Cock and Bull

  COCK AND BULL

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  FICTION

  The Quantity Theory of Insanity

  My Idea of Fun

  Grey Area

  The Sweet Smell of Psychosis

  Great Apes

  Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys

  How the Dead Live

  Dorian

  Dr Mukti and Other Tales of Woe

  The Book of Dave

  NON-FICTION

  Junk Mail

  Sore Sites

  Perfidious Man

  Feeding Frenzy

  COCK AND BULL

  WILL SELF

  BLOOMSBURY

  First published in Great Britain 1992

  This paperback edition published 2006

  Copyright © 1992 by Will Self

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 0 7475 8234 3

  9780747582342

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  All papers used by Bloomsbury Publishing are natural,

  recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed

  forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the

  environmental regulations of the country of origin

  www.will-self.com

  www.bloomsbury.com/willself

  Cock is for Cressida and Charles,

  Bull is for William.

  CONTENTS

  COCK: A Novelette 1

  1 The Prelude 3

  2 Climbing on Board 10

  3 Frond 21

  4 Dave 2 38

  5 It 51

  6 How One Becomes What One Is 65

  7 The Lager of Lamot 76

  8 The Icing Gun 87

  BULL: A Farce 129

  1 Metamorphosis 131

  2 First Impressions 153

  3 Seduction 179

  4 Pursuit 210

  5 Apotheosis 242

  Epilogue 274

  COCK

  A Novelette

  I won’t describe, that is, if I can help

  Description; and I won’t reflect, that is

  If I can stave off thought, which as a whelp

  Clings to its teat, sticks me through the abyss

  Of this odd labyrinth; or as the kelp

  Holds by the rock; or as a lover’s kiss

  Drains its first draught of lips. But as I said,

  I won’t philosophise and will be read.

  Byron, Don Juan

  1

  The Prelude

  CAROL HAD ALWAYS FELT at some level less of a woman when Dan was around. Not that she ever would have defined what she felt in these terms—and she certainly wouldn’t have used this particular language. Carol had completed one third of the degree course in sociology at Llanstephan, a small, dull Welsh college. Her tertiary education was brief. She was exposed to enough of the student radicalism that was then in fashion to have been able to attach to her feelings of alienation from Dan neat tags of feminist jargon—but Carol was too insipid to shape her critique. So while men weren’t necessarily stupid or chauvinistic, neither were they ‘phallocentric’ or ‘empowered by the male phallic hegemony’. And women, on the other hand, they weren’t depressed, oh no. And neither were they ‘alienated’. Of them, never let it be said that their ‘discourse was vitiated’.

  Carol had spent long, sapphic nights at Llanstephan under the influence of a rotund lesbian called Beverley, who hailed from Leeds. Beverley lectured her on the jargon, attempting to move her from the casting couch to a speaking part in the cod philosophy. They grew tense on instant coffee and eventually fiddled sweatily with the toggles of each other’s regulation bib ’n’ braces.

  But despite these relatively exotic experiences, Carol, the daughter of a desperately self-effacing woman and a dissatisfied autodidactic electrical engineer from Poole, was not impelled into an original lifestyle, or even inclined to complete her degree in order to counter the masculine cultural hegemony. Beverley’s sour-cream flesh and probing digits failed to release whatever lode of sexual ecstasy Carol might have had locked within her narrow bosom—as did the blind-mole bumping of the seven or so penises that had truffled up her thin thighs since she started going in for that sort of thing.

  This was left to Dan to achieve—by a fluke, entirely. And it was this fluke, combined with Carol’s tendency always, always to take the line of least resistance, in all that she ever said, or did, or even thought, that gives this story its peculiar combination of cock and bull.

  A pub-crawl down the snaking high street of a Warwickshire market town, this was the prelude to the chain of chance. In the manner of students the world over, Carol had departed from Llanstephan with two colleagues, one of whom she knew only vaguely. The vague one, in turn, had a still vaguer acquaintance with some design students at Stourbridge. A party was in the offing. The three Llanstephanites, Carol, a girl called Bea, and the boy, Alun, set off at dusk in a borrowed car and burrowed across Wales and then through night-time England in the narrow tunnel carved by the headlights.

  The party turned out to be Dan’s post-exam binge. Other boys, in the soul rebel uniform of tight dungarees and woolly caps, punched him on his upper arms. Carol noticed his sad, self-deprecating smile—folded in at the edges with a hospital corner—and wondered if he were quite as keen on the pub crawl as they were.

  He was.

  Atherstone had been selected as the crawl site, because it has the greatest number of pubs on a single street of any town in England (or Wales for that matter): twenty-two in all. The party from Stourbridge intended to start at one end and proceed to the other, downing a drink in every single pub along the way. It had been Dan’s own idea.

  The evening grew smokier and closer. Carol had started on gin, but soon, her head swimming, she switched to lager. At some crucial, undefined moment —finding herself staring, uncomprehendingly at the opening line of Desiderata (‘Go placidly amidst the something or others…’)—Carol realised that she had crossed over from being rather tipsy to being decidedly drunk.

  The HND design boys clung to one another’s shoulders. ‘Come on, Eileen!’ they shouted in parodic Geordie accents. They had prepared scorecards with the names of all the Atherstone pubs in one column and the other columns left blank for the names of the drinks, units of alcohol they represented and so forth. But by now they had given up on comparing each other’s performances and instead were simply and uncomplicatedly drunk.

  Carol looked at Alun and he looked at her. She realised how little he really knew these Stourbridge boys. The only real link was with Dan, whom Alun had been at school with for a couple of years in Cardiff, but they’d never really been that close. Carol rightly felt her own social position as even more teased out and attenuated than Alun’s. But then Dan looked at Carol, and for some reason she saw some compassion in those hospital-corner creases and in his mousy forelock that pointed in the same direction—towards the floor.

  They fucked on a thin foam mattress. With rasping predictability Dan entered her too early, she was tight and dry. And he came after three sandpapery strokes. But for some strange reason, some synaptic glitch, Carol came as well. Her orgasm crept up on her while she gazed in pained abstraction at an arty poster. It was the first orgasm she had ever had with a man inside her. Later, in a disoriented, boozy blackout, she squatted and peed on a pile of Dan’s textbooks that lay in a corner of the room.

  When she returned to the numb mattress and hunkered into a foetal curl, she felt Dan’s forelo
ck brush between her shoulderblades, his neat mouth nuzzled her back flesh. She responded, millimetrically.

  Dan and Carol were married a year or so later, and just about everyone who knew them reckoned that she had to be pregnant—but it wasn’t so. It was that brief, ecstatic lancing and subsequently balmy wave that had wedded Carol to Dan, and despite the fact that the experience had not been repeated Carol still felt obscurely bonded to him. She felt certain that the feeling she had for his slight, slab-sided white body with its little brown moles was love. And his sandy hair which naturally fell into a twenties crop—the forelock arching over his sensitive brows—that too was lovable. And Carol also responded to Dan’s deftness. Like many other design-oriented people Dan was good with his hands and made amusing little things out of paper and card. Their wedding invitation was in the form of a paper sculpture. On opening the card a church created itself; the little paper doors opened and disgorged a cut-out wedding party—it was terribly clever.

  Carol dropped out of Llanstephan and went into digs near Stourbridge to be with Dan. She had never really got to grips with sociology anyway. It had been the only course for which she could fulfil the matriculation requirements, and Llanstephan had been the choice of the UCCA computer rather than her own. Carol’s autodidactic, electrical engineer father was disappointed, and made his displeasure felt in a rancorous wedding speech, full of twists of convoluted and pedantic irony that were lost entirely on Dan’s family and guests, who, coming from more solid, middle-class homes, thought he was trying to be funny. Neither of them was religious—and the list was at Heal’s.

  Carol’s mother was less disappointed. She knew Carol to be like herself, good when subjected to the influence of the same, but lazy and with no profound convictions. As Carol was also lithe, and pretty in the mean-featured English provincial way, it was best that she married young and was subjected to a steadying influence.

  Carol was nineteen when she married Dan. Dan was twenty-one—with a year to go before completing his HND. After he had qualified, he managed to get a job with a consultancy in London that specialised in corporate identity. They moved from their one-room flat in Stourbridge to a two-bedroom maisonette in Muswell Hill, North London.

  It was about this time that Carol realised that she felt less of a woman when Dan was around. That she hadn’t articulated this feeling was really down to that strange loyalty engendered by their single, simple drunken coming-together. That she was unable to put it into more abstract and potentially empowering terms was due, as we have said, to Beverley’s failed influence.

  But in London Dan, exact in denim blouson and leather trousers, brought home fellow designers for supper or drinks. These creatures, with their padded kapok jackets and modular plastic accessories replete with winking LCDs, spoke a new language to Carol. As she learnt the vocabulary she began to understand that this world was one of potentially unambiguous satisfaction, sexual or otherwise.

  And so Carol began to see Dan for what he was: slight, sour, effete, unsure of himself. She began to let it sink home that those three sudden strokes really had been nothing but a fluke.

  2

  Climbing on Board

  DAN CALLED SEX ‘climbing on board’. He’d picked the phrase up from an apple-cheeked German boy with whom he’d pulled potatoes from an East Anglian field during a short, wet summer. Now when he wanted his little bit of relief he would say to Carol over supper (which they ate sitting side by side like passengers on some endless marital branch line), ‘Mind if I climb on board tonight?’ or, ‘How’s about I climb on board later, darling?’ Eventually Carol began to stare murderously at her oval platter whenever she heard the hated catchphrase. And once, as she sawed too vigorously at her M&S Chicken Kiev, a spurt of butter marinade shot from the ruptured fowl and fell, appropriately enough, like jism on Dan’s tented crotch.

  When he did climb on board Carol, the journey was inevitably brief and the transport was effected with little exertion by either party. The hospital corners of Dan’s mouth would be tucked in a little more deeply, his breathing would flute and subside. In due course Carol would roll over to avoid the damp patch.

  That Carol didn’t revolt against this cramped and pedestrian sex-life was largely a function of her pacific nature. With Dan packed off to work for the day, to add serifs to the uprights of characters forming acronyms, or remove them as the case may be, Carol found herself with lovely, indolent time on her hands. Like her foremothers, she would clean and categorise the wedding chattels from Heal’s and the more recent acquisitions from Habitat and the Reject Shop. She would straighten up the maisonette. And then, perhaps, she would take a walk in the park, or a trip to the library to exchange books. For six months Carol learnt Spanish, but she gave it up when it became too difficult. She considered getting a dog or cat for companionship but she had never liked the way that they paraded their leathery genitals, so she settled for a caged cockateel instead. Something Carol was prepared to wait for was children. This acceptable catchall served to hide from Carol the extent to which nuzzling up against Dan had already, mysteriously, shrunk her womb. Whittled away at her capacity for selfless mothering. The way her marriage was developing she began to feel prepared to wait a very long time indeed.

  After two years in London, Dan was promoted to head the typography team at work. This was very good going for a twenty-four-year-old. Coincidentally, he began to climb on board a lot less—and drink a lot more.

  Dan was one of those people who change character when they drink. With Dan it was a comprehensive metamorphosis, as if he had forgotten his own self entirely and taken on a distinct new personal history. Of course a chronic sot, in his cups, has no memory beyond the previous two or three minutes of staggering and altercating. He is a short-lived thing, a May bug, born to live, grow, propagate and then succumb to the next spring shower—or, in Dan’s case, the next shower of Lamot.

  Dan was a blacking-out drunk, he was a falling-down drunk. He was the kind of drunk that knelt on dinner tables, canted forward from the waist, spewing some rubbish about a girl he had once loved in Leighton Buzzard. He was also the kind of drunk who would then vomit copiously in mid-peroration. And—wait for it — he was also the kind of drunk who never, ever, remembered not to eat spaghetti bolognese or chicken tikka masala before he went on a binge. To put it in the modern idiom: he was a disaster area, albeit of slight proportions.

  When Dan and Carol married they had both belonged to lower-middle-class sets at their respective colleges. Lower-middle-class in terms of what used to be called, in my days as an undergraduate, ‘fastness’. I suppose that at more sophisticated institutions these children might have supped drugs. But as it was the boy students in these sets merely drank heavily and so did the girl students. Their consumption of alcohol was deemed a badge of maturity, of acceptance. So it was that in pullovers they grouped around curved, panelled bars, arms held aloft to form scenes of near-Canadian clubbability. Later, they would crash Mini Coopers into street furniture, or their hips into room furniture.

  In spring and autumn Carol and Beverley had drunk pints of bitter in straight glasses; in summer they had chug-a-lugged Pilsner lager in bottles capped by fool’s gold foil; in winter they had supped on a thick barley wine called ‘Winter Warmer’, which did just that. Carol had a good head for alcohol—in fact she had a spy’s head for alcohol; for as she drank, her washed blue eyes grew flatter and beadier, giving an accurate, if tarnished reflection of some pebbledashed saturnalia. That’s what one felt, watching her: that as she drank, she was somehow accumulating evidence against those who got drunk. When Carol married Dan, some of the hearties that had seen them boozing together quipped that it was a case of an under-the-covers policewoman having finally cornered her suspect.

  He paused. It was the first gap of any significance in his speech. For the first couple of minutes that he had been speaking, I had fretted. The storyteller had cornered me in the compartment shortly after he had boarded the train at Oxford
. He was like some ersatz ancient mariner; and after a rapid-fire exchange of inanities re. weather, travel and so forth, he had teased out what was little more than a thread of conventional politeness on my part into a skein of spurious intimacy. Then he had used the train’s lurch to a standstill in the orange evening of a rape-field as a pretext to ‘tell me a story’, i.e. enfold me in this repellent tale.

  It wasn’t exactly that he had spoken all of the above in a breathless hush, or as an onward galloping rant. It was rather that, despite allowing his voice the full dramatic range and cadence required to bring his, admittedly flat, characters to life, he had then compressed this dramatic inflection into the smallest of possible intervals.

  As I say, I chafed under the tale, desperate to interrupt and silence him. And then, when it became dear that he wouldn’t provide me with any polite opportunity, I succumbed to it. When the man paused, I was thrown out completely and the silence lay with the dust on the old, minute checkerboard of British Rail plush.

  But the pause did give me time properly to examine my travelling companion, the creator of the bibulous Carol and her saturated spouse. He was plump and his little hands formed a fleshly cup—in direct alignment with his sagged, flannel crotch. His nutty hair rose to form two birds’ wings which swooped across the pinkish tips of his ears. His face had the wire-biting-into-Edam look of a man grown old with little physical exertion and no physical danger save for the mineral drip, drip, drip of sherry, Madeira and claret dissipation. From his grey flannel trousers and tweed jacket, I took him to be a slightly faggoty, fussy middle-aged don. Given his embarkation point and the underlying snobbery of his characterisations, this didn’t exactly constitute a great feat of detection. Nor did it take the most acute of social observers to tear away the moulded panels of his accent, in order to reveal the very chassis of his diction. Which had perhaps been spot-welded by elocution lessons, some forty years before.