by Will Self
In his earlier incarnation Bull would have been horrified at viewing the transexual’s parts. But now? Well, the dry penile pocket which Ramona displayed to him was nothing, absolutely nothing in comparison to his own new arrangement.
‘Yer can tuch it if you like.’ Ramona was thrusting his/her fake vagina towards Bull. He recoiled. ‘Is’ no fun really, yer know. They like cut out all the blood vessels and stuff. And then they tuck the skin back inside. But I’ve no clit or nuthin’ like that. Straight sex has been nuthin’ t’me since the snip. And anyways the punters round here like it all up the bum, y’know. My bum, that is.’
‘Oh really?’ Bull felt vicarish.
‘Oh aye. They’re mostly papists of course. Italians and such. It must be somethin’ t’do wi’ their religious beliefs an‘that. So all in all it’s been a bit of a waste.’ The giant pseudo-woman balefully regarded his/her vagina as if it were a vast marrow that had also-ran at a garden show. Bull sensed that now was his moment.
‘You know, Ramona, I’m not exactly what I appear to be.’ And as he said this Bull became once again horribly aware of his leg’s radically independent gender; its strange metabolism; its awful vulnerable yearning.
‘What d’ye mean, lad?’
‘Well. It’s difficult for me to say this…I’m worried that you might be shocked…’
‘Let me tell you, lad, I’ve been on the game at the Cross for four years now, an’ I reckon I’ve seen just about everything. There’s nowt new in the fiddlin’ department as far as I’m concerned.’
Bull took heart from this. He stood up, and feeling the old vulnerability, not the new, the vulnerability he used to feel slipping his things off in Alan Margoulies’s surgery, he dropped his trousers and turned his back on Ramona.
For long seconds Bull heard nothing. And then Ramona screamed. Screamed like a giant foghorn on the Wear. Screamed with all the volume of his/her great chest. Screamed and screamed and screamed. Screamed so loud that Bull could still hear his/her screaming as he rounded the corner of the Caledonian Road, a good three hundred yards away from the prostitute’s bedsit, running as fast as if he were about to score a match-winning try.
The Wanderers were all aboard their minibus. There was much good-natured badinage and some jolly singing as they bowled down the A22 towards Bexhill-on-Sea. It might surprise the gentle reader (and even the vicious and unprincipled reader) to know that Bull was among the loudest of the singers, and the readiest of the quippers. His fellow-players were astonished by his good humour, and most of them put it down to his being de-mob happy, having lost his awful job at Get Out!
But the truth, as we know, was far stranger. Bull had, he thought, reached a new equilibrium, a new acceptance of himself. He understood as soon as he got home why Ramona had screamed at the sight of his vagina. He understood also the strange and nameless tension and anxiety that had gripped him throughout the day. He was getting his period.
No wonder he had bought the panty-liners and the Feminax in Boots, his feminine unconscious knew what was coming. Standing once more in the Council’s orange light, he had dabbed away the brown stains on his calf and applied the panty-liner, using one of his jockstraps to create a parody of a mono-knicker. The very assemblage, the idea of which had so excited Alan Margoulies at the outset of their strange affair.
And despite stomach cramps in the night, Bull was still full of resolution the following morning. He would, he decided, break entirely with Margoulies. He would continue as he was. And so what if he had to conceal his vagina for the rest of his life? So what if he could never marry? These were things he could accept. This was the decent thing to do: keep one’s personal and vile idiosyncrasies to one’s self, not inflict them on a blameless world.
So Bull outsang and outjoshed the rest. The minibus bowled through the shocking green of a bright English spring day, and all aboard felt a gleeful anticipation of the match to come.
In the changing-rooms Bull was especially careful to mind his back. But he’d sussed out his modus operandi well in advance. An elasticated knee-protector, of the kind commonly worn by sportspeople, neatly encapsulated the jock-strap and panty-liner assemblage. And in case that wasn’t sufficient, Bull also took the precaution of wearing particularly long socks, and on his left leg a very tight garter. None of his team mates suspected anything. They took his explanation of a ‘troublesome gash’ at face value.
The match was an overwhelming success. The visitors won with a remarkable try in the eighty-second minute of the game. The try was scored by Bull.
He had been in the scrum, locked into that strange, straining phalanx of heavy men, his shoulders grating against both those of the opposing prop forwards, and against the little bony collarbone of Mickey Minto, the Wanderers’ Maltese hooker. The ball came in fast, straight across to where Bull heaved, his big ear Legolocking into the big ear of the opposing left prop. One swift slash of Bull’s boot immobilised his opponent (who howled at the unfairness), another took it back to the wing forward, Dougie MacBeath, who broke hard and fast down the left wing. He was brought down within ten yards by a gaggle of Bexhill Bears, but before he fell he managed to flick the ball back to Bull, who was following on at the head of the Wanderers’ pack.
Bull hugged the warm ball to his chest. The score stood at forty-two points all. Seagulls swooped and screamed over the Bears’ goalposts. Beyond them Bull could see the lambent play of sunlight on green sea. The Bears’ ground was superbly situated on a chalk bluff, high above the Channel. What with the crispness of the day, and the firmness of his new resolution, Bull felt capable of flying, taking off and soaring over the defenders who, within seconds of Bull receiving the ball, had ranged themselves between him and the touchline.
Bull feinted, Bull dodged, Bull stuck his broad palm — hard and cold like a defrosting chicken—into the expectant faces of the defenders. Bull felt as if his boots had acquired turbochargers. He revved over the turf. Behind him there were cries: ‘Over ’ere, John!’, ‘Manon, John!’, ‘My ball, John!’ Bull paid them no mind. This was clearly his moment. He could tell it by the way that the defenders seemed to be moving in slow motion — backwards. It was as if they ran away from him and then leapt up from the ground, gratefully pressing his palm to their bruised faces, scrofulously receiving the King’s touch. It was that easy and sanctified a moment.
And then, when he actually crossed the touchline, Bull found that he had to make a decision. With this fantastic turn of speed perhaps he ought to make the leap? Over those two boy spectators, ano-racked by adolescence, and away. This was the Channel speaking. Speaking directly, imagistically, to that other manche. Bull felt deep, buried sensations, under sock and jockstrap and panty-liner. The two channels seemed to speak to one another, figuring the possibilities of an alignment, or alliance.
But Bull didn’t jump. He swerved beautifully — dipping down like a yacht—kinked slightly to avoid his final challenger, and finally placed the ball precisely on the sward, bang between the posts.
Against precedent Towser Bridges, the Wanderers’ captain, allowed Bull to do the conversion (for Bull was not known as the greatest of kickers). This was the ‘chonk’ of boot into turf Bull had so longingly anticipated during those two, dark, cunt-riven, London days. This was the free play of muscle and youthful vigour that Bull had set against the bogus credo of Juniper, and the pallid aestheticism of his ex-boss…Ach! But it didn’t work. Even as the ball lifted, and converted as surely as Wesley, Bull knew in his heart of hearts that the joy of rugby might distract him, but it could not cancel out what had happened between him and Alan Margoulies. It could not fill in the gnawing genital gulf.
So it was that after the match, once Bull had allowed himself to be bought a few congratulatory pints, he slipped away from his mates. He was glad to do so; never before had he felt quite so oppressed by their self-assurance, their seemingly unquestioning masculinity.
Bull walked the streets of Bexhill, moving towards the De La Warr Pav
ilion on the seafront, and his rendezvous with his lover.
Alan had had another tiring day at the Learning Jamboree. At least the weather had held up. But if anything the exercises designed by the facilitators were even more asinine than they had been the day before. They involved roleplay. The various GPs had to adopt the perspective of their patients and act out their anxieties and frustrations.
Alan was honest enough to admit to himself that in the roleplay he found a sinister congruence with the doctor-patient charade he had so recently enacted with Bull. But as we have remarked before, Alan’s sense of irony had long since become so rampant that anything was grist to its mill. Nonetheless the day was given over to images of Bull, just as the previous night’s ‘fun’ had been so awfully compromised.
I’ve never behaved like that before, thought Alan. He had his pride, after all. There is a big difference between gaily porking some squeaking nurselet in a studio flat in Chiswick, and allowing the prostituting girlfriend of a retarded chicken-sexer to suck you off in the dustbin area of a provincial guesthouse. Clearly the Bull-thing was to blame. But maybe he is as anxious to get back into society as I am, thought Alan, and resurrected the first view he had taken of Bull’s genital abnormality. Namely that it might make his clinical reputation, just as the Siamese perpetual-cunnilingus machine had done for Nicholson. ‘And if not…perhaps…perhaps…’ Perhaps what? Perhaps the kindest thing to do would be to kill Bull. Alan couldn’t quite formulate the thought, but it lay in his mind nonetheless. Heavily, like a poorly digested meal.
But while all this was thought, action was something else. More dissembling to Naomi on the telephone; more carefully cultivated images of his sweet daughter’s sweet burblings, as if they could somehow undercut all the weird shit he was bound up in. At the end of the day Alan gave Krishna Naipaul the slip. The dirty doctor hadn’t been sated by his activities of the previous night and at fishpaste sandwich time he had suggested to Alan a return trip to Tiresias’s establishment.
Alan drove back into Wincanton and hurriedly changed at Mrs Critchley’s. If he put his foot down he could make Bexhill by eight-thirty.
Juniper and Razza Rob faced one another across the cool pool of highly-focused greenish light. Juniper pushed her plate to one side and sighed contentedly.
‘Mmm,’ she said. ‘Razza, that was fantastic. You’ll have to give me the recipe before I go. I never imagined that anybody could do so much with nuts and mushrooms.’
‘Actually almonds, boletus and truffles. The topping was fresh ricotta, teased and shaped.’ Razza’s voice betrayed not irritation at this philistine’s crude appreciation of his cuisine, but a wry love of bringing on the untutored, who he enjoyed precisely because of their lack of sophistication.
‘I just didn’t expect to be fed at all, let alone so magnificently. Usually someone I’m interviewing expects me to feed them. And anyway how did you know that I was a vegetarian?’
Razza gestured enigmatically. ‘No one who appreciates the subtleties of my work as you do could possibly feed on carrion.’
Juniper looked at Razza Rob with frank admiration. It had been just as she had suspected. Arriving at Razza Rob’s unprepossessing council block in Grays Thurrock, Juniper had been beckoned into a Tardis of high culture. Behind the chipboard veneer of his front door this secretive, almost reclusive mortgage-broker had created a temple to the avant garde.
Naturally what struck Juniper most forcefully was the disjunction between Razza Rob’s stage persona — all wiry aggression; gimcrack obscenity; dangerous, frustrated lust—and the quiet, almost refined man who ushered her in.
Shorn of his spangled jockstrap, clothed in autumnal beiges and browns, Razza Rob’s face in repose was serious and thoughtful. As the tape recorder whirred he steepled his fingers and gave each of her questions deep and serious thought.
‘I would say that since “outrage”, or “repulsion” only really exists in the mind of the beholder, it is foolish to try and generally distinguish the things that provoke these feelings, from those that don’t. Furthermore, the mind-set that observes and considers this “thing”, is itself chronically relativised by a whole panoply of other factors. The analogy would be to ask someone to take an accurate reading with a theodolite when both they, and the object they wish to take the reading from, are both in constant motion.’ This little aperçu came from Razza Rob in response to Juniper’s slightly more basic question: ‘Tell me, Razza, do you think your critics are right when they describe your cunt jokes as obscene?’
Despite the challenge presented to her by this doyen of the smutty, Juniper couldn’t stop her attention from wandering from what Razza said to the magnificent decor of his flat. It was astonishing, but in this cramped and narrow space, with its front door opening directly on to the kitchen, and the other rooms leading off an abrupt corridor, Razza Rob had managed to create a sense of light airiness which engendered an atmosphere of aesthetic optimism. The walls, Juniper noted, were coated in steel-grey hessian, just the material she herself would have chosen…
No, not true. None of the above, that is. It would be nice if it were. It would, in fact, be a nicer world altogether.
‘You fucking anybody regular then?’ asked Razza Rob. But rather than answer the question Juniper found that she couldn’t lift her eyes from the spectacle of his pullover cuffs, dabbling in the pool of tomato ketchup that occupied half of his oval platter.
‘They do provide forks, you know,’ said Juniper. She still couldn’t decide which was worse; watching him eat, or averting her eyes but knowing what he was doing.
‘Forks for forking. Issat what you mean? Her, her, her, her.’ It was appropriate that the sound of the cunt comic’s guffaws should be so gender-specific.
‘Look, Razza, we’re here to do an interview, so let’s talk about your comedy, shall we, and not my sex-life.’
‘Yeah, all right, but y’know, they’re…they’re sort of, umm. I mean…right, I make cunt jokes right? And, like, well, you’ve…you’ve got a…’
‘A cunt, yes. So, what of it?’ But then it dawned on Juniper what the runtish jester was aiming at. ‘Oh, I see. You mean to say that there is an inextricable relationship between the very fact of my genitals, and the fact of your comedy. And that furthermore the telling of cunt jokes, whatever their nature or provenance, is a valid cultural pursuit because it helps to reify something that otherwise would be entirely vitiated by the phallocentric discourse? Is that it?’
‘Well, er, yeah, sort of.’ Razza Rob looked around the steak house balefully. No matter what kind of crudities he flung at this woman, they bounced off her. Then she grabbed them out of the air and incorporated them into this ghastly spiel. Parts of which she kept breaking off from eating in order to scribble down in her notebook.
Juniper had been disappointed by Razza Rob, but not half as disappointed as he had been by her. Felix Brownlow, Razza’s agent, had told him, ‘Just chuck more cunt jokes at ’em. Specially if they’re women. Women, deep down, can’t stand those cunt jokes. And women journalists hate them more than anything else. Remember that you’re meant to be controversial. Remember that, Razza. The more people you upset the better.’
But Juniper wasn’t about to be upset by a squitty little mortgage broker from Grays Thurrock, especially one who insisted on being interviewed in a steak house on the Mile End Road. Not now she was the cabaret editor of London’s bestselling listings magazine, Get Out! No, she was going to take this dross and transmute it into gold. She’d even flatter the little jerk to do it. If she had to, that is.
Razza tried another conversational gambit. ‘Doncha’ wanna know why women have legs?’
Bull faced Alan across the Crystal of Nargon table. Beneath its glass surface little televisual pellets plunged in furious, colourful trajectories towards electronic oblivion. It was the only table the couple could find in the main bar of the De La Warr Pavilion. The others were all packed. There was a convention being held in the vast Modernist bu
ilding, and the conventioneers thronged its flight-deck landings. They stood in staring lines, their faces turned to the sea, their gaze blank against the windscreen windows. Both Bull and Alan felt conspicuous without plastic name-bages. Both of them were drinking the indifferent local bitter. Both of them were in lust again.
‘I’m not sure I can take much more of this.’ Alan’s hand (fine and tapering, as has been remarked before) shook something fierce. Beer sloshed on to the games table and temporarily provided the Crystal of Nargon with another not-so-special effect. ‘I feel really guilty about it all. I’m deceiving my wife, I’m in breach of the medical ethics I’m sworn to uphold and most importantly I’m using you…’
‘…Using me? Whaddya mean, using me?’ Bull was querulous once more. He had had to wait half an hour before Alan turned up. Just enough time for him to put away a couple more pints to add to the couple he had downed with his team mates after the match. Bull was tipsy enough to feel assertive. Now he didn’t even wait for Alan to reply. He upped and offed to the gents, guiding his big sportsman’s body through the archipelago of tables as if it were an autonomous drunk person that he was escorting.
In the gents Bull took out his stubby cock and peed hard, peed like a fireman hosing a chemical incident with fuzzy foam. And as he peed he regarded his original genitals. Regarded them with the puzzled stare of a stranger. Why, I can’t say I’ve really paid much attention to these recently. And he emphasised the ‘these’ by shaking himself dry and repocketing the limp assemblage. And it was true. Ever since his startling metamorphosis Bull had all but forgotten about his most obvious masculine attribute.
True, when he had made love with Alan there had been a cock-rubbing aspect to the whole thing, but it was purely secondary to the fact of penetration. It was as if his penis had gracefully stepped aside, like a retiring diva introducing her successor to the adoring audience at La Scala. Together they sang one final aria, before the older woman bowed out.
