly said my corpse. But a corpse, strictly speaking, doesn’t belong to anyone, and though I could have laid some claim to her body while it lived, I like to think I have no claim, not even a murderer’s, on her corpse.

  I killed Cathie. There’s no point in denying it since no one would believe me. The police, with their usual sensationalism, began at once to investigate the possibility of foul play. That was according to
the newspapers. What it meant in fact was that they were already looking for a murderer. Well, they found one, but we’ll come to that later. What convinced them, I suppose, was the fact that she was wearing no clothes. That, they no doubt felt, indicated the presence of a man. At least one man. I’m with them there, of course. It’s the kind of conclusion I might jump to myself. You too, perhaps. But the assumption that because a man has sexual intercourse with a woman in somewhat unseemly circumstances, because later the woman’s body is found floating in one of our navigable rivers – the assumption that the man did her in afterwards seems to me to be entirely without justification.

  The newspapers, conscious of their status as guardians of public morals, encouraged the idea. The general public swallowed it greedily. Leslie believed. Bob believed. Ella believed. So I went on keeping my mouth shut.

  Go back to the beginning, the one I chose, though I might have gone back a year or even ten to find the beginnings of it all, to that morning we dragged her from the river. It was an odd thing that I, who saw Cathie topple into the river, should have been the one to find her body the following morning at one mile’s distance from where she fell in. I felt at the time that it was ludicrous, so incredible that if Leslie had not happened to come up on deck at the time I should most certainly have refused to accept such an improbable event and tried to thrust her away again with the boat-hook.

  Unfortunately, Leslie slouched up at the wrong moment and it occurred to him on seeing the body in the water that it was our duty to fish it out. At least that’s what he said.

  The face of the man in the cloth cap came into the news between an air crash, forty-seven dead, and a financial conference to be held in Paris. The dotted image was set obscurely in the page, a glint of white in a host of darker dots, as though the face were trying to sink into the background and merge with it. The caption underneath read:

  CLYDE MURDER

  Man charged

  Daniel Goon, plumber, of 42 Black Street, Glasgow, was today remanded in custody at the Central Police Court. He is charged with the murder of Catherine Dimly, 27, sometime actress, of 2, Noble Grove, Glasgow. Goon is the father of four children. Miss Dimly’s body was discovered two weeks ago by two bargemen who recovered it from the River Clyde.