Free Cain’s Book by Alexander Trocchi Page B

development. Her academic placement more or less cut her off from boys who, if she could have attended their dances,
might have been interested in her.
    The school, a coeducational boarding establishment in the countryside of Kirkcudbrightshire – a brave, wartime measure – was a sensitive spot for the more advanced educationists in
Scotland. The many acres of garden and park with its copses and wildlife in which children of both sexes could wander was always a potential target for the long moral rifles of the descendants of
John Knox. 8
    I was in the fifth form and had the privilege of visiting the junior dance which ended at 7.30 p.m. After that, Sylvia, as a junior, was not allowed in the large room where the dances were held.
Relations between her and me for the rest of the evening were regarded as improper. The headmistress, whose particular favourite among the boys I was – she saved me more than once from the
wrath of the headmaster – was doubly hard on Sylvia.
    “Sylvia Sylvia’s cunt”: I had no difficulty in conceiving that; I was conscious of its insistent animality every time I danced with her. On soft summer nights, set between her
soft plump thighs, like a dark rose, it was served darkly to me in my dreams. I would promise myself that on the morrow I would say yes. But the sun rose with Moira Taylor and daylight defeated
me.
    I made love for the first time with a prostitute. Princes Street, Edinburgh. Ten shillings for a short time in an air-raid shelter. I had never seen such ugly thighs nor ever imagined it like
that, exposed for me in matchlight, the flaccid buttocks like pale meat on the stone stairs, the baggy skirt raised as far as her navel and with spread knees making a cave of her crotch, the match
flickering and this first sex shadowy and hanging colourless like a clot of spiderweb from the blunt butt of her mound. She rubbed spittle on it brusquely, as my mother with a handkerchief rubbed
spittle against my cheek when we were visiting. She rubbed spittle on it and it was like someone scratching his head. It bristled then, and bared its pretty pink fangs. She told me to hurry up. The
stone steps were cold. Above in the street there was a fine rain and I could hear the swish of tyres on the wet macadam. At my naked thighs I felt the night wind. The match was out. In the almost
total obscurity of the shelter I lay on top of her and felt her belly sink cool and soft and clammy under my own.
    I was a seaman in the Royal Navy at the time. I remember walking alone back to the YMCA where I was staying. I went over it again and again in my mind, and by the time I reached the YM little
feeling of guilt remained. I was even in a vague way proud, callow possibly, but I experienced an authentic feeling of relief. I savoured it with a cup of milky coffee in the tearoom of the YM.
    I had been lying in the bunk for over an hour allowing thoughts of the past to mingle with my more immediate memory of the man’s naked body pressing down on me. He had
gone after about an hour, before dawn. I fell asleep almost at once.
    He was Puerto Rican and he told me his name was Manuelo. He spoke almost no English and I almost no Spanish and it had occurred to me as soon as we were in the cabin with one kerosene lamp lit
and the dead silence broken only by the regular leak of water at the bilges of the scow... on us and infesting us with its own secrecy... it occurred to me that it was better that way. There were
no common memories between us; we shared our male sex only, our humanity, and our lust.
    It was not the first time I had had sexual experience with a man, but it was the first time it was not in one way or another abortive, it was the first time I had encountered a man who knew how
to take all that was given without a trace either of embarrassment or of that shrill crustacean humour dedicated homosexuals sometimes adopt, and my body afterwards was heavy with the kind of
satisfaction I have often