Young Adam

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• Publisher: Alma Classics
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780714544625
• eBook ISBN: 9780714548692
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

Set on a canal linking Glasgow and Edinburgh, Young Adam is the masterly literary debut by one of the most important British post-war novelists.Trocchi's narrator is an outsider, a drifter working for the skipper of a barge. Together they discover a young woman's corpse floating in the canal, and tensions increase further in cramped confines with the narrator's highly charged seduction of the skipper's wife. Conventional morality and the objective meaning of events are stripped away in a work that proves compulsively readable.

Part One

1

These are times when what is to be said looks out of the past at you – looks out like someone at a window and you in the street as you walk along. Past hours, past acts, take on an uncanny isolation; between them and you who look back on them now there is no continuity.

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. It is unbreakable. My beard had grown imperceptibly during the night and now my cheeks and chin were covered with a short stubble. My eyes were less bloodshot than they had been during the previous fortnight. I must have slept well. 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 down into my left eyebrow was no more obvious than it had been the day before. Nothing out of place and yet everything was, because there existed between the mirror and myself the same distance, the same break in continuity which I have always felt to exist between acts which I committed yesterday and my present consciousness of them.

But there is no problem.

I don’t ask whether I am the “I” who looked or the image which was seen, the man who acted or the man who thought about the act. For I know now that it is the structure of language itself which is treacherous. The problem comes into being as soon as I begin to use the word “I”. There is no contradiction in things, only in the words we invent to refer to things. It is the word “I” which is arbitrary and which contains within it its own inadequacy and its own contradiction.

No problem. Somewhere from beyond the dark edge of the universe a hyena’s laugh. 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 wasn’t bad, but the way her body seemed to have given itself to the water, its whole gesture abandoned, the long white legs apart and trailing, sucked downwards slightly at the feet.

As I leant over the edge of the barge with a boathook I didn’t think of her as a dead woman, not even when I looked at the 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 away from the head like long grasses. Only it was alive, and because the body was slow, heavy, torpid, it had become a forest of antennae, caressing, feeding on the water, intricately.

It was not until Leslie swore at me for being so handless with the boathook that I drew her alongside. We 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. It was touching it that made me realize how bloated it was.

Leslie said: “For Christ’s sake get a bloody grip on it!”

I leant 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, like the fat underbelly of a fish. Together we pulled her to the surface and, dripping a curtain of river-water, over the gunwale. Her weight settled with a flat, splashing sound on the wooden boards of the deck. Puddles of water formed quickly at the knees and where the chin lay.

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

“A hundred and thirty at eleven pence a pound”: an irrelevant thought… I didn’t know how it came to me, and for more than one reason, partly because I knew Leslie would be shocked, I didn’t utter it. Later you will see what I mean.

The ambulance didn’t 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 potato sacks over her so that she wouldn’t frighten the kid and then I went over and telephoned and went back and joined Leslie and his wife and the kid 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 wasn’t true because I’d seen her take them from her basket when she returned. That made me angry, that she didn’t take the trouble to remember how she’d examined the shells because she thought she might have broken one of them, and me there in the cabin at the time. It was a kind of insult.

“Salt?” I said, the monosyllable carrying the cynical weight of my disbelief.

“Starin’ 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 Leslie, his face twitching as it sometimes did, went on reading the paper.

It was only when I had began to eat my bacon that it occurred to me they’d had an egg. I could see the traces on the prongs of their forks. And after I’d gone all the way across the dock to the telephone… Leslie 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, taking the kid with her, 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 Leslie went ashore to talk to them. Jim, the kid, was sitting on an upturned pail near the bows so that he would get a good view. He was eating an apple. 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 which crept upstream near the far shore. Beyond it on the far bank, a network of cranes and girders closed in about a ship. “To sail away on a ship like that,” I thought, “away. Montevideo, Macao, anywhere. What the hell am I doing here? The pale North.” 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 again of the dead woman and the egg and the salt and I was bored by the fact that it was the beginning of the day and not the end of it, days being each the same as the other as they...

Table of contents

• Young Adam
• Young Adam
• Introduction
• Young Adam
• Part One
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• Part Two
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• Part Three
• 1
• 2
• calder publications