by Will Self
However, along with this came a velcro wrenching as the little hooks of Carol’s will began to pull away from the little restraining loops of Carol’s conscience. And alone, naked from the waist down, she began to dance in front of the mirror. At first she just stood, lowered her jeans, or raised her skirt and struck a few attitudes, almost unconsciously. But it felt so good to acknowledge it, to see it now that its purpose was starting to be revealed, that soon she advanced to a proper terpsichorean promenade.
It was now large enough to waggle a little if she shifted from one foot to the other in a sort of soft-shoe shuffle; and indeed one waggle led to another, its tension increasing with each waggle.
Carol stood in front of the full-length mirror that formed the cupboard door, regarding its incongruity: peeking out from her hair-bedraggled lips, devoid of the pouch that perhaps ought to accompany it. She sat down on the edge of the bed and the fingers of both her hands toyed with it. It was at least three, or even five centimetres long. A pinky-brown roll of flesh could be pulled back from its tip to reveal a little mushroom, in the centre of which was a dry eye. It was, Carol decided, a penis.
* * *
‘To be a woman with a penis in our society—it isn’t an overwhelming distinction, is it? Well is it?’ The don was testy, I was clearly a pupil.
‘No, I suppose not.’
‘You suppose not. Why do you “suppose not”?’ The train clattered through a small station. I had a glimpse of an ornamental flowerbed; a fat porter; a swinging sign, and then darkness again.
‘Well, I suppose the increasing emancipation of women throughout this century has meant that they have—albeit in a rather metaphorical way—acquired some of the characteristics of men.’
‘Some of the sexual characteristics?’ The nasty edge was entering his voice again.
‘Perhaps.’ I tried to sound non-committal in a way that might please him, a facetious way. But he came back at me hard.
‘I think you’re being trite. That’s a mistake that young men always make with these issues. At times their entire overview of the sexual landscape seems merely an attempt to blot out the gynaecological Massif Central It’s a metaphorical penis that you’re talking about. I’m talking about a fucking literal penis, shit-for-brains, and “fucking” is very definitely the operative word here, because I’m talking about a cock that can fuck. I’m talking about a firm, springy, blood-filled sponge, with an enpurpled, engorged dome shooting spunk at you, shooting life at you: bullets of jism! God what a noble sight! I so, so, prefer the company of men, don’t you? I said don’t you?’
‘Oh, absolutely.’
‘Non-erotic male bonding, that’s the thing isn’t it; what our Ocker cousins call “mateyness”.’
‘Yes, yes, it’s true.’
‘The more non-erotic the better, wouldn’t you say?’
And he accompanied this latest decoy of an assertion masquerading as a question with another sinister little wiggle that started at his fundament and ran all the way up his spine to his nutbrown hair. The irony was that as his physical presence became more and more androgynous, so his voice increased in both timbre and depth.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘the more non-erotic the better.’
‘Quite so. We cannot abide those pillow-biting, fudge-packing, shirt-tail-lifting irons, now can we, my precious?’
‘Indeed not.’
‘Good.’ He slapped his thighs with a rifle’s crack and then said: ‘Well, if you’re ready, then I’ll resume.’
Carol found that she was beginning to prefer the company of her fellow endowed. She would step into pubs and sup pints at the bar. Or else eat lunch in a greasy spoon, craning over her sarnie to admire the airbrushed pudenda of that day’s page 3 automaton. Naturally she didn’t feel inclined to make a direct claim to common gender with the other patrons. She quite sensibly realised that the majority of men might not know how to respond to someone who could frig with one hand whilst tossing with the other. I do so like the rich, Anglo-Saxon vocabulary of our smut talk, don’t you?
Anyway, that’s beside the point, because Carol didn’t consider herself to be male. She’d never been conspicuously genderful anyway. Babytalk left her cold, witness Dan’s attempts to wallow with her in sympathetic semolina. Carol knew that her penis didn’t make her a man but it did free her a little bit more from being anything else, it did unslip those surly bonds and surly girly locks.
To the underwear emporium then and don’t spare the big-knobbed horses! Carol chose a small boutique on the high road, where she could be assured of a male shop assistant. She then thrilled to the conspiratorial talk of just how Dan might dangle. Carol didn’t even have to dissemble that much because Dan’s dear little waist was almost as neat as her own.
The next day she had a proper costume for her boudoir theatricals. This way and that she posed and pirouetted, but the shame was that she couldn’t even fill the smallest of filleted pouches in the slinkiest of men’s Italian briefs.
She pulled back the elastic of the waistband and fiddled with the newest member. By clenching and unclenching her buttocks she could get an internal, muscular handle on the development of what must surely be new peeing muscles. Carol was quite lucidly aware that soon she would be able to produce the most spectacular effects whilst micturating. Naturally the concept itself was inchoate but she did have a presentiment of that most trivial and yet enjoyable of exclusively male pastimes. Namely: directed peeing. But on the other front? Well, things didn’t seem quite well-developed enough to be effectual…but maybe not.
Dan meanwhile endeavoured to persevere. Back on the fast track once more, on his way to heading the corporate design group at the agency, he thwacked balls with Barry on a regular basis. And in the evenings, he repaired to St Simon’s with Dave 2. He also went by bus to meetings further afield. Dave 2 accompanied him on some of these trips, anxious to hear the words of alternative suburban seers, but mostly Dan went alone.
Dan realised that Dave 2 was gently encouraging him to gain his own position in AA, to become a member of the Fellowship in his own right. Dan was certain because Dave 2 had said as much. ‘M’dear Dan,’ he burred, ‘I feel like a father to you, and perhaps that’s a little too close a relationship for us, as recovering alcoholics, to have. We need to let go of one another. You need to find your own feet, find your own sponsor, just as I did.’ Here Dave 2 was referring to the practice of AA whereby those members with a greater experience of sobriety entered into bipartisan therapeutic relationships with their junior, pisshead colleagues.
Dan acquiesced to this gentle parting. He had no choice, being such a doormat. But in his sensitive heart, even when Dave 2 was only away from him for an evening, he felt abandoned.
‘Now don’t you go feeling sympathetic for Dave 2. Don’t embrace the fallacy of imagining that I have in some way misjudged or misread Dave 2. That I have spun you a line. Either intentionally or otherwise. There is no hidden hand in this tail; there is no lurking, shadowy narrator. What I tell you—that is the truth. Allah Akbar, you understand? I am a man of God. I speak the truth—God’s truth.” ‘There is no God but God.”’ The don pronounced these Islamic phrases with the lilting cadence of a Sahel évolué. Then he reverted to the type I have to concede that I had defined for him and asked his pupil, ‘Why does this seem tautologous?’ But he ran on and answered his own question. ‘If we consider the Islamic notion of history we see a process of social evolution analogous to the Hegelian concept of the World Spirit. However, whereas for Hegel the deus was very much ex, for the Muslim the World Spirit and the World are the same thing. Thus we see a cosmological loop: that as the cock of progress thrusts through social form and change, it is at one and the same time taking itself from behind.’
No, no. Listen to the truth: Dave 2 had already got his freckled hooks into another scene which he judged to be far, far juicier than Dan and Carol’s marriage. A young girl of only nineteen years had precociously sought out so much of the lager of
Lamot that she found herself at St Simon’s with plenty of entertaining incidents to recount. She was banged up within weeks by an occasional group member, a Welsh ex-steel worker of dwarvish proportions but peculiar prettiness. There was a lot of brouhaha surrounding this scene, and convocations in coffee bars as the group divided into warring factions, each accusing the other of therapeutic as well as moral crimes. Dave 2 was in his element, hearing versions from one and all. These he held on to, as if they were long threads, trailing from barely stitched emotional wounds. Dave 2 waited— waited to tug.
And Carol? Our dear little Carol, still attending Al Anon meetings, but mercifully freed from the attentions of the PEV crew, Dave 2 and Geena? Who can say? Who can mark the precise point where bad very definitely turned to worse? And who can get inside a mind that, vacillating to begin with, now found itself under the pressure of a strong and secret desire? I say ‘secret’ but really you would have to say that it was more than that. What she felt was, well, inexpressible. But guess what she did next.
Well, Carol was entirely certain now of her mastery over Dan’s mind, but she still felt that his body might present a few problems. So she too sought once more the lager of Lamot.
7
The Lager of Lamot
THERE IS A CERTAIN kind of off-licence, which although always absolutely and spotlessly clean, is nonetheless ever saturated with coils of cigarette smoke that hang around the interior, as stiff and desiccated as dried dog turds. In such establishments the proprietor is invariably to be found behind the cash register, ram-rod straight, fag fuming in face, and perhaps the corpse of its predecessor still smoking in the tin ashtray on the counter.
These offie proprietors are more often than not cardigan wearers, hair slickers, Fellows of the Ancient Antediluvian Order of Buffalos. They are men of a certain gravitas, usually with a half-hunter for any occasion that promises to be waistcoated. Years of Remembrance Sunday parades have left these men with a straight bearing; on the other hand, years of envy and resentment have almost certainly rounded their shoulders. Latterly, years of Lamot tend to have exploded mines of capillaries across their faces, faces that are frequently tensed up like clenched fists with aching disapproval.
You always take these men for the Proprietor—they look so proprietorial. Indeed that is their aim. They want you to forget the name of the chain above the shopfront and make the profound mistake of enquiring after business.
A selection of unfortunate entrées might be:
1. ‘How’s business?’
2. ‘Business slow?’
3. ‘Business not so good at the moment?’
4. ‘Quiet?’
And so on. The fag never leaves the mouth, the hand stays on the counter. The mouth opens and out comes a flat, weary litany of dissatisfaction.
Such an off-licence was Dan and Carol’s local. The manager, a Mr Wiggins, and his wife, also called Carol (let’s call her ‘Ur-Carol’ to distinguish her from Our Carol), were always firm allies in Dan’s fight to consume.
Ted Wiggins would even step down from the dais of his cash register to hold the door open so that Dan or Carol could stagger through, laden with characteristic blue and silver canisters that contained their favourite brew. More often than not, Gary, Barry, Gerry, Derry or Dave 1 would accompany Dan to Wiggins’s off-licence; and on these occasions half bottles of Dewars or White Horse might be purchased.
In addition to the normal range, the Wigginses also had a large selection of the cheaper bevvies on the market. These were products specially packaged— indeed branded—for alcoholics: syrupy beers, brewed in the vast steel vats of the East Midlands; re-labelled Philippino cooking sherries; toxically war-damaged Yugoslavian Riesling and various other sweet wines from sour places.
This sector of the sanitised emporium was Ur-Carol’s concern; indeed her domain. Ted was on his dais, Ur-Carol behind an unpainted, but spotless, plywood door. Whenever anyone strayed into that part of the off-licence, Ur-Carol would emerge from the door, looking for all the world like the plastic dog on the collecting box Ted kept by the till, going after its 2p offering. Shabby alcoholics, no matter how dirty, ravaged or potentially violent, she barred with absolute firmness: ‘Get out! You’re barred from these premises,’ she would shrill. ‘If I see you around this area again I’ll call the police, now bugger off!’ It always seemed likely that she might add to this: ‘This is a respectable neighbourhood.’ She was that sort of a woman.
But in truth, no part of London is entirely respectable. And even here, high on a hill, among the Edwardian villas with their snot-coloured masonry and their monkey puzzle trees, came filtering gyppos, tinkers, tramps and worse. Unspeakable travelling men wearing two donkey jackets and boots lashed in place with nylon towrope. Young men reared on morning glory seeds and regular inhalations of EvoStick, who had managed to reach maturity with huge lacunae in their minds. They parked their moribund buses and leper wagons on a piece of waste ground by the abandoned railway line and sought out the lager of Lamot. They were barred.
But on the other hand anyone who looked even superficially respectable to Ur-Carol was welcomed with folded arms and remorseless chatter which issued forth in a flat drone from between yellow dentures.
Dan had long since joined Ur-Carol’s temple of low-rent sedation. Many times she had thought to herself how much she liked a young man who had diverse tastes, for Dan would drink anything, he would go all the way from Château Haut Brion to Emu Export and back again. So it was that after three whole days had passed without seeing him, Ur-Carol went so far as to voice concern:
‘Father,’ she said, ‘that nice young designer boy hasn’t been in for a while.’ (She always addressed Ted Wiggins as ‘Father’, although in truth, the only creature they had ever managed to nurture was a yapping Yorkshire terrier that frequently bemerded the spotless linoleum.) Wiggins grunted non-committally. Like so many of his co-cardigan wearers Ted Wiggins couldn’t have given a dollop of trappist’s toss fluid for Dan, but he would have given a whole gross of packets of tortilla chips to shag the arse off his young and slim wife.
Carol could do that to a man. As I have said before she had the kind of cramped, mean, English provincial prettiness that could encourage even a buffalo as long in the tooth as Ted Wiggins to dare imagine that he might place his scrawny shanks inside her scrawny shanks.
But Ur-Carol’s concern at the disappearance of Dan and her namesake was far more straightforward still. In an area where fading gentility segued with the new health consciousness, the Dans of this world were easily her best customers. Give Ur-Carol an alcoholic in a pac-a-mac, a Gannex raincoat, even a herringbone crombie, and she’d be happy for months. She was like an old junkie, or a withered procuress, coaxing on these sherry-drinking widows and wine-supping travel-agency clerks. Dan had been her most promising protégé.
After about a fortnight, Carol passed the off-licence, seemingly by chance, and was snagged in by Ted Wiggins. ‘Haven’t seen you in ages,’ he shouted at her through the half open, sticker-laden door, so anxious was he to detain this vision in a Mail on Sunday Readers’ Offer raincoat. She came in, slightly, and explained what had happened. Ur-Carol emerged from behind her plywood door and, advancing as far as the circular niblets merchandising display in the centre of the shop—the outermost limit of her fiefdom—she tut-tutted as Carol told them both that Dan had become a member of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Ur-Carol knew all about AA. But she regarded it purely as a competitor, paying no heed at all to its dogma. As far as Ur-Carol was concerned, AA grabbed away thirsty throats, throats that needed and deserved to be slaked.
So Ur-Carol kept her thin lips zipped up and our Carol went away. But Ur-Carol knew that they would both be back. She twisted the copper bracelet around her lolly-stick wrist and willed it.
So it was no wonder that Carol chose the Wigginses’ off-licence as the logical place to seek out the lager of Lamot. Just going there, walking along Fortune Green Road to the head of the
parade of shops leading to the Quadrant, was second nature to her after living in Muswell Hill for two years. And when she got to the boozers’ bureau it was the same as ever, occupying the very prong position, with glass frontage extending down both boulevards.
On this occasion, as Carol entered through the door on one side of the shop, her namesake exited from the other in hot pursuit of one of the mutant waste boys. ‘You’re barred!’ screeched the harridan. ‘Don’t come back here again, if I even see you in the neighbourhood I’ll call the police!’ The mutant boy staggered on the pavement and regarded her with a fuzzy expression, which resolved itself within seconds into a visage of brutal irresponsibility. Ur-Carol had caught him off guard and hustled him out the door. He now managed to compose himself and with great deliberation his hand went to his fly.
Carol meanwhile stood alongside Ted Wiggins. Both of them were transfixed, viewing the action framed by the plate glass window as if it were being projected from behind them and they had paid to see it.
Although only newly accustomed to casually leaning side-on to a counter and hooking a hand into her jeans’ pocket, Carol had graduated with commendable speed to using her fingers as an instrument with which to stroke, tug and generally hang on to her penis.
Men like to do that, don’t they? They like to hang on. It’s like genital thumb-sucking. Stroking the old todge in its 65% cotton housing doesn’t really produce a sexual feeling, it’s more like keeping the sensual rev counter at a steady 10,000 revs. But somehow or other, Ted Wiggins sensed Carol’s arousal, an arousal that crept up the dial as the convoy man confronting Ur-Carol Wiggins pulled out his pride—a queer thing with a shaft as long and shiny as the ferrule of an alpenstock—and steamily pissed on the autumn pavement.
