Cock and Bull (17 page)

In a field somewhere near Wincanton Alan Margoulies was kneeling in a tent. It was one of those very old hundred-pound army tents. Big brown awnings of saturated canvas swayed over the heads of the thirty-or-so general practitioners who were huddled inside it.

There were three other tents in the field, all exactly the same. Each one had its complement of medics, and from the centre-pole of each there flew the Health Authority’s pennant.

On arriving at the field Alan had been issued with a clipboard, a map, a badge, an orienteering compass and a regulation Health Authority orange cagoule, with PARAMEDIC in big, black lettering across the back.

Alan felt damp and bored. He had thought that the Learning Jamboree was going to be a free-form exercise in which the GPs themselves would devise strategies for getting to grips with the new legislation in an open-air context. He had neglected to read the information pack, and it transpired that there were ‘Facilitators’, tedious bureaucrats who all looked horribly at home in this scout-camp ambience. This particular one was calling his complement of doctors to order.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, can I have your attention please.’ He rapped on the whiteboard behind him with the edge of his compass. The listless chatter in the tent subsided, reading material and cups were downed, thirty non-standard hair-dos swivelled to the front. ‘We’re here for a long weekend of learning. I know that you’re all busy people, people with demanding jobs. So I’m not going to ask you to concentrate too hard on the whys and wherefores of what we’re going to be doing. I would ask you to trust me and my fellow facilitators to look after that side of things. What I can guarantee is that if you throw yourselves into the learning exercises that we
have devised, I can assure you that you will get results when it comes to grappling with the complexities of the new system.’ The Facilitator uncapped a magic marker at this point, with an audible ‘plop’, and turned to face the whiteboard. Alan noted that, with weary predictability, the back of his orange cagoule bore the legend FACILITATOR.

The Facilitator began, with great crudeness of technique, to draw a plan on the whiteboard, referring constantly to the relevant section of the OS map.

It was somehow appropriate, Alan felt, that the Facilitator should prove so miserably inept with the whiteboard. No matter how hard he tried he simply couldn’t get the legends for the map he was drawing, to fit on the board. If he wanted to write ‘Spring Copse’, the ‘copse’ ended up vertical, the spidery letters climbing down the edge of the board on spastic feet. The Facilitator started to grunt with the effort, and in time his grunts began to synchronise with the squeaks of his Magic Marker. The doctors began to grow restive. Alan had already seen quite a few he knew, including Hurst and Mukherjee from his own practice. But he was more amused to see Krishna Naipaul, who had been at medical school with him. Krishna was what Alan called a ‘naughty doctor’. He was prone to writing slightly dodgy prescriptions for his friends, and making love (at least when he was an intern) on the slippery surfaces of operating tables that had only recently been hosed down.

Alan ran into Krishna Naipaul every year or so at some
GPs’ beano or other. He rather guiltily enjoyed Krishna’s company—for Naipaul was nothing if not
not
conscientious. He
was
nothing. Alan envied his ironic detachment and had often wished he could muster such easy cynicism. He couldn’t for a moment imagine that Naipaul had ever been afflicted by the Tolstoyan, moral self-obsession that had so scarred Alan’s early life. His life B.B. (before Bull).

But now? Well, Naipaul would be surprised if he knew the exciting new departure that Alan had so recently made. In the past Alan had slightly haughtily declined Naipaul’s invitations for them to ‘have fun together’. But now, kneeling, wet corduroy grating on his knees and wafting in his fine, tapering nostrils, Alan thought, why not, confident that even in a dump like Wincanton Krishna would have some angle.

Bull wandered London, jobless and equipped with his new insight into the cityscape. He wandered all day, dazed, depressed and disconnected, unaware that his mental state was so underpinned by strange chemistry that he had not a sorbet’s hope in hell of coming to terms with what had happened.

In Bull’s liver the micro-refinery of pulsing tubes shuddered with the unexpected order to manufacture unsuitable hormones in staggering quantities. The nodes and strings of genetic information formed weird shapes,
like cancerous pretzels, which oscillated out into the racing red water of Bull’s bloodstream.

From time to time Bull would enter a hotel or a fast food joint and politely request to use the toilet. As the fire door slid shut behind him on its pneumatic, intercourse arm, Bull would bend double, progesterone and oestrogen nauseas competing with one another to make him vomit. As soon as he had wiped another cravat of bile from his chin, Bull would repair to a cubicle. Here, moving his big body around in its confines, he adopted a position that looked as if it were part of some particularly unsuccessful martial art, and scrutinised his vagina.

Every time he did this it had changed. It had grown. To be more precise: it had grown up. It had acquired a tousled coif of hair. In lop-sided set and ginger fuzz, not dissimilar to Bull’s head hair. In the aftermath of his sex session with Alan, Bull had not been dismayed by blood, spunk and mucal discharge…that was the trouble, not ‘eurgh’ but acceptance.

And in his leg, so cruelly and scientifically delineated by flat striplight against the Formica cubicle siding, Bull sensed internal changes as well: shiftings, muscular growth, sinister accommodations.

Wending o’er the paved lea, in the forenoon, rain still flicking at his pink cheeks, Bull felt (oddly enough) depressed for no good reason. He couldn’t understand why he was so unhappy. Alan was known by one and all to be the most kind and conscientious of men—what more could Bull want in a lover? It was a little too early
in their affair for Bull to put pressure on Alan to leave his wife but that would come in its own time, albeit with acrimony and tears… And so what about the job? It was true that he hated it and hated cabaret. It would have been mendacious of him to protest too much. He had made a reasonable living as a freelance in the past, he could do so again. So why these pricking tears? This strange humming tension? His ankles seemed full of water; if he pressed the flesh it went white with a pink surround. And each time he looked at them the lips of Bull’s vagina were parted like an analogy.

Places of ingress still fixated Bull. Seeing a broken window along his aimless route, Bull felt that that was what had happened to him. His vitrified hymen had been broken into shards by Alan’s thick dick. A bizarre inversion of
Kristallnacht
indeed.

Behind the Swiss Centre Bull found himself staring up at the St John’s Hospital for Skin Diseases. The building was empty and derelict, its windows boarded. But it was the moulded mortar curlicues surmounting the tiered façade of the old Hospital which grabbed at Bull. What a sick irony, he thought, to beckon in the skin-diseased with these obvious rollmops of epidermal corruption. They were like his vagina; the simile appalled him. He leant, struggling to retain his equilibrium, against the window of Poons Restaurant, but recoiled instantly. Several brace of the restaurant’s speciality, wind-dried duck, dangled in the window. Their orange flesh and flattened, angled limbs reminded him of Juniper. Their
headlessness and prone position made him think of himself. He could not resist going in and asking to use the toilet.

The Vent-Axia moaned, and outside in the crepuscular, ancient light Cantonese voices yelped, zinc pannikins clattered, huge duck tenderisers smacked down —thwock! Bull considered the chipped aspect of the toilet; the ‘Not Drinking Water’ sticker over the sagging sink; the verdigris in the grout runnels of the tiling; the plaited but now frayed nylon twine that comprised the commode chain; and finally the rust that erupted in red ramparts all over the toilet’s metalwork: the pipes, the cistern, and even the hinges of the ill-fitting door.

Bull’s leg was becoming alien to him. He stripped it and held it away from himself, positioning it this way and that. Bull may have been disturbed, riven, confused, but he still had the strength of character (damn it all! This was a man who had gone to gold on the Duke of Edinburgh scheme; a man who had backpacked in the Catskills; a man who had finished first in an assault-course event organised as part of a press conference by a major DIY retailer) coolly and clinically to observe the progress of his own mutation.

There was a fundamental decency about Bull that lingered in the imperfection of his features, a fundamental decency that would have made him a good person to be kidnapped with in Beirut. One could imagine Bull’s parents being very correct on their lawn, when interviewed. But latterly one could also imagine
them becoming rather strident and bolshy, denouncing Government policy and launching their own campaign to free their son from the breakfast room of their detached house.

Their son meanwhile would be keeping his fellow-hostages’ spirits up by telling them stories of the kind of high-jinks the Wanderers got up to on their tours. They would be the sort of stories that would revolt these men (American academics, Italian photojournalists, diplomatic envoys and the like) in any other context. But here, South of the Green Line, with thin plaster trickle and water drip underlining the utter horror of their predicament, these men would laugh, laugh, laugh. After release they would blink into the lights. ‘It was Bull,’ they would cry to a man, ‘Bull kept us alive, with his solidity, his strength of character and most of all with his sense of humour.’

Thus it was that Bull rallied. Looked his new genitals in the eye, considered their deepening, their reddening, and saw his womanhood beckon.

But standing an hour later in Piccadilly poor Bull was seized and shaken by another epiphany. The window of Lillywhites directly abutted that of Boots. Behind one plate-glass sheet was a sales display for tights and other feminine impedimenta. Behind the other there was a display of rugby equipment. The Boots’ display featured a beautiful plastic leg, all caramel and sheer in slick sheeny stuff that would be bliss to feel. Around it, scattered as if discarded in passionate haste, were other
stockings and tights, their seductive hues forming a sensual collage on the ruched velvet that lined the window.

Whereas the display next door was poised and virile. It too featured a disembodied plastic leg, but whereas the female leg’s truncation drew the eye inexorably to the point where its precisely chopped groin should be joined to a soft and scented pudenda, the male leg was all solid and impulsive, kicking out on its invisible spindrift of acrylic, a rugby ball frozen, glued, to the very tip of its shiny boot. It was as if this leg had been amputated in the very act of punting the ball over the row of office buildings and shop units opposite and into Clubland. Positioned around this leg were trusses, jockstraps, socks, workmanlike garters, headbands, shirts, shorts and more socks, all of them lined up neatly on the Astroturf.

But which one is mine, thought Bull, ranging from one display to the other, his gaze running up the female leg and then down the male. Who am I? the former cabaret editor moaned, and American tourists poised behind him in brand new Burberry wondering whether he was exclaiming at some exceptional bargain.

At length he tore himself away and made some purchases: press-on panty-liners, Feminax and vitamins in Boots; a truss and two headbands in Lillywhites.

But despite this decisive and seemingly mature acknowledgment of his dual nature, in the bleak mid-afternoon Bull found himself crying once more, this time outside King’s Cross Station.

He leant up against the window of Wendy Burgers and watched the human mess circulate the station parade. Dossers and junkies formed companionable knots that broke up the streams of commuters and working folk. The spring rain still spat out of a dirty sky. Bull heaved and spluttered. He was alone in the world, he realised. Cut off, unable to confess his true nature. Oh, why had he allowed Alan to seduce him? If it hadn’t happened he could’ve gone to the Proper Authorities. Bull felt certain that he could not be entirely alone in his predicament. Somewhere in this great pluralist society there had to be a self-help group for people like him, some sort of Vaginas Anonymous.

Bull was oblivious to the tarts, but they weren’t of him. Standing in their stretchy pink microskirts and PVC stilettoes, they felt the cold and assessed all male passersby for commercial value. Bull looked like a possible John. After all, his tears could be a premature access of remorse, guilt before the event.

From a long way off Ramona had been watching Bull. He/She sensed that Bull was his/her kind of client. He/ she went on talking to Gail and Leroy, but his/her heart wasn’t in the conversation.

‘Sherri’s got some stones. Yairs I know she has, ’anna cunt owes me ’n stuff.’ Gail said this and took a suck on her Special Brew, fronds of vari-coloured hair floating in the breeze around her scuffed brow.

‘You’ll never get ’em out of her, girl. Pick up a punter. When you’ve earned I’ll sort you. Don’t I always see you
right, girl?’ Leroy puffed himself up, as conscious of his status as a pimp as another man might be of his as an alderman. Ramona wearied of it. He/She broke from them and sauntered across the road towards Bull.

‘Are you lookin’, dear?’ said Ramona in his/her best bed-and-breakfast voice.

‘I’m sorry?’ Bull looked up, his broad brow surprised.

‘Lookin’ fer coompany like?’ Normally Ramona would have abandoned ship on the basis of Bull’s bewildered tone. The last thing he/she needed was a fuss of any kind. But he/she persisted. There was something so pathetically vulnerable about this big man in blazer and grey flannels. And as for Bull, his grief and isolation had temporarily robbed him of what little street wisdom he possessed.

‘Company? I’m sorry I’m not sure I understand you.’

‘I’ve a little room, darling, not far off, jus’ a few steps from here. We could get acquainted.’ Giving the familiar sales pitch came more easily than Ramona had expected. He/she anticipated instant rejection from so many potential punters. They only had to look into his/her angular face with its too-strong features, and blue shadow, already by this time of the day, gathering substance underneath the slick of his/her foundation, to recoil.

But for some reason Bull didn’t recoil. He saw Ramona for what he/she was and sensed immediately the possibility of an ally.

‘You say it’s not far?’

‘Jus’ round t’corner, love. Come on, let’s walk, it’s
bitter standin’ here.’ Ramona drew the folds of her once-fashionable black velour coat-robe around her high shoulders and ostentatiously shivered.

‘You know…I’m not really interested in…you know…it’s just some…’

‘…Some coompany you’re after. I understand, love, no need t’be embarrassed like.’

Leaving the parade in front of the station Bull and Ramona looked as companionable as an old married couple. They disappeared towards the Caledonian Road.