Young Adam: A Novel by Alexander Trocchi

Author:Alexander Trocchi [Trocchi, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Literary, Psychological, Crime, Fiction
ISBN: 9780802126177
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 2017-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

Part Two

1

GO BACK TO THE BEGINNING.

It’s an odd thing, or rather it 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 brainwave, on the very day we dragged the dead woman from the river. For that reason, and not to complicate the issue, I said nothing about Cathie. At least I didn’t show where she fitted into the picture. She was there all the time of course, but you didn’t know it. She was the corpse.

I nearly said my corpse. But a corpse, strictly speaking, doesn’t belong to anyone, and though I could have laid some claim to her body while it lived, I like to think I have no claim, not even a murderer’s, on her corpse.

I killed Cathie. There’s no point in denying it since no one would believe me. The police, with their usual sensationalism, began at once to investigate the possibility of foul play. That was according to the newspapers. What it meant in fact was that they were already looking for a murderer. Well, they found one, but we’ll come to that later. What convinced them, I suppose, was the fact that she was wearing no clothes. That, they no doubt felt, indicated the presence of a man. At least one 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, conscious of their status as guardians of public morals, encouraged the idea. The general public swallowed it greedily. Leslie believed. Bob believed. Ella believed. So I went on keeping my mouth shut.

Go back to the beginning, the one I chose, though I might have gone back a year or even ten to find the beginnings of it all, to that morning we dragged her from the river. 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 at one mile’s distance from where she fell in. I felt at the time that it was ludicrous, so incredible that if Leslie had not happened to come up on deck at the time I should most certainly have refused to accept such an improbable event and tried to thrust her away again with the boat-hook.

Unfortunately, Leslie slouched up at the wrong moment and it occurred to him on seeing the body in the water that it was our duty to fish it out. At least that’s what he said.

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.

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