Cain’s Book (7 page)

That struck me as stupid so I didn’t answer.

“Do you hear what I say?” she demanded.

I looked at her speculatively.

“Well?” she said.

She began to speak again but this time she broke off in the middle. And then she walked across the room and poured herself a drink. She moved from one event to another without ever coming to a
decision. It was as though she were trapped outside her own experience, afraid to go in. I don’t know what it was she was going to say. She poured herself a drink instead. I watched her from
where I was sitting. Her thighs under the soft donkey-brown wool were attractive. She has still got good thighs. Her flesh is still firm and smooth to the touch: belly, buttocks, and thighs. The
emotion was there, at all the muscle and fibre. And then she was opposite me again, sipping distastefully at her drink, avoiding my gaze. She was trying to give the impression that she was no
longer aware of me and at the same time she sensed the absurdity of her position. That made her uncomfortable. For her the absurd was something to shun. She had a hard time of it, retreating like a
Roman before Goths and Vandals.

It occurred to me that I might take her. She didn’t suspect. She didn’t realize her belly was more provocative when it had been run through with hatred. Hatred contracts; it knitted
her thicknesses. She was hotter then, only then. As she began to doubt my love she became a martyr and unlovable. But anger sometimes freed her; her muscles had experienced excitement... To walk
across to her. She would pull herself up defensively and refuse to look at me. But her distance was unconvincing. She was not inviolable. That was the moment when I had to be in control of myself,
for my lust tended to become acid in my mouth. I preferred her anger to her stupidity. It was something against which I could pit my lust. When I was confronted by her stupidity there took place in
me a kind of dissociation, like the progressive separation in milk as it turns sour. I was no longer, as it were, intact, and she was no longer interesting.

I thought of the man in the lane. I had suddenly felt very close to myself, as though I were on the edge of a discovery. I was perplexed when I couldn’t find him in the bar. I supposed he
must have left while I was in the lavatory. The torso was cut deep in the wood, an oakleaf of varnish left where the pubic hairs were. I touched it with my forefinger, scratching varnish off with
my fingernail. It struck me that it was too big. My wife had a big cunt with a lot of pubic hair, but not as big as that. It was heavily packed into her crotch. When I thought of it I always
thought of it wet, the hairs close at the chalk-white skin of her lower belly and embedded like filings in the pores. That made me think of her mother. I don’t know why. The torso held my
attention. I ran my fingers over it. The pads of my fingers were excited by the rough wood. I felt a slight prickling at the hairs at the back of my neck. I hadn’t known wood so intimately
before. I participated. I leant against it. It felt good. That was when I first thought of my wife that night, more particularly, of the elaborate “V” of her sex, standing with my
thighs close to the door, touching. I took one drink and left. There was no sign of any man. I looked up and down the street. I felt it was going to snow.

My memory of that New Year’s Eve joins those two together, my ex-wife Moira, at her most abject, and the Glasgow proletarian my mother feared, and whose image in the lane under the
gaslight, with a thing of silver in one hard hand, elides mysteriously into myself. I often thought it must have been a razor, Occam’s perhaps.

It occurred to me she was wearing those new earrings her cousin brought her from Spain. That was the second time I noticed the earrings that night. She had had her ears pierced a month before.
The doctor did it for her. She said she thought drop earrings suited her.

It was New Year’s Eve. Moira felt she was about to step across a threshold. The earrings represented her decision to do so. The date was marked on a calendar. I had wondered why she was
wearing them. She had said earlier she didn’t want to go to a cinema. Actually I had forgotten the date. I was surprised she was wearing the earrings when I got back to the flat.

She was standing in the middle of the room, facing me. I felt she was waiting for me to say something. I had just come in. I was to notice the earrings. When I had done so we were to step hand
in hand into a new calendar year. But I didn’t notice them. I was still thinking of the man in the lane. And Moira herself got in the way, standing in the middle of the room, looking stupid,
like she did in public when she thought no one was paying attention to her. Her eyes, as they say, expressed polite interest, indefatigably. At nothing, nothing. At the beginning I didn’t see
it. Perhaps it didn’t exist at the beginning. I don’t know. Anyway, it came to be as obtrusive as her mother’s respectability. It had a murderous emphasis. As I say, I
didn’t see it at the beginning. I even looked the other way. But gradually it became clear to me that she was, among other things, stupid. A stupid bitch. And she had become a boring lay,
unimaginative, like a gramophone. And so I didn’t notice the earrings and my foot was not poised with hers on any threshold and my attention wandered.

I felt she was growing impatient, sitting there, nursing her drink, that she was not sure whether to make a scene, maintain her brittle composure there in the room, or go out quietly. The last
move alone would have been authentic... or if she had offered me a drink... but she was incapable of making it. I think she thought she gave the impression of being dangerous. But Moira was never
dangerous, or certainly wasn’t at that time. She was not in the least improbable. When the clock struck twelve I heard chairs scraping across the floor of the flat above and the muffled noise
of a woman’s laughter. When my wife heard it... our chimes clock now continued its monotonous tick... she stiffened, and at that instant I caught her eye. I had seldom seen her so angry. She
lunged out with her foot and kicked over the table. The whiskey bottle splintered on the hearth and the whiskey seeped out underneath the fender onto the carpet where it made a dark stain. For a
moment, contemplating it and then me, she tottered like a skittle, and then, bursting into tears, she threw herself out of the room. She had removed her body with her anger. I felt suddenly quite
empty.

My mind returned then to the lavatory. I had examined the oakleaf and with my penknife I hewed it down to its proper size. It was no bigger than a pea when I had finished, a minute isosceles
triangle with a rough bottom edge to it. I was pleased with the result. Leaning forward then on the handle of my knife, I caused the small blade to sink deeply into the wood at a low centre in the
triangle. The knife came away with a small tug. The score, because of the camber of the blade, was most lifelike; wedge-shaped, deep. I completed my toilet and returned to the bar. I drank a
whiskey. When I left I made straight for the alley.

The flats above formed a tunnel over it where it met the street so that one looked through darkness towards light. Just beyond the darkness, half out of sight round a jutting cornerstone, the
man should have stood. I walked along the centre of the lane through the tunnel. The lane, a dead end, was deserted. The dustbins were already out. I lingered a while. Perhaps I was the stranger
you watched apprehensively from your kitchen window. When I left the lane it was already dark and a lamplighter was coming in my direction with his long lit pole.

The flash of silver... the sudden excitement that was almost a nausea... the thought of Moira before we left Glasgow... the whole complex of the past: I relived it all in that
instant I caught sight of the man in the alley on my way back to the scow. The heroin had worn off but I was still pleasantly high from a joint that Tom and I had smoked on the way to Sheridan
Square. The street was deserted. The man in the alley, facing the wall, hadn’t noticed me yet. I was standing about ten yards from him. Like a man looking on a new continent. I felt the
decision at my nostrils, and perhaps it was to communicate that to him, or perhaps it was simply to steady myself in my purpose – I lit a cigarette, cupping my hands over the match and
holding them close to my face, causing the skin of my lower face to glow in the shaft of warmth from the match and leaving the skin about my lips tingling minutely in anticipation. The noise of the
match striking and the sudden glow in the dark reached him. He froze momentarily and then looked sideways towards me. I could just make out the round yellowish face and the black moustache. There
was a tightening pleasure at my entrails. I was quite sure of myself now. A nameless man. And something nameless had taken possession of me. I had simply to be and feel the workings of the nameless
purpose in me, to grant, permissively to meet with, sensation unobstructed, rocked gently out of nightmare at him. He was buttoning up, slowly, it might have been reflectively, and then he turned
towards me. There was something oblique and crablike in his movement. He was standing there, still under the electric lamp which shone on his shapeless double-breasted jacket at the shoulder and on
the right side of his round face. I felt myself moving slowly towards him a foot at a time, looking straight at his face. It seemed that he moved forward to meet me. In a few sensational seconds my
front was close to his front and our faces were an inch apart. I felt the warmth of his ear against mine and his hand. Belt, thighs, knees, chest, cheek. A few minutes later we were walking very
close together back to my scow at Pier 72.

New Year’s Day. Early. Just after two a.m. I had just written:

I heard them in the hall.

My wife’s brother crossed the room after glancing at the shattered whiskey bottle. It still lay where she had thrown it. He was wearing a fawn cashmere coat with a thick blue-and-white
scarf wrapped around his neck so that the head, tilted slightly backwards and bringing the fleshy chin into prominence, gave the impression of having been severed from the body and later cushioned
there, neatly, pink, and vaguely apoplectic.

When he greeted me it sounded vaguely like a challenge. Robert was vaguely many things; a challenger, a man embarrassed, an inquisitor; his approach, his whole demeanour – at least towards
me – was indirect. He was driven on by his sense of duty but was at the same time, so to speak, afraid to stir up the broth. He would gladly not have known what for a long time he had
suspected. He had often said to me that he didn’t think I was rotten through and through.

“Otherwise Moira wouldn’t love you as she does, now, would she?” But it wasn’t much after all. Not enough to dispel his consternation.

“Happy New Year, Joe!”

I took his proffered hand, thanked him, and wished him the same.

Moira, who had come in behind him, was staring angrily at the shattered bottle. Robert, turning towards her and following her gaze, murmured quietly: “Better clean it up, Moira.
It’ll get trod in.”

She burst into tears.

“Now, now, Moira,” Robert said to her, moving to her and guiding her by the arm towards the bedroom, “you just go to bed and get rested and let me talk this over with
Joe.” He followed her into the bedroom. I could hear him expostulating with her, imploring her to be reasonable. I felt sorry for him, for both of them, but I didn’t think it was a good
idea to go after them. It wouldn’t have solved anything.

When he came back he sat down in a chair opposite me. He had taken off his coat and scarf. He held them on his knees as he spoke.

“You might have cleaned it up,” he said.

“I probably will.”

He nodded quickly and, after a moment’s hesitation, he went on to say that he wasn’t the type of person who interfered with other people’s business, that if the war had taught
him anything it was that there were two sides to every question. During the war my brother-in-law was a major in the Royal Corps of Signals. The military air, leavened by what I suppose he took to
be his modesty, was to some extent still with him. He added that in his professional experience he had learnt that it was not always useful to look at everything through one’s own eyes; even
the Law recognized this in its principle of arbitration, the judge in a court of law being neutral in spite of the fact that he was appointed by State. My brother-in-law was a solicitor. He often
found it helpful to make a gesture to his authorities, military or judiciary, when he was leading up to his point, presenting credentials. He continued. He would be the first to agree if I objected
to his arbitration on the ground that he was his sister’s brother, and therefore not, strictly speaking, neutral. However, he hoped I knew
him.
And, as he had said before, he had no
wish to interfere, especially as it was the New Year. He paused. He said he thought one should begin the New Year with a fresh start, not with recriminations. But there it was. Moira, he meant. The
poor girl was deeply hurt. To throw bottles about, he meant. He knew I would see that. He had always known I was intelligent. And it wasn’t like her to throw bottles about all over the place.
We both knew that. He had said it. He had promised Moira he would have it out with me. And after all she
was
his sister. Very dear to him. He knew that she was dear to me also. He had
never had any doubts about that. He would not say he didn’t find me difficult to understand sometimes. A man who didn’t work, he meant. Oh, he knew I was supposed to be writing or
something. But after all I wasn’t a child any more. A man of my age. Well, anyway, it was none of his business and the last thing he wanted to do was to interfere. If Moira didn’t mind
working while I sat at home that was her business. But he didn’t like to see her upset. It was the New Year. Bygones should be bygones. If I was agreed no more needed to be said. He was sure
I would see things his way. I was a reasonable man. He was willing to shake hands and say no more. What now, agreed?