by Will Self
Oh Christ. What if my cock and balls were to wither up and drop off, thought Bull, splashing his anxious countenance with tepid water. He had seen something of the sort happen when sheep were castrated. A gadget put a tight rubber band around the base of the scrotal sac. In time the sac blackened and then simply fell off. I shouldn’t want that… The beer in his brain kept him buoyant, able to contemplate the most horrible involutions of his gender with a certain archness. He returned to where Alan sat, and the tipsiness easily shifted gear back to a tingling lust.
Alan looked up, hooking his lank hair behind his ears. His face was tense with contemplating the awful truth that they had to, just had to deal with. Gone was the Übermensch who had so cheerfully powered his way to Wincanton; gone was Sybil’s lover; gone was the Good Doctor, the prebendary saint. Alan was thinking of going to the head of his practice, old Dr Fortis, and confessing the lot. A GP as old as Fortis would have seen myriad odd things in his time. Bull’s vagina and Alan’s response to it. His breach of professional ethics. It couldn’t be the oddest thing that he’d ever heard of…could it?
Perhaps he would then have to go with Fortis and see some higher authorities. Certainly the senior administrator and perhaps even the Minister herself. Alan accepted that he would be unable to practise at the Grove any more, and that his chances of promotion were likely to be annihilated. But need it necessarily be the end of his career? For heaven’s sake, these were the nineties, not the twenties. People were far more understanding nowadays of the weaknesses of the flesh. Perhaps he would be allowed to move away quietly. Naturally Naomi would have to be told everything, but she was an enlightened woman. She campaigned for homosexual rights…perhaps the revelation of his conduct with Bull would be just what was needed to revive their own flagging, emphatically marital sex-life?
But then Bull’s freckled face appeared once more on the other side of the electronic games table. It was reddened by beer and had that underlying vascular dilation that comes either from exercise, or from its anticipation. Clapping eyes on him was just like clapping hands on him. And once again Alan felt the raw erotic edge of the forbidden. He remembered the stiff and complex sexiness of his last coupling with Bull. His resolution was abandoned. It bent, buckled, shrank and then melted, like a crisp packet chucked on a fire.
Within the half hour the two men were embracing in room five of the Ancaster Guest House, prop. Mrs Turvey. Mrs Turvey had been surprised by Bull’s early return from the De La Warr Pavilion. She had tagged him, rightly, as a rugby player, and assumed that he would be out on the piss until the small hours. She was surprised, and a little suspicious as well, at the sight of Alan, who certainly didn’t look like a rugby player. But she was reassured when the two men asked if she had a pack of cards that they could borrow. She did. And a cribbage board. They seemed very pleased—and so was she. In twenty years of keeping the guest house, Mrs Turvey had never known anybody who played cribbage to be involved in immoral goings on.
So it was that the long weekend passed. By day Bull played rugby. By night he made love with Alan. And in the small hours Alan drove his large black car back across the blackened countryside of southern England to Wincanton.
Alan’s dark and handsome face became still darker. Violet shadows appeared under his fine eyes. The stress was getting to him, but he just couldn’t stop.
On Saturday evening they met in the snug of the Old Ship on the seafront at Brighton. As Alan came in Bull was shamelessly blubbing into a schooner of sherry. It took twenty minutes for Alan to get the story out of him.
‘The game was going brilliantly. Dave Gillis had scored twice straight from the line out and we’d picked up a couple of other tries by sheer hard rucking. I just wasn’t thinking, I suppose. I’d been late into the dressing-room, I couldn’t find the ground. All the rest of the team were there already. I suppose I didn’t take enough care with my knee protector…’
They had scrummed down. Bull had felt the hard head of Gillis the lock forward ram against his hip; he then heard an audible ‘oomph’ as Masher Morton, the Wanderers’ number eight, plunged his head between the hard haunches of the two locks. Sixteen men strained together, sixteen pairs of eyes searched the turf, waiting for the scrum half to feed the ball in, thirty-two boots twitched with anticipation, waiting to delve and hack.
‘It was awful, Alan. I’d never thought about it before. I’d never seen the scrum for what it was: a sexual thing. I mean all those men, hugging each other, straining together. And then the ball being shoved in, like a… like a…’ Bull couldn’t get the words out but Alan caught his drift. ‘…Anyway, when the ball came in it fell straight at my feet. I hooked hard for it with my right boot, and just then I felt my knee protector slipping…’
Bull had looked down horrified. His extra jock-strap was lying in the mud. His kneepit was completely exposed. Caught like that, in the scrum, he was utterly unable to move. He was, however, able to look back and catch sight of the appalled face of Masher Morton, the Wanderers’ number eight. There was no need for Bull to even speculate as to what it was that Masher had seen.
‘So what did you do?’ Alan asked breathlessly. ‘What could I do.’ Bull snapped. It was clear to Alan that Bull felt a measure of the blame was his. ‘I had to get the jockstrap and the knee protector back on and play out the rest of the game.’
‘But what about Morton? Didn’t he say anything?’
And there was the good fortune in the whole story. Morton was a boozer. In fact he was the Wanderers’ principal boozer. Prone to mixing his drinks into dreadful gut-curdling combinations: port and gin; bourbon and vermouth; beer and Polish spirit. Morton had seen Bull’s vagina. Seen it as clearly as he saw the ball. But then he had also seen a werewolf stealing his underwear in the small hours of that morning. Morton was shaken. He retired to the dressing-room to contemplate abstinence.
When the rest of the Wanderers joined him in the plunge bath after the match, there was much goodnatured badinage. ‘Masher says he saw a cunt on the back of John’s leg! Ha, ha, ha!’ ‘One over the eighty last night, eh Masher!’ ‘Show us yer oyster bed then, John me old darling!’ And much other ribaldry as well. Bull had escaped, shaken, but his secret intact.
‘I’m not sure that I’ll be able to play tomorrow. They may remember. They’ve been asking me why I don’t stick around in the evenings. It’s not like me, you see. I’m normally really cheerful. I normally go out and socialise with them.’
But that wasn’t all. And as Alan teased the rest of Bull’s sorry story out of him, he was aware of how like his marriage his relationship with Bull was already becoming. For it was the same when something happened to upset Naomi. Alan would have to spend a long time getting her confidence, making the right sympathetic noises, before eventually she would tell him what little slight, what small contretemps during the day, had made her so weepy.
‘It was a shitty day.’ Bull was still blubbing; the snotty sheen on his upper lip was unattractive, as were his reddened, piggy little eyes. ‘After you left this morning I called a girlfriend of mine in London. I’d made a tentative plan to go out with her this evening…’
‘…And she wouldn’t?’ Alan couldn’t help snapping. Bull came back hard. ‘What are you saying? That a woman wouldn’t find me attractive. Is that what you’re saying?’
‘Now calm down, John. Of course I’m saying nothing of the sort. But you have to get all of this in proportion, don’t you.’
‘Anyway. I suppose I may as well tell you. After all, I’ve nobody else…’
Bull went on and told Alan how Juniper had not only rejected him, but how she had also, far from inadvertently, let slip the fact that she had taken Bull’s job. In fact she intimated to Bull that it was due to her intervention that Bull had been fired. Bull was gutted. But Alan wasn’t paying attention to what Bull said about Juniper; about the job; about their frenzied floor-bound couplings; about Juniper’s silly views, her patronage of Razza Rob. Alan had picked up on someth
ing else altogether. Something that Bull was wholly unaware of having said: ‘After all, I’ve nobody else.’
This was what stuck with Alan. And stayed with him as, in the small hours, he headed fast along the coast road, en route for Southampton. For he knew it to be true. Bull had told him of parents who had moved out to Portugal to spend their retirement golfing on the Algarve. And how his father had met his end climbing out of a golf buggy one day. He had tripped, rolled across the immaculate sward of a steeply raked green, and died, choleric and twitching, in a bunker. Bull had little contact with his mother, who had married the club chairman. There were no Bull siblings.
‘It’s my word against his.’ That’s what Alan kept thinking. He beat out the words in time with his fine finger-flicks against the black leatherette cover of the steering wheel. ‘That’s all there is to it: my word against his. If he says I did it I can simply deny it. Why need an Übermensch be destroyed by fate in this fashion? I must rise above it, master it.’
And although he lay once more with Bull the next night at the Crown Hotel in Shoreham, Alan’s mind was elsewhere. And when they parted and headed back to London separately the following day, Alan had no intention of ever seeing Bull again. And even if he were to feel a poignant pang, no, a multitude of poignant pangs, each time he passed a sports shop, or a playing field, or saw a child on its way home from school, duffel bag bulging with soiled kit, he would not relent. Alan saw his lust for what it was: a closet queen, parading in the assumed pasteboard finery of love.
* * *
It’s an everyday story, wouldn’t you say? This sad tale of Bull. Poor, poor Bull. Used and abandoned. There’s nothing new under this red dwarf emotional sun of ours. We grow up in sickly anticipation of love, romantic love. We sense with overweening joy that ours is but one amongst an infinity of unique sensibilities. What cruel irony that it is this very infinity that we later seem to find such a dreadful fag, and a bore to boot. We live out our lives with the studious, alienated politeness of big city dwellers: ‘I know you’re interesting,’ we seem to beam telepathically at our fellow sufferers, ‘and have hopes and fears of a unique quality, even views of some perspicacity. But none today please! Ting!’
So, in the light of the above, can we blame Alan? To be more precise, can we be bothered to blame Alan? Also can we be bothered to pity Krishna Naipaul, who, as Bull and Alan headed for London, was still trapped in the polymorphous perversities of the Tiresias Kebab Bar in Wincanton? In the neon wash from the freezer cabinet an odd triple-decker sexual sandwich twitched on the tiles. On the bottom was the flat white pudding of the chicken sexer’s girlfriend who gobbled Alan. Above her the corn-fed corpse of Tiresias himself flowed over her like hot fudge on to a sundae. And above both of them, arching back in fear and frenzy, the naughty doctor wriggled and scampered on the Greek’s big back, for all the world like the satyr that he so clearly was. Probably not. For in line with the disillusionment outlined above, we have jettisoned our capacity to judge the relationships of others. In this world where all are mad and none are bad, we all know that the finger points backwards.
So, no nausea please as Alan returns on a Monday evening to the terraced house he calls home. Of course he is still anxious, he has yet to tell Bull of his decision. He also knows that there will be tough times ahead, when Bull, who is, after all, some kind of journalist, starts shooting his big mouth off. But Alan knows he can weather it, because in essence he is a family man. See him now opening the door with his key, tucking his black attaché case behind the coat-rack in the hall. And here’s Cecile, stomping towards him on chubby legs. Alan sweeps her up and kisses her sticky cheek. And here’s Naomi, looking committed. Towelled from the bath, she smells good.
They all smell good as they cuddle in the hall. And Naomi figures this has to be the right time to tell Alan that she’s pregnant again.
Bull had a farewell drink with the Wanderers in a roadhouse. Amidst plastic beams and hard against a fruit machine that had a microprocessor with a far larger and more efficient random access memory than the publican, Bull tried to salvage something of his relationship with his team mates.
‘I’m really cut up about losing my job,’ he told Dave Gillis for the umpteenth time. ‘It’s tough to find freelance work in a recession.’
‘Yeah, I know all that, John.’ Gillis was tetchy. After Bull’s performance during the mini-tour he, for one, would have liked to have seen him dropped from the team. After all, amateur rugby is as much to do with socialising with your mates as it is with playing the actual matches. Gillis had always rather suspected Bull. There was something too good to be true about his lack of side, his open and friendly features. Gillis wouldn’t have been surprised if Bull was a poof. ‘But where the hell have you been getting to the last few nights? We’ve been having a bloody good time. It’s been the most successful tour any of us can remember, but you’ve been buggering off every evening after a couple of pints.’
‘Yeah, well, Dave. I have got a bit of a confession to make. There’s this bird I’ve been seeing.’ (It was terribly easy for Bull mentally to change Alan’s clothing and shave his legs. In Bull’s mind’s eye he made rather a fetching damsel.) ‘And, well, she’s married like.’ Gillis surprised himself by being relieved. ‘Well why didn’t you say! For Christ’s sake, we all would of understood. Oi! Lads. Johnnie boy here has a bit of the old forbidden on the side. That’s why he’s been sloping off all over the tour.’
There were guffaws from the assembled Wanderers. Big, certain men in blazers. Bull was much praised for his athleticism. For scoring so many tries when he must have been shagged out from the night before. There was much backslapping, and stiff punches to the upper arm. Bull felt enfolded once more by the smegmatic closeness of male camaraderie, and felt ghastly and fraudulent. He wasn’t able to get away to London for another couple of hours.
The journey was exhausting. What with the booze, the rugby, and the contorted sex he had been having with Alan for the last three nights, Bull could barely make it up the stairs, once he had managed to crawl up the hill from the tube station. He staggered into his flat and footed down the corridor to his bedroom, where he slumped down. Too weary to undress. He waited for oblivion to come.
But it wouldn’t. Bull felt the beer slop in his belly. Perhaps I need to go and drop some ballast before I sleep, he thought to himself, and rose from the bed. When he was on his feet, the tightness in his stomach changed to nausea. Bull hit the corridor at a run, and vomit was spurting from his mouth before he made it to the bathroom. Kneeling and wiping Bull pondered his nausea. He didn’t have more than five or six pints in the pub, certainly not enough to make him puke. And then the realisation tiptoed in, leaving the door ajar on that other world, that other hidden nature of Bull’s that he had done so well to deny for the past few hours.
For he knew by now that nausea danced attendance on those other parts of himself, those parts that lager simply could never reach.
Bull stripped, and stood once more before the full-length mirror where it had all begun, twisting himself to regard his vagina and its surround. Bull was aware now that his leg had developed a biology of its own. The period that had started in Ramona’s bedsit had ended within twenty-four hours. The night Bull had met Alan at the De La Warr Pavilion, he had had the added embarrassment of explaining that it was his ‘time of the month’, when Alan and he came to disrobe in the cramped confines of room five. Alan had scoffed at the very idea of Bull having a period, even after he had seen the dried and stiffened clouts. He had explained to Bull at great length that his vagina was an independent thing, cut out from its natural surround. He had pointed out to Bull that he had no urethra, and that the vagina itself was stopped by the back of his patella, as surely as an engine cylinder is capped by its big end.
And indeed, since Thursday, Bull had felt none of the inexplicable tremulousness that had characterised the two preceding days. He had assumed that his biology had ceased to dance in a lunar light. And s
o it had. What hubris of Alan to take his pleasure and not deploy his expertise! It would have only taken him a superficial examination, the tiniest admixture of business with pleasure, for him to have rumbled. For the truth was that in the mini-feminine world of Bull’s leg, everything was in perfect running order. It was all compressed, true enough, and distorted, not unlike the internal organs of a midget. But it was all in perfect running order. Bull’s cervix that is; Bull’s ovaries; Bull’s tubes. Bull’s womb, which, as it dawned on him that the calf muscle cramps he had been having that day might have an origin other than muscular stress, was pushing out in a slow act of biological attrition.
Bull found himself dressed and in his car. He knew there was an all-night chemist open in West Hampstead, a chemist where he could buy a Predictor pregnancy testing kit.
Bull crouched in the cramped confines of the cubicle, and his face distorted into a crazy mirror grimace as he watched the bluish solution in the plastic beaker turn a violent pink.
So that was that. Seduced, traduced and banged up to boot. Well now it was time for Alan Margoulies to show just how conscientious he really was. Now was the time for the Good Doctor to put his money (and it was bound to cost an awful lot of money, unless, that is, he was prepared to do it himself) where his mouth had so recently, so lickedly been. Bull, back in his car, gripped the wheel with ferocious strength. He felt that he might easily have torn it from the steering column and thrown it out the window, were it not that he needed it to guide him towards his deceiver.
Bull knew where Alan lived. The fool had mentioned it in passing, as they had lain together one night, entangled and idly discussing mortgage depreciation and the interest-rate crisis. Now Bull drove there fast, parked up, and concealed himself in the privet of the tiny front yard. Concealed himself in such a way that he could see in to the lighted kitchen without being seen. He peeked through the venetian blind slats and saw his lover, and with him his wife, Bull’s rival.