Young Adam
by Frances Lengel


PART ONE 

CHAPTER ONE 

This morning, the first thing after I got out of bed, I looked in the 
mirror. It is of chromium plated steel and I always carry it with me. My 
beard had grown during the night and now my checks and my chin were covered 
with stubble. I must have slept well; my eyes were less bloodshot than they 
had been during the previous fortnight. I looked at my image for a few 
moments and I could see nothing strange about it. It was the same nose and 
the same mouth and the little scar above and thrusting into my left eyebrow 
was no more obvious than it had been the day before. Nothing seemed out of 
place. Yet everything was out of place because there existed between the 
mirror and myself the same distance-the same break in continuity-I have 
always felt to exist between the acts I committed in the past and my present 
consciousness of them. 

But there is no problem. 

I do not ask now whether I am the "I" looking or the image which was seen; 
whether I am the man who acted or the man who thought about the act. I know 
now that it is the structure of language itself which lacks continuity. The 
problem comes into being as soon as I use the word "I." There is no 
contradiction in things, only in objects, that is, in the words we invent to 
refer to things. It is the word "I" which is arbitrary and contains within 
itself its own inadequacy and its own contradiction. 

There is no problem. 

I saw that. I turned away from the face in the mirror then. Between then and 
now I have smoked nine cigarettes. 

*** 

It had come floating downstream, willowy, like a tangle of weeds. She was 
beautiful in a pale way-not her face, although that was not bad-but the way 
her body seemed to have given itself to the water. Its whole gesture was 
abandoned, with the long white legs apart and trailing, sucked downwards 
slightly at the feet. 

As I leaned over the side of the barge with the boat hook, I did not think 
of her as a dead woman, not even when I looked at her face. She was like 
some beautiful white water-fungus, a strange shining thing come up from the 
depths, and her limbs and her flesh had the ripeness and maturity of a large 
mushroom. But it was the hair more than anything. It stranded way from the 
head like long grasses. It alone was alive, and because the body was slow, 
heavy, torpid, it had become a forest of antennae, intricately caressing, 
feeding on the water. 

It was not until Les swore at me for being so clumsy with the boat hook that 
I drew her alongside. He and I reached down with our hands. When I felt the 
chilled flesh under my fingertips I moved more quickly. It was sagging away 
from us, and it slopped softly and obscenely against the bilges. Touching it 
made me realize how bloated it was. 

Les told me, "For Christ's sake, get a bloody grip on it." 

I leaned down until my face was nearly touching the water and with my right 
hand got hold of one of the ankles. She turned over smoothly then. Together 
we pulled her to the surface and, dripping a curtain of rainwater, over the 
gunwale. Her weight settled with a flat splash on the wooden boards of the 
deck. 

We looked at her but neither of us said anything. It was obscene, the way 
death usually is, frightening and obscene at the same time. 

The ambulance did not arrive until after breakfast. 

I don't suppose they were in a hurry because I told them she was dead on the 
telephone. We threw a couple of sacks over her so that we wouldn't have to 
look at her and then I went over and telephoned and went back and joined Les 
and his wife at breakfast. 

"No egg this morning?" I said. 

Ella said no, that she'd forgotten to buy them the previous day when she 
went to get the stores. But I knew that that wasn't true because I'd seen 
them in her basket when she returned. 

"Salt?" 

"Staring you in the face," she said. 

It was damp. I had to scrape it from the side of the dish with my knife. 
Ella ignored the scratching sound and Les, his face twitching as it 
sometimes did, went on reading the paper. 

It was only when I began to eat my bacon that it occurred to me that they'd 
had an egg. I could see the traces on the prongs of their forks. Les got up 
noisily, without his second cup of tea. He was embarrassed. Ella had her 
back to me and I swore at her under my breath. A moment later she too went 
up on deck and I was left alone to finish my breakfast. 

We were all on deck when the ambulance arrived. It was one of those new 
ambulances, streamlined, and the men were very smart. Two policemen arrived 
at the same time, one of them a sergeant, and Les went ashore to talk to 
them. I was still annoyed and I sat down on a hatch and waited. I looked out 
across the water at the black buffalo-like silhouette of a tug that crept 
upstream near the far shore. Beyond it, on the far bank, a network of cranes 
and girders closed in about a ship. It was still early and the light was 
still thin but already a saucer of tenuous smoke was gathering at the level 
of the roofs. 

Then the ambulance men came across the quay and on to the barge and I 
pointed to where we had put the body under the sacks. I left them to it. I 
was thinking of the dead woman and the egg and the salt. I was bored because 
it was the beginning of the day and not the end of it, days being each the 
same as the other, alike as beads on a string, with only the work on the 
barge and Les to talk to. I seldom talked to Ella. She appeared to dislike 
me and gave the impression that she only put up with me because of her 
husband. 

And then I noticed Ella hanging out some clothes at the stern. 

I had often seen her do it before, but it had never struck me in the same 
way. I had always thought of her as Les's wife-she was always screaming at 
him about something or calling him Mr. High-and-Mighty in a thick sarcastic 
voice. I never saw her as a woman who could attract another man. That had 
never occurred to me-until now. 

But there she was, trying very hard not to look round, pretending she wasn't 
interested in what was going on, and I found myself looking at her in a new 
way. 

She was one of those heavy women, not more than thirty-five, with strong 
buttocks and big thighs. She was wearing a tight green cotton dress that 
pulled up above the backs of her knees as she stretched up to put the 
clothes on the line. I could see the flesh of her pink ankles growing over 
the rim at the back of her shoes. She was heavy all right, but her waist was 
small and her legs were not bad. I could imagine being between them, belly 
to belly, wrapped securely in the oval of their embrace. 

I watched her, and I could see her walk through a park at night, her heels 
clacking, just a little bit hurriedly, and her heavy white calves were 
moving just ahead of me. Even in the dark I was able to see them. And I 
imagined the soft sound of her thighs as their surfaces grazed, as whatever 
she wore beneath her dress was wedged softly in their damp and tremulous 
moving. As she reached up, her buttocks tightened, the cotton dress fitting 
itself to their thrust, and then she alighted on her heels, bent down, and 
shook out the next garment. 

My manhood stirred at the sight. The rest of the world slipped away and my 
mind filled with the thought of her. I longed to possess her and put her 
body to the test. Inspired by the back view I had now, I thought of raising 
that thin membrane of material as she bent, forcing her forward and belly 
down and mounting her from behind. Surprised and humbled, she would not 
resist long. Face down on the wooden deck I could take her then and there. I 
could see and feel her now, my knees astride those powerful timbers, my 
haunches hard on hers as my hands kneaded her buttocks and opened the 
rosebud of her anus to my view while my member entered her more womanly 
slit. 

She would be both humiliated and pleased at the ravaging I would render. 
Thrusting and lifting my body away from hers as she was pressed down to the 
hard wooden deck, I could touch Ella as I knew she had never been touched by 
Leslie. Plumbing a long-married woman's cunt from behind, I've found, very 
often introduces them to pleasant sensations long lost in a marriage become 
dull with sameness and ungenerous sex. I could be generous with a strong, 
mature body like Ella's. She would be appreciative. 

A moment later she looked round. Her curiosity had got too much for her, and 
she caught me looking at her. Her look was uncertain. She flushed slightly. 
And then, very quickly, she returned to her chore. 

The police sergeant was making notes in a little black notebook, 
occasionally licking the stub of his pencil. The other cop was standing with 
his mouth open watching the stretcher bearers who seemed to be taking their 
time. They had put the stretcher down on the quay and were looking 
inquiringly at the police sergeant who went over and looked under the sheet 
they had thrown over her when they put her on the stretcher. One of them 
spat. I glanced away again. 

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ella's legs move. 

The ambulance men had lifted the stretcher again but one of them stumbled. A 
very white naked leg slipped from under the sheet and trailed along the 
ground like a parsnip. I glanced at Ella. She was watching it. She was 
horrified but it seemed to fascinate her. 

"Whoa!" the man at the back said. 

They lowered the stretcher again and the front man turned round and arranged 
the leg out of sight. He handled it as though he were ashamed of it. And 
then they hoisted the stretcher into the back of the ambulance and slammed 
the doors. 

The sergeant closed his notebook, looped elastic round it, and went over to 
speak to the driver of the ambulance. Les was lighting his pipe. 

Leslie undoubtedly was a big man when he was younger, still was, but his 
muscles were running to flesh and his face was heavy round the chin so that 
his head had the appearance of a square pink jujube sucked away drastically 
at the top. As he didn't shave very often, the rough pinkness of his cheeks 
was covered by a colorless spreading bristle. He had small light blue eyes 
sunk like buttons in soft wax, and they could be kind or angry. When he was 
drunk they were pink and threatening. The way he was standing, you could see 
he wasn't a young man; in his middle fifties, I suppose. 

The ambulance was driving away and the sergeant was going over to talk to 
Les again. I remember it struck me as funny at the time that he should 
address all his remarks to Leslie. I watched the cat sniffing at something 
near the quay wall. It tried to turn it over with its paw. Ella lifted the 
basin that had held the wet clothes and gave me a look somewhere between 
angry and intimate. She turned away and I could see she was in some way 
trying to get back at me for the long look I had had at her backside, so I 
didn't say anything. I heard her clump down through the companionway into 
the cabin. 

Suddenly, I laughed. Les and the sergeant and the cat all stopped to look at 
me. But I went on laughing. 

There was the discussion about suicide or murder. "What did the police 
think?" Ella asked Les as soon as the police were gone, as soon as the 
ambulance had driven away and he, with an unlit pipe in his mouth, came back 
aboard. 

I watched Ella carefully. She was inquisitive. But, at the same time, she 
wanted us to think that she was above that kind of thing even if we weren't. 

Les said that the sergeant didn't know. But there were no marks on the body 
so Leslie did not think it could have been murder. 

And I knew Ella was going to say just what she did say about it "being just 
like men not to be able to keep their eyes off a woman especially if she had 
no clothes on." I thought the words just suited her standing there as she 
was in her too-tight green cotton dress, stretched so that you could see the 
shape and strength of her thighs and the muscles of her belly. 

Ah, but if I could have had at her, I'd change her tune. If I could get her 
without her clothes on she'd know the pleasure of the nakedness she now 
derided. Just rip that wash-faded cotton rag from her body and expose her to 
my intimate scrutiny. No need to steal a glance or hurry the moment. 
Stripped naked I could savor the bodily delights now hidden from my view. 

I could enjoy the spread of her broad hips above those sturdy loins. My gaze 
could explore the quick taper of her waist as it turned above her hips 
before it rose up and outward again to flesh-covered ribs that showed 
themselves ever so slightly before the underlying structure was lost in the 
middle softness distinct to a woman. Her tits were fine for me, I knew. I 
had glimpsed them from time to time. But to savor the sight of those 
pendulous hillocks, unfettered. I could teach her to enjoy the viewing as 
much as I would. 

It's all in the seeing, you see. To be seen naked, stripped bare, by 
appreciate eyes makes all the difference even to one as fearful of the 
seeing as Ella. I was sure I could convince her. I was equally sure that, 
despite the view she vocalized there on the deck, she wished to be 
convinced. 

From her breasts my gaze would caress her centerline, down the thin track of 
hair I was certain traced a path between her navel and the fuzz about her 
sweet slit. Beneath my unflinching eye her excitement would mount and those 
strong legs would tense and her mons would blossom. Her nether lips would 
engulf and darken and grow warm and moist, longing for a touch. She would 
shift and spread her legs apart for better balance and to better expose her 
sex. But I would not yet grant that touch to her or to my own desire. Just 
look on appreciatively. And that, in turn, would fuel her passion more. 

Her nipples would harden and grow small and dark and tight with 
anticipation. Her buttocks would tighten and signal their desire to her 
innermost being. Color would rise from her shoulders and flush her cheeks 
with an outward sign of her inward need. And still we would not touch. Only 
look, a powerful, sensual look. I in the armor of my garments. She in the 
vulnerability of her flesh. I would move behind her, study her unseen by 
her. She would quiver at the power of it. 

Then, with just enough rustling for her to hear, I would part my clothes, 
unleash the lance of my manhood and use it on her. That would change her 
tune once and for always. But now her voice broke the spell. 

I had the impression that she was talking to me more than to Les, although 
she spoke to him. She grudged me the glimpse I'd had of her. She said that 
we were bad bastards, both of us. Then she turned away. 

Leslie winked at me. I noticed there were red specks in the whites of his 
eyes. He said she had got up on the wrong side this morning. He nodded in 
her direction-she was sweeping near the stern-and he winked at me again. 

But I remembered how, through the wooden partition between the cabins, it 
was her soft moans of pleasure that had wakened me that morning. It was such 
an uncharacteristic noise from that quarter that I raised myself up to peek 
through the small separation between the boards that afforded me a limited, 
but adequate, view of Ella's marital bed. 

Although coitus had been long abandoned in her relationship with Leslie, 
Ella's sexual needs were not entirely uncared for. And that morning she was 
pleasuring herself while the drink-besotted Les snored beside her. Her 
gentle lowing was reflected by the rhythmic undulation waist-level beneath 
her blanket. Her shoulders raised and closed forward, the blanket slipped to 
her waist as her upper arms pressed her breasts together and up to the 
ceiling. Bother her hands moved stealthily about her hips, belly and, 
clearly, between her legs. 

She rocked slowly for a while, both hands secreted. Then one began to move 
about, coming out from below the blanket, caressing her upper body, then 
returning again to join the other between her legs. Again it moved about, 
this time her fingertips circling her aureole then tweaking the tips of her 
upthrusting breasts. Then back below the blanket. Then exploring above 
again. 

Finally, eyes shut against the morning light and the harsh reality of the 
cabin, she touched her moist and glistening fingers to her lips. She 
hesitated, then parted her lips slightly. Her tongue moved daintily out to 
taste. Inevitably her lips parted wider and she put first one finger, then 
all, in her sucking mouth. Meanwhile the activity beneath the blanket became 
nearly frantic. Certainly her hidden lips and fingers mimicked the exposed 
digits and orifice. 

I, for my part, had grown excited as her excitement had grown. I grasped my 
rigid member and matched her action stroke for stroke, one hand flat against 
the cabin wall, steadying my view, the other active as Ella's was active, 
between my legs. As if the wall did not separate us, I held back my release 
until I felt certain that Ella too had peaked. My instincts were dead on. As 
her writhing reached its crescendo, so did my tension. I envisioned my rod 
between those pouting lips above and below the blanket, spurting its seed 
into the warm, willing mouth, filling it to the brim and beyond with the 
sweet cream Ella only now dreamed of. 

Perhaps that, and not the sight of her as she hung the clothes on the line, 
was the beginning of it all. And I thought that perhaps she was angry with 
me because I knew about the egg, because she had been caught in a direct 
lie. 

My reverie was interrupted when Les said he wondered what the hell was wrong 
now. I looked up and saw that the ambulance had halted at the other side of 
the vacant lot that ran directly on to the quay side. The driver was talking 
out of the window to a man in plain clothes. We watched without saying 
anything until the man stepped on the running board and the ambulance drove 
away. 

"More to it than meets the eye," Leslie said. 

I shrugged my shoulders. 

I said it had got nothing to do with us. 

"We found the body, didn't we?" observed Les. 

I said that it might have been anybody. 

"But it wasn't. It was us," he countered. 

I didn't feel like arguing with him. I was thinking about Ella, wishing 
Leslie was to hell out of there so that I could make a play for her. 

"Anyway," I said, turning away, "it's over now." 

"Maybe," he said. 

There wasn't much to do then until the lorries came with the load. We were 
leaving in the afternoon with a load of anthracite for Edinburgh and Leith. 
Ours was a motor barge, so we could move straight from the river to the 
canal without waiting for a tow. The idleness left both of us a bit 
uncomfortable there on deck, doing nothing while Ella never seemed to stop 
working. She had finished sweeping and she was now doing some vegetables in 
a wooden bucket. An occasional plopping sound came from it as the potatoes, 
peeled, white and shinning, were dropped in. 

She was sitting just that distance away so that you did not know whether she 
could hear what you were saying or not. Every time I looked over at her I 
had the impression that she had just looked away. But maybe that was just my 
imagination. It may well have been because I couldn't get her out of my mind 
since I had watched her stretch up to put the clothes on the line. I had a 
faint nausea in the pit of my stomach when I thought that she might be as 
aware of me as I was of her. I felt idle then for the first time in a long 
time because I felt she was watching me. Obviously Les felt the same thing 
and was anxious to be occupied at some job or other, but evidently he could 
think of nothing to do. 

Ella, meanwhile, did not appear to care whether we were doing anything or 
not. She just squatted there on the small stool, her bare knees showing, 
peeling potatoes and humming to herself. I couldn't hear her humming, but I 
got the impression that she was, and I could see by the corners of her mouth 
that she was smiling. 

There was little doubt in my mind what her thoughts actually were at that 
moment. The way she held the knife in one hand, the potato in the other. 
That small wisp of a smile as she laid bare the glistening white moist and 
firm tuber hidden beneath the coarse and soiled outer jacket. 

As surely as my own being swelled at the thought, in her mind that 
newly-laid bare potato, or the manhood it represented to her, was firmly 
planted in her steamy slit. Moist and coolly rigid but pliant, it was 
parting and reaching deeper into her waiting warmth. I could see her legs 
moving, nearly imperceptibly, apart and together again as she drifted in the 
thought. Unaware of her action, she laid the brown skin back. And as she 
did, she fairly caressed the smoothness, then moved her hands about the 
stripped gift from the earth. 

She enjoyed the feel of her hands about the different shapes, that was 
apparent to those with the eyes to see. Given half the opportunity she'd 
have enjoyed the variety in the fit of those surprisingly human and manly 
roots beneath her skirt as she had enjoyed her flailing fingers in the 
morning. 

I thought how I would like to help her in that enjoyment. While she peeled 
the roughness of the ground-covered phallus I'd spread the petals of the 
hair-decked flower now blooming beneath her skirts. I would assist in the 
pollination of that blossom with various starchy tubers peeled and shaped in 
a variety of delightful forms. Squat hard on the stool, her legs apart and 
bum pressed to the wood, we would both take pleasure in the thrusting and 
exploration. 

Then, when Ella was sapped by our garden variety adventures, I would stand 
before her, my flesh stamen at her squatting eye level. She could hold it 
and fondle it and caress and cherish it as she now peeled the garden stock. 
She could take it raw between her lips as she dared not do with the raw 
potato. Then I would throw her to the deck and plunge home where our rooting 
about had laid open the way. 

Suddenly Les began to talk about the corpse. He said that, in his opinion 
she must have fallen in. "If somebody had pushed her there would have been 
more marks on the body, wouldn't there? She would have struggled." 

I asked him how he explained the fact that she had only a short petticoat 
on, that the skin on her buttocks was grazed. He said that she might have 
been drunk. 

He knocked out his pipe and repacked. Now that he had said it, I don't think 
it convinced even himself. I glanced round and I was sure that Ella was 
listening. She was still smiling at the potato in her hands. I watched it 
drop like a plummet into the bucket. She took another potato from the sack 
beside her. 

Leslie asked me my ideas on the floating body. He asked if I thought our 
corpse had made a night of it. He meant was she a tart who went aboard with 
some ship's officer or other. He was trying to visualize her drunk on deck 
with her skirt above her knees and her thighs splayed for the man who later 
got rid of her. 

I knew how his mind worked. I knew a good many of the adventures he'd had in 
his more viral youth. He knew well the life and loves of a sailor, though of 
the affairs of the officer class his knowledge was but rumor and conjecture. 

Doubtless from his question he had in mind the tale he had of late related 
to me of the chaplain's mate he had met during his service at sea during the 
war. A randy little fellow of Italian heritage Les told me. 

Luigi was exempt from the horrors of the battle because he had trained for 
the priesthood before the conflict was joined. And his strict papist 
upbringing had left him with a gift for all the right sounding yet 
meaningless phrases and religiousness that fool the unaware and had left him 
with a penchant for practically every pleasure his church had taught him was 
unholy. 

It was on the occasion of his last night of liberty in the safe harbor of 
these isles before he had to face the treachery of the North Atlantic that 
Luigi had exercised his sharp Latin tongue, spiritual corruption and 
holier-than-all prerogatives to bring one of the lovelier ladies of the 
docks on board his assigned ship, the flagship of the fleet. His double-duty 
as chaplain's aid and librarian gained him a berth in the space that served 
as both office and library. 

There too was stored the sacramental wine, enough to service all the true 
believers and any battle-converted agnostics, although it was unlikely that 
the ship carrying the admiral's ensign would see much of the battle hellfire 
that tricks the otherwise aware into thinking it might be prudent to get 
some religion to hedge your bet. 

More than a few drops of that unsanctified blood of Christ were shed during 
that evening in the process of saving Luigi and the object of his lecherous 
affections. And as the story was told to Les when it reached him below decks 
later the following day, more positions than any missionary ever brought to 
a gentle, unfettered native culture were employed. And Christ's blood was 
not all that was shed as things progressed. 

It seems that, stupefied by red wine never fermented to be consumed in 
quantity, Luigi had become limp beyond control at one critical juncture with 
his unholy angel. She, having lost in the fruit of the vine much of the 
sense that is one of the sweeter aspects of a professional's nature, mocked 
his inability. Of his limpness she asked if Easter would be arriving soon so 
that the Lord might rise again. Confronted by his duplicity and false piety, 
and enraged by his inability, the chaplain's assistant turned Judas. 
Grabbing the crucifix stored with the wine and communion paraphernalia, he 
bashed the half naked courtesan across the temple. 

Emboldened as his savior had been when he chased the moneychangers, Luigi 
felt the Holy Spirit move in his loins and was empowered from on high to do 
with the lifeless form what he had been unable to do with the life-filled 
child of God. Rigid again, he took pagan delights with her, the reports 
below deck later had it, buggering her senseless body as it lay face down 
across the library table. And all the while her life blood drained red and 
unnoticed by "Luigi the messenger of God" from the gash above her penciled 
eyebrow and painted face. 

Of course, when he finally exhausted his religious rage and came partially 
to his senses, Luigi's conquest had been well on her way to meet her maker. 
Infuriated anew at having buggered a corpse and broken so many of his 
church's commandments at once, he rammed the cross of her mortal destruction 
where his manhood had previously sought the greater glory and pitched the 
body from the library, over the rail and into the dark waters of the harbor. 
Then, screaming Hail Mary's in a final act of confusion and contrition, he 
defied his church's teachings for the final time. He dove head first, stark 
naked except for the miraculous medal he wore about his neck, from the lofty 
deck of his library/office/bunk to splatter himself on the hard steel deck 
many feet below. 

Early the next morning the corpse of Luigi's convert was fished from the 
harbor, crucifix firmly in place, to the stares of the changing watch. The 
Admiral's ship steamed out on schedule, on the turning tide. The crew never 
heard anything official about Luigi. But the first Sunday service at sea 
featured a simple metal cross fashioned below decks in the machine shop 
while the ship was underway. 

I guessed that that was at the heart of Les' question about our corpse. 

I said, "She might have been pregnant." 

But he said, "Naw, we'd've noticed." 

His blue eyes were worried and his eyebrows were twisted in concentration 
and his pink sugarloaf head tilted backwards as though he were in pain. I 
was thinking about the slow white thing which sagged beneath the surface of 
the water and of the petticoat like the petal of a flower, peeling back over 
the creamy white of the thighs. That's what remained vivid for me, not the 
irrelevant series of after-images of the morning, the cat, the policeman 
with his mouth open, the parsnip like appearance of the leg when the 
ambulance men tripped, the plainclothesman who stepped on the running board, 
all that, and even the sudden coldness at my fingertips as I grasped at the 
ankle, had nothing to do with it. 

It was strange, but my thoughts of Ella, unlike the morning's police-court 
details, was very close to it all; close enough so that I could not think of 
the corpse without thinking of her. I can remember at that moment thinking 
how full Ella's lips were and how sometimes when she was cooking in the 
cabin, little pinheads of sweat stood out on her upper lip and when the 
light struck them, they glinted. 

Perhaps Luigi's lustful playmate had glistened like that in the earlier 
rounds of their ill-destined adventures. Perhaps Ella would enjoy being 
conscious for a rough and tumble buggering like Luigi had delivered his 
corpse. Perhaps the deity that empowered her life would enjoy seeing his 
disciple's legs akimbo and penetrated by the symbol of a competing god. 

I certainly would. There was a philosophy worthy of worship, an 
unsanctimonious code of ethics that realized the true nature of men and 
women. There was a system I could heartily endorse. I could easily become a 
priest in this faith. I would excel at missionary work. Ella would be my 
first convert. She already showed signs of interest in the ritual. 

Virtually every thought I had would be holy. Every action and interaction 
between consenting men and women would be fraught with new meaning. Life 
would be exciting all the time, worth living every moment of every day. Even 
death would gain reasonable meaning. Luigi's corpse and the corpse of Les 
and my resurrection would not have died in vain. 

For a moment, when Les spoke next, I thought he was talking about Ella, for 
he said: "She was a bit heavy." 

"Who?" 

"The stiff!" He winked at me. 

"The water did that," I said. 

"You think so?" he queried. 

I lit a cigarette. Leslie and Ella, it was a strange combination. He must 
have been twenty years older than she. And with only a wooden partition 
between them and me, I knew quite a lot about them. I knew for example that 
Leslie was impotent. Too much carousing in his younger days left him jaded 
he bragged to me when we set out on manly excursions to nearby pubs in our 
barge journeys about. Closer to the truth was that too much carousing in the 
current days repressed his finer sensibilities for the sweet sex and 
rendered him incapable of little more than braggadocio, darts and-much like 
his tale of Luigi-occasional outbursts of violence that he mistook for sex 
on his part. 

Ella, however, seemed in her way to appreciate the finer aspects of even his 
crude arousals of the flesh. For example, one night when Les and I returned 
after closing from a neighboring pub and I know he was quite drunk, I 
repaired to my berth and heard them fight. They both swore quietly, aware of 
my presence at the other side of the partition, and then I heard them crash 
into the table. There came the sound of flesh smacking against wood, and 
then a dull thwack followed by a scream from Ella. He was thrashing her with 
his leather belt, her belly sprawled flat on the table. At least that is how 
I, without seeing it, saw it. After a while he left off. I could hear Ella 
sniveling. Then her voice pleaded softly, "Again." A long silence followed 
and she repeated, "Again. Leslie. Please. Again." The oaf stirred himself 
and I heard the leather whir through the air and slap sharply to silence. 

Ella whimpered, then begged, "Again." 

Les obliged with greater speed and the belt sizzled and cracked louder with 
his newly-kindled vigor. 

"Again," her voice came with a sob and her breath caught in mid-draw as the 
leather came quickly through the air and jolted abruptly against sweet white 
skin I knew was rising now in hot red welts. 

Another suppressed sob from Ella but no vocalized request was necessary as 
the air in their cabin and mine was rent by the belt as it tore home to the 
quick ending against firm, rounded buttocks. Her juices would be flowing, 
that was for certain. Les' liquor-laden brain would miss all the subtlety 
and beauty of the moment. Another crack and a whimper. 

Ella's cheeks would tighten in anticipation. The muscles of her anus would 
pull it down and tighten against the anticipated impact, then tighter still 
as cured leather met living flesh. The back of her thighs would tense and 
squeeze tighter her moistening pleasure box. The front of her thighs, 
pressed to the table edge, would tighten pulling her stomach muscles taut in 
turn tugging at the softness mounding over her opening soaked with her own 
juices. 

Had I fired that passion with the licking Les now rendered I would certainly 
not let it go unfulfilled. 

Yet the only pleasure brutish Les would know was alcohol-dulled power. He 
thought he'd humiliated her; controlled her. All the while she dictated her 
pleasure, unfortunately left incomplete by a man unable to bring her all the 
sensations she craved. Another roar of leather parting air... the stinging 
singing of flesh hard encountered and then, silence. Ella asked for no more. 
Not speaking, they shuffled about in the darkness. Soon we all slept. The 
following morning Ella looked radiant. 

"Joe, what do you really think happened to our corpse?" Les asked growing 
suddenly serious. 

I laughed. I began to tell him a story about a bridge at night and as I told 
him I became conscious of the fact that I had raised my voice. I realized 
then that I wanted Ella to hear what I was saying. 

I described how the woman had gone to the bridge fully dressed and then, 
very calmly, undressed. 

"First," I said, "she removed her jacket, then her blouse, a long-sleeved 
silk number with lace at the collar and cuffs and silk covered buttons 
closely placed down the front. She was quite elegantly dressed you realize. 
A broad-brimmed hat and tan kid gloves. A handbag of fine Spanish leather. 
Matching woolen jacket and skirt, plum colored, I think. Expensive white 
silk blouse. Fine under things, black brassiere and panties with a matching 
black garter belt. Dark shaded silk stockings. Exquisite leather pumps with 
heels just high enough to inhibit her easy walking and to tense her calf 
muscles just so. 

"But, having removed her jacket as she exerted herself to reach the center 
of the bridge, she folded it carefully and laid it down next to her on the 
span. Then she put her handbag on top to weight the jacket in place. The 
first piece of clothing she took off was her blouse. With her gloves still 
on, she undid the buttons holding the sleeves closed at her wrists. Then, as 
the cuffs flapped open, she slowly, slowly undid the buttons down the front 
and slipped her arms and torso free. 

"She carefully folded the blouse and slipped it between the handbag and the 
folded plum jacket. She cupped her breasts in her gloved hands and admired 
the black lace at the edge of her pale skin as she thought about the next 
item of clothing she'd remove. 'What will it be,' she asked herself. Then, 
her mind made up, she slid her hands down her ribs to her waist, reached 
behind and undid her brassiere. Her shoulders moved forward as she 
unfettered her breasts. The cool evening air splashed her warm, excited 
skin. Holding the scant bit of underclothing by the strap, she let it fall 
atop the handbag and the clothes piled beneath. 

"'And next?' she thought. Probably the hat, I imagine. A woman stripped 
naked to the waist, pale and exposed above a plum colored skirt, might 
realize that the topping of a fine chapeau is a bit incongruous. But perhaps 
not. Maybe the skirt was next to go. She'd reach behind again, thrusting her 
breasts forward as her hands reached back and her elbows moved up to undo 
the button at the nip of her spine and waist. Then open the closing to allow 
the skirt waist to slip down over her hips. She would have moved as women 
do, leaning to one side as she stepped through the lowered garment, first 
with one stockinged leg, then the other. Arms outstretched before her she'd 
shake the skirt straight and smooth, then bring it to her chest, folding it 
neatly above the pleats, feeling the pricks of the wool against her 
bareness. Then she placed the skirt atop the jacket, below the blouse, bag 
and brassiere. 

"Then the shoes, I think. She'd probably kick them off, lift one leg and 
gain her balance perched high on the heel of the other shod foot. Feeling 
secure, the raised leg would snap forward at the knee, pinwheeling the shoe 
up and out from the bridge into the dark, then arcing to the river below. 
Putting the stockinged foot on the ground, she'd immediately launch the 
second shoe with the same crisp snap. 

"Now the hat, for sure. The incongruity would be undeniable now. She'd reach 
up, elbow bending across her face and grasp the hat by its brim. With a 
flourish and smile of triumph it would skim off at an angle, become lost in 
the dark, glide, then in its final distance, tumble to the water. 

"More quickly now, sensing her growing nakedness and the urgency of her 
task, she'd release one stocking then the next. Then she'd grow calm. Why 
hurry now? Savor the moments. Lifting her slip-or was it a petticoat, what's 
the difference anyway-she'd unroll her stockings. First one, feeling the 
soft kid gloves on her inner thigh moving down, down to her knee. Then the 
other to the same point. Then, bending more and feeling skin touching skin, 
kid gloves and dark-yet-translucent silk caressing each calf, she'd roll 
them both until they reached her ankle. 

"Suddenly she'd ask herself, 'Why am I taking such care?' And throwing 
caution to the wind, she'd grab one silken sheath by the toe and, loosely 
anchored at the ankle, it would unfurl like a defiant banner. The sight 
would please her as she tossed the stocking to the wind. And she would move 
even more slowly to replicate the action with the other silk tube. Half 
bent, half squatting, conscious of keeping her balance, she'd unleash this 
second pennant of her liberation. 

"Now the moment of truth was approaching. Would she renege on the promise 
she made herself? The pile of neatly folded clothes left the option open. 
She could dress again in the partial ensemble that remained and walk back 
from the brink. 

"'Hell, no,' she'd say aloud and, swiftly lashing out with her now naked 
foot, would kick the stack off the edge of the bridge and send it tumbling 
to the water. She passed the point of no return. 

"With greater speed now she'd remove her gloves, her body suddenly chilled 
in its nakedness against the night and the damp of the river passing 
beneath. These she'd toss aside, uncaring. 

"Next, off with her garter belt and panties. Then, standing in her 
petticoated nudity, calm would prevail again. No reason to shed the 
petticoat. The show was over. She'd look at the night and the sky and the 
stars. Gaze across the water at the flickering lights on the opposite shore 
and their reflection. She'd think about the events that brought her to this 
brink. Then she'd launch herself into oblivion, petticoat billowing about 
her, she'd drop to the water like a rose, float there for a brief moment and 
then be gone." 

Silence hung heavy about the deck. 

Leslie was looking puzzled. He didn't know whether or not I was trying to 
pull his leg. He asked me guardedly what kind of woman that was. 

"Just an ordinary woman," I said. 

"Some woman!" he bellowed. 

I told him he might call her an exhibitionist. He asked me what I meant by 
that. He was suspicious. He didn't want to appear slow and I could see that 
he was getting ready to laugh at a joke that, at present, was beyond him. He 
had taken his pipe from his mouth. 

I glanced over at Ella. She was looking down into the wooden tub but I could 
see that she had stopped peeling the potato. 

I said that she wasn't the kind of woman who could have committed suicide 
with her clothes on. 

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. 

CHAPTER TWO 

Not long afterwards, the lorries arrived with the load of anthracite. There 
were four of them and they backed up against the barge in turn and the 
anthracite was shoveled down a metal chute straight into the hold. It was a 
dirty job for Les and me. After each load had been emptied down into the 
hold, he and I had to get to work with shovels and spread it evenly in 
readiness for the next load. It would not have been so bad working out in 
the open, but all the dust and grit in the world was down there in the hold. 
It got into our eyes and our noses and into the orifices of our ears. I 
never liked to carry coal or anthracite. Breathing coal dust usually gave me 
a headache and it was not as though we could take a bath afterwards. We had 
to wash off in a wooden tub on deck. The water was invariably 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 when, 
in some context or other, Les mentioned Ella's name, I could feel the dust 
prickle on my skin under my shirt. I became vaguely and physically excited. 
I thought about her standing naked on the deck while I beheld her charms. I 
thought of lying with her below deck with my fingers deep in the warmth 
between her legs, her lips and tongue caressing my stiff member. I 
envisioned her in the role of Luigi's whore and as the exhibitionist I had 
described to her obvious fascination. 

In the dark and coal dusty hold I could 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 thrust upwards on eager 
gimbals to meet my own lust. I tried to imagine her with no clothes on, but 
in the constant movement of anthracite and the rising dust I could not get 
beyond a vague white blur. 

When we climbed out into the thin sunlight, Les signed the receipt to say 
that he had received the load and then left 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 quay side on the River 
Clyde in Glasgow-we could only strip to the waist. 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 Les and I 
relaxed on top of the hatch while we were waiting. I was no longer bored. I 
reflected on how, from the moment I had wakened that morning, things had 
begun to happen. Nothing spectacular-but a kind of excitement at the edges 
of me. I was aware of a kind of nascent odor in things. As I rolled my 
cigarette I could feel a dull ringing at the tips of my fingers. The air 
smelled good. I wanted Ella to hurry up with the water. 

Les, as usual, smoked his pipe. It struck me as natural that Les should 
smoke a pipe. He had big heavy workman's hands with short fingers. His nails 
were broad and short, cracked and bitten to the quick, and the coal dust had 
settled on them, making them look alternately gray and pink. My own were the 
same, only my fingers were a bit longer and not quite so rough. 

As I looked at the palm of my hand, moist and pink and gray, 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. At that time I had never had my 
fingerprints taken and the thought of having it done made me feel guilty. 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, especially now since I 
had come to be aware of Ella, was full of possibility-especially if there 
were a pub close by, as a moth to a flame Leslie would undoubtedly go to a 
pub. So actually, where we halted for the night did not matter. There was 
not much to pick and choose between the small towns along the canal. 

He said he didn't know, that it 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. 

Ella and the kettle of water arrived. She carried the two buckets over for 
us; they were both about half full of cold water. And then she poured half 
the kettle into each bucket, or roughly half, because I thought she was more 
liberal with me. 

"Hey, don't give him all that 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. As she bent from her strong waist, her breasts fell free and through 
the ragged-edged "V" at the throat of her dress I could glimpse the darker 
color of their sensitive peaks as they brushed against the material of her 
dress. She looked up at me as she poured and stirred the waters and 
responded to Leslie, her head at the level of my crotch, I felt I could see 
in her eyes and lips signals confirming that his observation was correct and 
intentional on her part. 

I noticed, too, there was a damp patch under her arms and that the green 
cotton was discolored there, a gradual paling yellow like a leaf in autumn. 
Despite the coal dust I could detect the faint smell of her exertion and I 
thought of the beautiful beads and sweet scent of perspiration an energetic 
session of lovemaking would rise from Ella's work-tuned body. And I could 
fairly nearly smell her musky slit, well lubricated by vigorous pumping and 
moist with sweat and her hot juices and my volcanic spurting fluids. 

Leslie and I 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, Les still had a big chest, but it rippled on to his 
paunch without clear definition. It struck me then that he must have weighed 
at least sixteen stone. 

He was snorting into his bucket, washing behind his neck and ears which 
stood out like little red lamps on either side of his head, shiny and tufted 
with small sprouts of gray hair. As far as I could see, he was tattooed all 
over, with serpents and monograms and hearts and anchors in green and red 
inks. He 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-just by looking at the tattoos. 

As with his story about Luigi, there were certain tales related to certain 
tattoos that stayed fresh in my mind. The two women riding a horse tattooed 
on his chest was his first and would always be his favorite, he said. And 
the tale that went with it became my favorite for it became more elaborate 
with every retelling and it was retold often. I really did enjoy the story, 
too. In essence it was his first sexual encounter in the navy and his 
shipmates, knowing this, were of a mind to give him a treat unequalled in 
his experience to date. 

Unbeknownst to Les, they pooled some extra coins collected from each of his 
below deck mates and arranged for him to receive the tandem rider treatment 
at the local whore house on the first liberty after his enlistment. And as 
part of the contract, they bargained that the final act of relief that would 
normally accompany the tandem rider should be withheld from the inflamed 
young seaman. 

Now Les thought he was in line for a rather straightforward in-and-out, all 
that he had paid for out of his own limited funds. So when the rouge-cheeked 
madam separated Les from his fellow tars and escorted him up the heavily 
carpeted and draped staircase, he was, he readily admitted, perplexed. And 
when she handed him over to two tightly-corseted young things in the satin 
and velvet bedecked boudoir, he was dumbfounded. 

Naturally this did not keep these professionals from earning their wage. A 
brunette and a blonde (a true blonde by the delta of hair below her belly, 
Les recalled in one of his later tellings of the encounter), together they 
slowly stripped him naked, taking time to fondle and kiss each other and 
Les. Breasts bursting over the tops of their bustiers and naked from the 
waist down save the garter clips that pulled taut black mesh stockings, time 
and again they tugged and pinched and prodded and pulled at the naked Les 
and each other. But so deft were they at their art that Les, standing there 
in his youthful manhood, was brought again and again to the brink, but never 
over, by their coy ministrations. 

Rendered naked and afire with passion these Gemini of pleasure then 
conducted the totally malleable young sailor to the biggest four-poster he 
had ever seen. Easing him down, they bound him, arms and legs, with velvet 
covered cords to each of the posts. When he became conscious of his 
predicament, his first reaction was panic. But the twin angels of mercy, 
perched at either side of his bound body, were quick to assuage his fears. 
Facing the tethered young man, the blonde threw her leg across his chest and 
straddled his tense body. Like a cat in heat she began rubbing her 
moistening slit against him. 

After several calming moments of this delightful action by the blonde, the 
brunette mounted behind her partner, also facing Les. He could barely see 
her charms, hidden as she was behind her blonde counterpart. But he could 
feel her stockings on his sides, her crotch hair and the slickness of her 
nether parts as well, grinding in his solar plexus below his rib cage and 
above his hips. 

He pulled against his bonds as he struggled to rise up and know between his 
legs the pleasure they were having between theirs. But it was not yet to be. 
Suddenly the brunette's hands appeared under the outstretched arms of her 
playmate and grasped hard at the breasts upthrust above the blonde's 
corseted waistline. The red-nailed hands grabbed hard, distorting the bosoms 
and making the blonde wince, furrow her brow and squeeze her eyes more 
tightly shut with the sudden pain. But the hands were unrelenting and they 
crushed harder and contorted the twin peaks symmetrical shape even more. 

Relaxing her grip but not releasing her hold, the phantom tormentor pressed 
the dark tipped, fleshy mounds together and rubbed them against one another, 
then pulled them in opposite directions, far apart in an unnatural formation 
the likes of which Les had never seen. Then the hands cupped the breasts 
from below, fingers kneading forward until each draped heavy, suspended from 
a tiny apex of the blonde's nipple, pinched betwixt thumb and index finger 
of the hidden brunette. 

Small cries of pain and pleasure accompanied this exhibition for the trussed 
up Les, and much writhing by both the beauties astride his upper body. And 
had the touch of either of them released the flood of passion now dammed 
below his waist, he would have been grateful. But it was not yet to be. 

One of the brunette's hands dropped from view as the other moved, clenched 
and reached where two had worked before. Then the blonde rose up on her 
knees, removing some of her weight from Les' chest and letting in a dash of 
air, cool on the wetness where her warmth had risen. Les looked down from 
the breast-high activity to the spot where his body met the blonde between 
her legs and, to his surprise as the sight registered on his eyes and the 
feel on his chest, he saw the red-tipped fingers of the brunette's hand and 
felt her knuckles on his sternum. 

Four fingers appeared, the thumb still hidden beneath flesh and blonde hair. 
The blonde dropped her arms that had been outstretched in ecstasy and 
pressed the pink-tipped fingers of one of her hands against the golden 
fleece just below his chin. With the other she reached behind, clearly 
intent on returning the touch to her partner mounted behind. 

The brunette wrapped her free hand over the thigh of the blonde and joined 
her in pressing against the blonde's pleasure dome. Simultaneously she 
hitched her hips forward, impaling herself firmly on the blonde's hidden 
hand. The four red-tipped fingers that Les could see became two and one as 
the longest digit slipped up into the rocking lead rider. Quickly the two 
women were moving in tandem, faster and faster astride the tied and 
tormented Leslie. They rode and rode, busy pleasing themselves and 
apparently as unaware of Les between their legs as they would have been of a 
gelding rented from the local stable. 

Now, what Les had no reason to know at the time and did not learn until he 
returned to the ship, was that the usual denouement of this act was the 
release by the tandem riders of all the pent up passions of their stallion. 
But his fellows had contracted otherwise for Les. Finally spent and limp 
with exhaustion at their cross-country ride, the blonde and brunette 
silently dismounted and, arms about each other's waist, left Les, covered 
with their juices, imagination fired and erection raging, trussed to the 
bedposts. Time passed, interminably in Les' recounting, until the misshapen 
dwarf who served the mistress and the house, arrived to release him from his 
bondage. The dwarf was such an ugly sight after the mounted beauties that 
Les' ardor cooled immediately and irreparably for the balance of his shore 
leave. 

Of course in his youthful naivete Les pretended a different outcome back on 
board the ship. Just as naturally, everyone who had been in on the prank 
feigned refusing to believe any part of his tale. After they had put out to 
sea, they owned up to their part in it all. And on his next shore leave Les 
got ripping drunk and had himself crudely tattooed to commemorate the 
encounter. Of course he didn't get tattooed for every tart he slept with. 
Most of them weren't worth it. 

Leslie met Ella in a seamen canteen where she went to look for her father. 
Because there were no drinks served there officially, Leslie was drinking 
with him in the lavatory. 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. One thing led to another and they got married. Ella's father died 
shortly after and Leslie gave up the sea and took to working the barge that 
Ella had inherited. 

When we had finished washing our fronts, we washed each other's back, dried 
ourselves and put on clean shirts. After that, we rolled up our trouser legs 
and washed our feet and legs. Ella had gone below. When she was out of 
earshot, Les said we'd tie up at Lairs for the night. He said we'd be able 
to have a game of darts. 

If there was anything Les 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 was not really interested. Darts bored me just as much as Leslie's 
conversation. I was only interested 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. 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 Leslie first and then she served me. Leslie 
passed the bread she had cut in hunks and we both dipped it deeply in our 
soup as we ate. A moment later Ella 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. 
She rested her left arm on the table while she used the spoon. 

All through the meal I could not keep my eyes off her. On deck she had come 
on me suddenly, a woman hanging out washing with a vacant lot and a factory 
chimney in the background. I felt then 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. My rod began to rise at 
the feeling and the thought. But the sensation did not 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 ones 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 did 
not 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 loose across her haunches or pushing back her short straight 
straw-colored hair which I'd never seen her brush. It had the same effect 
upon me. I wanted her body-and I wanted it soon. 

I couldn't keep my eyes off her neck, which was the yellow color necks 
sometimes are, and I couldn't help associating that with the change in color 
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 center, 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 myself from touching her as she 
passed. 

Her odor wafted to my nostrils, sweet, pungent, slightly off as the 
sweat-faded armpits of her dress were off. And there was more to the scent 
that reached me. It was the strong musk of a body in estrus, coming into 
heat. Coming into heat for me, I was sure, certainly not for the clod 
Leslie. Ella was inflamed. My moment was approaching. 

We didn't talk much at dinner. 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 a half hour to digest my food. But my irritation 
was only in the background, like a stray thought you don't take any notice 
of, because by this time I was too completely interested in Ella to pay much 
attention to what Leslie was saying. 

When the mince came, Leslie said to her what he said to me about wanting to 
make Lairs that night. She said dryly 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 that 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 thought you'd find something better to do with your time," she said, more 
dryly than ever. 

I can't remember what I said next, but it was something that made Leslie 
laugh. 

Ella got up and went over to the stove. She said 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 
going over in my mind the situation of a moment before. I felt I had missed 
a cue from Ella or, at least an opportunity of letting her know that I knew 
the implication behind her words. 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, though it was not unusual at meal times when we were all 
congregated together, was aggravating now because since a few hours before, 
I wanted to change sides, to laugh with her at Leslie and not with Leslie at 
her. 

So when she asked us if we would like a cup of tea, and I saw that Leslie 
was getting ready to say no, we would have to get under way, there wasn't 
time and I said I would. 

"What about you, Leslie?" Ella asked and, as I had said yes, he quickly 
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 cheekbones, which I had noticed before in the morning when she 
turned round from hanging up the clothes and saw I had been watching her. 
While she was infusing 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 intently reading the 
morning paper with a look of pained disbelief on his face. 

Walled into privacy by the newspaper like that 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. 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. 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 
shaker, playing with it as if it were manhood itself. I spent the next 
minute consolidating my position, massaging gently with my shin on her bare 
flesh. Beyond us, the newspapers rustled, Leslie coughed, and the kettle 
began to spew steam more energetically. With a kind of eager reluctance 
then, I moved my right hand to her thigh under the cotton. It was warm, and 
soft. She was breathing more heavily. She did not dare to look at me. Gently 
I stroked her, advancing over the smooth and quivering slab of her thighs 
towards the hotness that was hidden almost frantically between them. I was 
aware of an urgency at my fingertips as they sowed desire there at her 
thighs, an urgency which stemmed from the knowledge that my present advances 
could come to nothing, that at any moment the tension might be broken by an 
unconscious movement of the one possible spectator. 

At that moment, my fingers came in contact with the prohibiting elastic of 
her old-fashioned knickers. The balls of my fingers scored into her soft 
flesh, bellying their way underneath the elastic, until suddenly, like a 
sudden carnal intuition, they were moving gently at the sensitive mass of 
her body's center. At the same time I felt her downwards movement, 
incredibly slow and incredibly heavy, as she slid forward on the wooden 
chair so that the lower part of her body raised itself almost imperceptibly 
at my fingertips, containing them. 

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. Embedded in her without 
motion, my fingers were quite wet with her passion. 

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 as 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. 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 table for our private 
world was invaded suddenly 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 busied herself collecting the cups. I stood up 
and said to Ella that I'd enjoyed my tea very much, but she didn't turn 
around. She was scraping the pot with a knife. I could not see her face. 

CHAPTER THREE 

Up on deck the air was cool, cool gray. Behind the sheds the brick 
factory-stack was enveloped in a stagnant mushroom of its own yellow smoke. 
Les 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 the ropes and soon we had moved out 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 away again, as we made way. Now and again 
a piece of pock-marked cork moved past low in the water. There was not much 
traffic on the river. Under the dirty lens of sky, Les was looking intently 
toward the quay, marking in his memory, I suppose, the stretch of water from 
which we had pulled the drowned woman. 

Now, when you get used to it, it is boring to crawl down a canal, to wait 
for a lock to open, for water to level. But you see some interesting things 
too, like cyclists on the footpath where the canal runs through a town, and 
kids playing, and courting couples. You see a lot of them, especially after 
dusk, and in the quiet places. They are in the quiet places where there is 
no footpath and where they have had to climb a fence to get to. Perhaps it 
is the water that attracts them as much as the seclusion, and of course the 
danger. In summer they are as thick as midges, and you hear their laughter 
occasionally towards evening where the broken bushes spread down the bank 
and touch the water. You can seldom see them. 

Usually you just hear their voices; the whispered intimacies, the deeper 
male voice urgent and insistent, his counterpart reluctant, difficult 
perhaps, coy. Then you can hear the sounds of success and submission. His 
grunts and her sighs and moans of pleasure as she submits to the plumbing of 
her depths at the water's edge. 

Sometimes the roar of his great release breaks the muffled phrase on the 
wind; sometimes her loud cry as barriers break down and bodies give in to 
the most pleasant carnal knowledge. And, only occasionally, there are no 
human sounds at all once the rapture has begun, only the thrashing of bodies 
against the earth and underbrush as they writhe in darkness-shadowed 
knowledge of each other. 

Of all the jobs I had been forced to do I think I liked being on the canal 
best. You are not tied to one place then as you are if you take a job in 
town. And sometimes, if you can forget how ludicrously small the distances 
are, you get the impression that you are traveling. And there is something 
about traveling. 

Soon we were chugging along the banks of the canal and it rolled away behind 
us like a very neat black tape dividing two masses of green-brown 
countryside. I was at the wheel, which was aft, and Les was sitting on the 
hatch over the hold, smoking his pipe. He was gazing idly at the landscape, 
spitting occasionally, lighting and relighting his pipe. Ella was still down 
below tidying up. It was peaceful. Leslie looked peaceful, thinking no doubt 
of how he was going to show off at the dartboard in the little pub at Lairs. 
I could see him raise a pint glass of beer to his lips, drink deep, leaving 
a layer of scum-colored froth round the side of his glass. He would ask me 
then if I wanted a game of darts. 

Yes, everything was peaceful, like the man who was plowing in the field over 
to the left and like the two cows that were grazing slightly ahead. There 
was the fresh air all around me and everything quiet and a little numb 
feeling of excitement somewhere deep down in me. 

Standing there at the wheel, it came to me suddenly that touch was more 
important than sight. I felt conscious of the pull Ella was exerting, almost 
as though she were hanging heavily and warmly from my skin, a heaviness 
which centered at the base of my spine and at the back of my thighs. 

Touch convinced in a way in which sight did not. I was struck by the fact 
that sight is hypnotized by the surfaces of things. More than that, it can 
know only surfaces, flatness at a distance, meager depths at close range. 
But the wetness of water felt on the hand and on the wrist is more intimate 
and more convincing than its color or even than any flat expanse of sea. The 
eye, I thought, could never get to the center of things; there was no 
intimate connection between my eye and a plant on the windowsill or between 
my eye and the woman to whom I was about to make love. 

And I remembered Cathie. I had lived with her for two years before I came to 
the barge, and I recalled how sometimes I had looked at her and felt 
appalled by a sense of distance. Say she was sitting on the bed with her 
knees up, a book in her hands. Somehow, I was not convinced. She was there, 
but only indirectly, like the wallpaper or the view of the street outside 
the window. I can remember as a small boy I loved touching things. Trees. 
Cats. Flowers. I saw a violet or a rose but I had to destroy the distance, 
to feel the soft petals with my fingers, with my cheek; I had to draw the 
smell of it inside me and feel it living in myself. 

It was the same with Cathie. I had to go over and bury my head in her 
thighs, to feel her in my nostrils, to move my hand over her belly and 
finally to draw her whole warm body close to me. But even that was not 
enough. Even touch was deficient. Perhaps she would be lying naked in my 
arms. I desired suddenly to see what it was that was so soft and moist and 
warm. Her body. But that was an abstraction, handy like a price-tag. It had 
nothing to do with the existence. I drew away from her and scrutinized her, 
the small breasts with their dull purple nipples, the firm brown heap of her 
belly, the chevron of black hair between her thighs. Her buttocks were 
smooth and yellow, rounded like marble where they fell to their deep and 
bosky cleft. But I could not touch these things. I wanted to touch what I 
saw. But I could only touch a soft thing, a moist thing, a hairy thing. 
Sight and touch may be correlative but their objects are vitally different. 
Ceasing to see the rise of her belly as I pressed my lips to it to confirm 
fled away from me, and in its place was something soft and warm. There was 
no intimate and necessary relation between what I saw and what I touched. 
The impressions existed together like a stone and a melody, ludicrous, 
fraudulent, absurd. It is the feeling that something has eluded you. 

I smiled when I thought of it. Cathie. I met her for the first time in a 
holiday resort on the coast. I had gone there because I had to get a job to 
earn some money. I was leaning on my elbows on the balustrade of the 
promenade looking out across the sands towards the sea. I had been aware for 
some time of a slight movement, of the soft sea wind in colored cloth, just 
below me on the beach. A girl was lying there, attempting with modest 
movements to oil her own back. I don't know whether at that moment she was 
aware of me. I allowed my gaze to fall on her occasionally and each time I 
did, she seemed to react by giving up the attempt to oil her back and by 
moving her oiled hand over the smooth flesh of her thighs and calves. They 
were well within her reach and she oiled them with great sensuality. 

I watched this ritual for perhaps ten minutes. I felt sure by this time that 
she was inviting me to make contact with her and I was afraid that if I did 
not do so, she would tire, gather her things together, and move along to a 
more populated part of the beach. 

I walked quickly along to the nearest steps, descended to the beach, and 
walked toward her along the sand. I walked slowly, trying to gauge her 
reactions. 

She was wearing sunglasses. Behind them, I felt her eyes focused on me, 
sizing me up. 

There is a point at which a man and a woman stalk one another like animals. 
It is normally in most human situations, a very civilized kind of stalking, 
each move on either side being capable of more than one interpretation. This 
is a defensive measure. Each stalker can, as it were, pretend up to the last 
moment not to be aware of the sexual construction. This way no one is bound 
to admit the intention to seduce before he or she is certain that the 
seduction is consented to. But one can never be quite certain because the 
other is just as wary, just as unwilling to consent. So a man and a woman 
fence with one another and the fencing is the more delicate because neither 
can wholly trust the other not to simulate ignorance of all that has passed 
between them. In every situation the man might be a puritan, the woman a 
woman who wishes to have the pleasure of being courted without the finality 
of the sexual act itself. 

Cathie, for example, could have pretended to be surprised at my sudden 
presence beside her on the beach. As a matter of fact, she did pretend 
surprise. It had given her pleasure to be seen stroking her own strong limbs 
and delicate ankles. Whether she would now consent to have me stroke them 
was not clear. She knew this, just as women usually know it, and she was 
going to enjoy having my purpose unfolded before her. At the point at which 
she was certain, she would be able to consent or not and without reference 
to my desire. 

I knew this and she knew it as I sat down beside her and offered her a 
cigarette. She accepted. We talked casually about the weather, about the 
sun, and that made it possible for me to pick up the bottle of sun-tan oil 
and to examine it. She said I could use some if I wanted to. 

I was still fully dressed and I had no bathing trunks with me. So I said 
there was not much point in it. Before she could interpret this as a 
withholding of myself, I suggested that I could oil her back for her. I also 
confessed that I had been watching her from the promenade above. She 
pretended not to know about this, but without a word she rolled over onto 
her belly and exposed her back to me. She was wearing a two-piece bathing 
costume of black nylon, the lower part closely sheathing her immaculate 
buttocks and most of the upper part that cupped her breasts now hidden 
beneath her except for the thin strand of nylon that ran across her back 
just below her shoulder-blades. 

I began at the small of her back, working with the oil in ever-increasing 
circles to the limits of her exposed flesh. Soon, however, the massage 
became a caress. When I felt her succumb to it, her face buried in her towel 
in the sand, my fingers slipped first underneath the strap of the top half 
and then gently to the smooth mould of her buttocks beneath the taut black 
nylon. She made no effort to resist. By the simple expedient of closing her 
eyes she had shut out the rest of the world from herself, shut out the fear 
of a casual onlooker from the promenade. I continued to caress her for about 
five minutes, speaking occasionally to reassure her. Then my hand moved down 
across the sleek nylon onto the smooth heavy fats of her thighs. Still 
pretending to oil her, I caressed her ankles, her calves, behind the knees, 
and more voluptuously, the dull sheen of her inner thighs where they joined 
her abandoned torso and where the nylon, thin almost as a cigarette paper, 
covered the hot rut between her legs. 

Not far away were some rocks where I knew it would be possible to be out of 
sight both from the beach and from the promenade. I did not even know the 
girl's name at the time. Still I was wondering whether I dared suggest that 
we should go out of sight of other people. After all, even with my hands so 
intimately at work on the softness of her body, she was at present safe, all 
fears gone and tensions relaxed. 

I could find little relief for myself, could do nothing on the exposed part 
of the beach. 

Of course, even if she were to consent, the sensations, the looseness which 
I had already instilled in her during the caress might disappear in the 
private place. She would have a hundred opportunities to revise and decide 
again. At that moment, I believe, had there been no danger of being 
witnessed, I could have pulled the pants of her bathing costume down over 
her thighs, parted her hot legs, and slid without protest between the 
thinly-sweated contours of her buttocks amongst the warm hair and 
lust-slackened lips of her sex. But whether, out of the sun, after a walk of 
a hundred yards, I would still be able to assert myself with a girl who was, 
after all, a stranger, I couldn't know. The thought made me pause. I was 
unwilling to lose what I had already gained in a premature attempt to take 
her. My fingers, moving upwards between her thighs, had already brushed her 
gradually moistening sex on more than one occasion. Now, casting all caution 
aside, I allowed them to mingle with her short hairs and with the wet lips 
which were soft and sleek to the touch. She was quivering with pleasure, 
totally oblivious to the people who walked past on the promenade overhead. I 
decided to risk it. I leaned down and whispered that farther along the beach 
we could find a place to be alone. 

For a moment she did not answer. She was lying with her eyes closed almost 
as though she were unconscious. I knew then that she wanted to go to 
wherever is was, but that she had not yet overcome all her scruples. The 
longer she analyzed, the cooler she would become. 

At this point it is always difficult to know what to do. If one is too 
enthusiastic, the woman has her "suspicions" confirmed; she knows what you 
want and is able by some species of rationalization to be shocked by your 
proposal. Further, as I've indicated, she's shocked, and in spite of the 
fact that she knew all along what you wanted; knew that she had no need to 
confirm her suspicions. She has, as it were, contemplated the possibility 
quite calmly and even with excitement up until the moment when you actually 
pose the question. At that moment, unless you have been extremely tactful, 
she is liable to become indignant that you should be able even to 
contemplate the possibility. On an animal level, she wants urgently to have 
sex. But, as soon as the desire reaches the level of speculation, the codes 
operative in everyday life come back into play. The most lustful woman is 
liable to be the most righteously indignant, perhaps because having 
copulated before, she is sentimental enough to regret the fact that she has 
nothing to lose. More probably though, it's because she resents your knowing 
it. 

"What do you think I am!" she says dishonestly, knowing very well that you 
know as she does what she is and what you could most enjoyably do together. 

If on the contrary, one is not enthusiastic enough, the woman is liable to 
be offended in almost the same way. 

"What does he think I am?" she says to herself, resenting the fact that you 
take her compliance or non-compliance so lightly. "He treats me as though I 
were a lustful bitch!" That, of course, is true. The woman whose thighs have 
been stroked is a lustful bitch and the woman and the man (the lustful dog) 
both know it. The woman knows it. What she resents is the man's knowing it. 
She is ashamed of appearing naked in that way before another person. 

The purpose of convention is to inculcate shame. Our priests have been 
singularly successful in teaching this for centuries. Thus a man must take 
account of a woman's shame, at least until he is between her legs. At that 
time, happily, the woman has no more need of her shame, except perhaps to 
increase her pleasure. 

"Let's go anyway," I said. "We needn't do anything when we get there." 

She opened her eyes and smiled, her suspicions calmed. 

"It's not far, is it?" she asked. 

Perhaps she, too, was frightened that her desire would die on the way. 

"A hundred yards," I said, pointing. "Over by those rocks there." 

Without another word, she rose, lifted her towel and the small bag in which 
she carried those articles which a woman takes to the beach, and walked 
beside me in the direction of the rocks. 

We walked separately, almost without speaking. 

The rocks were at the far end of the promenade, beyond the last hotel, and 
they rose up sharply and steeply enough to obscure anything from the sight 
of whoever passed by on the promenade. They were shaped almost like a 
horse-shoe within which small clusters of rock rose upwards from the flat 
sand, forming tiny water-logged caves. The nearest point sloped downwards 
almost to the sea's edge and as soon as we had walked round it, we had the 
impression that we were in a kind of amphitheater. Once inside, we followed 
the lee of the outer perimeter to a patch of dry sand, overhung by rock, but 
which was still in the direct line of the sun. 

I threw off my jacket. She arranged her towel. We sat down. The inarticulate 
closeness that had existed between us a few moments before had evaporated. 
She was suspicious and aloof. We smoked two cigarettes, one after the other, 
before she finally lay down and closed her eyes. This time, she was lying on 
her back, the disc of her belly gleaming with oil, her long legs apart and 
tapering downwards from the sleek cask of her nylon bathing suit. Her 
thighs, soft and already tanned dark with the sun, rose smoothly under 
glistening particles of sand, which, as she had lain on her front, clung now 
to the oiled and almost hairless skin. Her breasts were held tightly and 
nervously in the black nylon pockets of her brassiere. Her hardened nipples 
showed themselves beneath the covering. Above was her face, the lips heavy 
and sensual, the eyes closed under almond-shaped eyelids. 

There was no one in sight. 

The bottle of oil represented for the moment our only means of contact. A 
hand uncoated with the viscous gold substance would have been received 
coldly, perhaps repulsed. I poured it generously into my palm before leaning 
over and smearing it over the smooth skin of her calves. Once my hand 
touched her flesh there was no further resistance, merely a twitch of her 
whole body as the oil ran down the inside of her legs. Now that the tensions 
had again relaxed, she raised her knees, exposing the hanging thighs to my 
caress. Soon my palms moved away and I was caressing her flesh with my 
fingertips. Her whole body reacted, buttocks tightening and straining to 
rise from the toweled sand in which they were embedded, her mound wet at my 
groping fingertips beneath the wafer of nylon. 

The bottom part of her bathing costume peeled off the sultry white flesh of 
her lower abdomen like the bark off a supple switch. Suddenly the short 
hairs were there, windblown and rising from her damp skin in a minute 
commotion as the constricting nylon was pulled away. Without further delay I 
pulled the costume down over her willing thighs and calves and twisted it 
off her feet. 

Her eyes were still closed. Her body was entirely bare now except for the 
brassiere. Gently, I insinuated my hands under her shoulder blades and 
unhooked it. Her breasts caved slightly to their natural set and the firm 
purplish aureole were exposed, stranded with spider webs of sweat that ran 
up over her breasts towards the armpits. She made no effort to resist as I 
exposed myself and laid my sex in the groove between the hotly bunched flesh 
of her thighs. A moment later, sucked inwards. She groaned. We rolled over 
under the shade of the rocks. That was my first experience of Cathie. We 
were together a long time. 

Cathie. But she was in the past, buried there deeply, and finally. Now there 
was Ella. 

But when, toward evening, she came on deck, she did not even look in my 
direction. She went forward to where Leslie was sitting and said something I 
couldn't catch. Then she came back. I tried to hold her eye but she avoided 
my glance and went below. 

Her avoidance disturbed me, the more so because I had been watching her. 
Even a few moments before when she was standing talking to Leslie the wind 
had lifted her skirt gently towards the stern. I could imagine what it would 
have been like if I had been sitting opposite and had seen her from the 
other side. I thought then that the skirt would have been clinging up and 
against her left thigh, like a soft pew-cloth in the wind, and that the 
muscles of her thigh would have been clearly outlined against the cotton. I 
found it difficult not to think speculatively about her body, to finger it 
in my imagination, and yet it had been there at the other side of the 
partition for more than two months. 

Simultaneously, I derived a pleasing sense of detachment and isolation from 
the fact that she ignored me. It meant, after all, that she was aware of me. 
From that I derived a powerful sense, a vindication, of my own existence. To 
exercise power without exerting it, to be detached and powerful, to be 
there, silent and indestructible as the gods. That is to be a god and why 
there are gods. 

We could see the church-tower of Lairs in the distance, a black cone against 
a red-flecked sky, a witch's hat in a haze of blood. It seemed far away and 
enchanted. 

Les said we would get there before seven. He knew a good place to tie up not 
far from the little pub he had told me about, so we would have our evening 
meal and get along to the pub about eight. He wondered whether our discovery 
of the corpse would be reported in the evening paper. He hoped it would be. 
Anyway, he would see a paper at the pub. He was in high spirits. 

Leslie took over the wheel and I sat down and had a smoke. I was thinking 
that I did not want to go to the pub but I did not see how I could get out 
of it. I did not want to play darts, or to drink for that matter. Ella 
wouldn't have drunk anything and she might make that an excuse to refuse me. 
I had already decided to return earlier than Leslie. 

Come to think of it, I had never been alone with Ella, not for more than 
five minutes at a stretch anyway. In fact, we had hardly spoken. She had 
resented me from the first, perhaps because I was a man and because she 
judged all men in terms of her experience with Leslie. And, of course, 
during the first few weeks Les and I had grown close to one another in a way 
that only men can. I was, I suppose, his ally against her. But now, after 
the dangerous intimacy at the cabin table, she must have known I was 
interested in her. I was anxious now to be alone with her so that I could 
see what her attitude was. 

It was five to seven by Leslie's watch when we made Lairs. We tied the barge 
up in a little cutting off the main stream and before we went below he 
pointed out the road we would take to get to the pub afterwards. It was just 
up round the back of the church, he said, the coziest little place I would 
ever see. 

Close up, the church tower looked just as disenchanted as most church towers 
in Scotland do. Later in the evening, as we skirted the churchyard to reach 
the pub, I noticed the usual ugly red and black posters proclaiming the evil 
influence of alcohol and the imminence of the Last Judgment. 

"Let's go down and eat," I said. Les followed me. 

The tea was already on the table, at least mine and his was, because Ella 
had had hers earlier. Leslie grunted. He had no suspicions at that time. 

It was sausages for tea and bread with butter and jam to follow. So, as our 
sausages were already on the table, there was nothing for Ella to do except 
pour the tea. After she had done this, she sat down near the stove with her 
back to me and went on with her darning. 

I began to put mustard on my sausages. Naturally they reminded me of little 
erections, semi-transparent and firmly sheathed in their taut casing. I 
paused and wondered as I contemplated the repast if Ella appreciated the 
similarity. 

Could the musky, rutty scent I detected in the air be coming from the woman 
who sat now with her back to me or from my platter? Could it be she had 
pleasured herself with the meat now served to me? Could she have known my 
heightened sensibilities would appreciate the unique condiment she could 
have drawn from her deepest womanly parts and served exclusively to me while 
the lout Leslie dined on ordinary unadorned butchery? 

Working below decks while we labored above, the cooking chore could thus 
have easily become a pleasure for Ella. She might have removed her 
underpants. Then, warmed before serving, she could have sorted my share of 
sausages from the lot. Slippery between her fingers she might have nimbly 
lifted one at a time from the pan and holding her dress high with the other 
hand, gently eased them between her spread legs into her waiting warmth. 

The first would have been more difficult, her labia still tightly closed as 
she went about the routine of the kitchen. But slowly she would relax. The 
warm meat would signal its proximity to the tendrils of hair at her opening. 
Her juices would begin to flow and brushing the sausage against her outer 
lips she would slowly press it deeper and deeper until she surrounded it. 

Thus mutually lubricated, she could extract the first fortunate sweetmeat 
and slide home another and another. No need to rush the process, she could 
have directed her attentions to her own feelings and explored the dark 
cavity below her bush as my fingers had earlier. All that would be left to 
evidence the exploration would be the spice the sausage left on the lips 
between her legs and the spice her juices left on my meal. I decided to do 
without the mustard. 

I realized now that I was away from the wheel and the fresh air-the wheel 
itself under my hands had given me a feeling of control-it was only natural 
that I should have lost that feeling of restrained tension that made me feel 
so good during the afternoon. It was not easy to feel certain of her, down 
there in the cabin with their double bunk staring me in the face and her 
with her back turned to me and Leslie so sure of himself as he was thinking 
of darts. To Leslie it must have looked like she wasn't thinking anything, 
like she was just darning his socks and wondering how he got such big holes 
in them. But I knew she could not be as calm as she looked. She must have 
known she let me go too far at the midday meal to expect me to have 
forgotten about it. I suspected that was why she had her tea before us. She 
had probably thought it over during the afternoon and decided that no good 
could come out of it. Maybe she thought I was getting ideas above my 
station, for I had known for a long time that Ella was a snob and she had 
set her heart on leaving the canal one day to go to live in a nice little 
bungalow in one of the quieter suburbs of Edinburgh. Whatever she was 
thinking, I decided that it was a good thing I was going to the pub after 
all, because a couple of whiskeys would give me just the right amount of 
courage. 

Leslie finished his food before me. He was anxious to get away to the pub. I 
have never known a man to hurry his meals so much. He always wolfed his 
meals, carrying goblets of food to his mouth on knife or fork; it depended 
upon which instrument was nearest which piece of food and upon the shortest 
distance between plate and mouth. He was leaning forward 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. I thought 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 thought, too, that so positioned he might know not just her womanly way 
but her tight, pinched rump hole as well. To bugger an experienced mature 
body like Ella's would be a treat. Perhaps even it should be her first 
introduction to my manhood. I doubted she had much experience-if any-at 
being taken that way. She would protest and struggle. That wonderful body 
would contort and twist as it resisted to no avail. I would triumph and 
break into her virgin hindmost passage. 

Just the head of my raging gland first, barely into her, distending only the 
radiating opening that twitched its resistance at being violated so rudely. 
Then she would succumb to the sensations and I would read in her back and 
shoulders and buttocks her readiness to receive me deeper. And deeper I 
would plunge. Slowly, slowly, as I could interpret her surprise, her 
confusion and eventual delight at the new sensations this reaming would 
impart. Deeper and deeper until she was fully impaled and struggling for 
control. Her sphincter would contract and release about me. I would twitch 
inside her. Filled with my erection and held down by my weight astride her 
flanks, she would sweat and struggle vainly. 

Then I would withdraw partially. A novice at such delights, she would think 
her experience complete. She would relax at the withdrawal while remaining 
cautiously tense still less she unleash the sweet vapors of her toilet. And, 
to her surprise, I would reverse my action and drive forward, harder and 
deeper again, slamming the hard bone above my probe against her tailbone, 
pulling and tearing at the outer limits of her nether opening while ravaging 
the interior. She would not be able to distinguish her pain from her 
pleasure; her joy from her humiliation. 

I intended to return to her in the flesh, not just in my mind, 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, just in that way, at that time, in the field or in the bed or 
wherever it is. 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 wellspring of sensuality. 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. 

Right now I resented Ella's present coldness, her aloof resistance. It was 
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 backs of her thighs were bared momentarily 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 forward compartment to get mine from my bunk. When I came 
back, she was telling him not to get drunk. She had her back to 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. 

CHAPTER FOUR 

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 leaned 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 at that hour 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 "howdo," 
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 whiskeys and beer chasers. When he had served us, the barman 
asked us where we were from and Les 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 
the barman hadn't seen them for months and the bargeman was probably dead or 
had given up the canal. 

"Aye," Les said. "Like as not." 

Les did not know the man he meant anyway and Les 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 eyes, which 
looked as though they had been boiled in alcohol. 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. Time was passing, 
valuable minutes were passing during which I could have been alone with Ella 
or at least outside, 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?" Les was saying. 

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

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

"Same everywhere," Les said. 

"Taxes," the voice of the man in the bowler hat said. 

"Follow you to the grave," said the barman. 

Les laughed. "Talking of the dead," he said, "you don't by any chance have 
an evening paper?" 

"Sure. What's up?" 

Les explained that he and I had picked up a stiff out of the river that 
morning. She was stark naked, Leslie 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?" 

Les said that it was difficult to say, but that she could not have been over 
thirty. He asked me what I thought. 

I said she was twenty-seven. 

"Was she cut up like?" the man in the bowler said. 

"Not a mark," Les said untruthfully, for the buttocks had been rather badly 
scratched. "Here, have you got the paper?" 

The barman reached under the counter and passed it across. Les 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 whiskey in the glass, allowing it to ride 
against the sides of the glass as though I were searching for something 
within it. Of course I was. But my gaze was the kind of impotent gaze that a 
man in the gallery casts towards a chorus girl in the front row. At that 
moment, I resented my poverty, intellectual as well as economic. 

Just then I heard Les say triumphantly: "There it is!" 

"Where for Christ's sake?" 

"There!" 

And he read: The body of a dead woman was found in the River Clyde 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 are 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 goodnight all round and left. 

In the fresh air it came to me that I had 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. That 
worried me. 

I walked slowly down the narrow road past the church and stopped to read the 
poster, which I had glanced at on the way to the pub. It was too dark to see 
then. 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 goodnight to a policeman who I felt 
sure was watching me. Then I crossed the road quickly and turned down the 
little side street that led to the canal. I was already thinking about what 
I was going to say. By the time I reached the canal, clouds covered the sky 
and it was drizzling slightly. 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 finally going to break in on Ella's world. I 
listened to the fall of my own footsteps on gravel. 

The barge was lumpish, in shadow. 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. Ella was walking at my side 
and I had my arm round her waist. She had been insistent that we leave the 
barge, despite the damp weather. 

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 how she was at 
first reluctant and then the sudden lift, her voice almost triumphant, when 
she agreed to come on deck with me. She put on a yellow slicker and we left 
the barge. We were walking past a hoarding when she stopped. She said that 
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. 

The rubberized material of the slicker was very real and it filled my touch 
and nostrils with its presence. But all other bodily entanglements fell 
away. I touched and was touched only by the woman and the rubber foul 
weather gear. The scents intermixed and mingled, became as one to my mind. 
Living flesh and the textured, giving yellow outer skin of latex came 
together at my fingertips. 

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 crumble 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. Her lips were thick and licentious. She opened her 
mouth without resistance. And then I slipped my hand under her slicker to 
her thigh. The cotton dress, the same one, was warm under my fingers. I 
could feel that she wasn't wearing anything underneath. The dress lifted 
lightly 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 onto the grass. I followed her. And then my hand 
feathered her strong belly, teasing the hairs that were delicate 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 my pressure. Softly, with my 
knuckles, I came against her, allowing her rising wetness to be felt, 
considered, between my fingers. 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 
had 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. The dew on the grass was on her 
buttocks and on the backs of my hands which contained them. There was an 
immense relief at my belly as hers rose, supporting it. 

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

"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 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 to take her since her marriage. 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. 

We climbed onto the barge and went down below and put the light on. The 
paraffin lamp was smoking, scorching the globe, and she leaned 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 that 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 its 
faded quilt, almost colorless in the soft yellow light of the paraffin lamp. 
Through the partition I often heard it creak under their weight and their 
swearing, muffled conversations. And that time in the middle of the night I 
had heard the thick searing sound of the heavy leather belt. 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?" 

"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 on the stove. One hand grasped the 
handle of 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. 

"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 the deck. 

"It's him," she said without looking round, just as Leslie, climbing 
downwards and backwards, descended into the cabin. Sometimes he did that, 
although the steps were broad enough for a person to come down the other 
way. I supposed he had been drinking heavily after I left. 

When he turned round, my first thought was that he knew about Ella and me. 
He looked at us, from one to the other, without speaking. Then he slipped 
off his raincoat and hung it up on a peg. Next to the slicker Ella had worn. 
He sat down at the table opposite me and looked at his folded hands on the 
table in front of him. The lamplight accentuated the scarred and dust-pitted 
surfaces of his stubby fingers. 

"You two are bloody quiet," he said. 

"Pity you aren't," Ella said without turning round. 

I glanced at her. It was as though she had suddenly become her old self 
again. She was putting on her apron. When I looked back at Leslie, his face 
had changed too. He had that hurt, sullen expression that a drunk has when 
he is afraid of a woman and unable to answer her back. He looked out of the 
corner of his eye at me. 

"What's up Leslie?" I said. 

"I know damn well what's up," Ella said harshly, still without turning 
round. "He's been losing money at darts again. Then he comes back here and 
tries to take it out on me!" 

"I never lost a penny at darts!" 

"You're a liar!" 

He looked as though he was about to strike her, but evidently thought better 
of it. He said instead, "Is the tea ready yet?" 

"What's your hurry? You don't expect to come back at this time of night and 
have me at your beck and call?" 

Leslie drooped. Ella's back was still towards us. Looking at her now, I 
realized that you had to think in terms of two women, his and mine. His was 
hard. I could understand Les' dumb frustration, even sympathize with it. 
Mine, he had probably never known. It was difficult to square what I 
supposed his experience of her to be with the woman who, half an hour 
previously, had bared her belly for me against the hoarding and then sunk 
downwards through my arms onto the grass. 

The cabin clock, a little brass clock nailed above their bunk, struck ten. 
Ella was now infusing the tea, and Leslie, apparently recovered from his 
loss of face, asked me what I thought of the mangy write-up of our discovery 
in the paper. 

I said I wasn't really interested. 

"They always catch them in the end," Leslie said. 

I didn't reply. 

Ella poured the tea. She had removed her apron again and I felt her leg 
close to mine under the table. I put my hand on her knee under her dress and 
let it lie there, just moving my fingers slightly. The flesh was warm. She 
did not make any attempt to restrain me. But she did not respond or show in 
any way what was happening to her either. We sat like that, talking in a 
desultory way of nothing in particular for about half an hour, and then I 
turned in and left them together in the main cabin. I could hear their 
voices talking on for a while as I lay there in the bunk with the blanket 
drawn over me. Then the light in their cabin, which penetrated through the 
seam between two of the planks in the partition about a yard from where my 
feet were, was suddenly put out. After that, I could not hear what they were 
saying. Anyway, I wasn't interested. They were talking as a husband and wife 
talk, and that had nothing to do with Ella and me and our coming together. 
Leslie was irrelevant. Presently, he began to snore. It suddenly occurred to 
me that she might risk visiting me during the night, but I put the thought 
away from me. She wouldn't do that. I lay awake for a while. I could still 
feel her skin against mine, like smooth surfaces meeting. I supposed she 
could still feel me, even though she was in a bunk with another man. In a 
sense, she wasn't with Leslie at all, but there with me all the time, in 
touch, in smell, traces on my skin and in my nostrils as I fell asleep. 

I closed my eyes. The water was lapping against the side of the barge. I 
dreamed the most pleasant dreams. 

I dreamed of living in the golden age of myth and legend. I was a satyr and 
the gentle woods and pleasant hills and dales that were my domain ripe with 
nymphs and fairies and sweet things there for my taking. 

Still, in this dream it was not an easy time for me. The subjects of my 
kingdom knew that a good portion of the ultimate pleasure, for them and for 
me, was in the pursuit. And they obliged by making it difficult. Also, they 
were not all ready at all times to accept all pleasures. So I was 
continually challenged by the game of detecting the correct partner to serve 
my wants and desires at the moment. And, finally, each of my dreamtime 
subjects was not always willing to do precisely as I desired. That meant I 
was called on to discover the pleasure and perversity of each and to create 
laws and mete out punishment to those who would ultimately disobey their 
lord and master. Ah, it truly was a golden age and a sweet dream. 

CHAPTER FIVE 

The slow lick of the water against the belly of the barge was still present 
when I awoke, as though during the night it had guarded the connection 
between states of waking and waking. Often when I woke up I had the feeling 
that I was in a coffin. Each time that happened I recognized the falseness 
of the thought a moment later, for one could never be visually aware of 
being enclosed on all sides by coffin walls. As soon as one saw the walls, 
as soon as light entered, one would no longer be cut off. So the finality of 
the coffin would have disintegrated. And then I would be conscious again of 
the sound of the water and of the almost imperceptible movement of the barge 
in relation to it. 

That morning I was awakened by the smell of cooking bacon and by Leslie 
coughing in the main cabin. Leslie always coughed in the morning. You would 
have thought he was coughing his inside out, a big rasping cough which began 
somewhere deep down in his chest and ended with a struggle in his throat, as 
though all the poisons in his body had collected in his lungs during the 
night. 

The convulsion lasted for about five minutes and then I heard him banging 
out the dottle in his pipe on the side of his bunk. A moment later he would 
have filled it again and he would be sucking the flickering flame into the 
heavy sweet black tobacco. 

I ate a square of chocolate and as I screwed up the wrapper, the fact of 
Ella gradually dawned upon me again as a small needle-sharp excitement above 
and behind my loins. Ella. I was glad the day had arrived. Everything was 
changed, including my attitude toward the barge, toward the canal. For the 
first time in weeks, I was looking forward to getting out of bed. 

Not long afterwards, Ella opened the door and came in with my morning cup of 
tea. She gave us both a cup of tea in bed every morning. Usually she came 
into my compartment, laid the cup on the orange-box which served as a 
bedside table and went out again. Usually, if I bothered to look at her 
face, I saw hostility there, at least impatience. This morning it was 
different. 

I watched her hesitate in the doorway with the teapot in one hand, my cup in 
the other. Without speaking she put the cup down on the box and with her 
hand thus freed, opened her dressing gown. Her hand moved in a circle about 
her upper body, pushing the garment back on her shoulders and allowing it to 
drape free down her sides, exposing her breasts and belly and hips and delta 
of dark hair and powerful thighs and knees and straight shins and strong 
feet to my scrutiny. Eyes closed and head tilted back slightly, the flat of 
her hand explored all the exposed skin that fairly flamed with the heat and 
passion of her touch. 

Still holding the teapot in one hand, she sank slowly forward to her knees, 
robe still open and hanging from her shoulders with the material from her 
hips to the hemline piled around her on the deck of the cabin. Her knees had 
come down a good distance apart, her thighs were separated and deep in the 
shadows I could see the moist glint of her pink labia deep between them. She 
settled not quite back on her haunches and her free hand moved between her 
legs and spread her moist slit further. Then she brought the teapot around 
and moved her singular grip from its handle to caress the vessel, spout 
toward her, with both hands. 

Slowly she brought the tip of the spout to her waiting opening. A warm, 
moist breath of vapor condensed and glistened on the hair of her mons. 

The opening of the spout entered her. As it did, she rose slightly on her 
tensed legs, her breath caught, her head tossed back a bit further and her 
entire body signaled the invasion. Only tip deep, she moved the teapot up 
and down, stimulating the length of her eager opening. Then she dropped it 
low, almost to the floor boards and rocked up and forward, then down, 
impaling herself fully on the length of the gooseneck. Thus pierced, full of 
the smoothly turned "S" of the spout, she rocked in pleasure. I could hear 
the warm golden liquid sloshing in the pot, up the spout and into her 
chamber and back out again. The seconds passed like hours as I watched her 
delightful performance. 

Then, teapot still between her legs, she moved her grip once again and freed 
one hand. Without a word she ran it under the blanket, over my belly and 
down the side of my flank. She grasped my erect shaft and gave it a tug, 
slid her hand along its length to its tip, damp and sticky with the 
propellant of my seed, then released. She took her dampened fingers and put 
them to her lips as I had seen her do the morning she pleasured herself at 
the snoring Leslie's side. 

Unrequited, I tried to reach out to her but she abruptly removed the spout 
from its fleshy tea cozy, gathered her garment about her and filled the 
awaiting cup with the mornings exotic mix. 

"Drink your tea," she said. 

She waited until she saw me drinking it before she went out again, and then 
I heard her heavy walk on the wooden floor of the main cabin. I closed my 
eyes. Each time her feet moved, the impact would send a minute quiver up the 
sinews of her leg into the ambiguous and tensile mass of her broad thighs. I 
could almost smell them again. I could taste her in the tea. I felt relaxed. 

*** 

I was standing on deck, looking along the canal bank. There, about a hundred 
yards ahead, was the hoarding and the grass verge where we had lain down. 
About twenty yards behind the hoarding was a cottage of whose presence we 
had been unaware the previous night. We had made love almost in the garden. 

"Nice little house," Leslie said. 

I nodded. 

We both looked at it for a moment and I wondered if the situation was as 
artificial for him as it was for me. It was as though, because we had 
nothing to say to each other, we tacitly agreed to feign interest in the 
same thing, or what was outwardly the same thing, for the cottage must had 
had different associations for him and for me. It occurred to me that human 
beings often compromise with each other in this way. They choose what 
appears to be, but what each knows certainly not to be, a point of contact. 
And so we looked together at the same cottage and I said: "It needs 
re-slating, though." Les, catching the thread, went on to say that 
re-slating was expensive these days. So the shuttle moved backwards and 
forwards between us, neither of us willing to interfere with the glib 
mechanism, not at least until an alternative point of contact suggested 
itself. What we said was trivial, but our saying of it was not. That was 
often the way between Les and me. And since the previous night, because I 
was aware of something which concerned him intimately and was unable to 
speak of it, the actual distance between us had increased immeasurably. 

Conversation was difficult that morning. Les thought of something for us to 
do, I forget what exactly, with a hammer and nails. Ella came on deck with 
her shopping basket while we were doing it. She watched for a few moments 
and then, without saying anything, she went along the canal bank and out of 
sight into the road leading up to the church. Leslie was more involved in 
the job than I was. As I bent down over the wood, I watched her walk away 
swinging the wicker basket by her side. 

I never get tired of watching women walk, especially if they walk like Ella 
did, with slow, heavy movements, and a spring that did not come to the 
surface but vibrated at the thighs and at the haunches like a force held in 
check. Those thighs taut as she positioned her body over and on the teapot 
flashed to my mind again. The tension as she rocked the teapot between those 
powerful haunches and stimulated her outer lips then into the deeper 
recesses of her succulent passage. The rippling as they held her pierced by 
the porcelain and poised on the edge of release. Ah, women's bodies are 
wonderful things. 

"Mind your thumb," Leslie said, "or I'll cut it off." 

He was grinning at me and I found myself steadying a plank for him and 
Leslie with a three-foot saw in his hands. That surprised me because I had 
not been conscious of the saw or of the new position I had taken up. I moved 
my hand slightly. 

The moving saw began to retch its way into the wood. 

"Think it'll rain?" 

I looked up. The sky was beginning to be overcast, as though part of it were 
being stained gradually at its edges by the other part. The canal was choppy 
at the surface. 

"Looks like it," I said. 

"We'll go down and make a cup of tea," Leslie said. "There's nothing much to 
do anyway." 

We were drinking this ordinary tea when Ella came back. She had been caught 
in the rain, soaked to the skin. She got behind me and changed her dress. 
Leslie was reading the morning paper she had brought back, and presently he 
looked up and said: "Not a word about it here, Joe. An old woman's had her 
head bashed in in Paisley, but there's nothing about our one." 

Behind me, I could hear Ella's movement and her breathing in and out again 
as she stepped into dry clothes. There was a sliding sound, soft, prickling 
slightly, as the garments passed upwards over her legs and thighs. I was 
conscious of the wet smell of her as I was in the closeness of the night 
before. I fought an impulse to turn round. Then her voice said: "What's it 
to you anyway? Can you not leave her alone now she's dead?" 

Leslie grunted inarticulately. When he spoke, it was to say that the old 
woman had sat upright in her armchair for three days after she was dead. If 
the milkman had not noticed that her milk remained uncollected at the 
doorstep and reported it to the police, she would still be there, dead, with 
her head bashed in, in the empty house. 

"Funny that," said Leslie brightly. "Sometimes you don't know what's under 
your own nose." 

Dinner went much as usual. I touched Ella once under the table. She flushed 
faintly and went on eating. When we went on deck, the rain was off, but over 
the fields and the canal gusts of whiteness blew, not rain, but damply and 
wild, visible only when they thickened under the force of the wind, making 
the atmosphere bracing and uncertain. 

As I stood at the wheel and we moved slowly along the canal, that 
uncertainty communicated itself to me, making me impatient to be with Ella 
again. I wondered what she was doing, thinking, if she was waiting down 
there below, also fidgeting and impatient. I imagined the warmth of the 
cabin, the wood, the leather, the stove. Had I been alone on the barge with 
Ella, I would have tied up to the bank. In the cabin we would have been 
aware of the weather but been untouched by it. The barge would have rocked 
gently as she climbed naked onto the bunk for me. 

After I had allowed her to explore me fully, Ella would mount me as she had 
mounted the teapot; as the tandem riders of Les' youth had mounted him. 
Astride my chest with her pungent sex spread open and willingly wet before 
me, I could lay my unfettered hands on the haunches I so admired and caress 
their tensile strength and powerful beauty. I would spread her thighs still 
further apart and cause her to rise up off her buttocks and bring her 
slippery slit closer to my waiting mouth. Then I would honor her with a 
tonguing that would leave her eager to know the full penetrating hardness of 
my rod. 

First I would tease the fleshy darkness of her outer lips, moistening and 
tugging at them with my lips, letting them transmit to the deeper recess the 
hint of pleasure to come. Her hot juices would flow as I nuzzled deeper 
beyond the coarse hair and outer folds to the sweeter delights secreted 
beneath the sheltering flesh. My tongue would find the pinker meat of her 
willing body and ream the tighter orifice buried closer to the bone. 

Her erect simulacrum of a penis would fall to my gaze as her openness spread 
before me. It would brush my upper lip as I extracted the tasty juice from 
her ravaged slit. Then I would lift my chin against the hindmost length of 
her womanliness and nip the tiny guardsman between my teeth. She would start 
at the experience, then plunge forward begging for further stimulation. And 
so I would ravage her, pressing my face fully into that fleshy wonderland of 
womanly intricacy, sucking and poking with my tongue, pressing my lips and 
face and nose at parts unseen even by their possessor, biting at delicate 
bits, insinuating the roughness of my beard on baby-soft flesh and bringing 
red blood dotting to the surface to commingle with all the saliva and 
womanly release mixing there. 

With Ella thus satiated, I would have my release. Well lubricated below I 
would press at her hips and slide her down my chest until my erect member 
reached the first opening backing down upon it. While she was thoroughly 
afire, I would penetrate Ella's untouched nether opening and cram my rod 
hard up its tight passage. 

She would throw her arms back to ease the entry, raising some and tightening 
those fine muscles in the fore part of her legs. Impaled by my horn up her 
rump, the entryway so sweetly tasted moments before would spread open before 
my sight, wet and tangled, all shades of pink, red and lavender, fairly 
gasping as if an independent living thing enjoying the sensations 
experienced by its near opening. And all the while the barge would rock with 
us, bringing parts deeper and closer together. 

Later in the afternoon, Ella came on deck to hang up some wet dishtowels. 
She did this near the stern where the wheel was and I had an opportunity to 
speak to her. But she was evasive, pretending in the wind not to catch what 
I said. When she had hung up the towels she went below again. I had the 
impression that she was slipping away from me. Leslie went below then. About 
ten minutes later, he came back on deck with a cup of tea for me. He took 
the wheel while I drank and my eyes returned to the landscape where, in 
gusts, the trees and fields were swept as though by invisible brushes. 

As evening approached, Clowes came in sight. Another small canal town, more 
industrial than Lairs. 

We noticed the fair immediately. The marquees were pitched in the fields to 
the left which bordered the canal. The hurdy-gurdy music was suspended in 
the atmosphere for a long time before we saw them, or the stalls or the 
brightly painted caravans and lorries. Les stepped out on the deck for a 
better look. Ella, too, came up from below, looking questioningly up round 
the hatch. She had heard the music. 

I realized then that the fields were out of the question that night, even 
supposing I succeeded in getting Leslie away from the barge and got back 
myself. I felt Ella look at me and look away. She was finding fault with me, 
I felt. Ever since she had come on deck to hang the towels up, the feeling 
that she was sliding away from me had persisted, like a toothache all 
afternoon. Now her glance, and the way in which she turned away again 
without a sign and without speaking, confirmed my doubt. I almost called out 
to her, but when she disappeared below again, I was glad that I hadn't. I 
would not have known what to say. 

Les came back along the deck towards me. 

"Seen it?" he said, nodding backwards over his shoulder. 

I nodded. 

Les sat down beside me and we both looked and listened. Then, on the towpath 
not far ahead, we saw a man. He was sitting on the grass verge, leaning 
forwards, his shoulders hunched, his chin on his chest. As we approached him 
he did not look up. 

"Tramp," Leslie said. 

"Not much of him." 

Leslie glanced at me. 

"The tramp," I said. "Look at his boots." 

Two white sticks, the shins unsocked, like a thin neck from a collar, thrust 
upwards from split boots. The man's head under the old fedora remained 
tilted upwards as we passed. 

"Can't hear us," Leslie said. 

"He's not interested." 

Leslie tapped out his pipe on the deck. 

"Scare the birds," he said. 

"Poor bugger." 

"A man won't work," Les said. 

"Not much work left there," I said. 

"For the crows," Les said. 

"Or the rain, Les." 

"You'd be surprised," Les said. "A few nights in the open. They get 
toughened to it." 

And we both looked backwards but the man hadn't moved. He was folded like a 
penknife at the waist as though for the last time. 

"Might be dead." 

Leslie laughed. 

"You never saw a dead tramp," he said. "They don't die like the rest of us." 

"Who buries them?" 

"A pauper's grave," Les said. "But they don't die in the open. They go 
indoors to die." 

The music from the fairground was louder now and we could see the brass 
poles of the roundabouts spiraling upwards and downwards. 

"Not much farther," Leslie said. "We'll tie up along there." 

"Do you think he was dying?" 

"Who?" 

"The tramp." 

"Drunk more likely. Might take a look at the fair tonight." 

Sure, I said. It might be interesting. 

Leslie was looking back again. 

"There he goes," he said. 

The tramp had shifted. Still bent, his crumpled trousers tight on his 
shanks, he moved off in the opposite direction. He was more like a windmill 
than a man. 

We tied up a few minutes later. And then Ella was calling on us to come down 
for our tea. 

"You boys going over to the fair for a while?" Ella asked Leslie. 

"What about you?" he inquired without answering. 

"I've got work to do." She hadn't looked at me since I had come down, but it 
had not occurred to me until she spoke because I had been thinking about the 
tramp and wondering whom he reminded me of. 

It was not a direct resemblance, but there was a connection somewhere with 
someone. Something vaguely familiar. I was not able to put my finger on it 
until later. The familiarity was the familiarity of limbs out of control, of 
something missing that should have been there. The dead are like that, and 
the maimed, and the tramp was as he moved off. All irrelevant. And the canal 
and time and the barge which has passed him while he sat folded up on the 
grass was irrelevant too, all except the gratuitous moment in which he was 
involved. Even that was not his own because the man was absent from it. He 
had come close then to my memory of the corpse in the water, which was only 
a movements of limbs, less rigid than he, but in some unmistakable way the 
same. 

When Ella spoke, I gave up trying to find the connection. When I looked at 
her, she had raised the cup to her lips and they were touching the surface 
of the tea, pushing away and sucking at the same time. She was looking 
straight in front of her. 

"I'll stay aboard if you'd like to go," I said. 

I knew she was going to refuse but I wanted her to remember I was there. 
Somehow, I was afraid to touch her under the table. There was a wall between 
us, inexplicably there suddenly. 

"I've no time," she said. "You can go, too." 

"We'll go," Les said enthusiastically. Turning to me he added, "We don't 
need to stay too long, Joe." 

"Sure," I said. But it had already occurred to me that Ella would be alone 
on the barge. 

*** 

The ring of colored lights was turning. A man was speaking through a 
megaphone. The stalls opened like bright yellow mouths laughing. The 
hurdy-gurdy music formed a ceiling over the jutting squares of electric 
light bulbs. The timbers of the switchback were high over on the left. 
Leslie led the way, pushing through the crowd, turned, grinned back at me 
and then moved on. 

Then at one stall the penny rolled down the chute and landed on a square 
marked 4d. The woman tossed four pennies flatly across the squared cloth. 
Leslie retrieved them. 

"Always win," he said. 

Above everything, the night was dark blue. The board at the upper rim of the 
stall read "Abott Bros." It was scored with mud and paint. A man at the 
other side of me was pressing against me, a weight of shoulder, smelling of 
brilliantine and tobacco. Leslie had lost. His last penny landed on a line 
between two numbers. He was calling for change. The moon-faced woman with 
crinkling blond hair seemed to swim across the stall to me. The man beside 
her was looking at a roundabout. 

"Five pence," Leslie said, pointing. 

It was raining. I had been aware of it for the last few minutes. 

"It's raining, Les." 

None of his coins had landed properly. 

The shoulder dunted me. Excuse me, it said. 

"It's raining," Les. 

Somebody was making a commotion at the back of the crowd. I leaned forward 
under the roof of the stall to be out of the rain which spat coldly in. I 
was thinking of Ella. The roundabout had stopped. People were dismounting. 

"It's raining, Les." 

"What?" 

"Rain," I said. 

The commotion touched my shoulder. I turned round. A black face and white 
teeth, one gold one, was smiling. 

"Leslie!" 

"Bob!" 

They shook hands. 

"On the canal. We move off tomorrow morning," Leslie was saying. 

People were hurrying away under umbrellas. A crush of three rushed past 
under one mackintosh. 

"Come somewhere where it's dry," Bob was saying. 

His friend was leading. We reached shelter under the structure of the 
switchback. After a few moments the fairground was deserted except for 
people taking shelter here and there near the stalls. The rain became 
heavier still, forming puddles on the grass. The music had been turned off. 
We listened to the noise of the rain. 

"It can't last," Leslie said. 

"How's the wife, Leslie?" 

"Fine. Jesus! Look at it!" 

The wetness rose damply with its smell and circulated round our trouser 
legs. 

"Fine, Bob. How's yours?" 

"She's expecting." 

"Ha!" 

"We're looking for a house." 

"We'll make a dash for it in a minute," Leslie said. "Shall we head for the 
pub?" 

Bob shook his head in the affirmative. In the bad light, his hair had a 
grisly appearance and the raindrops moved downwards slowly from his temples 
to his cheeks. Walls, with rain on them, I felt for a moment. 

"I don't want to go home," Jim said. 

"Jesus! What a night," Leslie said. 

"You could take him to the pictures," Bob said. "Would you like to go to the 
pictures?" 

"Then let's get going," Leslie said. "What do you think, Joe? You come 
along?" 

"Aye." 

I lit another cigarette, shielding the match in my hands. The palms, close 
to my eyes, were the same palms which would raise Ella's buttocks, causing 
her thighs to fall apart, like a book open, pressed upwards at the spine. 
That gave me a strange feeling. Then the match went out and I lowered my 
hands. 

"All right, I'll walk you into town, have a drink with you boys as you 
reminisce." 

"Come on now," Bob said. "It may come on again." 

We moved out from under the switchback. Everything was dripping and the 
sodden turf squished underfoot. 

"Watch where you put your feet," Bob was saying. "It's not far. This way." 

His voice might have been that of a professional guide. We walked between 
two rows of stalls. The lights were going out, one by one. 

"Tough luck on the fair," Leslie was saying. 

"Up this road now," Bob said. "It's not far." 

He was walking in front, chatting with Leslie. I tailed along. The air after 
the rain was pleasant, like air blown in off the sea at night, and the 
hedges on either side of the road rustled softly. 

Shortly we reached the pub that was bustling with dampened fair goers who 
had much the same idea as we three. The mood was jovial and Les and Bob fell 
quickly into the spirit of the evening, full of boisterous backslapping and 
drink after drink. I remained subdued and innocuous, quaffed the first round 
that Bob bought for us and let the two of them gradually slip away from me. 
When some time had passed and more ale had been downed by the reunited old 
shipmates and the stories were getting more and more personal, I made my 
excuses to them fairly unnoticed and slipped out into the night. 

I was walking along the main street, which was nearly deserted. The canal 
bank would be deserted, too. Gravel and rain. The deck of the barge would be 
slippery. I felt free for the first time since early morning. There had been 
a nightmare aspect about the fair. I had been involved without being caught 
up in something that had nothing to do with me, and, being so involved, was 
cut off from myself, from my own direction. Now suddenly I was no longer 
coerced and the world came to exist for me again, not as a foreign element 
to be looked at, but as a climate in which I could become immersed. 

It had got colder. I buttoned up my jacket as I walked. I remembered the 
crinkling blond hair of the woman who had stood opposite at the stall and 
then the birdlike jerk of the tramp. It was then that it occurred to me that 
it was the dead woman he reminded me of. Something missing. What was missing 
seemed to imply what was not there. 

The rain was still holding off. I passed the public urinal. I felt somehow a 
hostility in the glances of the few loungers who hung about it. It struck me 
as strange how they stood there alone or in small groups, smoking, idling 
the time away. One of them laughed, but I did not hear what was said. A 
policeman passed me on a bicycle. Funny-I always notice policemen. The tires 
swished along the wet road and his cloak blew out like a tent behind him. I 
supposed he was going home. 

Then I was returning down the road between the hedges-hawthorn, I think. I 
could hear the branches dripping onto the grass and bracken on either side. 
A cat rose from the ditch, darted across the road and went through the hedge 
on the other side. Someone was walking in front of me, going in the same 
direction. His footsteps did not get any louder. I slowed down until they 
had passed out of earshot. Not far then. I passed the fairground. A few 
lights were still burning. I heard a woman's laugh. Farther on, I heard two 
men talking behind the hedge. By the time I reached the canal everything was 
silent except for the ambiguous presence of the canal itself. There is a 
noise that is peculiar to inland water at night, a kind of radiation that is 
not exactly sound and not exactly smell. It is closed to touch; it is, 
precisely, a presence. There was no one on the footpath. I walked carefully 
along the path and boarded the barge. 

It was dark in the cabin and quiet except for the tick of the clock above 
their bunk. 

I moved with my hands in front of me like a blind man. I found a chair and 
sat down. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I became aware of Ella's 
breathing. She was in the bunk and somehow I was convinced she was not 
sleeping. She must have known it was me. She must have heard me come down 
through the companionway. 

"Ella!" 

She didn't answer. Dimly, the clock face reflected what seemed to be an 
eternity behind the glass, as though there were a tunnel there leading into 
an obscure distance. I saw Ella's shape under the blanket, the edge of the 
table, the paraffin lamp, dark masses of varying densities at my elbows and 
at my feet and at the other side of the cabin. A shaft of lesser darkness 
came down through the companionway. "Ella!" 

I put out my hand and touched her shoulder. It was only then that I realized 
she was crying, not loudly, but softly into the pillow. I could not see why. 
My fingers were still on her shoulder. 

At that moment she moved her arm. 

"Go away, Joe. I don't want to see you." 

"You're mad," I said. I was mystified. 

"Go away, Joe!" 

"For God's sake!" 

As I said it, I stepped backwards and my arm caught the paraffin lamp which 
tilted and fell over. The glass splintered as it crashed on the deck. 

"Now look what you've done!" She sat up. 

"I can't see a bloody thing," I said. "Wait till I strike a match." 

Ella swung off the bunk. 

"Give them to me," she said, "and stand back out of the way until I clear it 
up." 

I felt her take the matchbox from my hand and a fraction of a second later a 
match spurted into flame between her fingers. In the sudden, brief eruption 
of the match I could see her clearly, her shadow on the woodwork, and the 
clock with its brass ring. At that moment it struck nine, its small chime 
magnified by the artificiality of the situation. The match went out and she 
lit another. She was bending, trying to see where the lamp had fallen. The 
cabin smelt strongly of paraffin. 

"It's leaking," she said. 

"Have you got a candle?" 

"Les used the last one." 

She did not appear to be aware that I was watching her. She was wearing a 
very loose white slip that hung on loose strings from her shoulders so that 
the nipples of her breasts showed clearly in the light. The slip clung 
tightly against her relaxed belly and stopped just short of the knees like a 
badly fitting curtain. Her thick legs were planted firmly on broad feet on 
the floor and her heavy upper arms slewed from side to side as she cupped 
her hands round the match to direct its beam on the deck. I noticed that she 
had a mole on her side, almost under the armpit where the hairs grew thickly 
and twisted into wisps. She smelled warm, of sleep-sweat, of the bed. 

"Watch your feet," I said. "You'll get them cut." 

"Can you see where the brush is?" she said, turning towards me. 

I was barring her way. 

"Joe... " 

"He won't be back for hours," I said. 

She was going to protest but when I moved against her, she drew in her 
breath instead. I held her against me, my thumbs under her armpits massaging 
the damp hairs and the remainder of my fingers crushing her at the fat parts 
of her shoulders. She did not resist. I relaxed my grip and moved my hands 
downwards over the hard flesh of her back to her haunches, pressing and 
relaxing with my hands so that her thick abdomen came against my clothed 
belly in a series of little shocks. A moment later, her head buried in my 
shoulder, she put one thigh between mine and pressed her belly close to me. 
As she did so, I discovered her skin beneath the smock-like nightgown and 
felt with the side of my forefinger the urgent little beard of damp hair 
that hung down between her thighs. I moved her to the bunk, undressed 
quickly and slipped in beside her. 

The previous evening, I had met her at my most urgent part. We had come 
together only at our lower bellies and upper thighs. This time it was quite 
different. Our limbs intertwined, our bellies met, her full breasts gave as 
my chest pressed against them and her arms, soft and glistening now with a 
pinprick sweat, folded about me, one hand moving down between my buttocks 
and the other pressing my head close so that our lips met firmly and our 
mouths broke open to each other. I moved my hand slowly at the sensitive 
fork of her torso and rolled inexorably over until her broad front bore my 
weight like a broken catapult. 

Afterwards, as we lay in each other's arms beneath the rough blanket, the 
sides of her belly and her flanks were covered in a thin lather of sweat. We 
breathed in and out together, deeply, so that our bellies met together and 
fell away again, leaving a slight prickle on the skin. 

Outside, it began to rain steadily. We could hear the hushed fall on the 
water, on the gravel, on the wood. It was there with our breathing, a 
curtain of sound, something outside of us to which we both listened as, with 
our eyes open, and with our own thoughts, we looked at each other in the 
dark. 

 PART TWO 

CHAPTER ONE 

Go back to the beginning. 

It's an odd thing or rather was an odd thing. Thank God it's not likely to 
happen again. 

I wanted to talk about Ella, about how she suddenly came to me, like a brain 
wave, almost. For that reason I said little about Cathie, at least I didn't 
show where she fit into the picture. She was there all the time of course, 
but you didn't know it. Or perhaps you did. She was the corpse. 

I nearly said my corpse. But a corpse, strictly speaking, doesn't belong to 
anybody, and although I could have laid some claim to a stake in her body, I 
like to think that I have no claim, not even a murderer's, on her body. 

I killed Cathie. There is no point in denying it since no one would believe 
me. The police, with their usual sensationalism, began to investigate the 
possibility of foul play, according to the newspapers at least. What it 
meant in fact, of course, was that they were already looking for the 
murderer. Well, they found one, but we'll come to that later. What convinced 
them, doubtless, was the fact that she was wearing no clothes. That, they no 
doubt felt, indicated the presence of a man. I'm with them there, of course. 
It's the kind of conclusion I might jump to myself. You too, perhaps. But 
the assumption that because a man has sexual intercourse with a woman in 
somewhat unseemly circumstances, because later the woman's body is found 
floating in one of our navigable rivers-the assumption that the man did her 
in afterwards seems to me to be entirely without justification. 

The newspapers encouraged the idea. The public accepted it. Les believed. 
Even Ella believed. So I went on keeping my mouth shut. 

As I said, go back to the beginning. It was an odd thing that I, who saw 
Cathie topple into the river, should have been the one to find her body the 
following morning, a mile from where she fell in. I felt at the time that it 
was ludicrous, so incredible that, if Les had not happened to come up on 
deck at the time, I should most certainly have refused to accept such an 
improbable event and have prodded her away with the boat hook. 

Unfortunately, Leslie slouched up at the wrong moment. 

*** 

The face of the man in the cloth cap came into the news between an air crash 
(forty-seven dead) and a financial conference to be held in Paris. The 
dotted image was set obscurely in the page, a glint of white in a host of 
darker dots, as though the face were trying to sink into the background and 
to merge with it. The caption underneath read: CLYDE MURDER MAN CHARGED 
Daniel Goon, plumber, of 42 Black Street, Glasgow, was today remanded in 
custody at the Central Police Court. He is charged with the murder of 
Catherine Dimly, 27, sometime actress, of 2 Noble Grove, Glasgow. Goon is 
the father of four children. Dimly's body was discovered two weeks ago by 
bargemen who recovered it from the river. 

I found it difficult to understand what evidence they could have against 
Goon. Goon had nothing to do with it. And I was quite convinced that I had 
destroyed all possible evidence. 

When Cathie tripped and fell backwards into the river, the scream choked in 
her throat before it was uttered. The lights on the opposite shore went on 
winking and everything seemed deadly quiet. The splash was contained inside 
my head for a few moments, like a cry in a wood, before I lay down flat on 
the quay and peered down at the black water. It sidled past the quay stones 
and a few yards away, quietly at the surface, a few bubbles moved, like suds 
from laundry, farther and farther away until there was nothing to be seen. 

I remained where I was for a long time, my eyes well-accustomed to the dark 
after the hour we had spent together. First there was a match-box, and then 
a bottle, and then a spar of wood, and each object made a different noise as 
it scraped past the stones and disappeared with the flow of the current. 

Cathie was down there somewhere. It had been too dark and now it was too 
late to do anything. I looked for a trace of her for a long time but, except 
for the debris that floated past, the water was evenly dark. It struck me 
that what I was trying to do was like trying to pin the tail on the donkey 
behind the sheet. She might have been anywhere, at any level. 

There had been no scream. No frantic hand in the water. I was surprised at 
my own calm as I contemplated her disappearance. Did I believe she had swum 
a distance under water and reached the bank farther down? I knew she had 
not. I knew she couldn't swim. She had always been afraid of the water. I 
used to tease her about it sometimes when we went out rowing. A summer's 
day, perhaps, off the shore somewhere on the west coast, and we would be 
lying naked on the bottom boards under the seats. 

She was more passionate that way than any other and that was because she 
couldn't swim, because our erotic struggle in the drifting boat represented 
for her a life and death matter. It was not only her abandoned flesh that 
prostrated itself in the thin shell of the dinghy, it was her whole life 
that she gambled with, uttering little screams of delirious pleasure when a 
chance wave decapitated itself on the gunwale of the boat and the cold water 
splashed on the taut flesh of her thighs. As she felt it lap around her 
buttocks, she gave little shudders of pleasure as though a slight electric 
shock were being intermittently carried to her body. 

She said she felt the power of the sea through the wood of the boat and that 
she never felt she was giving herself so utterly as when, her flesh fitted 
to the rutted bottom-boards, the bows lifted, a spray of water chilled her 
thighs, and my male core, tilted with the movement of the boat, ploughed 
more deeply at the wet sex she bared for me. 

Our love-making was usually a sudden affair. When we had lived together for 
some time, the constriction of our life set us at a distance from one 
another. We were no longer free to choose being together. It was the 
necessity to break through those constrictions that led us, unconsciously 
for the most part, to explore violence. 

Perhaps you have watched a man and woman making love, from a distance. Or 
perhaps they have gone about it with you still in the room, the fact of the 
witness's presence increasing their desire. From this viewpoint you will be 
struck by the fact that in their soft nobbled movements, as their bellies 
slide together and retract in small strong heaps of muscle, there is an 
undercurrent of violence. 

You become aware suddenly, as you disassociate the idea of love from the 
strong torques and thrusts of the limbs, that you are watching a union of 
animals, which will continue brutally at least until the moment at which the 
male achieves his orgasm. The female's legs perhaps have on more than one 
occasion sought to extricate themselves, because her position has not been 
satisfactory, or because she desires to arrest momentarily the flow of 
passion. But her muffled and near-impotent movements have been trapped and 
re-gathered, perhaps between his knees, much as a tomcat traps and 
re-gathers a female cat to him, and she is forced again to submit. These 
small, almost imperceptible, movements come across to a spectator and 
constitute the best evidence of the constant presence of violence in the sex 
act. 

Now, if there is no passion, or if the passion had been suffocated by the 
civilized structure into which an ordinary man allows it to run-if the 
accumulated tedium of years of living together has killed the animal 
excitement of the sexual act-it is not surprising that men seek artificial 
means of stimulating violence so that the act, become frantic, may again be 
passionate. 

So there was an undercurrent of violence always in our unions in the dinghy. 
But it was not until one day in our small flat in Leith that we came to 
realize that violence alone could make our love interesting. 

Cathie worked during the day. I hung about, doing the small chores, reading, 
vegetating. One day I made a large bowl of bright yellow custard. I don't 
remember why exactly. There was a lot of milk in the house. The weather was 
quite warm and I was afraid it would turn sour. Anyway, I was bored. I made 
it early in the afternoon and it had stood cooling for about three hours 
before Cathie returned from work. I was reading the evening paper when she 
came. 

I could see she was in a bad mood. She fiddled around with this and that 
without paying any attention to me. Now and again she sighed heavily to let 
me know that she was exasperated. I watched her over the top of the 
newspaper. 

Suddenly she said she was going out. 

I did not answer. 

She hesitated and then, without another word, she began to change her 
clothes. She had taken off what she was wearing and was sitting in her 
panties, rolling on her best nylon stockings. 

Even this did not excite me. I saw only an exasperated woman whose body now 
bored me and whose conversation was constructed for the most part to express 
her resentment of the fact that her body did bore me. Suddenly she said: 
"What have you been doing all day anyway?" 

"Nothing much," I said. "I made some custard." 

"You made what?" 

"Some custard," I said. 

"What did you want to make custard for?" 

I stood up. 

"I thought I might make some custard," I said. "It struck me as a good idea. 
So I made it. Here it is." 

I walked toward the bowl. It was a 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 on her other stocking. 
"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 even looking at 
me. 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 cat 
tails 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 gob 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 backwards in 
her chair so that her body, now covered with custard, sprawled across the 
floor. Her thighs in their upward arc as the chair spun backwards, and her 
hot spread buttocks glimmering white 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. I grasped her by one arm and twisted her about so that her great and 
now custard-smeared buttocks were facing me. 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 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 colors 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 odor of her 
pain and sweat and gnashing. By that time I was hard. I stripped off my 
clothes, grasped the slat of the orange box, and moved against her with 
prick and stick, like a tycoon. 

When I rose from her, she was in a hideous mess, almost unrecognizable as a 
white woman, and the custard and the ink and the sugar sparkled like 
surprising meats on the haired twist of her satisfied mound. 

I washed myself 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. 

*** 

After a while, I became used to the idea that she was drowned, beyond help. 
Somehow the quiet lap of the water against the stones was reassuring. More 
than that, it had a positive fascination for me. Undoubtedly that was 
because of the kind of compact that had always existed between our mating 
and the water. She attained an ecstasy through terror of it, and on more 
than one occasion she had said that she felt that that was how she would 
die, overtaken in sex by the water. And it had almost been like that. 

If a policeman had come along at that moment, I should probably have made no 
move to escape. It was only afterwards that I realized that my own position 
was dangerous, that there was only my word that it was an accident. Or was 
it an accident? I suppose it was. It never occurred to me to kill her. I was 
merely walking away. She tried to hold me back. I pushed her. She tripped 
over a cobblestone and then she was in the water. It all happened so 
quickly. 

Perhaps some people would say I was to blame because my reactions were so 
slow that I must have willed her death. I don't think so. Although certainly 
the feeling uppermost in my mind when she fell backwards was that of 
annoyance. I was annoyed with her. And then curiosity. She was gone 
suddenly, and as my anger evaporated I became breathlessly curious, a little 
frightened perhaps, and I leaned down over the water and looked for her. 

I leaned down curiously with a sense of quiet shock, and soon I began to 
enjoy looking at the water as it swirled indolently past the slime-covered 
quay stones. The seconds marked themselves with the disappearance of the 
bubbles, and with the appearance of the matchbox, the bottle, the spar. 
Three minutes at least must have passed before I felt any sense of personal 
danger. That came suddenly, as though a trapdoor all at once opened into a 
deeper consciousness of the situation. My eyes left the surface of the water 
and moved across the flickering gleam of the river to the other side where 
the lights still winked in a kind of cynical confederacy. I felt very alone. 
There was only my word for what had happened. 

I was now in a kneeling position on the cobblestones and I could feel the 
cold hardness of the stone at my kneecaps. I stood up and as I did so my 
eyes caught sight of the bundle of clothes Cathie had so willingly taken off 
for me. They were against the wheel of the railway truck under which we had 
made love. The siding was right on the quay. Both of us thought it was a 
good place. 

It was then that it occurred to me that things would have looked better for 
me if she had had her clothes on when she fell in-the sexuality of the 
situation would tend to make it appear criminal. I had the absurd idea of 
finding the body and dressing it in the clothes. That struck me as funny a 
moment later. I picked up the clothes and looked at them. They were 
evidence. Naturally, I had to get rid of them. 

It did occur to me to go to the police, but I saw no reason why they should 
accept my version of the incident. I always say the wrong thing at 
interviews. I dislike the way other people expect me to share their 
attitudes. I could imagine their questioning me about Cathie, the loaded 
questions they would thrust at me. So I dismissed the thought of going to 
the police almost as soon as it occurred to me. 

There was no hurry. There was no sign of anyone about. I decided to smoke a 
cigarette. 

The cigarette made me feel better. I was not going to do anything rash. The 
clothes were there, still slightly warm under my hand. I decided to think 
the whole thing out in detail before deciding on any course of action. I 
almost began to enjoy the situation. It had been forced upon me without 
logic; it was up to me to accept my predicament and to free myself of its 
implications. 

Good. I ground out the stub of the cigarette on the stone. My hand had 
hardly left it when my finger felt for it again almost reflexively. It was, 
I supposed, evidence. I smiled then. It was a good thing I had smoked a 
cigarette. Somewhere under the truck there were two other cigarette butts 
and one would have lipstick on it. I repressed the urge to look for them 
immediately. There was plenty of time. The main thing was not to commit 
myself to any unanalyzed act, however slight it might seem and to destroy 
scientifically the absurd complex in which I had become involved. 

I had got myself involved. Absurdly and without forethought. For I had met 
Cathie in the street quite by accident, after a space of two months during 
which I had neither seen her nor written to her. Our decision to make love 
had been as sudden as decisions sometimes are, made while seated in an 
alcove in a small cafe where we had gone for coffee. There I had impulsively 
put my hand on her thigh. That move brought back a hundred memories of 
nights during which we lay in one another's arms, or struggled desperately 
about the floor, her gleaming buttocks twitching as she dragged herself on 
her belly across the floor out of reach, and the bruises we suffered as we 
toppled over chairs in our lust for one another. 

We had known each other for a long time and there in the cafe we did not 
need to speak about it. A glance was enough. A slight flush of excitement on 
her cheeks. She would if I suggested it. We left the cafe and walked 
straight to the river. 

The proprietor of the cafe was an old Italian who sat on a high stool behind 
the counter. He had looked at us without interest, as later, while we were 
drinking the coffee, he had looked at the wall with the faded harlequins 
that happened to be opposite him. He said goodnight as we left. He might 
have recognized me again but there was little likelihood of his being called 
upon to do so. As far as he was concerned, there was nothing for me to be 
afraid of. 

And unless we had been seen by someone who knew us, he appeared to be the 
only possible witness. We had met two streets away from the cafe, walked 
there together, and then, when we came out again, had gone quickly along the 
dark streets that led to the river. It's possible we were seen. But as I 
smoked my second cigarette, I became certain that we had not. It was dark 
when we met. We crossed only one main street. It was highly unlikely. 

No connection for over two months. For the world, for the people who knew 
us, we were separated. She had had no chance to speak to anyone of our 
meeting. The element of chance had worked for, as well as against, me. There 
was no point in going to the police. It wouldn't do Cathie any good. She had 
no relatives. In a way, I suppose I was her only relative, and I already 
knew. I began to pity her then. It had been so sudden, so fraudulent, and 
she had been laughing a few minutes before. But going to the police was out. 
It might involve me, fatally. 

What about the clothes? "Let me take them off," she had said, insisting. I 
was surprised at first but then I realized what it was she wanted. It would 
give her pleasure to feel the wood of the railroad tie and the gravel under 
her. She was almost frantic to have her bare bottom on the wood. She took 
everything off except the slip and that was above the waist, protecting her 
back only. Her naked hips were on the wood, her thighs on the sharp gravel, 
and she looked up at the oily underside of the truck. She was rubbing 
herself against the ground, like a cat does, and I knew that she wished to 
cut herself on the gravel, to have the knotty wood chafe her soft skin, 
before we made love. I aided her with a hand on her warm belly, pressing 
downwards, and by inciting her verbally to do damage to herself. I was used 
to that. She needed little encouragement. 

As she worked to bring blood to her buttocks, her motions were as violent as 
those of an epileptic. Soon she was groaning with pleasure and pain. She 
stiffened as though she had inflicted a terrible wound and then, suddenly, 
she turned over on her belly and gouged it against the gravel. A moment 
later, she pulled me down on top of her, forcing me to get rid of my 
trousers altogether, then we fought while we drove our lust at each other, I 
to remain mounted, to keep her riveted to the wooden sleeper, and she to 
unhorse me so that with her on top I too should suffer the pain of the 
cutting stones. 

I was sorry now that she had taken her clothes off. If she had been fully 
dressed she would not have been in such a hurry to stop me as I walked away. 
The whole thing might never have happened. And now the clothes were a 
problem. 

Not much of a problem though. If there was nothing to connect me with her, 
then her clothes were irrelevant. The police might as well have them. They 
would miss them anyway. The coroner's verdict would be "murder by person or 
persons unknown." Some impulse made me throw the clothes into the truck. 
Afterwards I wondered why I had done it. Perhaps I derived a sense of having 
gambled from that act in spite of the fact that the clothes were irrelevant. 
Then there was the handbag. I had touched that, so there would be 
fingerprints on it. I rubbed the surface briskly with my handkerchief before 
finding a large stone, weighting the handbag with it, and throwing it into 
the water. That took care of that, doubly. And then I was suddenly annoyed 
with myself. There was a cigarette lighter in the handbag and I had touched 
that, too. But the bag would probably never be found. 

My sense of tidiness made me search for the cigarette stubs. It was 
fortunate that I did so. I found her packet of Players and the cigarette 
lighter, too. I was pleased about that. The cigarette lighter had been my 
only oversight, and lying there under the truck for anyone to see and pick 
up might have been fatal. I wiped it with my handkerchief and threw it as 
far as I could into the river. I listened for the plop. I saw no point in 
wasting the cigarettes. I transferred what remained to my own box and 
dropped the empty package into the river. I found the two stubs and did the 
same with them. After that, there was nothing else to be done. Perhaps an 
hour had passed since Cathie had disappeared in the water. 

I stepped forward and looked down at the water again. There was still no 
sign of her. The water was smooth and black, with lights like fish scales 
glimmering where a street or bridge lamp was reflected, smooth as though 
smoothed by a plasterer's trowel, and inscrutable. Behind me, the line of 
railway cars stood, silent and abandoned, their wheels at rest and their 
couplings dangling loose, screening me with their immobility from the 
movement of the city. They seemed bigger than they were, and their 
immobility communicated itself to me. I felt vaguely that the whole incident 
had taken place outside time, that there had been a break in continuity, 
that what had happened was not part of my history. It was pervaded with the 
unreality of fiction. I had merely to walk away to free myself of an 
obsession. 

I walked carefully, in the shadow of the line of trucks. I did not wish to 
be seen coming away from the place. As I crossed the rails behind the last 
truck, it came to me that anyway I had never told Cathie my real name. She 
knew me as Joe Taylor-I always give my correct Christian name because it is 
difficult to remember and react normally to an incorrect one. Perhaps in her 
room there would be a few photographs, not many, because I never like having 
my photograph taken, but one or two, and that worried me. Still, it wasn't 
likely they would look very hard for Joe Taylor. Those who knew us both knew 
that we had separated over two months ago, without words and not in anger. I 
had not seen any of them since. 

I reached the street without being seen. I passed only one man on the dark 
streets that led to the center of the city. Then, by another route 
altogether, I made my way back to the river and the barge. Ella-as yet Les' 
wife only-was awake when I got back. 

"That you, Joe?" she called from the bunk. 

In the darkness I heard Leslie's snore. 

"Yes," I said. 

"Fine time to get back!" she said. 

I did not reply. 

When I got into my bunk it never occurred to me that I would see Cathie 
again. 

CHAPTER TWO 

The facts were not made public at that time. I could get no information from 
the newspapers beyond the fact that the plumber had been charged with 
murder. I assumed that investigations were still being made and the lack of 
information in the press made me uneasy. 

When I considered the whole thing calmly I saw no reason why I should even 
be questioned, far less suspected. But as the days passed and no new 
reference was made to the crime, the silence struck me as ominous. The fact 
that I could make no move to find out what was happening without running the 
risk of bringing attention on myself made things worse. 

I wanted to act, I had an illogical fear that I had left something undone 
and that by so doing I had committed myself unknowingly, but to what 
circumstances or line of action I had no idea. There was nothing to do but 
wait. The silence could not last indefinitely. Sooner or later they would 
bring the plumber to trial. For the present, there was no moment at which I 
could say with certainty that I was more in danger than I had been the 
moment before. This inability to pin down a concrete danger made me morose 
and uncommunicative. 

As for the plumber, I felt sorry for him, to some extent even responsible. 
But I knew very well that it was ridiculous to blame myself for the crass 
stupidity of the police. The position might have been reversed. I should not 
have expected Daniel Goon, plumber, to get himself hanged for me. I had no 
intention of being shamed by a convenient social fiction into assisting at 
my own murder. 

It was not my sympathy for the plumber that took me to Black Street 
neighborhood. I was drawn there in the hope of finding out something that 
would make my own position clearer. 

I walked to the end of the street and back again. It was a short street of 
tenement houses in a poor quarter of the town. It looked like any one of the 
surrounding streets. There was nothing to see. As I turned into it, a coal 
cart moved slowly towards me at the other side, but there was nothing 
special about the horse that drew it nor about the man who walked beside it, 
holding the horse at the bit. No one paid any attention to me. There was no 
sign of a policeman anywhere. I stood at the corner for about ten minutes 
and smoked a cigarette. There was nothing to be done. I returned to the 
barge more helpless than before. 

Ella, meanwhile, was becoming less and less cautious. She wanted me to make 
love to her at every odd moment. When I protested that it was too risky, she 
laughed at me. I think she almost wanted Leslie to find out about us. 

"Who's scared now?" she said. 

There was nothing I could say. 

One time, the three of us went for a picnic and Les went off to get water to 
make tea. He was hardly out of sight when she pulled me over on top of her. 
I made love to her quickly, almost passionately, because I wanted to get it 
over with before Leslie returned with the water. That kind of thing happened 
often and I began to realize that it was only a question of time before Les 
found out. Ella knew that too. It increased her pleasure, I think. Her 
attitude was infectious and I entered into the spirit of the affair almost 
because in doing so I was able to forget the other more serious threat which 
the silence of the newspapers seemed to signify. 

Ella's body continued to excite me. When she made love now, she gave herself 
to me completely, almost hysterically. 

She had learned to love the touch of my manhood wherever I deigned to give 
it to her. Of course she still readily and willingly lavished it with kisses 
and oral caresses at practically any opportunity. It was easiest for her to 
service me quickly in that way and she, it appeared from her enthusiasm and 
frequently self-initiated attempts to extract my penis from my pants, gained 
as much pleasure as I. 

But that was only the beginning, of course. In the days and nights of our 
encounters, when Les was away and we were confident that time favored our 
amorous accords, I taught her delights of the body she had never dreamed of. 
And she took to each as if it were the singularly most pleasurable 
experience of her life. 

I threw her across the table below decks, flipped up her skirt and buggered 
her ass and she delighted in the ravaging. 

I straddled her ribs with my sword of flesh sheathed between her quivering 
breasts and ejaculated my hot sperm across her chest and chin and face and 
lips and she licked and lapped at the juice as if it was nectar from the 
heavens. 

I bound her tenderly and bound her roughly and she took equal delight in 
whatever method I chose. 

I punished her with items at hand below decks; my leather belt, the cooking 
spatula, odd bits of rope and she squealed and writhed and begged for mercy 
and later insisted on more new sensations. 

Through her, I lived out a life that was separate and intact, with its own 
violence and its own risk and its own center. 

Gradually I began to forget that I had been with Cathie when she fell 
backwards into the river and that there was any connection between the woman 
who had been my mistress and the drowned woman toward whom I reached with 
the boat hook. And then, one day, Leslie discovered us. 

*** 

Ella had ceased to move. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing heavily. 
Inside me, a recession was taking place, the sensation of closeness was 
evaporating. The image sharpened. She was merely a woman I had just fucked. 
Her body was soft, like putty, unexhilarating, out of tune. 

The weight of her thigh on my knee was uncomfortable. I had a slight 
headache. The clock with the brass ring ticked loudly, stabilizing the 
atmosphere in the cabin and drawing all objects back to their accustomed 
banality. The quilt was merely a quilt that had been washed too often. The 
varnished planks did not fit tightly together and the varnish looked 
unsmoothed and brittle. For the last few minutes I had been conscious of the 
buzz of a fly and now it landed on Ella's shoulder and walked towards the 
nipple of her breast. She appeared to be unaware of it. Her head leaned over 
to the side and the hairs of her temple were stringy with perspiration. 
There was a faint smile on her lips as though she were thinking of something 
that amused her. Her satisfaction seemed inane. The fact that she had 
withdrawn and remained confident with her eyes closed annoyed me. Her 
attitude was insulting. She appeared ridiculous to me with her smirk of 
withdrawal, her white flesh patched red where it had been crushed under my 
weight and with the fly at her nipple, hesitating, flexing its minute 
feelers. 

"When will Leslie be back?" I said. 

She opened her eyes and looked at me. At that moment the fly rose into the 
air and disappeared somewhere against the dark brown varnish of the planks. 
She was smiling. 

"Not for a while yet," she said. 

She put out her arm and drew me down to her again. I resisted slightly but 
she was determined. Her mouth was soft and too wet. I closed my teeth 
against her tongue. But without exerting myself I couldn't get free and so I 
closed my eyes and allowed her to go on kissing my neck and my cheeks. After 
a while my resentment seemed to move outside of me and to stand off at a 
distance, until, when her fingers moved at my belly again, it sank away like 
the light of a buoy below the horizon and I was no longer conscious of it. I 
felt no urgency at first, but gradually my submission ceased to be passive 
only, and I found myself fucking her again. Afterwards, we were both tired 
and we fell asleep. 

Les must have come down to the cabin and when he saw us he must have gone on 
deck again. When we awoke, it was nearly dark and we could hear him walking 
back and forth on the deck above us. We listened for a while without moving. 
Neither of us had any idea how long he had been there, but he was obviously 
waiting for us to wake up, letting us know by his walking that he knew and 
at the same time giving us an opportunity to prepare ourselves before we 
faced him. We spoke in whispers. 

"Do you think he knows?" 

"Of course he does!" I said. I lit a cigarette. 

"What'll we do?" 

I smiled in the dark. "I suppose that depends on him." 

Ella did not answer for a moment and then she said, "Why should it depend on 
him? Who the hell does he think he is anyway? Clumping around up there like 
the Day of Judgment?" 

"It's only his way of letting us know he's there." 

"He's done it," she said dryly. 

She was waiting for me to say or do something and she moved slightly so that 
no part of our bodies touched under the rough blanket, which now seemed 
rougher and more prickly than it had before. I saw only the end of my 
cigarette glowing in the dark and somehow that seemed to fill my mind, that 
and that shadows beyond it. I knew without discussing it with her that if 
Leslie had been going to do anything rash, he would have done it by now and 
that he was probably as nervous as we were about what was going to happen 
when we met again. 

"Are you just going to lie there?" 

"There's no hurry," I said. "I'll finish my cigarette." 

"What are you going to say to him?" 

"What is there to say? The whole thing's pretty obvious, isn't it?" 

She moved again, but she did not speak. I thought for a moment that she was 
going to climb out over me but she must have changed her mind for some 
reason or other. In moving, she had pulled the blanket off my right side, 
which was at the edge of the bed. She wanted me to move. Reluctantly, I 
lowered myself to the deck, struck a match and lit the oil lamp, and then, 
without looking at her, I began to dress. 

Leslie must have become conscious of the light in the cabin because a few 
moments later he stopped walking back and forth on deck. For a moment I 
almost expected him to come down through the companionway and I pulled on my 
trousers quickly so as to be in a better position to face him. But he didn't 
come, didn't even call down to us, and Ella said then, "He's waiting for you 
to go up." 

I did not answer. I wasn't in the mood to discuss it, to talk at all. Now 
that it had happened, the thought of the other danger came back to me. It 
was as though, unconsciously, I had all the time associated the two threats. 
It was as if now that one threat had been realized, a corresponding 
development in the other was threatening. At that very moment perhaps, the 
official in charge of investigations into Cathie's death would be noticing 
for the first time a connection between the deceased and one of the bargemen 
who had discovered the body. Or perhaps it was merely that the world of Ella 
and Leslie was no longer separate and self-contained, since Leslie had found 
out about us. I remember that my mouth was dry then. 

Ella watched me but said nothing. She was withdrawn in a different way now, 
and it was I who was being looked at. That made me uncomfortable. I had no 
idea what she was thinking as she lay there on her side, supported by her 
elbow, watching me dress, with her eyes in shadow. I remained bent over my 
untied shoe longer than necessary and the hair on my naked arms looked gray 
and the flesh dirty where the veins rose near the surface like a complex of 
geographical contours. It occurred to me that I hadn't had a bath for more 
than three weeks. 

When I had tied my shoelaces, I slipped my shirt over my head and while I 
was buttoning it, I looked at her. 

"Are you getting up too, Ella?" 

"Maybe," she said. "I'll wait and see what happens. Look. Your cigarette. 
It's burning the table." 

A long bow of ash fell on the floor as I lifted it to stub it smoldering on 
the ashtray. I lifted my jacket from the back of the chair and put it on. 

"I'll see what he says," I said then, more because I felt I had to say 
something before going on deck than because she needed to be told. I think 
she laughed as I turned and climbed up through the companionway. 

*** 

When I returned to the cabin about fifteen minutes later, Ella, who had not 
moved since I left her, lay half-naked on her elbow with the blanket fallen 
away to the level of her navel. The cabin was already in semi-darkness but 
it did not seem to concern her. She had made no effort to reach out and turn 
the oil lamp down or to trim the wick. Instead she had watched as the arc of 
light moved away from her. The smoking orange eye of flame flickered as I 
climbed down through the companionway as though it were trying to draw all 
the light in the cabin back into itself. I turned it down and for a moment 
the room was in almost total darkness. 

"You'll have to trim the wick," Ella's voice said to me from the bunk. And, 
as I burned my fingertips when I tried to remove the hot globe, she said, 
"There's a dishcloth behind you. Use that." 

She did not speak again until I had pinched away the burnt part of the wick 
between my thumb and forefinger, relit the lamp and replaced the globe. The 
lamp was now burning rather dully because the globe was dirty. 

"You might have turned it down," I said. 

"It'll clean," she said shortly. 

And I supposed it would clean. That was part of Ella, to be cleaning things, 
dishes or shoes or the table, scouring pots and pans, polishing brasses, 
which she did with a special cloth, blowing her hot breath on to the metal 
and then making it squeak under the friction of the cloth. I recalled her 
big forearm moving backwards and forwards like a piston whose energy you 
could almost see being drained from the tensed stock of her body and from 
the rigid stance of her powerful haunches. 

I lit a cigarette and, crossing my legs, sat down at a distance from her. 
She appeared to be content to wait for me to tell her what happened. Knowing 
what had happened and the uselessness of any effort on our part to alter it, 
I was not in any hurry to speak. I had half finished my cigarette before she 
decided that she had waited long enough. 

"Where is he?" 

"He's gone," I said. 

"Where for God's sake!" 

"God knows," I said. "I suppose he'll stop at a men's club tonight and go to 
his mother's in Glasgow in the morning." 

"Did he say he was leaving me?" 

"He said he would write you a letter." 

"Jesus!" 

Big and white, she clambered from the bunk, the soles of her feet making a 
flat stabbing sound on the boards as she landed on the deck. She brushed 
past me leaving her odor as she crossed the cabin to the stove. To suddenly 
see her close like that, naked flesh in flat surface not six inches from my 
eye, which received the impression in a neutral, emotionless way, was in a 
new way horrifying. The flesh I thought I knew, had touched and had held 
under the pressure of my fingertips, was presented anonymously as an 
amorphous mass of gray-white, yellowing at its edges, and pitted almost like 
pumice-stone. It became a mass that lost its identity in its momentary 
passage in front of my eye, and, a fraction of a second later, was gone and 
replaced by an odor which grew familiar, of woman, in my nostrils. I moved 
my head to watch Ella arrive at the stove, strike a match and place the 
kettle on the lighted gas ring. The new sound, the thrust of the ignited 
gas, seemed to restore equilibrium to the cabin, to make of Ella again a 
woman with a tendency to fatness who no longer considered it necessary to 
cover herself in front of me. 

"Jesus!" she said again. "So he's going to write me a letter!" 

"That's what he said." 

"Do you want a cup of tea?" She was smiling now. 

"I could do with one." 

"Me too," she said, and then, "It looks as though we've settled for one 
another, Joe!" 

I didn't know what else I could do other than to laugh pleasantly. 

She reached for the tea caddy. 

CHAPTER THREE 

During the days that followed, we remained tied up at Leith. 

A feeling of constriction descended on me one morning as I was touching up 
the paintwork of the barge, which hugged the quay squatly. Nearby, a 
motor-crane, its gears grinding, advanced and retreated with nets of tarred 
barrels at its claw. A man in shiny serge trousers, stringed at the knees, 
bawled instructions from under wide nostrils, spat, and screwed each spittle 
under the sole of his iron shod boot as though he were trying to obliterate 
it from his memory. The dockside, fanged and strutted with steel girders in 
the pale fog, sprawled shadowy oblongs into the hawser-shortened distance. 
The scene rang hollowly with the monotonous splutter of blunt-nosed drills. 
The feeling of constriction remained with me all morning. 

It was not lessened by Ella's occasional appearances on deck, the first time 
with a bucket of refuse, the second with some rung-out rags and a pail of 
muddied, soap-broken water, which she emptied over the side. I suppose it 
had to come to this. Considering everything, I had good reasons for 
remaining where I was, waiting for something to break. But at the same time, 
I had the uncomfortable feeling of having lost my identity. I had become 
part of a situation. The situation seemed to protect me against another, 
less enviable one-the one in which I should have been involved had I gone to 
the police. But the more I became involved in the small world of the barge, 
the more I felt myself robbed of my identity. 

It has been that way with me as long as I can remember. I am a rootless kind 
of man. Often I find myself anxious to become involved with other people, 
but I am no sooner involved than I wish to be free again. Ten years ago I 
walked out of the university one spring morning with a small overnight bag. 
I never returned. Since then, I have worked when I needed money, or because 
I have wished to break out of a sexual situation in which the necessities of 
life were provided for me. In relation to the barge, I was beginning now to 
feel the familiar urge to break with the present. 

During the day, I noticed Ella's attitude towards me was becoming more 
proprietary. She made a number of references to the future, all of which 
took me, my continued presence, for granted. She talked about divorce. I sat 
through it all quietly, without protest, eating mechanically, or smoking one 
cigarette after another, and answering her in monosyllables. When I thought 
of the plumber awaiting trial, my need to be safely involved came on me like 
a sickness, but my primitive protest was all the louder for that need. 

And then Ella's voice would come back, "It wouldn't take long, would it, 
Joe?" 

"What?" 

"The divorce!" 

"I don't know, Ella. I don't know about these things." 

"I'll find out in Glasgow. That's where we were married." 

"Yes." 

"It'll be all right," Ella said with conviction. 

I looked at her then and for a moment, in an oblique way, I found myself 
wondering what the reason was for her determination. It seemed pointless, 
not quite serious. 

Later in the afternoon, she went ashore to buy food. After she left, I tried 
to read but found I couldn't. The atmosphere was still constricted and 
yellow, drawn in on all sides by the black spokes of the dock. Every now and 
again, metal clinked against metal, and then sharply the noise of riveting 
began. I was depressed, vaguely annoyed. I missed Ella, but only in an 
indirect way. I was bored with her. When she was there, I had good reason to 
be bored. When she was not, I could only find the reason in myself, 
reflected in the fog and in the hawsers. I had a need to act, which I 
repressed again and again. I wanted to break through the immobility in which 
I had become involved, but I had come to identify my safety with inaction, 
almost with the boredom, which I was beginning to feel in relation to Ella. 

It couldn't go on. I had already decided to leave, I suppose, even that 
afternoon when I found myself telling myself not to be a fool, to wait and 
see. I threw away a newly-lit cigarette and went below again. 

When Ella returned, I was lying on the bunk. She was excited. She said 
immediately that the date of the plumber's trial had been set. I took the 
paper from her and glanced at it: FATHER OF TWO TO STAND TRIAL 45 YEAR-OLD 
GLASGOW MAN ACCUSED IN CLYDE MURDER There followed a brief account of the 
facts the police had made public. Daniel Goon was known to have been 
intimate with the murdered woman, to have been associating with her for some 
time. 

I did not need to read any further. I remember Cathie talking very quietly, 
persuasively, after we had made love. Telling me she was pregnant, that it 
was I, and asking me to marry her. That was how it happened, with her 
running after me as I walked away. And, of course, she had told someone, a 
friend at work probably, and she had told that friend that the father was 
Goon. 

I was reading on and Ella said that she thought it was four he had. Children 
she meant. I said yes, I had thought so too but that it had probably been a 
mistake. She began to empty the contents of the shopping bag on the table. 

"Move your paper," she said. "You're in the way." 

She stuffed a biscuit into her mouth. 

I watched her chewing. Her teeth were large. They broke it to powder. 

Later, her face was damp. She had been working at the hot stove. 

I was still the hired man. She laughed as she paid me, coloring slightly, as 
though she weren't sure what service she paid me for. 

"We're making good money," she said, "sometimes. It will be better when 
everything's good and proper." 

She included me, defending herself against her suspicions. 

I made love to her under a haystack, noticing for the first time the tiny 
red network at the surface of her left thigh. 

We moved along the canal. I saw the tramp, or it might have been another 
one, only this time he watched us from under the brim of his hat as we 
passed. 

When everything would be 'good and proper'. She meant marriage, of course. 
The impropriety worried her. She wasn't sure of me. She talked about the 
divorce. Leslie wrote about it, almost apologetically. He hoped we were 
well. He had a job as a night watchman in a warehouse. 

Sometimes, I looked at her back. Her hips seemed broader. The apron string 
still dangled. Most of the time she tried to be attractive, wore lipstick, 
crossed her legs casually so that I could see the smooth white rise of the 
back of her thighs. In the dark we were still lovers. But during the day, I 
was conscious of her looking at me, analyzing, speculating. From the 
newspapers I derived the impression it was a foregone conclusion that they 
would find Goon guilty. We heard that Les alone would be required as a 
witness at the trial. I began to wonder whether I would find myself in the 
courtroom watching the web of guilt being woven round the wrong man. Ella 
joked about my sudden interest in the affair. She said she thought I wasn't 
interested in that kind of thing. But she was pleased at the same time. She 
helped me cut out all the items from the different papers. Some evenings by 
the light of the oil lamp I sat with all the cuttings spread out on the 
table in front of me like a pack of cards in front of a fortune teller. 

What if they convicted him? I resented my connection with Goon. There was no 
murder. The guilt was invented. And then, with the question unanswered, I 
put my hand on Ella's belly, and as she turned towards me and I felt our 
thighs touch I had an impulse to abandon myself and my freedom to the sheer 
physical power of the woman whose hands were cupped over my buttocks and who 
thrust her abdomen towards me, to place myself at her mercy quietly with 
words there in the bed as the violence of our sensations increased, but each 
time, before I spoke, the orgasm was over and she was separate again, heavy 
and separate and dangerous. Conscious of the heat of her body close to me, 
so slack now and so dangerous, I lay awake for a long time. My mind was not 
blank, but I could not have been said to be thinking of anything. 

*** 

It was about this time that Ella picked up a letter from the post office. It 
was from Gwendoline, her stepsister in Leith, and had been lying in the post 
office for sometime. Her husband, Sam, a driver for a firm of fruit and 
vegetable brokers had fallen off his lorry and been crushed to death by a 
bus. He was already buried. Gwendoline said that although she would be the 
first to admit that poor Sam and her "didn't get on very well," it had come 
as a shock, a blow in fact, which was not entirely countered by the damages 
she received from the company he worked for. She wanted to know when Ella 
would be in Leith. 

It was Saturday. We were tied up in Glasgow. Ella sent Gwendoline a telegram 
to say that we would come by train to visit her. In the compartment I sat 
beside Ella. I was feeling uncomfortable in the hard collar she insisted I 
wear. Ella was wearing a shiny black dress that was too tight for her and 
made her look hot and red. We didn't talk much during the journey. 

Gwendoline lived in a tenement that was just like any other tenement in 
Leith, a bleakish gray building, scaled on the inside by a creeping gray 
stair with an iron banister, leading to brown doors with brass plates on 
them at every landing. It smelled of refuse and decaying food. Hers was at 
the top of the building on the fifth floor. 

Gwendoline was in her dressing gown when she opened the door. It fell open 
at her breasts, which were long and white and pulpy like the long slender 
part of pears. She was younger than Ella. When she saw me, she caught up the 
dressing gown at her throat and smiled. 

"This your new boyfriend, El?" 

Ella sniffed. 

"This is Joe," she said. "We're going to be married." 

It sounded like an ultimatum, and she spoke it in an intense hard way, 
almost as though she were afraid she would be contradicted. 

Gwendoline must have noticed my reaction because she laughed and said, 
"Pleased to meet you, Joe," and she stood away from the door to allow us to 
enter. "You'll excuse me for not being dressed," she continued, "but I 
wasn't expecting a gentleman visitor." 

Her skin was very white and her mouth lipsticked heavily, like a bloodstain 
on porcelain. She led us into a sort of bed-sitting room with an unmade bed 
and her clothes lying about. I noticed there was a chamber pot under the 
bed. It was half full of urine. The window on the far side of the room 
wasn't open, the fire in the grate was out, and the air was sour, stuffy and 
motionless, impregnated with the cloying heat of a one-bar electric heater. 
It occurred to me that she had just got out of the bed to open the door. 

"Sit down while I tidy up a bit," she said. 

Ella looked around disapprovingly. This kind of thing brought out the worst 
in her. 

Gwendoline was moving about stuffing things out of sight, her long chestnut 
hair hanging in strings at her pallid cheeks. She smoked heavily. There were 
cigarette stubs everywhere and the first two fingers of her right hand were 
nicotine-stained at the nails. 

At first, I didn't pay much attention to her. I was looking at Ella. She sat 
in her shiny black dress in an old armchair. Her lips were pursed and an 
aura of respectability emanated from her. It seemed to move up from her 
stiff haunches to the tilt of her neck; a moral judgment smelling of eau de 
Cologne. I wondered how near I had come to committing suicide when I almost 
told her the truth about Cathie. I was horrified to think that I had nearly 
spoken. It seemed absurd now. I looked away from her at a little glow of the 
element of the electric heater. 

"Excuse me, Joe!" Gwendoline said as she brushed past me. She had taken her 
hand away from the top of the dressing gown and as she stooped to lift a 
silk stocking from the floor I saw the breasts hanging, long and 
pear-shaped, and they shone with an orange color where the electric glow 
reflected on them. "I'll make you all a cup of tea," she said as she stood 
up again. 

Ella said she would help her and the two women went through to the next 
room. They were talking but I couldn't hear what they were saying. 

Left alone, I wandered about. The pot with the yellow liquid under the bed 
fascinated me. I laid my hand against the side and discovered that it was 
still lukewarm. A short while ago she had squatted on the pot and then 
raised herself on her long white flanks and returned to bed. 

I stood up again. As I did so, I glanced at the cigarette butts and at the 
soiled underclothing pushed hurriedly out of sight under a cushion. I walked 
over to the bed again and put my hand on the sheet where she had lain. That 
too was almost warm and there was a feel of biscuit crumbs under my fingers. 
On the bedside table was a bent hairpin, a piece of ribbon, an ashtray with 
red-stained tips and chewing gum. Beside the ashtray was a bottle of 
aspirin. 

Like an inventory clerk I took stock. Gwendoline, a widow. There was 
something unpurposeful about Gwendoline, a sort of tadpole quality which 
suggested that if she found herself in bed with a man she would stay there 
because she was too lazy to get out. At the foot of the bed there was a 
morning newspaper and a book on astrology. In the latter, as it fell open in 
my hands, I noticed that she had underlined the following: The terror which 
the Moon inspires in us is not altogether unjustified. The proofs of its 
evil influence are corroborated by a hundred flagrant facts. A red Moon is 
particularly detestable. I puzzled over the second sentence for some time, 
laid it down finally, and returned with the newspaper to my chair. 

There was nothing in it about my crime. 

I was sitting there when they returned with the tea. 

"Gwen's having a holiday with us," Ella said almost immediately. 

"Oh?" 

"She's coming on the barge for a week or two." 

Gwendoline smiled at me. She had gathered her dressing gown properly about 
her now and secured it, her tapering teats out of sight, with a safety pin. 

"I hope you don't mind, Joe? I don't suppose I'm breaking up a honeymoon or 
anything?" 

I shrugged my shoulders. I was glad that Ella spoke before I could say 
anything because I could not think of anything to say. 

"It'll be good for her," Ella said. "She's going to pack now and come back 
with us on the train tonight." 

"I'll just have a cup of tea," Gwendoline said. 

Ella was looking hard at the pot under the bed. I followed her glance and 
thought what was so lately shed would understandably tend to stamp the room 
indelibly as Gwendoline's as it rose on the warm strings of the atmosphere. 

*** 

Two days later, on a fine spring morning, we loaded early with limestone. We 
were well along the canal by midday. 

It was good to be standing there at the wheel with the flat greens and 
browns stretching on either side as far as the horizon. At that point the 
landscape was almost treeless and the view across the fields was 
uninterrupted. The sun was strong and the yellow-black canal water reacted 
to it, glowing behind us as it peeled off the bilges in long black flakes. 
The wheel was warm with the sun. Everything seemed far away-events as well 
as things-and I almost forgot the plumber, and the dead woman, and Les and 
even the two women who were below. 

Gwendoline did not get up for breakfast. She slept late. For her complexion 
she said. She was not the kind of woman who could make herself useful on the 
barge, not that I wanted her to do that. I was not interested in getting 
anything done quickly or efficiently. I should have been quite content to 
stop the engine and moor along the bank somewhere, or to tie up for a week, 
until the weather broke or until we ran out of food. 

Not quite true perhaps. Ordinarily, I could have said that without 
misgivings. That was the way I lived. But since the arrest of the plumber I 
was uneasy, idiotically anchored to time, to events and processes over which 
I had no control. 

Gwen came on deck around noon, up through the companionway and close to me 
almost before I was aware of her. She had done her face up. After watching 
me for a few minutes, she wanted to take the wheel. So I sat down near her 
as she steered. I rolled a cigarette. At first, neither of us spoke. She 
appeared to be engrossed in her work, which she did well (she had been 
brought up on the barge with Ella) and she was looking straight ahead. And 
then she put a question to me. 

"Are you really going to marry Ella, Joe?" 

"That's what she said," I said noncommittally. 

She laughed. 

"What about you?" she said. 

"I don't say anything." 

"Oh, have it you own way!" she said. "It's none of my business." 

I agreed with her. She looked back along the canal. 

She was wearing slacks. She had brushed the stringy appearance out of her 
hair, but its auburn color made her face appear very white, like bread and 
jam because of the sudden lipstick. She was younger, thinner and not as tall 
as Ella. She was intelligent enough to know that I had no intention of 
marrying Ella but it did not seem to worry her. 

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 some women have so that you think if you brushed the palm of 
your hand over their skin it would come away quite wet, the kind of pallor 
that makes you think of sickrooms and flannel underwear. It occurred to me 
that she would probably have T.B. The thought of her slender white breasts 
seemed to confirm that impression. She would be white all over, white with a 
few pink parts where she had sat or where her belt chafed. Stripped naked 
she would look like a long white root with a tuft of brittle auburn hair at 
the center. 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. More, I think, in her 
whole attitude. 

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. Its movement reminded me of that of the bottle and the 
matchbox and the spar of wood that had moved 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?" I inquired. 

"It's no life," she said. "I could tell the first time I saw you that 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. But seriously, 
Joe, you know as well as I do that you're fed up with it." 

"It's a job like any other," I observed. 

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." 

"Shit!" Gwendoline said rudely. 

After a few silent moments, we talked on. She was telling me that Ella did 
not 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 we were going to the cinema. Not that we would. She didn't suppose I 
liked the cinema any more than she did. Once in a while to pass the time. 
What she liked was a good game of cards and a spot of gin. 

In spite of her slacks, she looked incongruous at the wheel. The slacks were 
of a soft green velour, 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. 

Ella came on deck a short time afterwards and called Gwendoline to go and 
eat. While we were under way we usually had dinner in shifts like that. I 
was left alone on deck. I could hear the two women talking and laughing 
below, and I found myself envying them. In one way, and for each of them, 
they were secure. The absurdity that 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 that threatened me was the end of all 
possibility. 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 unfinal about death. No sane man could 
accept it. Or do I mean that no insane 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 the distance like a javelin-shaft. 

The voices from below came back to me again. 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. 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. Sooner or later-I was temporarily unable to 
make any decision-I would leave. 

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. 

Gwen was young and old. She looked old and yet her body gave the impression 
sometimes of being almost adolescent. She was less sensitive than her 
stepsister and it was obvious that she despised Ella. 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 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 white shoes were toe-less, 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 that 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 
where women were allowed. 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 got hold of 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 onto the floor. I froze momentarily. The waitress picked it up and 
handed it to me without looking at it. 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 completely distracted. 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 got her all wet and she spent a long time drying 
herself with my handkerchief. It was over quickly. The cigarette she had 
been smoking was still smoldering in the grass. I put my foot on it. I was 
wondering if she always made love that way. She seemed scarcely 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 that his boots clumping in and out from the room to 
the kitchen no longer wakened her early in the morning. 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 considering 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 had it stiff enough to give it to her. He said 
he felt like he was desecrating the grave. 

"Some grave," Gwendoline said to him. There was no clay in her furrow! 
"There I was," Gwendoline said, "with my knees up like shepherd's crooks and 
my pussy raised with my fists under my bum and all he could do was to stand 
there like a Methodist minister and say he was sure it was a sin with the 
grass not yet grown on Sam's grave." 

It had taken all the spunk out of him. But when she said "now or never," he 
unbuttoned himself and disclosed his fright. Well, that was all right as far 
as that went. But she thought it was too much 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. She said that she 
had found most men were like that and that she hoped I wasn't. 

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 became more confidential. "Anyway," she said, "married life 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 came to the conclusion that you got nothing 
for nothing in this life. She'd take a glass of gin any time. 

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 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 servant for him. She asked 
me if I could sympathize. 

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 had not taken her long to 
realize her mistake. After that she did the best she could but it was 
difficult with Sam coming home in the evening. A girl had to make do with 
what she could get, which was not 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 
old age pensioners didn't ask for much. Ten minutes and sometimes not even 
that. 

There was one old man who gave her ten shillings a week just for the 
opportunity to visit her twice a week. All he wanted was to have her squat 
on the palm of his hand while he lay on the floor with his head against her 
bare belly. She didn't mind that, she said, because she could read the 
newspaper at the same time. Ten minutes later it was over. She got up, put 
her clothes on again and he went across the street to the pub. 

Each time she squatted, he said: "I've got you, you bitch! I've got you on 
the palm of my hand!" It was true, Gwendoline admitted, but after four years 
it wasn't even funny. If she was that way when she was old, she said, she'd 
blow her brains out-take poison anyway, because she didn't like blood. 

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 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 was not quite sure I knew what she meant but I saw no point in discussing 
it. Whatever she said, she had a tone of hard conviction in her voice, and I 
had no intention of arguing with her. 

Ella was very quiet. She made some tea for us without speaking and then sat 
down with a cup herself. Gwendoline looked at me and made a face. 

I was wondering whether Ella suspected about Gwendoline and me. She had 
avoided my eye as she spoke and it was obvious she was disturbed. Still, she 
made no reference to where we had been, did not speak at all in fact, except 
to ask whether we wanted tea. 

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 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 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. I knew 
that under the same impersonal sky the plumber Goon awaited trial with nary 
a clue as to what had transpired to bring him to his perilous state. I 
thought too of the other men who would soon weigh the so-called evidence 
against Goon. And yet the night was motionless, empty. I thought of Ella. I 
knew now that I was going to leave. I remained on deck for half an hour, 
smoking. 

CHAPTER FOUR 

From where I sat at the table in the bar I could see the last daylight 
merging above the partition with the pale electric light that had 
perceptibly grown in intensity as daylight faded. The men in the bar, the 
bottles, the conversation seemed somehow more in focus in the electric 
light. 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 raising a 
hand in greeting-"Bill!"-the other turning from a group and smiling in 
cross-recognition. The swing-doors pivoted, steadied, then closed, cutting 
off noises and restoring volume and excitement to the conversation, 
drink-calls, bar sounds. All the time I sat there I had been conscious of 
these things, as a man is always when for one reason or another he is 
excluded. 

I laid down the newspaper not knowing whether or not to be satisfied that 
Goon would stand trial in two days. I had glanced at the fading panel of 
daylight and sipped the froth from my beer, tasting malt. I had heard Goon's 
name mentioned angrily by one man who wanted to know why we wasted public 
money giving the bastard a trial. At least one man chimed "hear-hear." 
Another, with a grin, made some remark that caused him and the man next to 
him to guffaw. The conversation swayed from heavy to light, was interrupted 
occasionally by a staccato demand for a drink, and by someone flourishing a 
newspaper. A suggestion that Goon was not 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 cunningly, 
"you'll see." 

The conversation continued as I drank my beer. I found myself listening to 
the man who was saying that hanging was too good for a man like that, a man 
who wouldn't let women alone ought to be burned. And I was apart at the same 
time, my knowledge isolating me, excluding all possibility of conversation. 
The glare from the yellow-painted wall was making my eyes smart. I had been 
looking at the wall, listening with my ears only. I turned in my chair and 
emptied my glass. 

I walked back to the barge, which was tied up quite close to where we had 
been tied up when we 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, perhaps a kind of ambiguous pit into 
which their scarred and autopsied remnants were gradually fed. And then I 
remembered that Cathie was a Catholic and that it would have worried her to 
die without confession and I wondered whether she had had time to think of 
that before she was drowned. 

During the time we lived together, her religion always puzzled me. She 
wouldn't hear a word against the priests. And yet she did not like them. She 
went to confession once a year but as long as I knew her, she never attended 
mass. There was the same contradiction in her attitude toward me. 

She disapproved of what she called my atheism and each night before she came 
to bed she knelt down, crossed herself, and mumbled a short prayer. A prayer 
for my conversion, she said. At first I didn't realize how serious she was. 
I remember one time while she was kneeling there at the bedside I approached 
her silently from behind, lifted her skirt, and tried to mount her like a 
dog bitch. She fought tooth and nail for at least two minutes before her 
resistance collapsed, her buttocks slackening to allow penetration, and even 
then she lay sprawled, belly downwards on the carpet with her eyes closed 
while I bared her lower torso and lifted her hot heavy thighs apart to 
disclose the wispy chevron in reverse. 

Afterwards, she said that I shouldn't have done it, that it was blasphemy to 
attempt to come between her and God. I said roughly, I remember, that that 
was between her and Him, that He could have her soul but that her body was 
mine, before prayer, during prayer, or after it. The funny thing was that 
she laughed, apparently having forgotten all about her religion, and posed 
for me in her brassiere and her knickers, which struck me as altogether 
pre-Christian. 

As I walked back from the pub 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 of her 
abdomen. As her belly was smooth and soft, so were her thighs. She had a 
trick of oiling them and it with sun-tan oil so that our movements were 
sleek and our lunges smooth until, after we came, the moment at which our 
skin peeled back, with a prickling of hairs, and a tiny sensation of 
tearing. 

But in the end it did not work. Cathie was, for all the strange and 
insistent lust she developed over a period of time, a woman who made plans 
for the future. Those plans included me and the more definite, the more 
socially realizable they became, the more violent were the ways in which we 
strove to excite desires in ourselves for one another. 

Cathie's thighs were smooth, under oil some of the most beautiful thighs I 
have ever seen. But they represented a prison. She wanted children. That 
meant that I had to find a job, to make a home. Cathie always agreed that 
this was unfair to me. It was an imposition. It meant that I would have to 
limit my desires, to canalize them along channels that would contribute 
towards the social idea and fact of marriage. 

Cathie's last act was to inform me that she was going to have a child. She 
said it was mine in the hope that I would throw over my own life and make it 
contribute towards that of her child and herself. She must have known even 
at the time that it was hopeless. She must have known it because we broke up 
knowing it one night after some of the most wonderfully violent sex we had 
ever experienced. 

Cathie had come home from work to find me doing nothing, as usual. I think I 
was doing a crossword puzzle in the evening paper. As often happened, she 
kept silent. She made herself a cup of tea and did not invite me to have 
one. While she was drinking it, she presented me with an ultimatum. 

"It's no use, Joe," she began quietly. "Either you get regular work and we 
get married or we're finished." 

I didn't answer. I had heard the same ultimatum a thousand times. It was 
usually retracted as soon as we made love. 

"I'm serious, Joe." 

"Forget it!" I said. "You know the answer for God's sake!" 

"What do you mean?" 

"I mean, if those are your terms, we're finished." 

"You selfish bastard! Is that all it means to you?" 

"I don't present you with any either-or's. I take you when I want you. I 
don't make any prediction about what I'll want to do in future. If I don't 
want you in the future, I won't have you, that's all." 

"But what about me!" 

"What about you?" 

"What do I get out of it?" 

"That's for you to decide." 

"I know what I want out of it," she said dangerously. 

"Go on," I taunted. 

"I want you. I want to be married to you and I want your children." 

"You can have children if you want them." 

"Who'll feed them?" 

"Look, Cathie," I said gently, "we've been over this before. You've agreed 
in the past. I'm tired of the same old arguments." 

"And what am I to do?" 

"What you want to do." 

"You're a fraud! I've wasted two years with you!" 

"So you've wasted two years with me. I don't see how that makes me a fraud." 

"Of course you're a fraud!" she raged. "You know I want children!" 

"I know you say you do, but you don't do anything about it." 

"How can I!" was her frenzied reply. 

I was slightly rattled. I controlled myself. For the last time, I said 
quietly, "Understand this: I'll take you when I want you and when I don't, I 
won't. You are at liberty to do the same. You can leave now or next week. I 
have no intention of marrying you. I won't make any such damn fool judgment 
about our future together. As far as I can see, I'd want you even less if I 
married you. I have no intention of marrying anyone." 

"What about me!" she screamed. 

"If you want to stay, stay. If you want to go, go. If you want to be 
married, find someone who wants to marry you. I don't give a damn. If I want 
you, I'll have you. I'm not interested in your plans. I'm interested in what 
you and the Pope would call your lower nature. I've never pretended 
otherwise. That's the only sense in which you can have me. I have no 
intention of helping you and your friends build Christendom. I think that's 
a bad smell. I can't tell you what to do. You know yourself what you want to 
do. Don't come in here every day and present me with you bloody ultimatums!" 

My voice had become excited. Cathie, meanwhile, had risen to her feet, and, 
with an angry impulse, she threw the hot cup of tea over me. It burned my 
face and I lurched towards her. At that moment Cathie lost her head. She 
lifted the teapot and the sugar bowl and crashed them to the floor. Then, 
systematically, she began to break the crockery. One after another, she 
threw the cups and saucers into the fireplace. Bits of china were scattered 
all over the floor. 

Her actions made me very calm. I wiped my face, crossed to the coal bunker 
and armed myself with an axe. Without delay I set about making kindling wood 
of the furniture. First, I tackled the table. It came apart more easily than 
I had anticipated and soon it was merely a neat pile of sticks in the middle 
of the floor. Then, deliberately, I chopped three chairs, the wooden fender, 
a Japanese lacquered cabinet Cathie's mother had given her, and the 
sideboard of veneered walnut that we were buying on the hire-purchase 
system. I derived great pleasure from the sight of these symbols of "a home" 
destroyed. 

Soon, unable to compete, Cathie left off breaking the crockery and watched 
my destructive carpentering. Finally, driven mad to see her valuable 
possessions thus annihilated, she threw herself at me with all fangs bared 
and succeeded in toppling me off my feet onto the sad mash of splintered 
wood and china. One of her long varnished nails opened a livid scar in and 
above my left eyebrow. The sight of the curtain of blood that splashed down 
across my vision on my cheek roused me against her. I slapped her once 
across the face with the back of my hand and she fell with a muffled scream 
on top of the pile of wood that had been the table. I turned my destructive 
impulse on her. 

I did not unbutton anything. With short strong wrist-strokes I tore her 
clothes off her body. They came away in shreds. She tried to resist but I 
was too strong for her. I remember the sight of her breasts jumping free as 
the cloth of her brassiere was torn from them. Her shoes I hurled into the 
fire. The arched line of her naked belly appeared as I ripped her panties 
off, and her mound, hairy and rucked up by a sudden angry movement of her 
knees. Her buttocks rose from the sharp splinters of wood in which they were 
embedded and careened backwards like a beautiful soft jaw towards the china 
chips. We were both bleeding at the face and she from the various cuts and 
bruises sustained from falling heavily against the brittle debris of the 
room. 

Now, there she was, spread-eagled like a starfish on the floor, her sex 
bared and her breasts cut, and all the pent-up anger and hate rippling in 
the muscles of her thighs and abdomen. Her whole torso was shuddering with 
emotion. I took off my belt and thrashed her. At first she tried to meet my 
onslaught but then, too weak to protest, she moaned and collapsed on the 
cutting china chips. At that point, I threw away the belt, bared my sex and, 
pinioning her limbs to the floor with my own, I drove my whole power between 
her abandoned thighs. She was never able to bring her resistance to the 
surface. It rose and melted into the gentle rubbing motion of her loins 
against mine, and soon I was able to release her arms without fear that she 
would renew her attempts to resist. Our hairs prickled, our movements became 
soft and relaxed, the whole sheath of her lower torso twisting upwards from 
the sharp splinters under them to nudge itself against the muscular 
rectangle of my moving front, and her legs, once eager to close themselves 
against me, became hot and flaccid as they widened to a bowl to contain me. 
My own body leapt with soft tense smacks within the limits allowed to it by 
the urgent clamp of her long naked legs. 

We might have made it up, have gone on from where we had left off, with new 
crises and new reconciliations had it not been for the fact that the priest, 
Father Doherty, arrived about a quarter of an hour later. 

We had almost begun an attempt at reconciliation when the knock came at the 
door. I opened it slightly and when I saw who it was, I threw it wide open 
and invited the gentleman to come in. I was still naked and Cathie, bloody 
and tired, was lying naked on the bed contemplating the destruction of her 
plans. The priest decided that his presence was urgently required. Cathie 
sided with him. They went into conclave. And I left with a small bag. 

And so, although Cathie's body was different from either Ella's or 
Gwendoline's, she was not in any vital way different from either one of 
them. If I had allowed her, she would have spun a chrysalis of 
respectability into which my desires, castrated, perhaps defunct, would in a 
few years have been absorbed. That was why I left her and why she must have 
known when we were under the railway truck that it was impossible that I 
should consent to become the father of her child... 

I was so engrossed in my thoughts that I almost turned directly into the 
street where the cafe 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. Then I turned 
and walked quietly back the way I had come. 

*** 

Gwendoline was sitting alone in the cabin reading a paper. As I came down 
through the companionway she looked up. 

"You're back?" 

"Where's Ella?" She laughed. 

"Ella'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 Leslie." 

I sat down, accepting the glass she offered me, and drank. It was not until 
the bitter taste of the gin was over my palate and in my throat that I 
remembered I hated raw gin. 

"Christ! Have you not got something to go with this?" 

"What I can't imagine," Gwendoline said, "is what she wants with a man like 
that." 

I wasn't listening to her. I was collecting my various personal possessions 
and stowing them into the small kit bag with which I came to the barge. 

"What do you think you're doing?" 

"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 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." 

"Not if you've got nothing to go with it." 

I found the mirror in the table drawer and put it beside the rest of my 
property in the kit bag. 

"Have just one drink." 

"I don't like raw gin," I said. 

She looked at me for a moment and then burst into laughter again. I left her 
there, her elbows on the table, laughing hysterically, her face pale and her 
coppery red hair like a wig in the lamplight. 

Outside on the quay I looked around and then walked away towards the city. 
It occurred to me that I was free. 

 PART THREE 

CHAPTER ONE 

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 onto the narrow 
crescent-shaped street. The pavement on the opposite side was on four 
levels, lava-like steps that sloped downwards to a narrow bed of cobbles. 
Only three vehicles ever came by, the dust-cart, the coal-cart, and the 
milk-lorry. The street was lit by five lamps, four lampposts and one 
scrolled Victorian bracket riveted almost opposite the window to the 
crumbling gray wall opposite. And now the light from it filtered into the 
room where I lay, in the recess bed in the kitchen. It gleamed dully on the 
bone-like rim of the sink from whose pipes the plopping and gurgling sounds 
came, and cast the floor in shadow so that the bits of furniture seemed to 
be suspended in mid-air. I had the impression of being within a shaft with 
unsubstantial furniture around me, and below, where no floor was, the shaft 
continued downward without sensible bottom. 

I was lying on my side and with my hand I reached downwards tentatively and 
touched 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 the surface 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 contours of the lamp-bracket and the pale glow it cast above the 
name-plate of the street. If I had not known the name already I would have 
been unable to decipher it from that distance 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 Lucas Street. 

I turned back to the woman beside me and laid my hand on her belly just 
above her mound. She was sleeping soundly and rather noisily. My fingers 
moved downward softly amongst the intricacy of her damp hairs. 

It was the night before the day on which Goon would stand trial. I had been 
unable to sleep. 

In the small Bridgeton flat I was given to understand from the beginning 
that it was my right as the lodger to avail myself of the narrow breasted, 
thin blonde of twenty-five. Her husband worked as a night-watchman in a 
warehouse in Stockwell Street. There was only the one bed to which I as one 
who contributed to household expenses, was unconditionally entitled from 
dusk to dawn. 

Her husband's first act when he came in at daybreak was to remove his boots. 
These were big boots, shod heavily with iron yet warped by the sweat of his 
feet, His next act was to make tea for all of us. After that, he 
resuscitated the dead embers of the fire and warmed his feet. He was waiting 
patiently on those occasions for me to vacate my part of the bed. Later, 
when I rolled out from beside her and shaved myself at the sink, I heard the 
woman gasp suddenly as the man mounted her. He did so with no hint of 
gentleness. For him, she was something to be taken, almost vengefully. 

I did not look round. 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, saying: "I suppose you'll be 
wanting your due like the others," opening her pallid thighs like slender 
scissors almost mechanically. 

I remained tinkering with my shaving kit, washing one piece after another 
under the tap, the soap swirling from the bristles of the brush until the 
grunts of the man and the heavy breathing of the woman were over. I turned 
then to the man who was lying sideways across his wife and said that I was 
going to watch the trial of Goon that day, that it would be interesting. He 
nodded slightly. 

In spite of the mute rivalry that existed between us over the woman who 
served us both, there was also a tacit understanding. We were friends and we 
drank together, that too almost from the beginning-the night when I had left 
the barge and met him in a pub. That first night, back in the kitchen, he 
had lowered his eyes and said, "And you'll be expected not to bring any 
fancy women here. 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. I lay the 
money, as though I were buying her, at the corner of the table near the 
wife. After a moment's hesitation, she 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 your work," his wife said as we went out. 

Over a beer we talk about her. All the time we talked I felt it was strange 
he didn't talk about her body or about the woman either 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 Connie. 

The man seemed reluctant to go. I felt he would have liked to see me take 
his wife, for he was saying almost in embarrassment, "No fears about her. 
Give it to her good and straight. She can take any amount of punishment." 

The word punishment came naturally to him. 

And then, with a weight of chains at my abdomen, I was on my way back to her 
and the tiny flat in Lucien Street. It was then when I entered, that she 
said without formality and without warmth, that she supposed I, like the 
others, would be wanting my due. With that she lifted her skirt above the 
matted chevron of almost colorless hair and moved backwards towards the 
alcove and bed. 

I took what I was offered, keeping well in mind, as I had been informed, she 
could take any amount of punishment. I unbuttoned my shirt, removed it and 
draped it over the back of a nearby chair. Then I moved my hands to my 
pants, undid my thick leather belt and slid it from my waist. Folding the 
tip to the buckle and holding the limp leather high in one hand, I took one 
step forward and reached out to her with the other. Her eyes grew wide and 
fearful and she moved backwards. 

"Do as you're told, my dear," I said, and she remained silent and withdrawn. 
"Come to me," I commanded. Slowly she obeyed, taking my outstretched hand. 
Keeping her at arm's length I instructed her to remove all her clothing. She 
complied, her gaze fixed hypnotically on the upraised leather lash. Her body 
was hard, lean and worn but not unattractive in its life-toughened way. "Now 
kneel before me, woman," I directed, "and undo my pants." Mindlessly she 
complied. 

"Take my tool in your mouth," I told her and in her awkward way she did as 
she was told. The moment her lips accepted my stiff gourd I slapped the 
folded belt against my free palm with a crack that made her start and 
withdraw her moist lips and look up at me, wide-eyed and mouth agape. "Deep 
in your mouth," I commanded and her eyes lowered and fixed again on the 
erect phallus threatening her. With renewed vigor she placed her palms flat 
where my thighs and hips joined and plunged forward, sucking in her cheeks 
and gradually taking a full three-quarters of my shaft into her mouth. 

Again I cracked belt to palm, but this time she did not withdraw her favors, 
only ceased her progress and with lips encircling her swollen attacker, 
looked up with doleful, questioning eyes. "Lick me," I said fiercely and 
once again she quit her ingestion and began to tongue the head glistening 
with moisture before her. "Lick the length of my tool and my balls," I said 
cracking the belt above her again. Warming to the instruction, she moved to 
do as she was told and with that I passed the free end of the belt through 
the buckle and slipped the belt about her throat like a noose. 

Thus collared I directed the movement of her head and her oral ministrations 
with a tug and a pull. When she tried to resist the belt's pull, I tightened 
its grip about her throat further and brought the flat of my free palm 
cracking across her cheeks. Her eyes filled with tears of pain, but she 
spoke not, nor defied my instructions. When I'd had enough of licking and 
felt confident of my control of her, I stepped back and snapped her head up 
like a disobedient dog on a leash. She began to rise up off her reddened 
knees and I, with a downward pull on the belt, brought her hard back to the 
floor, now on all fours. She tilted her head up and looked to me for 
instruction. Above tear-stained cheeks her fearful eyes questioned what was 
next in store, but she remained mute. 

"Finger yourself, bitch," I ordered. She remained unmoving. "Finger 
yourself," I spat out again, yanking back on her leash and sweeping both 
cheeks first with the flat of my palm then with the back of my hand. Her 
hands dropped to her crotch and she began her self-discovery. She smoothed 
her hair, then spread her labia and massaged her waiting inner folds. I 
pulled up on the belt, tangling her hair and causing her to turn her head to 
one side and stretch up her body to keep from choking. 

Her hands left the delta between her legs and reached for the constriction 
about her neck. My free hand shot out and smacked her reddened cheeks anew. 
"Finger yourself," I barked and pulled her outstretched body yet an inch 
higher, revealing all manner of lovely muscle, bone and a tracery of 
blood-filled veins beneath the tensed epidermis. 

Finally she loosed a little whimpering cry and reached to comply. Her arms 
could not quite extend far enough to insert her fingers in her 
stretched-taut slit. Her face reddened rapidly above the brown leather 
choker that formed a border between it and a pale, translucent body that 
had, it seemed likely, never known the sun. I held her suspended for a few 
moments longer, until I thought she would lose consciousness, then I dropped 
the belt. 

She slumped forward again on her hands and knees but struggled to remain 
upright. One hand reached to loosen the grip of the belt about her throat 
while the other dropped quickly to her lap to do the commanded duty between 
her legs. I moved behind her, dropping my pants as I circled. She bent 
forward and, leaning on one hand, the fingers of the other spreading her 
slit, accepted my thrusts with little reaction. 

So went my first encounter with Connie. The man spoke truly. She could take 
it. Too well. 

The man was now lying on his side at the back of the bed. The woman slipped 
out from underneath him, climbed out naked and joined me at the sink. I 
stood back. Without comment, she heaved her buttocks on to the sink and 
urinated there in front of me. The hot musky smell of her unwashed body and 
of her urine as it ran in a generous yellow stream across the chipped 
porcelain of the sink came across to me. I did not find it unpleasant. I 
might have laid my hand on her thigh as she pissed had I not thought she 
would have resented any tenderness. 

She, meanwhile, could be said to be ignoring me, if you could take the 
active element out of the word ignore, for she was completely indifferent to 
me. I would have liked to have gotten close to this woman, to have had some 
kind of give and take with her, but I found it impossible. She ignored every 
movement of mine toward her except those she could interpret on a sexual 
level. To those movements she responded immediately, crooking the softness 
of her thighs and abetting the rise of my sex towards her. 

She slid down from the sink to the soft female pads of her feet, crossed the 
floor to the stove and poked the fire. For a moment both of us watched her 
vaguely and then her husband closed his eyes and dozed. 

She dressed in front of the fire without looking at me. I finished my 
ablutions at the sink and then sat down at 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 contents of the pan onto a plate, 
which she passed across to me. I took it to the table with a knife and fork, 
broke some bread and commenced to eat. A moment later, she had laid a cup of 
strong tea beside me. 

"You going to that police court?" she said. 

I nodded. 

"You think he's guilty?" 

"They haven't proved it was murder yet," I said. 

"Oh, they know that," she said vaguely, bringing her own plate, with bacon 
only, to the table beside me. "A woman doesn't get undressed for nothing." 

"That's not the point," I reasoned. 

"You'll see," Connie said, "they'll hang him." 

I was uneasy about it. I could not deny that it was likely. But, anyway, for 
the moment there was nothing I could do. I would go to the trial. Les would 
be there, perhaps Ella. But I had to go to see how the lawyers and other 
court functionaries committed legal murder. In this instance, neither the 
victim nor the murderers would dream of taking their clothes off. That 
thought amused me. The judge would be an old man. He would lose altogether 
his so-called dignity if he were forced to perform before the public without 
his trappings. His skinniness, or his obesity perhaps, would give the lie to 
the odor of righteousness. The crowd would laugh at his pomposity and shout 
down the brutality of his sentence. All judges, it occurred to me, all the 
lawyers and the lawyers' clerks should be forced to try their case in the 
nude. In that way they would be unable to convict anyone, because their own 
voices, as they became aware of the ludicrousness of their postures, would 
lack all conviction. 

*** 

I was out in the street early and found myself walking slowly 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 though 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 go to their offices. A shot 
of whiskey, which I drank from a flask at my hip, appeared to have drawn 
things more clearly together. It gave me at the same time assurance, 
certainty, not of anything-unless it were of the fact that when I returned 
to Lucien Street Connie would be there, sexually approachable-confidence 
simply in the fact and in the necessity of my own 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 tram window 
and saw beyond it a girl in a pink coat who was looking into a shop window. 
I caught a glimpse only of smooth and sunburned legs under the hem of the 
coat. I wondered whether, under other circumstances, I would have had 
courage enough to introduce myself. The tram moved on a few stops. I got off 
with as little purpose as I had got on. The pavement was crowded. People 
pushed past me to get on, women with parcels mostly, touchable, aware of me 
as an obstacle only. I said to myself that, normally speaking, in relation 
to other people I could be regarded primarily as an obstacle. 

When I reached the pavement I had already decided to have another shot of 
whiskey. I made my way to a snack bar and walked through into the men's 
toilet. There, sitting on the lavatory seat, I allowed the whiskey to 
trickle down my throat. I replaced the cap on the flask, pocketed it, and 
defecated. There was an excitement at my belly which made itself known at 
the surface in a slight sweat. I read the various invitations to sexual 
abnormality that covered the walls about me. The world really is a perverse 
place. A moment later, I wiped myself and walked back out to the street. 

An old man with a gray beard was selling shoelaces and pencils. The 
shoelaces were draped over the arm which held the white stick. The head 
nodded wisely. It occurred to me that he was probably a fool even before he 
was blind. "A shilling for St. Francis." I skirted him, unwilling to be 
touched. I put on my gloves and went into a post-office. 

I bought a letter-card. Over at the window, with one of the post-office 
pens, I wrote the following message in block capitals: I HAVE NO INTENTION 
OF SURRENDERING TO YOU OR OF PROVIDING YOU WITH FURTHER INFORMATION. IF YOU 
CONDEMN THE PLUMBER GOON YOU WILL CONDEMN A MAN WHO KNOWS NOTHING OF THE 
CIRCUMSTANCES OF CATHERINE DIMLY'S DEATH. I ALONE WAS WITH HER AT THE TIME 
SHE DIED. I CANNOT PROVE THIS WITHOUT IDENTIFYING MYSELF AND THAT IS OUT OF 
THE QUESTION. UNDERSTAND THAT YOUR HYPOCRITICAL MORAL NONSENSE WON'T SHAME 
ME INTO COMMITTING MYSELF FURTHER THAN I DO NOW. THE CORONER WAS WRONG. 
CATHERINE DIMLY'S DEATH WAS ACCIDENTAL, IN SPITE OF THE FACT THAT SHE 
DROWNED IN HER PETTICOAT. SHE REMOVED HER CLOTHES FOR REASONS BEST KNOWN TO 
HERSELF. I SHALL FOLLOW THE "TRIAL" WITH INTEREST. I HOPE YOU DON'T HANG 
GOON BUT I SUPPOSE YOU WILL FIND REASON TO DO SO. I REALIZE THAT THIS 
DOCUMENT DOES NOT CONSTITUTE EVIDENCE THAT WOULD BE USEFUL TO GOON'S 
LAWYERS. BUT I AM AFRAID I CAN DO NO MORE. 

I waited for the ink to dry in the air, not wishing to have the message 
appear on the post-office blotter. Then, sealing the letter-card, I posted 
it to the judge in charge of the case. 

Of course, I was under no illusions that my dramatic message would make any 
difference to the proceedings. But it did give me some satisfaction to sow a 
seed of doubt in the judge's mind. Still I even doubted whether my message 
would have that effect. Whether or nor they admit it, all judges must look 
upon themselves as God. To judge is to become God, and that is why we have 
put words forbidding us to judge one another in the mouth of God. 

A policeman directed me to the particular courtroom. It was already quite 
full of people, mostly middle-aged women. I had the impression that I was 
watching a parliament of birds. 

As soon as I was seated, I began for some reason or other to think of my 
shaving mirror. I remembered that on more occasions than one I had dropped 
it and I was being continually surprised by the fact that it did not break. 
No matter how often I repeated to myself that it was made of metal, I could 
not rid myself of the expectation that it would break. 

I tried to make myself comfortable on the seat, looked closely at the 
polished wood, my legs tired, and that made me look at the scarred black 
leather of my boots. In a way, I was bored. I had not realized how utterly 
dependent on things I had become, even if only to catalogue them, saying 
over and over again, the door, the seat, the boots, the mirror, the thing to 
urinate in. If I had had a big ledger I could have drawn up an inventory of 
things, neatly arranging columns of the names of the microscopic objects 
which, with the courtroom about me, formed so large a part of my experience. 
With a ledger and a pencil, I could have kept going indefinitely. The seats 
for example were grouped in rows, they were really benches with backs and 
multiple legs. The mirror-I had it in my inside pocket-had four corners. The 
table over there had four corners. The scarf of the woman next to me was, 
when examined closely, composed of weaves of wool ranging from a distinct 
red, through all the various shades of purple, to one strand that was almost 
white. I would not have been at a loss for things to catalogue. 

It suddenly occurred to me that plumber Goon was still alive. It struck me 
as obscene that they should put him on trial for his life. He would be 
eating, drinking, sleeping, and defecating much as a housebroken cat might 
do under the same circumstances. He would be constantly forced to focus his 
attention on his bodily functions. That would cause him to be more aware of 
himself as a living thing than he had been before when, in his actions, he 
could lose sight of himself. Gradually his mind must have escaped less and 
less from the limit of his perceptions. He must have spent hours and days in 
measuring distances within his cell, making an inventory of its contents and 
his life. 

I remembered one time, after a fight in a bar, I came to consciousness in a 
hospital. There were screens where the walls should have been and I smelled 
antiseptic instead of air that hangs around a bed where two people have 
slept. I was living with Cathie at the time. On returning home, things were 
different. As I awoke and began to take in my surroundings, I realized that 
the constable was not there on a chair close by the bed as he had been when 
suddenly at the hospital out of nothing I came back to my senses. I remember 
he was a young man with worried gray eyes and a white pouchy face. I cannot 
remember whether he had a black moustache or no moustache at all. I watched 
him for a time under the rims of my eyelids and then I must have fallen 
asleep again because when I looked back, he was an older man with veined 
cheeks and with eyebrows as fierce as shrimps. And I can remember the 
buttons on his uniform were very bright, so bright that beyond the pervasive 
consciousness of my limbs between the clean sheets I counted them twice at 
least to be sure I hadn't made a mistake. I forget now how many there were. 

I was thinking of that, I suppose because that was my only direct contact 
with the police when, beyond me, someone said: "Nonsense!" and I was 
suddenly aware that the trial had begun. There was Goon, a pale-faced man of 
middle age, in the dock. Two policemen stood behind him. The remark-by whom 
it was spoken I do not know-was followed by silence in the courtroom, which 
gave way gradually to talking in hushed tones, terminated abruptly by the 
insistent rapping of the judge's hammer. Looking up at him, I had the 
impression that I was being stared at by a venomous old turtle. 

The court became quiet. 

A man in a wig was speaking. He seemed pleased with himself. Even in his 
gown it was obvious that he had an abnormally large rump. An ass with a 
large ass I thought. His voice derived somewhere from his adenoids. 

The people in court looked more like birds than ever, tilted, an eye 
glinting, about to peck. I became absorbed in watching them. As the trial 
proceeded, they were sometimes bored, sometimes tense and feverish, and all 
the time ridiculous, blobs of expression huddled together, marveling at the 
sanctimonious odor of their paid prosecutors. 

Throughout the trial, it was quite clear that they were not talking about 
Goon at all. The perpetrator created in the speeches of the prosecutor to 
fit the sea of evidence, had nothing to do with any self Goon was conscious 
of. I was disturbed by the placid way they all took it for granted that it 
was Goon The Guilty they were talking about. If they condemned the straw man 
they had created, they would condemn Goon. If they hanged their fictional 
perpetrator, it would be Goon's body they would cut down. 

"When you went... " they said. 

"When you did this or that... " 

Questions. Off-key. Counterfeit. Loaded. 

I could see that they wanted things to fit as a man wants to believe in God. 

Poor bewildered plumber Goon sat, looking sullen and afraid. From time to 
time he was called upon to testify. He did so with a kind of helpless rage, 
almost tearfully. A woman's voice beside me whispered to no one that it was 
easy to cry when you were caught. 

The courtroom smelled musty, vaguely perfumed. Very little light penetrated 
from the street through the high-level window. The lawyers stood up and sat 
down, sat down and stood up, and a small man in spectacles was explaining 
that Goon's fingerprints had been found on the shoes of the deceased. 

"There could be no mistake." 

"What?" 

"None whatever." From a handkerchief, tilting his little voice, he looked 
out through his pince-nez. 

That item of information obsessed me. No doubt the witness went back to his 
laboratory afterwards. He did not appear again. 

Les appeared toward the end of the morning. He testified that he had 
recovered the body from the river. With Joe, he said. 

"Joe?" 

It is strange to think that I am mentioned in the transcript of the 
proceedings of this trial. 

"My mate," Les said self-consciously, and there was a titter in court. Les 
wore a high white collar above which his sugar-loaf head with its cropped 
gray hair maintained a startled tilt during his questioning. 

He was not asked for his opinion. The Crown ascertained that the woman was 
dead when she was pulled from the water. 

The court was adjourned at the end of the first day. It was quite obvious 
that the prosecutor was going to get his conviction. He was a small man, 
rather self-satisfied, and he seemed to take a personal pleasure in 
murdering poor, pathetic Goon. 

I did not feel like returning to the house immediately. Instead, I took a 
tram to Kelvingrove and walked through the park. I sat on a seat for a long 
while thinking about nothing in particular. Ella had not been present at the 
trial. Les had come and gone without seeing me. I wondered vaguely where he 
was a night-watchman. I missed Les more than I missed Ella. I was glad to be 
rid of Ella. There were many things I liked about Les. 

After a while I got up. 

I was walking near the tennis courts when two young men and a girl passed me 
on the footpath. I supposed they were students because they were carrying 
books under their arms. When they saw me they stopped laughing. It was as 
though what they were laughing about was too private to be shared with 
strangers. Then they were past me and laughing again, and the voice of one 
of the men came back to me, high, artificial, excited, as though he were 
mimicking someone. Then the girl's laughter again. I turned to watch them. 

She was walking between them, in flat shoes and a summer dress, swinging a 
pot-shaped handbag on a long leather strap. Strikingly blond, her hair rose 
gracefully from her neck in a ribboned pony tail. She was slim-hipped, and 
desired obviously by both of them. 

They walked out of sight. 

I found myself thinking that she could not have been more than twenty and 
wondering whether I looked old to her. Then I found myself envying the two 
young men who escorted her. A feeling almost of despair came over me. I felt 
a devastating sense of loss for something I had never had. I was tired and 
slightly distraught and so it did not occur to me that that something was a 
thing no one ever possesses. It did not occur to me that that something 
exists only for the spectator without whom it could never become an object, 
never tantalize, never to be unattainable. 

I was tired and distraught and it did not strike me then that her escorts 
were even farther than I from the thing about which I felt such an acute 
sense of loss. Their laughter, the swing of her hips, the ribbon, the 
familiarity, all that. It did not strike me then that even if she were the 
mistress of one of them-I had created the thing towards which I felt the 
sense of loss. It was not anyone else's to be enjoyed. 

Afterwards I saw that it is ludicrous to envy someone because he is part of 
a situation which does not exist for him. I realized that night things can 
only be seen, and thus exist, from the outside and always as a lack. A man 
cannot have a sense of loss towards a situation in which he is seen to be 
involved because, being involved in it, that particular situation does not 
exist as seen for him. He can stand in no relation to it, feel towards it 
neither a sense of loss nor of possession. It is something for someone else, 
for the man who is on the outside, and eternally condemned to feel loss. 

I did not think that then, but during the night. At that time I was tired, 
outraged. 

When I returned to the flat in Lucien Street, Connie's husband was preparing 
to go to work. Connie was wrapping his sandwich in a newspaper. 

"How did it go, Joe?" he said. 

"They'll find him guilty," I said. 

As soon as her husband departed, I was at Connie. I was enraged by the day's 
proceedings, confused by the slim-hipped girl, furious with Connie's 
indifference to me. For the first time since our initial sexual encounter, I 
unleashed my belt. Her back to me as she finished up her kitchen work, I 
gained her immediate and stark staring attention by cracking the two halves 
together. 

Her hands dropped to her sides, she turned to face me and the color drained 
from her face. I gestured with a nod of my head and she immediately and 
compliantly stripped naked where she stood. I handed her the belt. "Leash 
yourself," I said. She fumbled for a moment as she passed the belt end 
through the buckle and slipped the big loop she had formed over her head. 
She shivered with anticipation, not knowing what to expect next. I stood and 
looked on. 

"What do I want?" I interrogated. 

"To be undone and licked?" she questioned. "To have me frig myself off? To 
have at me from behind?" 

"Wrong," I intoned. "I want your obedience. Will I have it? Or must I exact 
the ultimate penalty for your willful noncompliance?" I sounded just like 
the pompous judge. 

This last phrase left her with a befuddled look on her plain, uneducated 
face. I realized then that-like Goon-she was a simple creature, nothing 
more. Her needs were few and her pleasures were limited. The attentions I 
gave her were adequate for her limited life. The sexual act was, for her, as 
much a part of her routine as her morning ablutions. For me to make more of 
it or be offended by what I perceived as her lack of interest in me was 
folly on my part. 

I replied, "I want to fuck you top to bottom, every opening in your body," 
and her eyes brightened with excitement at the thought. "Tighten the belt 
about your throat and we'll begin." She complied and moving toward me, 
rounded her sweet lips, dropped to her knees before me, and with one hand 
fumbling at my crotch, handed me the free end of the belt. 

*** 

I had pushed Connie's naked loins away from me just as her husband came into 
the kitchen on the following morning. 

There was a twinkle in his eye as he removed his boots. 

"She's a game bird!" he said in a voice in which I could detect pride of 
possession. 

I didn't know whether to reply or not. The woman didn't take it as a 
compliment. She turned over and pretended to go to sleep. 

He began to kindle the fire. 

"Going there today again, Joe?" 

"May as well," I replied. "I've never watched a trial before." 

"What's it like?" 

"It's insane," I said. 

The flames crackled in the grate. He filled the kettle and placed it on top. 

"How do you mean?" 

"It's like some kind of ball game," I said. "Goon, the plumber is the ball." 

The man laughed. He began to rinse out last night's tea cups. 

"It's just like that," I continued. "Goon's not important. It's the game 
that's important. Two teams of lawyers out to win. Only it was obvious from 
the beginning that the defense team is only a second-rate one. And that's 
just how they report it in the papers. It's a kind of tournament and the 
readers can follow it. The lawyers are all out to cut a fine figure for 
themselves. For them it's not the case that's important, it's what happens 
to their reputations." 

He carried two cups of tea across to us. Connie sat up beside me and we both 
drank. I could feel her hot thigh close to my own and I had no doubt that 
soon her husband would be taking over where I left off. I drank my tea 
quickly, vacated my half of the bed, and crossed to the sink. 

I shaved carefully, watching the smooth line of my chin appear from under 
the soap in the mirror. Reflected there I could see the man undressing. I 
tilted the mirror slightly to take in Connie. She was holding the covers up, 
inviting him to come beside her, the smooth line of one hip, thigh, and 
breast naked for his eyes. Further down, almost out of sight under the 
covers, was that part of her belly to which the hairs of her mound clung, 
close, like a wet leaf. A moment later, her husband clambered into bed 
beside her. 

I did not delay overlong watching them. They were still at it when I left 
the kitchen and made my way down the stairs to the street. It was like the 
previous morning, the streets wet and rain threatening, but the air was 
warm. 

Once again I found myself in Argyle Street. I almost decided not to go to 
the trail. The outcome was a foregone conclusion. They had created a crime 
and now they had created a man to fit it, as a theologian creates his God 
and then his philosophy. The only disquieting part about the whole freak 
show was that they would hang an actual living creature in deference to the 
system. Oh, there was no doubt about it. The man who was created in the 
speeches of the prosecutor was fitted admirably to the crime which, in turn, 
the police had invented. It is a very gratifying thing indeed to see two 
branches of the public service, the judiciary and the police, work together 
in such imaginative harmony. If they can do so much on so little evidence, 
there is nothing, nothing at all that is beyond them. Our system is built on 
a rock and woe betide to any anarchist, deviationist, criminal, bootlegger, 
or lustful trade-unionist who happens to brush against its web. At last, we 
may hope, the evil will be rooted out, and peace will reign in our unhappy 
land. 

So I did not go to the Court in the morning. I found myself instead playing 
pinball in a dive in Jamaica Street. There were few people there at that 
early hour of the day and the attendant was almost suspicious of me. 

After lunch, I made my way to the courtroom to find that the jury had 
already retired. The newspapermen were there with their cameras. I sat not 
far from where I had the previous day and waited for the twelve jurors 
(three ladies and nine gentlemen) to return. Their pomposity made them 
ridiculous. It occurred to me that there might be one among them who felt 
like a murderer. The rest were protected by their sanctimoniousness. 

I can remember no quiet so quiet as that which followed when Mr. Justice 
Parkington had finished saying that never before in his long experience of 
crime had he felt so justified in awarding the maximum penalty. He said it 
almost lecherously, and only then was I struck by the fact that the man was 
quite mad. 

Goon was called to stand. Mr. Justice Parkington had already asked him if he 
had anything to say before sentence was passed on him. The reply had been: 
"Just that I am innocent, Sir," said Goon without daring to look at the owl 
who leaned forward angrily towards him. The remark was received in silence. 
Its meaning seemed to escape everyone. Having said it, Goon began to sway. 
He had to be supported by policemen. I take it that this would have happened 
even if he had killed Cathie. At this point Mr. Justice Parkington fitted 
the black cap neatly to his balding crown and delivered his barbaric 
sentence in nasal tones. The law, it seemed, required that Goon be hanged by 
the neck until dead. A day was prescribed. The time, early in the morning. 
Mr. Justice Parkington's denture-shored mouth then uttered the formula that 
God should have mercy on Goon's soul. 

The courtroom was silent and gray and heavy despite its high ceiling. The 
brass lamp brackets on the walls were high up and austere. I tried to hear 
the noise of traffic outside on the streets. I wanted badly to hear that, 
but the walls must have been too thick. And the people were silent except 
for a slight cough, a rustling of paper, the small scraping of a boot. 

I cannot remember how the court broke up. All I know is that suddenly Mr. 
Justice Parkington was gone and the disintegration was already taking place. 
A woman in front was remarking to a friend that she felt exactly as though 
she had been in the presence of God. 

CHAPTER TWO 

Perhaps you think I ought to have kept to the side streets, to have walked 
quickly to avoid being looked at. But the truth is that no one gave me a 
second glance. The tedium of waiting for the trial wore me down more than 
anything. I was a spectator watching your justice from the outside. I had no 
doubts about its direction. The final judgment came as no surprise to me. 
Had I felt any sense of personal danger, I might have taken my walks at 
night, taken them to relieve the tedium of days spent eating, reading, or 
lying on the bed of my room. After a while I might have ceased to look 
forward to those walks because they would give me nothing more than exercise 
and fresh air. I would have spoken to no one. And gradually, as I saw that 
the people I met in the street paid no attention to me, I would have lost 
that sense of danger. I would no longer have started at my own shadow, no 
longer have turned my face away if a young woman brushed past me in the 
street. 

But none of this happened. I realized from the beginning that you must be 
called a murderer before you become one. You must live up to the idea other 
people have of you. In that way they can dispatch you quickly at the end of 
a long rope. 

But I did need a drink. Badly. The social syllogism in which Goon had been 
unfortunate enough to get himself entangled upset me deeply. If any act of 
mine could have destroyed that syllogism, I should have acted gladly. Go to 
the police? Confess? That would have been in an indirect but very 
fundamental way to affirm the validity of a social structure I wished to 
deny. 

A double whiskey was more relevant, more fit under the circumstances. I 
drank two double whiskeys in an alcove in a bar. As I hadn't eaten anything 
since early morning, the alcohol had an exaggerated effect upon me. When I 
left the pub I was feeling tipsy. 

My thoughts turned naturally to women, to the vital part of them which 
cannot be institutionalized. The tram passed under Central Station Bridge. 
Not far away, I recognized a bar to which I had gone one evening about a 
month earlier. Its clients were a melange of swarthy, foreign sailors, a few 
nondescript white men, and prostitutes. 

There had been five women then and they all looked vaguely like Gwendoline. 
The comparison amused me. After a while, one of them broke away from a group 
at the bar and came over to me. Her lips were, I remember, thick and wet, 
and red like Gwen's, and her teeth, except for one gold one, were white and 
broad. Glancing at the other women in the background I remember being glad 
it was this one who had come over. The others were thin and dark-haired, 
with very thin dark red lips. She asked me if I would like to buy her a 
drink and sat down before I replied. She said she would like stout. She was 
a big woman, something like Ella, broad-bellied and fat-thighed. Her hair, 
dark at the roots, had the curl and color of a smoked haddock. I ordered a 
drink for her and another double whiskey for myself. She stayed with me 
until closing time and then we left together. We took a taxi to a small 
street on the other side of George's Square. In the room there was a dirty 
bed, an empty wardrobe, a marble-topped wash-stand with a flowered china 
water jug, and one unvarnished chair. She began immediately to take off her 
blouse. She had a broad belly. Her breasts were gathered flatly within a 
pink cotton brassiere, which was sustained tremulously by thin ribbons 
which, in their taut task, were embedded in the thick flesh of her back and 
shoulders. I watched her from the edge of the bed where I was sitting... 

By this time, of course, the tram car had moved on and the pub in question 
was long ago out of sight. I wondered at my impulse to recapitulate the 
scene in great detail. I wondered why, if it had afforded me such pleasure, 
I had not got off the car and made my way to the same pub. 

It was then that the thought came to me that, for all that many people 
pretended to be disgusted by her, the prostitute is an integral part of the 
same system which condemned Goon. She herself knows that she is part of it. 
Nothing is farther from her mind than the idea of revolt. The categories of 
civilization include and tolerate her: a necessary evil, like hanging. 

I knew then why the movement of the young girl in the park had so excited 
me. She was a potential ally. In her-in any woman who gives herself angrily 
and freely-there is the impulse to revolt. The prostitute is an ally, an 
accomplice of the married woman. When marriage falls, the prostitute will be 
out of business; if the prostitute goes, marriage will be insufferable. The 
dishonesty of marriage is a fundamental one: it requires a man to make a 
judgment about future experience which only that experience can justify. 
Against all the cautions of probability, one is asked to accept an absolute 
judgment about another person and about oneself. 

I got off the tram car at the foot of Gibson Street and walked slowly 
through the gates into the park. It was a pleasant spring evening with at 
least two hours before dusk. 

I walked uphill and across the park so that soon I was looking across it 
towards the gray spire of the university. I sat on a bench and gazed over at 
it. It was over there that the technicians of our civilized sclerosis were 
manufactured. And sometimes, a rebel. My thoughts were not particularly 
profound. I was enjoying the seat and the fresh air. 

About half an hour later I began to walk toward the Kelvin Way. 

I was walking slowly, paying no particular attention to the people who 
passed me on the paths when suddenly, as I rounded a corner, I came upon the 
girl I had seen the day before. She had a briefcase under her arm and she 
was engaged in conversation with a tall serious youth who looked in the air 
as he spoke. I sat down immediately at a distance. They talked for perhaps 
five minutes, shook hands, and each continued in his own direction. 

The girl was walking towards me. 

I intercepted her. Something in my manner must have made her hesitate. You 
understand that almost ten years had passed since I had given up all 
pretensions of respectability. I was dressed like a shiftless member of the 
working class which, in a sense, I suppose I had become. I saw a pretty, 
approachable girl. She saw a man of another class with the visor of his 
vulgarity drawn down over his face. Had there been a policeman in the 
vicinity she might have called him. 

When I told her I wanted to speak to her, a conflict of emotions was visible 
on her face. She was at once interested, afraid, and, I suppose, insulted by 
my tone of familiarity. 

She asked me rather coldly what I wanted to talk to her about, no doubt 
thinking I was a hawker of stolen property or something of that kind. Our 
meeting was, from all ordinary points of view, improper. I realized this, 
but, since it was the impropriety I wished her to accept, I had no way of 
reassuring her. To apologize for coming on her suddenly in this 
way-molesting is the appropriate word-would have been to grant the rectitude 
of the very system my life had been lived to destroy. I found myself more 
angry with her than sympathetic. This had the effect of making her more 
nervous still. 

"I don't know what it is you want to say to me," she said quickly, "but I am 
in a hurry. I have an appointment. I'm late already. You must excuse me, 
please!" 

This caused me to laugh suddenly. She regarded me distantly. 

"Go on," I said. "If you are in a hurry, it doesn't matter. I'm sorry to 
have detained you." 

I leaned back against the railing and lit a cigarette. 

She hesitated for a moment and then, seeing no one detained her, she took a 
few tentative steps away from me in the direction in which she had 
originally been going. 

"I would still like to talk to you," I called after her. 

She turned on the balls of her feet. 

"Why don't you say what you mean?" she said in a proud voice. "Why do you 
have to pretend you want to talk to me?" 

I hesitated and then I said: "All right. I don't want to talk to you. I want 
you to take your clothes off and make love to you." 

She flushed and I thought for a moment that she was going to turn on her 
heel and walk quickly away. But she did not. She stood there undecided and I 
had the impression that she was looking for something very witty and 
devastating to hurl back at me. 

"Why bother saying it?" I said. "Why do you look upon me as your enemy?" 

"I don't," she said quickly, as though I had caught her out at something. 
"I'm just not interested, that's all." 

"If that's true," I said, "there is no more to be said." 

"I'm glad you understand," she responded hesitantly. "I have no wish to 
offend you." 

"You cannot offend me since I had no previous idea of you," I said. "I had 
no reason to expect you to accept or reject. I was merely interested, that 
was all." 

"I see." 

"Will you let me take you for a coffee?" 

She was looking at my clothes as though she were speculating on the 
possibility and its effect of being seen in my company. But suddenly she 
seemed to thrust all this away from her. 

"I'd enjoy it very much," she said with a smile. "Where shall we go?" 

"It doesn't really matter," I said, coming up beside her. "Wherever pleases 
you." 

"There's a cafe in Sauchiehall Street at the other side of the park," she 
said. "We could go there." 

*** 

In the old way, in the old places, there is a structure which you build up 
of another person in terms of which that person must make his impact upon 
you. Beyond this structural idea there is no experience; the structure 
itself is armor against it. For two people to come close together, it is 
necessary to destroy the structures in terms of which each experiences the 
other. When she accepted my invitation to take coffee with me, Jacqueline 
had done just that. She thrust away from her the whole system of weights and 
measures which a conventional upbringing had bequeathed to her. This she did 
tentatively, but a tentative movement is all that is necessary. 

Let me be quite candid. I wished to undress Jacqueline and make love to her, 
quite literally. It was the experience I most desired of her. It is neither 
interesting nor instructive to say that all our talk led up to the very 
simple matter of going to bed together. In the first place it was not a 
simple matter. In the second place, the words that were spoken between us 
did not detract in the slightest from the value of the mating which was 
ulterior to them. Why do we consider that an ulterior motive is necessarily 
a shameful one? The words attuned us to one another, made it possible for us 
to contemplate a sexual union that would not be obliquely twisted by the 
truss of convention. 

We re-interpreted a myth. The tree in Eden was the Tree of Knowledge; quite 
simply the tree of structures in terms of which, the apple eaten, our first 
fathers began to interpret the world. Before that, communion had been 
immediate, achieved without the aid of structural ideas. After countless 
centuries of mediated communion, it was not surprising that love was not a 
simple thing. It had become metaphysic. To achieve the communion of Eden it 
was necessary to jettison our ideas, of ourself and the other; to do so was 
to act in innocence, to allow the possibility of love. 

It became obvious to us both as we talked about this and that, and things 
with no importance in themselves, that we intended to have sex with one 
another. At least that was obvious to me. 

Jacqueline was, perhaps, more at the edge of things. She seemed interested, 
but meeting her own desire with reservations which her upbringing had 
instilled in her. 

After an hour we were talking like old friends. She found the students at 
the university childish, she said. Of course they were interested in 
sleeping with her, but they were embarrassed and they usually spoke of 
marriage. 

I walked her back to the park gates and said goodbye. We arranged to meet 
the following day in the same cafe at the same time. I watched her walk away 
along the path, her blond hair still high in a ponytail at the back of her 
head. Her body was lithe and slim and I could imagine the smooth warmth of 
her delicate young buttocks, modest now under her fresh linen, her bare legs 
below, tanned and smooth like the surface of mercury. 

I thought at that moment that a whole night and day was a long time to wait. 

The evening passed slowly. 

I sat for two hours with a glass of beer in front of me. I suppose I was 
thinking, although the process that was going on inside me seemed continuous 
with something else which was below the level of thought. I had a vague 
feeling of desire. I was unable to direct it towards any of the tired 
prostitutes who occasionally stopped by my table. It had nothing to do with 
them. 

Have you ever tried to explain anything to a prostitute? Prostitutes make 
the best listeners in the world because they don't listen. They smile and 
they agree with you. At first, perhaps, you are taken in. You expand, you 
have found your first neophyte. Or perhaps it is you who are the neophyte. 
You are feeling very expansive. You are about to have your way in spite of 
the fact that there is something of the fish bone in this tired woman. But 
at this point she tells you about her child in the country, and how she does 
it just for her. Little Mary will get a better start in life, go to a good 
school, perhaps even marry a professional man. At that point it comes home 
to you that you are about to fuck your mother. "What is it, dearie?" she 
says. "Is something wrong? Come closer. That's right. Wait till I wet it a 
little for you... " 

I was thinking of Jacqueline. I had been looking for a woman like her a long 
time. Sometimes I have imagined I have already found her. That night, 
sitting in the pub, watching the prostitutes steer in and out through the 
swinging doors, I was feeling certain again, tentatively certain. To feel 
certain of anything is the proof that you have already lost it. No feeling 
of certainty, no feeling of uncertainty, just a feeling, undifferentiated, a 
well-being, and no word for it. One must resist all temptations to invent 
the word. In the beginning was the word, and that was the end. 

I thought about poor Goon. He was part of a vast octopus organism which, 
spotlighting an individual cell, called that cell bad. Poor Goon was bad. 
The judge said so. The octopus said so. So the octopus would strangle him. 
Only poor Goon knew he was not bad. No doubt he was convinced that someone 
was bad. I, for example, although to him I was nameless. But I was sorry for 
him in spite of the fact that he thought I was bad. That didn't make him 
bad, not at all. It was the octopus that was bad. And even that was not bad 
all the time; that's to say, the people in it were not bad, only the idea 
they had of themselves as belonging to a society. And that was not bad 
either; it was merely unintelligent. 

To tell the truth, Goon bored me. Rather, I knew that he would bore me if I 
ever met him. I wanted him to live and I thought for a long time wondering 
how I could get him off. I sat thinking for hours. But without wiping the 
arse of the octopus and getting myself strung up for it, there did not seem 
to be any way. If the lawyers couldn't do anything, I couldn't. After all, 
the lawyers made the damn setup. If they can't help you, no one can. That's 
why it always pays to consult a lawyer before you do anything bad. Then it 
may not be bad. He'll tell you. 

I drank a bottle of beer before I went to bed. 

*** 

I arrived at the cafe early. 

The woman behind the counter had black hair and a mole on her upper lip that 
showed through the thick layer of powder. When I entered, she was talking to 
a man who might have been a commercial traveler. He had a briefcase from 
which he kept drawing display cards and catalogues which he then passed 
across to her. She examined them carefully and handed them back in turn, 
nodding all the time with the kind of nod that patronizes and humors at the 
same time. She didn't appear to want anything, but the man insisted on 
leaving two catalogues. He left the cafe as though he had just arranged a 
big deal. His step was one of a man of forty-five who thinks he's behaving 
like a boy of twenty. It left him as soon as he had crossed the threshold; 
through the glass door I watched him come to himself. He hesitated on the 
pavement as though he couldn't make up his mind and then he crossed the road 
slowly. When he had gone, the woman came over to take my order. He had been 
trying to sell her a new type of display case, she said. It was made of 
plastic and he had given her many reasons why it was preferable to glass. 
The woman did not seem to be convinced. She brought my coffee with a look of 
disbelief on her face. 

At exactly 5.45 p.m. Jacqueline entered the cafe. 

She was wearing a red coat and she was carrying a small traveling case. She 
had wrapped her long blond hair into a bun at the back of her head. When she 
saw me she smiled and came over at once. 

"You came," I said. 

"You didn't think I would?" 

I pointed to her case. 

"Does that mean you have decided?" 

She laughed. 

"I don't know," she said. "It's not too big to go back with!" 

"You just brought it in case?" 

She was looking at me seriously. 

"I wouldn't have brought it unless I had been nearly sure," she said. 

"And you want me to convince you?" 

"No! Don't talk like that, Joe" she cried! "You'll spoil it." 

I took her hand beneath the table and pressed it. 

"If it can be so easily spoiled," I said, "you had better go carefully. 
There's no way back." 

"I know that, Joe." 

"I'll order you a coffee," I said. 

The woman nodded from behind the counter. She was obviously inquisitive 
about us but her face was inscrutable. A moment later, spilling the fawn 
liquid into the saucer, she laid the cup down in front of us with her red 
hand. 

I pushed it towards Jacqueline. She sipped it without saying anything. 

"It's like believing in God," I went on. "Once you realize that He's a 
metaphysical construct, you can't believe in him any longer. There's no way 
back. You can't choose to believe in him again." 

"I know." 

"It's settled then," I said. "The train leaves at 11 from Central Station." 

"I wish it were 11 now," Jacqueline said. 

"Just five hours," I said. 

She shuddered as my hand reached higher on the soft skin of her thigh under 
her skirt. Her cheeks were flushed. I stroked gently, feeling the smooth 
firm flesh ride between my forefinger and thumb. Then I felt her hand on my 
wrist. 

"Not now, Joe. Please. Later." 

I lit a cigarette. 

"What shall we do to pass the time?" 

"Could we go to a cinema? Then we could eat dinner. And by that time it'll 
almost be time for the train." 

"Sure," I said. "We'll go when you've finished your coffee." 

In the back row of the almost deserted cinema she turned her thighs towards 
me like the long slender necks of horses. They were smooth and dully white 
in the darkness, like pale flowers. Their grace and their naivete delighted 
me. She was breathing heavily and the rest of her body was slumped backwards 
in the seat. Had we not been in a public place, I would have knelt down 
beside her and buried my face in them. 

I felt no sense of urgency. My whole body was wrung by desire for her but 
the delirium was controlled. I paid little attention to the film. I don't 
even remember what it was called. As I stroked her I imagined what it would 
be like to peel off her thin underwear from her young body... what it would 
be like for the first time to open with her wetness at my hand the scar-like 
weal at her soft groin, to try her young muscles with soft explorative 
pressures of my own, and finally, still with no conscious urgency, to break 
through the trim growth of her short hair into her warm, wet sheath. 

I can remember a time when I would have moved quickly, when I would have 
been afraid of losing the opportunity by delaying too long. Those were the 
days when I took women intellectually. But that no longer interested me. 
Especially with Jacqueline. Neither had I taken Ella intellectually. It was 
she who raised the intellectual barriers against me. Was it because she was 
too old? Gwendoline was different. My desires were mixed. I didn't like 
Gwendoline very much. 

Jacqueline was only twenty. I was delighted by that, for she was already 
young and she had not much life to unlive. I would take her the whole way, 
corrupt her utterly within two years. I wasn't quite sure whether or not I 
was committing a crime in taking Jacqueline. I wasn't quite sure of the law. 
It might have been an abduction. Unfortunately, I was not in a position to 
consult a lawyer, and so I put the question from my mind. It was improbable 
that her parents would be able to trace us. That was just as well because we 
did not intend to be married. I didn't know them. It occurred to me to ask 
Jacqueline. I leaned near her to do so, but her eyes were closed and she was 
breathing deeply so I didn't disturb her. Instead I stroked more gently 
nearer the edge of her knickers, searching with the blind pads of my fingers 
for the first signs of the frail hairs that would arrow inwards towards her 
sex. She moved her other thigh and pressed it against my hand. She whispered 
something, which I didn't hear. In the darkness her profile was very 
beautiful. 

We sat until the cinema began to fill up and we were forced to discontinue 
our caresses. We decided to leave and go somewhere to eat. 

In the street outside she suddenly threw her arms round my waist and kissed 
me on the lips. 

"What was that for?" I said. 

"That was for you!" she said, "and you deserve a silly answer!" 

I laughed and we walked down the street towards a cheap restaurant. 

"That's the only thing I'm sorry about," I said. 

"What's that?" 

"Money," I said. 

"What about it?" 

"It's hard to get." 

"Oh, we'll manage." 

"Of course," I said. "But don't be romantic. People must either give us 
things, or we must earn them, or we must steal them. I'm not really prepared 
to earn." 

"I wouldn't expect you to, darling!" Jacqueline said brightly. 

In the restaurant we ate quickly because the food was not particularly good. 
As soon as we had finished, I helped her on with her coat, I lifted her bag, 
and we left. When we were outside in the street, Jacqueline produced a 
teaspoon from her pocket. 

"That's to prove I have decided," she said. 

I took her arms and we walked down to the station where we deposited the bag 
in a locker. Then we walked slowly through the town, down to the river. 

We stood on the suspension bridge looking into the water. Circles of 
reflected light seemed to spread and stay as they were crossed by the sleek 
tar-like movement of the water towards its estuary. It was raining slightly 
but the thin sprinkle was refreshing and we stood in the darkness quite a 
while before either of us spoke. 

"How long is it now?" she said. 

"About two hours," I said. 

She was lighting a cigarette; I was reminded of Cathie. She had stood just 
like that not long before we made love. My eyes moved down the river towards 
the spot at which the railway trucks were, coupled together like so many 
boxlike houses, near the edge of one of the quays. 

"I wish we had a boat," she said. "Wouldn't it be fun to sail away from here 
now, without waiting?" 

I drew her towards me and kissed her. 

And then we moved back against the side of the bridge against one of the 
girders which, with the rest, arched upwards over our head like the rib cage 
of a prehistoric animal. I ran my fingers through her hair. 

"Are you quite sure?" 

"Of course," she said without hesitation. "You must believe I've decided." 

I kissed her again and we walked back along the bridge and turned along the 
street which was parallel to the river. We walked with our arms round about 
one another. Soon we came to the spot where Cathie and I had stopped a 
number of months before. 

"I know a place out of the rain," I said. 

She obediently walked quickly across the open space behind the line of 
trucks which still huddled squatly close to the water. She moved ahead 
hesitantly in the dark, propelled gently by my hand at her elbow. I counted 
the railroad cars. At the ninth one I stopped. 

"Here," I said. 

After a moment I took off my coat and threw it down under the car. I sat 
down and looked up at her. 

She hesitated. 

I was looking directly at her bare legs, slightly apart and visible under 
the hem of her coat. When she knelt down beside me it occurred to me that 
she was very nervous. Her face was soft but slightly tense, her eyes 
suggestive and afraid at the same time. I put my hand under her skirt to the 
sudden warmth of her thigh and drew her nearer. She swayed forwards, the 
undercurrent of reluctance in her movement countered by the pressure of my 
fingers on her flesh. The wind rose across the water making her skin chill 
at the same time as the hot strands of her desire grew. It played gently at 
the sparse hairs that quivered delicately close to her goose-fleshed skin. 
Almost suddenly she squatted down beside me. 

The place smelled dankly and of oil. On one side the river was visible and 
the lights of the river street on the far side. On the other side our view, 
and the world's view of us, was totally obstructed. The atmosphere was close 
and her body's perfume hung about us like an insinuation. 

I began to undress her. She put up no resistance. It was almost as though 
she were a spectator at her own seduction. Her shirt came away easily in my 
hands as she raised herself slightly, her lower body abetting its downward 
movement. The ambiguous warm scent of her abandoned limbs rose to me with 
the soft white discovery of her roundness, vibrant and somehow more naked 
than I could have imagined. I laid my hand on her mound above the fragile 
panties and moved my fingers gently at the hidden beard of hair over which 
the thin and moistened ruck of nylon lay, a discreet curtain, causing her 
sex to be emphasized and veiled at the same time. I felt her quiver at my 
touch. Her head was bent and her face was slightly averted as my fingers 
slipped tentatively between the material and the soft sweat-inhabited skin 
of her body's center. As one of my fingers stabbed between the frail sharded 
flanges of her sex, her face moved downwards shyly to hide itself on my 
shoulder. 

Slowly, my right hand holding her fine blond head close to my shoulder, I 
unbuttoned myself to allow my own power to rise like a pale boom between my 
legs, thick growth of male hair at its roots gave it a gnarled, almost 
venomous appearance. And then, insinuating gently, I forced her head 
downwards over my bared belly until her lips came to rest on the moist 
bluntness. At that point I relaxed the downwards pressure, my hand at the 
back of her neck bathing itself in the heavy yellow coils of her hair. I 
wanted her to choose it for herself. Momentarily, although soft and loving, 
her lips remained closed as though they were savoring, perhaps fearfully, 
the first tentative realization of the situation into which she had 
willingly allowed herself to be led. Then, a decision made, her little pink 
adder's tongue thrust itself from between her lips and caressed the taut 
nakedness that I exposed to her. The point of her tongue painted sensations 
skillfully at the surface, sensations that radiated downwards to my vitals 
and caused the muscles of my back and buttocks to clench themselves in hard 
knots. This, like a rising platform beneath me, caused me to thrust upwards. 
Her mouth broke open lovingly, its soft wet interior containing me until I 
felt its first doting suction bring urgency to the muscles of my thighs. At 
that moment I took her head in both my hands and set it there at my body's 
center between the strong vice of my thighs. 

While she doted in this way, I began to remove her upper clothing, passing 
my hands tentatively up over her respiring body, over the twin sleekness of 
her breasts to the sultry spun-haired resilience of her armpits. Then, when 
she sat white and young and naked except for her nylon panties, her head 
still bowed downwards at its intimate task, I moved downwards again with my 
hands, silhouetting the graceful form of her body to her haunches, allowing 
the elastic of her knickers to run over them like soft gloves. And then I 
moved downwards again, drawing them along her firm but flaccid thighs to 
expose navel, mound, and sex, all arching upwards now as her lips broke away 
and her body spined gently into an abandoned position and one of her sleek 
young thighs brushed against my cheek. 

In her turn, her hands at the back of my head were insistent, and I allowed 
myself to be drawn into her, my mouth opening to the faintly odored hair 
that split and broke against my lips, minutely, like an uneasiness. Then the 
softness of her deep young flesh had engulfed me, with the warm and meaty 
blocks of her thighs closing about my ears. At the same time, I moved my 
hands to her lean young belly and pulled it downwards, shutting out the 
sight of the truck's wheels against which the rain inconsequently spat. 

Her slim hands on my shoulders urged and inspired my fluctuation. The slim 
girl, pricked at the seat of her passion, became at that moment merely a 
desperate physique, a lithe thing, tubbed and hot, lowering itself 
relentlessly onto the mouth which doted on her. It was a ball-like motion 
which inhabited her hips and flanks, a motion which spread upwards like a 
strident poison into the muscles of her naked back and shoulders. She 
groaned, fell sideways, drawing me with her, so that my right shoulder came 
to rest on the stones. Her buttocks, ballooning outwards to be confederate 
with my face, failed to land on the coat in their fall and were grazed, a 
trickle of blood drawn, on the stones. She experienced it with a small cry 
of pain which seemed to have the effect not of loosening her grip but of 
knitting it to a frantic fleshy tightness that threatened to suffocate me. 
Gently, I parted her beautiful knees so that her sex, as yet undiscovered in 
its depth, became an expanding oval of wet desire, rising now, like the 
interior of an exotic flower through the forest of delicately stranded 
hairs. 

A few moments later, I felt my head pulled gently upwards towards one of her 
young and sinuously curved breasts on which the nipples, silhouetted darkly 
in the gloom, were small tight buds of pigment almost rubbery to my lips. I 
circled the sweet nipple with my tongue and then, as she raised her breasts 
with one hand towards my face, I took if playfully between my teeth and 
subjected it to a long and doting suction. 

The coolness of the night had the effect of magnifying the odors of her 
nakedness. Her skin all over was smooth and cool to the touch. The coolness 
in conjunction with the desperation of her physical being, in conjunction 
with the almost hysterical flow of warm and viscous liquid from her young 
woman's sex, had the effect of making her seem pure and immaculate in love. 
Her voice never rose above a shy and nervous whisper which urged me always 
and pleadingly to more violence. 

Suddenly I thrust her downwards over the stones so that her sex struck 
against mine, and, after one cry of pain, I felt her cool hands close round 
my buttocks and with violent pressure pull me to her. She uttered a gasp of 
pain and joy and her teeth sank into my neck as my hard expansion broke 
through inexorably into her sex, which before had only known those secret 
instruments a shy girl knows, in darkness, in the locked privacy of her 
bedroom. And then, my sex contained firmly up to the hilt, our bellies met, 
rubbed, and doted, the flick of our haired fronts joined. I was aware 
suddenly of her legs draped downwards against my harder ones and touching 
like warmed silk. With gentle pressure behind her thighs I drew them 
upwards, crooking the knees until her calves encircled the purposeful 
cylinder of my body and her own torso strained eagerly forward to receive 
me. Our lips had come together, wetly; like the alluvial silt that was the 
product of our more sexual union. The wetness of our mouths seemed to feed 
us outwards into each other, absorbing at all our pores. Our pressures 
slick, and our limbs grafting themselves into the twisted embrace, a small 
seed of ecstasy, bright as the pole star, broke away from the vital nexus of 
my lower abdomen and became an electric needling jet through the part of me 
which impaled her. Sensitive to the growing shudder, her young loins burst 
like a poppy against my riding belly. Her whole lithe frame cracked upwards 
like a sinuous whip. She cried out. Her ankles twisted together, locking 
away all possibility of retreat, and her voracious young belly, swilling in 
its own juices, shuddered violently to receive my load. At that point, or a 
fraction of a second later, all her firmness left her and she softened 
backwards against the ground, like rain, I thought, so delicate she was, yet 
somehow substantial. 

Her eyelids fluttered open and in the darkness I saw her smile. 

"Oh Joe," she said, "I had no idea it would be so wonderful!" 

Her trust made me nervous. I was almost afraid. I tried to judge her 
reactions to anything and to everything as I pressed her lovely slack 
nakedness close to me. 

How difficult it was even to begin to say what I had intended from the 
first! 

"I'm cold," she said suddenly. 

I passed her slip to her. When she put it on, the lower part of her torso 
protruded from it like the long shoot of an uprooted plant from the 
earth-caked end of the stalk. I laid my hand on her soft wet cunt hairs and 
caressed her. She smiled, laughed softly, and closed her moist thighs 
against my hand, imprisoning it. With my free hand I gave her a cigarette. I 
watched her face light up and fade in the darkness as she drew in the smoke. 
Then suddenly I began to talk. 

I talked softly and she sat there, leaning backwards on her hands, her legs 
flat on the ground and stretched out towards me. 

"This is where Catherine Dimly fell in," I said. 

"Who?" 

"The woman they're hanging the plumber for." 

"Oh." 

She smiled in the dark and then she said: "I thought it never came out at 
the trial? Where she was pushed in, I mean?" 

"It didn't." 

She hesitated. 

"How do you know then?" 

"Because I was with her." 

"You?" 

"Yes." 

"Oh." 

"Do you want to hear about it?" I inquired. 

"Yes." 

"The plumber didn't murder her," I revealed. 

"You did?" 

"She fell in." 

"Oh." 

"She was with me. We made love under this railroad car." 

"This one?" 

"Yes. I was going away. She was trying to force me to marry her. She said I 
got her pregnant." 

"Did you?" 

I smiled. "What does it matter?" I said. 

"Nothing. It doesn't matter at all," Jacqueline said softly. 

"I was walking away from her. She came after me. I shook her off." 

"And she fell in?" 

"Yes. I didn't go to the police. If you fell in now I wouldn't go to the 
police. Do you understand? If there were the slightest possibility of their 
hanging me for the accident, I wouldn't go to the police." 

"Yes." Jacqueline breathed. 

"So I didn't." 

"I see," she responded, the words coming in tense bursts. 

"And they are going to hang Goon," I informed her. "Yes." 

"And I haven't the slightest intention of going to the police," I said. 

"Mm." 

"Not now and not the morning they lead him out and hang him." 

I hesitated. 

"Are you still decided?" I said. "You will still come tonight?" I craned 
forward to look into her eyes. On her answer, on perhaps her mere tone of 
voice, her life depended. 


Finis
