“About the custard,” I said after a moment, “it struck me as a good idea. So I made it. Here it is over on the dresser.”
I walked towards the bowl. It was a very large bowl and it must have contained about two and a half pints of custard.
“I don’t give a damn where it is!” she said, pulling off one of her stockings, “You’ll have to eat it yourself, that’s all. I certainly don’t want any custard.”
I looked at her. Suddenly I was annoyed with her. I had been bored all day. I had enjoyed making the custard. I was damned if I was going to have her sit there making nasty remarks about my custard. Her face had taken on that kind of stupidly defiant look. It angered me. She was not looking at me even. She was straightening the seams of her stockings. Above them were her black nylon panties. That was all she was wearing. Her hair, still in cattails after her work, was hanging over her face as she bent to twist the stocking straight about her calf. I spoke slowly and threateningly.
“I made the custard and you’re going to eat it,” I said.
I don’t know why I wanted her to eat it but I did.
“You know what you can do with it!” she said derisively.
“I know what I am going to do with it!” I replied.
I threw it at her.
The custard, slipping from the bowl, a massive yellow gobbet of it, sailed across the room and struck her on the breasts. It had not hardened. It had the consistency of a soft glue paste. She screamed and tilted backward in her chair so that her body, now covered with custard, sprawled across the dusty oilcloth on the floor. Her thighs meanwhile in their upward arc as the chair spun backward and her hot spread buttocks glimmering whitely beneath the gauze-fine nylon stimulated me to further action. I lifted a stick from the fireplace, the split side of an egg crate, and leapt upon her. She was whimpering with fright.
“You bastard! you bastard! you bastard!” she was saying.
I grasped her by one arm, twisted her about so that her great big and now custard smeared buttocks were facing me and with all the strength of my right arm I thrashed at them with the rough slat of wood. I thrashed her mercilessly for about a minute. She was making shrill whinnying noises as she threshed about on the dusty floor. The custard was dripping off her nipples and mingling already with the short hairs of her sex. I paused, moved over to the mantelpiece and grasped a bottle of bright blue ink. She was seated on her haunches, crying, wheezing and shaking. I emptied the contents of the bottle over her head so that it ran through her hair and down over her face and shoulders where it met the custard. It was then that I remembered the sauce and the vanilla essence. I stirred them into the mixture, tomato ketchup, brown sauce, and a bottle of vanilla essence, blues, greens, yellows, and reds, all the colours of the rainbow.
I don’t know whether she was crying or laughing as I poured a two-pound bag of sugar over her. Her whole near-naked body was twitching convulsively, a blue breast and a yellow-and-red one, a green belly, and all the odour of her pain and sweat and gnashing. By that time I was hard. I stripped off my clothes, grasped the slat of the egg crate, and moved among her with prick and stick, like a tycoon.
When I rose from her, she was a hideous mess, almost unrecognizable as a white woman, and the custard and the ink and the sugar sparked like surprising meats on the haired twist of her satisfied mound.
I washed and went out without a word. When I returned, there was no evidence of the mess. She was in bed, and as I got in beside her, I felt her arms close about me and she kissed me on the lips.
It was a painful memory now. Not long after that we broke up, quietly, with no hysterics. “You should have been rich, Joe,” she said to me. “It might have worked then. I loved you.” Past tense. Because I was not rich I should submit to the harness? “Ah, but ’twas my fearless rebel eye that made you love me, dear?...”
I was so engrossed in my thoughts that I almost turned directly into the street where the café was, where she and I had sat on the night of her death. As I turned the corner, a sense of familiarity made me halt and I stood for a moment wondering until the fact of my foolishness struck me and then I turned and walked quickly back the way I had come.
When I returned to the barge Gwendoline was sitting alone in the cabin reading a paper. The kid was asleep in the for’ard cabin. As I came down through the companionway she looked up.
“When’s your birthday, Joe?”
“What?”
“Your horoscope,” she said. “I’ll read it to you.”
“Where’s Ella?”
She laughed.
“El’s gone daft! Come on and sit down.”
She poured me a glass of gin from the bottle in front of her.
“What do you mean ‘daft’?”
“She’s gone to see Leslie.”
I sat down, accepting the glass she offered me, and drank. It wasn’t until the bitter taste of the gin stung my palate and my throat that I remembered that I hated raw gin.
“What I can’t imagine,” Gwendoline said, “is what she wants with a man like that.”
“He’s a rock,” I said, getting up. I didn’t listen to her reply. I was collecting my various personal possessions and stowing them into a small kitbag with which I came to the barge.
“What d’you think you’re doing?” Gwendoline demanded.
“I’m clearing out,” I said. “I should have gone a long time ago.”
Gwendoline went into a fit of hysterical laughter. Her white face with her vivid thin lips was like a ghoul’s in the light from the oil lamp.
“Have you seen my mirror?” I said.
“What mirror?”
“It’s a metal one. I use it for shaving. It’s got a hole in the top end.”
“Are you really going off tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Have a last drink then.”
“No. I hate the stuff.”
I found the mirror in the table drawer and put it beside the rest of my property in the kitbag.
“Aw, come on! Have a drink!”
“I don’t like raw gin.”
She looked at me for a moment and then burst into laughter again. I looked at her. She sat with her elbows on the table, laughing hysterically, her face pale and her coppery red hair like a wig in the lamplight.
“You burn that photograph yet?”
I froze, and found myself sitting down. “What photograph?”
“Aw, you know!” Her voice was growing thicker with the gin. “The one of your ole girfrien’.”
“Oh, that one. Sure, I burned it.”
“Thash good. Don’t like souveneers, heh, heh, no regrets, Joe, old boy, whadiyou shay?”
I poured myself a small shot of gin and clinked glasses with her.” Let the dead bury the dead,” I said.
“Thash my Joe!” She slumped forward on the table and I stared for a moment at the scrawny neck where the dark roots of her hair showed, the glint of iron filings.
She hadn’t seen the photograph. I was reasonably certain of that. And I had burned it since. Anyway, I had to take the chance. I couldn’t imagine myself killing her. Kill the old Italian in the café too! I got up and climbed up through the companionway.
Outside on the quay I looked around at the distant flickering lights and then walked away into the city.
Part Three
1
DURING THE NIGHT I listened to the plumbing. The bed was hard and the broken state of the springs made the mattress uneven. The one-room-and-kitchen flat was at the front of the house and the windows gave on to the street, a narrow crescent-shaped street, the pavement of which on the opposite side was on four levels, lava-like steps which sloped downwards on to a narrow bed of cobbles along which only three vehicles ever came – the dust cart, the coal cart and the milk-lorry. The street was lit by five lamps, four lamp posts and one scrolled Victorian bracket riveted almost opposite the window to the crumbling grey wall opposite. And now the light from it filtered into the room where I was ly
ing, in the recess bed in the kitchen, and gleamed dully on the bone-like rim of the sink from whose pipes the plopping and gurgling sounds came, and cast the floor in shadows so that the bits of furniture seemed to be suspended in mid-air and I had the impression that I was within a shaft with unsubstantial furniture around me, and that below, where no floor was, the shaft continued downwards without sensible bottom.
I was lying on my side, and with my hand I reached downwards tentatively and touched the oilcloth on the floor. The feel of it reassured me and I caressed it with the backs of my fingers. My head rested at the edge of the bed and I tried to make out with my eyes the surface which my fingers touched. A moment later it was there, shadowy, under the dull droop-white of my fingers.
The noise from the pipes approached and retreated like a train along the rails. Out of the corner of my eye, beyond the hanging window, I could see the coloured contours of the lamp bracket and the pale glow which it cast above the nameplate of the street. If I had not known the name already I would have been unable to decipher it from that distance and in that light, but as it was I could see it, blurred at first and then in sharp focus, as though I were its creator. It was called Lucien Street. It was adjacent to Black Street.
I turned back to the woman beside me and laid my hand on her belly just above her pelvis. She was sleeping soundly and rather noisily. My fingers moved down softly, exploring the intricacy of her dormant being. It was the night before the day on which Goon was to stand trial. I was unable to sleep.
In the small Bridgeton flat I understood from the beginning that it would be possible as the lodger to avail myself of the narrow-breasted, knuckle-haunched, thin blonde of twenty-five whose husband worked as a night-watchman in a warehouse in Stockwell Street, there being only a flimsy door which would not close properly between the kitchen where they slept, the two children in a cot and the wife in a cavity bed, and the small room which was mine.
The door from the stairs opened into the kitchen.
Her husband’s first act when he came in at daybreak was to remove his boots. These were big boots, warped by the sweat of his feet and shod heavily with iron.
His next act was to make tea for the adults in bed. At the same time he resuscitated the dead embers of the fire and warmed his feet.
Before he retired I got up from my bed in the small room, to which I had retreated a couple of hours before, and went through to the kitchen to shave myself at the sink. While I was shaving I heard the woman gasp suddenly as the man joined her. He did so with no gentleness, taking what was his.
I didn’t look around. I watched the soap thicken on the end of my shaving brush and remembered how from the beginning she had unquestioningly but without passion accepted my own embraces.
I remained tinkering with my shaving kit, washing one piece after another under the tap, the soap swirling from amongst the bristles of the brush until the grunts of the man and the heavy breathing of the woman were over. I turned to the man, who was lying sideways across his wife, and said I was going to watch the trial of Goon that day, that it would be interesting. He nodded sleepily.
In spite of the mute rivalry which existed between us over the woman who – he must have known – served us both, there was also a tacit understanding. We were friends and we drank together, that too almost from the beginning – the night on which I had left the barge I met him in a pub – when, back in the kitchen, he said: “Your kip’s in the other room. If there’s anything you need, the wife here’ll attend to you.” The wife, a thin, hard-muscled woman of the slums, cocked an eyebrow and looked me up and down. Under her look I felt the courage drain away from my spine and I could think of nothing better to do than to produce a handful of half-crowns and shillings and pay two weeks’ rent in advance, laying the money, as though I were buying her, at the corner of the table near the wife who, after a moment’s hesitation, passed two of the coins over to the husband and swept the remainder into the pocket of her apron. The man accepted them without expression and invited me to go downstairs for a drink.
“See you’re not late for work,” his wife said as we went out.
Over a beer we talked about her. All the time I felt it was strange he didn’t talk about her body, nor even about the woman really, only, and with a stubborn primitive knowledge of what he was talking about, about his experience of her.
At the corner of the street we parted company, he to go to the warehouse, I to return to the flat. For a moment he seemed reluctant to go.
And then, when he was gone, and with the weight of chains at my abdomen, I was on my way back to her and the tiny flat in Lucien Street. I paused on Black Street, the scene of my crime. It was when I entered the flat again that she said without formality that she supposed I’d be like the last. She said it without warmth and added: “Wait till the wains go to sleep.”
She dressed in front of the fire without looking at me. I finished my own activities at the sink and then sat down in front of the fire and smoked a cigarette. She was frying bacon. A moment later she broke two eggs into the pan, let them fry for a moment, and then emptied the entire contents of the pan on to a plate which she thrust at me. I took it to the table with a knife and fork, broke some bread and commenced to eat. A moment later she laid a cup of strong tea beside me.
“You going to that police court later on?”
I nodded.
“You think that Goon’s guilty?”
“They haven’t established it was murder yet.”
“What d’you mean?” Connie said.
“They haven’t proved it was.”
“Oh, they know that,” she said vaguely, bringing her own plate with bacon only on to the table beside me. “A woman doesn’t get undressed for nothing.”
“That’s not the point. So she made love.”
“You’ll see,” Connie insisted. “They’ll hang him, the poor bugger.”
I was uneasy about it. I could not deny it was likely. But there was nothing I could do. I would go to the trial. Something might turn up. But after all the dramatic news coverage there had to be a victim. I would go. Leslie would be there, perhaps Ella. And Gwendoline? When I thought of her I became even more uneasy. She threatened more than my peace of mind. But she hadn’t seen the photograph. I had it out of sight too quickly for that. I thought for a while that I would leave the city altogether, even go abroad, at once. But I had to go to the trial to see how the lawyers and other court functionaries committed legal murder. The image of Cathie’s naked body floated before me, like Macbeth’s dagger. But during the trial neither the victim nor the murderers would dream of taking their clothes off. Too bad. The thought was more than amusing. The judge would be an old man. He would lose all dignity if he were forced to perform without his majestic trappings. His skinniness, his obesity perhaps, would give the lie to the odour of righteousness. The crowd would laugh at his pomposity and shout down the brutality of his sentence. All judges, it occurred to me, all lawyers and lawyers’ clerks ought to be forced to try their case in the nude. The naked truth. In this context it would be more than a metaphor. It was doubtful if they would be able to convict anyone. Their voices, reflecting the all-too-human evidence of the naked postures, would lack conviction.
I was out in the street early and found myself walking along Argyle Street in the general direction of the courts. I stopped for a cup of tea at a snack counter, smoked two or three cigarettes, and then continued on my way. As I walked through the town, a strange feeling of confidence settled upon me. The rain was on and then it was off. There were women in the street, typists, shop-girls, clerks, hurrying to work. Men in suits, in overalls, in uniforms. A shot of whisky, which I drank from a hipflask, appeared to have drawn things more clearly together. It gave me at the same time assurance, certainty, not of anything; confidence simply in the face of the necessity of my isolation.
I boarded a tram. As soon as I was seated I found myself putting my hand in my pocket to make sure that my money was still there.
Of course it was. I smiled at the almost transparent reflection of myself in the window and saw beyond it, like a memory walking out of my head, a girl in a pink coat who stood looking in a shop window, a glimpse of legs which under the hem of the coat were pink and sunburned as Cathie’s had been, and I wondered whether under different circumstances I would have had the courage to get off and introduce myself. The tram moved on, an island of windows. I got off with as little purpose as I had got on. The pavement was, if anything, even more crowded. People pushed past me to board the tram, women with parcels mostly, touchable, aware of me as an obstacle only. It occurred to me that normally speaking, in relation to other people, I could be regarded primarily as an obstacle.
Young Adam Page 12
