Cock and Bull v5

by Will Self

  ‘I didn’t know that you had a patient in Archway.’

  ‘Yeah. An old guy called Gaston. Strictly speaking he shouldn’t be registered with me, but for some reason I’m the only doctor that he’ll see.’

  ‘Will you be long?’ asked Naomi. Alan looked at his watch, it was six-thirty.

  ‘If I hurry I can make it back by eight. I may have to drain his cyst.’

  ‘You know Alan, you haven’t put Cecile to bed for a week now…’

  ‘I know, I know. I’m sorry, darling. I’ll make it up to you both at the weekend.’

  And he was gone. Out the door before another exchange with Naomi, lawfully wedded Naomi, could challenge the forgetfulness of habit.

  Alan hung on to the image of his daughter a little bit longer. For as long, in fact, as it took him to find and start his car. He used the image the way that so many duplicitous and driven men do: to produce guilt in lieu of conscience.

  As Alan wheeled the car out of the terraced street where he lived and on to the High Road he felt the urgency of his house call, but underlying that was a deeper urgency, an urgency Alan could barely acknowledge. The road north to Mr Gaston’s house followed on to where Alan knew that Bull lived.

  3

  Seduction

  BULL SAT IN the stuffy dusk of his bedroom. The occasional artic soughed down East Finchley High Road, its double bogeys clacking hard against the rubber strip of the pelican crossing.

  Bull felt tired and woozy. Towards the end of the working day he had considered going back to the Grove to see Margoulies again. Perhaps he was allergic to the antibiotic? But he thought better of it. It wouldn’t do to be a trouble to the Good Doctor. He would get a good night’s sleep, and if he still felt the same in the morning he would make another appointment. Alan had told Bull to come in and see the nurse in another couple of days anyway, so that she could change Bull’s dressing.

  The truth was that the dressing had started to trouble Bull already. Because of the awkward location of the wound Margoulies had been unable to place flat coils of crêpe across it. Instead he had tried to brace the wound with a series of bandage buttresses running up and over the knee. Even when wounded and drugged Bull was a vigorous creature. The constant movements of his meaty leg throughout the day had partially displaced the bandage; and the delightful, cool sensation Bull had had at the surgery, as the wound was swabbed with distilled water and coated with Vaseline, had faded, first into no sensation at all, and now into irritation.

  Bull knew he should take another pill but somehow he couldn’t rouse himself from where he sat, leg outstretched, in front of the window, looking down towards the statue of the bald-faced stag that surmounted the portico of the Bald-Faced Stag. Perhaps I should go for a drink? mused Bull to himself. He felt a little lonely this evening, washed up. He was still young enough to associate illness with people being nice to him. He wished his mother were there to re-dress the wound and make him some supper.

  But even the thought of drinking alcohol was sick-making. And going into a pub, how could he? Bull visualised the interior of the Bald-Faced Stag. It was dark and thick with acrid smoke. Big-pig men stood about in suits, leaning against things. As the swing door swung open to reveal Bull, their dead brown eyes tracked him across the carpet tiles, stripping away his clothes…

  …That was it! I feel really vulnerable, realised Bull with a shock. I’ve lost some element of my basic bottle. Perhaps it’s this injury? Or that terrible night last night, that really did depress me…

  Actually it wasn’t so much the Razza Rob act that had depressed Bull. As long as he felt confident of publishing a coruscating review of it—an utterly comprehensive panning, in the next issue of Get Out!—Bull didn’t pay any mind to Razza’s ribbing. But as he had struggled to compose the review that day, preoccupied by his leg and partially stupefied by the valium, Bull’s editor had appeared at his shoulder.

  The first Bull had been aware of it was the strong smell of Cellini Per L’Uomo, one of the Harold Acton range of male toiletries and fragrances. The Editor believed strongly in self-promotion. After the waft of aftershave, which was not dissimilar to an olfactory version of Fernet Branca, the Editor’s blue spectacle frames had appeared in the periphery of Bull’s vision. He scanned the twenty lines of green copy on the screen of Bull’s word processor.

  ‘Ah, um, John,’ he managed to say at last. ‘This Razza Rob review…Ahh we um, won’t really need to run it.’ Bull was uncharacteristically snappy.

  ‘Whyzzat?’

  ‘’Cos um, er…Y’know Juniper has written up a little feature about Razza Rob and that will, like, include a review of his act.’

  ‘What!’ Bull was incredulous. ‘The man doesn’t warrant fifty words, let alone a feature. He’s stupid, obscene, boorish and utterly unfunny.’ Bull rocked back in his swivel chair and turned to face the Editor, who dissembled frantically.

  ‘That’s as may be, John, but he’s getting a real following. This particular kind of comedy is really taking off at the moment. You know, we’re not here to prescribe for our readers, John, we’re here to describe what they’re into. We should never tell them what to do.’

  Bull groaned. This was the Editor’s catchphrase. He’d even had it incorporated into a ‘Mission Statement’ for Get Out! which, in the form of a plastic encapsulated card with five bullet points, had been distributed to the uninspired and uninspiring hacks. The catchphrase formed point 3: ‘Never Prescribe—Describe. Art is the mirror of life.’ The Editor also had pretensions to being a Stendhalian. He had called his son ‘Julien’ and his son’s pony ‘Sorel’.

  As soon as the Editor had gone Bull called Juniper. Juniper wrote regular freelance features for Get Out! She had also slept with Bull on a number of significant occasions. Significant for Bull that is—not for Juniper. Juniper had sexual intercourse the way that some people eat dry-roasted peanuts: compulsively, in large quantities and with progressively less pleasure.

  Dialling her number Bull remembered a drunken evening three weeks previously when Juniper had consented to come back to Bull’s flat. She had eschewed the sagging bed in favour of the kitchenette floor. She had gone on top. Bull had found himself contemplating a thick yellow rheum of grease and crumbs that formed an actual ledge under the edge of the gas cooker, while Juniper’s hard chassis of crotch ’n’ bum ’n’ thighs had hammered down on to him. Her vagina had gripped Bull’s poor penis with the riffling handclasp of an aspirant mason. Her chinless face had zoomed over Bull with Vorticist foreshortening.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Juniper, it’s John,’ said Bull.

  ‘John?’

  ‘John Bull.’

  ‘John Bull? Is this some kind of a joke?’

  Bull became flustered. ‘No, it isn’t. You know me, I do the cabaret listings and reviews for Get Out!’

  ‘Oh, John. Of course, I am sorry, I must have been miles away. You know, dreaming and stuff.’

  ‘What stuff?’

  ‘Well…er you know, stuff.’

  Bull pictured Juniper, with her bum, hips, U-bend crotch and flat tummy sheathed in mannequin-tight Lycra bicycling shorts. Her hairless ankles were as brown and symmetrically columnar as thick fifties chairlegs and her hard little chest was begirt with synthetic knobbled belts and bandoliers. All around her on the artfully stained floorboards of her studio flat, there was her stuff —the stuff in question. What stuff it was! Platform-soled shoes and lamé dresses; ostrich feathers and film posters; patchouli bottles and chillums; lapel badges and album covers; guitars and goatskin drums; hula-hoops and Ouija boards; compact discs and concert posters; head-bands and armbands; drumsticks and frisbees. All the detritus of forty years of popular youth culture… Juniper’s stuff.

  That’s how Bull pictured it at any rate. The truth was that Juniper’s studio flat was relentlessly minimalist. In keeping with contemporary ideas of style. For Juniper was one of those people, lost in their late thirties, who have gone on troubling to
assume each little style and youth cult, even as it has been stillborn.

  For people like Juniper have a sense of cultural history as radically foreshortened as the bonnet of a bubble car. And for them, each new wave of teeny trippers and boppers seems as significant as the decline of Ancient Sumer, or the expansion of the Russian empire under Peter the Great.

  Although Bull had only ever seen her in her fourteen-hole Reeboks and cod-filleted Mercx bike shorts, he understood intuitively that this was just the latest form of the primordial loons and the Peruvian blanket chic.

  When naked Juniper retained the imprint of so many decadences in the peculiar glacé quality of her flesh—it was as if she were basting herself from within. And her hair, currently worn in Pre-Raph pelt, had been so bleached, dyed and thoroughly teased over the years, that to touch it was like handling swarf with the consistency of spun sugar. Bull had refrained from running his fingers through her hair when they made what passed for love. He feared cutting himself.

  It wasn’t that Bull thought himself unattractive, although let’s face it he was no oil painting (leastways not a Titian or a David—perhaps a Dutch burgher shitting in the corner of a Breughel), but he had a fundamental diffidence when it came to sex. Came in particular to the raw elasticity of any bond that might connect him to a woman, bind him in to the bouncy push-me pull-you of attraction (and repulsion). It was this diffidence that made him seek out the Junipers of this world. Those individuals whose sexuality was already fatally compromised and detached from the gender specific. By what? Neurosis? Social pressure? Who can say.

  So, the tactile memory of sharp swarf hair, snagging at the soft webbing of his fingers, summoned up an access of warm feeling in Bull’s big chest. How sad that I should mean so little to her, he thought, whereas to me she is all women…And why, the question nagged at him, did she betray me over this Razza Rob piece? She must realise that it’s within my remit. Even if an article were to be written, it should, in the natural course of things, be commissioned by me.

  ‘Juniper.’ She was once more kabuki on the lacquered boards. Her stuff had vanished into some Narnia-sized closet of the retro. ‘Have you actually written this Razza Rob piece yet?’

  ‘Um, well, I’ve done the review bit but I’m going to interview him on Thursday evening, then I should have enough copy and stuff.’

  ‘You know I went to see him last night…’ Bull tailed off. He sensed a conflict. On the one hand he felt he ought to speak his mind about Razza Rob; after all it was a question of his critical integrity. But Bull stood accused, he was tainted with the universal smear of wanting-to-be-liked. The very fact that Juniper was doing the piece was probably a sign that she had already developed some overarching aesthetic architectonic, into which a taste for Razza Rob’s cunt humour could be neatly fitted, like the keystone into a building. Bull didn’t want to alienate Juniper. He wished for more linoleum swishing experiences, more oblique sightings of crumbs, fluff, confiture and the like, rendered geologic by their unexpectedness.

  ‘…Did you?’ Juniper sounded pleased. She was either feeling especially damning, or especially enthusiastic, Bull couldn’t tell which. She went on, ‘I saw him… let me see…was it last Monday? I think it was. Let me see, I went to a crystallography workshop on the Tuesday …’ She seemed on the verge of a digression into the tree spirit mumbo-jumbo that currently formed her credo, but to Bull’s surprise she mastered the urge to sound off. ‘…It was a Monday,’ she concluded. ‘Because he was on at the Sheaf of Rape and they only have comedy gigs there on a Monday evening. Isn’t he fantastic!’ She trilled the explosive judgment.

  ‘Well he’s certainly popular,’ Bull demurred, hoping he hadn’t heard her correctly.

  ‘And rightly so.’ He had heard her correctly. She ran on again, ‘He’s pushing back comic frontiers with his act. He’s digging up the road in the quiet cul-de-sac of British comedy.’ Now, Bull realised she was quoting from her half-written article.

  ‘But Juniper.’ He tried to sound conciliatory, possessed of an opinion but willing to be swayed by sound argument. ‘The act is nothing but obscenity after obscenity.’

  ‘Get it right!’ Juniper guffawed with golf-club merri-ment. ‘It’s cunt joke after cunt joke. Each more defiantly vaginal than the last.’

  ‘But Juniper, isn’t that just shoring up a set of obsolete attitudes, women-hating attitudes? Isn’t he appealing to the basest fears and preoccupations of his audience?’

  ‘Well, what about the audience?’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Weren’t they enjoying it?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Bull was deflated. In his heart of hearts he didn’t want to be argued round.

  ‘And what about the composition of the audience?

  Were there women there as well as men?’

  ‘Yes there were.’

  ‘And they were laughing, weren’t they?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. But maybe they were laughing just because they’ve been conditioned to have the same vile attitudes as the men?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Bull. You’re so ten-years-after. People are a lot more sophisticated than you give them credit for. Razza is an ironist. You probably didn’t notice’ —but naturally, Bull gritted mentally, you did—‘but all these cunt jokes are just that: cunt jokes. They aren’t jokes about women at all. They have nothing to do with women. Razza is cutting the archetypal cunt out of the woman—and displaying it for the world to see, and appreciate, that it’s just a cipher—an empty category on to which people project their own distorted attitudes. After all, what’s a hole once one removes it from the ground?’ She was quoting the article again, Bull realised. And indeed he was right, those very words still gleamed wetly on the LCD of the lap-top, which was perched on the corner of Juniper’s futon platform in the next room.

  ‘Well, I suppose it’s…it’s…’ Bull floundered, angry at himself for failing to come up with a rejoinder to the facile riddle.

  ‘Nothing at all. Bang on, mate. Nothing at all. Mmmn …No, I think he’s brilliant, sexy too…’ (Sexy? thought Bull. With that shopping-trolley pelvis? And those injection-moulded thighs, as thin as his calves? Disgusting, leaving the knobbly knees free-floating like fungi borne on a sapling’s trunk. He was appalled) ‘…I think he’s going to be very big indeed. In fact I’ll stake my reputation on it.’ Irony? The woman didn’t know the meaning of the word.

  Bull, to his credit, came back at her. ‘I don’t think you’re reading him right, Juniper. Wait until you interview him. I think you’ll find that he’s just another funny-faced man with an inferiority complex, who made kids laugh at school to save himself from bullying and humiliation. Now he thinks he’s got a crack at the big time. Go and talk to him. I’ll be very surprised if he’s able to give you any objective justification for his act at all. My theory is that he thinks that if he talks about women’s genitals for long enough, he’ll manage to get his grubby little hands on some live examples.’

  The instant he had said this, Bull regretted it.

  ‘That’s probably your attitude,’ snapped Juniper, ‘you’re projecting.’ ‘Projecting’ was one of her buzz-words. During her protracted sojourn on the wilder shores of psychotherapy, she had somehow acquired the idea that all potentially laden and upholstered comments were necessarily subjective and self-revelatory pronouncements. All except her own that was. At parties Juniper had been known to mutter caustically, ‘He’s projecting,’ when a man said something as apparently void of the psychopathology of everyday life as ‘The old Soviet Union’s in a hell of a mess, you know.’

  ‘Maybe, maybe I am.’ Hating himself, Bull became abject. Juniper’s sexuality may have been completely circumscribed by neurosis, but for him the inside-outedness of her mons, defined as it was by the artful filleting of her Mercx cycling shorts, was more than he could bear. In that moment he contrasted her feral impatience yanking at his cock as if it were an oryx she had managed to down on the veldt, with his own d
reamy inexactitude of touch. ‘I’m not as sophisticated as you are, you know that. I’m always impressed by the rigour you bring to these things.’ This shameless brown-nosing seemed to work. Either she was purring or he had a bad connection. As he finished speaking the purr seemed on the verge of turning into a giggle, so he went on. ‘You have to teach me. You know how ignorant I am about all aspects of the theatre—and therefore about life.’

  She giggled again. ‘What are you saying, Bull?’

  ‘I just thought…I just thought we might have dinner together. After you’ve interviewed Razza. I want you to put your analysis of his act in a wider context for me.’

  ‘Well, it couldn’t possibly be this week, I’ve got far too much on. I’m up against a deadline.’

  ‘How about the weekend?’ And once again, the instant he launched the fragile paper words on to the telephonic pond, Bull regretted them. The Wanderers’ mini-tour was this coming weekend. They were to play four matches, Friday through to Monday. All Sunday League teams based along the South Coast. The fixtures were at Bexhill-on-Sea; Rottingdean; Brighton and Shoreham. Bull wouldn’t miss it for the world. The freshness of spring, the animal joy of unfettered movement, and the whole package salt ’n’ shaken by a sea breeze. What could be finer?

  ‘We-ell, I don’t know.’ She clearly had a prospective invitation, thought Bull, but it hadn’t been firmed up yet. ‘Call me Saturday morning and we’ll see how the land lies.’

  ‘See how the land lies’. That was the phrase from the phone-call that now came back to Bull as he stared into the suburban night. But it was only as much of a euphemism as Bull’s ‘dinner’, so did he really deserve any better? And anyway, why was he so intent upon Juniper? She was, quite frankly, silly. What with her fanatical modishness and fifth-hand hackery masquerading as philosophy. Bull knew she had other men, many other men, and probably women as well. He could feel it in the way the self-basting quality of her skin turned into grittiness, as she worked her way up to another utilitarian climax. It felt like the porous facing-stone of a London monument. A monument that had been recreationally scaled by a multitude.