“Look, let me come with you. If I stay around here I’ll meet someone and get turned on.”
“I thought that’s what we were sitting here for.”
“No, Joe, it’ll be OK tomorrow. It’ll be three days.”
“OK. Come on then.”
We get into the narrow bed and turn off the light. We lie awake for a while in the dark. I say: “Look, Tom, you’ll be OK.”
“I think I can sleep.”
I feel his arm move round me. I am suddenly very glad he is there.
I used to wonder if we would make love. Sometimes I felt we were on the brink of it. I think it occurred to both of us during those nights Tom slept with me in my single bed on Bank Street, his long brown arm round my body. There hasn’t been much of what is ordinarily understood as sexuality in our relationship. The effect of heroin is to remove all physical urgency from the thought of sex. But on those nights we hadn’t taken any heroin. We had drunk, turned on pot, taken whatever pills were available, and there were moments when our naked flesh touched and we were at the edge of some kind of release. If either of us had moved the other would probably have followed.
I can see Tom smiling as he comes in, his lips drawn back, showing his long teeth. He is wearing a chamois cap in the style of the English gentleman, a well-cut green pullover, drainpipe trousers, and a pair of oversized, beat-up ankle boots. Over all he wears a brown leather coat of past days’ motorists. When he turns on he walks and stands vaguely like an ape, bent at the knees, bent at the crotch, bent at the midriff, long arms dangling in front. Sometimes he carries an umbrella.
His first glance is at me, smiling across at me with his dark, beautiful eyes. And then, “Down boy! Down! Down, I tell yah! Christ, yah bad bitch!” The dog, its legs rigid, is dragged by the collar across the wooden floor and forced outside the main part of the loft. Tom closes the door quickly behind it, turns to me and grins again.
“You wanna get straight?”
He unbuckles his leather coat, hangs it carefully on a hanger, his cap on a hook, and unwraps the beautifully designed pale green scarf from his shoulders.
When I come with the water he is already pouring the powder from the transparent envelope into the spoon.
“I go first,” he says.
I don’t answer. I am watching how he lifts the water from the tumbler into the eye-dropper. I am wondering whether he is going to be quick or slow.
His nose is two inches above the spoon as he drops the water from the eye-dropper onto the powder. He holds the spoon near his eyes as he applies matches to it. He sets the spoon back on the table, bubbling.
He is doing all right.
Siphoning up the liquid again, applying the needle with its collar (a strip from the end of a dollar bill) to the neck of the dropper, twisting it on, resting the shot momentarily at the edge of the table while he ties up with the leather belt on his right arm... but I am already beyond all that. I am not watching and he is not playing for a public... if he is I shan’t notice because I am not watching... we are both of us, I believe, relating each and separately to the heroin before us. He is stroking the arm he is about to puncture just above a blackish vein and I am already moving to cook up my own fix in the spoon. By the time I have it prepared he is already loosening the belt. And now he presses the bulb. It doesn’t take long. It might have taken much longer.
As I take my own fix I am looking at all the needle marks. They follow the length of the vein down the arm. Since the Man looks for marks I am trying to keep them dispersed, to keep them as impermanent as possible. Some junkies use a woman’s cosmetic to mask their marks; it is simpler to stick to one vein until it collapses. They do so and make up their arms, just where the elbow bends, like a woman makes up her face. Shooting in places where the vein is more submerged has over a period of time made quite a mess of my arm. As I fix I am aware of Tom, slightly to one side of me, standing, his left hand lying on the table for balance, smiling idyllically. I wash out the eye-dropper and sit down on the bed. I begin to scratch.
An hour later Tom says: “Man, that’s good shit,” and he drapes himself at the other end of the bed. The dog barks in the next room.
“Don’t let the bastard in,” I say.
I was still lying on the bunk at three in the afternoon when Geo’s scow was unexpectedly pulled in. I opened the door and it was Geo, grinning hugely in greeting. “Runner told me to give you this,” he said, handing me a letter. “I see it’s from Scotland. Who’s it from? Your old man?”
When I was four I fell from a swing and broke my arm. When it was set in plaster I asked for a big box with a lid on it, like the one the cat slept in. I put it in a corner near the fire in the kitchen and climbed into it and closed the lid. I lay for hours in the dark, hearing sounds, of my mother’s moving about, of others coming and going from the kitchen, and inside sensing the heat of my own presence. I was not driven from my box until after my arm was healed, and then at my father’s insistence. It was a stupid game, he said. And the box was in the way. A boy needed fresh air.
MY MOTHER WAS PROUD and my father was an unemployed musician with the name of an Italian.
The blue-black hairs on my father’s legs gave to his flesh the whiteness of beeswax. I associated him with the odours of pomade and Sloan’s Liniment. The bathroom was his lair and his unguents were contained in a white cabinet affixed by four screws to a green wall. The pomade came in a squat jar with a red cap, the liniment in a flat bottle on whose label was an engraved likeness of Joseph V. Stalin. Because of his strange moustache I always thought of Mr Sloan as an Italian. It was not until today that it occurred to me to suspect that he wasn’t. The name of the maker of the pomade was Gilchrist, and yet it too was oily and glistened in my father’s scalp.
In my father’s obsequiousness there was an assurance, but as he grew older he became reflective during the winter months. His step quickened, his distances were less ambitious. He spent more time in smoke rooms over coffee and didn’t move out again into the street until the waitresses had begun to sweep away the fag ends which had been trodden into the carpet and to polish the glass tops on the tables. At that point he glanced at the clock he had been aware of since he came in, pretended to have found himself once again in time confronted by an overlooked appointment, and walked purposively to the swing doors. In one of his ungloved hands he carried a small leather briefcase which contained the morning paper, the evening paper, and a pale-blue box of deckled notepaper with envelopes to match. Sometimes he stopped abruptly on the pavement and fingered the lapel of his heavy coat. He looked guiltily at the feet of the people who passed him on either side. And then he walked more slowly. Every so often, just in that way, he remembered his angina. The word stuck in his throat. He was afraid to die on the public thoroughfare.
Sunday. My father would be awake before the milk and the morning papers were delivered. He slept four or five hours at most. After the death of my mother he lived alone. At nine he shaved. Not before. The number of such necessary enterprises was very meagre. He had to spread them thinly over the day, as he spread the margarine thinly over his bread, to prevent the collapse of his world. The fort wall was a frail one between my father and his freedom. He shored it up daily by complex ordnance. He was chosen for by an old selector system of tested rites. He gargled, watching his eyes in the mirror. He polished his shoes. He prepared his breakfast. He shaved. After that he staved off chaos until he had purchased the morning paper. Births, marriages and deaths. He moved up and down the columns at the edge of himself. But with the years he achieved skill. Either way he was safe. If none of the names meant anything to him he could enjoy relief; if a friend had died he could after that first flicker of triumph be involved in solemnity. His hours were lived in that way, against what was gratuitous, and he was all the time envious... at the brink. There is no suspicion so terrible as the vague and damning awareness that one was free to choose from the beginning.
Glasgow, 1949. When I let myself into his room my fa
ther was sitting in front of a one-bar electric fire. His hands were thrust forward in front of him, the fingers tilted upwards to catch the glow on his soft white palms. He was looking at the wedding ring of his dead wife which he always wore on the third finger of his left hand. He was pleased to see me. It was the first time since the New Year. He shook hands ceremoniously, holding mine within both of his, and then he lit the gas and put on the kettle. He said we would have a cup of tea. It was cold outside and he hadn’t been out during the day. We were in for a long winter by the looks of things. He asked me if I was hungry. He had some tins, one of sardines, one of peas, and one of pilchards or herrings in tomato sauce – he didn’t know which. I said I wasn’t but that I would take a cup of tea. He nodded vaguely. “Damn gas,” he said, “there’s no pressure.” He fiddled around with the rubber tube which was attached to the gas ring and then, still with his back towards me, he said: “Doing anything yet, son?” And I said: “Not yet.”
He leant down and removed a piece of white fluff from the carpet. For a moment he seemed to be at a loss where to put it. He laid it at last in an ashtray on the mantelpiece. His hand brushed the pale-green alarm clock which stood there and came to rest on his fountain pen, which he carried in his right-hand vest pocket, fingering it. He wasn’t wearing his jacket.
When the kettle began to sing he came back again, lifting the lid and peering inside. Steam rose up about his hand. He replaced the lid, walked away again, and wiped his hands on one of his very clean white towels. His towels are always immaculate, especially the one he wears round his neck as he shaves. He arranged it neatly on the towel rail when he had finished. He said it was difficult these days. The post-war boom was over.
My father had been unemployed for twenty-five years.
He stood well back from the teapot, his left hand pressed against his paunch as he poured the water in with his right hand. He was forced to lean down over the teapot to see if it was full. He poured the tea and handed me my cup. As he did so, he looked hurt for some reason or other, but he wasn’t looking directly at me. “How’s Moira?” he said. “She back at work?”
I nodded. I asked him if he had seen Viola lately.
“Your cousin?”
He hadn’t seen her but he had heard of her through Tina. Viola’s husband was ill again evidently, one lung collapsed. He had given her a hard time; she had gone again to the minister as she would have gone to the priest. The minister talked to him, man to man.
“Still,” my father said, “he gets a good pension. Your aunt’s just the same as ever.”
“I thought of going to see Viola,” I said.
He nodded. “She’d appreciate it. She’s had a hard time.”
He looked at my empty cup and poured me another one, milk, sugar, tea, in that order. Then he sat, rubbed his stockinged feet, and put on his outdoor shoes. He supposed I’d be going in a few minutes. If I cared to wait while he put on a collar and tie he would have a drink with me before I caught the tram. He said again he hadn’t been out during the day. It would do him good, he felt.
The beer was cold and almost flat. He introduced me to the barman. “Just down from the university,” he said. Since I looked vaguely like a tramp both the barman and myself were a little taken aback, but upon my father’s face there was a kind of waxen innocence, and no sign at all he was aware he was being inexact.
“What are you going to do now?” the barman said after a pause. He directed his question at me.
It was my father who answered.
“He’s training to be a journalist,” he said with a small, birdlike smile. He laid his finger at the deep hollow in his temple. There was a macabre irrelevance in all he said. But I was glad enough not to have to say anything. The barman nodded his head, saying that the old days were over, tentatively, and my father, his Adam’s apple wobbling, tilted his head back to drain the beer from his glass.
“Have another?”
“If you’re having one,” he said.
“Two more,” I said to the barman.
When they were placed before us I asked my father if he wouldn’t care to sit down. When we were in the company of a third person, whether it was a relative or a stranger, my father had a trick of addressing himself to him and discussing me as though I weren’t present. In that way, adroitly placing me in some sense beyond them both, he was able at once to be proud of me and to cut the listener down to his own size; then, when my pre-eminence was established, his little potato of a mouth split to show a cheap crescent of false teeth, and he asked after the other’s offspring as though it were an old old story to which he condescended to listen out of sympathy for the other. From the point of view of the listener it was a disturbing game. If he was unskilful enough to attempt to hit back, recounting the successes of his own offspring, my father had only to glance at the clock, whistle soundlessly through his thin lips, smile tolerantly to give the impression that he would have been interested if only the subject had been more important, and say: “I don’t want to keep you late for that appointment, Joseph.” Then, with a small bow to the other, he would usher me away, solicitous of my non-existent affairs. At this point, before we had gone two steps, he would play his ace. He turned round and said brightly to the other: “I’m sorry I’ve got to rush him away like this, but you’ll probably have the opportunity of seeing him again before he leaves town. He’s going to be here for a couple of weeks at least...” The other, if he wasn’t mortally offended, smiled weakly and nodded his head, for we were both looking at him, my father with an air of royal commiseration and I, forcedly, with one of polite and distant recognition. When we were alone again my father would be humming to himself, usually some light operatic air. After a pause he would ask me where I was going. If I was not doing anything in particular we could have a game of billiards.
I carried my beer over to one of the empty tables and he was forced to follow me with his own. I remember thinking that I shouldn’t grudge the old man his victories, nor even his using me as a foil. They were more necessary to him than his bread.
He knew that he had displeased me and he laughed nervously when he sat down. “Good chap that,” he said most treacherously of the barman.
“Tell me, Dad, what does it feel like not to have worked for twenty-five years?”
“What? Pah... Ha ha! That’s not so! You’re a joker, you are! Hem... It’s true I’ve been out of a regular job since the Depression. Now, before that, son, as your brothers will tell you, you went off every year for two months’ holiday, and all three of you were dressed in white... not like your cousins... with bonnets to match. Your mother wouldn’t have you in anything but white, and neither would I. Always out of a bandbox, you children.”
“But in a way it’s an achievement, Dad.”
“What? What’s that? What’s an achievement, son?”
“Not working all that time.”
“Pah, it’s not true! I looked after the house! Who do you think looked after the house? The house couldn’t have been run without me. Your mother was always too soft. Good thing she had me!”
The reverse was true. He always made things twice as difficult for my mother by generally getting in the way, scaring the lodgers with his ugly temper, by bursting constantly into the kitchen like an angry bear and striking my mother, or in one way or another reducing her to tears, and by his habitual practice of seizing the bathroom and barricading it against all comers.
A bathroom-toilet is a vital place in a boarding house. If one person monopolizes it a queer kind of consternation overtakes the household. My father regarded the bathroom as his own.
He cleaned it and polished it and made every surface gleam. He arranged the coarse runner carpet lovingly as though it were fine rare Persian. He waxed the oilcloth and applied Brasso to the two inefficient carpet rods which more or less kept the long strip of carpeting from gliding into folds across the oilcloth when you walked on it. He kept the windows spotless and changed the cream curtains twice a week.
(At the same time he grumbled if one of the lodgers wanted his curtains changed more than once a fortnight.)
He had four different locks on the bathroom door: a key, a snib, a snick and a hook-and-eye. He used all four when he was in there himself, I suppose in all about eight to twelve hours a day. The kitchen was the family living room, and my father and mother slept there in a retractable bed. All the other rooms except “the boys’ bedroom” had been converted for the use of lodgers, so he had no other room of his own in his own house. The major cleaning took three hours every morning. It began as soon as the lodgers (by preference “professional men”) went to work and the children had gone to school.
An old couple who came eventually to stay were the bane of my father’s existence. The old man was crippled and had to be helped to the bathroom by his wife and my mother. Together they supported him across the hall and down the passage which led to the bathroom. On a good day their passage from the room to my father’s lair took about three minutes each way. At the weekend the children often timed it and placed bets. A good passage was usually assured if my father was in a tolerable humour. Then he would stand with a peculiar, fawning smirk of distaste in the open kitchen doorway as the faltering procession passed, the old man wobbling on two sticks between the women. On a bad day the passage sometimes took as long as six minutes and was once clocked on a stopwatch at 6 min. 48 secs. This occurred almost exclusively ’cause my father was in a foul temper. The old couple visited the bathroom twice a day, once in mid-morning between 10.30 and 11.00, and in the evening between 7.30 and 8.00.
As the morning visit forced my father to interrupt his cleaning it was usually the more perilous. He would stamp and rage in the kitchen, shouting: “Always the bloody same! Got to clean the bloody place twice! Leave towels all over the bloody place!”
On such days the frail group quivered perceptibly as it neared the kitchen door. Then, when they had come and gone, my father would move with a cry of triumph like a beast to his lair. On bad days he was still cleaning the bathroom when those of us who came home for lunch returned. And then my mother would go nervous and angry to the door and knock on it: “Louis! Would you please finish up in there! Mr Rusk wants to use the bathroom before he eats lunch!”
Cain’s Book Page 8