by Will Self
‘But what about you?’ It was my first defiant croak since the assault started, my first stab at redemption. Could I hit him where it hurts? In his soft, didactic underbelly? ‘Are you responsible for your actions?’
‘Oh entirely, completely, utterly. I’m right in there. I can transcend your “typing”, your insinuations, even what you imply about what I like to do in the privacy, yes, the very sacred privacy of my own home.
‘You must have realised that anyone who could undergo such a splendidly original and entire meta-morphosis would be well-placed for further theatricals.’
He pulled back from me and stood. He closed the switchblade, still smiling. ‘I think further force,’ he said, ‘will be unnecessary.’ It may have been the kava, or just the shock —but it was true. I felt like milk going off, all my limbs were transmogrifying into useless globs of rennet, I could not have moved—even if I had wanted to.
The don was moving about the carriage with dread efficiency. As he passed and re-passed me the open gash of his flies came again and again before my eyes. Was there one fly, or two?
He sat and unlaced his shoes. He looked at me almost quizzically—it was as if, in that moment, another engineer had taken over in the studio—for this voice had a new accent and a different timbre, as surely as if a new tape had been shoved home and played. His voice now was sweet and cloying, full of the sugary puke of togetherness.
‘Some might say that it’s of no importance how I feel about my sexuality.’ He shook his heel and a brogue fell to the floor. His socks were argyll. ‘After all I’m an odd mule, a procreative cul-de-sac, a genetic dead end.’ He stood, unbuttoned his flannels at the waist and stepped out of them. There was no surprise in the liverish sag of his pants. ‘As I said in my story, I’ve tried doing it to myself, but the results haven’t been too good…’ He slipped out of his tweed jacket and hung it on the hook provided. He took off his tie, using one hand to loosen it from the knot, like a boy—or an inexperienced man. He flushed with the exertion; perhaps, also, he was little embarrassed to be undressing like this in public. ‘…Miscarriage after miscarriage, each of my bloody slunks seemed to provoke me to create another.’ But he pulled off his vest just like a woman, his arms crossing over his chest, his hands going to the hems at the front.
And when he had slipped off his pants as well, unfastened his garters and removed both them and the tartan socks, when he stood before me, naked as the day he was born, I felt a deep compassion for the don, for Carol. For the truth was that he had none of the mean-featured prettiness he had ascribed to his fictional alter-ego. (I want you to understand that I only use the following term by way of deploying the full range of possible epithets to describe his looks, but, to be blunt): he was a dog. He was one of those women with the body of a middle-aged male sedentary. Flat white dishes of breast—piecrusts on the kitchen table—came to a head, sort of, with nipples that threatened to invert if you pressed upon them. His un-thighs, his bent shanks, they were a travesty of shapeliness. He sat again and parting his knees, brought me face to face with the heart of the matter. It was a huge, brown jewel lying on the velvety plush. It was gnarled and veined, for all the world the hacked-off stump of an old oak. It spilt from the burst slit of his vagina like a pile of grain from a slashed sack. It was strange for me to observe how the lips of his vagina had been altered by the transformation. The dermis had hardened, browned, so that it seamlessly merged with the root of the penis, like a packaged shirt and V-neck pullover combination.
And that was the strangest thing of all, what in retrospect struck me most about the time I spent with the don. This fact: that there was nothing particularly disquieting about his genitals, or at least there seemed nothing threatening about them. It struck me as natural to want to take them in my mouth, to feel the hard head beat against my palate as the thick shaft pulsed against my lips and my tongue at last sought out the don’s soft core.
The don may have had a man’s figure but his body felt like a woman’s His back was soft, lacking, even in arousal, the rigor of a man’s musculature. And his breath—when he raised me from my knees, pulled me away from his crotch and leant forward to kiss me—was full of the vanilla essence of childhood. It was innocent breath, kind breath, trusting, uncorrupted breath.
He kissed me and undressed me, and then he raped me.
He raped me. And it’s an unusual thing to be able to say this, in this day and age and in this successfully plural society, but he defiled me as well. Defiled me insofar that as he raped me he screamed and ranted, gibbered and incanted the most awful mish-mash. A vile medley of all the loose accusations he had already laced his story with: against Jews, intellectuals, Modernists and the psychoanalytically inclined.
And for him, it was plain, this rape had a resolving character. In forcing himself into me I could sense that the don was forcing himself also back into the now.
‘Not yet,’ he said, kissing me kindly, his tongue coming into my mouth with the easy familiarity of a boiled sweet. ‘Let me do that for you.’ And he had knelt in turn before me. He kissed his way into my clothing, running his tongue over seams and buttons and zipper. I felt madly aroused, tripped-out by urge. But when he had my penis, instead of kissing, licking and sucking—he bit. Bit hard and then used my condition, hobbled by garments, to turn the trumps, to repeat his Dan act. He flipped me over, so that he could bugger me.
‘Who—says—lightning—never—strikes—twice—in—the-same-place-eh!’ He used each thrust to push home the words. He had me now, no mistaking. I had wanted it, hadn’t I, I had asked for it. ‘You fucking yiddo! You dirty kike! You nancy Jewboy! You purulent, disgusting queer! England not good enough for you? My values not good enough for you? The rigid assurance of my cock not good enough for you? Do-you-seek-to-rearrange-things?’
I thought he was going to rearrange me—but he didn’t. I thought that I would end up like his first husband, but on this occasion he wasn’t playing things quite so rough. He just stunned me, battered me about with ringing clouts around my ears. He slashed, scoured and stropped me with strokes of his switchblade across my back and shoulders. And when he was done he left me. The door of the compartment swung behind him on its giant hinges. The peculiarly spacious, cold, diesel smell of a major London terminus quickly displaced the closeness of the compartment, blowing out the last few hours.
I struggled to my hands and knees, hiccuping bile. I stood; pulling up my pants and trousers I lurched to the door. The platform was streaming with disembarking passengers. It seemed impossible that any of them hadn’t looked in this direction, hadn’t seen the don’s departure.
I leant out of the door using the step as a foothold. And there he was, going strong. He was walking free with the tight, mincing gait that I would have prescribed for him, given the chance.
And did I go to the police? Did I spill the proverbial beans? I should say not, oh so gentle reader. Wood-jew? Instead I paid my 10p and took to the tiled exposure of the Temporary Toilet. In the short-let cubicle I scraped the drying semen from the insides of my thighs with hard paper, closer to manila than tissue. And then, standing splashing water on my numb face, I saw a prefiguration of the interview room in the functional anonymity, the uncaring facility of the public’s convenience.
There would be a detective constable and his partner— family men with wholemeal concerns—whose faces would become sicklied o’er as I ran through the particulars of my liaison with the don. They would shake their jug heads as they listened to how the don seduced me, bamboozled me.
‘Now quite honestly, sonny, dressed in this get-up. I mean to say what do you expect if you venture out into the fictional night alone, looking like you do, acting as you did? I’m not trying to talk you out of us going forward, there is the physical evidence after all, but I think you should be prepared for what people are going to say. Because I reckon that they will be forced to conclude that you were asking for it. You actually wanted someone to perform to you. In fact, I’
ll go further. I think you wanted to be an audience. Oh, I don’t doubt that you feel bad about it now, you feel used. But really, luvvie—come on. This is what you get if you sit there like a prat, listening to a load of cock…and bull.’
BULL
A Farce
I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood,
Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red edges,
The red ribb’d ledges drip with a silent horror of blood,
And Echo there, whatever is ask’d her, answers ‘Death’.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Maud
1
Metamorphosis
BULL, A LARGE and heavyset young man, awoke one morning to find that while he had slept he had acquired another primary sexual characteristic: to wit, a vagina.
The vagina was tucked into the soft, tendon-edged pit behind his left knee. It is quite conceivable that Bull wouldn’t have noticed it for some time had it not been a habit of his lightly to explore all the nooks and crevices of his body prior to rising.
So, Bull, lying in frozen bicycling posture, the duvet wrapped around his crotch and lower abdomen like an inflated dhoti, felt his hand and his hand felt him. It traversed the hair-frosted pap-hummocks on his chest and swooped into his sternum, only to rise again, like a downhill skier, on to the glorious piste of his tummy.
What did Bull usually think of during this instrument check prior to the day’s take-off? Very little. Very little indeed. Awake and upright, or even in bed but accompanied, Bull was a perplexed soul. His broad brow was often furrowed with concentration, but his thoughts were like aging, arthritic sportsmen. They shambled, lurched and feinted around one another, always on the verge of contact but never quite achieving it. The strain of this tended to push his coarse (but shapely) features into close and unsavoury proximity with one another. But in the net-strained light of a London spring morning Bull did not think. Instead he tried to roll himself back into the surf of sleep. Again and again he dived forward, aiming for the point at which the wave of oblivion broke on to the beach of his consciousness; only to find himself, still lying on the grainy mattress, with repose in lapping retreat beyond and below him.
Bull stirred himself and made ready to wank. He rolled over on to his broad white back. His big arms freed themselves from the folds of the duvet and went to work to remove the thing from the bed altogether. Eventually it joined the carpet. Bull’s hands went next to his thighs and kneaded them; to his knees and cupped them; back up to his buttocks and hammered into them like wedges. The vagina, the malevolent reality-gashing interloper, chose that moment to prink and snag against the back of Bull’s left hand.
And suddenly he was on his feet, his mind screaming at the incongruity of his eyes noticing the plaster gape and mortar trickle from the damp patch beneath the window, while he, while he, while he had this…this …thing on his body. Or was it in his body? He could not tell. He knew only this: that there was something in the vulnerable pit behind his knee. Something that might be a wound, perhaps inflicted by a dying bedspring, but already partially healed; or it might be a bubo or a carbuncle, grown in the night with horrible speed.
Whatever it was, Bull felt he could not stand like this, sucking on the lino from one sweaty foot to the next, without touching it once again. The thing, whatever it was, was an itch that mustn’t—but must—be scratched; and writ Brobdingnagian.
Bull touched it again, without being aware of having made the effort. But this time the touch turned into a feel. The thing was raised and roughly oval in shape. It was perhaps four inches long; extending from the very crease of the knee-back down to where Bull’s calf bulged out. Bull could feel that the wound or infection was bifurcated and that its crevice was wrinkled and reassuringly dry. But now he was aware of it, the thing was clearly serious, because whatever movements he made— either squatting or crouching to feel the thing, or frantically twisting to try and actually see it—set off frantic waves of internal sensation. Awarenesses of partings and viscous rubbings, of something deep into his body, stuck inside his body and apparently broken off at the haft…
Bull, still naked, staggered to the full-length mirror that was shinily affixed to the rose-patterned wallpaper. He placed his back towards it and sighted over his shoulder and down. His eyes met the cyclopean squint of the vagina, but before he could examine it closely Bull vomited copiously. He brought up full half-pints of twice-fermented lager, in which all the alcohol had long since turned back to sugar. These fell the fathom from Bull’s mouth to the lino and then pushed out across it, wave after wave, each one taking with it a little surf of hair, and lint, and dust.
I’m sick, thought Bull to himself. Really sick. I’m ill. I have a huge infection in the pit of my knee. I better go and see the doctor. If I’m vomiting the infection must be beginning to poison my blood.
He pulled on a pair of trousers and went along the corridor to the bathroom, where he undertook a sketchy version of his usual toilet. He gathered together a handful of fossilised J-Cloths that had been wadded in the u-bend of the sink’s outflow pipe.
The floor mopped, Bull dressed. Despite the fact that he wasn’t going to go directly into the office he still put on creased trousers, collared shirt, jacket and tie. He regretted not being able to wash more thoroughly, on account of the wound, but he had shaved his wide pink face with fierce precision.
Bull went back along the corridor to where the phone crouched on a fake Chippendale stoolette and dialled the group practice where his doctor worked.
‘Grove Health Centre,’ trilled the woman on the end of the line. She had the vocal automatism that comes to people whose job description might well read: ‘ceaseless repetition’.
‘Could I have the Andersen Practice?’ asked Bull.
‘Just putting you throu-ough…’ The woman’s voice was cut off abruptly by the ringing of an extension, but Bull could still hear her taking other calls from the switchboard. She said ‘Grove Health Centre’, and ‘Just putting you throu-ough’ at least four more times before Bull’s call was answered and he was retrieved from the static limbo.
‘Andersen Practice,’ said another woman with a marginally different voice.
‘I need to see Dr Margoulies,’ said Bull. ‘Has he any appointments available today?’
‘Ooh-er,’ came warbling from the receiver, ‘I don’t think so, and he’s off for a week tomorrow to a Learning Jamboree.’
‘Whaddya mean?’ Bull was getting querulous. ‘Learning what, precisely?’
‘It’s a kind of a competition you see.’ (The girl was ‘being helpful’. She had taken to heart the circular issued by the Health Authority requesting all employees to view NHS patients as viable fee-paying customers; rather than as the work-shy alcoholics, hypochondriacs and torpid valium addicts that they so clearly were.) ‘Teams of doctors from the various health centres in the Authority’s area go and camp in a field near Wincanton where they have a series of inter-active competitions designed to increase their awareness of the new reforms.’
‘And Dr Margoulies is actually going on one of these things?’ Squatting by the telephone in the gloom of the corridor, Bull’s hand had strayed once more down his thigh to the inappropriate quim site. Sensing a lip under the gaberdine of his trouser leg, his fingers froze and retreated.
‘Oh yes, he’s really looking forward to it… But hang on a minute. There’s a cancellation here for 9.30. How quickly can you make it over here?’
‘I can do it in twenty minutes.’
‘What’s your name please?’
‘Bull.’
‘And initial?’
‘“J”.’
Bull hung up and called into the office. He got an Australian temp who took the message that he would be late in without comment.
Bull double-locked the door to his flat. He paused on the walkway and surveyed the scene. Bull’s flat was above a parade of shops on East Finchley High Road. The shop units were of thirties vintage, red-bricked
and vigorously coped and mansarded with snowfall ridges of glutinous rendering. But while the front of the shopping parade had the congruence that comes with aspiration (the tenants’ association still managed to stamp on attempts to introduce loud or flashing signs), the back of the parade betrayed the building’s utility. The walkway to Bull’s flat ran up a ramp that ill concealed a number of huge, three-wheeled canisters of domestic and commercial detritus. This was the entry point to the parade for the tradesmen’s tradesmen, and one was out there already, erecting a tiny portable railing around the oblong entrance to a subterranean ductal zone.
Bull looked at the gas engineer, he looked at the red-brick Methodist church that rose above the suburban roofscape, he smelt the spring air. He felt an odd vulnerability this morning which he attributed to his wound or burn.
But Bull didn’t let this govern him. After all, he was a man with an appointment to keep, always a potent motivator. Instead he got into his car, pulled out from behind the parade, and drove off towards Archway.
So let us leave Bull, our protagonist, already well on the road to his personal Thebes. Already imprisoned in a stereoscopic zone where a shift in angle is all that’s required for free will to be seen as determined. Let us leave Bull enjoying his last Heraclitan morning before being buckled into the implosion of farce. And turn our attention up and over Highgate Hill, down to the grid of streets that surrounds the Grove Health Centre.
In a house in one of the adjacent streets Alan Margoulies’s wife Naomi was making the baby’s breakfast. ‘Making’ really only amounted to pouring warm, boiled water from the electric jug on to the heap of nutritious grey powder in the plastic bowl. But for some reason this slight action rang her head with the metallic vibration of something like despair.
The baby was strapped into her high chair with a ludicrously professional piece of webbing, all steel U-clips and ribbed orange nylon. Looking at the baby’s chubby face, with its flattened cheeks and ‘O’ing nostrils, Naomi suddenly saw it as a clever little homunculus, an alien presence.