Cock and Bull

by Will Self

  Despite her so recent distress, Carol was nonetheless totally unresponsive to yet another nuzzling interception from Dan, as she crossed the living room en route for the kitchen. And she continued to keep his nose to the grindstone for the rest of the day. For, the separate compartments of Carol’s mind, which had always been strung out along a lurching, ill-lit corridor, had now begun to detach themselves from one another altogether. They were much like this compartment we are sitting in now. It is part of the train, yes, but we cannot access any other part of the train from it. And in that sense I suppose it isn’t part of the train at all…

  The don interleaved his plump little fingers and basketed a flannel knee as if well pleased with this piece of sophistry. Somehow I had failed to notice the pre-war rolling stock when I boarded the train. But what he said was true. The compartment was self-contained, with no access to the rest of the train. It belonged to an earlier age. An age when sexual assault was collectively believed to be something undertaken solely by those without the wherewithal to buy a train ticket. I wanted to discuss this oddity, this example of British Rail underfunding with the don, but he was off again.

  …Carol had always been subject to a time delay between emotional event and emotional response. And therein, of course, lay the essence of her neurosis. But however attenuated, the connection did always exist, and, if you like, her failure adequately to explain why such and such an event might make her cry, while another might make her angry, was a guarantee of her real stability.

  The proof of this assertion is in what began to happen to her next. With increased detachment came increased awareness. Carol flitted in the darkness along the gravelly grading, peeking into the lighted compartments of her mind. In one she saw herself at an Al Anon meeting, sharing; in another she was retching over it; in a third she listened attentively to Dave 2 and in a fourth she was turning away from Dan. The Carol in the darkness, the ghost, as it were, ex machina, smiled and passed on.

  Carol was also getting more aggressive. When a plasterer set aside his hawk and praised her svelte figure —in demotic terms—as she passed along Fortune Green Road, she turned back and spat at him, ‘Shove it up your fucking arsehole,’ and walked on happy. Dan didn’t notice the change, in part simply because he was used to her. Habit is such a great canceller-out of any reflective thought and Dan was nothing if not a creature of habit— and anyway it had never really been Carol that he was married to, but a simulacrum of her, spun from his own fantastic mental projections and the accident of his mother’s indifference. (‘She’s just a little chit of a girl but frankly I don’t think he could do much better.’ This had been the Empress’s response to the news of Dan and Carol’s engagement.)

  Anyway, Dan found himself sober in the clean, cold light of day, and remembered that once upon a time, before Barry, Gary, Derry, Gerry, Dave 1 and he had taken to regularly seeking out the lager of Lamot, they had gained much pleasure from squash, and all the mateyish towel-flicking, play-fighting and Lucozade-swigging that had accompanied it.

  The first four days of sobriety had been sheer hell for Dan. He was so naive and ignorant that he had never known that you could have physical withdrawal symptoms from alcohol. The sweating, retching, and puking, together with the unsettling peripheral hallucinations, took him entirely by surprise. Carol reacted by exiling the sweating grub of his body to the futon divan. There he lay, storms of electrons coursing behind his narrow forehead. And as he tossed, he was subject to waking dreams in which odd sexual chimeras—women with testicles instead of eyes and men with vaginal ears—stood about, unconcerned, in a delusional lounge bar.

  On the fifth day he rose from the futon and went to work. Apart from an odd tingling around the tips of his fingers and toes—as if he were a quadra-amputee, afflicted with the ghost memory of limbs long gone— he felt nothing. Not even a bat’s squeak of a craving for alcohol beset Dan. He had handed over his will and his life to a power greater than himself. According to the AA credo the power did not have to be God, it could be any force greater than one’s self, provided that it was benign and transcendent rather than phenomenal and temporal. Unfortunately, although Dan did try awfully hard not to personify his higher power, occasionally, being a vengeful God, it would manifest itself; appearing in Dan’s mind’s eye in the form of a heavyset middle-aged woman eating Battenburg cake, a woman not unlike Dan’s mother.

  Another week came and went at Melrose Mansions. It grew. Carol and Dan continued on their divergent courses, meeting up only in the short period before their respective meetings; and then afterwards in order to harken once more unto Brother Dave.

  Dave 2, it needs to be said, was playing his own very particular game. For Dave 2 was a parasite of the emotions. Dave 2 could gain no direct pleasure from any intimate relationship, but rather, like some honey-sucking bird with an obscenely elongated bill, he gained an intense and even sweetly erotic pleasure from sucking out the juice from the private parts of other people’s entanglements. And so, to this end, he encouraged each half of any given couple to regard him as their supreme and absolute confidant. When this ideal situation was achieved, Dave 2 attained his own strange nirvana.

  But with Carol and Dan, things were proving a little tough. Sure, both of them were willing to confide in Dave 2, but the nature of their confidences was entirely unsatisfying. Both of them were vague about their resentments, hurts and passions. And the precise detail, the who, where, why, what and when, was altogether missing. It was this hot intimacy that Dave 2 desired more than anything else, so, like a spymaster, Dave 2 determined to employ an agent, and to that end he waited behind at St Simon’s on the tenth day after Carol’s induction and introduced her to Geena.

  Geena was a fellow recovering alcoholic, a stringy old hippy thing in black lycra that smelt of patchouli long past its sell-by date. Geena was an old-time accomplice of Dave 2’s, similarly sexually dormant, and addicted to the delights of what we may call—to coin a neologism— psycho-empathetic voyeurism, or PEV for short.

  Geena came lurching up to Carol, rocking hard on her preposterous heels. Carol was helping to dispense handleless mugs of instant coffee to the Al Anon group members. Carol was struck immediately by the strange way that Geena’s belly bulged out at the sides, as if she had a circular cushion rammed up her stretchy top. Struck by this and struck also by Geena’s defiantly ethnic hairstyle. All of her thick black locks had been gathered up into a single plume on top of her head and garlanded there with skeins of fake amber beads. Geena’s face was unremarkable to begin with; her flywhisk hair-do made it wholly unmemorable.

  ‘Hi, I’m Geena,’ said Geena, before Dave 2 had even had an opportunity to introduce them. ‘The old pisshead here has told me about you. I insisted that he introduce us, I keep birds too.’

  This was three arrows straight into the bull. Carol did like her birds and she could be flattered as much as the next. But Geena’s real stroke had been to ridicule Dave 2. Carol had begun to develop some profound doubts about Dave 2, after the first flush of her conversion had started to fade. And although the ridicule was clearly not intended to be pejorative in this context, Carol thought she could definitely sense some lurking malice.

  Carol didn’t need much urging to accompany Geena back to her flat off the Harrow Road. It was a long way but Geena had a car. Carol was doubly pleased because riding in the car gave her a good pretext for discussing her favourite thing of the moment—driving. Ever since Carol had started her driving lessons she had developed an unreasonable interest in everything to do with the road. She had already had two lessons and they had gone off more than satisfactorily. The instructor was feeling so relaxed towards the end of the second lesson, that he lifted his feet aside from the dualcontrol pedals and let her go solo on Green Lanes. ‘You’re a natural,’ he told Carol. And only 80 per cent of the compliment sprang from his fuzzy desire to go where it was.

  Geena and Carol talked about driving all the way down to the Harrow Road. Once there, they t
alked about Carol and a little bit about Geena. Geena clutched at her hosed and knobbly knees, and bent forward. She was flanked by low tables covered with ratty bibelots. Incense mouldered in a corner. Geena’s face folded itself into a listening ear and Carol felt compelled to give her at least a version of the truth…about her and Dan that is, certainly not about it.

  But the version was no better than what Dave 2 had already. And as an exercise in PEV Geena had to concede to herself that the interrogation had proved a failure. For the essence of PEV is to create in its practitioners’ minds pictures of the most intimate aspects of their subjects’ lives. A seasoned PEVist gets off, not on secretly watching sexual intercourse, but simply on knowing that it is taking place. But Carol’s info brought Dave 2 and Geena no closer to this devoutly desired consummation. Instead, when either of them tried to form a mental image of Dan and Carol’s intimate life, it remained as woodenly two-dimensional as an animated cartoon.

  Returning home, Carol found Dan in the kitchen, looking flushed. He was sitting reading the local advertiser. After a game of squash with Derry, en route from work to St Simon’s, Dan was feeling pleasantly tingly.

  Dave 2 had been compelled to retire early for the evening. It was the first night since they had ‘come into recovery’ that he had neglected Dan and Carol. Dan had wondered whether this wasn’t the beginning of the end of Dave 2’s concern for him, but at the very end of the evening Dave 2 had come across to Dan and given him a really big hug. Dan went home with a new glow. Dave 2’s hug had somehow unlocked a wave of sensual memories for Dan. Memories of entwinings, limb stretchings, sighs and lubricious sounds. Dan’s sexual recall was so pathetically confused that it was difficult for him to judge whether these were genuine memories, or merely memories of witnessing actors, working at sex for the requisite Equity minimum fee. If you wanted to be clever and allusive you might say that Dave 2’s hug was Dan’s madeleine.

  ‘That’s your style, isn’t it. Being clever and allusive, but what does this really amount to save for trying to get one over on good, ordinary, straightforward people? Trying to get one over with your slimy little mind and insinuating your snaky little cock into them while they’re not looking! Pushing it up their trouser legs while they’re strap-dangling on the train! Or while talking to them at a party flipping it up ’n’ under their skirts! You’re an incubus, that’s what you are; a night creeper, a ravager, a rapist. Yes, that’s right—a rapist! …You fuck! You fucking fuck…Oh gaa!’

  The hate had been injected into the don’s voice like dye into water. The aftertone hung there in the dusty compartment, puffing into dense billows of aggression. I sat stunned. Too stunned to pull myself away from his protuberant gaze and twitching lip, too stunned to say anything.

  It was clear that the don was changing before my eyes, and along with this change came an alteration in the nature of his tale. It was becoming clear to me that the tale itself had no autonomous existence, that it was simply a direct expression of the don’s nature. And if any further confirmation of this hypothesis were required it was amply supplied within seconds, when the don, instead of leaping from his seat and throttling me, or metamorphosing into someone else altogether, resumed the story in the same rapid but even tones with which he had begun. Insulting me directly was no fun for him—or so I thought. He wanted me to suffer alongside Dan and Carol.

  The rest of the evening Dan spent sacked down in the living-room watching a repeat of Doogie Howser MD. He ate some of the new poly-flavoured crisps: wiener schnitzel with red cabbage. Upstairs Carol did the same. He came to his twin bed at about eleven-thirty. He kissed Carol on the cheek and said ‘night love’. They simultaneously snuggled down and clicked off their respective bedside lamps; just like synchronised sleepers.

  But sometime during the night they lost this unconscious harmony. Carol, who had taken to sleeping with legs slightly apart, lying three-quarters on one side, felt a deft hand slide across the top of her thigh, towards it. Dan’s lethargic voice, fat-bellied with desire, whispered in her ear: ‘Is it all right if I climb on board?’

  6

  How One Becomes What One Is

  CAROL STIFFENED. No, not quite right, bit of an unfortunate choice of words that, it would be better to say that she froze. Indeed she went so crisply hard that she might have been freeze-dried. What to do? Dan’s hand, was it headed towards Carol? Or towards it?

  It would have been entirely in character for Carol to shrug Dan off at this point. She knew the balloon of his erection to be so diffident that it was easily punctured. There was nothing whatsoever compelling about Dan’s lust. Maybe she would have given him some explanation, but it would have been just as typical for her to simply turn aside. You’d like that, wooden d’jew? You’d like Carol to turn aside. I don’t think you really want to confront this particular mise en scène. I doubt your capacity for genuine PEV. I doubt your ability to endure the trufflings and mufflings beneath the patterned cover. Tough.

  Some access of jouissance made Carol not turn aside. Made her in fact welcome Dan’s questing hand with her own and guide it towards her nipple… He lapped hungrily at her ear, as if sufficient stimulus might cause it to lactate. He nuzzled and snuffled, little bleatings issued from his lips. His silky thigh slid on top of hers; his free hand went to her shoulder, and like a sailor hooking his way up on to a mast, Dan swung on board with amazing facility.

  But had it not always been thus? Cast your mind back to the prologue… And can you recall those three sandpapery thrusts that accidentally coaxed our Carol into tremulous orgasm; into the most petit of petit morts? Carol had no choice, comfort alone dictated that she open her legs. She did this and despite Dan’s lower abdomen pressing into her groin, felt it pull free from its housing and this time perceptibly harden. Mercifully this ghastly sensation—full of bloody meaning—was at least eclipsed by Dan’s sudden entry.

  Now came the acid test. And as his mouth galumphed once more on to her wet neck, and Carol turned aside to look at the glass of dusty water on the bedside table, she knew that her fate might well be decided. Would he feel it? Would he notice? Could he avoid it pressing into his pubis? A little knotty thing, a baby brother snuggling up against its older sibling.

  No, he didn’t. And is it any surprise? After all Dan had never troubled to examine Carol’s cuntal area with any kind of attention. He knew nothing of her true shape. For Dan this America, this New Found Land, had always remained terra incognita. Beneath the hairy diadem that did Carol adorn, Dan knew there was a hole…but he knew of little else besides. His thrusts had always been into an insensate void. The sensation he received from intercourse had always been mechanical and piston-like. Three thrusts and come; four thrusts a bogey; and five thrusts just about par for the course—and the hole.

  This is exactly the handicap that Dan achieved on this particular round, to persist with our facile and demeaning golfing metaphor. And then he disembarked—again with great ease—and cushioned his slightly sodden muff and softening frond against her upper thigh. A few whispered tendernesses, in gratitude for the relieving milking, and he was gone, back to his own single.

  Carol lay in the darkness. The digital alarm clock glowed and so did she. More than that—she exulted. Yes, exulted, although she was unable fully to acknowledge the source, or even the content of her feelings. For Carol it was enough that she had escaped detection… But really…absolutely entre nous I think it was because when it stiffened and Dan made his febrile stab at her, Carol thrust back. Yes! Lifted her hips a little from the mattress, using the tension of the springs to ease up and— not feel him sliding inside her oiled sheath, no. Quite the opposite. It was she, Carol, who thrust up inside him, just for one insidious instant. Gone just as soon as it was—oh, so barely, but nonetheless nakedly—acknowledged.

  ‘“Morning stirs the feet and hands

  (Nausicaa and Polypheme)

  Gesture of orang-outang

  Rises from the sheets in steam

 
This withered root of knots of hair

  Slitted below and gashed out with eyes

  This oval O cropped out with teeth

  The sickle motion from the thighs…”

  ‘You see, my memory for quotation improves as I progress,’ said the don, addressing me personally, directly and not simply as a unitary audience. ‘Eliot, isn’t it? Hate his stuff. Uptight he was, a frozen puritan bumhole. Scared of cunt, wouldn’t you say? But whose vagina was dentata in this context? Or to place the question in a more modern idiom: who was zooming who? Fucking kike Eliot. Not a lot of people know that, but you would, wooden d’jew?’

  The very next day Carol went for her third driving lesson. Two days later for her fourth. At the end of the following week her instructor, a Turkish Cypriot, rasped his thumbnail along his moustache and confirmed what she already suspected. ‘Youse know, pretty lady, youse can take your test now I think.’ Carol felt exultation again, but not that dangerous thrusting exultation we touched on before; this was a more workaday sensation. It was combined for Carol with an acute awareness of a solid and mechanical species of causation in the world, of the form: push button A and B will happen.

  Now of course it would be absurd to suggest that Carol had not been aware of this in the past, but her apprehension of her own impact upon this stratum of the world had never before been so nakedly and enjoyably intuitive. Driving in the school’s Mini Metro; cutting an onion; completing a transaction in a shop, Carol felt empowered by all these simple acts, she felt her status as a potentially effective agent being pushed and moulded into shape by everything she did.