Cock and Bull (6 page)
‘That’s your style, isn’t it. Being clever and allusive, but what does this really amount to save for trying to get one over on good, ordinary, straightforward people? Trying to get one over with your slimy little mind and insinuating your snaky little cock into them while they’re not looking! Pushing it up their trouser legs while they’re strap-dangling on the train! Or while talking to them at a party flipping it up ’n’ under their skirts! You’re an incubus, that’s what you are; a night creeper, a ravager, a rapist. Yes, that’s right—a rapist! …You fuck! You fucking fuck…Oh gaa!’
The hate had been injected into the don’s voice like dye into water. The aftertone hung there in the dusty compartment, puffing into dense billows of aggression. I sat stunned. Too stunned to pull myself away from his protuberant gaze and twitching lip, too stunned to say anything.
It was clear that the don was changing before my eyes, and along with this change came an alteration in the nature of his tale. It was becoming clear to me that the tale itself had no autonomous existence, that it was simply a direct expression of
the don’s nature. And if any further confirmation of this hypothesis were required it was amply supplied within seconds, when the don, instead of leaping from his seat and throttling me, or metamorphosing into someone else altogether, resumed the story in the same rapid but even tones with which he had begun. Insulting me directly was no fun for him—or so I thought. He wanted me to suffer alongside Dan and Carol.
The rest of the evening Dan spent sacked down in the living-room watching a repeat of
Doogie Howser MD
. He ate some of the new poly-flavoured crisps: wiener schnitzel with red cabbage. Upstairs Carol did the same. He came to his twin bed at about eleven-thirty. He kissed Carol on the cheek and said ‘night love’. They simultaneously snuggled down and clicked off their respective bedside lamps; just like synchronised sleepers.
But sometime during the night they lost this unconscious harmony. Carol, who had taken to sleeping with legs slightly apart, lying three-quarters on one side, felt a deft hand slide across the top of her thigh, towards
it
. Dan’s lethargic voice, fat-bellied with desire, whispered in her ear: ‘Is it all right if I climb on board?’
How One Becomes What One Is
CAROL STIFFENED. No, not quite right, bit of an unfortunate choice of words that, it would be better to say that she froze. Indeed she went so crisply hard that she might have been freeze-dried. What to do? Dan’s hand, was it headed towards Carol? Or towards
it
?
It would have been entirely in character for Carol to shrug Dan off at this point. She knew the balloon of his erection to be so diffident that it was easily punctured. There was nothing whatsoever compelling about Dan’s lust. Maybe she would have given him some explanation, but it would have been just as typical for her to simply turn aside. You’d like that, wooden d’jew? You’d like Carol to turn aside. I don’t think you really want to confront this particular
mise en scène
. I doubt your capacity for genuine PEV. I doubt your ability to endure the trufflings and mufflings beneath the patterned cover. Tough.
Some access of
jouissance
made Carol not turn aside. Made her in fact welcome Dan’s questing hand with her own and guide it towards her nipple… He lapped hungrily at her ear, as if sufficient stimulus might cause it to lactate. He nuzzled and snuffled, little bleatings issued
from his lips. His silky thigh slid on top of hers; his free hand went to her shoulder, and like a sailor hooking his way up on to a mast, Dan swung on board with amazing facility.
But had it not always been thus? Cast your mind back to the prologue… And can you recall those three sandpapery thrusts that accidentally coaxed our Carol into tremulous orgasm; into the most
petit
of
petit morts
? Carol had no choice, comfort alone dictated that she open her legs. She did this and despite Dan’s lower abdomen pressing into her groin, felt
it
pull free from its housing and this time perceptibly harden. Mercifully this ghastly sensation—full of bloody meaning—was at least eclipsed by Dan’s sudden entry.
Now came the acid test. And as his mouth galumphed once more on to her wet neck, and Carol turned aside to look at the glass of dusty water on the bedside table, she knew that her fate might well be decided. Would he feel
it
? Would he notice? Could he avoid
it
pressing into his pubis? A little knotty thing, a baby brother snuggling up against its older sibling.
No, he didn’t. And is it any surprise? After all Dan had never troubled to examine Carol’s cuntal area with any kind of attention. He knew nothing of her true shape. For Dan this America, this New Found Land, had always remained
terra incognita
. Beneath the hairy diadem that did Carol adorn, Dan knew there was a hole…but he knew of little else besides. His thrusts had always been into an insensate void. The sensation he received from
intercourse had always been mechanical and piston-like. Three thrusts and come; four thrusts a bogey; and five thrusts just about par for the course—and the hole.
This is exactly the handicap that Dan achieved on this particular round, to persist with our facile and demeaning golfing metaphor. And then he disembarked—again with great ease—and cushioned his slightly sodden muff and softening frond against her upper thigh. A few whispered tendernesses, in gratitude for the relieving milking, and he was gone, back to his own single.
Carol lay in the darkness. The digital alarm clock glowed and so did she. More than that—she exulted. Yes, exulted, although she was unable fully to acknowledge the source, or even the content of her feelings. For Carol it was enough that she had escaped detection… But really…absolutely
entre nous
I think it was because when
it
stiffened and Dan made his febrile stab at her, Carol thrust back. Yes! Lifted her hips a little from the mattress, using the tension of the springs to ease up and— not feel him sliding inside her oiled sheath, no. Quite the opposite. It was
she,
Carol, who thrust up inside him, just for one insidious instant. Gone just as soon as it was—oh, so barely, but nonetheless nakedly—acknowledged.
‘“Morning stirs the feet and hands |
‘You see, my memory for quotation improves as I progress,’
said the don, addressing me personally, directly and not simply as a unitary audience.
‘Eliot, isn’t it? Hate his stuff. Uptight he was, a frozen puritan bumhole. Scared of cunt, wouldn’t you say? But whose vagina was
dentata
in this context? Or to place the question in a more modern idiom: who was zooming who? Fucking kike Eliot. Not a lot of people know that, but you would, wooden d’jew?’
The very next day Carol went for her third driving lesson. Two days later for her fourth. At the end of the following week her instructor, a Turkish Cypriot, rasped his thumbnail along his moustache and confirmed what she already suspected. ‘Youse know, pretty lady, youse can take your test now I think.’ Carol felt exultation again, but not that dangerous thrusting exultation we touched on before; this was a more workaday sensation. It was combined for Carol with an acute awareness of a solid and mechanical species of causation in the world, of the form: push button A and B
will
happen.
Now of course it would be absurd to suggest that Carol had not been aware of this in the past, but her apprehension of her own impact upon this stratum of the world had never before been so nakedly and enjoyably intuitive. Driving in the school’s Mini Metro; cutting an
onion; completing a transaction in a shop, Carol felt empowered by all these simple acts, she felt her status as a potentially effective agent being pushed and moulded into shape by everything she did.
However, along with this came a velcro wrenching as the little hooks of Carol’s will began to pull away from the little restraining loops of Carol’s conscience. And alone, naked from the waist down, she began to dance in front of the mirror. At first she just stood, lowered her jeans, or raised her skirt and struck a few attitudes, almost unconsciously. But it felt so good to acknowledge
it,
to see
it
now that
its
purpose was starting to be revealed, that soon she advanced to a proper terpsichorean promenade.
It
was now large enough to waggle a little if she shifted from one foot to the other in a sort of soft-shoe shuffle; and indeed one waggle led to another,
its
tension increasing with each waggle.
Carol stood in front of the full-length mirror that formed the cupboard door, regarding
its
incongruity: peeking out from her hair-bedraggled lips, devoid of the pouch that perhaps ought to accompany it. She sat down on the edge of the bed and the fingers of both her hands toyed with
it
.
It
was at least three, or even five centimetres long. A pinky-brown roll of flesh could be pulled back from its tip to reveal a little mushroom, in the centre of which was a dry eye. It was, Carol decided, a penis.
* * *
‘To be a woman with a penis in our society—it isn’t an overwhelming distinction, is it? Well is it?’
The don was testy, I was clearly a pupil.
‘No, I suppose not.’
‘You suppose not. Why do you “suppose not”?’
The train clattered through a small station. I had a glimpse of an ornamental flowerbed; a fat porter; a swinging sign, and then darkness again.
‘Well, I suppose the increasing emancipation of women throughout this century has meant that they have—albeit in a rather metaphorical way—acquired some of the characteristics of men.’
‘Some of the sexual characteristics?’
The nasty edge was entering his voice again.
‘Perhaps.’
I tried to sound non-committal in a way that might please him, a facetious way. But he came back at me hard.
‘I think you’re being trite. That’s a mistake that young men always make with these issues. At times their entire overview of the sexual landscape seems merely an attempt to blot out the gynaecological
Massif Central
It’s a metaphorical penis that you’re talking about. I’m talking about a fucking literal penis, shit-for-brains, and “fucking” is very definitely the operative word here, because I’m talking about a cock that can fuck. I’m talking about a firm, springy, blood-filled sponge, with an enpurpled, engorged dome shooting spunk at you, shooting life at you: bullets of jism! God what a noble sight! I so, so, prefer the company of men, don’t you? I said don’t you?’
‘Oh, absolutely.’
‘Non-erotic male bonding, that’s the thing isn’t it; what our Ocker cousins call “mateyness”.’
‘Yes, yes, it’s true.’
‘The more non-erotic the better, wouldn’t you say?’
And he accompanied this latest decoy of an assertion masquerading as a question with another sinister little wiggle that started at his fundament and ran all the way up his spine to his nutbrown hair. The irony was that as his physical presence became more and more androgynous, so his voice increased in both timbre and depth.
‘Yes,’
I said,
‘the more non-erotic the better.’
‘Quite so. We cannot abide those pillow-biting, fudge-packing, shirt-tail-lifting irons, now can we, my precious?’
‘Indeed not.’
‘Good.’
He slapped his thighs with a rifle’s crack and then said:
‘Well, if you’re ready, then I’ll resume.’
Carol found that she was beginning to prefer the company of her fellow endowed. She would step into pubs and sup pints at the bar. Or else eat lunch in a greasy spoon, craning over her sarnie to admire the airbrushed pudenda of that day’s page 3 automaton. Naturally she didn’t feel inclined to make a direct claim to common gender with the other patrons. She quite sensibly realised that the majority of men might not know how to
respond to someone who could frig with one hand whilst tossing with the other. I do so like the rich, Anglo-Saxon vocabulary of our smut talk, don’t you?
Anyway, that’s beside the point, because Carol didn’t consider herself to be male. She’d never been conspicuously genderful anyway. Babytalk left her cold, witness Dan’s attempts to wallow with her in sympathetic semolina. Carol knew that her penis didn’t make her a man but it did free her a little bit more from being anything else, it did unslip those surly bonds and surly girly locks.
To the underwear emporium then and don’t spare the big-knobbed horses! Carol chose a small boutique on the high road, where she could be assured of a male shop assistant. She then thrilled to the conspiratorial talk of just how Dan might dangle. Carol didn’t even have to dissemble that much because Dan’s dear little waist was almost as neat as her own.
The next day she had a proper costume for her boudoir theatricals. This way and that she posed and pirouetted, but the shame was that she couldn’t even fill the smallest of filleted pouches in the slinkiest of men’s Italian briefs.
She pulled back the elastic of the waistband and fiddled with the newest member. By clenching and unclenching her buttocks she could get an internal, muscular handle on the development of what must surely be new peeing muscles. Carol was quite lucidly aware that soon she would be able to produce the most
spectacular effects whilst micturating. Naturally the concept itself was inchoate but she did have a presentiment of that most trivial and yet enjoyable of exclusively male pastimes. Namely: directed peeing. But on the other front? Well, things didn’t seem quite well-developed enough to be effectual…but maybe not.
Dan meanwhile endeavoured to persevere. Back on the fast track once more, on his way to heading the corporate design group at the agency, he thwacked balls with Barry on a regular basis. And in the evenings, he repaired to St Simon’s with Dave 2. He also went by bus to meetings further afield. Dave 2 accompanied him on some of these trips, anxious to hear the words of alternative suburban seers, but mostly Dan went alone.
Dan realised that Dave 2 was gently encouraging him to gain his own position in AA, to become a member of the Fellowship in his own right. Dan was certain because Dave 2 had said as much. ‘M’dear Dan,’ he burred, ‘I feel like a father to you, and perhaps that’s a little too close a relationship for us, as recovering alcoholics, to have. We need to let go of one another. You need to find your own feet, find your own sponsor, just as I did.’ Here Dave 2 was referring to the practice of AA whereby those members with a greater experience of sobriety entered into bipartisan therapeutic relationships with their junior, pisshead colleagues.
Dan acquiesced to this gentle parting. He had no choice, being such a doormat. But in his sensitive heart,
even when Dave 2 was only away from him for an evening, he felt abandoned.
‘Now don’t you go feeling sympathetic for Dave 2. Don’t embrace the fallacy of imagining that I have in some way misjudged or misread Dave 2. That I have spun you a line. Either intentionally or otherwise. There is no hidden hand in this tail; there is no lurking, shadowy narrator. What I tell you—that is the truth.
Allah Akbar,
you understand? I am a man of God. I speak the truth—God’s truth.” ‘There is no God but God.”’
The don pronounced these Islamic phrases with the lilting cadence of a Sahel évolué. Then he reverted to the type I have to concede that I had defined for him and asked his pupil,
‘Why does this seem tautologous?’
But he ran on and answered his own question.
‘If we consider the Islamic notion of history we see a process of social evolution analogous to the Hegelian concept of the World Spirit. However, whereas for Hegel the
deus
was very much
ex,
for the Muslim the World Spirit and the World are the same thing. Thus we see a cosmological loop: that as the cock of progress thrusts through social form and change, it is at one and the same time taking itself from behind.’
No, no. Listen to the truth: Dave 2 had already got his freckled hooks into another scene which he judged to be
far, far juicier than Dan and Carol’s marriage. A young girl of only nineteen years had precociously sought out so much of the lager of Lamot that she found herself at St Simon’s with plenty of entertaining incidents to recount. She was banged up within weeks by an occasional group member, a Welsh ex-steel worker of dwarvish proportions but peculiar prettiness. There was a lot of brouhaha surrounding this scene, and convocations in coffee bars as the group divided into warring factions, each accusing the other of therapeutic as well as moral crimes. Dave 2 was in his element, hearing versions from one and all. These he held on to, as if they were long threads, trailing from barely stitched emotional wounds. Dave 2 waited— waited to tug.
And Carol? Our dear little Carol, still attending Al Anon meetings, but mercifully freed from the attentions of the PEV crew, Dave 2 and Geena? Who can say? Who can mark the precise point where bad very definitely turned to worse? And who can get inside a mind that, vacillating to begin with, now found itself under the pressure of a strong and secret desire? I say ‘secret’ but really you would have to say that it was more than that. What she felt was, well, inexpressible. But guess what she
did
next.
Well, Carol was entirely certain now of her mastery over Dan’s mind, but she still felt that his body might present a few problems. So she too sought once more the lager of Lamot.