Young Adam

by Alexander Trocchi

  Leslie finished his food before me because he was anxious to get away to the pub. I have never known a man to hurry his meals so much. He gobbled, always, carrying gobbets of food to his mouth on knife or fork, not alternatively – it depended upon which instrument was nearest which piece of food and upon the shortest distance between plate and mouth. He was leaning forwards now to blow the steam from the surface of his tea.

  I looked at Ella’s back. It was a broad back, the back of a woman who in maturity was beginning to spread, not slackly, for I could see that her flesh was still firm, but spreading nevertheless, so that a man might feel a powerful lust under him, opaque flesh, strongly muscled, and banded by the strong torque of her body’s dynamism.

  I intended to return to her, just as soon as possible. I was certain that beneath a few plausible inhibitions she felt as I did, hungry, as though there were a kind of elemental fitness between our respective lusts. I have always felt like that about sex. Each time I close with a woman I have the feeling that we were destined to come together, body to body, just on that way, at that time, in the field or in the bed or wherever it is, and I suppose that doesn’t mean anything except that I am always there, waiting, ready to be caught up in it. I am like a sexual divining rod moving furtively at the edges of a meeting. I wait for a sign. It has something to do with the propulsion I feel from the instant desire is born in me, a shadow on a neck, the outline of a thigh, flanks, a gesture of lips wetting themselves, until the instant when I close with the woman. I resented Ella’s present resistance. It was a kind of treason. She had already acquiesced. She could not back out. The whole thing sprang into existence when she stretched up to hang the clothes on the line, when the back of her thighs were bared momentarily up to perhaps six inches below her buttocks. And the risk we would run put an edge to it. I was certain that she was not unaware of my thoughts.

  Leslie had already put on his cap and was waiting for me, so I went through into the small for’ard compartment where my bunk was to get mine. When I came back she was telling him not to get drunk. She had her back towards me and I winked at Leslie over her shoulder. Then I walked past her, brushing her buttocks with the back of my hand, and climbed up through the hatch. I felt her shudder. But she didn’t say anything.

  “See you later,” I said without looking back.

  I heard Leslie laugh from above as I climbed through.

  4

  A LITTLE BELL ABOVE THE DOOR tinkled as we went in.

  It was a neat little pub with an open fire at one end and some bright brass ship’s bells hanging from the rafters. An old man in a bowler leant across the counter and talked in a confidential voice to the barman, who wore a lick of hair, stranded and oiled, like a comb on his gleaming pink forehead.

  The only other customer was a young man in a cap, who sat huddled over the fire as though he were trying to guard it against the room.

  The barman nodded to us. He had prominent yellow eye teeth and pinkly blue bulbous eyes. The man in the bowler turned, nodded briefly, said how-do, and, resuming his confidential whisper, attempted to restrain the barman from hurrying to serve us. We waited politely a few yards along the bar.

  Soon the barman approached us backwards, like a yoyo on a string, nodding all the time in response to the gradually expanding voice of the elderly man in the bowler hat.

  “Scuse me, Mr Keith,” he said suddenly, and turned to face us. “What’ll you have, gentlemen?”

  We ordered two whiskies and beers as chasers. When he had served us, the barman asked where we were from and Leslie told him we had come from Glasgow with a load of anthracite for Leith and the barman remembered him and asked him about another bargeman who used to come in sometimes – what was his name? – a small sallow man, he was, with a harelip and he always had a woman with him who looked like a gypsy, a girl of about twenty-five, an eye-catcher, but he hadn’t seen him for months and he was probably dead or had given up the canal.

  “Aye,” Leslie said. “Like as not.”

  Leslie did not know who he meant anyway and Leslie knew pretty well all of the bargemen, so they concluded the man couldn’t have been a regular.

  The barman said discreetly that he wouldn’t have minded having a go at the girl. She was anybody’s meat, he said, not that he would have, being married and all with two fine children.

  I was impatient. I didn’t like the bar. I didn’t like the barman’s eyes, which looked as though they had been boiled in alcohol, and I had difficulty in pretending not to see the look of proffered friendship in the eyes of the old man who was now edging towards us along the bar. I saw nothing with attention. Time was passing, valuable minutes were passing during which I could have been alone with Ella or outside anyway and deciding how to go about being with her. I could not think clearly. Everything got in the way, the faces, the voices, the grease spot on the barman’s tie, the hair on his pink arms, and his shiny yellow-white collar. I watched his Adam’s apple move up and down as he spoke.

  “How’s business?” Leslie was saying.

  I swallowed my whisky at a gulp and pushed my glass forward to be refilled.

  The barman leant back, selected the bottle, and began to refill my glass. It was slack, he said. There wasn’t any money about these days. Saturday wasn’t bad.

  “Same everywhere,” Leslie said.

  “Taxes,” the voice of the man in the bowler hat said. The man in the bowler hat didn’t look as though he had paid a tax in the last twenty years.

  “Follow you to the grave,” said the barman. “Costs you a pretty penny to die these days.”

  Leslie laughed.

  “Talking of the dead,” he said, “you don’t by any chance have an evening paper?”

  “Sure. What’s up?”

  Leslie explained that he and I had picked a stiff out of the river that morning. “She was stark naked,” he said.

  The barman whistled and the old man with the bowler took the cue to move up and join us.

  “Murder?” he said. He had a long chin and his watery eyes were unpleasant. He was looking at me, inviting confirmation.

  “Must’ve been,” the barman said, “if she had no clothes on. Young?”

  Leslie said that it was difficult to say, but that she couldn’t have been more than thirty. He asked me what I thought.

  I said: “She was twenty-seven.”

  “Was she cut up like?” the man in the bowler asked, screwing up his eyes.

  “Not a mark,” Leslie said untruthfully, for the buttocks had been rather badly scratched. “Here, have you got yon paper?”

  The barman reached under the counter for it and passed it across to Leslie, who moved systematically over the columns with his thumb.

  “Let’s have another drink,” I said.

  The barman poured it automatically, changed the coin, and I retreated from the bar and sat with my drink at one of the tables. The conversation came to me from a distance. I examined the whisky in the glass, allowing it to ride against the sides as though I were searching for something in it. Of course I was. But my gaze was the kind of impotent gaze that a man in the gallery casts at a chorus girl in the front row. At that moment I resented my poverty, intellectual as well as economic.

  Just then I heard Leslie say triumphantly: “There it is!”

  “Where, for Christ’s sake!” the barman said.

  “There!”

  “There. Bottom of the third column. Look!”

  And he read:

  The body of a dead woman was found in the River Clyde early this morning. The woman was wearing only a thin petticoat. She is so far unidentified. The police are investigating the possibility of foul play.

  “Thought you said she was naked?”

  “Same thing. These petticoats is transparent.”

  It was not difficult to leave before Leslie. I told him I had a headache. The man in the bowler had offered to play darts with him. I said good night all round and left.

  In the fresh air it ca
me to me that I’d had too much to drink, not really too much, but enough to slow down my reactions, to make me careless and know it without being able to do anything about it. I felt it in my walk and it worried me.

  I walked slowly down the narrow road past the church and stopped to read the posters which I had glanced at on the way to the pub. It was too dark to see them. I found myself lighting a match and holding it close to the boards. The match burned my fingers and went out. I cursed silently and stepped backwards. Farther down the road, I said good night to a policeman who I felt sure was watching me. Then I crossed the road quickly and turned down the little side-street which led to the canal. I was already thinking about what I was going to say, but by the time I reached the canal and when I came within sight of the barge I stopped to blow my nose and laughed at myself for being nervous. I was nervous, without a single thought in my head about how I was going to do this thing, about how I was going to break in on Ella’s world finally because I was set that way and had been since early morning. I listened to the fall on gravel of my own footsteps.

  The barge was lumpish, in shadow as I walked towards it. Somewhere nearby a dog barked.

  Now it was dark and the canal water was there as witness. It forced itself on me, a sound, a smell, present as we walked. She was walking at my side and I had my arm round her waist. Even at the time I was unsure how I had persuaded her to leave the barge with me.

  It was a dark night on the towpath and there was no moon. Her face was there, just a bit phosphorescent beside me. I tried to recall the argument and how scared she had been that the kid would wake up, and then the sudden lift, her voice almost triumphant, when she agreed to come on deck with me. We were walking past a hoarding when she stopped. She said she wasn’t going any farther, but she said it softly, as though she were afraid of being overheard. It was not that she was resisting me. Realizing it, I moved her against the hoarding and stood very close to her. It was a chill night. I had experienced before this conjunction, I mean the cold air containing the warm smell of a woman, warmer for the air’s being cold. I realized suddenly that her clothes were not part of her. It sounds like a truism. But in the intensity of the moment it is a wonderful discovery. The cloth seemed to crumple beneath my hand, and I felt the strong flank muscles arching firmly beneath. I had to put my hand under her chin and tilt her face upwards towards me. And then I slipped my hand under her coat to her thigh. The cotton dress, the same one, was warmer under my fingers. I could feel that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath. The dress lifted lightly over my wrist as I brushed my hand upwards over her skin. I kissed her then at the same time and we stood there swaying slightly as though the light night wind, smelling of the canal, had the power to move us.

  She sank downwards on to the grass. I followed her. And then my hand feathered her strong belly, teasing the flesh towards the navel, where, abruptly, the belt of the dress girdled her, making her belly curve upwards like a great white moon of sensuality. She was breathing heavily, her heavy thighs widening to encourage pressure. She had closed her eyes. Her frock, peeled upwards now above her hips, revealed the derelict posture, from the abdomen downwards, the knees slightly raised, the whole creature part of her like a strange night animal trapped beyond its lair. I moved downwards. Across her belly, across the thigh that rose against my cheek, I saw the glimmer of the canal water, and beyond that nothing, for the houses on the opposite bank were already lightless, their inhabitants asleep. The dog barked in the distance.

  It was perhaps the dog’s bark that brought me back to time. I don’t think I have ever seen anything lovelier than Ella in her abandoned position. The obstinate stupidity was gone. The futility of her existence was utterly transcended. I heard her say huskily: “Now, Joe,” and a moment later we were together, fused, as lead is fused to lead, and the dew on the grass was on her and on the backs of my hands where they held her.

  Later, she rose from the grass like an animal shaking itself into wakefulness, and I had lit a cigarette and was standing away smoking with my back against the hoarding. I noticed then for the first time that there were stars.

  I watched her tidy herself. She did it impatiently, or rather with the air of impatience, because she moved slowly, as though she were giving herself time to compose her face before she looked at me. I watched her button up her coat.

  “The police are investigating that woman,” I said.

  She looked at me. “What made you think of that?”

  “Something to say.”

  “You’ve done enough talking for one night,” she said.

  I could not see the expression on her face.

  “Are you sorry?”

  “A fat lot of good that would do me!”

  “We’d better be getting back,” I said. “I told Leslie you’d have a cup of tea ready for him when he got back.”

  “You would!”

  She was bending down, brushing her bare legs with her hand. As she rose again, I pulled her towards me and kissed her. For a moment we tried to see each other’s eyes in the dark and then she freed herself.

  “Get back to the barge,” she said. “We must.”

  She made me walk apart from her and, as the towpath wasn’t wide enough for two to walk abreast and apart at the same time, she walked in front.

  As I followed, I was wondering what thoughts were running through her head, whether she regretted it now it was over or whether she would want to develop the relationship. I knew that Leslie wasn’t much use to her in that way. She had told me her age: thirty-three. She was probably two years older. I wondered whether I was the first. I supposed I was. Living with him on the barge, it wouldn’t be easy for her; they were moving most of the time. And anyway, she did not strike me as the kind of woman who would go out looking for it. She was a snob. And she despised men, at least up till now she had, or pretended to do so, with that thick sarcastic voice of hers, stupidly and obviously; but up till that time I had not thought of disbelieving her because even if she had only consciously formed a habit of despising them, it came to the same thing. In the end she would do so. But now I wasn’t too sure.

  We climbed on to the barge and went down below and put the light on. The kid was still sleeping. The paraffin lamp was smoking, scorching the globe, and she leant over the table to turn it down.

  As the lamplight struck her face I noticed again how full her lips were. She was the kind of woman I liked, mature, strong-bodied, with a thick opaque quality of flesh. Her hair, though cut short, was quite straight. In spite of the fact that I hadn’t been aware of her before, I found myself thinking that she was the kind of woman a man was bound to be conscious of, a woman whose body was still young, not fat, and yet which appeared at the belly, hips and breasts, to be about to tear through the fragile too-much-washed cotton dress which encased it. If she turned at the waist, it seemed, the cotton would rend apart.

  “Too bad he’s coming back,” I said.

  She finished with the lamp.

  “What?”

  “Too bad he’s coming back.”

  I nodded towards the double bunk. There was something seductive about the heavily planked bunk with its faded quilt which was almost colourless in the soft yellow light of the paraffin lamp. Through the partition I had heard it creak under their weight often, and that time in the middle of the night I had heard the thick searing sound of the heavy leather belt; swearing, muffled conversation too, but the noises were always too spasmodic and infrequent for them to be those of a man and woman making love.

  “In there,” I said. “In the bunk.”

  She smiled at me for the first time since I had raised my body from hers.

  “You’re nice, Joe,” she said, squeezing my wrist. And then she turned away and lit the gas under the kettle. I sat down at the table and glanced at the morning paper.

  “Did you bring the paper back with you, Joe?”

  “No, Leslie’s got it.”

  “What did it say about that woman?”
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  “Not much. Just that the police were investigating.”

  She shrugged her shoulders and didn’t say anything. I saw her profile from where I was sitting. Her face was set, heavy at the jaw, slightly sullen, tilted downwards, looking at the kettle as though she were willing it to boil. Behind, on the planks of the partition, was her shadow. I watched that for a moment and then returned to the paper. The kid was still asleep in the small bunk opposite the double one. When I looked up again the cat was rubbing itself against her ankles.

  “Are you hungry?” she said. Her back was turned to me. Her voice came again. “I could fry you an egg.”

  It was a confession.

  “Not now, Ella. Just a cup of tea.”

  A few moments later we heard footsteps on the towpath, and then the clump of Leslie’s boots on deck.