When I looked over at Ella again she was dropping the potato back into the bucket. It made a little splash. She found another one and began to peel it.
2
NOT LONG AFTERWARDS the lorries arrived with the anthracite. There were four of them and they backed up to the edge of the quay in turn and the load was shovelled down a metal chute straight into the hold. An open-deck scow would have been more practical but Leslie had to take what loads he could get. It was a dirty job for Leslie and me. After each load of anthracite had been emptied into the hold, he and I had to get to work with shovels and spread it evenly to prevent the barge listing. It wouldn’t have been so bad working at the other end, but all the dust and grit in the world was down there in the hold and it got into our eyes and our noses and into the orifices of our ears. I never liked carrying coal or anthracite. The dust in my nostrils gave me a headache and it wasn’t as though we could take a bath afterwards. We had to do it all in a wooden tub on deck and the water was cold with only a kettle of hot water poured in to take the chill off.
The loading took us about an hour and a half. I was hot and sticky and I could feel the coal-dust prickle on my skin under my shirt and when, in some context or other, Leslie mentioned Ella’s name, I became vaguely and physically excited to imagine her against me, clean and warm and firm. I wondered how she would take it, whether her naked body would quiver and draw away or whether it would meet me with its own urgent thrust. I tried to imagine her with no clothes on, but in the constant movement of the anthracite and the rising dust I could not get beyond a vague white blur.
When we climbed out into the thin sunlight Leslie signed the receipt to say that he had taken delivery and the men drove away in the last lorry. We closed the hatch over the anthracite and then all we had to do was to sweep away the dust from the deck and get washed.
As we were in rather a public place – it was at the quayside on the Clyde in Glasgow, and we would go along the canal that joins the Clyde and the Forth, and then we would come back again with another load, whatever we could pick up in Edinburgh or Leith – we could only strip to the waist, and this was annoying because I could feel the coal-dust in my boots and on my legs and thighs. We could only roll up our trouser legs and stand knee-deep in the buckets. Ella had gone down below to get the kettle of hot water and Leslie and I relaxed on top of the hatch while we were waiting. I was no longer bored. From the moment I had wakened that morning things had begun to happen, nothing spectacular – I’m not talking about the corpse – but a kind of excitement at the edges of me. I was aware of a kind of prenatal odour in things. As I rolled my cigarette I could feel the dull ringing at the tips of my fingers, brought on no doubt by handling the shovel. The air smelled good. I wanted Ella to hurry up with the water.
Leslie, as usual, smoked his pipe. It struck me as natural that Leslie should smoke a pipe. He had big, heavy workman’s hands with short broad fingers and he wore a gold signet ring on his left hand. His nails were short, cracked, and bitten to the quick, and the coal dust had settled on them, making them look grey and pink. My own were the same, only I didn’t wear a ring and my fingers were a bit longer and not quite so rough. As I looked at the palm of my hand, moist and pink and grey, it occurred to me that if I placed my hand on a sheet of paper and pressed it there it would leave a clear and perfect impression. The mere thought of having my fingerprints taken made me feel guilty and I found myself wondering how a man could destroy all traces from a place where he had been. Leslie interrupted me to say that we would leave for the canal as soon as we had eaten.
I asked him where we would stop for the night. Night, since I had become aware of Ella, was full of possibility, especially if there was a pub close by to which Leslie would undoubtedly go. Apart from the existence of a pub, where we stopped for the night didn’t matter. There was not much to pick and choose between the small towns along the canal. A few lights after ten o’clock at night, and they all went to bed early.
He said he didn’t know, that all depended on how far we got before dark. He said we were in no hurry, that we had a load of granite chips to pick up in Leith on Saturday morning. It was only Tuesday.
The kettle of water arrived.
Jim came up from below with his mother and stood, eating another apple, staring at us.
“That boy eats too much fruit. He’ll get the bellyache,” Leslie said gruffly.
“Leave the boy alone,” Ella said, carrying two buckets over to us. “You give me the bellyache with your complaints!” The buckets were both about half-full of cold water. Ella poured half the kettle of boiling water into each bucket, or roughly half, because I thought she was more Liberal with me.
“Hey, don’t give him all the hot water!” Leslie said.
“Aw, shut your mouth! You’re like a big kid!” Ella replied.
I liked the way she stooped to pour the hot water in, stirring it with her hand. I noticed there was damp patch under her arm and that the green cotton was discoloured there, a gradually paling yellow like a leaf in autumn.
We both stripped to the waist and began to soap our chests and arms while Ella went down below again to prepare the meal.
In spite of his age Leslie still had a big chest, but it rippled on to his paunch without clear definition. It struck me then that he must have weighed well over two hundred pounds.
He was snorting into the bucket, washing behind his neck, behind his ears, which stood out like little red lamps on either side of his head, shiny and tufted with small sprouts of grey hair. As far as I could see he was tattooed all over, with serpents and monograms and wreaths and hearts and anchors in green, blue and red inks. He’d got them done while he was still at sea. Each tattoo, he said, represented one woman, and he was able to bring back to mind their breasts, their thighs, their buttocks, the way they cried out – like alley-cats, most of them, he said, drawing extravagantly from his mean imagination – just by looking at the tattoos. Of course, he didn’t get tattooed for every tart he slept with, just if they were special. Most of them weren’t worth it.
Leslie met Ella in a seamen’s canteen where she went to look for her father. Leslie was drinking with him in the lavatory because there were no drinks served there officially. They were both drunk and her father insisted that they should take Leslie home with them. Leslie had been ten years at sea as a stoker. Ella’s father died shortly after they got married and Leslie gave up the sea and took to working the barge which Ella inherited.
When we had finished washing our fronts we washed each other’s backs, dried ourselves and put on clean shirts. After that, we rolled up our trouser legs and washed our feet and legs and the kid was still standing there gaping at us and Leslie told him to beat it down below and tell his mother we’d be down in a minute. I was looking forward to going down myself. When the kid had gone he said we’d tie up at Lairs for the night. He knew a good little pub there where we’d be able to have a game of darts.
If there was anything Leslie prided himself on it was his darts. He played very well with a gentle little overhand movement surprising in a person of his weight and size. I can see him now, poised on the ball of his right foot, his tongue protruding slightly between his lips, balancing one of his expensive metal darts on the tip of his short stubby fingers.
But I wasn’t really interested.
Darts bored me just as much as Leslie’s conversation. I was interested only in his wife.
After we had emptied the buckets over the side we went down to the meal. It was a good smell. She had made some soup and we were going to have some mince and potatoes afterwards. Jim was banging on the table with his spoon and his father told him to be quiet and behave himself. I was watching Ella ladle the soup into the plates. The pot was steaming. Beside it were two other pots. I could distinguish the bubbling sound of the potatoes and the stewing sound of the mince. I was hungry. She served the boy first and then she served Leslie and me and Leslie passed the bread which she had cut into hunks and we both
dipped it deeply in our soup as we ate. A moment later she came to the table and sat down. Leslie and I sat one at either end of the table and she sat between us at the side opposite the boy. She rested her left arm on the table while she used the spoon.
All through the meal I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. She had come to me suddenly, a woman hanging out washing with a vacant lot and a factory chimney in the background: it was as though someone had poured warm water on the back of my neck and it ran down over my front and back and down the inside of my thighs and down my legs and ankles. But the sensation didn’t fade and leave me cold as the water would have. It lingered on my skin, reminding me of her. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her and even when I looked down to dip the bread in the soup I was still aware of her.
She was close. Every movement, even the one I’d associated in the past with Leslie’s wife during the three months I’d been with them, seemed to have taken on the same quality. It didn’t matter whether she was reaching out for the bread and showing the yellow patch under her arm or standing at the stove serving the mince with the apron string lying loosely across her haunches or pushing back her straight short two-coloured hair which I’d never seen her brush, it had the same effect upon me. And I couldn’t keep my eyes off her neck, which was the yellow colour necks sometimes are, and I couldn’t help associating that with the change in colour of a stalk of grass of which the blade is green and dry relatively and then lower down, where the grass enters the earth, the stalk has a sweet milky appearance. It is smooth yellow-white, like ivory, only it has the smear of life, of what breeds. And if you compare a woman to a stalk of grass then her neck is the point at which she enters the earth, at which the sun strikes only intermittently, and below her neck she thrusts downwards, kinetic, towards the earth’s centre, like the moist white shoots and roots of plants. I had often thought that. That was why I couldn’t keep my eyes off her neck. And while I was eating my soup that was what I was thinking.
She got up to serve the mince.
As she did so the cotton of her dress fell softly about her thigh and it was as much as I could do to prohibit the impulse to touch her.
We didn’t talk much at dinner. She scolded the boy once or twice for making a mess on the tablecloth and she asked Leslie when he intended to cast off. He said he wanted to get away as soon as the meal was over, and that irritated me because I like half an hour to digest my food. It was all right for him; his boat, his profits. But my irritation was only in the background, like a stray thought you don’t take any notice of, because I was by this time too completely interested in Ella to pay much attention to what Leslie was saying.
When the mince came Leslie said to her what he had said to me about wanting to make Lairs that night. She said drily that it didn’t matter to her where he got drunk. Leslie said defensively that I had challenged him to a game of darts.
Ella raised one eyebrow.
“Do you play darts?” she said, unconvinced.
I really didn’t know what to say, for it was one of those questions spoken in that tone of voice which makes you feel very small and tongue-tied and to which, if the question is unexpected as this one was, you give a false, weak defensive answer.
“Sometimes, to pass the time,” I replied.
“I thought you’d find something better to do with your time,” she said more drily than ever.
I can’t remember what it was I said then, but it was something that made Leslie laugh.
Ella got up and went over to the stove. Meanwhile, Jim was wondering what his father was laughing at and he asked his mother, who told him not to be inquisitive and to hold his tongue. “Eat your potato,” she said, and to Leslie: “Don’t rupture yourself!”
Leslie finished what was on his plate and a moment later pushed it away from him. By that time, with the feeling that I had said the wrong thing, I was finished myself and was going over in my mind the situation of a moment before in which, even allowing for the bias of my mind, I felt I had missed a cue, an opportunity anyway of letting her know that I knew the implication of her acceptance as natural of the fact that Leslie liked darts and the implication behind her sarcasm when she asked me if I liked darts too. Perhaps she was defending herself even then, against a fear in herself, when she placed me precisely and adroitly in the position of having to answer an awkward question. And her sustained sarcasm during the last few minutes, though it was not unusual at mealtimes when we were all congregated together, was aggravating now because since a few hours ago I wanted to change sides, to laugh with her at Leslie and not with Leslie at her. And so when she asked us if we would like a cup of tea and I saw that Leslie was getting ready to say no, that we would have to get under way and there wasn’t time, I said I would. “What about you, Leslie?” – and as I had said yes he shrugged his shoulders and said yes too.
I could see she was wondering why I had said yes so quickly and maybe she was amused. She had got that queer look on her face, a flush at her prominent, almost Mongolian cheekbones, which I had noticed before in the morning when she turned round from hanging up the clothes while the ambulance men were taking the body away and saw that I had been watching her. While she was brewing the tea she was smiling and humming to herself like she was when she was listening to my version of how the woman came to be in the water. I guessed that she knew I was interested in her.
She brought the cups over and put them on the table and then went back for the teapot and sat down in her place again.
I was rolling a cigarette and trying to appear casual, but inside I was alert and wondering just how far I could go. Leslie was reading the morning paper with a look of pained disbelief on his face and the nipper had a comic strip in front of him and was swinging his legs, as kids do, under the table.
That, and the fact we were walled into privacy by two newspapers, was what gave me the idea.
Of course, I was taking a risk and I might have been wrong about everything I thought had gone before, but even then I did not think she was likely to give me away. She was a woman after all, a woman who had been brought up on the barges. I watched a frail spout of steam issue from the kettle on the hob.
Slowly, very slowly, I moved my leg until it was touching hers under the table, until my shin was round under the back of her calf, and then, touching, I drew up my trouser leg to expose my shin and moved it softly up and down against the back of her calf. Her flesh was warm, the skin slightly rough. I had time to be conscious of that. I watched the flush spread from her neck to her cheeks, saw her stiffen, felt her whole torso quiver as, in collusion, she pretended not to know anything about it, and for a moment we sat in a kind of state of esoteric transmission, her profile towards me, her chin raised slightly, baring the thick sensuous line of her neck, her nostrils tense like shells and her right hand on the table gripping the salt cellar, playing with it. I spent the next minute consolidating my position, massaging gently with my shin on her bare flesh. Beyond, the newspapers rustled, Leslie coughed, and the kettle began to sing more energetically on the hob.
With a kind of eager reluctance then, I moved my hand on to her right thigh under the cotton. It was warm, soft, and elastic. She was breathing more heavily. She did not dare to look at me. Gently I stroked her, aware of the growing urgency at my fingertips as they sowed desire there at her thighs, an urgency which stemmed from the fact of my knowledge that my present advances could come to nothing, that at any moment the tension might be broken by the unconscious movement of one of the possible spectators. At that moment my fingers came into contact with the prohibiting elastic of her old-fashioned knickers. The balls of my fingers scored into her flesh, pushing their way under the elastic. At the same time I felt her downwards movement, incredibly slow and incredibly heavy, as she slid forward on the wooden chair so that her body raised itself almost imperceptibly to my fingertips.
At that moment she looked at me. It was almost, I felt, a look of hatred, her eyes brittle and passionate at the same time. I felt a fool
suddenly to be watching her, to be at such a distance from her. I am sure she felt it too, but from her point of view it was a kind of treason. I tried to reassure her by glancing meaningfully over at the double bunk where Leslie and she slept. But that had the opposite effect from the one I anticipated. She breathed outwards quickly through tightened nostrils and heaved backwards with her rump to be free of my exploring fingers, at the same time moving her leg forwards away from mine in a delayed reflex action. Her left hand grasped with strong fingers at my wrist and thrust my hand from her. In her alarmed movement she must have kicked the kid for our private world was suddenly invaded by him: “Hey! Stop kickin’ me, Ma!” and she clasped her hands on the table just as Leslie lowered the paper in front of him and said: “Well, Joe, if you’ve finished your tea we’ll get started.”
Ella was hot and confused and she was collecting the cups and telling the nipper to stop his yelling before she belted him. I stood up and said to Ella I’d enjoyed my tea very much, but she said something under her breath and didn’t turn round. She was scraping the potato pot with a knife and I couldn’t see her face.
3
UP ON DECK the air was cool, cool grey, and over behind the sheds the brick factory stack was enveloped in a stagnant mushroom of its own yellow smoke. Leslie spat out over the side of the barge and put away his pipe.
“I’ll start her up, then,” he said, and went below again.
I let go of the ropes and soon we had moved out into the yellow flank of the river into midstream and were heading for the entrance to the canal. The water was smooth and scum-laden and it seemed to lean against us and fall again, the surface broken with scum-spittles, as we made way. Now and again a piece of pockmarked cork moved past low in the water. There wasn’t much traffic on the river. And then, under the dirty lens of sky, Leslie was looking intently towards the quay from which we had just pulled away, marking in his memory, I suppose, the stretch of water from which we had pulled the woman’s corpse.
Young Adam Page 3