Cock and Bull

by Will Self

  Bull drew the right conclusion: whether or not the sex session with Alan was the cause, the vagina was noticeably maturing.

  Straightening up, he felt maturer. More grown-up. After all, simply because a chap has a gash, a beaver, a fanny, the old bearded clam embedded in his poor peg-leg—that’s no reason to write him off. Plenty of the boys Bull had been at Markhams College with had gone on to peculiar destinies. Only last week Bull had read in the paper an item about a boy who had been two years above him. A man now of course, although apparently still a boy at heart, in terms of his vicious amorality and his relentless definition of his sexuality through aggression and violence. This boy then, risen in a provincial bureaucracy, a social services director or some such, had danced around a fire (gas, with imitation logs), ululating, prancing, buggering, and ultimately garotting, a number of pubescents whom he had stupefied with Mogadon-spiked scrumpy. It had been a cause célèbre. Worthy of ‘comment’.

  And even Tittymus, Bull’s friend and contemporary, had slid into the Lanes at Brighton. Where he and his black boyfriend, Duvalier, camped and distressed both themselves and their stock of furniture. Tittymus still dared to attend the regular Markhams reunions on the Isle of Grain. And he was accepted! He and Duvalier, in matching brass-buttoned blazers, their breast pockets emblazoned with the Sussex County Cricket Club badge. It was absurd, but it was true. Surely there was some way in which Bull could gain acceptance for his ‘peculiarity’, in this world in which social and sexual characteristics were already being tossed and dressed like salad?

  Musing mind, as ever with Bull, went with musing hand. He found himself in the middle of his Tittymus reverie gently exploring the slick softness of his clitoris, a tiny bead of excruciating erogeneity, that Margoulies had dealt with cursorily and coarsely during their coming-together in the vestibule. Bull taught himself rapidly that what his clitoris required was not a staccato pressing—like an ulcerated middle manager banging on a lift-call button —but a teasing, suggestive stroke. A touch that existed more in his anticipation than in its execution.

  Bull squatted, and then slumped against the clacking Melamine of the ill-secured bath siding. His masturbation was intense, intercrural as well as penetrative. His fingers arced, dipped and dived, his broad brow fogged up, his eyes glazed.

  Bull came this time with shattering high-pitched timpani of feeling. It was wholly different to the percussive bashing of the night before. Shattered, he lay panting on the crocheted oval mat while a new epiphany visited him. Masturbation brought self-determination. Bull felt somehow more subtly, but more certainly, connected to the world, than he had of late. As if, within the lineaments of this admittedly unfathomable new sexuality, he could yet discern deeper, more concrete verities than he had ever been subjected to before.

  But entering his car, as it stood on the moss-lined concrete pan in back of the Parade, Bull collapsed. He was dressed for the office, in a sports jacket, clean shirt, well-pressed trousers and penny loafers. His only concession to his vagina had been to wipe it clean and sheath it in a knee-high sock. Now the concavity, the internality, the very ingressability of the car, yawned at him. He felt sick and pitched headlong across the front seats. Eugh! The vinyl seat covers were ribbed with raised strips, forming a gullet-like impression. Bull repeated and swallowed.

  It didn’t help that Bull drove a VW Beetle. The rounded form of the car, with its buttock bumpers and mammary bonnet, now defined him sexually far more than it ever had socially.

  Even when he recovered himself and assumed the automatism of London driving, in which the brain is rendered hypothalmic and intentionality takes on the status of breathing, Bull was not delivered.

  Doors, windows, garage forecourts, railway tunnels, even bus shelters. All struck at him with forceful, imagistic resonance. It’s all cunts! Bull exclaimed to himself, his eyes flicking from the cowled hollow of the car’s fascia to the numerous portals that studded his route. It’s all openings, entrances and doorways… London itself, Bull now realised, was essentially a network of tunnels. It was patently absurd to describe the city’s architecture, as Bull had heard the art critic at Get Out! do, as ‘phallic’. The church spires, the war memorials, the clock towers, the skyscrapers—Brutalist, Purist, Constructivist, it was of no account—even poor old Nelson; they were all terminally irrelevant, ultimately spare pricks. The real lifeblood of the city, Bull now saw, was transported in and out of quintillions of vaginas. The city was a giant Emmenthal cheese, and the experience of entering it was both greedy and erotic.

  The shaken man could barely haul the steering wheel around hard enough when it came to parking at Lincolns Inn. He staggered, rather than walked, into the offices of Get Out! The nondescript, open-plan office, which spread across the first floor of an undistinguished block on the Grays Inn Road, had acquired a ghastly aura for Bull. But he couldn’t decide whether this was a function of his new awareness of vagocentricity, or whether there was something else, some tense expectation about the place that heralded change.

  It was the latter. Encountering the Publisher in his glassed-in tank of an office, Bull was cordially, but summarily, fired. ‘I just can’t see that we’re ever going to re-start the sports section,’ said the Publisher. He was mopping his brow with a cambric hanky soaked with one of his own colognes, although the temperature hardly warranted it. ‘And as you’ve often said yourself, cabaret wasn’t what you were hired to write about.’ Bull was speechless. He stared at the leather-flanged oxbow of his instep and tried desperately to resist the sexual lode of the image. The Publisher thought he was being difficult.

  ‘I shall of course give you a generous settlement in lieu of notice…’ Bull continued to keep his own counsel — observing, instead, the incongruity between the boudoir smell of the office and the work-in-progress impression the Publisher had tried to convey with dummied-up covers and galleys lying in a raffia work pile on the broad desk. ‘…So that’s two months’ wages…’ Bull didn’t stir. ‘Oh all right, call it three. Frankly I think I’m being damn decent, considering that you’ve been here less than a year.’

  Bull found himself speaking, saying, ‘I don’t know how you can write off sport like that. Tens of thousands of people are interested in sport. All the cities, parks and open spaces are packed, at every hour of the day and night, with people dribbling here and there, and playing both by themselves and with each other…’ The Publisher stared at Bull with an odd expression on his face. ‘Look, John.’ A new tone had entered his voice. ‘Let’s just go and clear your desk, shall we? None of us wants a scene, now do we?’

  Bull allowed himself, passive and yielding, to be hustled out of the offices of Get Out! His office belongings—more Wisdens, some papers, a gonk mascot, computer discs—all were tumbled into a cardboard box. He managed to affect nonchalance with his ex-colleagues, who murmured, ‘Bloody hard luck, John,’ whilst secretly thanking the great Recruitment God in the sky that it wasn’t them who were going down the tubes.

  The Publisher himself held the swing doors open for Bull, and his fluting tones followed Bull up the crowded street. ‘Of course we’ll be happy to consider any freelance projects you have in mind, John.’ Bull heard this but faintly. The musky tickle of the box rim was jammed against his nostrils. He was lost in a deeper, earthier consciousness. A reality in which the concerns and petty justifications of the Publisher were so much puerile time spent wanking. Bull was so far gone that he didn’t even trouble to ask the Publisher who was to replace him as Get Out! cabaret editor.

  In a field somewhere near Wincanton Alan Margoulies was kneeling in a tent. It was one of those very old hundred-pound army tents. Big brown awnings of saturated canvas swayed over the heads of the thirty-or-so general practitioners who were huddled inside it.

  There were three other tents in the field, all exactly the same. Each one had its complement of medics, and from the centre-pole of each there flew the Health Authority’s pennant.

  On arriving at the fiel
d Alan had been issued with a clipboard, a map, a badge, an orienteering compass and a regulation Health Authority orange cagoule, with PARAMEDIC in big, black lettering across the back.

  Alan felt damp and bored. He had thought that the Learning Jamboree was going to be a free-form exercise in which the GPs themselves would devise strategies for getting to grips with the new legislation in an open-air context. He had neglected to read the information pack, and it transpired that there were ‘Facilitators’, tedious bureaucrats who all looked horribly at home in this scout-camp ambience. This particular one was calling his complement of doctors to order.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, can I have your attention please.’ He rapped on the whiteboard behind him with the edge of his compass. The listless chatter in the tent subsided, reading material and cups were downed, thirty non-standard hair-dos swivelled to the front. ‘We’re here for a long weekend of learning. I know that you’re all busy people, people with demanding jobs. So I’m not going to ask you to concentrate too hard on the whys and wherefores of what we’re going to be doing. I would ask you to trust me and my fellow facilitators to look after that side of things. What I can guarantee is that if you throw yourselves into the learning exercises that we have devised, I can assure you that you will get results when it comes to grappling with the complexities of the new system.’ The Facilitator uncapped a magic marker at this point, with an audible ‘plop’, and turned to face the whiteboard. Alan noted that, with weary predictability, the back of his orange cagoule bore the legend FACILITATOR.

  The Facilitator began, with great crudeness of technique, to draw a plan on the whiteboard, referring constantly to the relevant section of the OS map.

  It was somehow appropriate, Alan felt, that the Facilitator should prove so miserably inept with the whiteboard. No matter how hard he tried he simply couldn’t get the legends for the map he was drawing, to fit on the board. If he wanted to write ‘Spring Copse’, the ‘copse’ ended up vertical, the spidery letters climbing down the edge of the board on spastic feet. The Facilitator started to grunt with the effort, and in time his grunts began to synchronise with the squeaks of his Magic Marker. The doctors began to grow restive. Alan had already seen quite a few he knew, including Hurst and Mukherjee from his own practice. But he was more amused to see Krishna Naipaul, who had been at medical school with him. Krishna was what Alan called a ‘naughty doctor’. He was prone to writing slightly dodgy prescriptions for his friends, and making love (at least when he was an intern) on the slippery surfaces of operating tables that had only recently been hosed down.

  Alan ran into Krishna Naipaul every year or so at some GPs’ beano or other. He rather guiltily enjoyed Krishna’s company—for Naipaul was nothing if not not conscientious. He was nothing. Alan envied his ironic detachment and had often wished he could muster such easy cynicism. He couldn’t for a moment imagine that Naipaul had ever been afflicted by the Tolstoyan, moral self-obsession that had so scarred Alan’s early life. His life B.B. (before Bull).

  But now? Well, Naipaul would be surprised if he knew the exciting new departure that Alan had so recently made. In the past Alan had slightly haughtily declined Naipaul’s invitations for them to ‘have fun together’. But now, kneeling, wet corduroy grating on his knees and wafting in his fine, tapering nostrils, Alan thought, why not, confident that even in a dump like Wincanton Krishna would have some angle.

  Bull wandered London, jobless and equipped with his new insight into the cityscape. He wandered all day, dazed, depressed and disconnected, unaware that his mental state was so underpinned by strange chemistry that he had not a sorbet’s hope in hell of coming to terms with what had happened.

  In Bull’s liver the micro-refinery of pulsing tubes shuddered with the unexpected order to manufacture unsuitable hormones in staggering quantities. The nodes and strings of genetic information formed weird shapes, like cancerous pretzels, which oscillated out into the racing red water of Bull’s bloodstream.

  From time to time Bull would enter a hotel or a fast food joint and politely request to use the toilet. As the fire door slid shut behind him on its pneumatic, intercourse arm, Bull would bend double, progesterone and oestrogen nauseas competing with one another to make him vomit. As soon as he had wiped another cravat of bile from his chin, Bull would repair to a cubicle. Here, moving his big body around in its confines, he adopted a position that looked as if it were part of some particularly unsuccessful martial art, and scrutinised his vagina.

  Every time he did this it had changed. It had grown. To be more precise: it had grown up. It had acquired a tousled coif of hair. In lop-sided set and ginger fuzz, not dissimilar to Bull’s head hair. In the aftermath of his sex session with Alan, Bull had not been dismayed by blood, spunk and mucal discharge…that was the trouble, not ‘eurgh’ but acceptance.

  And in his leg, so cruelly and scientifically delineated by flat striplight against the Formica cubicle siding, Bull sensed internal changes as well: shiftings, muscular growth, sinister accommodations.

  Wending o’er the paved lea, in the forenoon, rain still flicking at his pink cheeks, Bull felt (oddly enough) depressed for no good reason. He couldn’t understand why he was so unhappy. Alan was known by one and all to be the most kind and conscientious of men—what more could Bull want in a lover? It was a little too early in their affair for Bull to put pressure on Alan to leave his wife but that would come in its own time, albeit with acrimony and tears… And so what about the job? It was true that he hated it and hated cabaret. It would have been mendacious of him to protest too much. He had made a reasonable living as a freelance in the past, he could do so again. So why these pricking tears? This strange humming tension? His ankles seemed full of water; if he pressed the flesh it went white with a pink surround. And each time he looked at them the lips of Bull’s vagina were parted like an analogy.

  Places of ingress still fixated Bull. Seeing a broken window along his aimless route, Bull felt that that was what had happened to him. His vitrified hymen had been broken into shards by Alan’s thick dick. A bizarre inversion of Kristallnacht indeed.

  Behind the Swiss Centre Bull found himself staring up at the St John’s Hospital for Skin Diseases. The building was empty and derelict, its windows boarded. But it was the moulded mortar curlicues surmounting the tiered façade of the old Hospital which grabbed at Bull. What a sick irony, he thought, to beckon in the skin-diseased with these obvious rollmops of epidermal corruption. They were like his vagina; the simile appalled him. He leant, struggling to retain his equilibrium, against the window of Poons Restaurant, but recoiled instantly. Several brace of the restaurant’s speciality, wind-dried duck, dangled in the window. Their orange flesh and flattened, angled limbs reminded him of Juniper. Their headlessness and prone position made him think of himself. He could not resist going in and asking to use the toilet.

  The Vent-Axia moaned, and outside in the crepuscular, ancient light Cantonese voices yelped, zinc pannikins clattered, huge duck tenderisers smacked down —thwock! Bull considered the chipped aspect of the toilet; the ‘Not Drinking Water’ sticker over the sagging sink; the verdigris in the grout runnels of the tiling; the plaited but now frayed nylon twine that comprised the commode chain; and finally the rust that erupted in red ramparts all over the toilet’s metalwork: the pipes, the cistern, and even the hinges of the ill-fitting door.

  Bull’s leg was becoming alien to him. He stripped it and held it away from himself, positioning it this way and that. Bull may have been disturbed, riven, confused, but he still had the strength of character (damn it all! This was a man who had gone to gold on the Duke of Edinburgh scheme; a man who had backpacked in the Catskills; a man who had finished first in an assault-course event organised as part of a press conference by a major DIY retailer) coolly and clinically to observe the progress of his own mutation.

  There was a fundamental decency about Bull that lingered in the imperfection of his features, a fundamental decency that would have made him a g
ood person to be kidnapped with in Beirut. One could imagine Bull’s parents being very correct on their lawn, when interviewed. But latterly one could also imagine them becoming rather strident and bolshy, denouncing Government policy and launching their own campaign to free their son from the breakfast room of their detached house.

  Their son meanwhile would be keeping his fellow-hostages’ spirits up by telling them stories of the kind of high-jinks the Wanderers got up to on their tours. They would be the sort of stories that would revolt these men (American academics, Italian photojournalists, diplomatic envoys and the like) in any other context. But here, South of the Green Line, with thin plaster trickle and water drip underlining the utter horror of their predicament, these men would laugh, laugh, laugh. After release they would blink into the lights. ‘It was Bull,’ they would cry to a man, ‘Bull kept us alive, with his solidity, his strength of character and most of all with his sense of humour.’

  Thus it was that Bull rallied. Looked his new genitals in the eye, considered their deepening, their reddening, and saw his womanhood beckon.

  But standing an hour later in Piccadilly poor Bull was seized and shaken by another epiphany. The window of Lillywhites directly abutted that of Boots. Behind one plate-glass sheet was a sales display for tights and other feminine impedimenta. Behind the other there was a display of rugby equipment. The Boots’ display featured a beautiful plastic leg, all caramel and sheer in slick sheeny stuff that would be bliss to feel. Around it, scattered as if discarded in passionate haste, were other stockings and tights, their seductive hues forming a sensual collage on the ruched velvet that lined the window.

  Whereas the display next door was poised and virile. It too featured a disembodied plastic leg, but whereas the female leg’s truncation drew the eye inexorably to the point where its precisely chopped groin should be joined to a soft and scented pudenda, the male leg was all solid and impulsive, kicking out on its invisible spindrift of acrylic, a rugby ball frozen, glued, to the very tip of its shiny boot. It was as if this leg had been amputated in the very act of punting the ball over the row of office buildings and shop units opposite and into Clubland. Positioned around this leg were trusses, jockstraps, socks, workmanlike garters, headbands, shirts, shorts and more socks, all of them lined up neatly on the Astroturf.