Cock and Bull (11 page)

Swish, went the blade of the knife in the enclosed air of the compartment, swish and then swish again. The don was beginning to conduct his finale.

‘There’s no accounting for other people’s minds, now, is there, Jew boy? Oops, I’m rather out in the open now, aren’t I? I’ve rather told you what I know about you,
haven’t I? Still not to worry. You must understand that this is nothing personal, this little prejudice of mine, it’s the race I object to, not the individual. However, you are right to suspect that there is some connection between my carefully considered opinion of the Hebrew people and this marvellous recital which your waxy ears, full of the cheesy gunk of the
shtetl,
have been so fortunate to hear. You should know how Dave 2 felt, you should know how Dan felt. You should know because that’s the sort of thing you like to do to people, isn’t it? Well, isn’t it? Taking Christian children by night, children as young as six or seven, spiriting them away to your synagogues and there they are stripped naked, isn’t that so? Drugged…won’t you admit it? And all sort of things are shoved up them, aren’t they? Cocks of course, shiny, domey, kikey cocks and other more sinister things; ceremonial candles, fists and menoras. Deny it if you will…will you?’

‘No.’

‘You won’t deny it?

‘Why should I?’

He was on me in an instant. And of course that plump exterior, soft and apparently futile, was just that: an exterior. He was wiry and strained with strength, his hand gripped my throat, he plunged a knee into my crotch, the knife point came hard into my throat, hard enough to prick and draw a little blood. My ability to resist it—the loathsome spider of spindly intent— skittered away. And it left my mind scrabbling for purchase on the smooth awfulness of the moment. And what could it come up
with? Nothing but the peasant advice of the body.

When someone holds a knife to your throat you have to hold very still, that’s the most important thing: hold still. They might gash you from nerves or because they misinterpret the slightest of movements, so bear that in mind and hold still!

Close to mine the don’s face was a mutating thing. It is part, I realise, of the failure of my mind, this collapse of the second order. And as if to bracket it, give it phenomenal backing so to speak, my eyesight is failing as well. My vision is no longer stereoscopic. Contour and shape change as I flick from oval screen to oval screen. The thin, etched wrinkles that I had noted earlier were revealed as a restraining net, holding amorphous features together, features that threatened to change into something else altogether.

So we can say with some certainty that Dave 2, milked, humiliated, his principles shattered, was led around the flat by his penis, like a dog on a lead. Carol got him to drink, the manipulative bitch, destroyed his five years of sobriety in an instant. She alternately mocked him and wanked him. And then, as he sat in his cups, surrounded by empty cans, his limp dick dangling, she bashed him hard on the back of the head with a meat tenderiser.

He shifted his weight so that he could lean partially against the window. The knife stayed at my throat, but
his other hand strayed away from my gullet and towards his crotch.

What could be neater, eh? The thin young man, curled in the boot of the yellow hire car. They found him down by the abandoned railway track, you know…looking peaceful save for the jagged hole in his head. To begin with they grilled the deadbeat travellers, they delighted in it. But it didn’t take long to identify Dan as the young man who had hired the car that afternoon; and after that things began to fall into place very quickly… They found Dave 2 in the flat, still unconscious…they found the semen in Dan’s dead arsehole…they matched it…bingo! Ur-Carol came forward and told them that she had seen Dan, that afternoon, walking towards the travellers’ camp.

Poor Dave 2. Clearly he was a victim of circumstance, but then perhaps…tee-hee, he should have practised a little more circumcision. We should all take care in that department, shouldn’t we?

His hand groped to undo fasteners, to pull apart the flannel and cotton lips.

I believe that Dave 2 has done very well inside. He’s even organised an AA group with the other Rule 43 prisoners. I think that shows tremendous good faith, don’t you? Naturally he was horrified by what he had done, but in a way it wasn’t really him was it? I mean he was in an alcoholic blackout, he can hardly be held responsible for his actions…

‘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.’

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.

The baby, on the other hand, regarded Naomi with frank and blissful wonderment. She was of an age (about fourteen months), when each new morning represents nothing so much as a triumph on the part of the Continuity Department. The baby was amazed to see roughly similar objects, of similar colours, occupying the same positions as yesterday. And more than that the baby was delighted (albeit perplexed) that the actors playing her parents seemed to have remembered, once again, the parts assigned to them.

‘Come on, ba-aby,’ said Naomi, approaching the high chair with Swiss cereal in one hand and two spoons in the other. She gave one teaspoon to the baby and plied the other herself. They made free with the Farex. Naomi had to stand in an awkward position to feed the baby, because her husband, the doctor, was occupying the whole of one end of the big, scrubbed, plain wood table that dominated the Margoulieses’ kitchen. Naomi knew better than to disturb him. Alan often had filthy tempers in the morning. If provoked he might easily spiral into quite staggering flights of abusive fancy.

Naomi couldn’t decide what to look at. For some reason she felt nauseous this morning; and the sight of the baby squidging and patty-caking the beige pulp was more than she could bear. But then, the aerial view of
her husband was just as much of a turn-off. Alan Margoulies may have been universally acknowledged by all who knew or met him to be a charismatic and sexually attractive man. But from the angle afforded her Naomi could see brown
and
white scurf in the parting of his lank black hair. She also noticed with a shock of recognition—it was a fact that she had registered before but only with her hands—that the back of Alan’s head really did have little or no projection to it. There was an almost perpendicular line running from the apex of his scalp to where the hair flopped across his collar.

Naomi shivered. The translation of one sense into another left her feeling still more nauseous. The Doctor rattled his newspaper. ‘Mmm…mmmm,’ he grunted, a private assent to something he was reading, in that awful, affected, self-consciously absent-minded way that Naomi had come very quickly to despise. Naomi meditated on the peculiar quality of her husband’s gaucherie. It was so poignant and total: as if he had just returned from a naff finishing school in Switzerland. Better to sit down opposite him at the far end of the table, and move the baby’s high chair. Anything but sustain the aerial view. This Naomi did.

At eye level Alan Margoulies was much easier on the eye—pretty even. He had a long slim nose; flat dark brows; slightly protuberant but very, very brown eyes; and the mouth of a woman. His skin had the tinge of marble, and everything about him tapered: fingers, ear lobes, chin. He was slim and vigorous, and he wore his
hair unfashionably long, hooked back behind his ears. He was never, ever still, not even now. Naomi could hear his crêpe sole slapping against the red tiles of the kitchen floor, and fingers of one of his hands were performing a drum solo on the underside of the table.

Alan sensed her looking at him. He glanced up into her eyes and smiled at her quite beautifully. He said, ‘Why don’t we get a sitter tonight? We could go out to dinner and catch a film. Whaddya say?’

Oh, he does still love me! Waves of pleasure beat up in Naomi’s chest. It takes so little, she thought, and quite rightly despised herself for it.

Alan pulled the heavy front door shut firmly enough for the little panes of coloured glass set into it to rattle. He flexed his shoulders and set off on the one-hundred-and-fifty-yard walk to the Grove Health Centre.

Alan Margoulies was what is known as a ‘conscientious man’. This is at least a third of the way up the career path to being a saint. Conscientious men (and women for that matter) often hear a sort of susurration in their ears when they achieve this prebendary status. If they concentrate hard on this susurration they can just about hear the words ‘Ooh, he’s a saint’, repeated over and over again.

Alan Margoulies was a general practitioner who actually cared about his patients. His professional rise had
been sufficiently speedy to hold at bay the cynicism and alienation that dance attendance on the healing art. Only thirty-two and already in line to become the practice head when old Dr Fortis retired; no wonder he had so much love for his patients, they were working so hard on his behalf. Lobbying all and sundry with their chance declarations: ‘Ooh, that
nice
Dr Margoulies,’ they said, in that very emphatic way that invariably makes one think that this Dr Margoulies must be a veritable ‘Doctor of Niceness’.

And let us not forget that great moral and emotional template: home life. We’ve seen Alan Margoulies at home already. Not very nice perhaps. In fact not nice at all—egotistic, domineering, aggressive and duplicitous. But conscientious—blindingly, achingly conscientious, as Naomi could no doubt testify. After all, who else but Alan would have read her passages from Leach and Jolly whilst she was actually eggy-puking, lost in the great fastness of her first morning-sick session?

Alan walked briskly. His tapering body, clad in what he imagined was tan-fashionable suit bagginess, flexed and rippled in the sharp light that fell from between the clouds scudding over Archway Hill. If Alan looked upward from the petrified trench of the street he could see the steel bridge that crossed the sharp cutting of Archway Road. Alan knew that a lot of unhappy people committed suicide by jumping off that bridge. The impact on the road below, according to a doctor Alan knew who worked in Casualty at the Whittington, sent
their femurs shooting up into their stomachs like crossbow bolts. If, that was, they were lucky enough to avoid being hit by a speeding vehicle on the way down. While contemplating these people’s action-packed demise his fine face became overcast with sadness and back-lit by sympathy. In two words: genuine caring. That is, until a little voice whispered in his ear: ‘He’s a saint.’

Alan stopped, and scratched back a long strand of hair that had become unhooked from his ear. I mustn’t keep thinking like that. He rapped the thought out as type-punched words in his mind’s eye. In some ways I do try to be really caring and selfless, but in others I am utterly selfish, utterly egotistic and very much a typical man. He continued: I have foibles and real failings. All too often I over-compensate in terms of the freedoms I allow myself, on account of my overwhelmingly committed, caring and conscientious programme.

What Margoulies was referring to in the above was his proclivity for extra-marital fucking. Most recently two couplings had been effected in the shared flats of student nurses who had done temporary placements at the Grove. But before that Alan had had a more protracted dalliance (in fact throughout Naomi’s pregnancy) with a moody sculptress from Maida Vale. Sybil created pseudo-Easter Island heads out of building materials— breezeblocks and the like—and fellated Alan vigorously, which was something that Naomi could bring herself to do only occasionally.

Of course Alan was thinking magically, attempting
proleptically to influence the question of his canonisation. By admitting to his faults he wished to avoid the accusation of hypocrisy or egotism. Even to himself he couldn’t make a flat statement about the adultery, because he found it too exciting. Sybil and the student nurses lay in the past, and recently sex with Naomi had started to get smelly. Smelly in Alan’s mind if not actually in Naomi’s body.

Levering his thin form off her torso, which was pancaked by his prodding on to the posturepedic mattress, Alan didn’t so much smell her, as smell a nuance of her, an ugly nuance.

One of Alan’s patients was the licensee of the local, a concrete pillbox called the Greyhound, which was stuck on a traffic island. The pub was accessible only through subterranean corridors that dripped with urine. His broad knuckles were tattooed: ‘hate’ on one hand, ‘indifference’ on the other. When the cynical publican’s wife was pregnant, which she often was, he referred to her as creatin’. ‘She’s creatin’ again,’ he would report to Alan in flat tones, taking his heavy ease on the three-legged blond wood chair that Alan provided for his patients.

It was this expression that now linked itself to the eggy-smelling nuance in Alan’s memory and put a stop to his moral inventory. Oh Christ, he thought, surely not, surely she isn’t?

And then he substituted scented muffs like downy lavender cushions for the smell. Vaginas that hummed internally with a wet electric caress; the underside of
breasts as smooth as warm pebbles, nipples so erect that each touch brought forth an ‘aaah!’; and great flouncing, billowing, parachuting swathes of underwear.

For Alan had become thus: addicted to the pornographic whimsy of his own silly imagination. A dedicated truffler, up through lips of velvet, into lips of satin, through them to lips of silk and then finally on to warm lips, live lips, wet lips. After all he couldn’t help it, now could he? He was old enough and married enough to know that people’s bodies expand and contract; that they take on and let off ballast; that they are dry-docked and de-barnacled; that they even become infested—especially after an Arctic winter—trapped in the frigid pack ice.

It was this maturity, rather than his professional status which made his fantasies seem so absurd to him. And yet here he was—now within twenty yards of work—lost in the ravenous contemplation of a warm young snatch. A snatch that had yet to be punched from within by a baby’s head. A scented snatch, softly encased in pure linen filigreed with girly embroidery. The whole framed by flat tummy, handlebar hips, suspender belt and dark stocking tops.

‘Ooh-ooh!’ Margoulies let out an involuntary moan and bashed through the swing doors into the main reception of the Grove Health Centre.

Bull was already there, waiting for him.