It was not my sympathy for the plumber which took me to Black Street. I was drawn there in the vague hope of finding out something which would make my own position clearer. Somewhere, perhaps at that very moment, a clerk in a police station would be fingering a sheaf of documents. Later, he would walk along a corridor in some building or other and put the file on someone’s desk. The anonymity of the men who at that very moment might be working against me not because they had a personal grudge against me but because they were part of an impersonal machine whose function it was to maintain order, to explain the presence of an ambiguous thing like a corpse, to see that, if foul play was deduced, someone atoned for it that the moral structure of the system might be preserved – that was horrifying. These men, whoever they were, would sleep with their wives, take their children for a picnic on Sundays, mention casually to a friend that investigations were proceeding satisfactorily, much in the same way as they might talk about a crossword puzzle. There was something nightmarish about it – my nightmare, for the machine might include me in its intricate pattern-making at any moment.
I walked to the end of the street and back again. It was a short street of tenements in a poor quarter of the town, bleak and grey, and looked like any one of the streets surrounding it. There was nothing to see: few men, shambling women wrapped in shawls. I looked up as the shrill cry of a woman issued from one of the windows. She was leaning over the sill, her flat, red, suspicious face craning out from the window above her flaccid breasts like some grotesque figurehead. She clutched a towel to her breast in a thin red hand. Her mouth hung open as though to receive the reply of the woman to whom she had called, a short, stout woman, hatless, with bare pink legs and broken shoes, clutching a baby in a grey shawl about her. I felt depressed. I turned away. A coal cart moved slowly towards me at the other side, but there was nothing special about the Clydesdale horse which hauled it nor about the man who walked beside it, who, as it had now begun to rain, wore an empty coal bag like a monk’s cowl at his head and shoulders. He walked in front of the horse and slightly to one side of it, shuffling his big boots along the gutter.
Above, a ribbon of white sky, just beginning to be overclouded, from which rain fell in slender, broken javelins. I felt the first drops break on the shoulder of my blue serge jacket. My hair didn’t get wet, for that day I was wearing one of Leslie’s cloth caps as a badge of my insignificance. There was no sign of a policeman. The street that had housed and would if necessary sacrifice a murderer to society at large bore no singular mark of its distinction. No black or yellow cross was painted at the close numbered 42. No curious group gathered nearby to talk of omens. I stood out of the rain in a close near the corner a dozen yards away for about ten minutes, smoked a cigarette, trying to absorb something, I don’t know what, and felt foolish and vaguely false. There was nothing to be done. I had no plan in mind. It had occurred to me to visit a neighbourhood bar on the off chance that I might overhear something, anything. But when I got there I didn’t feel like it. Some kids were coming home from school, kicking an empty can along the street, and I wondered if any of them were his kids. That made me wonder what it would mean to them now to have Goon as a father. If a policeman had been shot, or even a man knifed in the street, the kids might have turned the notoriety to some account. But a sex crime was something shameful like a bad smell. It was tough on the kids. It must have occurred to me vaguely that I might catch a glimpse of the wife: fat, thin, scrawny, red, bow-legged? What was she thinking? Would she stand by him? There must have been some connection between Goon and Cathie, or they wouldn’t have arrested him. I wondered what it was. It seemed to me he must have been her lover. It puzzled me. A plumber, Goon. Married with four children. And Cathie, whose father had been a minor civil servant with the Post Office or something, an eager representative of possibly the most class-conscious of all British classes, whose influence she had never quite thrown off. I was very curious about this. It would come out if and when there was a trial, how they had met, some of the particulars of their relationship. Cathie hadn’t mentioned him to me. It might have been Goon’s child. It gave me a strange feeling to know that I would never know whose child died with her in the river. I forgot to remind you, Cathie was pregnant.
I walked away at last out of that part of the town. The rain had stopped abruptly. It was still early in the evening and I didn’t feel like going back to the barge. Ella would be there, alone probably, or with the kid. Leslie might still be knocking about. More likely he was in one of the dockside pubs, playing darts, or if no one would play with him, dominoes. I didn’t want to see Ella at that moment.
I wondered how much of a coincidence it was that I first made love with Ella on the day Cathie’s body came floating back to me like a little hunk of synthetic guilt. I wondered how much I was moved by an instinctive need of a woman at the precise moment, on that precise day, because I was suddenly an outlaw beyond any intellectual and voluntary commission, not for now but from now on. If I went to the police with my story of what happened, and if I were very lucky, I might get off with manslaughter, though the temper of the good people, citizens of the Presbyterian city of Glasgow, their moral appetites already whetted, made me have a second thought about that. My sudden need of Ella the day after Cathie died and after many months of living close to her in a state of detached unaffection, and the fact that the power of seduction came with the need, that I discovered in every successive response a sense of control in myself and of her permissiveness – this complex knowledge gave me a sense of vast gravitational forces which went beyond any “I” I was conscious of, of a complexly woven matrix within which my own conscious decisions were mere threads.
I didn’t want to see Ella because she was becoming demanding and less and less cautious. She wanted me to make love to her at every odd moment, and when I protested it was too risky she laughed at me. I think she almost wanted Leslie to find out about us.
“Who’s scared now?” she said.
There was nothing I could say.
One time the four of us went for a picnic and Leslie and the kid went off to get water to make the tea. They were hardly out of sight when she pulled me over on top of her. I made love to her quickly, almost passionately, and I had just broken loose when Leslie and the kid came into sight with the water. That kind of thing happened often and I began to realize it was only a question of time before Leslie found out. Ella knew that too. It increased her pleasure. Her attitude was infectious and I entered into the spirit of the affair almost because in doing so I was able to forget the other more serious threat which the silence of the newspapers seemed to signify.
Ella’s body continued to excite me. When she made love now she gave herself to me completely, almost hysterically.
So I returned that night only a few hours after I had left Black Street and she was waiting for me as I knew she would be. I felt in some undefined way resigned. The days passed and through her I lived out a life that was separate and intact, with its own force and its own risk and its own centre. Gradually, until the day when it fell to pieces, I began to forget that I had been with Cathie when she fell backwards into the river and that there was any connection between the woman who had been my mistress and the drowned woman towards whom I reached with the boat hook. I didn’t think of Goon. He bored me. And then, one day, Leslie discovered us.
Ella had ceased to move. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing heavily. Inside me, a recession was taking place, the sensation of closeness was evaporating. The image sharpened. She was merely a woman with whom I had just made love. Her body was soft, putty-like, unexhilarating, out of tune.
The weight of her thigh on my knee was uncomfortable. I had a slight headache. The clock with the brass ring ticked loudly, stabilizing the atmosphere in the cabin and drawing all objects back to their accustomed banality. The quilt was merely a quilt which had been washed too often. The varnished planks did not fit tightly together and the varnish looked unsmooth and brittle. F
or the last few minutes I had been conscious of the buzz of a fly and now it alighted on Ella’s shoulder and walked towards the nipple of her right breast. She appeared to be unaware of it. Her head leant over to the side and the hairs on her temple were stringy with perspiration. There was a faint smile on her lips as though she were thinking of something which amused her. Her satisfaction seemed inane. The fact that she had withdrawn and remained confident with her eyes shut annoyed me. Her attitude was ridiculous, insulting. She appeared ridiculous to me with her smirk of withdrawal, her white flesh patched red where it had been crushed under my weight and with the fly at her nipple, hesitating, flexing its minute feelers, like a minute chef preparing to carve up a turkey.
“When will Leslie be back?” I said.
She opened her eyes and looked at me. At that moment the fly rose into the air and disappeared somewhere against the dark brown varnish of the planks. She was smiling.
“Not for a while yet.”
She put out her arm and drew me down to her again. I resisted slightly but she was determined. Her mouth was soft and too wet. I closed my teeth against her tongue. But without exerting myself I couldn’t get free and so I closed my eyes and allowed her to go on kissing my neck and my cheeks. After a while my resentment seemed to move outside me and to stand off at a distance, until, when her fingers moved at me again, it sank away like the light of a buoy below the horizon and I was no longer conscious of it. I felt no urgency at first, but gradually my submission ceased to be passive only, and I found myself making love to her again.
Afterwards we were both tired and we fell asleep.
Leslie must have come down to the cabin and when he saw us he must have gone on deck again. When we awoke it was nearly dark and we could hear him walking back and forth on the deck above us. We listened for a while without moving. Neither of us had any idea how long he had been there, but he was obviously waiting for us to wake up, letting us know by his walking there that he knew and at the same time giving us an opportunity to prepare ourselves before we faced him. We spoke in whispers.
“Do you think he knows?”
“Of course he does!” I said. I lit a cigarette.
“What’ll we do?”
I smiled in the dark.
“I suppose that depends on him.”
Ella did not answer for a moment and then she said: “Why should it depend on him? Who the hell does he think he is anyway? Clumping around up there like the Day of Judgement!”
“It’s only his way of letting us know he’s there.”
“He’s done it,” she said drily.
She was waiting for me to say or do something and she moved slightly so that no part of our bodies was touching under the rough blanket, which seemed rougher and more prickly now than it had before; but I saw only the end of my cigarette glowing in the dark and somehow that seemed to fill my mind, that and the shadows beyond it, excluding any immediate adjustment to the situation. Anyway, I knew without discussing it with her that if Leslie had been going to do anything rash he would have done it by now and that he was probably as nervous as we were about what was going to happen when we met again.
“Are you just going to lie there?”
“There’s no hurry,” I said, “I’ll finish my cigarette.”
“What is there to say?”
“The whole thing’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?”
She moved again, but she did not speak. I thought for a moment that she was going to climb out over me, but she must have changed her mind for some reason or other. In moving she had pulled the blanket off my right side, which was at the edge of the bed. She wanted me to move. Reluctantly, I lowered myself on the deck, struck a match and lit the oil lamp, and then, without looking at her, I began to dress.
Leslie must have become conscious of the light in the cabin because a few moments later he stopped walking backwards and forwards on deck, and for a moment I almost expected him to come down through the companionway and I pulled on my trousers quickly so as to be in a better position to face up to him, but he did not come, didn’t even call down to us, and Ella’s voice said then: “He’s waiting for you to go up.”
I did not answer her. I wasn’t in the mood to discuss it, to talk at all. Now that it had happened, the thought of the other danger came back to me. It was as though, unconsciously, I had all the time associated the two threats, as though, since they were almost coeval, they had lain on me together, apocalyptically implying one another, point for point, and now that one threat had been realized a corresponding development in the other was threatening – at that very moment perhaps, the official in charge of investigations into Cathie’s death would be noticing for the first time a connection between the deceased and one of the bargemen who had discovered the body; or perhaps it was merely that the world of Ella and Leslie (for both of whom the incident was now closed) in which to the exclusion of the other I had been able to involve myself, like an invalid in the routine of the sickroom, was no longer, since Leslie had found out about us, separate and self-contained. I remember that my mouth was dry then. I had been thirsty before I fell asleep, and I lifted the milk which had been on the table since early afternoon and drank a deep draught from the bottle.
Ella watched me but said nothing. She was withdrawn in a different way now, and it was I who was being looked at. That made me uncomfortable. I had no idea what she was thinking as she lay there on her side, supported by her elbow, watching me dress, with her eyes in shadow back somewhere behind and above her protruding lips. Her neck and the top part of her body, which was relaxed heavily on the under-sheet were an ochrous colour in the lamplight which, radiating through the tall, no longer clear globe from one hard bright tongue of flame, lighted my tagless shoelace under my fingertips. I remained bent longer than necessary and the hair on my naked arms looked grey and the flesh dirty where the veins rose near the surface like a geographical complex of contours. It occurred to me that I hadn’t had a bath for over a week.
When I had tied my shoelaces I slipped my shirt over my head and while I was buttoning it I looked at Ella.
“Are you getting up too?”
“Maybe,” she said. “I’ll wait and see what happens. Look. Your cigarette. It’s burning the table.”
A long bow of ash fell on the floor as I lifted it to stub it smouldering on the ashtray. I lifted my jacket from the back of the chair and put it on.
“I’ll see what he says, then,” I said, more because I felt I had to say something before going on deck than because she needed to be told that. I think she laughed then as I turned and climbed up through the companionway.
When I returned to the cabin about fifteen minutes later a tremorous black thread of oil smoke was suspended between the scored globe and a spot on the bulkhead where the fine particles of soot densened and wavered in a flat, spider-like cloud, while the globe itself, a chancre of red and yellow and black in suppuration, gave less and less light on to the table and the bed where Ella, who had not moved since I left her, lay half-naked on her elbow with the blanket fallen away to the level of her navel. The cabin was already in semi-darkness but it did not seem to concern her. She had made no effort to reach out and turn the lamp down or to trim the wick. Instead she had watched as the arc of light moved away from her centripetally towards the smoking orange eye of flame, which flickered as I climbed down through the companionway as though it were trying to draw all the light in the cabin back into itself. I turned it down and for a moment the room was in almost total darkness.
“You’ll have to trim the wick,” Ella’s voice said to me from the bunk, and, as I burned my fingertips when I tried to remove the hot globe, she said: “There’s a dishcloth behind you. Use that.”
She did not speak again until I had pinched away the burnt part of the wick between my thumb and forefinger, relit the lamp and replaced the globe. The lamp was now burning rather dully because the globe was dirty.
“You might have turned it down,” I said.
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“It’ll clean,” she said shortly.
And I supposed it would clean. That was part of Ella, to be cleaning things, dishes or shoes or the table, scouring pots and pans, polishing brasses, which she did with a special cloth, blowing her hot breath on to the metal and then making it squeak under the friction of the cloth, her big forearm moving backwards and forwards like a piston whose energy you could almost see being drained from the tensed stock of her body and from the rigid stance of her powerful haunches on which the apron string, idle and discoloured, always lay.
Then I lit a cigarette and, crossing my legs, sat down at a distance from her. She appeared to be content to wait for me to tell her what had happened. Knowing what had happened and the uselessness of any effort on our part to alter it, I was not in a hurry to speak. I had half-finished my cigarette before she decided that she had waited long enough.
“Where is he?”
“He’s gone,” I said.
“Where for Heaven’s sake?”
“God knows,” I said. “I suppose he’ll stop at a men’s club tonight and go to his mother’s in Glasgow in the morning.”
“Did he say he was leaving me?”
“He said he would write you a letter.”
“Cripes!”
She clambered bigly and whitely from the bunk, the soles of her feet making a flat stabbing sound on the boards as she landed on the deck. She brushed past me, leaving her odour as she crossed the cabin to the stove, and to see her close, suddenly like that, naked flesh in flat surface not six inches from my eye which received the impression in a neutral, emotionless way, was in a new way terrifying, because the flesh which I thought I knew, had touched and held under the pressure of my fingertips, was presented anonymously as an amorphous mass of grey-white, yellowing at its edges, and pitted like pumice-stone, a mass which lost its identity and its momentary passage in front of my eye, and, a fraction of a second later, was gone and replaced by an odour in my nostrils which grew familiar, of woman, as I moved my head to watch Ella arrive at the stove, strike a match, and place the kettle on the lighted gas ring. The new sound, the thrust of the ignited gas, seemed to restore equilibrium to the cabin, to make of Ella again a woman with a tendency to fatness who no longer considered it necessary to cover herself in front of me.
Young Adam Page 9
