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Category: Erotica/Classic Erotica/Classic Literature
Description: Here is the frank, revelatory novel that served as the basis of the recent celebrated art film. The two crew members of a barge owned by the wife of one of the men pull an almost nude female body from the river. Murder is suspected. The single crew member becomes attracted to his friend's wife. The feeling is mutual. The lovers are caught in the act. Then the plot thickens and the lovemaking hotter!
eBook Publisher: Renaissance E Books/Sizzler, 2004
eBookwise Release Date: October 2004

2 Reader Ratings:

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Available eBook Formats: OEBFF Format (IMP) [240 KB]
Words: 57581
Reading time: 164-230 min.

PART ONE

PAGEBREAK

Chapter 1

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. My beard had grown during the night and now my checks and my chin were covered with stubble. I must have slept well; my eyes were less bloodshot than they had been during the previous fortnight. 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 into my left eyebrow was no more obvious than it had been the day before. Nothing seemed out of place. Yet everything was out of place because there existed between the mirror and myself the same distance--the same break in continuity--I have always felt to exist between the acts I committed in the past and my present consciousness of them.

But there is no problem.

I do not ask now whether I am the "I" looking or the image which was seen; whether I am the man who acted or the man who thought about the act. I know now that it is the structure of language itself which lacks continuity. The problem comes into being as soon as I use the word "I." There is no contradiction in things, only in objects, that is, in the words we invent to refer to things. It is the word "I" which is arbitrary and contains within itself its own inadequacy and its own contradiction.

There is no problem.

I saw that. 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 was not bad--but the way her body seemed to have given itself to the water. Its whole gesture was abandoned, with the long white legs apart and trailing, sucked downwards slightly at the feet.

As I leaned over the side of the barge with the boat hook, I did not think of her as a dead woman, not even when I looked at her 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 way from the head like long grasses. It alone was alive, and because the body was slow, heavy, torpid, it had become a forest of antennae, intricately caressing, feeding on the water.

It was not until Les swore at me for being so clumsy with the boat hook that I drew her alongside. He and I 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. Touching it made me realize how bloated it was.

Les told me, "For Christ's sake, get a bloody grip on it."

I leaned 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. Together we pulled her to the surface and, dripping a curtain of rainwater, over the gunwale. Her weight settled with a flat splash on the wooden boards of the deck.

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

The ambulance did not 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 sacks over her so that we wouldn't have to look at her and then I went over and telephoned and went back and joined Les and his wife 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 that wasn't true because I'd seen them in her basket when she returned.

"Salt?"

"Staring 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 Les, his face twitching as it sometimes did, went on reading the paper.

It was only when I began to eat my bacon that it occurred to me that they'd had an egg. I could see the traces on the prongs of their forks. Les 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 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 Les went ashore to talk to them. 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 that crept upstream near the far shore. Beyond it, on the far bank, a network of cranes and girders closed in about a ship. 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 of the dead woman and the egg and the salt. I was bored because it was the beginning of the day and not the end of it, days being each the same as the other, alike as beads on a string, with only the work on the barge and Les to talk to. I seldom talked to Ella. She appeared to dislike me and gave the impression that she only put up with me because of her husband.

And then I noticed Ella hanging out some clothes at the stern.

I had often seen her do it before, but it had never struck me in the same way. I had always thought of her as Les's wife--she was always screaming at him about something or calling him Mr. High-and-Mighty in a thick sarcastic voice. I never saw her as a woman who could attract another man. That had never occurred to me--until now.

But there she was, trying very hard not to look round, pretending she wasn't interested in what was going on, and I found myself looking at her in a new way.

She was one of those heavy women, not more than thirty-five, with strong buttocks and big thighs. She was wearing a tight green cotton dress that pulled up above the backs of her knees as she stretched up to put the clothes on the line. I could see the flesh of her pink ankles growing over the rim at the back of her shoes. She was heavy all right, but her waist was small and her legs were not bad. I could imagine being between them, belly to belly, wrapped securely in the oval of their embrace.

I watched her, and I could see her walk through a park at night, her heels clacking, just a little bit hurriedly, and her heavy white calves were moving just ahead of me. Even in the dark I was able to see them. And I imagined the soft sound of her thighs as their surfaces grazed, as whatever she wore beneath her dress was wedged softly in their damp and tremulous moving. As she reached up, her buttocks tightened, the cotton dress fitting itself to their thrust, and then she alighted on her heels, bent down, and shook out the next garment.

My manhood stirred at the sight. The rest of the world slipped away and my mind filled with the thought of her. I longed to possess her and put her body to the test. Inspired by the back view I had now, I thought of raising that thin membrane of material as she bent, forcing her forward and belly down and mounting her from behind. Surprised and humbled, she would not resist long. Face down on the wooden deck I could take her then and there. I could see and feel her now, my knees astride those powerful timbers, my haunches hard on hers as my hands kneaded her buttocks and opened the rosebud of her anus to my view while my member entered her more womanly slit.

She would be both humiliated and pleased at the ravaging I would render. Thrusting and lifting my body away from hers as she was pressed down to the hard wooden deck, I could touch Ella as I knew she had never been touched by Leslie. Plumbing a long-married woman's cunt from behind, I've found, very often introduces them to pleasant sensations long lost in a marriage become dull with sameness and ungenerous sex. I could be generous with a strong, mature body like Ella's. She would be appreciative.

A moment later she looked round. Her curiosity had got too much for her, and she caught me looking at her. Her look was uncertain. She flushed slightly. And then, very quickly, she returned to her chore.

The police sergeant was making notes in a little black notebook, occasionally licking the stub of his pencil. The other cop was standing with his mouth open watching the stretcher bearers who seemed to be taking their time. They had put the stretcher down on the quay and were looking inquiringly at the police sergeant who went over and looked under the sheet they had thrown over her when they put her on the stretcher. One of them spat. I glanced away again.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ella's legs move.

The ambulance men had lifted the stretcher again but one of them stumbled. A very white naked leg slipped from under the sheet and trailed along the ground like a parsnip. I glanced at Ella. She was watching it. She was horrified but it seemed to fascinate her.

"Whoa!" the man at the back said.

They lowered the stretcher again and the front man turned round and arranged the leg out of sight. He handled it as though he were ashamed of it. And then they hoisted the stretcher into the back of the ambulance and slammed the doors.

The sergeant closed his notebook, looped elastic round it, and went over to speak to the driver of the ambulance. Les was lighting his pipe.

Leslie undoubtedly was a big man when he was younger, still was, but his muscles were running to flesh and his face was heavy round the chin so that his head had the appearance of a square pink jujube sucked away drastically at the top. As he didn't shave very often, the rough pinkness of his cheeks was covered by a colorless spreading bristle. He had small light blue eyes sunk like buttons in soft wax, and they could be kind or angry. When he was drunk they were pink and threatening. The way he was standing, you could see he wasn't a young man; in his middle fifties, I suppose.

The ambulance was driving away and the sergeant was going over to talk to Les again. I remember it struck me as funny at the time that he should address all his remarks to Leslie. I watched the cat sniffing at something near the quay wall. It tried to turn it over with its paw. Ella lifted the basin that had held the wet clothes and gave me a look somewhere between angry and intimate. She turned away and I could see she was in some way trying to get back at me for the long look I had had at her backside, so I didn't say anything. I heard her clump down through the companionway into the cabin.

Suddenly, I laughed. Les and the sergeant and the cat all stopped to look at me. But I went on laughing.

There was the discussion about suicide or murder. "What did the police think?" Ella asked Les as soon as the police were gone, as soon as the ambulance had driven away and he, with an unlit pipe in his mouth, came back aboard.

I watched Ella carefully. She was inquisitive. But, at the same time, she wanted us to think that she was above that kind of thing even if we weren't.

Les said that the sergeant didn't know. But there were no marks on the body so Leslie did not think it could have been murder.

And I knew Ella was going to say just what she did say about it "being just like men not to be able to keep their eyes off a woman especially if she had no clothes on." I thought the words just suited her standing there as she was in her too-tight green cotton dress, stretched so that you could see the shape and strength of her thighs and the muscles of her belly.

Ah, but if I could have had at her, I'd change her tune. If I could get her without her clothes on she'd know the pleasure of the nakedness she now derided. Just rip that wash-faded cotton rag from her body and expose her to my intimate scrutiny. No need to steal a glance or hurry the moment. Stripped naked I could savor the bodily delights now hidden from my view.

I could enjoy the spread of her broad hips above those sturdy loins. My gaze could explore the quick taper of her waist as it turned above her hips before it rose up and outward again to flesh-covered ribs that showed themselves ever so slightly before the underlying structure was lost in the middle softness distinct to a woman. Her tits were fine for me, I knew. I had glimpsed them from time to time. But to savor the sight of those pendulous hillocks, unfettered. I could teach her to enjoy the viewing as much as I would.

It's all in the seeing, you see. To be seen naked, stripped bare, by appreciate eyes makes all the difference even to one as fearful of the seeing as Ella. I was sure I could convince her. I was equally sure that, despite the view she vocalized there on the deck, she wished to be convinced.

From her breasts my gaze would caress her centerline, down the thin track of hair I was certain traced a path between her navel and the fuzz about her sweet slit. Beneath my unflinching eye her excitement would mount and those strong legs would tense and her mons would blossom. Her nether lips would engulf and darken and grow warm and moist, longing for a touch. She would shift and spread her legs apart for better balance and to better expose her sex. But I would not yet grant that touch to her or to my own desire. Just look on appreciatively. And that, in turn, would fuel her passion more.