Cock and Bull

by Will Self

  But when she opened the front door to Dave 2 this lay some weeks and several group meetings in the future. For the meantime, she just invited him in. Dan skulked off to get ready. He still had the adolescent awkwardness that makes a hash out of introductions. Dave 2, cosy with instant coffee and a fag in the kitchen said, ‘He’s awfully young, but if he’s had enough, Carol m’dear, this could be the turning point for him.’

  Dave 2 leaned across the breakfast counter and took Carol’s forearm gently in between the thumb and fore-finger of his huge, freckled right hand. This was a characteristic gesture of Dave 2’s, and as usual, it came accompanied by a special, more spiritually intense, lowering of his burry West Country voice. ‘You look all in, m’dear,’ said Dave 2. ‘I don’t wonder that you haven’t had a hell of a time coping with him.’

  Carol tried not to shrug. She didn’t want to do anything that might cause the grip of those fingers to tighten on her. She said, ‘Oh, I don’t know, it hasn’t been too bad.’ But Dave 2 wasn’t taking ‘not too bad’ for an answer. This was a man who firmly believed that the word fine, as in ‘I’m feeling fine’, was really an acronym, spelling out Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic and Emotional. Indeed, when Dan had become quite integrated into the St Simon’s group, he was set to work by Dave 2, labouring, with a magic marker in his fine hands, to create a series of signs. In some, the acronym and its interpretation was written in sans serif characters, in others in serif script. It was all rather like what Dan did for a living anyway.

  So, Dave 2 pressed on, undeterred: ‘You say it hasn’t been too bad, m’dear, but I can see that in here you’re hurting.’ Dave 2 removed the large hand from Carol’s forearm and placed it in the vague area of his heart. His great chin filled up with dimples and his cheeks creased as his long face took on an expression that was obviously intended to betoken deep sympathy, or even empathy… yes empathy, for Dave 2, unchallenged by Carol, followed on: ‘I can identify with your hurt, Carol. I’ve felt as you have—utterly indifferent to the fate of someone I once thought I loved. Utterly indifferent. Now that’s what this awful disease can do to us, my love…’ That was clever. Even Carol couldn’t help but be jarred, and appalled, by the accuracy of Dave 2’s probing spiritual diagnosis. In that moment of shared feeling Dave 2 hooked his nail under the scab of Carol’s indifference and prised it up, exposing an area of pain. Of course Dave 2 could hardly have been expected to know that her real and abiding anxiety was centred not on Dan, nor even on the fact of her marriage, but entirely on the gristly frond that lay in wait at the very juncture of her thighs.

  Instant coffee downed and a thin and wispy Dan buckled into his fashionable leather blouson, there was but token resistance on Carol’s part to the suggestion that she accompany Dave 2 and his charge to St Simon’s, and while they attended the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting she should attend an adjacent and highly congruent meeting for the relatives of alcoholics.

  The atmosphere of the Al Anon meeting was a revelation to Carol. Here was the intimacy and sense of shared purpose that she had been exposed to when attempting to raise her consciousness with Beverley at Llanstephan, but united with a social veneer and sense of organisation that reminded her more of her father’s allotment society.

  She was shocked by the candour of these very English people in macs and cardigans who described in a matter-of-fact, if confessional, manner, episodes of the most disgusting drunkenness, domestic violence and sexual abuse.

  A long, sad lady in a fawn suit recounted in a breathless rush the frenzied assaults that her husband, a bibulous and failed salesman, had made on her several orifices with various hard and vitreous objects, beer bottles and the like.

  A middle-aged educationalist, intellectual with thinning hair and tortoiseshell bifocals, did his best to describe, plainly and directly, the obsessive dossier he had felt compelled to compile of the vomitings, douchings, colonic purges and gratuitous sexual acts that his sixteen-year-old daughter had engaged in, while he stood by madly impotent on two counts.

  Not that evening, nor the next, but the one after that, did Carol feel relaxed enough to offer her own version, pallid and softcore by comparison, of Dan’s pukings, his muttered obscene eructations and occasional beery gropings. The outrage may have been slight, but Carol’s description of her own pallid indifference, and anemone-like withdrawal from Dan’s distress, was wholly authentic. And when she had finished speaking, or ‘sharing’ as the group called their version of bearing witness to the Truth, she looked up from the linoleum to see the equine visage of Dave 2, who had joined the group from next door, and who was now looking at her with an expression of undiluted sympathy, compounded by admiration and something that might have been, but wasn’t, love.

  Over that week both Dan and Carol attended six of their respective meetings. And both of them felt the ideology of Alcoholics Anonymous swimming in to form a structure for their lives. There was something so reassuring about these twin groups of quite ordinary people gathered in circles of S-framed, khaki-bottomed chairs, under the flickering neon of the church hall. The Al Anon group met in the room set aside for the Sunday school, and as Carol’s ears were warmed by tales of casual bashing and buggery, her washed-out blue eyes roamed over the walls, where a collage alphabet had been created by the children, and the curate had stuck up naive bible story pictures with red and gold sticky tape.

  The drinking of instant coffee and the smoking of many, many cigarettes; the business of the group, concerned as it was with the treasury, the coffee rota and the sale of pamphlet literature; these were secure facts and routines that drew Carol in. As for the catharsis afforded by speaking of one’s innermost hurts, fears and desires to a room full of strangers, Carol felt this too; albeit that her provision of the therapeutic goods was closely constrained by an unusual talent for compliance.

  But this needn’t surprise us. We know Carol to be like this. We have remarked before on her tendency always, always to take the line of least resistance. Why can’t we let her have her Dralon confession in peace? After all, it might help her with that other, more intimate, more pressing problem.

  While Carol was getting integrated, Dan, in a quiet and unspectacular way, was doing the same. From the day of Dave 2’s advent and his first meeting at St Simon’s, Dan had put down the alcohol. He found the admission that he was powerless over alcohol, the first and pre-eminent statement of the AA credo, easy to make. Since his student days at Stourbridge Dan had felt intensely that his conscious will was but an impotent, flopping marionette, inanimate until vivified—until sought out by the lager of Lamot. This WD40 of the soul would flood out of its can and form a thick, white cloud in Dan’s narrow head. The cloud would over a number of hours resolve itself into a Genie, a giggling djinn that would manipulate the marionette-that-was-Dan, jerk him this way and that.

  Dan, like Carol, found it hard to speak at the AA meetings. But unlike Carol, it wasn’t because Dan had anything to hide. On the contrary, with Dan there was a niceness to the fit between his inarticulacy, his inhibition and his simplicity of mind, that is fortunately rare. Otherwise we would all be a great deal more bored than we are already. No, it was just that Dan had very little to say. But if catharsis was unnecessary, at least Dan now had access to the relief that came with learning that alcoholism was a disease. A disease with its own aetiology and pathology. A disease recognised by as august a body as the WHO. A disease prominently listed in the Observer’s Guide…AA told him the disease was both chronic and incurable—that was the downside. The upside was that the symptoms of this disease could be entirely alleviated, given vigorous attendance at AA meetings and rigorous abstinence. Prior to this Good News Dan had feared that his mind, really as delicate and ductile as one of the paper sculptures he himself used to make, might have been on the verge of crumpling itself up into a little wadded ball of insanity.

  Now Dan had friends, supportive friends. Dave 2 was so supportive that he would come home with Dan after the meeting to preach to hi
m further. They would find Carol already at the flat—the Al Anon meeting started and finished a half hour in advance of the AA meeting — and the kettle on the boil. The three of them would then sit down around the breakfast counter to share the articles of Dave 2’s faith. These he would pronounce with the kind of affectedly natural sincerity that is most typical of an Anglican priest at his worst.

  The rubric of Dave 2’s sermons was that of a kind of spiritual ’n’ tell. He had a great number of quasi-devotional postcards and stickers that he liked to distribute to his new acolytes. An example of what was depicted on one of these would be: cuddly puppies in a wicker basket, the cutest dangling from the handle. Underneath there was a slogan in curly cursive script. It read, ‘Faith isn’t faith until it’s all you’re hanging on to.’ Another showed kittens in a rumble-tumble bundle. The slogan read, ‘What we need are lots of hugs!’ Dave 2 also had A5-sized tablets of card laminated with plastic that carried the AA commandments (the Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions), or very important AA prayers: ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change…etc…etc…’ You know the type of thing. These he would slap down on the formica, as if they were the flesh that justified his burring, bleating homilies…

  The don’s voice trailed off again quite suddenly. The light in the little circular shade above his head had come on, and the nutty wings of hair that smoothed to his scalp were burnished and refulgent in the downlight. He stood, and in the tiny roomlet of the enclosed compartment, turned and paced from one door to the other. He stopped and looked at me, slope-shouldered, ectomorphic. He was like a peardrop someone had dressed at Turnbull & Asser. His pate was framed by the gaudy surround of a retouched Highland photo, the proud stag poking its head from behind his ear.

  The don looked at me and for the first time I saw something else in his eyes besides the usual facetiousness. A glimmer of hate? Or at any rate flat anger at felt or imagined hurt and insult. His clipped voice spat again: ‘You’re typing me, boy, aren’t you? You’re turning me into something that I’m not. An amusing character, an oddity, a type!’

  Still facing me, he half crouched, half knelt in the space between the seats. He looked intently at my profile, as if trying to make up his mind about something, and then, apparently satisfied, he straightened up. He sat down opposite me again and recommenced his narrative in the same rapid, even tones. This more than anything else shocked me. There was something so utterly pat and performative about everything that he did. It gave me the chilling feeling that I was not the first unwitting listener to be pinioned by the don. Nor was I the first audience for this tawdry cast. There was that and there was the compartment itself. I couldn’t place my finger on it but somehow the decor was changing, as surely as if ghostly but efficient stagehands were playing their part. The scene was shifting more exactly to accommodate the don…But as if to forestall my examining this impression more clearly, he went on.

  Suffice to say that Dave 2 became a fixture in the flat, an adept of the idiosyncratic toilet-roll holder, a hunter after Marvel and condensed milk for late-night brews.

  5

  It

  THERE ARE THOSE people in the world whose lives really are as flat as those of characters in a slight fiction. You know the kind of thing: bound in light blue cloth and picked up for 25p from a cardboard box outside a charity shop. When you get on the bus and start to read a few pages you are struck immediately by the leaden feel of the characterisations. You chuck it to one side and with it go Dan and Carol—and Dave 2 for that matter.

  Gary, Barry, Gerry, Derry and Dave 1 had never supplied any depth to Dan’s life; no interconnectedness, no grout with which to edge the smooth, square featurelessness of Dan’s identity. His mother dominated him in the manner of a Roman emperor. She might send a legion to pacify him from time to time but mostly she preferred to rule him through a provincial governor, a psychological satrap she had established in his very sense of self. And Carol? Well, we know about her. Dave 2’s cards started to appear on the corkboard, next to joky parodic postcards from Camden Lock.

  Carol and Dan’s life was thus exactly like a work of literature: thin and pulped into existence. They floated in vacuo, cut off from parents, isolated from one another. Since there was no other conduit to direct them into the corpuscular circulation of society, while the current was on they flew like filings towards the healing magnet.

  Each evening at their respective meetings Carol and Dave blossomed and then they raced home to receive a little Potterton-side sermon from Dave 2, who would depart punctually at 11.10 pm to get the last 114 bus heading north into the fastness of Friern Barnet, where he had a little quasi-serviced flatlet.

  They hardly had time to nauseate one another. Padding passers-by in the alcove by the bathroom, bath-robed like Rock Hudson and Doris Day, their lips were sealed. I could almost say that Carol didn’t have time to examine the gristly frond. I could almost say that, and I know that in a way, despite your enquiring fucking mind, you’d rather like me to do that, n’est ce pas? But you would also know I was lying, wooden d’jew? Of course Carol had time, no, took time to check out that little priser. Because that’s what it was, a little priser. At odd moments she could feel it prising her apart below; sitting in the group listening to someone share, or else standing at the library counter, crotch bumping against the veneer slab, which, peeling away from its restraining rivet, clacked mournfully.

  And how could we forget pissing and shitting? We mustn’t forget those. Sometimes I feel that my body is nothing but one enormous, snaking bowel, stuffed full of ordure and but thinly covered with skin. Nietzsche, you know, suffered agonies on the toilet. In Ecce Homo he damns the Germans for their beer and sausage, bum-concretising cuisine. Like Gogol, another neuro-neuter, he roamed the cities of Northern Italy, seeking digestive relief in huge antacid bowls of pasta.

  I digress. On the toilet then, Carol’s usual sense of micturation was muted, she felt the stream somehow tramelled—funnelled externally. Looking down she would catch sight of a bead of flesh and set into it a bead of urine. Then Carol’s fingers would brush and freeze as if skewered, on confirming the testimony of her eyes: it was still there. And now poking forward, out from the lips. She could hardly bear to encompass it with shaking thumb and forefinger. She could see herself, outlined in avocado, framed in the half-length mirror over the sink. Legs akimbo, underclothes like twisted fan belts between her splayed shanks, she sweated and twisted on her plastic horseshoe of a torture throne.

  But grasp it she did. And feeling the, by now, wormlet of flesh and gristle between her fingers did something to her. On the one hand it hardened an awful bone of knowledge, a hard white femur or tibia torn from a pirate flag and shoved through her life, cutting her out from the herd, along with her secret. (Although it can be said with certainty that, as yet, Carol did not view this secret as having any greater import or connotation of the bizarre than an adulterous liaison or a dumped foetus.) But on the other hand, or in the other hand, the wormlet was there. It was, as it were, accomplished. And when, clothes still half off herself, she shiveringly, retchingly pulled it out and held it hard against the edge of a perspex six-inch ruler, the memory of capturing her brother Steven doing the same with his willy, some fifteen years before, came to her involuntarily. It wasn’t an inference that she could slap aside. The wormlet was clearly not that strange after all, it was something that she had had an acquaintance with before, albeit in quite a different context.

  ‘Monday, 9.45 am. Length: 7mm. Appearance: that of an extended clitoris, sac-like but containing an interior twistle of nerve-ending-packed gristle. Remarks: sort of a second fun button really.

  ‘Tuesday, 11.45 am. Length: 8.5mm. Appearance: as yesterday but more distended still, clearly poking out from the labia minora now. The wormlet seems to quest for the light, just as the clitoris above retreats under its fleshy hood. Remarks: the increment in length of 1.5mm is not altogether credible. With such small increments we doubt
the accuracy of the Oxford Geometry Kit six-inch perspex ruler.

  ‘Wednesday, 3.30 pm. (In the library toilet, hence the brevity of this entry) Length: 10mm. Appearance: repulsive, it has a little eye. Remarks: I feel sick, very sick.’

  Such might have been the entries if Carol had troubled to keep a written log detailing all the steps of its development. Of course she did no such thing. But strange to relate, within the context of her relationship with it, it was as if she had kept a matter-of-fact account. Moreover this strand of Carol’s character, the matter-of-fact, pragmatic, practical qualities—qualities one primary-school teacher had once reported that she possessed, but which, to my knowledge at least, she had never before exhibited—began to come to the fore in other ways as well.

  Dan was set to work to build a cabinet for the CD/video module. Carol went off on the Thursday morning after her first Al Anon meeting and purchased the required rivet gun and composite wood slabbing from a DIY superstore in Wood Green. Work was scheduled to commence on Saturday morning. On the same trip to Wood Green Carol did something else she had been meaning to do for a while. She signed up for a course of driving lessons.

  But Saturday came and as Dan outlined the shape of the cabinet on a sheet of tracing paper with a special pencil, Carol gibbered and cowered upstairs on her bed. A TV interview with Julio Iglesias’s father, a prominent Spanish gynaecologist, was the trigger point that set her off. She inadvertently opened her fly buttons and took it out. ‘Jesus Christ! I did that. I took it out!’ Awareness screamed. She retched and up came All Bran, an irregular and unscheduled appearance for this most regulatory of breakfast cereals. Carol staggered off the bed to find the security of the carpet. It was rasped against the thick denim of her jeans by the move, and imperceptibly — thank God, because personally I don’t think she could have taken much more at this stage—hardened.