Cock and Bull v5

by Will Self

  As he got drunker, the sense of sweet and directionless guilt made Dan maudlin and sentimental. In his cups he dampened Carol’s shoulder with his tears of gratitude and self-pity. She uncorked a blue bottle of thick, sweet beer, brewed by a tiny, closed Walloon order. He gulped it down. The Spanish fly was holding him upright. He was surprised through his stupor to feel his thin dick stretch itself and yawn for some kind of action. He would have been very surprised if he had known that Carol was feeling exactly the same thing.

  Under the solo-stares of the mynah and the cockateel A Whiter Shade of Pale seeped out from the music cabinet that Dan built. Carol slipped one white shoulder out of her little black dress. Dan slobbered on it but she managed not to wince. His hand went to her nipple —chinese burnt her pallid aureole—and then lurched to her crotch. How fortunate that she had tucked her penis back under her perineum, for even though the buckled bend stuck out a half inch from her vagina, his conditioned nerves, sedated at the periphery, would never notice. Nor did they; his hands flopped around on her like dying fish, seeking insufficient moisture, moisture with which to breathe.

  His breath fluted in her ear, so laden and yeasty that she could imagine a host of micro-organisms streaming in and on to her brain. She was glad when the fingers swooped down once more and started to scrabble at her back and buttocks, as if Dan were struggling to remove the cellophane from some large product.

  But lest we forget…Carol’s hands with their carmine nails were voyaging as well. Carol’s hands sought out the pressure points and tremulous gullies of Dan’s body. They fanned down his narrow sides and swooped over his meagre hips, his boyish bum cheeks. They moved back up to his face, still soft with adolescent down. Carol had never consciously thought about what was going to happen, she was just blithely following an instinct, but her hands knew. Like busy predators they circled and plotted, ducked down behind the cover of breast- or hip-bone, and then shot up to survey the epicene country. Carol’s hands felt the submissiveness, the yielding quality of Dan’s body. It was Carol’s hands that went to the metal-edged wings of Dan’s check collar, but it was Carol’s flat and nasal voice that eventually said, ‘Let’s go upstairs.’

  As he passed the low coffee-table, tugged by Carol towards the narrow stair, Dan reached out, his hand scrabbled for the plastic webbing that held the four familiar red-and-yellow cylinders. It was the last time he ever sought out the lager of Lamot.

  In the bedroom she pirouetted, her dress twisting fully off her narrow shoulders. She whirled round and let her hands rub her breasts, her thighs, her pubis, with rough abrasive strokes; the way she wanted to be touched. She was so instantly and fully aroused that it was all that she could do to clutch her penis back, to stop it unfurling and declaring her strange sovereignty.

  She slid the rag-rolled corner of her bedside table between the back of her thighs and nudged her perineum against the acrylic of the clock radio. Wedged there, trembling; with the two waves of arousal beating up inside her—the one a heavy swell, the other a fast gathering breaker—she watched while Dan, hobbled by his trousers, teetered in the act of undressing and fell sideways, slamming his head in to the venetian-blind-slatted cupboard door.

  Seeing his ribbed body folded against the ribbed door, Carol was overtaken by a wave of strange tenderness and stranger possessiveness. She hopped up and lifted him by the shoulders, lifted him like a baby, his nether parts still begirt with bands of clothing, and threw him on to the bed.

  The unfamiliar intoxication, the shock of the rounded back of his skull whacking into the wall, saved lucky Dan from feeling the sinister power of this lift ’n’ chuck; this unconscious absorption by Carol of all the wrestling throws she had ever idly seen on World of Sport.

  Carol was now the deft one: removing Dan’s velcro-strapped bootees, denim bags and snug briefs before he could say ‘knife’. Not that Dan was really capable of saying anything at this stage. His eyes had slipped out of gear, was it Carol he was looking at, or his mother? His head slid sideways, saliva and Lamot bubbled at the hospital corners. This evening, someone had made up Dan’s mouth with a rubber sheet.

  He barely noticed when she turned him over. But he did notice when she entered him. He couldn’t fail to, her cock was such a big, hot, hard thing; and his anus, although causally lubricated, was still tight with self-repression, bunged up with the enduring legacy of auto-erotic toilet training. She pushed into him and rent his sphincter, tore a crack in one of its muscular segments.

  But hold up! Tolle! How was it for her? Surely that’s the important thing. Fuck him, he’s a passive thing, an empty vessel, a field upon which the majestic battle may rage, but Carol? Well…Isn’t she beautiful? She’s taken the prudent and I would say beautiful step of putting her silken scrap on over her suspenders. So now she can rip it away and let her fantastic penis tremble, oscillate up, all girded and framed by the black straps and slick columns of her upper thighs.

  How she promenaded around the end of the bed! Holding noble, rampant postures for full seconds! Tearing off her bra so her meagre dugs could hang free. But hist! They are no longer meagre dugs, barely domed, surmounted by a disappointing aureole. Now she feels beneath them the firm saucers of pectoral muscle, she lifts her arms aloft and charming duck eggs of bicep boing up.

  Downstairs, the Riders on the Storm were moving through the tinkling rain, shifting up from a trot to a canter. Carol’s eyes passed over the litter of pots and plastic sticks on her glass-topped dressing table, but stayed on Dan’s neon-tinted hair gel. The carmine nails snaked down to get it…

  …Dan felt the cold glob of viscous tackiness, rammed by the sharp fingers into his arse cleft. Carol covered him, her chest on his back for a moment, and then she reared up, sighted along his humped spine and oh, so tenderly guided her penis home.

  She felt its shaftiness, its columnar construction, its vascular rigidity. She felt the tight rejection of Dan’s restraining ring but pushed in despite and because of it. This was her moment, she sensed. Her confirmation of what she truly was…Crass isn’t it? The idea that being able to fuck Dan, actually penetrate him somehow made Carol aggressive, made her a rapist…Crass, but true. Come on, let’s face up to it, if you hand someone a loaded gun and present them with a target—the outline of a man—then they’re going to shoot at it, aren’t they? It would be nothing but naive to imagine any other course. Anyway it isn’t a case so much of the tail wagging the dog, it’s more that the dog is the tail and vice versa. And if you say any different then it can only be because you have nothing whatsoever between your legs, no gash, no tool, no nothing, just the smooth and puckered skin that seals off a wound after an operation.

  We were stuck in a tunnel. I couldn’t be absolutely sure but I suspected from the way he had begun to pant, and the way that his Mr Kipling voice had begun to flake and crumble, that the don was playing with himself.

  * * *

  Hrrumph! Later, by pushing home hard with the rectal thermometer, taking a variety of swabs and blood tests, the pathologist was able to make a specious pronouncement to the press. Dan, he said, had understood little of what was happening to him before he mercifully expired; his blood/alcohol level was too high, and anyway any one of the head injuries that were inflicted on him would have been sufficient to render him unconscious… Bollocks! Utter kak! In truth he was aware, and he felt everything. Each sandpapery thrust into him, abrading the sensitive blood vessels, each smack of his narrow head into the pine headboard, each concertina-ed groan from his thorax as it tried to swallow the abdomen that reared into his diaphragm. And there were many such strokes, many such smacks, for Carol was a young woman in her prime, and as we all know, young women of this particular type are very difficult to arouse sexually, but once they are aroused they are even harder to satisfy without the most vigorous of jouncings.

  She would pause at the top of a stroke…and then come on again…harder each time. She had lost the sense of thrusting into him, lost the feeling in her newes
t member, lost any awareness of the aftershock as with each push his skull slammed into the woodwork. Instead the whole world…nay even the whole cosmos, had contracted into a pulsing clanking thing, a pulling apart and rattling together of chain links, the spasmodic eruption of a white grub from its fibrous pupa…

  She came with a bang rather than a whimper, the bummy numbness of her genitals squishing home for the last time into the bummy mush of Dan’s derrière, her thin poitrine, dart-tip nipples questing for the target, thrust forward as if breasting the tape, and she subsided. Subsided and looked, and saw: Dan’s dying stare, fawn-like, innocently stupid, as the grey giblets fell from his shattered skull and grey porridge began to stain the flower-patterned pillowcase.

  Carol heaved herself off what had been Dan and looked round for a towel to wipe herself with. She was standing on the landing tying the belt of her robe when she heard the ‘bing-bong’ of the door chime. She footed down to the half-landing and peered over the banisters. The downstairs hall was dark, but from where she stood, backlit by the uplight in the vestibule, she could clearly make out the distinctive, lopsided silhouette of Dave 2.

  Dan’s bowels loosened when he died, and it may be small consolation, but he also had one of his sweet little piddling orgasms, nice that isn’t it? As I’ve said, the pathologist was a stupid man with no real powers of deduction, but we have to be fair, what would you be able to divine from such stringy auguries? There were two types of semen in the anal cavity of the dead man… and one of them corresponded to his own…indeed one of the semen samples had to be his own.

  * * *

  ‘I know what you’re thinking but I think I’ll trouble you to wait, if you don’t mind, if you would be so good.’ The don emphasised the ‘so good’ with the double click of a large switchblade which he had drawn from an inside pocket of his jacket. He turned it this way and that, as if trying to catch points of light on its long, shark’s snout of a blade. Then, sighting at me along it he said, ‘There’s nothing democratic about this situation, boy. But, nonetheless, should you tire of deliberations I shall be only too happy to introduce my version of the guillotine.’ He placed the knife on the seat, next to his plump thigh, as if it required no further acknowledgement. I sat silently and absorbed the awful realisation. For, when all is said and done, there is nothing worse under the sun than the revelation that you have been a fool.

  ‘It always amazes me that people don’t always think of doing things like that when they see an icing gun, wooden d’jew agree? They are such conspicuously venal objects, like giant painted tin hypodermics, complete with a penile eye. They are entirely logical, perhaps even essential tools for the injection of one man’s semen into another man’s body. At any rate that’s what Carol thought the minute she opened the second cutlery drawer and saw the icing gun lying alongside the Kitchen Devils and the tenderising mallet, hard against the forgotten fondue forks and the kebab skewers shaped like miniature sabres. I’m getting ahead of myself.’

  * * *

  Dave 2 wasn’t fazed when the door swung open and Carol stood in front of him in her nightie and terry-towelling bathrobe.

  ‘Oh hi, Dave,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve just come back from a convention up in Colchester,’ said Dave 2, hefting a flight bag of devotional literature that he held in his left hand to point up the fact.

  ‘Come in, come in. I’ll just put the kettle on.’

  Dave 2 settled himself at the breakfast bar while Carol pirouetted around making the coffee. Dave 2 explained that he had come to see Dan. There was to be a fundraising jumble sale at St Simon’s the following weekend and Dave 2 wanted Dan to make the signs. ‘I think he went to a meeting directly from work,’ said Carol distractedly. She was crumbling the last of the three golden insects into Dave 2’s mug of Gold Blend…

  It was like taking candy from a baby. To begin with they just had a good old emotional confab. Dave 2 had never known Carol to be so open and honest. If only she had been like this before! She would have given Dave 2 and Geena such pleasure. Here she was, gently sobbing out the frustrations and coldness of her marriage to Dan. Dave 2 couldn’t prevent himself from placing an avuncular arm about her thin shoulders. She nuzzled into the foetid greasiness of the cranny between the worn khaki collar of his jacket and the worn khaki skin of his throat. ‘Oh Dave,’ she sighed.

  Something fizzed in Dave 2’s denim crotch. His thick and stubby penis prickled with pins and needles. It was like milking a cow. They never shifted from sideways-on positions on the pine bench, they just grappled with one another’s shoulders. Dave 2 was never quite sure what was happening to him and in the light of subsequent events this is hardly surprising. Subsequent events and of course his own personal history, which was full, as we have said, of the most remarkable gaps.

  He never touched her cunt or cock. His ginger fingers just managed to tweak at her darting nipple as she manoeuvred the little plastic beaker under his bubbling spiracle. He came before he was even half-erect, such was the effect of the aphrodisiac on a man whose sexual ideal was Jenny Agutter in The Railway Children. He felt Carol’s cool hand expertly tugging at his cock and balls, tugging at them with an easy and intimate familiarity. There was plenty of semen, which was just as well because some of it missed the plastic beaker and spotted the lino. Carol missed it when she cleaned up later on. But that was O.K. because the team from Fortune Green Police Station (two lumpen detectives and a wall-eyed forensics expert) also missed it.

  Swish, went the blade of the knife in the enclosed air of the compartment, swish and then swish again. The don was beginning to conduct his finale.

  ‘There’s no accounting for other people’s minds, now, is there, Jew boy? Oops, I’m rather out in the open now, aren’t I? I’ve rather told you what I know about you, haven’t I? Still not to worry. You must understand that this is nothing personal, this little prejudice of mine, it’s the race I object to, not the individual. However, you are right to suspect that there is some connection between my carefully considered opinion of the Hebrew people and this marvellous recital which your waxy ears, full of the cheesy gunk of the shtetl, have been so fortunate to hear. You should know how Dave 2 felt, you should know how Dan felt. You should know because that’s the sort of thing you like to do to people, isn’t it? Well, isn’t it? Taking Christian children by night, children as young as six or seven, spiriting them away to your synagogues and there they are stripped naked, isn’t that so? Drugged…won’t you admit it? And all sort of things are shoved up them, aren’t they? Cocks of course, shiny, domey, kikey cocks and other more sinister things; ceremonial candles, fists and menoras. Deny it if you will…will you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You won’t deny it?

  ‘Why should I?’

  He was on me in an instant. And of course that plump exterior, soft and apparently futile, was just that: an exterior. He was wiry and strained with strength, his hand gripped my throat, he plunged a knee into my crotch, the knife point came hard into my throat, hard enough to prick and draw a little blood. My ability to resist it—the loathsome spider of spindly intent— skittered away. And it left my mind scrabbling for purchase on the smooth awfulness of the moment. And what could it come up with? Nothing but the peasant advice of the body.

  When someone holds a knife to your throat you have to hold very still, that’s the most important thing: hold still. They might gash you from nerves or because they misinterpret the slightest of movements, so bear that in mind and hold still!

  Close to mine the don’s face was a mutating thing. It is part, I realise, of the failure of my mind, this collapse of the second order. And as if to bracket it, give it phenomenal backing so to speak, my eyesight is failing as well. My vision is no longer stereoscopic. Contour and shape change as I flick from oval screen to oval screen. The thin, etched wrinkles that I had noted earlier were revealed as a restraining net, holding amorphous features together, features that threatened to change into something else altog
ether.

  So we can say with some certainty that Dave 2, milked, humiliated, his principles shattered, was led around the flat by his penis, like a dog on a lead. Carol got him to drink, the manipulative bitch, destroyed his five years of sobriety in an instant. She alternately mocked him and wanked him. And then, as he sat in his cups, surrounded by empty cans, his limp dick dangling, she bashed him hard on the back of the head with a meat tenderiser.

  He shifted his weight so that he could lean partially against the window. The knife stayed at my throat, but his other hand strayed away from my gullet and towards his crotch.

  What could be neater, eh? The thin young man, curled in the boot of the yellow hire car. They found him down by the abandoned railway track, you know…looking peaceful save for the jagged hole in his head. To begin with they grilled the deadbeat travellers, they delighted in it. But it didn’t take long to identify Dan as the young man who had hired the car that afternoon; and after that things began to fall into place very quickly… They found Dave 2 in the flat, still unconscious…they found the semen in Dan’s dead arsehole…they matched it…bingo! Ur-Carol came forward and told them that she had seen Dan, that afternoon, walking towards the travellers’ camp.

  Poor Dave 2. Clearly he was a victim of circumstance, but then perhaps…tee-hee, he should have practised a little more circumcision. We should all take care in that department, shouldn’t we?

  His hand groped to undo fasteners, to pull apart the flannel and cotton lips.

  * * *

  I believe that Dave 2 has done very well inside. He’s even organised an AA group with the other Rule 43 prisoners. I think that shows tremendous good faith, don’t you? Naturally he was horrified by what he had done, but in a way it wasn’t really him was it? I mean he was in an alcoholic blackout, he can hardly be held responsible for his actions…