Young Adam

by Alexander Trocchi

  “Cripes!” she said again. “So he’s going to write me a letter!”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Do you want a cup of tea?” She was smiling now.

  “I could do with one.”

  “Me too,” she said, and then: “It looks as though we’ve settled for one another, Joe!”

  I didn’t know what else I could do other than to laugh pleasantly. I brayed like an ass.

  She reached for the tea caddy.

  3

  DURING THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, we remained tied up at Leith. Leslie sent a boy to fetch his things and Ella picked up her kid, who had been staying for a few days with her step-sister, Gwendoline, whose husband was a lorry-driver for a firm of fruit and vegetable dealers.

  A feeling of constriction descended on me one morning as I was touching up the paintwork of the barge, which hugged the quay squatly near where a motor crane, its gears grinding, advanced and retreated with nets of tarred barrels at its claw. A man in shiny serge trousers, stringed at the knees, bawled instructions from under wide nostrils, spat, and screwed each spittle under the sole of his iron-shod boot as though he were trying to obliterate it from his memory. The dockside, fanged and strutted with steel girders in the pale fog, sprawled shadowy oblongs into the hawser-shortened distance, which rang hollowly with the monotonous splutter of blunt-nosed drills. The feeling of constriction remained with me all morning.

  It was not lessened by Ella’s occasional appearances on deck, the first time with a bucket of refuse, the second with some wrung-out smalls and a pail of muddied, soap-broken water, which she emptied over the side.

  I suppose it had come down to this. Considering everything, I had good reasons for remaining where I was, waiting for something to break. But at the same time I had a strange feeling of having lost my identity. I had become part of a situation which seemed to protect me against another, less enviable one, the one in which I would have been involved had I gone to the police. But the more I became involved in the small world of the barge, the more I felt myself robbed of my identity.

  It has always been that way with me as far as I can remember. I am a rootless kind of man. Often I find myself anxious to become involved with other people, but I am no sooner involved than I wish to be free again. Ten years ago I walked out of a university one spring morning with a small overnight bag. I never returned. Since then I have worked when I needed money, because I felt like moving, because I had to break out of a situation in which, though the necessities of life were provided for me, I felt myself being crushed. Now on the barge I was beginning to feel the familiar urge to break with the present. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the ships on the river, especially those which I knew would sail over the tropics into the southern hemisphere.

  During the day I noticed Ella’s attitude towards me was becoming more proprietary. She made a number of references to the future, all of which took me, my continued presence, for granted. She talked about divorce. I sat through it all quietly, without protest, eating mechanically or smoking one fag after another, and answering her in monosyllables. When I thought of the plumber awaiting trial, my need to be safely involved came on me like a sickness, but my primitive protest was all the louder for that need.

  And then Ella’s voice would come back: “It wouldn’t take long, would it, Joe?”

  “What?”

  “The divorce!”

  “I don’t know, Ella. I don’t know anything about these things.”

  “I’ll find out in Glasgow. That’s where we were married.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’ll be all right,” Ella said with conviction.

  I looked at her then and for a moment, in an oblique way, I found myself wondering what the reason for her determination was. It seemed pointless, not quite serious.

  Later in the afternoon she went ashore to buy food. After she left, I tried to read but found I couldn’t. The atmosphere was still constricted and yellow, drawn in on all sides by the black spokes of the dock. Every now and again metal clinked against metal, and then sharply the noise of riveting began. I was depressed, vaguely annoyed. I missed Ella, but only in an indirect way. I was bored with her. When she was there I had good reason to be bored, but when she was not I could only find the reason in myself, reflected in the fog and in the hawsers. I had a need to act which I repressed again and again. I wanted to break through the immobility in which I had become involved, but I had come to identify my safety with inaction, almost with the boredom which I was beginning to feel in relation to Ella.

  But it couldn’t go on. I had already decided to leave, I suppose, even that afternoon when I found myself telling myself not to be a fool, to wait and see, and I threw away a newly-lit cigarette and went below again.

  When Ella returned, I was lying on the bunk. She was excited. She said immediately that the date of the plumber’s trial had been set. I took the paper from her and glanced at it:

  FATHER OF TWO TO STAND TRIAL

  45-Year-Old Glasgow Man is Accused in Clyde Murder

  There followed a brief account of the facts which the police had made public. Daniel Goon was known to have been intimate with the murdered woman, to have been associating with her for some time.

  I did not need to read any further. I remembered Cathie talking very quietly, persuasively, after we had made love, telling me she was pregnant, that I was the father, and asking me to marry her. That was how it happened, with her running after me as I walked away. And, of course, she had told someone, a friend at work probably, and she had told that friend what was probably the truth, that the father was Goon. I was reading on and then Ella said that she thought it was four he had, children she meant, and I said yes, I had thought so too but that it had probably been a mistake. She began to empty the contents of the shopping bag on the table.

  “Move your paper,” she said. “You’re in the way.”

  She stuffed a biscuit into her mouth.

  I watched her chewing. Her teeth were large. They broke it to powder.

  Later, her face was damp. She had been working at the hot stove.

  I was still the hired man. She laughed as she paid me, colouring slightly, as though she weren’t sure what service she paid me for.

  “We’re making good money,” she said sometimes.

  She included me, defending herself against her suspicions.

  I made love to her under a haystack, noticing for the first time the tiny red network at the surface of her left thigh.

  We moved along the canal. I saw the tramp, or it might have been another one, only this time he watched us from under the brim of his hat as we passed. When everything would be “good and proper...” She meant marriage, of course. The impropriety worried her. She wasn’t sure of me. She talked about the divorce. Leslie wrote about it, almost apologetically. He hoped we were all well. He had a job as a night watchman in a warehouse. He asked how Jim was.

  Sometimes I looked at her back. Her hips seemed broader. The apron string still dangled. Most of the time she tried to be attractive, wore lipstick, crossed her legs casually so that I could see the smooth white rise of the back of her thighs. In the dark we were still lovers. But during the day, I was conscious of her looking at me, analysing, speculating. Once she said she was looking forward to Jim’s growing up. Things would be easier on the barge then, with the three of us. It didn’t seem to occur to her that I might object to the idea of living by proxy through her moronic child. I found it difficult to take her seriously. I felt her suspicion.

  From the newspapers I derived the impression that they were going to find Goon guilty. We heard that Leslie alone would be required as a witness at the trial. I began to wonder whether I would find myself in the courtroom watching the web of guilt being woven round the wrong man. Ella joked about my sudden interest in the affair. She said she thought I wasn’t interested in that kind of thing. But she was pleased at the same time. She helped me to cut out all the items from the different papers
. Some evenings by the light of the oil lamp I sat with all the cuttings spread out on the table in front of me like a pack of cards in front of a fortune-teller.

  What if they convicted him? I resented my connection with Goon. There was no murder. The guilt was invented. And then, with the question unanswered, I put my hand on Ella’s belly, and as she turned towards me and I felt our thighs touch I had an impulse to abandon myself and my freedom to the sheer physical power of the woman whose hands were cupped over my buttocks and who thrust her abdomen towards me, to place myself at her mercy quietly with words there in the bed as the violence of our sensations increased, but each time before I spoke the orgasm was over and she was separate again, heavy and separate and dangerous. Conscious of the heat of her body close to me, so slack now and so dangerous, I lay awake for a long time. My mind was not blank but I could not have been said to be thinking of anything.

  It was about this time that Ella picked up a letter from the post office. It was from her step-sister in Leith and had been lying in the post office for some time. Her husband had fallen off his lorry and been crushed to death by a bus. He was already buried. Gwendoline said that although she would be the first to admit that poor Sam and she didn’t get on very well, it had come as a shock, a blow, in fact, which was not entirely countered by the damages she received from the company he worked for. She wanted to know when Ella would be in Leith.

  It was Saturday. We were tied up in Glasgow. Ella sent Gwendoline a telegram to say that we would all come by train to visit her. In the compartment I sat beside Ella, and the kid, in a blue sailor suit and a sailor hat with a ribbon on it, sat opposite. I was feeling uncomfortable in a hard collar which she insisted I wear, and Ella was wearing a shiny black dress which was too tight for her and which made her look hot and red. We didn’t talk much during the journey.

  Gwendoline lived in a tenement which was just like any other tenement in Leith, a blackish-grey building, scaled on the inside by a creeping grey stair with an iron banister, leading to brown doors with brass plates on them at every landing. It smelled of refuse and decaying food. Hers was at the top of the building on the fifth floor. Jim was up first and waiting for us on the landing.

  Gwendoline was in her dressing gown when she opened the door. It fell open at her breasts, which were long and white and pulpy like the long slender part of pears. She was younger than Ella. When she saw me, she caught up the dressing gown at her throat and smiled.

  “This your new boyfriend, El?”

  Ella sniffed.

  “This is Joe,” she said. “We’re going to be married.”

  It sounded like an ultimatum, and she spoke it in an intense hard way, almost as though she were afraid she would be contradicted.

  Gwendoline must have noticed my reaction because she laughed and said: “Pleased to meet you, Joe,” and she stood away from the door to allow us to enter. “You’ll excuse me not being dressed,” she continued, “but I wasn’t expecting gentlemen visitors.” She ruffled Jim’s hair as, eel-like, he slithered under my arm into the house.

  Her lips were lipsticked heavily and her skin was very white, slightly yellowish in comparison, her mouth like a blood splash on porcelain. She led us into a sort of bed-sitting-room with an unmade bed and her clothes lying about. The window on the far side of the room wasn’t open, the fire in the grate was out, and the air was sour, stuffy and motionless, impregnated with the cloying heat of a one-bar electric fire. It occurred to me that she had just got out of the bed to open the door.

  “Sit down while I tidy up a bit,” she said.

  Ella looked around disapprovingly. This kind of thing brought out the worst in her.

  Gwendoline was moving about stuffing things out of sight, her long chestnut hair was hanging in strings at her pallid cheeks. She smoked heavily. There were cigarette stubs everywhere and the first two fingers of her right hand were nicotine-stained at the nails.

  At first, I didn’t pay much attention to her. I was looking at Ella. She sat in her shiny black dress in an old armchair and her lips were pursed and an aura of respectability emanated from her. It seemed to move up from her stiff haunches to the tilt of her neck; a moral judgement smelling of eau-de-Cologne. I wondered how near I had come to committing suicide when I almost told her the truth about Cathie. I was horrified to think that I had nearly spoken. It seemed absurd now. I looked away from her at a little spark on the element of the electric fire. Zzz... Leaning close I could hear it sizzle. A sudden feeling like a dull hammer blow, Goon’s mouth opened in a wide scream, the hairs of his purple head alive with shock... thank God they didn’t electrocute them...

  I was in the way.

  “Excuse me, Joe!” Gwendoline said as she brushed past me. She had taken her hand away from the top of the dressing gown and, as she stooped to lift a silk stocking from the floor, I saw the breasts hanging, long and pear-shaped, and they glowed with an orange colour where the electric fire was reflected on them. “I’ll make you all a cup of tea,” she said as she stood up again.

  Ella said she would help her, and the two women, followed by the kid, went through to the next room. I glanced at the cigarette butts and the soiled underclothing pushed hurriedly out of sight under a cushion, and then I walked over to the bed again and put my hand on the sheet where she had lain. It was still warm and there was a feel of biscuit crumbs under my fingers. On the bedside table was a bent hairpin, a piece of ribbon, an ashtray with red-tipped fag ends, and a little grey ball of chewing gum. Lying beside the ashtray was a bottle of aspirin. Like an inventory clerk, I took stock. Gwendoline, a widow. There was something unpurposeful about Gwendoline, a sort of tadpole quality which suggested that if she found herself in bed with a man she would stay there because she was too lazy to get out. At the foot of the bed there was a morning newspaper and a book on astrology. In the latter, as it fell open in my hands, I saw she had underlined the following:

  The terror which the moon inspires in us is not altogether unjustified. The proofs of its evil influence are corroborated by a hundred flagrant facts. A red moon is particularly detestable.

  I puzzled over that for some time before I shut the book and returned with the newspaper to my chair.

  There was nothing in it about my crime.

  I was sitting there when they returned with the tea.

  “Gwen’s having a holiday with us,” Ella said almost immediately.

  “Oh?”

  “She’s coming on the barge for a week or two.”

  Gwendoline smiled at me. She had gathered her dressing gown properly about her now and secured it, her tapering breasts out of sight.

  “I hope you don’t mind, Joe? I don’t suppose I’m breaking up a honeymoon or anything?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. I was glad that Ella spoke before I could say anything because I could not think of anything to say.

  “It’ll be good for her,” Ella said. “She’s going to pack now and come back with us on the train tonight.”

  “I’ll just have a cup of tea,” Gwendoline said.

  Two days later, on a fine spring morning, we loaded early with limestone. We were well along the canal by midday.

  It was good to be standing there at the wheel with the flat green and brown fields stretching on either side as far as the horizon. At that point the landscape was almost treeless and the view across the fields was uninterrupted. The sun was strong and the yellow-black canal water reacted to it, glowing behind us as it peeled off the bilges in long black flakes. The wheel was warm with the sun. Everything seemed far away, events as well as things, and I almost forgot the plumber and the dead woman and Leslie and even the two women who were below.

  Gwendoline did not get up for breakfast. She slept late – for her complexion. She was not the kind of woman who could make herself useful on the barge, not that I wanted her to do that. I was not interested in getting anything done quickly or efficiently. I should have been quite content to stop the engine and moor along the bank some
where, or to tie up for a week until the weather broke or until we ran out of food. Not quite true perhaps. Ordinarily I could have said that without misgivings. That was the way I lived. But since the arrest of the plumber I was uneasy, idiotically anchored to time, to events and processes over which I had no control.

  She came on deck around noon, up through the companionway and close to me almost before I was aware of her. She had done her face up. After watching me for a few minutes, she wanted to take the wheel, so I sat down near her as she steered. I rolled a cigarette. At first, neither of us spoke. She appeared to be engrossed in her work, which she did well (she had been brought up on the barge with Ella) and she was looking straight ahead. And then she put a question to me.

  “Are you really going to marry Ella, Joe?”

  “That’s what she said,” I said non-committally.

  “What about you?” she said.

  “I don’t say anything.”

  “Oh, have it your own way!” she said. “It’s none of my business.”

  I agreed with her. She looked back along the canal.

  She was wearing slacks. She had brushed the stringy appearance out of her hair, but its auburn colour made her face appear very white, like bread and jam because of the sudden lipstick. She was not as tall as Ella, younger, thinner. She was intelligent enough to know that I had no intention of marrying Ella, but it did not seem to worry her.