Cock and Bull (4 page)

And, at this juncture, the poofy old don paused again. He got out from his inside pocket one of those Mahawat cigarillos that were popular in the mid-seventies. He put it in his pink little mouth and lit it with a rolled-gold Dunhill lighter.

The props and the deft blocking that made up the whole performance were so in keeping with his soft countenance and the faggy invective that laced his tale that I became slightly uneasy …This sardonic, effete don with his amusing if mordant story …Damn it all, he had to be too good to be true.

The lights had gone out in the carriage, and we had ground to a halt again, while an Inter-City 125 whooshed past on the main line. The tip of the cigarillo glowed and dimmed in the close darkness. He cleared his throat with a click of firm sputum on palate, and continued.

Dave 2 was of that opinion himself. ‘I’m fortunate to be what I call—and I hope you’ll pardon my French, ladies —a pisshead. Yeah, I’m fortunate to be a pisshead. You want’er know why? Because it’s brought me to a spiritual life: a life of the spirit. Oh, and why pisshead? Because sometimes I would get so drunk that I would piss all over myself. I was completely incontinent, totally, completely. So that’s what I was—literally a pisshead.’

But being a pisshead had really been the least of it.
Indeed, given Dave 2’s accounts of some of his more extreme intoxicated behaviour one might almost have said that had he
confined
himself to pissing on his own head, he would have been almost socially acceptable.

For, compared to Dave 2’s lapses in memory and consequent losses of identity, Dan’s escapades were mere awaydays. With Dave 2 we can see the compass of the whole Grand Tour.

Dave 2 had once had an alcoholic blackout that was so long that during it he had joined the army, gone through basic training and been dishonourably discharged, for, guess what, drunkenness.

And if you don’t believe that this is possible, then spend an evening with Dave 2 and his cronies, because they know more about alcoholism in all its manifestations than an institute full of experts, and they are very keen to impart. So keen that a session with them is more tedious and introverted than being stuck on a desert island with a tour-load of constipated, bourgeois, middle-aged French women.

But of all this Dan and Carol were unaware. Instead, from the moment Dave 2 arrived at the maisonette in Melrose Mansions, both of them were captivated by his vitality, his immediacy; the way he seemed to smash into shards the very quiddity of a continuum in their lives that they had always assumed to be of the consistency of the toughest Tupperware.

‘Bing-bong’ went the door chimes at seven o’clock. Dave 2 stood in the vestibule, arms akimbo, jaw
lanterned, a thatch of thick sandy hair tilted sideways on his head, so that one edge touched the collar of his army surplus fatigue jacket. This garment was Dave 2’s trademark. He called it ‘my uniform’. It was re-equipped for the campaign each and every day. One hip-dangling pocket was stuffed to overflowing with mock-gold flip-top boxes of Benson and Hedges Special Filter, and the other was usually stretched to its seams with some work or works of an improving or a spiritual nature. Books with titles like
Why Am I Afraid to Tell You Who I am?
or
Why Are You Afraid to Tell Me Who You Are?
and even the blunter and more comprehensive
Why Are We Afraid?

Dave 2 then, lowering in the vestibule, under the neat certainty of the sconce, says to Carol, ‘Dave, Dave Hobbes. I’ve come to pick up…Dan?’ He said the name as if not quite sure, and an appealing glance seemed to come up at Carol from his yellow eyes. Seemed to, because it was a trick, an illusion. Dave 2 stood at least a foot taller than Carol, but constant abasements and attempts to achieve perfect humility had given him the ability to alter his height at will.

And Dave 2 saw a thinnish, blondish young woman, her flat hair trained behind lobeless ears. She had flawless skin, but it did have some kind of a waxy patina; and there was also an oddly collapsing aspect to her midriff, as if Carol were a card table in the process of being vertically folded for storage purposes. Dave 2 said later of this encounter and the first impressions he associated
with it, ‘It was obvious that she was ready for help, that she had reached her own personal Waterloo… She was all sort of faded and wrung out, weren’t you?’ And at this point he would turn to Carol, sitting next to him in the circle of chairs, radiant in white chemise, and she would radiantly smile her assent.

But when she opened the front door to Dave 2 this lay some weeks and several group meetings in the future. For the meantime, she just invited him in. Dan skulked off to get ready. He still had the adolescent awkwardness that makes a hash out of introductions. Dave 2, cosy with instant coffee and a fag in the kitchen said, ‘He’s awfully young, but if he’s had enough, Carol m’dear, this could be the turning point for him.’

Dave 2 leaned across the breakfast counter and took Carol’s forearm gently in between the thumb and fore-finger of his huge, freckled right hand. This was a characteristic gesture of Dave 2’s, and as usual, it came accompanied by a special, more spiritually intense, lowering of his burry West Country voice. ‘You look all in, m’dear,’ said Dave 2. ‘I don’t wonder that you haven’t had a hell of a time coping with him.’

Carol tried not to shrug. She didn’t want to do anything that might cause the grip of those fingers to tighten on her. She said, ‘Oh, I don’t know, it hasn’t been too bad.’ But Dave 2 wasn’t taking ‘not too bad’ for an answer. This was a man who
firmly
believed that the word
fine,
as in ‘I’m feeling fine’, was really an acronym, spelling out Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic and
Emotional. Indeed, when Dan had become quite integrated into the St Simon’s group, he was set to work by Dave 2, labouring, with a magic marker in his fine hands, to create a series of signs. In some, the acronym and its interpretation was written in sans serif characters, in others in serif script. It was all rather like what Dan did for a living anyway.

So, Dave 2 pressed on, undeterred: ‘You say it hasn’t been too bad, m’dear, but I can see that in here you’re hurting.’ Dave 2 removed the large hand from Carol’s forearm and placed it in the vague area of his heart. His great chin filled up with dimples and his cheeks creased as his long face took on an expression that was obviously intended to betoken deep sympathy, or even empathy… yes empathy, for Dave 2, unchallenged by Carol, followed on: ‘I can identify with your hurt, Carol. I’ve felt as you have—utterly indifferent to the fate of someone I once thought I loved. Utterly indifferent. Now that’s what this awful disease can do to us, my love…’ That was clever. Even Carol couldn’t help but be jarred, and appalled, by the accuracy of Dave 2’s probing spiritual diagnosis. In that moment of shared feeling Dave 2 hooked his nail under the scab of Carol’s indifference and prised it up, exposing an area of pain. Of course Dave 2 could hardly have been expected to know that her real and abiding anxiety was centred not on Dan, nor even on the fact of her marriage, but entirely on the gristly frond that lay in wait at the very juncture of her thighs.

Instant coffee downed and a thin and wispy Dan buckled into his fashionable leather blouson, there was but token resistance on Carol’s part to the suggestion that she accompany Dave 2 and his charge to St Simon’s, and while they attended the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting she should attend an adjacent and highly congruent meeting for the relatives of alcoholics.

The atmosphere of the Al Anon meeting was a revelation to Carol. Here was the intimacy and sense of shared purpose that she had been exposed to when attempting to raise her consciousness with Beverley at Llanstephan, but united with a social veneer and sense of organisation that reminded her more of her father’s allotment society.

She was shocked by the candour of these very English people in macs and cardigans who described in a matter-of-fact, if confessional, manner, episodes of the most disgusting drunkenness, domestic violence and sexual abuse.

A long, sad lady in a fawn suit recounted in a breathless rush the frenzied assaults that her husband, a bibulous and failed salesman, had made on her several orifices with various hard and vitreous objects, beer bottles and the like.

A middle-aged educationalist, intellectual with thinning hair and tortoiseshell bifocals, did his best to describe, plainly and directly, the obsessive dossier he had felt compelled to compile of the vomitings, douchings, colonic purges and gratuitous sexual acts that his sixteen-
year-old daughter had engaged in, while he stood by madly impotent on two counts.

Not that evening, nor the next, but the one after that, did Carol feel relaxed enough to offer her own version, pallid and softcore by comparison, of Dan’s pukings,
his
muttered obscene eructations and occasional beery gropings. The outrage may have been slight, but Carol’s description of her own pallid indifference, and anemone-like withdrawal from Dan’s distress, was wholly authentic. And when she had finished speaking, or ‘sharing’ as the group called their version of bearing witness to the Truth, she looked up from the linoleum to see the equine visage of Dave 2, who had joined the group from next door, and who was now looking at her with an expression of undiluted sympathy, compounded by admiration and something that might have been, but wasn’t, love.

Over that week both Dan and Carol attended six of their respective meetings. And both of them felt the ideology of Alcoholics Anonymous swimming in to form a structure for their lives. There was something so reassuring about these twin groups of quite ordinary people gathered in circles of S-framed, khaki-bottomed chairs, under the flickering neon of the church hall. The Al Anon group met in the room set aside for the Sunday school, and as Carol’s ears were warmed by tales of casual bashing and buggery, her washed-out blue eyes roamed over the walls, where a collage alphabet had been created by the children, and the
curate had stuck up naive bible story pictures with red and gold sticky tape.

The drinking of instant coffee and the smoking of many, many cigarettes; the business of the group, concerned as it was with the treasury, the coffee rota and the sale of pamphlet literature; these were secure facts and routines that drew Carol in. As for the catharsis afforded by speaking of one’s innermost hurts, fears and desires to a room full of strangers, Carol felt this too; albeit that her provision of the therapeutic goods was closely constrained by an unusual talent for compliance.

But this needn’t surprise us. We know Carol to be like this. We have remarked before on her tendency always, always to take the line of least resistance. Why can’t we let her have her Dralon confession in peace? After all, it might help her with that other, more intimate, more pressing problem.

While Carol was getting integrated, Dan, in a quiet and unspectacular way, was doing the same. From the day of Dave 2’s advent and his first meeting at St Simon’s, Dan had put down the alcohol. He found the admission that he was powerless over alcohol, the first and pre-eminent statement of the AA credo, easy to make. Since his student days at Stourbridge Dan had felt intensely that his conscious will was but an impotent, flopping marionette, inanimate until vivified—until sought out by the lager of Lamot. This WD40 of the soul would flood out of its can and form a thick, white cloud in Dan’s narrow head. The cloud would over a
number of hours resolve itself into a Genie, a giggling djinn that would manipulate the marionette-that-was-Dan, jerk him this way and that.

Dan, like Carol, found it hard to speak at the AA meetings. But unlike Carol, it wasn’t because Dan had anything to hide. On the contrary, with Dan there was a niceness to the fit between his inarticulacy, his inhibition and his simplicity of mind, that is fortunately rare. Otherwise we would all be a great deal more bored than we are already. No, it was just that Dan had very little to say. But if catharsis was unnecessary, at least Dan now had access to the relief that came with learning that alcoholism was a disease. A disease with its own aetiology and pathology. A disease recognised by as august a body as the WHO. A disease prominently listed in the Observer’s Guide…AA told him the disease was both chronic and incurable—that was the downside. The upside was that the symptoms of this disease could be entirely alleviated, given vigorous attendance at AA meetings and rigorous abstinence. Prior to this Good News Dan had feared that his mind, really as delicate and ductile as one of the paper sculptures he himself used to make, might have been on the verge of crumpling itself up into a little wadded ball of insanity.

Now Dan had friends, supportive friends. Dave 2 was so supportive that he would come home with Dan after the meeting to preach to him further. They would find Carol already at the flat—the Al Anon meeting started
and finished a half hour in advance of the AA meeting — and the kettle on the boil. The three of them would then sit down around the breakfast counter to share the articles of Dave 2’s faith. These he would pronounce with the kind of affectedly natural sincerity that is most typical of an Anglican priest at his worst.

The rubric of Dave 2’s sermons was that of a kind of spiritual ’n’ tell. He had a great number of quasi-devotional postcards and stickers that he liked to distribute to his new acolytes. An example of what was depicted on one of these would be: cuddly puppies in a wicker basket, the cutest dangling from the handle. Underneath there was a slogan in curly cursive script. It read, ‘Faith isn’t faith until it’s all you’re hanging on to.’ Another showed kittens in a rumble-tumble bundle. The slogan read, ‘What we need are lots of hugs!’ Dave 2 also had A5-sized tablets of card laminated with plastic that carried the AA commandments (the Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions), or very important AA prayers: ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change…etc…etc…’ You know the type of thing. These he would slap down on the formica, as if they were the flesh that justified his burring, bleating homilies…