Cock and Bull

by Will Self

  But Bull feared rejection by Juniper far more. He feared that his thrustings were not firm and follow-through enough to satisfy her. He worried that his circumnavigations of her breasts were not emphatically solo—that his hands were all too obviously carrying the pilots of his sex-manual study. Bull wanted to graduate from Juniper’s dry-roasted academy. And, added to that, on this particular evening there was this extra, nagging vulnerability. This extra sense of being put upon by injury, by his own inadvertent actions.

  Bull’s broad hand rubbed over the bandaged mound as a junior thuggee let off a roman candle in the car park of the modern Congregationalist Church two streets away from the flat. The flash of yellow-white light sheened the window pane into opacity. When it cleared a figure emerged from the tatters of Bull’s retinal after-image. He stood across the road, in front of the Budgen Freezer Food Centre, looking quizzically up at Bull’s flat, as if he had seen it before but could no longer remember where or when. It was Alan Margoulies.

  Alan had driven North, up from the Archway Tower, past the Whittington Hospital and towards Highgate Village. He absolutely intended to go and drain Mr Gaston’s cyst. Gaston, a retired French teacher, lived in a shoebox cottage in the village. He lay all day, every day, stinking on a divan, his bilious, tweed-clad form surrounded by a drift of the yellowed and yellowing paper covers of Éditions Gallimard.

  Gaston had a huge cyst in the very pit of his back. It was a cyst with a life cycle of its own—seemingly unconnected to Gaston’s metabolism. No matter how many times Alan, or Gaston’s health visitor Helen Meyer, drained the thing, it swelled back up again within thirty-six hours. It was, Alan often thought, as if the disgusting sac was parasitic upon its host’s enormous reserves of vitriol and bile.

  Alan fully intended to drain the cyst. And then, if there was time, drive the two miles on to East Finchley and see if Bull’s dressing needed changing. It was the least he could do, considering…considering that he was going away tomorrow to the Health Authority’s Learning Jamboree at Wincanton!

  ‘Shit, fuck, damn!’ Alan cursed and pounded the wheel of the car. It juddered and hummed like a giant tuning fork. ‘Bull will go to the nurse while I’m away and then the game will be up!’

  Alan drove straight past Mr Gaston’s cottage. He flicked through the chicane and headed on down towards East Finchley. A little devil sat on Alan’s left shoulder, a little angel on his right. On the right-hand shoulder of the little devil sat a littler angel; and on the left-hand shoulder a littler devil. It was the same for the first angel, and so on, and so on. This was the reductio ad infinitum of Alan’s moral sense: a great Renaissance canvas depicting diminishing tiers of cherubim and seraphim, imps, satyrs and familiars. All towering up into an impossible void.

  You see, Alan had all the equipment in place already. He had done his deal with the diabolic Russian Doll of dramatic irony. He had had his little peccadilloes and consigned his wife and child to the status of emotional also-rans. He was dutiful, yes. Conscientious, yes. I would never do anything that was disrespectful to my wife; he had thought this many times, whilst examining Sybil’s round parting, as the sculptress’s lips blubbered up and over his fine and tapering cock. I love my wife, he had said to himself with practised ease as his thighs were slapping against Sybil’s buttocks. On more than one occasion, looking up, matching the trope to his stroke, he had caught the eyepits of one of Sybil’s Easter Island statues regarding him from the dark garden with a face full of baleful and ancient amorality.

  So that’s how it was. Alan had effectively substituted his love for his wife for the floor of Euston Station buffet as a good mental tag with which to counter ejaculatio praecox.

  But would he be able to feel the same way as he thrust with skilful, sinuous angularity into the pit of Bull’s knee? Into Bull’s cunt, not Sybil’s?

  There! It was out in the open. He’d yanked it from under the rug. It was damp, compacted, putrescent, like an ancient meat pie folded into a dirty sock. Could he possibly sweep it back under again?

  Alan swooped under the railway bridge and looked up at the statue of the stylised Red Indian that was set on top of East Finchley Tube Station. It was eternally frozen, this statue, in the act of firing an arrow towards Highgate Tube Station. What if the arrow were to be fired? Alan mused. Shot off, unleashed. What if the Achilles tendonseeking missile were to be allowed to seek the tendonedged pit?

  It is necessary to understand at this juncture that Alan was guilty of hubris, pure and simple. In assuming voyeurism, bondage, sodomy and other really quite harmless kinks, to be nothing more (or less) than the evidence of their practitioners’ arrested sense of irony, Alan had lost control. His own Schwarzenegger-sized sensibility had leapfrogged the poppers, the peep-shows, the crotchless panties and uterine fag-puffing sessions. Leap-frogged them and run off towards this coup de foudre, this Bull-thing.

  Alan was unmanned by it. Thrown back into pubescent homoeroticism. He shivered on the touchline, his thighs wavering in the wide legs of his rugby shorts. Out near the thirty-yard line Bull was practising place kicks. Alan wanted so much to be like Bull—hearty, popular, accepted. He’d do anything to be like Bull.

  Alan hooked his lank hair back behind his ears. He hadn’t felt cold when he left the house, but he did now. Along with his bag for housecalls, he pulled a herring-bone tweed overcoat from the back of the car and buttoned himself into it. He went and stood on the pavement and looked up towards the window of Bull’s flat opposite, waiting for it all to begin.

  ‘You’d better come in,’ said Bull, once Alan had waved to him from across the road and then made his way around the parade to the flat’s entrance. Standing in the doorway Bull noticed for the first time that he was at least a head taller than Margoulies.

  Alan thought different things, whilst looking at Bull, lowering in the vestibule. He thought: I fancy him, it’s true. But damn it all, I’m not queer, I’m just not.

  Bull was looking uncharacteristically shabby. On arriving home he had stripped off jacket, shoes and socks; and since then he had been slopping around the gloomy flat in carpet-slippers, his shirt-tails escaping from his thick waist to form elephant’s ears.

  The sitting-room, when they arrived there, was already fully occupied by an extravagant coffee table. It was square-bordered, but cratered by a circle of glass six feet in diameter. Cubic, wheeled pouffes, which clearly matched it, stood about in awful caramel vinyl suitings.

  They stood awkwardly at the edge of the room, as if the coffee table had usurped them. After too long a pause Margoulies said, ‘I thought I’d better come by and take a look at that dressing, John.’ He was hyper-solicitous. Bull, despite himself, was suspicious.

  ‘You should have rung, I might not have been here.’

  ‘Well I thought you probably would be…’ Margoulies had a thought. ‘Have you been taking those pills?’ Bull sank down heavily on a tufty armchair. A big hand went to a ginger brow.

  ‘I took some this morning but they made me feel woozy, so I didn’t take any more.’

  There was such pathos in Bull’s posture. Such innocence in the way that he hunched his knees together, as if trying to hide his treasure still further from view. Alan knew he would have to tell him now, right away.

  ‘John, I gave you those pills for a reason.’

  ‘I know you did.’

  ‘No, not that reason. I gave them to you because I felt that you needed sedating.’

  ‘Sedating, why?’

  ‘Because that thing in the pit of your knee isn’t a wound or a burn, John.’ Bull’s eyes went round with understanding. His well-shaped features drew themselves together into an ugly knot of revelation. His clipped voice sprang back at Margoulies.

  ‘It’s cancer, isn’t it?’

  Alan felt so powerful and protective of Bull. So in control now of this odd seduction that he couldn’t stop himself from laughing. The guffaw propelled him out of his chair, and he stood jiggling and chuckling with si
nister solicitude over the hapless cabaret editor. Even-tually he recovered himself enough to say, ‘No, John, it’s not cancer, nothing like that at all. Where have you got a full-length mirror? I want to show you something.’

  Bull led Alan next door to the bedroom. He was so excited, so exalted. This would have to be the ultimate striptease. This was why the Playboy dynamics of Alan’s sexual fantasies had seemed so silly and banal to him. For this was the Real Thing. Now the clashing colours and faded forms of Nicholson’s tome came back to Alan, but decked in familiar, lacy filigree. This was true excitement!

  At home Naomi Margoulies ushered in the babysitter—a foreign-language student whose face, under the hall light, shone with crusted acne.

  ‘He went out to drain Mr Gaston’s cyst,’ said Naomi. She was so pissed off that she couldn’t be bothered to contextualise the statement. ‘I’ve no idea where he’s got to.’

  Alan and Bull had got to the bedroom. Bull snagged on the overhead light. It glared down at them from its chintzy shade like a disapproving landlady. On Bull’s ‘occasional’ bed were scattered clothes. A rugby ball lay on the floor together with a tangle of other sporting kit. There was a small bookcase in the underdeveloped bay window, stacked with old editions of Wisden and sporting magazines. Alan said, ‘You’d better slip out of your things, John.’ Christ! How he was enjoying this.

  Bull unfastened his elasticated belt and slid his trousers off his rounded hips. Kicking off his carpet slippers, he teetered out of the trousers, shifting from one foot to the other, until he stood before Alan, Y-fronted and blinking.

  Alan positioned him with his back to the full-length mirror, just as Bull had positioned himself at the very start of this strange day. Alan’s touch may have been light and professional, but Bull sensed it lingering a half-beat too long. Alan undid the safety pins and began to demolish the flying buttresses of bandage. Loop after loop, skein after skein came away. And, as he undressed Bull, Alan felt that at last he was doing something truly sexy, something with real edge.

  He hadn’t felt like this since he was eleven and he and a school friend called Solomons had frolicked, naughtily naked, around the miniature cedars of Solomons’ parents’ formal garden. Together they had collapsed in a tangle of limbs as white as new shoots, and Solomons had touched Alan’s trembling little cock, making him come for the first shivering time. Alan had ejaculated gouts of fluid, still devoid of spermatozoa and as clear as battery water.

  Alan’s homosexual phase had been brief. But Solomons went on to manage a ninety-bed ‘travellers’ hotel in Sydney, and Alan had heard rumours that he was mixed up in the drugs trade. It all seemed such a long way from Hendon.

  But tonight even East Finchley seemed a long way away from Hendon. The last crêpe loop fell away and there it was, even prettier than Alan remembered it. Even more perfect. It had all the symmetry of a mandala, but it was vivified, animated, moving in more ways than one. Alan steadied Bull’s thick leg, holding it in place, and stood up.

  ‘Now look over your shoulder, John. Can you see it?’ Bull could see it all right.

  ‘What is it, Doctor?’

  ‘It’s a vagina, John. You’ve grown a vagina.’ Bull’s reaction was far more extreme, far more intense than even the conscientious, the caring Alan Margoulies could have imagined.

  The big, ginger man knelt moaning on the carpet. A bubbling, keening sound came unbidden from the corners of his not unsensual mouth. Then he straightened the fateful limb towards the mirror, adopting a sort of half-squat thrust position. Alan felt detached enough to observe how satisfactorily Bull’s leg muscles stood out, once his leg was tensed, displaying the invasive feminine biology to full effect. The vaginal surround, perineum, mons and pubic bone were so neatly implanted into the limb that the overall effect was surreal—straightforwardly in the manner of Dali, or Man Ray.

  Bull craned his neck around and stared transfixed. In the mirror he too could now see the errant orifice standing out, almost in relief, despite its recessed position. Alan goggled as well. The keening coming from Bull was gaining in volume. Alan started to mutter inanities in a prayerful undertone: reassurances; forecasts of possible treatments based on garbled excerpts of spuriously successful case histories, garnered from Nicholson, the British Journal of Abnormal Physiology and the like. The muttering and the keening did battle with one another in the polystyrene space of the room, while both men’s eyes remained fixed on the by now parted lips of Bull’s vagina.

  Together they observed the stratifications of the orifice. The way the dry smoothness of the kneepit flowed up and over, into the mucal membranous strias of the vulva. Bull made a grunting ‘Hhn, hhn’ noise from somewhere deep inside his beefy chest. He sprang to his feet, fell across the bed, sprang up again. He swept the thick volumes of cricket statistics from the bookshelf on to the floor. He pirouetted, caromed off a wall, off Alan, off a doorjamb, and was gone into the corridor, roaring.

  Bull saw it all. Bull understood it all. Understood the feelings of vulnerability that had been troubling him all day; understood the difficulties he had had in analysing the sensations that the wound, or burn, had provoked in him; understood Alan’s behaviour in the health centre. But worse, far worse, Bull understood certain deep and painful things about himself that had always shamed him.

  Poor, poor Bull. He stood, now hugging the hum-ming fridge, and now butting the broken thermostat. He cantered whinnying up and down the corridor, kicking to bits the telephone and its fake Chippendale stoolette. He stood in the orange living-room and railed at the bald-faced stag, as if it were some ancient Nordic idol, a forest god with a tree for a cock, capable of re-manning him once more.

  And as Bull joined the dots of memory and saw the sketchy picture of his latent femininity emerge from a myriad of locker-room blushes and missed emotional connections, Alan was with him—at his side—understanding, empathising, as Bull’s wheezing intellect, like the little engine that couldn’t, struggled to make sense of its own identity.

  At home Naomi Margoulies stood on the half landing. The baby’s mouth, gummy with sleep, applied itself to the racing pulse in her neck. Naomi had sent the babysitter home. As soon as she could put Cecile back down again, she was going to phone Helen Meyer. Perhaps the health visitor would know what had happened to her husband? He had never behaved like this before.

  Bull stood hunched in the asymmetric space formed by the stairway leading to the flat above. Alan stood by him. Bull squatted in the gap beneath the formica kitchen surface, left vacant for the washing machine he had never troubled to purchase. Alan squatted by him. Bull sandwiched himself into the narrow declivity between the wardrobe and the wall, in the semenstained darkness of the spare bedroom. Alan was sandwiched alongside.

  Both began to understand that in occupying these quirky sites in Bull’s flat together, they were in fact encountering the mysterious and special character of their new relationship. And in the cadence of Bull’s slowly subsiding hysteria there was an anticipation of a new loss of self, a new petit mort.

  The first touch came when Bull was lying full-length along the skirting board in the little six-foot vestibule that connected the bathroom to the kitchenette and the front door. He was the picture of powerlessness. His sensible, striped M&S shirt was rucked up around his back, his white, cotton Y-fronts dewlapped over the flat surfaces of his buttocks. Alan’s fine and tapering hand described an arc over him. He knelt as if stroking a cat. At the zenith of the arc Alan’s palm made contact with the small of Bull’s back. Bull stiffened but did not cry out or resist… Oh, cruel deceiver! For how could Margoulies not have known that in this moment of breakdown, of cracking distress, the thing that Bull, of course, still desired most ardently, was the dry, sensible touch of a doctor.

  But very soon Alan was lying with Bull. Full-length as well. His lips sought the firm warmth of Bull’s neck, his hands reached forwards, around Bull, and ran over his chest, down to the top of his thighs. Alan’s fine and tapering nostr
ils, their flanges as sharp as paper edges, dilated, taking in Bull’s strong, meaty and reassuringly masculine odours. There was a tang of sweat as pungent as urine, and a deeper, almost farmyard aroma of digestion and decomposition. However, alongside these safe whiffs, Alan could detect something else, strained, fishy and yet flannelly. Like a lavender bag left in the sheets of the sea. This was the olfactory suggestion of Bull-as-woman; Bull as inside, rather than outside.

  When Alan actually entered Bull his face was buried between the prop forward’s well-upholstered shoulder blades. Bull’s leg was bent back at the knee and tucked comfortably up, and under Alan’s crotch. Even lying as he was—awkwardly on the floor — Alan’s left hand was still free to wander. Free to stroke Bull’s surprisingly slim cock, his massive belly, his gnat bite nipples.

  Alan was transported. Bull was all woman to him. Bull’s hysteria and now this tremulous capitulation. What could be more feminine? For Alan, they were like two crash survivors copulating amidst burning wreckage, deliriously affirming the very fact of living. And Bull’s leg, how beautifully it rubbed up against Alan, rounding off each one of his own thrusts!

  Alan had never screwed a virgin before; certainly not a virgin who was intacta. He had worried that there would be a lot of pain for Bull, and a lot of blood that might stain their discarded clothing, which lay wadded beneath the two thrashing bodies. Alan wanted the first time to be extra specially good for Bull. Alan sensed that it might be make or break. With a sexuality as potentially powerful and omnivorous as Bull’s now was, he might take his pick of partners.