Cock and Bull (3 page)
Frond
THE MORNING AFTER the night when Dan tried to memorise STD codes by pressing his cheek hard against the booklet for eight hours, he woke up groaning. ‘Gor…’ he exclaimed to a sunfilled kitchen, ‘I really tied one on last night.’ There was no one to answer. Beverley and Derek had gone and Gary had never returned. Dan found Carol upstairs, watching TV-AM in bed. He cursed, seeing how the hands stood on the little clock in the corner of the screen, but he was interrupted in mid-curse. The lining of his stomach had been saturated like a sponge with alcohol, and then compressed beneath the waistband of his jeans for eight hours. He just made it to the bathroom. Carol blocked out the sound of his retching by humming, and affected not to notice when he came nuzzling back to her and slid his thin head up under the bedcovers. ‘Jeez, I feel awful,’ he said, ‘just awful.’ And then he fell asleep. Carol waited half an hour and then she called his work.
So began the era of the sick calls. With monstrous regularity, once, twice and even three times a week, Dan would fail to make it to work. From what snippets of information Carol could glean, Dan was no longer the
blue-eyed boy at the design agency. They were only snippets because Dan was as unforthcoming about his work as he was his feelings. Carol knew better than to risk a direct question; that would just precipitate a retucking of those hospital corners and a bob-bob out the door by that by now lank and tired forelock.
Along with absenteeism came more drinking. Carol found suspect bottles of sticky liqueur and smoky aquavit in odd places: under the sink, in a hollow pouffe, behind a ventilation grille. But the novelty of unearthing Sambucca from the sock drawer, or Poire Guillaume from the pelmet, soon palled.
About this time, Dan’s mother came on a visit. She was a formidable woman in late middle age. Dan had been the child of her latter, inferior marriage. Before Dan’s father she had been married to a man who had made his fortune out of sherbet fountains. She was possessed of the pear-shaped figure that English women of a certain class and disposition inevitably acquire. And to go with it she had astonishing tubular legs, encased in nylon of a very particular caramel shade. The effect was one of kneelessness, tendonlessness—Dan’s mother’s legs, one felt, if cut into, would not bleed. They were somehow synthetic, plasticised.
She stayed for four nights. Night One: Carol cooked chilli con carne and they drank a bottle of Matéus Rosé. Night Two: Carol made shepherd’s pie with the leftover mince and they drank an odd six-pack of Mackesons that Dan ‘found’ at the back of the fridge. Night Three: Carol
made lamb chops and they drank a bottle of Valpolicella. Actually, it was a two-litre bottle that Dan had brought home especially, and he did most of the drinking. His mother didn’t really seem to notice. On the fourth night Carol didn’t bother to cook. Dan, maddened, shouted at her right in front of his mother, as if it were her presence that gave him the licence to behave in this appalling fashion. He stormed out of the maisonette and came back banging, crashing and ultimately puking at four a.m.
In the morning, before she left, Dan’s mother took Carol to one side. She hadn’t addressed Carol directly more than ten times during her entire stay.
‘You remind me of myself as a young woman,’ said Dan’s mother. Carol looked into the uttermost denseness of her rigid coif. ‘You’re quiet, but you’re not stupid.’ Carol stared fixedly at a bad watercolour of Llanstephan that a be-scarfed admirer had once given her, willing Dan’s mother not to say anything too intimate. Embarrassment wasn’t an emotion that Carol was familiar with, but she did know when she should adopt a mien appropriate to someone receiving a back-handed compliment. Dan’s mother went on. ‘I see my son is becoming an alcoholic. It doesn’t surprise me—it’s in the family. My father died on a mental ward. He had been a celebrated high court judge. He had what they called a “wet brain”.
‘The day he died I went to visit him. He was terribly thin and his eyes glittered. He grabbed my wrist and said,
“D’ye see them?” “What?” said I. “The peacocks,” he said. “They are beautiful with their radiant plumage, but why does matron let them run about the ward, it can’t be hygienic.” He died an hour later. My son is the same, although I cannot imagine that he is sufficiently grandiose to hallucinate peacocks. There’s no reason for it, you see—it’s hereditary. Try and hold out, my dear, if he asks for it I’ll arrange for some help. But if things get too bad, my advice would be to leave him.’
And with that she left herself. Heading back to Burford with all sorts of goodies she had tracked down in the West End. Goodies she hadn’t bothered to show Carol.
It was two nights after her departure that Carol masturbated for the first time. It is true that she had been thinking about masturbation, albeit in a rather woolly way, for some time. But she hadn’t concretely imagined what it would be like, or indeed what she would have to do.
Dan was out with Derry. They had heard about some pub on the Pentonville Road where a man had been killed the preceding weekend: this was their macabre excuse for an unseasonal Oktoberfest. ‘I shan’t expect you,’ said Carol, standing in her nightie and dressing-gown, unaware of cliché or irony. She retired to bed with a Jilly Cooper. In the book, a woman was wanked off with great expertise by a Venezuelan banker. Carol, who was no connoisseur, found the description exciting, and more importantly, technically illuminating. She put
the book aside. Her hand crawled down under the covers to the crackling hem of her nightie, and lifted it. Her fingers flowed up the smooth runnel between her thighs. She cupped her vulva and then kneaded it a little. One finger slipped inside the puckered lips and sought out the damp pit of her vagina.
The access of power thrilled Carol to the tips of her carmined toenails. Of course she had been aware of the act, but the liberation from being climbed on board, or pummelled by Beverley’s exhausting manipulations, was ecstatic. Carol orgasmed within seconds, one finger on the slick dewlap of her clitoris, another inside herself. The
News at Ten
theme tune drummed a counterpoint to her subsiding sighs.
This, then, was the pattern that they established: Dan went out drinking, and Carol, as soon as he was out of the way, treated herself to a really big wank. Over a period of some eight or ten weeks, she staged productions of a number of masturbatory playlets, all of her own devising. Her imagination wasn’t that fertile, but we mustn’t laugh at her legions of buck niggers, priapic and grinning; nor at her Latino playboys, who bore down on her riding foam-flecked polo ponies, and dismounted only to remount…Carol.
How those fingers flew! And how Carol discovered herself; every millimetre of damp erogenous site was mapped out. How peculiar that Dan, with his deft hands, had never bothered to discover
this
spot, had never chanced to trail his fingers
here,
or
there
.
One night Dan, Gary, Barry, Gerry, Derry and Dave 1 all took off for Ilford. Their goal was an enormous nightclub, famous for its ‘caged’ bar. This was mounted on concrete, enabling the young men and women who patronised it to reach fabulous levels of intoxication, and to indulge in commensurate behaviour without being able to trash, vandalise or
bemerde
. At dawn they were hosed down by thick-set men wearing dinner jackets.
In Barry’s car on the way there, Dan was clearly troubled and more than usually silent. The others asked him what the problem was, but he wouldn’t reply. So, in lieu of sympathy they offered him Jack Daniels.
At home meanwhile, behind drawn, patterned blinds, Carol was getting down to business. She undressed in the living room. She had discovered that the juxtaposition between her own nakedness and the room’s bland formality really excited her. And furthermore, by moving around the room she could catch sight of herself in numerous mirrors and glass surfaces that had been vigorously Mr Sheened.
She undid her blouse and ran her hands over her nylon cones, seeking out the gap between breast and cuirass. She undid the buttons of her slacks and let them swish to the floor. She kicked herself free of them.
A Whiter Shade of Pale
oozed from the CD player, Carol’s hand slid under the waistband of her pants…
* * *
‘Do you believe in horror?’ The direct question threw me out completely. I had been utterly absorbed, and, despite myself, a voyeuristic party to Carol’s onanism. Now the don had broken off, without warning or explanation.
The train lurched and clattered over points, I could see the modern lines of Reading station swimming towards us out of the dusk. The don repeated his question:
‘Do you believe in horror?’
I summoned myself:
‘Do you mean the occult? Beasts, demons, ghouls, table turning, that kind of thing?’
‘Oh no, not that at all.’
The train juddered to a halt. People in nylon windcheaters and off-the-peg suits dis- and embarked. But even this profoundly workaday sight somehow failed to rupture the thickening atmosphere in the compartment.
‘Oh no, not outlandish horror. That’s chickenfeed, mere persiflage. What I’m talking about here is
real
horror. The horror that shadows each and every aspect of the ordinary, just as surely as the darkness shadows that vending machine over there.’
He pointed at a vending machine that hung about in the shadows on the platform. A whistle rose and fell, the train jolted and moved off once more. The don shifted on his buttocks and leant forward, adopting a didactic, tutorial posture.
‘You know that poem of Roethke’s, how does it go? “All the nausea of brown envelopes and mucilage, Desolation in hygienic public places…”
‘No, no, that’s not
quite
it. But you know what I mean …’
His faced bulged at me, as synthetic as injection-moulded plastic.
‘That’s the horror that interests me, the horror that we all feel, left alone in a living-room, in the mid-
afternoon, in the centre of a densely populated city… that horror.
‘There is that horror and its interaction with another horror. The bloody horror of gynaecological fact. Modern horror films are all blood and the membranous stria of bio-goo. But really they have simply rendered external what is at the very core of our dearest friends. They have just turned inside out the sock of feminine biology.
‘So, while you wait for what is going to happen next, prepare yourself for these two kinds of horror and unite them in your mind. Then you will be able to calmly assure yourself, that the muffled “bong” of that ultimately distressed spring, as you subside alongside Carol on to one of the pieces of her suite, really
is
a reptilian alien tentacle, lunging through the soft upholstery.’
Carol’s hand travelled down, through her furze, doctored to a socially acceptable flying vee. Her pinkies scampered ahead to truffle in the gashed loam. But here, where Carol had tactilely surveyed every pore, set the theodolite of her hand on every mound, she found something new. Her fingertips just skated over her clitoris, tucked as it was under the hood formed by her inner labia, like a tree growing in a gulley.
But en route to her vagina, in that place where there should have been nothing but slippery anticipation, the
tipping deck before the sea, she found instead a tiny nodule, a little gristly frond of flesh.
Of course, had Carol troubled to wield her hand mirror as she had been instructed, had she placed it where Dan’s mouth had so seldom been, she would have been in a position to establish the truth. She would have clocked immediately that the frond was an outgrowth of the spongiosum material surrounding her urethra—that somehow her vestibular bulb was being grossly flexed from within, pushing forth a miniature volcanic column of tissue, sinew, blood and vessel.
Now the body is an old peasant, it retains a vivid memory for felt (and imagined) injustice. Even more peasant-like is the body’s tendency to retail little proverbs or sayings to its accompanying mind. A good example of this practice, so ubiquitous that it is scarcely ever remarked on, was prompted by Carol’s discovery. Her finger probed. There was definitely something there, something that seemed quite large and embedded. Something that neither felt full of fluid, like a cyst; nor insensate like a wart or a callus. ‘But,’ said Carol’s body to her mind, ‘objects in the genitals, like those in the mouth, do appear to be so much larger than they really are.’ And with this folksy assurance Carol let the gristly frond rest. One finger headed south to her vagina, another north to her clitoris. In due course,
A Whiter Shade of Pale
took on form and substance and became a
Rider on the Storm;
and when the rider had passed by Carol was left behind, naked and gooey, spent on the slip-on cover.
But that was not the last of the frond, oh no, far from it. For although the peasant body dismissed it in the short term as an accident, a filament of meat stuck between the teeth and swollen against the gum, it also retained a memory like an embarrassing polaroid taken at a hen party. And when Carol was relaxed and unsuspecting the following afternoon, her vile body thrust the photograph in front of her mind and threatened blackmail.
She was in Safeway at the time. She had asked a Muslim shelf-stacker where the bacon was kept. The shelf-stacker, whose uncle was a haj, and who believed that Allah struck down those who ate the flesh of the pig with cancer, did his best to give Carol the most obscure and misleading directions. As she turned away from where he knelt, pricing up tins of puréed tomato, the frond swelled up in her mind with such alacrity, that she became petrified, fearing that the awful little promontory might come bursting out of the tight armature of her jeans and elasticised underwear.
As soon as she found herself in a deserted aisle, Carol popped her fly buttons and her hand sought out the damp interior. Jesus! There it was, larger than ever! Was it just the sensitivity of her fingertips, or had the frond actually grown? Was it just her imagination, or could she, with her probing digit, actually feel some kind of structure to the frond; some internal viscosities of its own that suggested that it was not simply a raggle-taggle end of gristle, but something sensate?
The curious head of the Muslim shelf-stacker ap-
peared around the end of the gondola. Carol withdrew her hand from her jeans and broke out in a sweat, just as if she had been discovered wanking next to the bouillon cubes.
Now, say you. You find a gristly frond growing in your vagina masturbating of an evening. What could be simpler than to make an appointment at the local health centre and in due course visit your doctor?
‘What seems to be the problem?’ says the doctor, a kindly middle-aged woman, the Friends of the Earth badge on her lapel winking at you in philanthropic conspiracy. You tell her. She asks you to take off your clothes and hop up on the examining table. Once there, she examines you with a care and dexterity that is in itself instantly reassuring. The examination completed, she provides you with a completely satisfying explanation of the frond: its origins, its form, its likely extent and duration. You leave the surgery with a prescription for various salves and unguents; there is no problem.
That’s what you would will Carol to do, isn’t it? But Carol’s medical experiences hadn’t been like that. Carol’s mother was too inhibited ever to even say words like ‘sanitary’ and ‘towel’. This left Carol to discover her own biology in the fullness of time. The fullness was reached in the showers at school, where Carol had the misfortune to start with a bang rather than a whimper; a thick and bloody discharge splashing over her wet shanks. Some of the other girls screamed, Carol was mortified. Her
mother, fidgeting like a rat, fixed her up with ‘STs’ that evening.
At Llanstephan Beverley had been astonished by Carol’s ignorance of her own biology. ‘The female body is incredible,’ she breathed at Carol, using her enthusiasm for it as a rope with which to pull herself closer. ‘It is an ever-changing, self-regulating mechanism. A kind of chemical factory really. Totally unlike a man’s body, which never changes, which is static and lifeless.’
That night in her blond-wood study bedroom, half wired still on instant coffee, Carol dreamt that she was an enormous chemical factory; like the ICI refinery near her parents’ house in Dorset. Great twisted ganglia of pipes burst forth from her vagina, some of them emitting vast plumes of dry ice spume, others winking with warning lights protected by metal basketry. Her head was marooned far away on the esturine sand; her great buttocks were shoved up against the concrete causeway. Little men, wearing hard yellow hats and driving little yellow trucks, hovered around her anus and vagina. Carol awoke screaming.
Subsequently she was persuaded by Beverley to attend a well woman group, which met in the house of an active and sympathetic faculty member.
Here female undergraduates were encouraged to probe their breasts, their genitals, and even to worm their fingers upwards, towards their gonads. It was all designed to help them to appreciate the wonder of their own biology. Carol learned to palp for cancerous lumps,
and to utilise a hand mirror in the search for cell dysplasia; so as to obviate the need for some man to perform the ritual humiliation of dilation and curettage.
Carol stuck it out for three sessions, but baulked after a demonstration of the application of a poultice of comfrey and live yoghurt to a large, inflamed pudenda. It wasn’t that Carol felt that the poor girl was being hurt, exposed or humiliated (although she was all three). It was rather that some atavistic impulse led Carol to feel, suddenly but with absolute conviction, that such things were better left in the dark, where they belonged.
So, Carol had no sympathetic woman GP, friendly, and determined to adopt a holistic approach. Instead she had Dr Flaherty, the local doctor, with whom both she and Dan had registered as a matter of course within a month of moving to Muswell Hill.
Carol had been to see him once, on account of a dry heave of a cough. She judged that he was just the doctor for Dan as soon as she clapped eyes on him; poking his cropped and buffeted head around the door of the waiting room, ushering her through to his inner sanctum. For Flaherty was stinking. Stinking at three o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon. Stinking as if his whole body had been dipped in a mixture of cooking sherry and Rémy Martin. Flaherty was stinking, arsing, fucking drunk. Drunk, drunk.
He made a half-hearted attempt to persuade Carol that she needed a chest examination, but it was a feeble effort. As she left the surgery, clutching her prescription
for linctus simplex, the ancient receptionist, clad in white like a nun, but with the withered face and beady eyes of a Neapolitan procuress, looked at Carol as if she were personally to blame for the distempered premises with their foetid odour.
Needless to say, Carol had not been back. But she did send Dan. It was after the occasion when he had gone missing for a full thirty-six hours. And Derry, by dint of working backwards from fuddled supposition to more lucid fact, had eventually discovered him, cuddling a bottle of Night Train, underneath Charing Cross railway bridge.
Dan returned from his consultation with Flaherty with two bits of information. Firstly Flaherty told him that what he had experienced was an alcoholic blackout, otherwise known as an instance of Korsakov’s Syndrome. And secondly, Flaherty urged Dan not to worry. ‘My dear boy,’ wheezed the patchy and varicoloured old medic, ‘you don’t have a drink problem. No man has a drink problem until he drinks more than his doctor!’ And then he filled the surgery with great gusts of evil, shit-smelling laughter.
Now medicine is the modern religion and doctors are our shamen, possessed of arcane knowledge and imbued with the necessary wisdom, and commensurate powers, to decoct the auguries and then to cast out the evil spirits that plague us, whether they be spirits that infest the body, or worse, spirits that infest the mind. But once one has abandoned the idea of seeking assistance from a
doctor, one has instantly entered a twilight zone, a crepuscular territory, where the anatomy and its corruption through disease becomes fantastical and phantasmagoric.
Over the next forty-eight hours, Carol agonised over whether or not to see Flaherty; or to call Beverley and ask for advice; or to do nothing at all, in the hope that whatever the gristly frond was, it would just shrivel up, wither, collapse in on itself. In a word: just plain disappear. Leaving her genitals pristine, smooth, a delight to find and find again, just as she had been doing in the few short weeks since she had discovered the joy of wanking.
Carol would be ironing, or tucking in a bedcover, or making free with the Shake ’n’ Vac, when the gristly frond would come teasing its way back into her mind. Her agitated claw, seemingly against its mistress’s will, would once again make its exploratory journey. The frond would still be there. It could be her imagination, inflamed by anxiety, but each time her fingers prised her labia apart, the frond seemed a little larger, a little more gristly.
After forty-eight hours Carol, despite her insipid nature, was really quite upset. She resolved that in the morning she would either call Beverley, or make an appointment with Flaherty; one or the other—if not both. What swayed her and buried the issue for the foreseeable future (what a trite expression! How can a future be ‘foreseeable’, especially when you’re growing some ghastly frond between your soft thighs), was a great
life change that swept over both Carol and Dan. The herald of this life change was Dave 2, and its harbinger was Dan’s mother.
Morning came, and a grey wash of light found Dan, his cheek thrust hard in the carpeted right-angle of the bottom stair. The vomit had got into his hair and down the round collar of his fashionable leather blouson. He cried over his Alpen. Those folded corners were turned into raw gutters, the better to funnel the salty stream into the Swiss cereal. Carol was not unsympathetic but she wasn’t sympathetic either. She pulled the sides of her terrytowelling robe tighter around her slim shoulders, and idly noted that the TV-AM weatherman, an effete creature missing from the screen for these past two months, had now reappeared on BBC Breakfast Time, wearing a suit.
Dan blubbed as he dialled his mother. And then he blubbed to Carol that this would be the last time—the last time he would ask her to phone work on his behalf— and the last time that his behaviour would make it necessary.
‘I’m stopping boozing, Carol,’ he blubbed, and his deft fingers scouted and shaped the edge of the breakfast counter, as if it were some benchmark of sobriety, soon to be attained. ‘I’ve asked Mum for help. I knew that she would know what to do. She’s sending someone to see me this evening, someone called Dave. He’s going to take me to a kind of meeting.’
All day Dan lurked around the house, propping his
pounding head against door jambs and patterned cushion covers. God, how his hangdog look infuriated Carol! Never before, not even in his cups, had Dan disgusted her as he disgusted her now. He was such a turn-off. And now he was giving in to his mother, accepting her estimation of him and seeking her help. This was weakness run rampant.
That afternoon Carol went to the pet-shop at the Quadrant. They had had a fresh delivery of cuttlefish. Carol brought back two pieces, one for the mynah and one for the cockateel. The cuttlefish was white, dry and light in her hand, like a bleached bone. She pushed it through the wire bars. The birds looked at her with their solo-eyed, insectoid stares. Dan came up behind her, she could feel his forelocked head nuzzling between her shoulderblades. She shrugged him off. In the kitchen, while she waited for the kettle to boil, she could hear Dan in the living-room, still blubbing.