Cain’s Book (15 page)

I told her that the first six weeks of training finished me, how I spent the remaining three and a half years in the lavatories of various training ships, armed with a long-handled broom so that
I could pretend to be scrubbing the floor if anyone important came in; my best trick, for it never occurred to anyone that a man would impersonate a lavatory cleaner. I did most of my reading
there, Plato, Shakespeare, Marx, and I masturbated myself thin. I never saw the enemy until after the war and that was in Norway from whose King Haakon
²⁰
I had a red, white and blue certificate thanking me for liberating his country.

She said she felt exactly as I did, like being unwilling to commit herself to anything, ever. She didn’t want to do anything, travel a bit perhaps, just be, have a child maybe, but simply
have it and let it grow up with her.

“Bill thinks we haven’t got enough bread. He thinks I’m irresponsible. But we can get bread without making the kind of scene he wants to make. He wants to buy a motel.
I’ve had an abortion before. I don’t want another one.”

The atmosphere had become conspiratorial. She went on talking and her voice grew soft and I sensed her nearness. She was no longer talking about Bill, but about the present moment, all present
moments, about us really, not complaining any longer.

We sat talking for another hour or so. I found myself taking her hand and when we got used to that feeling, the vast sense of possibility touch implied, she extinguished the oil lamp. As we lay
down on the bed I heard her draw in her breath. She smelt sweet and warm. The other lamp was still burning, but low, and it gave off almost no light because of the soot on the globe. I moved my
hand over her buttocks and she moved her stump between my thighs and pressed her belly close to me.

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 and
flesh fell away, leaving a slight prickle on the skin. It was still raining. We could hear its fall on the water, on the gravel load, on the wood of the deck. It was there with our breathing,
something objective to which we both listened as, with our eyes open, and with our own thoughts, we looked at each other in the dark.

A
UNT HETTIE DEAD
. S
HE
was the first woman I ever saw naked. She slept in the cavity bed in her
kitchen. One afternoon I went in and she was alone, standing naked in the middle of the floor. I surprised her in a pose that she would subsequently have to explain to herself.

I was sixteen, her favourite nephew. She was about fifty at the time, with grey, almost white, hair. But the hair on her mound wasn’t grey. It was the colour of a hazelnut.

She was angry at me for barging in unannounced. She was a little drunk. But she calmed down, put on a dressing gown, and made tea. We sat in front of the fire. She said in her husky
chain-smoker’s voice that I would be making women dance “bare-nekit” soon enough.

When I was younger I was afraid to kiss her. The skin of her face was porous and she was old and smelt of port and soiled underwear. But that day my attitude changed. The house was empty, she
was naked, and I was nearly seventeen and deadly curious.

“Where’s Hector?” I said.

“He just went round the corner. He’ll be back in a few minutes.”

We sat in silence, each conscious of the other in a new and disturbing way.

That night I stayed at my aunt’s, sleeping with my cousin Hector. In bed I contemplated the possibility with vague lust before I went to sleep. Hector was sleeping soundly and I could hear
my aunt moving around in the kitchen. But at the last minute, standing outside the kitchen door in the dark hall, listening, breathing softly, I lost my nerve. I’m inclined to think that I
knew I would from the beginning, that I knew I should not have the nerve, that the satisfaction I sought was in the danger of the dark passage, naked in the hall. Anyway, I didn’t go in, and
afterwards I didn’t say anything to Hector, a boy a year younger than I. It was his mother and I thought he might be angry.

Two factors combined to give the impression that my aunt was fat. Her paunch had spread with middle age. Her cheap, fitted skirt made an inverted pear of her lower torso. Then, she wore no
brassiere, and her large, pendulous breasts were slung within the stained woollen jumper like a bag of meat almost at the level of her navel. When she moved about, her broad Slavic countenance
sailed under a bell of grey hair. Or she sat, feet on the hob, her knees up and causing her thighs to fall like Gladstone bags below the hem of her skirt. Seated like this, a smouldering cigarette
at her lips, she shot spittle or fart at the fire, drank tea or port, and directed the complex prenuptials of two unmarried daughters who in their later teens were groped and punctured on the couch
in the parlour. Christ died there nightly on wood hewn at Jerusalem, and Elvira, a dead member, was pale within the mahogany frame to which memory and a cancerous tumour had transposed her.

It was my father’s opinion that his brother’s house was unclean.

From time to time, in a variety of places, my mind has travelled back to the dead Elvira, to the couch whose old springs creaked under human weight, to the silver photograph frame containing
snapshots of my uncle in Naples, in Jaffa, in Suez. He died eventually of coronary thrombosis, the disease which killed my grandfather. In our family, amongst the menfolk, it is the heart which
cracks first.

There were many visitors at the house of my aunt. The sex of two young females, and, in their absence, the various articles of a personal spoor, was the catalytic influence which governed the
confluence of things, of the stewing meat, of the bottle of ruby port secreted beneath the disordered cavity bed, of teacups accepted and discarded by the perpetual stream of visitors who came
there in the afternoons and in the evenings and late at night when the girls appeared in the kitchen with their smoking rumps and ate finnan haddock which their father, retired from the sea and
working as a chef on the trains, had carried south from Aberdeen.

The girls, now women of mature age, were Viola and Tina.

I remember Viola in her petticoat at the sink. Her mauve armpits glistened with soap. She sponged, and the suds returned to the tin basin where her hand was. The small spike of wet hair down
which the water trickled was at that time eight years old and the armpit itself was twenty-two. The hair spread electrically while she was still in the convent about the time of the first flowering
of the bloody roses. Her bodily beauty got her a professional man against whom at moments of extreme tension she still invokes the Church. Malcolm was a medical student not yet qualified. They
lived in obscure furnished rooms at the east side of the city. She conceived for the first time defiantly, in squalor, and since that time, because her husband became a semi-invalid, her rooms have
always been more or less obscure, and her attitude has been one of tearful defiance, more or less. As a child I was always in love with Viola.

Each time I saw Angus he was going to or coming from bed. He was an argumentative man of slow speech and a score of rocklike abstractions. When those were not questioned his utterances began,
broke or ended with a yawn, and were often inspired by the weather. This last fact was strange because he had been on the night shift in a factory for fourteen years and the subtleties of the
weather were for him little more than a memory. “It’s cold,” he said, or, “It’s hot,” or, sometimes, “It’s raining.” The other was most helpful
when he commented on the state of the weather during the day. Angus narrowed his grey eyes and rubbed his prominent Adam’s apple. It was pale, pointed and bony, like the joint of a plucked
chicken’s wing. If there was any discrepancy between the item of information furnished by the other and the meteorological report on the radio Angus became reflective. If the other man was
still with him, he posed a question, his voice deliberate and high-pitched: “You said it rained all day?” The other nodded hesitantly. “That’s funny,” Angus said.
“It said on the wireless it was showery with bright periods.”

The other sister, Tina, was married to Angus and she copulated with him on Sunday mornings after reading the Sunday newspapers. That was in the bed behind the green curtains in the parlour
where, under the photograph of Elvira, Tina’s piano had stood since she became a woman of property. She owned a small general store which remained open sixteen hours a day including Sundays.
It was hard after her father succumbed to coronary thrombosis, for in his latter years he worked only six days a week in the kitchen of a large canteen and was thus free to work in the general
store on the seventh.

“He should’ve told us!” Aunt Hettie said after the last spasm.

There was a time when Tina was merely not beautiful. After she got goitre I visited her in the private nursing home where she had carried her shame, her boiled-egg eyes and humped throat, amidst
a litter of hairpins, chocolate wrappings, filter-tipped cigarettes and ailing females, each in a sad way excited to be a victim amongst other victims and to indulge herself in toilet waters and
expensive bed wraps such as that kind of invalid carries to that kind of place. Each was strangely flushed, with fats arranged nicely under silks and cashmere, and emitting an ambiguous odour of
scents, illness and sweat. They were very fond of the nurses.

Tina is out now and about, but her eyes at odd moments slip silently out of alignment and she has the aspect of looking at the floor and the ceiling at the same time. When she remembers, she
wears dark glasses, but she likes to be told that they are not necessary.

Hector, my boyhood friend, is the youngest member of the family. After his return from the army of occupation in Germany he worked as a commercial traveller. Like most of the younger salesmen,
he was only “marking time”. But after a few months Hector brought to the most obscure mysteries his eye of a commercial traveller. No other eye was his to bring.

It all seems a long time ago now, and my father saying his brother’s house was just a bloody railway station.

5
A
.
M
.
TUG CAME
for three of us before midnight. We moved line ahead over
the dark water past Brooklyn towards Coney Island. My scow was at the stern of the tow. The Ferris wheel was still alight. I felt rather than saw activity there as we drew nearer. Faint sounds.
Suddenly round the point on our starboard side the unutterable night of the Atlantic, big, black and menacing; there was no more light from the Jersey coast. From now until we gained the lee of
Rockaway Point we were in open sea.

I’d heard about it from some of the other scowmen but I hadn’t thought much about it, how a flat-bottomed scow loaded down almost to the gunwales with a thousand ton of stone, and
slung in a chain of scows behind a tug, moves when it is suddenly struck broadside by the black Atlantic.

It struck me as funny tonight that it should take place off Coney Island in sight of the Ferris wheel and all that crazy-motion machinery.

I had blown a joint and I was brewing a cup of coffee in the cabin when it struck. Somehow the helmsman of the tug misjudged his distance as he rounded a marking buoy and caused it to leap like
a wild top between the linking lines of the tow. First I heard a sharp crack from somewhere up at the bows and then there was an unidentifiable scraping or gouging which seemed to approach my cabin
with the shuddering noise of an express train. I moved quickly and as I opened the door an anonymous object like a huge Chianti bottle rose out of the spray, toppled quick and ghostly around my
port quarter and hurled its way out of sight into the swirling trough of water astern. I was still wondering what the hell that was as I became aware of the Atlantic rising like a sheet of black
ink high on my starboard and blotting out even the night sky.

I was standing in the wind, clutching at the doorway of my shack, the sea falling steeply away under my narrow catwalk, and for a moment I had the impression of tottering at the night edge of a
flat world. Then I was going down like you go down on a rollercoaster, braced in the doorway, the cabin light flooding out round about me as though it would project me into the oncoming blackness.
Black, then indigo as the horizon moved down like a sleek shutter from somewhere high above and flashed below the level of my eyes. A moment later the sea rose with a sucking sound and slid like a
monstrous lip onto my quarterdeck about my ankles. It was icy cold. At that moment, staring down at it as it swirled round about the battened hatches, it occurred to me that I might be about to
die.

It is surprising how after that split-second hesitation as one becomes adjusted to that possibility one moves at once to prevent it.

I had the sense of being adrift.

I locked the cabin door and climbed onto the roof where my storm lantern was creaking and dancing like a gibbet. Staring for’ard over the load it seemed to me that the long shadow of my
own scow and that of the scow ahead were bending together in the night like a gigantic hinge.

I moved gingerly on the leeside along a lifeline towards the bows. I knew as I got there that my starboard hawser was gone and as I climbed round onto the fo’c’sle I saw that both
crosslines had gone too. That left my port hawser. When that went, without power, my scow would be so much flotsam in the Atlantic. This had just occurred to me when the man on the scow ahead, the
devil himself it seemed to me at that moment, an ageless taciturn German with a beard and wearing a sou’wester, struck two blows with a heavy axe and parted my port hawser.