Cain’s Book (10 page)

I have talked to him for hours. But in the end he always comes back to saying he’s going to kick. That’s because he hasn’t really got much choice. He has no money. To get money
he has to kick and there’s a fat chance of his kicking without money. Still, it bugs me when he goes on talking about kicking.

“I’m gonna kick.”

“Man, you’ll never kick.” Sometimes I don’t even say it.

“You bastard, I will.”

“OK then, you’ll kick.”

“Sure I will. You think I can go on like this?”

“You did before.”

“That’s different. I was hung up then. I’ll get the place fixed up good. You help me, Joe. If we only had some bread.”

“How much rent do you owe?”

“Not much, a few months.”

“How many months?”

“Must be about eight.”

“You’ve been goofing for eight months? You owe 320 dollars back rent.”

“I’m gonna see him and say I’ll pay it off, twenty a week.”

“Where are you going to get twenty a week?”

“I can get a job. I’ll start kicking tomorrow. I can kick it in three days. I haven’t got a real habit. I’ll get dollies. I know a stud who knows where to get them cheap.
I’ll stay off shit. I won’t touch the damn stuff.”

“Don’t talk like an alcoholic.”

But it’s like telling a man inflicted with infantile paralysis to run a hundred yards. Without the stuff Tom’s face takes on a strained expression; as the effect of the last fix
wears off all grace dies within him. He becomes a dead thing. For him, ordinary consciousness is like a slow desert at the centre of his being; his emptiness is suffocating. He tries to drink, to
think of women, to remain interested, but his expression becomes shifty. The one vital coil in him is the bitter knowledge that he can choose to fix again. I have watched him. At the beginning
he’s over-confident. He laughs too much. But soon he falls silent and hovers restlessly at the edge of a conversation, as though he were waiting for the void of the drugless present to be
miraculously filled. (
What would you do all day if you didn’t have to look for a fix?
) He is like a child dying of boredom, waiting for promised relief, until his expression becomes
sullen. Then, when his face takes on a disdainful expression, I know he has decided to go and look for a fix.

“You going to split, Tom?”

“Yeah, you comin’?”

I have gone with him sometimes.

“Look, you’ve still got some dollies, Tom.”

“I finished them.”

“Christ, already? OK. I’ve got some goofballs and we can get a bottle of cough syrup. You can drink that.”

“That stuff’s no good.”

“It’ll cool you.”

Two o’clock in the morning. Sitting in Jim Moore’s drinking coffee slowly. A few haggard men. A drunk woman trying to get someone to go home with her.

“I’m going home, Tom.”

“Where?”

“Bank Street. I’m going to try and get some sleep.”

“Look, let me come with you. If I stay around here I’ll meet someone and get turned on.”

“I thought that’s what we were sitting here for.”

“No, Joe, it’ll be OK tomorrow. It’ll be three days.”

“OK. Come on then.”

We get into the narrow bed and turn off the light. We lie awake for a while in the dark. I say: “Look, Tom, you’ll be OK.”

“I think I can sleep.”

I feel his arm move round me. I am suddenly very glad he is there.

I used to wonder if we would make love. Sometimes I felt we were on the brink of it. I think it occurred to both of us during those nights Tom slept with me in my single bed on Bank Street, his
long brown arm round my body. There hasn’t been much of what is ordinarily understood as sexuality in our relationship. The effect of heroin is to remove all physical urgency from the thought
of sex. But on those nights we hadn’t taken any heroin. We had drunk, turned on pot, taken whatever pills were available, and there were moments when our naked flesh touched and we were at
the edge of some kind of release. If either of us had moved the other would probably have followed.

I can see Tom smiling as he comes in, his lips drawn back, showing his long teeth. He is wearing a chamois cap in the style of the English gentleman, a well-cut green pullover,
drainpipe trousers, and a pair of oversized, beat-up ankle boots. Over all he wears a brown leather coat of past days’ motorists. When he turns on he walks and stands vaguely like an ape,
bent at the knees, bent at the crotch, bent at the midriff, long arms dangling in front. Sometimes he carries an umbrella.

His first glance is at me, smiling across at me with his dark, beautiful eyes. And then, “Down boy! Down! Down, I tell yah! Christ, yah bad bitch!” The dog, its legs rigid, is
dragged by the collar across the wooden floor and forced outside the main part of the loft. Tom closes the door quickly behind it, turns to me and grins again.

“You wanna get straight?”

He unbuckles his leather coat, hangs it carefully on a hanger, his cap on a hook, and unwraps the beautifully designed pale green scarf from his shoulders.

When I come with the water he is already pouring the powder from the transparent envelope into the spoon.

“I go first,” he says.

I don’t answer. I am watching how he lifts the water from the tumbler into the eye-dropper. I am wondering whether he is going to be quick or slow.

His nose is two inches above the spoon as he drops the water from the eye-dropper onto the powder. He holds the spoon near his eyes as he applies matches to it. He sets the spoon back on the
table, bubbling.

He is doing all right.

Siphoning up the liquid again, applying the needle with its collar (a strip from the end of a dollar bill) to the neck of the dropper, twisting it on, resting the shot momentarily at the edge of
the table while he ties up with the leather belt on his right arm... but I am already beyond all that. I am not watching and he is not playing for a public... if he is I shan’t notice because
I am not watching... we are both of us, I believe, relating each and separately to the heroin before us. He is stroking the arm he is about to puncture just above a blackish vein and I am already
moving to cook up my own fix in the spoon. By the time I have it prepared he is already loosening the belt. And now he presses the bulb. It doesn’t take long. It might have taken much
longer.

As I take my own fix I am looking at all the needle marks. They follow the length of the vein down the arm. Since the Man looks for marks I am trying to keep them dispersed, to keep them as
impermanent as possible. Some junkies use a woman’s cosmetic to mask their marks; it is simpler to stick to one vein until it collapses. They do so and make up their arms, just where the
elbow bends, like a woman makes up her face. Shooting in places where the vein is more submerged has over a period of time made quite a mess of my arm. As I fix I am aware of Tom, slightly to one
side of me, standing, his left hand lying on the table for balance, smiling idyllically. I wash out the eye-dropper and sit down on the bed. I begin to scratch.

An hour later Tom says: “Man, that’s good shit,” and he drapes himself at the other end of the bed. The dog barks in the next room.

“Don’t let the bastard in,” I say.

I was still lying on the bunk at three in the afternoon when Geo’s scow was unexpectedly pulled in. I opened the door and it was Geo, grinning hugely in greeting.
“Runner told me to give you this,” he said, handing me a letter. “I see it’s from Scotland. Who’s it from? Your old man?”

M
Y MOTHER WAS PROUD
and my father was an unemployed musician with the name of an Italian.

The blue-black hairs on my father’s legs gave to his flesh the whiteness of beeswax. I associated him with the odours of pomade and Sloan’s Liniment. The bathroom was his lair and
his unguents were contained in a white cabinet affixed by four screws to a green wall. The pomade came in a squat jar with a red cap, the liniment in a flat bottle on whose label was an engraved
likeness of Joseph V. Stalin. Because of his strange moustache I always thought of Mr Sloan as an Italian. It was not until today that it occurred to me to suspect that he wasn’t. The name of
the maker of the pomade was Gilchrist, and yet it too was oily and glistened in my father’s scalp.

In my father’s obsequiousness there was an assurance, but as he grew older he became reflective during the winter months. His step quickened, his distances were less ambitious. He spent
more time in smoke rooms over coffee and didn’t move out again into the street until the waitresses had begun to sweep away the fag ends which had been trodden into the carpet and to polish
the glass tops on the tables. At that point he glanced at the clock he had been aware of since he came in, pretended to have found himself once again in time confronted by an overlooked
appointment, and walked purposively to the swing doors. In one of his ungloved hands he carried a small leather briefcase which contained the morning paper, the evening paper, and a pale-blue box
of deckled notepaper with envelopes to match. Sometimes he stopped abruptly on the pavement and fingered the lapel of his heavy coat. He looked guiltily at the feet of the people who passed him on
either side. And then he walked more slowly. Every so often, just in that way, he remembered his angina. The word stuck in his throat. He was afraid to die on the public thoroughfare.

Sunday. My father would be awake before the milk and the morning papers were delivered. He slept four or five hours at most. After the death of my mother he lived alone. At nine he shaved. Not
before. The number of such necessary enterprises was very meagre. He had to spread them thinly over the day, as he spread the margarine thinly over his bread, to prevent the collapse of his world.
The fort wall was a frail one between my father and his freedom. He shored it up daily by complex ordnance. He was chosen for by an old selector system of tested rites. He gargled, watching his
eyes in the mirror. He polished his shoes. He prepared his breakfast. He shaved. After that he staved off chaos until he had purchased the morning paper. Births, marriages and deaths. He moved up
and down the columns at the edge of himself. But with the years he achieved skill. Either way he was safe. If none of the names meant anything to him he could enjoy relief; if a friend had died he
could after that first flicker of triumph be involved in solemnity. His hours were lived in that way, against what was gratuitous, and he was all the time envious... at the brink. There is no
suspicion so terrible as the vague and damning awareness that one was free to choose from the beginning.

Glasgow, 1949. When I let myself into his room my father was sitting in front of a one-bar electric fire. His hands were thrust forward in front of him, the fingers tilted
upwards to catch the glow on his soft white palms. He was looking at the wedding ring of his dead wife which he always wore on the third finger of his left hand. He was pleased to see me. It was
the first time since the New Year. He shook hands ceremoniously, holding mine within both of his, and then he lit the gas and put on the kettle. He said we would have a cup of tea. It was cold
outside and he hadn’t been out during the day. We were in for a long winter by the looks of things. He asked me if I was hungry. He had some tins, one of sardines, one of peas, and one of
pilchards or herrings in tomato sauce – he didn’t know which. I said I wasn’t but that I would take a cup of tea. He nodded vaguely. “Damn gas,” he said,
“there’s no pressure.” He fiddled around with the rubber tube which was attached to the gas ring and then, still with his back towards me, he said: “Doing anything yet,
son?” And I said: “Not yet.”

He leant down and removed a piece of white fluff from the carpet. For a moment he seemed to be at a loss where to put it. He laid it at last in an ashtray on the mantelpiece. His hand brushed
the pale-green alarm clock which stood there and came to rest on his fountain pen, which he carried in his right-hand vest pocket, fingering it. He wasn’t wearing his jacket.

When the kettle began to sing he came back again, lifting the lid and peering inside. Steam rose up about his hand. He replaced the lid, walked away again, and wiped his hands on one of his very
clean white towels. His towels are always immaculate, especially the one he wears round his neck as he shaves. He arranged it neatly on the towel rail when he had finished. He said it was difficult
these days. The post-war boom was over.

My father had been unemployed for twenty-five years.

He stood well back from the teapot, his left hand pressed against his paunch as he poured the water in with his right hand. He was forced to lean down over the teapot to see if it was full. He
poured the tea and handed me my cup. As he did so, he looked hurt for some reason or other, but he wasn’t looking directly at me. “How’s Moira?” he said. “She back at
work?”

I nodded. I asked him if he had seen Viola lately.

“Your cousin?”

He hadn’t seen her but he had heard of her through Tina. Viola’s husband was ill again evidently, one lung collapsed. He had given her a hard time; she had gone again to the minister
as she would have gone to the priest. The minister talked to him, man to man.

“Still,” my father said, “he gets a good pension. Your aunt’s just the same as ever.”

“I thought of going to see Viola,” I said.

He nodded. “She’d appreciate it. She’s had a hard time.”

He looked at my empty cup and poured me another one, milk, sugar, tea, in that order. Then he sat, rubbed his stockinged feet, and put on his outdoor shoes. He supposed I’d be going in a
few minutes. If I cared to wait while he put on a collar and tie he would have a drink with me before I caught the tram. He said again he hadn’t been out during the day. It would do him good,
he felt.