by Will Self
‘Henry James and Mikhail Bakunin, that’s the other great nineteenth-century non-cocksman that springs and then comes to mind. Bakunin at the barricades of 1848, rapier in hand. Bakunin at the inaugural meeting of the First International, striking the board and severing the working movement for all eternity; whilst all the time it wasn’t a proud manhood that bumped for emphasis against the wooden lectern—but nothing at all. “Die Lust der Zerstörung ist zugleiche eine schaffende Lust!” Now there, there, dear, of course it is. And you know there’s a pun there somewhere, but I’ll be buggered if I’ll grope for it…drink?’
I don’t know where it came from but there was a small leather-covered hipflask in his outstretched hand. His face puckered up with bogus encouragement, he pushed the flask at me again, willing me to take it, a card forced from a pack of one. I did take it and raised it to my lips. The drink tasted of vegetation, chlorophyll, it had the texture of semolina, or semen. I tried not to gag as I swallowed, and handed him back the flask.
‘Different, isn’t it? It’s called kava, by the way. The Fijians make it by knouting some root or other. Its effect is mildly psychotropic rather than sedative. They find it helps them to perform certain feats, like walking across hot coals and putting hooks through their penises. We might disparage such activities as idiotic—or even more idiotically, reverence them. But see how you feel in half an hour or so, perhaps you’ll surprise yourself.
‘Bakunin didn’t surprise himself much in that department. It was rumoured that the absent organ had been hacked off by a playmate brother in a garden fight, but nothing was ever proven. Imagine it, living out your life as something much less than a man, you’d be the opposite of Carol, but your sac would be worse than unsatisfactory. It would be, tee-hee, the ultimate redundancy. With just a furry space where it ought to be. You’d become a veritable teddy bear and intercourse would be just that, or at best a frantic nuzzling. Frankly I think it’s all those stinking skin-cutters—Henry and Mikey—deserved, for them it was just a little late visit by the Möhel. I can imagine them, you know, sitting in hell together; Bakunin in his beard and James with his shiny pate. They are hanged men, joke men, upside-down men. They have a table in the fungal horror of the Styxside café. Giant spermatozoa like antediluvian dragonflies whirr around their ears, they’re being forced to eat Spanish fly by the handful, under the watchful eye of my old friend Goering—perhaps Chatterley would consent to join them, or Piers Gaveston de temps en temps. I’m a mine of penile facts, you know, a very deep shaft indeed, perhaps you’d like to hear more of my esoterica, no? Dommage.’
The don faltered. He allowed his voice to drop a half tone to a more companionable and relaxed pitch. A odd note of sympathy came in, which almost persuaded me that his earlier outbursts had been mere play acting: clever embellishments of his clever-clever story.
‘There’s this big thing about the progress of stories, isn’t there, my lad? The writers say they never know what is going to come next. What will happen when the next sheet of foolscap is fed into the roller’s maw. And of course this is like life. Life with its preposterously long odds against anything happening at all. And anyway ex post facto we will incontinently impose some tawdry motif on these senseless experiences and muddled ideas. All too often nowadays the motifs are crass—merely cinematic. Oiled, reflexive brain stems, plunging out from the face of some Levantine matinee idler. But that being said, inspiration is what we must call what Carol did next.’
* * *
Carol itched with anticipation. There were three hours to kill. She stripped off and wanked several more times, until all her genitals were raw with rubbing, but it was still only 4.30 pm.
She mounted the stairs to their pastel bedroom and went through the walk-in cupboard where their clothes were hung, Dan’s to the right, Carol’s to the left — sinister that, isn’t it? Carol changed her clothes once more, but on this occasion she substituted someone else’s, and then quickly rifled the drawer where Dan kept his papers: passport, birth certificate and so forth.
About five that afternoon, Ur-Carol saw Dan walking along Fortune Green Road. She recognised the baseball cap he sometimes wore, his narrow shoulders, and the distinctive leather blouson jacket, with its rounded collar and fake epaulettes. She was sorry he didn’t stop into the shop to say hello, she wouldn’t have pressured him to buy anything, she just would have liked it if he could have borne to be a little chummy. She watched his slight form until it was almost out of sight, and saw him cut through the alley between two houses that ran down to the overgrown railway track where the mutant waste mob had their camp.
At about a quarter to six, Carol parked the yellow Ford Fiesta in the side street behind Melrose Mansions. It was a hire car and it smelt strongly of rubber floor mat.
She went up to the flat and changed yet again. And although she had intended this to be an automatic, brusque performance, she still became lodged in front of the mirror, admiring her own naked form. When she could see her penis she seemed to fall into a kind of reverie, a waking dream. It was in direct contrast to how she felt when she was clothed. For now she acted with more decisiveness and sense of purpose than she had ever known before, but to what end she had no idea. Out of this mire thrust Carol’s touchstone—and touch it she did, often and with increasing deliberation. It was about three inches long now when flaccid, but it was a good ’n’ thick dick. And when erect it more than doubled in length, although it did not increase significantly in girth.
What now impressed Carol most about her penis was not its size or turgid potential—but its versatility. It was like New Zealand Lamb. When it was flaccid Carol could bend it effortlessly this way and that. As long as she didn’t wrench at it, or allow her pointed nails to dig into it, she could twist it into a bewildering variety of shapes: a zeppelin, a ball, a manta ray, a nose, a horn. She even tucked it away completely between her clenched thighs, and stood looking at herself, rendered 100% womanly once again. But this made her shiver, and she happily let it spring back out again. When the penis was semi-erect she found that she could even fuck herself a little, turn her penis back on itself so that she was able to tuck its head inside of her vagina. But this was a children’s game only, it was no kind of serious pleasure.
Like a middle-aged pop chanteuse, Carol punctuated her performance with her umpteenth costume change. This one was to be final. Carol knew she would take her bow and whatever encores were offered in this next outfit. And, as she dressed herself for the evening Carol allowed herself to become aware of the sharp contrast between the deliberation and efficiency of her actions and the vagueness and ambiguity of her ultimate intentions. Please, no psychobabble claptrap. There was no false bottom of self-deception set into the ground of Carol’s consciousness. It was just that she quite simply couldn’t see where all this was leading to. It was as if she were the lens of a camera; sharp foreground focus made necessarily for a muddied background, and vice versa. I always think life is a little like that, don’t you? Rare is the individual who can retain the wider picture whilst concentrating on the detail. Very rare. So rare in fact that it can only be a stupid and ungrateful world, manipulated by covert conspiracies, that could possibly blacken or tarnish the reputation of such a man. And it would have to be a man, would it? You’d agree, wooden d’jew?
By the time Dan got back from work the focus was pulled to the middle distance and dinner was on.
‘What’s for dinner?’ he said, clunking his trendy aluminium attaché case down on the floor.
‘Oh, hello darling,’ said Carol. She affected not to notice that he had come in, and hurried over from the stove to give him a fulsome kiss on his turned-down lips.
Dan noticed immediately that she was dressed up and wearing perfume. She had on a full-length apron, one of those ones that have a trompe l’oeil naked body printed on the front. But it couldn’t conceal the stiletto heels, or the sheer stockings. And it was so uncharacteristic. Not that Carol had ever neglected her marital duties, as
far as nettoyage and cuisine was concerned. She was far too well acculturated even to consider not getting Dan his evening meal, however much she despised him. But the sexy trimmings and the obvious affection, now that was a surprise.
‘What’s up?’ asked Dan, sitting down to read the showbiz gossip in the Standard with a can of Coke from the fridge.
‘It’s our third anniversary, dummy,’ replied Carol, moving from stove, to fridge, to work surface in the steps of a solo waltz. ‘I thought we ought to celebrate.’
‘Whaddya mean anniversary? We were married in April—it’s now late September.’
‘No, not that anniversary, dummy, the anniversary of the night we met, the anniversary of the first night we… you know.’ Carol did her best to blush, but all it really amounted to was a beige tinge at the edges of her foundation.
‘Oh, oh, that.’ Dan was far better at it, he went puce to the roots.
And of course, as we know, Dan’s macho bravado about sex, his ‘climbing on board’ and his former drunken rantings had all been show. In reality Dan was scared stiff of it. He feared that he didn’t have what it took to satisfy a woman. Every time he had climbed on board Carol, penetrated her, and then wetly withered, he had lain, feeling her hips dig into him, conscious of his dwindling virility. His whole cock area was plunged in the sensual equivalent of muzzy darkness. He had tried to pull his cock into attention by tensing and relaxing his pubic and buttock muscles, but they seemed connected to nothing. With his mind attuned to the mechanical, Dan pictured the muscles as steel hawsers, that should have been linked up to the motive force for the great battering ram, but instead had been hacked away at, until their frayed ends pulled on nothing.
On occasion, although Carol had never seen fit to notice, Dan had leaked warm tears during this post-coital tristesse. He knew he ought to say something to Carol, to discuss frankly and openly the interface between his feelings and his penis. He had heard enough phone-in programmes to be familiar with the vocabulary, but he had never had the balls to do it. It was so much easier to sleep. And what if he could have got another erection? What would have come of it? Surely just another minute or so of pelvic bicycling on top of Carol’s wan form… to be followed by more spent impotence.
And now that Dan was ‘in recovery’, as they said in Alcoholics Anonymous, his sexual feelings, if they can be dignified with that name, had taken a turn for the worse.
Dave 2 had told Dan that he could expect to find himself feeling intensely vulnerable, childlike and sentimental, as the feelings he had repressed with alcohol came surging back. These would be the perfectly normal feelings he should have had in adolescence, but which he had prematurely knocked down and dragged out of his psyche, with the assistance of the lager of Lamot.
Dan’s sexual feelings had never been anything but intensely vulnerable, childlike and sentimental. That fabled coupling when he had accidentally sandpaper-stroked Carol into orgasm had almost scared the life out of him. Drunk as he was, the moans and cries shocked him into the peculiar sensation that his triple thrust had hurt her, damaged her soft internality. This sensation summoned up as well an awareness of his little penis as a hard tool, a bludgeon, a corrector.
Dan recoiled from this; and this repulsion gives the lie to their true circumstance. You see, his relationship with Carol was a tragedy borne not of real circumstance necessarily, but of failure to communicate. What she could never have known was that after that night on the thin mattress in Stourbridge, Dan positively avoided the possibility of her orgasming; even that much reaction (and in truth Carol’s orgasm had been a muted tea-break affair) assaulted his passivity.
And now he was in recovery, instead of resolving to ‘talk through’ his relationship with Carol, to ‘openly and honestly’ share his feelings with her, Dan was caught up on an almost continual basis in the most insipid of sexual fantasies. What he really wanted was to be gently wanked off, with a warm towel, by his female, emotionally inadequate counterpart. She wouldn’t even have to take her clothes off to arouse him. To give Dan credit, he beamed this fantasy at all the women in the AA group (even the quasi-bag lady with her formaldehyde face), and sensing it, they ever so quietly drew away and avoided him.
It’s lucky that Carol had taken the precaution of obtaining some cantharides; without them the evening might have been a dead loss. The man in the tight T-shirt in the shop where she had bought them had looked down the sides of his moustache at Carol. He rippled his pecs, as if he were about to start breast feeding her with testosterone and admonished her quite severely against giving him more than one. But looking at Dan again, from the vantage point of her own self-erecting scaffold, Carol was acutely aware of his flabby aura. While he went for a wash she crumbled two of the golden bugs into his Coke. They were funny little things, dry and desiccated, but golden red in colour, their wings and legs tightly folded into the body, as if they had arranged themselves on purpose for an eternal internment in some insectoid mausoleum. Instead, their heads, thoraxes and abdomens were pulverised by Carol’s fingers. Dan came back from his wash and went on swigging the coke. He was thirsty, he had beaten balls with Barry after work.
They ate the steak, the sautéed potatoes and the green salad in silence. A candle burned down between them, timing their failure to communicate. Dan didn’t so much as glance into Carol’s (admittedly meagre) décolletage. Instead he read a copy of Design Week, paying more attention to the pictures than the words. Carol didn’t mind, she was no conversationalist herself. She sat and masticated forty times before each swallow, and wondered what would happen next.
In truth she too was preoccupied, preoccupied by her penis. The afternoon’s wanking had left her feeling bruised, numb. But now the blood started to beat up again. Carol was wearing quite tight satin knickers, but even so she could feel her pole stirring, attempting to tent the restraining fabric. On more than one occasion, as she was cooking the dinner, Carol had to turn away, lest Dan see something he shouldn’t. And even when the todger wasn’t seeking the light, Carol was visited by shocked intimations of its very furled quietude. But that’s what it’s like when you’ve got a John Thomas, isn’t it? I mean to say that there are times when, even as a career-man, one double-takes on its very existence. They go so quiet don’t they, curled up in their little cotton burrow, that one forgets them—and then remembers, what a revelation! A continual revelation, a never-ending story!
Carol had over-salted the potatoes and over-salted the salad dressing. She got her result towards the end of the meal. Dan looked up from his magazine and flicked back his forelock: ‘Blimey I’m thirsty,’ he said, ‘I could really use another Coke.’
‘Sorry love,’ Carol replied. ‘That was the last one.’ And then entirely innocently, just as if it were an odd afterthought, she said, ‘How about a beer?’
Dan stared at her. And then stared at her again. It was that quiet in the kitchenette that you could have heard a cock crow a mile off.
‘You know I can’t have a beer, Carol. And you know why.’ His voice wasn’t rancorous, and that was a good sign, rather it was weary.
‘Yeah, yeah, sorry, I was forgetting, just for a moment. Anyway I thought just the one…perhaps it wouldn’t matter?’
Ohhh… She was oh so clever, wasn’t she? She knew how to twist the knife and no mistaking. She couldn’t fail to be aware of the real dynamics of Dan’s alcoholism, now could she? She had after all had the opportunity to study him at closer quarters for a very long time. She knew that Dan had no power of his own; she knew that he invested his decision-making faculty in whomever was near to him, whomever asserted themselves in a way that was vaguely congruent with what he wanted. How else to explain the close friendships with the undistinguished Barry, Gary, Gerry, Derry and Dave 1, or the speed with which he bonded with the likes of Derek the tosser, or for that matter Dave 2?
From the off, whenever she was within range, Carol had taken full responsibility for Dan’s fundamental actions. He had abrogated it withou
t even noticing. It wasn’t that Carol was a trusted satrap of the Empress of Burford, she had after all yet to be invested with the sacred Peter Jones charge card. It was just that she was there… and as long as she wanted him to have a beer, well then…
‘Well…I would like one…but what could I say to the Group at St Simons? What would I say to Dave 2? They…they…have faith in me.’
‘Yes, but I have faith in you as well, Dan, and I think a single beer now and then won’t matter too much. After all, they’re always saying that you only put down alcohol one day at a time; this is our special anniversary’—on ‘special’ Carol essayed a coquettish moue—‘it can be one day when you pick it up.’
See how easily she smashed down the little ideological rockery that Dave 2 had erected in Dan’s front-garden-sized intellect? It just goes to show the infinite malleability of the human spirit. Of course the salt helped, banking up the thirst Dan had acquired beating balls with Barry, and so did the Spanish Fly, which now started to beat up prickly flames in Dan’s little crotch.
Carol plunked a distinctive can of Lamot in front of Dan. It was icecold and filmed with special-effect condensation. She produced one for herself as well. They drank them down, and then two more besides.
They moved to the living-room and Dan put on his requiem: Dire Straits. They slow danced a little before starting to tackle the rest of the eclectic collection Carol had assembled. Dan had a bottle of Gulder, then two or three of Pils. He was drunk by now. Carol, mindful of her role, was pacing them both carefully. She was tipping away three quarters of each of her beers into the yucca. She knew Dan was probably good for at least five or six more before he became useless, but the cantharides might be a random factor…