Cock and Bull

by Will Self

  The baby, on the other hand, regarded Naomi with frank and blissful wonderment. She was of an age (about fourteen months), when each new morning represents nothing so much as a triumph on the part of the Continuity Department. The baby was amazed to see roughly similar objects, of similar colours, occupying the same positions as yesterday. And more than that the baby was delighted (albeit perplexed) that the actors playing her parents seemed to have remembered, once again, the parts assigned to them.

  ‘Come on, ba-aby,’ said Naomi, approaching the high chair with Swiss cereal in one hand and two spoons in the other. She gave one teaspoon to the baby and plied the other herself. They made free with the Farex. Naomi had to stand in an awkward position to feed the baby, because her husband, the doctor, was occupying the whole of one end of the big, scrubbed, plain wood table that dominated the Margoulieses’ kitchen. Naomi knew better than to disturb him. Alan often had filthy tempers in the morning. If provoked he might easily spiral into quite staggering flights of abusive fancy.

  Naomi couldn’t decide what to look at. For some reason she felt nauseous this morning; and the sight of the baby squidging and patty-caking the beige pulp was more than she could bear. But then, the aerial view of her husband was just as much of a turn-off. Alan Margoulies may have been universally acknowledged by all who knew or met him to be a charismatic and sexually attractive man. But from the angle afforded her Naomi could see brown and white scurf in the parting of his lank black hair. She also noticed with a shock of recognition—it was a fact that she had registered before but only with her hands—that the back of Alan’s head really did have little or no projection to it. There was an almost perpendicular line running from the apex of his scalp to where the hair flopped across his collar.

  Naomi shivered. The translation of one sense into another left her feeling still more nauseous. The Doctor rattled his newspaper. ‘Mmm…mmmm,’ he grunted, a private assent to something he was reading, in that awful, affected, self-consciously absent-minded way that Naomi had come very quickly to despise. Naomi meditated on the peculiar quality of her husband’s gaucherie. It was so poignant and total: as if he had just returned from a naff finishing school in Switzerland. Better to sit down opposite him at the far end of the table, and move the baby’s high chair. Anything but sustain the aerial view. This Naomi did.

  At eye level Alan Margoulies was much easier on the eye—pretty even. He had a long slim nose; flat dark brows; slightly protuberant but very, very brown eyes; and the mouth of a woman. His skin had the tinge of marble, and everything about him tapered: fingers, ear lobes, chin. He was slim and vigorous, and he wore his hair unfashionably long, hooked back behind his ears. He was never, ever still, not even now. Naomi could hear his crêpe sole slapping against the red tiles of the kitchen floor, and fingers of one of his hands were performing a drum solo on the underside of the table.

  Alan sensed her looking at him. He glanced up into her eyes and smiled at her quite beautifully. He said, ‘Why don’t we get a sitter tonight? We could go out to dinner and catch a film. Whaddya say?’

  Oh, he does still love me! Waves of pleasure beat up in Naomi’s chest. It takes so little, she thought, and quite rightly despised herself for it.

  Alan pulled the heavy front door shut firmly enough for the little panes of coloured glass set into it to rattle. He flexed his shoulders and set off on the one-hundred-and-fifty-yard walk to the Grove Health Centre.

  Alan Margoulies was what is known as a ‘conscientious man’. This is at least a third of the way up the career path to being a saint. Conscientious men (and women for that matter) often hear a sort of susurration in their ears when they achieve this prebendary status. If they concentrate hard on this susurration they can just about hear the words ‘Ooh, he’s a saint’, repeated over and over again.

  Alan Margoulies was a general practitioner who actually cared about his patients. His professional rise had been sufficiently speedy to hold at bay the cynicism and alienation that dance attendance on the healing art. Only thirty-two and already in line to become the practice head when old Dr Fortis retired; no wonder he had so much love for his patients, they were working so hard on his behalf. Lobbying all and sundry with their chance declarations: ‘Ooh, that nice Dr Margoulies,’ they said, in that very emphatic way that invariably makes one think that this Dr Margoulies must be a veritable ‘Doctor of Niceness’.

  And let us not forget that great moral and emotional template: home life. We’ve seen Alan Margoulies at home already. Not very nice perhaps. In fact not nice at all—egotistic, domineering, aggressive and duplicitous. But conscientious—blindingly, achingly conscientious, as Naomi could no doubt testify. After all, who else but Alan would have read her passages from Leach and Jolly whilst she was actually eggy-puking, lost in the great fastness of her first morning-sick session?

  Alan walked briskly. His tapering body, clad in what he imagined was tan-fashionable suit bagginess, flexed and rippled in the sharp light that fell from between the clouds scudding over Archway Hill. If Alan looked upward from the petrified trench of the street he could see the steel bridge that crossed the sharp cutting of Archway Road. Alan knew that a lot of unhappy people committed suicide by jumping off that bridge. The impact on the road below, according to a doctor Alan knew who worked in Casualty at the Whittington, sent their femurs shooting up into their stomachs like crossbow bolts. If, that was, they were lucky enough to avoid being hit by a speeding vehicle on the way down. While contemplating these people’s action-packed demise his fine face became overcast with sadness and back-lit by sympathy. In two words: genuine caring. That is, until a little voice whispered in his ear: ‘He’s a saint.’

  Alan stopped, and scratched back a long strand of hair that had become unhooked from his ear. I mustn’t keep thinking like that. He rapped the thought out as type-punched words in his mind’s eye. In some ways I do try to be really caring and selfless, but in others I am utterly selfish, utterly egotistic and very much a typical man. He continued: I have foibles and real failings. All too often I over-compensate in terms of the freedoms I allow myself, on account of my overwhelmingly committed, caring and conscientious programme.

  What Margoulies was referring to in the above was his proclivity for extra-marital fucking. Most recently two couplings had been effected in the shared flats of student nurses who had done temporary placements at the Grove. But before that Alan had had a more protracted dalliance (in fact throughout Naomi’s pregnancy) with a moody sculptress from Maida Vale. Sybil created pseudo-Easter Island heads out of building materials— breezeblocks and the like—and fellated Alan vigorously, which was something that Naomi could bring herself to do only occasionally.

  Of course Alan was thinking magically, attempting proleptically to influence the question of his canonisation. By admitting to his faults he wished to avoid the accusation of hypocrisy or egotism. Even to himself he couldn’t make a flat statement about the adultery, because he found it too exciting. Sybil and the student nurses lay in the past, and recently sex with Naomi had started to get smelly. Smelly in Alan’s mind if not actually in Naomi’s body.

  Levering his thin form off her torso, which was pancaked by his prodding on to the posturepedic mattress, Alan didn’t so much smell her, as smell a nuance of her, an ugly nuance.

  One of Alan’s patients was the licensee of the local, a concrete pillbox called the Greyhound, which was stuck on a traffic island. The pub was accessible only through subterranean corridors that dripped with urine. His broad knuckles were tattooed: ‘hate’ on one hand, ‘indifference’ on the other. When the cynical publican’s wife was pregnant, which she often was, he referred to her as creatin’. ‘She’s creatin’ again,’ he would report to Alan in flat tones, taking his heavy ease on the three-legged blond wood chair that Alan provided for his patients.

  It was this expression that now linked itself to the eggy-smelling nuance in Alan’s memory and put a stop to his moral inventory. Oh Christ, he thought, sure
ly not, surely she isn’t?

  And then he substituted scented muffs like downy lavender cushions for the smell. Vaginas that hummed internally with a wet electric caress; the underside of breasts as smooth as warm pebbles, nipples so erect that each touch brought forth an ‘aaah!’; and great flouncing, billowing, parachuting swathes of underwear.

  For Alan had become thus: addicted to the pornographic whimsy of his own silly imagination. A dedicated truffler, up through lips of velvet, into lips of satin, through them to lips of silk and then finally on to warm lips, live lips, wet lips. After all he couldn’t help it, now could he? He was old enough and married enough to know that people’s bodies expand and contract; that they take on and let off ballast; that they are dry-docked and de-barnacled; that they even become infested—especially after an Arctic winter—trapped in the frigid pack ice.

  It was this maturity, rather than his professional status which made his fantasies seem so absurd to him. And yet here he was—now within twenty yards of work—lost in the ravenous contemplation of a warm young snatch. A snatch that had yet to be punched from within by a baby’s head. A scented snatch, softly encased in pure linen filigreed with girly embroidery. The whole framed by flat tummy, handlebar hips, suspender belt and dark stocking tops.

  ‘Ooh-ooh!’ Margoulies let out an involuntary moan and bashed through the swing doors into the main reception of the Grove Health Centre.

  Bull was already there, waiting for him.

  * * *

  Bull had bettered his promised journey time to the health centre by more than four minutes. To begin with he had sidled down through East Finchley, driving like an invalid. But when he stopped at the confluence of the High Road and the Great North Road, by the pelican crossing which is level with the Elite Cattery, Bull touched it again and almost fainted clean away.

  Copping this particular feel perhaps wasn’t as disturbing as Bull’s explorations after waking. After all, he knew that it was there. But in each new context the vagina seemed to take on a different guise, project itself as an alternative blight.

  On this occasion the sensation of pulling up trouser leg and smoothing hand up calf almost gave the game away. Bull, although no Lothario, had been known to pull and push and gather material on his way to digital exploration and entry. This being so the vagina was able to insinuate itself as being more ‘familiar’, more acceptable, when encountered underneath clothing by touch alone. But this ‘familiarity’ was of course wholly in-admissible to Bull’s mind. To acknowledge that one has a cunt on the back of one’s leg at 9.10 am whilst paused alongside one of London’s most desirable pet hostelries would be to go too far towards disturbing the natural order of things.

  So instead Bull felt labia majora and mons veneris as fluid-filled sacs. Christ, it’s a burn, he immediately concluded. A whopping great burn, already infected. With this new hypothesis Bull started searching for a cause. He racked his addled mind for information about the night before. After finishing work at his office Bull had gone to meet some of his rugby mates at Brixton Sports Centre. They had regular games of five-a-side football there on Tuesday evenings, in order to get fit before matches.

  Bull had played vigorously and worked up a good sweat on his white and blocky body. Had he perhaps leant back against a hot-water pipe in the changing room? Sometimes when one is exhausted by exercise, one’s lobes awash with additional endorphins and encephalins, one doesn’t notice even quite severe injuries. But not this severe. Bull winced with the realisation, feeling the vagina prink once again on the stiff fabric of his trouser leg. And after the game? What then? They had gone on to the Atlantic in Coldharbour Lane where old West Indian men in nylon hats slammed down dominos. Bull had had two or three pints and jawed for a while. Had there been anything untoward? Bull couldn’t remember anything.

  And then on. It had been a working evening. Bull had the profound misfortune to be the cabaret editor for a listings magazine called Get Out! It was a job he cordially loathed. He had joined the magazine after a spell in the USA, at a time when American football and baseball were beginning to take off in London. Bull had written extensively on these and other sports. He was taken on as Get Out! sports correspondent.

  But after a week there had been an office crisis. The cabaret editor died on the job, in an incident involving a French funambulist and seven live eels (one of which was in flames). The magazine’s publisher-cum-editor, an aesthete by nature, loathed what he called ‘hearties’. One of his earlier ventures had been launching the hugely successful Harold Acton range of men’s personal fragrance products. He cut back the sports section of Get Out! to half a page and shoved poor Bull on to cabaret.

  So it was, that on the preceding night, for the nth time, Bull had found himself in a grotty suburban bar contemplating the sub-Escher pattern on the carpet, while a mortgage broker from Grays Thurrock clad only in a leopardskin jockstrap told jokes about… vaginas.

  ‘Wickedly funny’, ‘saucy, irreverent and unsuspected’, ‘not for prudes or soap-box moralists’. These had been some of the press notices that had greeted this new star in the comic firmament. Through the sheer weight of the opposition’s coverage Bull had been forced to go and check out Razza Rob, as he had been forced to check out so many like him before.

  ‘Doncha wanna kno-ow! Doncha wanna kno-ow!’ Razza Rob was working his audience. He fluted out the words in an exaggerated nasal singsong, twisting on the spot all the while, with an undulant shimmy that rendered his hairy little body quite, quite obscene. ‘Doncha wanna know what happened to the gynie that operated on the world’s largest cunt? Doncha…’

  ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ There was a scattering of drunken and bellicose shouts from the pub audience.

  ‘She gave him knighthood when she left office!’ A ragged peal of laughter greeted this. Razza Rob was encouraged and emboldened to push back still further the performance envelope of his satire. ‘And what about the army gynie who got his hand stuck up the cunt of the commanding officer’s wife? Doncha wanna know what happened to him? Doncha?’

  There were more ragged cries. For some reason this foray into vaginal gags seemed to have grabbed the audience’s attention in a way that Razza Rob’s earlier badinage—ranging as it had across matters as diverse as shit, piss and puke—had not. ‘Don-cha wan-na know-ow!?’ He was drawing out the tedious catchphrase for all it was worth, beating out the syllables with leaden pulsings of his shopping trolley pelvis. The little pouch of spotted fabric that had the misfortune to contain his genitals oscillated furiously.

  ‘Well I’ll tell ya. He was dis-charged!’ The audience erupted. Bull made his way to the bar for another Pils.

  And then Bull made his way to the bar for another Pils, and another Pils, and yet another Pils. Until, after a while, he ceased to notice that Razza Rob just wouldn’t let vaginas lie. The audience kept on lapping it up (they would have appreciated the pun). Wan clerks and their girlfriends from Accounts somehow found this cuntal humour sweet inspiration. They egged Razza Rob on until they were weeping with laughter, and their nylon chemises were half-mooned at the armpit with the heady sweat of release.

  Although Bull preferred light comedy, he was as susceptible to peer pressure as anyone. Given the right circumstances Bull could appreciate a good joke at the expense of women’s genitals just as much as the next man. Nor was it the particular atmosphere of the place, with its four square feet of spangle-sprayed stage and Woolworth’s disco lights, that made the ‘act’ seem so depressing. No, Bull could have coped with that perfectly well—in a leisure context.

  Bull was not averse to the occasional game of rugby union. An alumnus of an exceedingly minor public school, Bull was a competent prop forward who excelled in stolid, rhythmic pushing, both in the scrum and the lineout. After matches he was also well used to adopting similar tactics in crowded pubs, to secure foaming beakers of pilsner lager, the alcohol shimmering in the liquid with a crystalline brilliance borrowed from the sugar it had so recently been.
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  Bull could cope with the cunt jokes in his spare time, but at work it was a chore. Bull was glad he hadn’t asked Juniper, a Get Out! freelance he was interested in, to accompany him. He felt certain that she wouldn’t have approved of Razza Rob.

  Eventually Bull had had to leave. The tiny bar-room was by now charged with a mad, cackling impotence. Razza Rob hated people getting away before the end of his cunt act. And anyway, he couldn’t fail to recognise Bull, whose constipated and unfeeling reviews, freighted as they were with unnecessary sporting analogies, were an easy source of resentment for des artistes to lock on to. Bull had never met Razza Rob but a description of him was in ready circulation. There just weren’t that many cabaret reviewers on the London scene with Bull’s big frame, tuft of ginger hair and frank, white features.

  ‘Oi! You!’ screeched Razza Rob, his voice lifting to Nuremberg pitch. Bull resolutely did not turn. ‘Yeah, you!’ Razza was stabbing a finger at Bull’s broad retreating back. Some of the quisling audience were already measuring Bull for the ‘participation potential’ he might represent. ‘Whaddya call a man with a cunt in the back of his leg?’ A tatter of ‘wots?’ spattered from the audience. Bull felt the ridges of his ears harden with shame. There were only two bald boys in matching, short-sleeved shirts with tartan pocket-facings to part—and Bull would be free, into the suburban night.

  ‘Fucked if I know, but any port in a storm, eh old chep?’ Razza’s imitation of Bull’s slightly clipped, Pathé News accent was accompanied by him dropping to his knees and shimmying delightedly. He worked his raggy bouffant hair-do into a fizz whilst he simulated intercourse for all it was worth. A trainee auditor from Godstone fainted clean away with the excitement of it. Her Cinzano made an awful stain. Bull was in the car park, almost running.