Cock and Bull v5 Read online

But what Margoulies wrote would have made Bull doubt the good doctor’s sanity. The Papermate titivated the narrow feint with Margoulies’s characteristic spyrogyra of a hand. ‘Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt…’ he wrote. And his fine brown eyes stared sightlessly into the aquamarine sheen of a Monet reproduction that had been clumsily blu-tacked on to the wall above the examination couch.

  ‘Well, we better get this wound or burn of yours dressed, hadn’t we?’ Margoulies snapped out of it and began to move about the office collecting crêpe bandage, adhesive tape, swabs, scissors and a bottle of distilled water. Bull began to feel better and better as Margoulies’s tapering fingers softly palped the vagina’s surround.

  Margoulies wasn’t quite sure what he was doing. He wanted to cover the vagina up so that Bull wouldn’t discover what it was. He swabbed it with distilled water to give Bull the impression that he was disinfecting it. He then applied a translucent layer of Vaseline to the whole kneepit area. After that, he used thin strips of adhesive to butterfly stitch Bull’s vaginal lips together. Finally he covered the whole thing with a sturdy but flexible covering of crêpe bandage.

  Margoulies stood upright to finish the task. Looking towards Bull he applied loop after loop of bandage with strategic skill. After each loop he asked Bull to move the leg, and to tell him if the dressing was comfortable. Bull, increasingly at ease, felt the marvellous lightness that comes with knowing that one has had the appropriate treatment. When at last he popped off the couch and pulled on his trousers, he felt almost normal again. He took a couple of turns around the consulting room. He could still feel deep, internal rubbings and partings within his leg, but the immediate, surface sensation that had so horrified him was muted and cushioned.

  ‘Now listen, John.’ Margoulies was back at his desk, this time writing on a prescription pad. ‘I’ve dressed this myself because I wouldn’t trust the nurses either here or at the Whittington to do it properly. I want you to fill this prescription…’

  ‘Should I take some bed rest, Doctor?’ Bull sounded enthusiastic about the prospect. Sickly belly burn and ringing head of hangover told him to get horizontal with an insistence that now easily eclipsed the vagina’s insidious effect.

  ‘Oh no, I wouldn’t say that was necessary. I should cut your day short, but in a way, with something like this, it’s better if you keep moving.’

  Bull was puzzled by this, but he trusted Margoulies implicitly. After all, why wouldn’t he? How could he know that a parallel universe of perverse calculation was establishing itself in Margoulies’s mind? How could Bull know that Margoulies’s concern was first and foremost to stop Bull discovering the vagina before he, Margoulies, could…could…what? Aye, there’s the rub. Margoulies was setting something up already. He was ‘treating’ Bull with all the cynicism of von Ribbentrop treatying away with Molotov. Margoulies had become a silent signatory of the hypocritic oath.

  * * *

  Bull stood in the pharmacy, his prescription clutched in his plump hand. Ahead of him in the queue two junkies were receiving their daily methadone script. They moved away from the counter, but only so far as a circular wire display rack of spongiform products, where they paused to drink the sweet linctus lustily. To one side of the shop a schizophrenic argued with a nylon-coated assistant about the ‘cleanliness’ of an emery board; whilst on the other two skinny kids with the shaven, blue-sheened heads of habitual ringworm hosts, riffled the lipsticks annoyingly in their acrylic trays.

  The pharmacist plonked Bull’s valium down on the ledge of the serving hatch. He stared at Bull with mild curiosity. Bull didn’t look like the sort who needed sedation. He looked more like a hail-fellow-well-met type, full of bone-crushing bonhomie and stupid drinking games.

  Bull took the pills from the assistant without troubling to read the label. He took his change and his receipt. The pharmacist, feeling the obscure power of the apothecary who alters moods at a distance through the use of such philtres and preparations, noted his bemused expression. And he would have been right about this, for Bull didn’t have a clue what Diazepam was. He thought Margoulies had prescribed him an antibiotic.

  Bull faffed around the precincts of Lincoln’s Inn, looking for a parking space, and in the process twice tangling with the same bald and belligerent cabbie. Eventually he found a temporary resting place and struck out up the Grays Inn Road towards the offices of Get Out! The spring day had cleared and the clouds had scudded off to Sveningen, leaving London bald and bright under a high, blue sky.

  Bull took the stairs gently, feeling the tug of the adhesive strips on his soon-to-be-pubic leg hairs. In the open-plan offices of Get Out! he moved among the tatty desks, each with its paper toupee, muttering ‘hellos’ to his various colleagues. They were either drinking plastic beakers of coffee, with their feet up on their desks, or else they were humped in the green wash of their VDUs, tapping away.

  Bull settled himself at his desk, snapped on his word processor, and while the machine chatted itself up and into life he began mentally to compose his review of Razza Rob.

  Now, as has been said, Bull was a sportswriter by inclination. And in fact (although it has no relevance to our story) he wasn’t a bad sportswriter at all. He came to the business of describing sport not with the facile vision of a would-be novelist, but with the clear-eyed probity of a would-be sporting professional. Bull had become a journalist in order to be with the people he admired: sportsmen. He was a good rugby player but he had never kidded himself that he could be a professional. Because of this he brought to his sports-writing a practical knowledge and fluidity of expression that coincidentally rendered his prose quite excellent. Thus:

  Guggenheim received the ball with a coiled muscularity that then effortlessly exploded into a looping, feinting run which culminated in a drop goal of rare brilliance

  was Bull’s empathetic and vivid description of the high-point of a match between Wigan and Filey RFC ‘B’ teams.

  While, on the other hand—as we have already remarked—Bull’s cabaret reviewing suffered terribly from a leaden injection of sporting metaphor and analogy. Thus:

  Les Jongleurs Diaboliques never quite get off the starting blocks with their new ‘theatrical experience’ at the Diorama. The inexpert blocking that characterises Les Jongleurs’ movements around the stage leads this reviewer to suspect that they were directed by the late lamented Bobby Robson, in a belated attempt to reintroduce the discredited 4–3–3 formation to English soccer.

  Bull’s copy would regularly come back from the editor with all but the most straightforward of statements ruthlessly excised. Bull felt something like a prisoner on a chain gang, forced to dig holes and then fill them in again, without purpose, without reason. As his inability to write about it increased, so did Bull’s loathing for all forms of cabaret, stand-up comedy, fringe theatre and other small audience entertainments.

  Sport on the other hand continued to grip Bull with a passion. The only thing he would hate to miss through injury or illness was a forthcoming mini-tour of South Coast resorts by his Sunday League team the Wallingford Wanderers.

  Bull had been playing for the Wallingford Wanderers almost since leaving school (except for the hiatus while he was in the USA). The team was loosely connected with his old school, but in practice drew on the friends and acquaintances of team members to find useful players. Most of Bull’s mates were Wanderers. They were solid young men, quantity surveyors, actuaries, the odd dentist or retail services manager adding a hint of cosmopolitanism.

  What Bull liked about the team most of all was that the Wanderers represented the acceptable face of small-club rugby. There was beeriness but not too much leeriness; and huggery but not too much buggery. In essence for all of them it represented a continuation of their minor public schooldays. And once a year the team went to play the old school’s first fifteen. This was the high point of the season.

  Trying to concentrate on a pithy demolition job on Razza Rob was difficult for Bul
l. He tapped out characters on the screen and then let the pulsing cursor eat them backwards, again and again. Images of clean green turf slid in front of his eyes. He felt the surge of sheer adrenalin-fuelled joy that he always experienced, lined up with his team mates, clean, pressed and raring for the kickoff. He felt the delightful shock through his leg that comes when you chonk the back of your boot into the greensward and hack out just the right divot to support the ball for a placekick.

  The shock-in-the-leg sensation reminded Bull of his wound. He had been lost in a daydream. He felt woozy and relaxed. The valium did its job. Bull continued to function for the rest of the day while the sedative kept him calm.

  At lunchtime Bull went out for a drink with a couple of his colleagues. One of them noticed him limping. ‘What’s up, John,’ he said, ‘pulled a muscle playing five-a-side?’

  ‘No,’ Bull replied, suddenly self-conscious. ‘It’s nothing, really.’

  Margoulies took the smelly lift down into the sub-basement of the hospital. It smelt of the dead forefathers of old school dinners. The sub-basement had an oppressively low ceiling, and immediately outside the door of the lift the linoleum on the floor had started to decompose, breaking up into ragged, isolated island shapes, as if the surface had been subject to some tectonic shift. A porter with the face of a medieval villein—all warty wattle and Cyrano nose—directed Margoulies to where the closed stacks were housed, and opened the wire cage for him with a Yale key.

  Margoulies snapped on the Anglepoise that stood on the small metal reading desk and went ranging along the shelves, peering at the spines of the thick medical reference works and bound journals, occasionally pulling one out.

  It was Margoulies’s lunch hour. The rest of the morning, after Bull’s visitation at his surgery, had been an odd one for Margoulies. Alan had palpably felt his ethics and his restraint draining out of his mind like bath water. Round and round in his tortured brow went the arguments and considerations, until they disappeared with a ferocious gurgle. Only to be replaced by still more arguments and more considerations.

  Alan’s conscience told him that he was doing something wrong. Something very, very wrong. Something, in fact, that might seriously undermine his candidacy for canonisation.

  Alan’s reason also told him that when a man walks into your office with a vagina tucked behind his knee, the first thing you must do in order to preserve both your sanity, and his, is tell someone else. The abnormal becomes normal through its inclusion in the worlds of others. Exclude it and it begins to take on a penumbra of sinister otherness.

  But the problem was this: Alan was already functioning within the dramatic irony of betrayal. His adulterous liaisons had opened up a gulf between what he knew and what others knew about him. Into this gulf came Bull… and his cunt. And worse luck for Bull, quite filled it.

  Alan couldn’t understand the why, but the more he tried to think about what he should do to help Bull, the more images of Bull that were strictly non-scientific started to flood him.

  Bull was so vulnerable, so trusting. There was something rather pathetically sweet about his lumpy features and expression of huge and baffled sincerity. And he wasn’t unattractive…Lots of women like men who are well built; especially with a rugby player’s flabby solidity.

  And the vagina. What an orifice! So seldom is it aesthetically appreciated. Men shy away from its very fleshly reality. They’ll lick it and prod it, but they’ll seldom take a really long, loving look. They prefer to regard it with children’s eyes as the secret trap door leading to a room full of sweeties.

  Perhaps it’s because babies come out of it, Alan had mused, toying with his clay blobs while waiting for another tortured arthritic to crawl in from the reception area. Alan, for all his vaunted intellect, had a rather nauseous and jejune style of internal monologue. Is it another twist in the male psyche of the virgin/whore complex? We cannot bear to acknowledge the cunt’s visual reality because to do so would be to acknowledge pissing, periods and the bloody, pushing heads of babies?

  Of course Alan wasn’t so sheltered as not to know that there are heaps of porno mags absolutely groaning with crotch shots. Full of cunts delineated with forensic precision; plastered on to the page, their silk thread slash and surrounding furze flattened like a river valley photo-graphed from the air…But he was also perceptive enough to realise that these aren’t intended to beautify the women who pose for them…they are intended to humiliate them, to expose them.

  Alan was subjected to these reveries mercilessly. And even when they seemed to be taking an honestly reflective turn, as above—a direction that might lead him out of the psychological labyrinth into which he had descended at ten minutes to ten—he would be brought up sharply by another surge of lust. A surge that pushed Bull’s anatomy before Alan’s eyes bathed in an entirely different light: roseate, pulsing, undulant, sweetly erotic…

  …Alan saw Bull posing naked in the striped shadow of a venetian blind—rather like Richard Gere in American Gigolo. He was swivelled prettily on one thick leg, like a discus thrower, pushing the back of his knee towards the silent voyeur. His pubis nouveau was sheathed tightly in a little pouch, a sort of mono-knicker. Wisps of hair poked out of the edges. Alan could just make out…those lips, delineated by the soft sheen of the silk.

  It was in order to shake these images out of his mind— the awful cross-fertilisation between his fantasy life and Bull’s genital abnormality—that Alan had repaired to the library of the local teaching hospital at lunchtime.

  The receptionists, seeing Alan leaving the Grove looking harassed and preoccupied, tut-tutted to each other. ‘Shee…’ said the black and conical Gloria who had just come on shift ‘…the man done wo-ork ’imself down t’ the bone y’know. Shee! ’N he’s saint, ain’t that the truth.’

  The Saint’s mind was full of chimeras as he walked towards the centre of town. Images of the marriage of organ and organ grinder into the most surreal and frenzied of combinations. But down in the sub-basement the closed stack of the library brought him some relief. Here the mind’s eye changed to eyes on page, as Alan flicked over leaf after leaf of the Journal of Abnormal Physiology.

  The faded half-tones, and worse, chromatically distorted colour plates, showed the most fantastic profusion of physical confusion: a man posed shyly—naked white belly billowing—his hand on the back of a kitchen chair, his chest a veritable palimpsest of nipples, some half-cancelling others, some saucer-large; another man screwed up the side of his head towards the camera, the Dürer whorls of his inner-ear containing a scrap of a penis; a woman, pear-shaped and otherwise chillingly ordinary, lay back to give the ultimate crotch shot: double-decker vaginas.

  There was more. Much, much more. Alan flipped over page after page. He pulled down Nicholson’s classic Distortions of the Sex, a book that had been rented out by those who could get their hands on it when Alan was at medical school. He laid it alongside the Journal and compared weird with weirder. In Nicholson, Siamese twins lay cunt-to-mouth, trapped by a webbing of flesh into a life-long act of cunnilingus; a perfectly ordinary man’s penis had another perfectly ordinary man’s penis, growing out of it at right angles; a young woman, not unattractive in a pinched and mean English provincial way, had a clitoris the size of a parsnip.

  But however many pages he turned, however much of this fleshly phantasmagoria Alan took on board, he could not find anything that even approximated to Bull’s condition. Sure, there were plenty of hermaphrodites, but their vaginas were invariably distorted simulacra, tucked in alongside their penises. There was no one like Bull, with a vagina perfectly and beautifully formed, albeit in an entirely unexpected place. And furthermore, as Alan read Nicholson’s text, although he came across some utterly bizarre stories of genital abnormality, none of them were remotely similar to Bull’s genital nativity.

  Plenty of little girls had, according to Nicholson, reached puberty only to have a wash of testosterone push their clitorises into penises and pull out balls
from their crotches. But the same could not be said of little boys. If they weren’t given a vagina from the off they never subsequently acquired one. And indeed this conforms to what we know intuitively. For the male physiology is a static and lifeless thing, a metabolic Empty Quarter, unaffected by the tremendous lunar pulls and washes of hormonal gunk that stream through its sister form.

  Alan closed up the books with grim finality. He called for the porter to lock the stack, and ascended via the stinking lift to ground-floor London.

  So, instead of the trip to the library acting as a catharsis, it ultimately only served to exacerbate Alan’s condition. Images of Bull began to flood into him like some sort of meditational illness. Alan found he could hardly concentrate on what his patients were saying during afternoon surgery. (Poor Dr Margoulies, they thought to themselves, the man works far too hard, he’s so conscientious).

  At the end of the day Alan took his house-call bag and went back home. Naomi was feeding the baby in the kitchen, just as she had been when Alan left that morning.

  Alan cupped Naomi’s cheek with one of his fine tapering hands and the baby’s cheek with the other. He kissed them both and told them he loved them. Suddenly, the contrast between the grotesque images that had been projected into his mind for most of the day and the utter wholesomeness of this domestic scene struck him like a rabbit punch in the gut. It was all he could manage not to hang on the chestnut pelt of his wife’s lovely hair and sob the whole story out into her neat ear. But manage he did. Alan knew that the first aid he had done on Bull that morning would only serve as a temporary measure. Alan felt devoid of ideas of how to help Bull, but he knew that he had to see him and do something.

  ‘I’ve booked a sitter,’ said Naomi. ‘She’s coming around eight.’

  ‘Fine, fine,’ said Alan. Not at all in a distracted manner, but with genuine emphasis. He had that ability: turning on immediacy, seeming intimacy, for Naomi; so that she felt that he was with her and her alone. And then he remembered the cancellation that had furnished him with Bull that morning. It was the perfect opportunity and it prompted him to say: ‘I have to pop up to Archway and see a patient.’ Naomi was surprised and a little put out.