by Will Self
Alan moistened the tips of his fingers with his own saliva, and rubbed it into Bull’s parted lips. He nudged a finger tip into Bull’s vagina, seeking out his hymen. Whilst another finger tip traced the slippery pod of Bull’s clitoris. Alan was reassured. Bull’s breathing had become deep and rhythmic, each breath coming from the very pit of his abdomen. Alan took the head of his own penis and pushed its head just inside Bull. Bull sighed. Alan held it there, tensing it and un-tensing it, letting Bull become accustomed to the sensation, before he thrust home in one long, fateful stroke.
It’s like that, isn’t it? Just as Raymond Chandler says, ‘The first kiss is dynamite, the second is routine and then you take her clothes off.’ It had been like that for Alan in his previous affairs, even the extended one he had had with Sybil while Naomi was pregnant. Sure, Alan went on enjoying the sex with Sybil, but at a fundamental level his lust for her had died the very first time he felt the shock of her pubic bone against his, and knew that they were now truly welded into one another. Alan was a one-thrust man. Not that he’d ever been exactly promiscuous. Perhaps it would have been better for all concerned if he had been. Rather, his sentimental self-absorption had managed to gild each of these terminal thrusts with enough self-regarding burnish for him to sustain the ‘relationships’ that legitimised them for months; and in at least two instances, for years.
While each thrust had, therefore, gone in, it had turned back on Alan, at some deep level penetrating him with the morbid realisation that his sexual being was a dull thing, a lifeless thing, a mass-produced marionette with chipped paint and fraying strings.
And, of course, it was the same as it ever was. Now Alan’s rocks had hardened, swelled and gushed—in the immediate aftermath of climax Alan sensed Bull as liability, pure liability, triple liability. Alan was now having an affair with a man who had a cunt in the back of his leg. Worse still, the man was his patient. At the very least he would be struck off… No, Alan couldn’t really conceive of the appropriate official sanction for this kind of behaviour, although possibly public castration by the Minister of Health might get close. Still lying, his fine features pressed into Bull’s freckled spine, Alan saw in his mind’s eyes the bright cuirasses of the Household Cavalry flashing in the Whitehall sunlight. In his mind’s nose he smelt a waft of Givenchy from the Minister’s fragrant cheek as she approached the quivering, half-naked Alan, who was lashed to the Cenotaph. The Minister’s wedding ring glowed dully against the green, plastic handle of the garden secateurs she held in her outstretched hand; whilst in Alan’s mind’s ear the ‘Sshk, sshk’ noise the secateurs made as the Minister flexed them sounded horribly loud and ominous.
Bull stirred beneath Alan. And Alan felt his limp penis slide out of Bull’s kneepit with lubricated ease. Bull struggled round in the fluff-encrusted runnel of the vestibule and brought his pale, frank eyes, with their horrible weight of understanding into the brown, trustworthy gaze of his seducer. They tried very hard to stare affectionately at one another.
And what did Bull feel throughout this? How was it for him? Shame on you for even daring to ask. Some things must, after all, be sacred. Some things mustn’t be picked apart and subjected to such close scrutiny. But still, it is only fair to say that the experience was shattering. Bull felt violated, traduced, seduced, bamboozled, subjugated, entrapped and enfolded. He felt his capacity for action surgically removed. He felt, for the first time in his life, that his sense of himself as a purposeful automaton, striding on the world’s stage, had been completely vitiated by a warm wash of transcendence. This must be like a religious experience, thought Bull, his veal cheek pressed against the double plug socket. And had he been better versed in such things he might immediately have given his vagina the status of stigmata. In which case the outcome of this strange tale might have been considerably different.
The two orgasms had beaten up on him from either side. One came with each thrust of Alan into Bull, and the other derived from Alan’s expert and emphatic tugs at Bull’s cock. Though of such different natures and provenances they had somehow managed to merge together, like the Skaggerack and the Kattegat off Bull’s Jutland.
Sad to say, although Bull thought that this feeling might just be a new love, he knew in his heart of hearts that this was just dependency wearing an ornate garb. For Alan was only a representative, he was not the whole organisation.
After they had made love the two men righted and tidied both themselves and the flat with studious work-manlike efficiency. Alan put the phone back together and crouched holding the fractured dial in two hands while he made the connection to Helen Meyer. It was by now almost 10.00 pm. The health visitor relayed that Alan’s wife was worried about him. Alan explained that he had had an emergency bleep to visit another patient — he didn’t mention Bull’s name. Bull the patient no longer existed. The subterfuge was a safe one, Meyer was close-mouthed in the extreme. Alan asked her to call Naomi, apologise on his behalf, and say that he would be home shortly.
When Alan hung up Bull was standing over him in the corridor. The overhead light that dangled above and behind his head transformed his ginger hair into a fiery aureole.
‘Will I see you again?’ Bull was shy, almost blushing.
‘John, I have to go to this damn Learning Jamboree thing tomorrow.’
‘I know, your receptionist told me on the phone this morning.’
‘It’s down in Somerset. It runs over the long weekend. Still, I might be able to get away to London one evening, say Friday?’ Alan was already calculating his duplicitous angles with the adulterer’s practised ease.
‘I won’t be in London on Friday evening, I’ll be in Bexhill-on-Sea. I’m going on a mini-rugby tour.’ Bull said this tersely. His voice already had the hurt huffiness of a subordinate partner whose personal interests are held to be of no account.
‘A rugby tour. That’s interesting. That’ll be a good idea, John, it’ll keep your mind off things…’ Alan’s voice died away and they both stood, contemplating the ‘things’ in question. ‘Look, anyway,’ Alan resumed brightly, ‘I can make it to Bexhill from Wincanton and be back within the evening. Where can I meet you?’ Bull thought for a second. ‘There’s a big bar in the De La Warr Pavilion. Meet me there. It’s on the seafront, everyone knows it. Meet me there at eight o’clock.’
They stood, clotted with shyness, their rendezvous made.
‘Well, ’til Friday evening then,’ said Alan.
‘’Til Friday,’ replied Bull. They shook hands and Alan left, shutting the door with exaggerated care, as if frightened of waking a baby.
By morning Mr Gaston’s cyst was so large that it could quite reasonably have claimed that it had a better quality of life than Gaston himself. And that perhaps it was he, rather than it, that should be drained on a regular basis.
4
Pursuit
THE FIRST THING that occurred to Alan on waking the following morning was that he had managed to square things away with Naomi pretty convincingly, all things considered. But deep down he knew that regularity, and regularity alone, was the key to a successful adulterous deception. The night before had constituted an irregularity, therefore the seed of doubt—no matter how achingly legitimate Alan’s excuse might have been in a multitude of other contexts—had been sown in Naomi’s fine chest.
In those two hours of lost contact—of parting from the Mother Ship—Alan had entered the twilight zone.
Naomi left before him. She wheeled Cecile down the neat street of terraced Victorian villas on her way to the Ten O’Clock Club at the Grove Health Centre. Each house had its respective campaign sticker in its respective window, but on this particular morning Naomi paid them no mind. On any other morning she would have probably hailed them thus: ‘Ah, the healthy evidence of a genuinely pluralist society,’ for Naomi was nothing if not committed.
It’s just that commitment had fucked off on this dark, damp, leafy London morning. London had this ability, Naomi now knew, to take spring
and turn it in to autumn, just by tweaking the air quality, raising its contrast. The privet hedges tossed like tethered donkeys at the knackers, and sprays of dirty rain fell across her cheek, and across the plastic rain cover of Cecile’s pushchair.
Naomi felt sick. She felt sick, she realised, because she was unquestionably pregnant. Or could there be another explanation? Could there…please?
At the Ten O’Clock Club all the toddlers and babies were glued together by Marmite hands into a pullulating swarm that circled the brown, disinfected floor with a Doppler wail of need and recrimination. Naomi threw Cecile to the multi-cellular creature that sported amongst the finger paintings and joined the other mothers, and a father.
The other mothers, and a father, were sitting on miniature chairs drinking tea out of plastic paint-beakers. The mothers talked about their children; their children’s ailments; their own ailments. It was as if their very presence within the perimeter of the health centre made them more acutely aware of the fits and starts of their malfunctioning bodies. The father sat with them but kept his own counsel. His pipecleaner body was tubed in worn denim. His gasmask bag lay on the lino next to his booted feet. Every so often he touched the scrappy end of a roll-up to his brown, bearded lips and leaked a piddle of smoke. He was, Naomi observed, reading the Guar-dian ‘Society’ section as if he didn’t in any way belong to it.
Naomi knew him slightly. She knew that he was a child psychologist at the Gruton Clinic, who specialised in difficult toddlers. Naomi and Cecile had once passed him in the street when he was with his little boy, Hector. The two-year-old had been bemusedly leaning against the plate-glass window of the bank, while his father treated the passers-by to a full-scale tantrum. ‘I won’t have it!’ shouted the Child Psychologist. ‘I can’t take it!’ he wailed. He had emptied the contents of the baby’s changing bag on to the pavement and was tossing around nappies, Wet Ones, Calendula cream and changing bags, all with whirling-dervish abandon. Naomi was happy to scrape by without being noticed.
Normally Naomi would have talked with the other mothers, and father, about any one of the numerous local self-help groups that they were severally and variously involved with. But this morning the talk was all of legs ivied by varicose veins; bowels that tortured their respective anuses into pastry-cutter shapes; heads that were tintinnabulated by the air-pressure changes occasioned by the rise and fall of catflaps; and endless, runny colds. The tea slopped in the paint beaker. Naomi slurped it down and felt it slopping in her stomach. ‘Four times a night,’ said Gail Hutchinson, somewhere off to Naomi’s left, ‘each one bigger and stickier than the last.’ There was a small rash of ‘Nos!’ Naomi rose and made her way unsteadily through the kitchenette. In the miniature stalls, with their doors—just the right height for a calf’s neck—Naomi knelt and gratefully voided egg, waffle, Special K and tea into the titchy toilet.
She stayed there for a while, staring down into the terminal soup, as if, before being consigned to the recently privatised sewer, its tummy globs and salival strands might form and re-form into a prescient tableau of her future. Her future with Alan.
Alan was sitting at the lights next to Regent’s Park tube station. He was in his black Citroën XM 3.0SEi. Too much car for a conscientious GP, but too little for the Übermensch he had so recently become.
A trio of dildo aerials, thick and rubberised, sprouted from above the dreamboat’s tinted rear window. Across the fascia of the car various pin-point lights glowed with machine vigour. On the black velour of the seat-cover lay Alan’s black attaché case. On the black rubber floormat lay his black medical bag. Clipped to the dash was his wafer-thin black cellular phone, with its enviable console of green buttons. The information pack for the Health Authority’s Learning Jamboree lay open on Alan’s black-clad knees. The papers the folder contained had been ruffed out invitingly. But Alan wasn’t reading them; he was concentrating on the traffic lights. He was assessing the weight, volume and potential velocity of the vehicles that coughed around him. His incisive mind flicked indiscriminately between the contorted penetration of the night before and calculations of the now. All this was to the rhythm of the black music that thudded from the car’s eight black, rhomboid speakers.
The light changed and Alan hit the accelerator, savouring the almost neural response of the powerful engine. He went barrelling off through the traffic; lane-switching; accelerating; braking; forging on in a seamless, solo strip-the-willow that took him flying through the exhausted trough of the Marylebone Road, hitting five green lights in succession, and up on to the cold heights of the Westway flyover.
Alan exalted as the black wedge of car lifted him above the wrinkled skin of the city. Ahead of him the flyover described a sinuous curve as it stretched to the West. Squalls of spring rain lashed the window, but the gusts that bore them didn’t displace the car’s track by even a millimetre. Rock hard and rock steady, plunging on to her, Alan saw for the first time that the line of the flyover formed the stick shape of an enormous woman. The head was the elevated roundabout at White City. From there one extended arm was formed by the motorway spur that ended in Shepherd’s Bush round-about. The other arm was flung over the woman-figure’s head. It arced into a three-lane elbow, and then placed its hand in Acton. The woman-figure’s long back curved this way and that over Notting Hill, before rising to a concrete runnelled rump, that split; one thin leg dangled down to kick petulantly at Paddington, whilst the other was loosely crossed over it, foot firmly on the Marylebone Road.
Right now Alan’s car was charging like a runaway vibrator, towards the very crotch of the flyover. Alan appreciated that he was about to penetrate the woman-figure with 170 brake horsepower. He felt just fine. The floating digital display of the Citroën’s speedometer teetered to a hundred as Alan plunged through the macadamised maw.
He revelled in it! He felt that now, at last, he understood the matrix that encapsulated his life. He had scaled the heights of medicine—and with them the heights of morality. He had married a beautiful and committed woman, together they had an adorable, dark-eyed child with a fashionable French name. He had lasciviously pronged bohemian sculptresses and sturdy health workers. Now came his greatest coup! His great synthesis of the experiential: Bull. Bull the man; Bull the woman; Bull the cunt… But what if he’s fickle? The sudden uncertainty jerked Alan’s foot from the accelerator. The car wavered and nearly side-swiped a panel truck.
The rest of Alan’s drive to Wincanton was marked by a see-saw between this exultation and this remorseful fear. Somehow the realisation that his affair with Bull might fail activated Alan’s guilt about Naomi and Cecile. For a while they ceased to be ciphers, ironic columns for his public theatre and his private cinema. Instead they were damnably separate centres of self. With feelings. Tedious, shitty little feelings for which he had some milksop’s sense of responsibility.
Now everything had to be focused on the next rendezvous with Bull. All emotional roads led to Bexhill-on-Sea.
Bull slept the sleep of the justly shagged. He slept hunkered deep down into the tortured springs of his mattress. In sleep, Bull’s heavy corpse assumed stylised poses, embedded in the bed’s surround like a bas-relief. One arm was thrown back, the other out, just like the Westway flyover. At certain times Bull’s eyelids flickered with the Noh play of the unconscious, then Bull whimpered, clutching a rugby-ball-shaped space to his pudding pectorals. At other times, in deep repose, the bug legs bicycled and canted themselves just-so. Just so that his two sets of genitals were neatly juxtaposed within the same tight frame.
The time-switched spotlight that by night lit the antlers on the bald-faced stag that stood on the pediment of the Bald-Faced Stag had long since been extinguished, and the thin beige dawn was draining through the net curtains, when Bull was woken by the rattling and ringing of the phone in the hall. He cursed and fought off the duvet aggressively, as if it had broken into the flat and attacked him while he slept.
Bull batted along the corridor from
wall to wall and crouched by the noisome thing.
‘Hello? John? I hope I didn’t wake you?’ It was his boss, the effete aesthete who published Get Out!, and, worse, pretended to edit it.
‘Er…no. Well…yes. Actually I was getting up anyway.’ Bull felt more assured by his habitual diffidence than by the fact of his being alive. And it acted as a bulwark while, the Bakelite still cabbaging his ear, the memories of the previous evening began to flood in.
‘I was only calling to see how you were. Some of the chaps said that you were injured in some way the night before last; and that you went home yesterday looking rather green. You didn’t say anything to me…’ This was a reproach. ‘…I hope it’s nothing serious?’
‘No, no, nothing at all.’ (I have a cunt in the back of my knee.) ‘I feel fine.’ (I feel mad. Mad.) ‘I’m on my way in.’ What else can a man do but go to work?)
‘Oh good. I’m so pleased to hear it. I wanted to have a little word with you. Nothing important, just a little word.’
How little a word? mused Bull, making his way to the damp certainties of the bathroom. ‘A’, or perhaps ‘the’? If it was really that little, he could have safely let it scuttle down the phone line. He snapped the cord and the light over the sink sprang on. Bull opened the leathern flap of his Gentleman’s Travelling Dressing Kit (a present from Mummy four Christmases ago), and extracted a pocket mirror. Then he bent down and wedged his head right between his knees. Frozen like that Bull seemed to be on the verge of nutting the bath mat. He wielded the pocket mirror and confronted his vagina. It had grown during the night!
Whereas yesterday the fine ginger hairs on the back of Bull’s calf had teased themselves into a vague whorl over his mons veneris, now they had regrouped and increased in both length and thickness to produce a definite tuft, and even a nascent triangle. And below the vagina, the wrinkled zip of brown flesh that Alan had correctly identified as Bull’s perineum was now choked with hairs like an overgrown railway cutting.