Young Adam

by Alexander Trocchi

  She looked, I thought then, as though she had just got out of bed. She would always look like that. Even in the spring sunshine she had that damp white look about her which some women have, so that you think that if you brushed the palm of your hand over their skin it would come away quite wet, the kind of pallor which makes you think of sickrooms and flannel underwear. It occurred to me that she would probably have T.B. The thought of her slender breasts seemed to confirm the impression. She would be white all over, white with a few pink parts where she had sat down or where her belt chafed, a long white root with a tuft of brittle auburn fuzz at the centre. And yet there was something attractive about Gwendoline, not in her features, which were flat and puttylike, not in the forward jut of her abdomen nor in the premature thinness of her legs, but in her whole attitude. I doubted whether she had ever felt righteous.

  I had finished rolling my cigarette and I struck a match on the sole of my boot. I threw the match over the stern and watched it heaved aside on the surface of the water, and its movement reminded me of that of the bottle and the matchbox and the spar of wood which had moved past beneath me as I searched for Cathie’s body in the water.

  Gwendoline was speaking again.

  “Don’t you ever get bored with the canal, Joe?”

  “Sure I do, sometimes.”

  “I thought you would. You don’t look the type.”

  I didn’t contradict her.

  “You’ve got to be born to it,” she said.

  I flicked the ash from my cigarette in reply.

  “And even then,” she continued, “if you’re like me you don’t want any part of it.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s no life,” she said. “I could tell the first time I saw you you weren’t cut out for it.”

  I was not impressed by her assurance.

  “Did you see it in the stars?” I said mockingly.

  “You’re ignorant,” she said flatly. “And you’re not funny.”

  We heard the kid scream down below.

  “He’s a brat,” Gwendoline said. “But seriously, Joe, you know as well as I do that you’re fed up with it.”

  “It’s a job like any other.”

  She laughed at that.

  “When are you going to walk out on her, Joe?”

  “Today, tomorrow, the next day,” I said. “I can’t read the stars.”

  “Stuff it!” Gwendoline said rudely.

  After a few moments silence, we talked on. She was telling me that Ella didn’t drink and that she couldn’t understand a person who didn’t drink, and that if it were not for the head she had in the morning she herself would get drunk every night. She liked gin, she said, not gin and lime or gin and vermouth or anything else; gin straight. She didn’t find it bitter. She suggested we ought to go for a drink together some time, that we could tell Ella that we were going to the cinema, not that we would, she didn’t suppose I liked the cinema any more than she did. To pass the time, what she liked was good game of nap and a spot of gin.

  In spite of her slacks, she looked incongruous at the wheel. The slacks were of a soft green velours, grease-stained and with bags at the knees. She was not wearing stockings. She told me that if there was one thing she hated it was to go to the dentist’s.

  Ella came on deck a short time afterwards and called Gwendoline to go and eat. We usually had dinner in shifts like that while we were under way. I was left alone on deck. I could hear the two women talking and laughing below, and then the kid’s voice, coarsely sibilant, and I found myself envying them all suddenly. In one way, and for each of them, they were secure; the absurdity which touched them (if at all) was an acceptable one; they were protected by the structures of their own minds, by the fact that they were neither implicated in “murder” nor, to ordinary thinking, “insane”. But the absurdity which threatened me was the end of all possibility, and often when I was alone I experienced a terrible certainty that it would strike and that when it did I should be free neither to accept nor to reject it. There was nothing un-final about death. No sane man could accept it.

  But I was glad to be alone there at the wheel again with the sun on my hands and the water ahead pointing at distance like a javelin shaft along which crept towards me a horse-drawn barge, the Clydesdale straining forwards and sideways with a man at its head. For a long time it remained in the distance, a man, horse, and barge, like an insect with three segments to its body, and then, all at once, they were separate and growing in size more rapidly until finally they were near and abreast and the man was waving his hand in greeting. Neither of us spoke. When they had passed, I turned round, and the horse still leant forwards and sideways with a man at its head and the man was looking straight ahead. The voices from below came back to me again. The kid was saying something about rice pudding and Ella had raised her voice. Apart from a slight apprehensiveness, I had no qualms about Ella. She had become again just what she was at the beginning, Leslie’s wife. Sooner or later – I was temporarily unable to make any decision – I would leave her. I was conscious of her almost as a chemical reaction which was trying to assimilate me. She was trying to force me to give what I had given freely. I think Gwendoline knew that from the beginning and that she sympathized with me, and perhaps that was what attracted me about her.

  We tied up at Clowes in the middle of the afternoon. Ella had wanted to go on for a bit because it would be light until after seven, but she didn’t insist. Gwendoline had already told her that she wanted me to take her to the cinema.

  Gwendoline was young and old. She was less sensitive than Ella and it was obvious that she despised her. And I could see that she wanted me to be unfaithful to Ella with her. It was difficult to believe that she was only twenty-nine. She looked old and yet her body gave the impression sometimes of being almost adolescent. She had changed into a red skirt and a green jumper the front of which, decorated with white vees, dragged flatly because she wore nothing to support her long conical breasts. Her shoes were white court-shoes, toeless, and when she crossed her legs I was fascinated by the thick varnish-red toenail at the point of each and by the fine coppery hairs which ran down her shins in twin spines. I wondered vaguely if she was a prostitute. I could sense that she was really indifferent to men, only vaguely sexual.

  A bow of lipstick was revealed brightly on the rim of her teacup.

  We did not talk much on the way to the pub (the hotel bar, the only one in which women were allowed) and, seated at the table, red, green, white and thin, Gwendoline smoked one cigarette after another and sipped her gin. She dabbed her lips with a handkerchief and said she thought it was about time Ella took a jump to herself.

  “Get us another gin, Joe,” she said.

  I had paid for the first drinks with the change I had in my pocket. As I drew out my wallet to pay for the new drinks, a photograph of Cathie fell out of it on to the floor. I froze momentarily. The waitress picked it up and handed it to me without looking at it. As calmly as possible, I returned it to my wallet. Gwendoline was smiling.

  “An old girlfriend?” she said.

  “Yes,” I replied. “She died.”

  “But you still carry it?”

  “I don’t know why. I ought to have destroyed it a long time ago.”

  “Of course you should! The dead can look after themselves!”

  She screwed her cigarette into the ashtray.

  “Drink up,” she said. “We’ve got business to attend to.”

  We made love very coldly and mechanically in a field. Not exactly business, because no money passed between us. It was very dark, the ground for the most part firm but in places, where the wind had caused a crust to form on the mud, soft as our feet sank in. Her cheeks were very cold. When I touched her breasts she did not react at all. The glow of her cigarette was bright and dim evenly; she seemed to be completely abstracted.

  She interrupted me. She said she didn’t want any trouble. And then, when it was over, and she got up she complained that I had g
ot her all messed up and she spent a long time tidying herself. It was over quickly. Her cigarette was still smouldering in the grass. I put my foot on it. I was wondering whether she always made love in that way. She had scarcely been aware of me.

  We walked slowly back to the barge talking in a desultory way about Leith, where we had both lived. She liked Leith, she said, and she thought she would go back there and settle down when the damages came for her husband’s death. It was hard to believe he was dead, she said. What convinced her more than anything else was the fact that she was no longer wakened early in the morning by his boots clumping in and out from the room to the kitchen. He was a big man, as big as Leslie. She laughed then. Poor Sam. It was too bad the way she talked about him, she knew that, but what was the use of telling lies? Of course, she was sorry for him, so sudden it was, to go to your work one morning like any other and then suddenly to have it happen like that. It made you think. It gave her a queer turn when they brought her the news. Luckily, she hadn’t time to dwell on it. He had to be buried – as soon as possible on account of how the bus had run over him when he fell from his lorry. The police were very helpful, especially one fair-headed young man with a walrus moustache who kept making her cups of tea. She had always disliked the police, but it just went to show some of them were human beings too.

  It was a quiet funeral and the young policeman took her home afterwards and she felt sorry for him, he was so clumsy, so she let him do it to her on the couch. Somehow the bed would not have seemed right. He was very nervous and it was a long time before he could bring himself to do it. He said he felt like he was desecrating the grave. The funeral had taken all the spunk out of him. But when she said now or never, he opened up and disclosed his fright. Well, that was all right as far as that went but she thought it was a bit thick when he kept calling on her, bringing her violets and lilies of the valley every day when he was off duty. She gave him an inch and he took a mile, she said. I had the impression that she expected me to reply and so I nodded and said that although I could understand the young policeman’s desire to continue the relationship I could understand her point of view too.

  “I should hope so,” she said rather pertly. She said that she had found most men were like that and that she hoped I wasn’t.

  I assured her that I wasn’t.

  She was glad of that.

  She became more confidential. Anyway, she said, it was not what it was cracked up to be. She knew that and she was sure I did. All that Hollywood bunk, she said. She’d take a glass of gin for preference any time, and, by an association of ideas she came to the conclusion that you got nothing for nothing in this life.

  I said that I supposed she was right.

  “You’re smart, Joe,” she said. “I could see that the moment you walked in. Now Ella’s a bloody fool. She always was.”

  Looking down, I could see her feet walking slowly over the stones, and above them the thin white legs to the level of her skirt. She was smoking. She seemed to assume that I felt like her about everything. She did not expect to be contradicted.

  I asked her how she came to leave the barge in the first place.

  That was not where she had made her mistake, she said. It was no life on the barge. Her big mistake was getting married, Sam giving her two pounds a week to run the house and expecting her to be a bloody skivvy for him. She asked me if I would credit it.

  I nodded sympathetically.

  She could have earned more every night of the week, she went on, and not running around picking up things after any man. It hadn’t taken her long to realize her mistake and after that she did the best she could, but it was difficult with Sam coming home in the evening and you had to make do with what you could get, which wasn’t much because all the young men were working and that left only the old-age pensioners and those who were on the dole and neither kind had much money. Still, it wasn’t so bad because the pensioners didn’t ask for much, just a feel usually, over in a minute, not like Sam.

  We were coming near the barge and she said we’d better pretend to Ella that we’d been to the cinema and so we agreed on a film which we’d both seen so that we would be able to speak about it if she asked.

  “If all men were like you, Joe,” Gwendoline said, “perhaps things would be different.”

  I wasn’t quite sure I knew what she meant but I didn’t contradict her Whatever she said, she had a tone of hard conviction, and I didn’t want to make an enemy of her.

  Ella was very quiet. She made tea for us. Gwendoline looked at me and made a face.

  I was wondering if Ella suspected about Gwendoline and me. She had avoided my eye ever since we returned and it seemed to me she had a hurt look, but she didn’t question us.

  Gwendoline was smiling. I noticed that her little finger was cocked like a trigger as she lifted her cup to drink. I was annoyed with her. She was merely making things difficult. She appeared to take pleasure in seeing Ella subdued and me without words, not knowing how to make conversation.

  About half an hour later Gwendoline went to bed in the forward cabin. As soon as she had gone Ella prepared to go to bed. She looked tired. She cleared the table and began to undress, still without speaking. I went over to her and tried to take her in my arms but she pushed me away.

  “Leave me alone, Joe.”

  I thought, “To hell with them both.” I went up on deck and smoked a cigarette. It was a clear night. The stars were very high and far away, the sky vaulted, dark and impersonal, and I knew that under the same impersonal sky were other men who, in spite of the fact that in a few day’s time the plumber, Goon, would stand trial, would be weighing the evidence, searching in a routine way for a new clue. Yet the night was motionless, empty. I thought of Ella. I knew now that I was going to leave. And sooner or later I would have to go far away. I remained on deck for half an hour, smoking. When I went down again Ella was asleep.

  4

  FROM WHERE I SAT AT THE TABLE in the bar I could see the oblong of glass on which “Bass” was readable in reverse, the last daylight merging above the partition with the pale electric light which had perceptibly grown in intensity as daylight faded, becoming yellower, more in keeping with the men in the bar, with the bottles and with the conversation, the scene seeming somehow more in focus in artificial light; and from outside beyond the swing doors the clang of city traffic moved inwards with the man who hesitated there, his pink gaze floating over the crowd in attempted recognition, until the gaze arrested and his hand raised in greeting – Bill! – and the other turning from a group and smiling in cross-recognition, the swing doors pivoted and steadied, then closed, cutting off outside noises and restoring volume and excitement to the conversation, drink calls, bar sounds, of which I had been conscious during the time I had sat there, acutely conscious as a man tends to be when for one reason or another he is excluded. I had laid down the newspaper, not knowing whether or not to be satisfied that Goon would stand trial in ten days’ time and I had glanced at the fading panel of the daylight and sipped the froth from my beer, tasting malt. I had heard his name mentioned angrily by one man who wanted to know why we wasted public money giving the bastard a trial, at least one other saying “Hear, hear,” and another with a grin making some remark which caused himself and the man next to him to guffaw. The conversation swayed from heavy to light, interrupted occasionally by a staccato demand for a drink and by someone flourishing a newspaper. I glanced down at my own newspaper and in a side column read: “‘If he did it, he’d be better off dead,’ wife says.” That for poor Goon. Poor bastard to be married to a woman like that. I shuddered. At the bar a suggestion that Goon might not be guilty was greeted by a solid protesting wall of disbelief until the speaker, asking them to mark his words, said it was obviously the work of a homicidal maniac, a Jack the Ripper who didn’t use razors.

  “Necrophilia, it’s called, but they won’t let it out,” he said in the ensuing silence. “Mark my words! You’ll see!”

  The conversatio
n grew more heated. I overheard one man say hanging was too good for a man like Goon; a man who couldn’t let women alone ought to be burned.

  I was isolated from it all by my certain knowledge of Goon’s innocence and I began to have foreknowledge of what a fantastic puppet play the trial would turn out to be. That disturbed me, and the glare from the yellow-painted wall was making my eyes smart, that and the excessive smoke. I had been looking at the wall, listening with my ears only... somehow that made it all less real. But I didn’t stay long. I emptied my glass and left the bar with the wife’s words ringing in my ears: If he did it, he’d be better off dead...

  Jesus Christ!

  I walked back to the barge. It was tied up quite close to where we had fished Cathie’s body from the water. I found myself wondering where she was now. She would be buried in some cemetery or other. I wondered whether they had a special place for people who had been murdered and whose relatives didn’t claim them, an anonymous pit into which their scarred and post-autoptic remains were gradually fed. I was stopped by the violence of my thoughts. I felt empty and very alone, as though in some anomalous way it was part of myself which had been labelled, boxed, and interred. And I resented the prurient interest of the men at the bar.

  As I walked I remembered very well how different her body was from either Ella’s or Gwendoline’s. It was younger, smoother, with no flatulence; a brown-yellow becoming yellow-white on the underside; and I remembered being soothed out of tedious wakefulness in her soft arms.

  There was a time, I suppose, when we were happy. Long summer days in the cottage at the edge of the moor when we saw nobody. And I was going to write a book, a masterpiece, and we would go abroad. We spent the few hundred pounds that came to her when her father died. For a few weeks after that I did odd jobs about the neighbouring farms. But it couldn’t last. “If I see another bloody potato I’ll go stark raving mad!” So we moved to town and Cathie got a job. She came home tired and after a while there was an undercurrent of bitterness. “I wouldn’t mind so much if I thought you were ever going to finish it,” she said. “Do you think it’s easy? Do you think all I have to do is to sit down and write the bloody thing? I don’t have a plot. I don’t have characters. I’m not interested in all the usual paraphernalia. Don’t you understand? That’s literature, false. I’ve got to start with the here and now. I...” “No, I don’t understand,” she replied. “I don’t know why you can’t write an ordinary book, one other people will understand. It’s been eight months now. I get up early in the morning, sit in a lousy office all day, and when I come home you’re either drunk or asleep! What have you done today, Joe, while I was out earning the money for us to eat with?” “I made some custard,” I said dangerously. “You did what?” “I made some custard. Here it is.” I held up a large bowl of rich yellow custard. That morning when I found myself unable to work I looked round for something to do. I found an old recipe for custard. It was the best custard I had ever tasted. I was looking forward to Cathie’s coming home so that she could taste it. “Custard!” she said as she might have said “Bedbugs!” “I work all day and you make custard!” Without saying anything she began to change her clothes.