Free Cain’s Book by Alexander Trocchi Page A

stockings hung loose and creased, making her legs look mauve,
skin the colour of an eggplant, her taste in all things suggesting long indoctrination in a Mission School, her natural smell conveyed about her on waves of perpetually evaporating eau de cologne,
her manner of sitting at the edge of a chair, tall, straight, with her hat on and wearing white gloves, her cheap navy-blue suit buttoned up to the demure white ruff at her neck, knees together,
her feet ridiculous in Minnie Mouse shoes. When she visited she gave to whatever room the air of a waiting room in a provincial court. He read history at Oxford and not long after he arrived in
Paris to study certain medieval legal texts he met her at a Communist Party “social” near Barbès. She had come with her sister and her brother-in-law. When she became pregnant he
married her. He used to visit Moira and me when we lived together on the Rue Jacob. He was in love with Moira in his quiet, hopeless way, and of all his friends we were the only ones who were
permitted to meet his wife. I used to try to imagine conditions under which such a man would choose such a woman. For me she symbolized the vulgar triumph of all the tawdry goods, spiritual and
material, which were foisted on the African in exchange for lands and freedom.
Ave Caesar! Nunc civis romanus sum.
7 She was the kind of victim who
believed it. Was it only later that he discovered this or did he know it from the beginning? Each time he visited us we could sense his reluctance to return to her, but he went always, and I have
the impression that he is still doing so.
    The idea which I married when I married Moira was more obvious. From the age of twelve on she was the princess of my immediate experience, first evidence that beautiful girls existed beyond the
shadowy, teasing images of the cinema. Her beauty, I felt, would serve to put a frame round my own which, sad to say, had up till that time attracted the attention of few connoisseurs. I most
desperately needed evidence that in spite of the obvious deficiencies of my birth I was, after all, a prince, and I treasured intimations of things or imaginings to come as jealously as a
prospector his bag of samples. Daydreams anyway, drained of all assurance each time I was confronted by Moira in the flesh, too struck and captivated by her brilliant presence to have ulterior
thoughts; indeed, I had no more freedom than a yo-yo. Every dangerous act of rebellion – in time I attained a relative mastery – was consecrated to her, a classroom infested by six
hundred and forty-two bees, a fallen ceiling in the north wing, endless acts of sabotage to break the monotony of the long school day. She was flattered by the grandeur of some of these love tokens
but remained out of reach.
    My thoughts of her well beyond puberty were of a ghastly purity. Softs and damps were taboo. If she had dropped her pants I might have hanged myself. The first time I noticed the new inscription
in the boys’ lavatory: “Moira Taylor’s cunt”, I was stunned. Up till then my romantic agony had prevented me from framing such a concept.
    The object of my wet dreams was another girl, the highly sexed daughter of a Portuguese tart, whose actual advances I was young and misinformed enough to consider improper. Sylvia. Her surname,
like my own, provoked a strange response when it occurred in a list of more native surnames: Laird, Little, Macleod, McDonald, Morrison, Ross, Sylvia... Sylvia Jesus Sylvia was the full name
inscribed in the register, and, in its shortened form... Sylvia Sylvia, with the accent on the second syllable, its sound was almost obscene; it trickled like olive oil amongst the crags and the
heather. She was reputed to wear red knickers and her name was current in the school lavatories. Although she was only a year younger than I, Sylvia was at three forms remove, considered a rather
backward child, a problem for the teachers because of her abnormal physical