Cock and Bull

by Will Self

  He stepped down from his dais and sidled up behind Carol. Outside, there was no dénouement in sight. Far from being intimidated or repulsed by the spluttering spout, Ur-Carol was pouring on more invective. The bemused wild man staggered and righted himself under her verbal strafing, but not before an arc of toxic pee had flown across both the shop window and his own trousers.

  From behind Ted Wiggins gently inserted his hand between the warm denim tubes that sheathed Carol’s upper thighs. He froze, in his mind’s eye seeing the bench passing sentence, and then reached up and grabbed at Carol’s penis…

  Wiggins had intended to lurch into her at the same time and then claim that it was an accident—that he had cannoned into her out of desperation to reach the unfolding action in the street. But what happened next was determined entirely by Carol and her quickening reflexes. Sensing her penis under threat, Carol grabbed a bottle of Emva Cream that one of the fuddled pac-a-mac brigade had left on the counter, and, whirling round, she dealt Ted Wiggins a glancing blow on the side of the head. Such was the force of the blow that the follow-through took the bottle on to the steel casing of the sacred cash register, where it gloriously shattered.

  You might have thought that this explosive and sticky incident would have sent Carol scampering out of the door of the shop, while Wiggins was still lying dazed on the lino, scampi fries rustling down about his ears. But no. Carol felt an access of phlegm so palpable that she almost harrumphed—and stood her ground. The shattering bottle, clearly audible outside, had given the wild man the opportunity to wrench himself away and head off, skittering and batting against parked cars, towards Ally Pally. Ur-Carol shot back inside the shop.

  ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ she exclaimed, seeing her brilliant(ined) husband felled.

  ‘He just tripped right over the counter trying to get to you…’ explained Carol, trying desperately to inject a note of shock into what she was saying. They both stood and stared at Wiggins as, slowly, he struggled to his knees and shook his head like an old sheepdog.

  The two Carols met each other’s level stares over the collapsed spine of the tedious vintner, and there was great complicity in that eye contact—which meant that Carol’s version of events was logged and not disputed by any of the parties involved. Not disputed at the time, that is.

  ‘Oooergh. Fuck,’ said Wiggins—he was clearly fine. During the Second War an entire case of Klim had fallen on his head while he was posted to guard a NAAFI storage dump at Acton. Ted Wiggins had barely stopped smoking for thirty seconds: the Wigginses were a thick-skulled breed.

  When he was recovered enough to stand, Ur-Carol sent him off with an anaemic shopgirl from next door to get the wound dressed at the Whittington. Ur-Carol would, of course, have gone herself, but she had to mind the shop.

  It’s lucky that Ur-Carol did stick around, because once Ted was gone she made one of the great sales of her life. Carol flitted across the linoleum checkerboard from one glass side of the shop to the other, hands dipping down and diving up to reach out bottles and cans. On the wide counter—which was still being mopped and doused with Flash to eliminate the sweet smell of Carol’s violent success—she ranked them in an orderly phalanx: first the Pilsners, Czechoslovakian, German, Austrian and the domestically brewed varieties; then the esoterica: Elephant from Denmark, Wildebeeste from the Republic of South Africa, Simpatico and Sol from down Mexico way; some Nigerian Gulder, a few high-waisted silvery cans of Japanese Sapporo; Carol even picked out a four-pack of a very obscure beer called Black Mambo, brewed in Mauretania, which no one, to Ur-Carol’s knowledge, had ever bought before. On top of the esoterica Carol piled a squat pyramid of products whose branding aimed them at that tight sector of society between early adopters, ethnic minorities and rank piss-artists. The beers in this section were sickly sweet and double strength, they had names like ‘Radical Stout’ and ‘Safe Haven’. Carol knew that Dan was a particular fan of one called ‘Premier Class’. This came in a burnished copper can with a baroque coat of arms emblazoned right the way round the can. Below this was the motto of the English royal house: ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’. Before you think it, let me trouble to reassure you that the irony of this was lost entirely on its brewer.

  After the esoterica and the poor people’s liquid sedatives, Carol moved back to more familiar ground— taking a swing through that fictitious Asgard that must provide the provenance for the nomenclature so beloved by the East Midlands breweries’ marketing men. From this branding zone Carol pulled out green cans of Odin, fiery orange cans of Wotan, the iridescent mauve bottles of Brunnhilde Brew, a plastic demijohn of Loki Lager and—naturally—plenty of the lager of Lamot.

  The total bill came to over £100. Ur-Carol rang it up on the till; the automatic printer chattered and extruded the long frog’s tongue of receipt. Carol took a taxi home.

  8

  The Icing Gun

  SAFE IN THE FLAT, Carol changed out of her sherry-stained jeans and set out to hide the beer. She didn’t want just to conceal it—that would have been easy enough, for during the week Dan never paid any attention to anything but the superficial. No, Carol wanted all the beer to be out of sight, but effortlessly accessible. She hid the beer so that she could lean out from any vantage point in the flat and instantly access any one of the bewildering variety of alcoholic beverages she had purchased. This she achieved with a rare artistry.

  The beer was hidden, the flat was clean. Carol looked at the electric clock in the kitchen—she had two hours before Dan would be back from work. She took some steaks from the freezer and set them to thaw on the top of the cooker. She put on the kettle and sat down on one of the varnished pine benches that ran along the wall of the kitchen. She scrutinised the cork board with its coating of PCs, secular and devotional. But now neither kind meant anything to her. The silent flat felt pressurised to Carol, as if, on this quiet autumn afternoon, it were about to be lowered into the Marianas Trench—a bathysphere for living.

  Carol’s flatfish hand skated down on to the lap of her dress. She regarded it as it lay there—for some reason it looked ludicrously arbitrary to her, as if it were just one of a number of possible wrist attachments that she could pull off and slot in at will. The electric clock buzzed subsonically. The hand slid down the schüss of material and plucked at the hem…

  The train clattered across a small bridge and slowed again. I sort of thought that this might be an opportunity to take my leave of the don. I didn’t mind the idea of waiting at some sleepy station for the next train. I had no stomach for the don’s idea of honor and I felt he was giving his sordid little tale unnecessary airs by quoting Roethke. It was true—I knew that I had no thirst for the dénouement. I wished Dan and Carol dead, lifeless, deconstructed—or better still never constructed in the first place. I stood up for the first time since he had begun to talk and immediately felt much better. I was tall and he was short. And now, standing over him, I could see that he was going bald.

  My standing up also ruptured the thickening atmosphere in the compartment. While seated I had felt intimidated and sucked in. I had become half convinced that the don was mad. I had expected some kind of an outburst when I stood up—that he might immediately get nasty—but he stayed silent. The train coasted to a halt. The window was half open anyway…I reached out into the warm pollen of the night and found the handle. I was on the point of stepping down from the compart-ment when a railwayman appeared beneath me at the side of the track. He was holding a signalling lantern in his hand with both red and green lights illuminated.

  ‘I wouldn’t get down here if I were you, sorr…’ He had a burry West Country accent and an equine visage. The log of his head was surmounted by a Saturn’s ring aureole of ginger hair. He looked up at me with sincere, dutiful eyes and went on. ‘The train’s only halted to take on water—you’ll be off again directly, as soon as we’ve got steam up.’ Before I had time to analyse these anachronisms a hand tugged at the back of my jacket.

  ‘Co
me on! Sit down! I want to tell you the rest of this story.’

  I complied. The railwayman shut the door, I heard a whistle rise and fall, the train moved off once more through the close darkness. There was an internal shift inside me. It felt like something had given way, some membranous lining had ruptured. I shook my head from side to side, vigorously, and felt the tips of my hair flick against my cheeks and brow. But even as I fell back on to the plush and allowed the golden snowfall of retinal flecks to subside, I knew that it hadn’t worked. I was still in the carriage, the don was still opposite.

  ‘Don’t try it,’ he said. The mutant was reading my mind. ‘You, boy, you’re a literary train-spotter. No less and no more. But you’ve fallen off the platform you see. Your anorak is torn and dirty, your trainers are scuffed and you’ve lost your notebook. You’re stumbling across the tracks at Clapham Junction—which as you know is the widest narrative interchange in Europe. If you don’t watch it some purely local story, some commuting tale, will mow you down, cleave you in two, finally separate your dialogue from your characterisation. So-don’t-try-it.’

  ‘Try what?’

  ‘Try and downgrade me in this fashion. It’s unseemly, it’s cheap. My reality shouldn’t be tipped into a plastic laundry basket and flogged off in this manner. I reserve my right to centrality—to be the pro- as well as the antagonist.’ The don’s voice picked up speed with the train. He was managing—once again—to marginalise me.

  ‘“It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.” Wooden d’jew agree with that—wooden d’jew? I certainly think so. And what that quotation tells us about the value of expectation can be applied to all areas of our life, can’t it? I also think that the quotation …who is it, by the way? I simply cannot remember… tells us something about the value of good narrative, don’t you? It points the way towards the positive values of storytelling. Naturally a story requires a coda, but this should not overwhelm the body of the tail. In truth I faintly despise the oblique and distorting innovations of the modern…don’t you? I like something to be straightforward. I like a story to tell me no more or no less than the storyteller intends. I don’t go looking for hidden meanings, I don’t try and pick away at the surface of things, pretending to find some “psychological” sub-structure that really I have placed there myself, by dint of sleight-of-mind. I like to call a spade a spade… Or a coon, or a nigger, or a buck-fucking Mandingo slamming his great engorged purple shaft into the bleeding, wrenching, splitting arse crack of some poor, pretty, pure white flower of a girl. Some soft thing, just past her first communion, all her clothes and underwear scented by a fucking lavender cushion. Christ, it makes me sick! Ga!’ I could see he was physically biting back the cud of his nausea.

  ‘So, anyway, stick with us for the end of the story, now won’t you, my sweet? Won’t you, my precious jewelkin? Pleaseums?’ His aged baby-face creased up with a sickly grin and then relaxed once more into dolly automatism. ‘Goody gumdrops!’

  Carol’s hand then, plucking once more at the hem, and then lifting up the whole bell of the dress bottom, scrunging it up to her waist, whilst she remained seated on the bench. Her fleshy tights sandwiched her blouse and underwear as if they were thick fungal petals in a transparent press. Carol took down the tights—freed them. She was wearing a neat pair of Y-fronts, they tented over her pubis, but still there was no satisfying sac dangling below. At any rate, this is what Carol thought, catching sight of herself, from the waist down, in the sheeny glass door of the music centre cabinet that Dan built.

  Carol moved about the rooms, swivel-hipped, legs swinging out to each side, buttocks centred. She leaned against the doorjamb and tried punching a few imaginary upper arms with easy bonhomie. From outside the maisonette came the sound of the heavy wheeled canisters that contained the detritus of Melrose Mansions being shifted on to the garbage truck. Carol froze. Perhaps, she thought, perhaps I should go and show myself to them? After all, I have nothing to feel ashamed of, it’s not my fault. And anyway they might find me attractive… I bet all of them have dreamed of finding a woman like me, a woman with just that little bit extra… to make them feel truly at home.

  The Y-fronts fell down to her ankles and Carol stood as Nature intended her. She took her penis in her hand. It was small, brown-pinkly insignificant. She looked at it and thought What’s all the fuss? But then it began to swell, to pump itself up, to inflate. And what a magnificent sight that was! For it didn’t lift itself up in any ungainly fashion, there was nothing mechanical in its sudden growth, nothing wooden. Rather, like a flower opening in a stop-action film, the penis grew all at once, every part of it moving together, in concert, in harmony. It unfolded, spread itself to the sun. Lifted up its slim, supple length so that its smooth skin covering became taut, velvety. And as the head appeared, pulsing and bobbing, with a tear of semen in its slashed eye, Carol felt a surge of exultation. She clenched her buttocks and leaned back on her heels.

  Some people say that the penis is an ugly thing, one of God’s creative afterthoughts. They draw comparisons between its dangling extraneousness and the neat, fitted design of the female snatch. A pox on such pundits with their envious carpings. We know all about their pendulous labia, their cetacean clitorises and Moby Dick odours! Oh, Carol’s penis, I could write an ode to it. The penis anyway is such a powerful thing, a solid rod packed with the fluids of life…

  ‘Hold up! I sense something, my laddie. I sense that as I describe the glories of the newest member you are thinking along different lines…that you are placing different interpretations on what I am saying. Is this not so, my friend? My little cottager… Well educated are we?’

  I demurred frantically.

  ‘Good, because I hope for your sake that you aren’t regarding Carol’s penis as anything but what it is. I hope you aren’t deriving any signifiers or symbols from Carol’s penis. I hope you aren’t undertaking some convoluted analysis of this story in your sick sheeny mind. And you know when I refer to “sheeny” I’m not talking about glass, don’t you, my sweet? Only a faggot would do such a thing—and he would prettily lisp “it takes one to know one”. Not so. Sometimes you don’t even know who it is, right up to the moment when you feel the hot head batter against your dry sphincter…or so people tell me…’

  Carol ran her fingers along the obsidian rod. She is back standing in her tiled, fantasy courtyard. A fountain plays in a stone basin, all around are fluted columns. From somewhere comes the faint sound of a flamenco guitar, lightly strummed. From behind one of the columns, lightly stepping on heeled boots, comes a slim, elegant figure in short black jacket and tight trousers. He is handsome beyond belief, with thoroughbred features. He takes Carol by the arm and leads her to a divan upholstered with the finest of Persian kelims. And there he strips both himself and her, all the while running his fine, tapering hands over her smooth body, lingering over her penis, her clitoris, her nipples, her vagina.

  Carol was really wanking by now. One hand pushing the skin of her penis back and forth, the other inside her cunt. The daydream divan corresponded to the divan bed in the living room. And it was here that the hidalgo started to fuck her, moving rapidly on from sinuous insertions to a seemingly infinite series of great whooshing strokes, each of which seemed to teeter on the brink, like a roller coaster at the very apex of its run, before sweeping in to fan up her fanny flames. Ooh! Ooh-ooh. That’s ni-ice, isn’t it? But I’ll tell you, my little keikel, something funny was happening in Carol’s little keikel.

  Now of course she canted and moved her hips, and lying as she was, tipped back on the warm upholstery of the Habitat divan, she used its loofahesque action to enhance her pleasure. But this was something more than a thrusting back as she was thrust into (although that in itself was one of the innovations Carol had made alongside the joy of wanking). No, no. The worm turned. The cylinder was becoming the piston. And as she felt the sweet stirrings of orgasm in the deep pit of her loins Carol realised that she was fucking as well as being f
ucked, that she was inside the hidalgo, just as surely as he was inside her.

  She came with great cracking thermofaxed plashes of jism. They shot out from Carol’s third eye and fell, on the cushion covers, on the carpet, on Carol’s smooth and hairless thighs. She dipped a carmine fingernail into the viscous mother-of-pearl fluid and brought it to her lips. Mmm! Di-vine. Salty and yet sweet and a texture unachievable by the finest and most famous of sauciers. Carol was transported.

  She lay for a moment or two, replete, beautifully relaxed, her mind clear and even emptier than usual— then she mopped herself up matter-of-factly with a wad of toilet paper. She put on her Y-fronts, tights and skirt; straightened one or two things in the room, and sat down to wait for her husband to get home.

  * * *

  ‘Henry James only had half a cock. Not a lot of people know that. The poor man lost it chasing after a fire engine, trying to help out as an amateur fire fighter in his native Boston. He tripped and fell beneath the horses’ hooves, only to emerge white and half unmanned. They carried him home to his exceptional family on a board. His brother William looked at poor Henry. He focused on the bloody patch that coated Henry’s breeches, and challenged God, whomsoever he might be, to make his brother whole again. He was praying for all of us you see, he knew his brother. He knew that all we could look forward to was a series of thick, turgid novels; penis substitutes. Since poor Henters couldn’t fuck anybody else, he resolved to fuck us all up with his serpentine sentences…uncoiling inside our minds like everlengthening weenies.