by Will Self
Now Bull sketched over these events, the Pils had smudged the neural imprints and the detail wasn’t forth-coming. Who can say whether Razza Rob, like some obscene magus, had inflicted the vagina on Bull. A magical curse pointing up the involuted redundancy of their common sexuality. Who can say? It does seem fitting however, apt. There would be no point in implanting a vagina in the back of just any man’s knee. You might get some scion of raised consciousness; some almost-Iron John; some acquaintance of Dorothy longing to become a friend. No. Much better that this be just a congruence understood by us. And much better that it should be Bull, the dubious Bull, the shy Bull, the conditioned Bull, who had to bear the weight of this unacceptable transmogrification.
Horns roared right inside Bull’s head. He was staring sightlessly at the cracked concrete that formed the parking space in front of the Elite Cattery. He let out the clutch with a lurch and the car promptly stalled. Bull sweated violently for the seconds it took to grind the engine back on, but his mind would not clear. He lurched past the garden centre, still trying to pick out from his record of the previous night the moment when it became reasonable to assume that he had been so drunk that he hadn’t noticed his leg being burnt.
Could it have been some resentful artiste? This thought seriously occurred to Bull, a measure of just how the false burn’s vast flap of fleshly corruption had disturbed the balance of his reason. Sitting at the Ton of Shale watching that bloody Razza man, someone could have probed my calf and the back of my knee with a heated poker, or one of those portable mini-elements used for boiling water in a cup…
But even as he analysed this, and checked also for any recollection of leaning up against some other unseasonably hot radiator or overheated exhaust, Bull knew that he could not supply a rational explanation for what had happened to his leg. As he pushed down the clutch he could feel once again that the burn’s epicentre was scored deep into his leg. The point of weird sensation was at least eight inches obliquely upward from Bull’s kneepit, knocking strangely behind Bull’s ringing patella.
Bull depressed the clutch, feeling again all the burn’s strange internality. His ancient Mini Cooper flipped over the crest of the hill and started down through the cutting towards Archway Roundabout. Moss shone like verdigris on all the rubber runnels of the car. Overhead Suicide Bridge ignored the sky and clamped itself to London’s lagging land. Bull could make out the complicated pyramidal roof of the health centre, rising up from a tangle of Victorian terracing that lay both below and ahead of him.
2
First Impressions
‘MORNING,’ said Margoulies to Bull and the receptionist.
‘Morning,’ they chorused back. Margoulies paused, searching their faces to see if they had heard his little ejaculation. But all he could detect was Bull’s anxiety and the receptionist’s boredom.
‘You aren’t my 9.30 are you?’ said Margoulies to Bull, whom he knew well enough to be off-hand with.
‘There’s been a cancellation, Doctor…’ the receptionist broke in. ‘Mr Gaston says he’s now in too much pain to make it into surgery. Will you make a housecall?’
‘Oh all right, all right. Tell him that if Helen Meyer can’t fit him in I’ll come by this evening.’ Margoulies shook his head from side to side. The mock weariness of this gesture was clearly compounded of both caring and irritation. But only the kind of irritation a busy man assumes to show that underneath it there is still more caring. Margoulies smiled at Bull and said, ‘Please come along when you’re ready, you know where I am.’ With another smile at the receptionist he swept on through another pair of swing doors.
Bull sat for a moment longer on the foam-upholstered bench. He was enjoying the relief that came with knowing that he was about to be treated. That the ‘thing’ on his leg was soon to be dealt with: extirpated, cauterised, sewn up, or otherwise disposed of.
Then he rose, plonked down the coverless Country Life he had been searching in for a good convalescent home, and with a nod to the receptionist followed on.
Whilst the roof of the Grove Health Centre was roughly pyramidal, the bulk of the building was essentially circular. The administrative department, reception area, treatment rooms and nurses’ clinic were in the centre of the building, the offices of the various general practitioners who worked for the Health Centre’s two practices were located around the periphery. Small signs projected from the top of each office door, giving the name of its occupant. Bull passed by Doctors Hurst, Mukherjee, Fortis, Ambrose and Kowlakowski, before stopping at Margoulies. He knocked. ‘Come,’ called Margoulies from within. Bull entered.
The Doctor was sitting behind his blond wood desk, which was canted across the corner of the office. Behind him there was a pie-slice-shaped projection of glass which served the office as a window. The whole room was pie-slice-shaped: the exterior wall conforming to the outside circle of the building, the interior wall to the circularity of the corridor. An examination couch stood opposite Margoulies’s desk, with a swishy plastic curtain mounted on the wall beside it. The impedimenta in Margoulies’s office was the usual GP’s mixture of personal and medical artefacts.
As Bull settled himself in the three-legged chair, Margoulies was leafing through his case-notes. Bull found himself fixedly contemplating a selection of children’s clay sculptures, blobbed about on the surface of the desk like miniature menhirs. Bull looked at them with his eyes alone, his mind concentrated, fixated even, on the back of his leg.
‘Is it another ENT thing then, John?’ asked Margoulies, peering up from the notes. Bull was a healthy young man, save for regular sinus infections, caused not by any innate quirk of Bull’s physique but by the fat fist of an Old Malthusian mashing Bull’s septum during a charity match.
‘Oh no, Doctor,’ replied Bull. ‘It’s something else. Some kind of wound or burn on the back of my leg.’
‘If it’s a wound or a burn one of the nurses could take a look at it.’
‘But that’s just it, Doctor.’ Bull felt once more the nameless exasperation that had visited him talking to the receptionist. ‘I can’t tell which it is, a wound or a burn.’
Margoulies raised his eyebrows and looked up at Bull for the first time. Alan liked Bull. Bull had been one of his first patients at the Grove when Alan had started there some four years ago. Bull was seldom ill, but whenever he was he didn’t whine or carp. He listened dutifully to whatever Alan’s diagnosis was, and then followed to the letter his instructions. Alan thought of Bull as an essen-tially hearty, uncomplicated, rugby-playing type of fellow, in direct contrast to his own neurotic self-absorption and intellectual pretension. He had never had to append to Bull’s case-notes the damning word ‘psychosomatic’. But then there was always a first time for everything.
‘OK then, old fellow, pop yourself up on the examining table and we’ll take a look.’ Bull did as he was told. He sat sideways on the examination table, slipping off his loafers. Then he swung his legs up and laid his large ginger head down on the crêpy white disposable anti-macassar. ‘Oh, I think we better have those trousers off, don’t you?’ Margoulies was extracting two-dimensional rubber gloves of a synthetic fleshy colour from a boxed dispenser. Bull fiddled with his elasticated belt and pulled his neatly-creased trousers down, over his knees and off.
As he did this Bull had to cant himself up, on to the curve of his buttocks, coincidentally adopting the same posture as he had when he first became aware of the vagina. Oh God, thought Bull, I hope it’s nothing serious. Although another craven little part of him secretly hoped that it was serious enough. He was very well insured and anything…yes anything to get out of writing cabaret reviews for a few weeks.
Margoulies loomed in the periphery of Bull’s vision, hooking his hair back behind his ears with a characteristic two-index-fingers gesture. Then Bull felt Margoulies’s hands beginning to toy with his upper left thigh, moving slowly, palping the flesh with careful, detached fingers.
Bull stiffened and began to experience,
for the first time in his thirty-something years, acute anxiety. This was different to the fear that he usually felt when he was touched by people in non-intimate situations, or had to undress in front of them. On these occasions Bull’s secret horror was that his penis would be primed, limbered and rolled out for target practice. Bull could conceive of nothing more embarrassing than an involuntary erection —especially if a man, such as Margoulies, was touching him.
But this dread was something different. It was a fear of intrusion into himself, rather than of expansion into the World’s gaze. Bull felt his leg as a soft, shrinking and vulnerable thing. He longed to cry out to Margoulies and warn him to examine his leg in a particular way, with specific firm, yet calm, movements. But his tongue was dried out and glued to the floor of his mouth.
Margoulies meanwhile was making small observations, aloud but ostensibly to himself, about Bull’s leg. This was the way Margoulies liked to proceed. It didn’t matter what the examination was for, cancer or the common cold, gangrene or gonorrhoea, Margoulies liked to do what he called ‘putting it in the right context’. Margoulies couldn’t quite go so far as to call himself a holistic Doctor, but he did believe that the injury or malaise should at least be treated within the context of the section of the body within which it was manifested, if not within the body as a whole.
‘Turn over now, please…. Mmmm. Very pro-nounced gluteus maximus,’ he murmured, sticking a rubber fingertip into the white softness of Bull’s buttock, his other hand gripping the thick snake of muscle that curved around Bull’s thigh. And then, suddenly, silence. Margoulies’s mutterings were cut off as abruptly as if he had had a pad soaked with ether clamped across his face, and his hands fell away from Bull’s leg.
Bull waited. And waited. All he could hear was Margoulies’s breathing, which seemed to have become heavy, laboured and slightly intermittent. Bull lay still, holding himself in readiness for the Doctor’s pronouncement, and, of course, willing himself not to get an erection. He stared fixedly at the way the plaster had been teased up into little fronds on the wall, like miniature stalactites.
Margoulies had of course seen the vagina. That was the explanation for his abrupt silence. His eyes rounded the horizon of Bull’s broad, firm, ginger-fuzzed thigh, and saw it, tucked into the pit behind the knee.
Two observations struck Margoulies with equal force the very second that he clapped eyes on Bull’s cunt: first that it lacked pubic hair, apart from a thickening and tufty teasing of Bull’s leg hair over the mons veneris; and second that the cunt had not simply appeared in the pit of Bull’s knee like an alien interloper, but rather that Bull’s basic physique had been customised, within a very localised area, to accommodate the new orifice.
The two thick tendons on either side of the pit had been pushed out by what surely must be a ridge of new pubic bone. The muscle at the top of Bull’s calf was clearly bifurcated underneath the skin to allow space for the entrance to the vagina, whilst the kneepit itself bulged out to house the projection of the mons, and the clitoris that already peaked from beneath its edge.
It was an astonishing sight for someone like Margoulies, who understood the anatomy of the human body from both within and without. And that was a relief, because it meant that the first few seconds of utter disbelief became centred not on the ‘how?’ or ‘why?’ of the vagina’s presence in Bull’s body; but instead on the technicalities of whether the vagina was a well-constructed thing, or merely an odd simulacrum, more akin to a penis-shaped potato than a functioning genital.
Margoulies did feel faint. That’s true. He breathed deeply, and visions of all the medical literature on genital abnormalities that he had ever read began to flit in front of his eyes. But within seconds he steadied himself. Steadied himself by making two simultaneous and far-reaching decisions, decisions that, in Alan’s mind at least, marked him out from all other GPs who might have been placed in this very peculiar situation. Decisions that reflected the justness of this particular phenomenon coming to his attention and his alone.
The first of these was to retain control of Bull as his patient, rather than referring him automatically to a gynaecological specialist. The second was, for the mean-time, to withhold the truth about the vagina from Bull himself. Margoulies didn’t doubt that the vagina could be explained. He was a scientist to the core, an absolute believer in the total discoverability and explanation of cause. But until he could divine the aetiology of Bull’s vagina, Margoulies knew intuitively that the awareness of it would severely disturb his patient. To act otherwise would have been less than conscientious.
‘What is it, Doctor?’ Bull’s voice sounded odd and phlegmy in his deep chest.
‘Well…er…John. Well, you were really right on both counts…’ Margoulies spoke the words with gratitude, as if he had been corpsing and had them thrown to him by the prompter.
‘Whaddya mean?’
‘Well, it’s a very nasty wound, that’s true, but it’s also quite badly burnt.’
‘I thought so! I knew it. And what’s worse I can feel that it’s pushed all the insides of my leg about. It’s…It’s as if I’ve mutated in some way.’
‘Does it hurt very badly?’ Margoulies’s voice was laden with concern. He was by now standing over Bull, looking down into the freak’s broad and freckled back.
‘Hurt? Why yes…of course it hurts…’ Bull’s voice trailed away into nothing and a perplexed expression took up residence on his face. Hurt? How can the man be so stupid as to even ask, he thought. But now that Bull was called on actually to analyse the sensations he had experienced when becoming aware of the wound, he couldn’t really, in all conscience, describe them as pains. Rather they seemed on reflection to be feelings of extreme sensitivity; neurological messages remarkable for a shocking newness that combined at once both the visceral and the voluntary; the feelings of being touched and of wanting to touch.
‘Now, John, can you describe the pain for me?’ said Margoulies. His voice came once again from the south of Bull. His dark head had disappeared once again beneath the hair-flecked dome of Bull’s knee. But Margoulies couldn’t concentrate on Bull’s incoherent answer, struggling as he was to come to terms with this thing. He had only thrown out the question as a reflex, doctorly thing to do.
Margoulies used the balls of his thumbs gently to prise apart the outer lips of the vagina. The inner lips parted slightly as well. The skin of the vagina’s interior was pearly pink and glistening; the clitoris poked up perkily from underneath the cowl of flesh at the top of the orifice. Margoulies peered closer and deployed his fine-beam flash. He braced his shoulder against Bull’s thigh to steady himself. Interesting. There was no urethra…and …Well, he supposed it stood to reason. Margoulies struggled to apply an internal rationale; Bull was virgo intacta, surprising in a man of his age. The fleshy trapdoor filled the mouth of the true vagina in a most cosy and apt manner.
‘…Sort of exposed, raw, and very sensitive.’
‘Whossat?’ Margoulies started guiltily.
‘When my trouser leg rubs against it, Doc-tor.’ The querulousness was creeping back into Bull’s voice. But Margoulies didn’t hear it. He was back, truffling around the vagina again. It really was the cutest little snatch he’d ever clapped eyes on…Whossat! Margoulies smacked himself internally for this abandonment of professionalism. Damn it all, he’d seen more than enough of these in his work, and he had never, ever made the mistake of confusing them with their leisure-time sisteren. Why this one now? It couldn’t really be more inappropriate.
But then Bull’s vagina really was cute. A dear little box. Its lips were just so, flanged just so. The pearly pink of the vagina’s internal skin faded into the white, freckled skin of Bull’s leg, just so. And the lips weren’t too crinkled, the clitoris wasn’t too long…Margoulies was testing the neural equipment of the orifice at this point. Touching the inside of both sets of lips, the clitoris, what ought to be Bull’s second perineum (it was defined by a strip of brownish, cri
nkly flesh, running up and over the swell of Bull’s calf), with a tongue depressor. From the tiny twitches and convulsions he felt running through Bull’s leg with the flat of his palm; and the other, deeper tremors Margoulies could sense in Bull’s abdomen, he could tell that Bull’s equipment was functioning just as it should be.
‘Just so!’ Margoulies punctuated the thought with an innocent tweak of Bull’s clitoris. Or at any rate that’s how he tried to pass it off to himself, but in that very attempt lay the core of his duplicity. And this thin wedge of irony was the start. From here on in everything that the good doctor did was tantamount to taking a chain-saw to his Tree of Knowledge. For Margoulies had abandoned his professional perspectives, he had allowed his own likes and dislikes to affect his judgment. He was no longer acting in the best interests of his patient.
Naturally Margoulies had ample reserves of denial to damp down this awareness. He flotched off his rubber gloves with his usual insouciance and took a turn over to his desk. Bull remained prone and turned his round head on the scratchy paper.
‘Well, Doc?’
‘Well, John, it’s not as bad as you might think.’ (The inside surface of the patella must correspond to the mouth of the cervix; even as he mouthed the practised reassurances, Margoulies’s professional faculties were constructing an internal map of Bull’s new sex organ.) ‘It is, as you say, both a burn and a wound. And frankly I simply cannot guess at what may have caused it.’
Margoulies sat down behind the blond wood desk and began to write something on the uppermost sheet of Bull’s notes. Bull, still contemplating the abrasive wall, felt more reassured by this than by anything Margoulies had done so far. This was the way doctors were meant to behave: leaving their patients weirdly exposed while they senselessly plied the biro.
