Cock and Bull

COCK AND BULL

FICTION

NON-FICTION

COCK AND BULL

WILL SELF

First published in Great Britain 1992

This paperback edition published 2006

Copyright © 1992 by Will Self

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7475 8234 3
9780747582342

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

All papers used by Bloomsbury Publishing are natural,
recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed
forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the
environmental regulations of the country of origin

www.will-self.com

www.bloomsbury.com/willself

Cock
is for Cressida and Charles,
Bull
is for William.

Byron,
Don Juan

CAROL HAD ALWAYS FELT at some level less of a woman when Dan was around. Not that she ever would have defined what she felt in these terms—and she certainly wouldn’t have used this particular language. Carol had completed one third of the degree course in sociology at Llanstephan, a small, dull Welsh college. Her tertiary education was brief. She was exposed to enough of the student radicalism that was then in fashion to have been able to attach to her feelings of alienation from Dan neat tags of feminist jargon—but Carol was too insipid to shape her critique. So while men weren’t necessarily stupid or chauvinistic, neither were they ‘phallocentric’ or ‘empowered by the male phallic hegemony’. And women, on the other hand, they weren’t depressed, oh no. And neither were they ‘alienated’. Of them, never let it be said that their ‘discourse was vitiated’.

Carol had spent long, sapphic nights at Llanstephan under the influence of a rotund lesbian called Beverley, who hailed from Leeds. Beverley lectured her on the jargon, attempting to move her from the casting couch to a speaking part in the cod philosophy. They grew
tense on instant coffee and eventually fiddled sweatily with the toggles of each other’s regulation bib ’n’ braces.

But despite these relatively exotic experiences, Carol, the daughter of a desperately self-effacing woman and a dissatisfied autodidactic electrical engineer from Poole, was not impelled into an original lifestyle, or even inclined to complete her degree in order to counter the masculine cultural hegemony. Beverley’s sour-cream flesh and probing digits failed to release whatever lode of sexual ecstasy Carol might have had locked within her narrow bosom—as did the blind-mole bumping of the seven or so penises that had truffled up her thin thighs since she started going in for that sort of thing.

This was left to Dan to achieve—by a fluke, entirely. And it was this fluke, combined with Carol’s tendency always, always to take the line of least resistance, in all that she ever said, or did, or even thought, that gives this story its peculiar combination of cock and bull.

A pub-crawl down the snaking high street of a Warwickshire market town, this was the prelude to the chain of chance. In the manner of students the world over, Carol had departed from Llanstephan with two colleagues, one of whom she knew only vaguely. The vague one, in turn, had a still vaguer acquaintance with some design students at Stourbridge. A party was in the offing. The three Llanstephanites, Carol, a girl called Bea, and the boy, Alun, set off at dusk in a borrowed car and burrowed across Wales and then through night-time England in the narrow tunnel carved by the headlights.

The party turned out to be Dan’s post-exam binge. Other boys, in the soul rebel uniform of tight dungarees and woolly caps, punched him on his upper arms. Carol noticed his sad, self-deprecating smile—folded in at the edges with a hospital corner—and wondered if he were quite as keen on the pub crawl as they were.

He was.

Atherstone had been selected as the crawl site, because it has the greatest number of pubs on a single street of any town in England (or Wales for that matter): twenty-two in all. The party from Stourbridge intended to start at one end and proceed to the other, downing a drink in every single pub along the way. It had been Dan’s own idea.

The evening grew smokier and closer. Carol had started on gin, but soon, her head swimming, she switched to lager. At some crucial, undefined moment —finding herself staring, uncomprehendingly at the opening line of
Desiderata
(‘Go placidly amidst the something or others…’)—Carol realised that she had crossed over from being rather tipsy to being decidedly drunk.

The HND design boys clung to one another’s shoulders. ‘Come on, Eileen!’ they shouted in parodic Geordie accents. They had prepared scorecards with the names of all the Atherstone pubs in one column and the other columns left blank for the names of the drinks, units of alcohol they represented and so forth. But by now they had given up on comparing each other’s
performances and instead were simply and uncomplicatedly drunk.

Carol looked at Alun and he looked at her. She realised how little he really knew these Stourbridge boys. The only real link was with Dan, whom Alun had been at school with for a couple of years in Cardiff, but they’d never really been
that
close. Carol rightly felt her own social position as even more teased out and attenuated than Alun’s. But then Dan looked at Carol, and for some reason she saw some compassion in those hospital-corner creases and in his mousy forelock that pointed in the same direction—towards the floor.

They fucked on a thin foam mattress. With rasping predictability Dan entered her too early, she was tight and dry. And he came after three sandpapery strokes. But for some strange reason, some synaptic glitch, Carol came as well. Her orgasm crept up on her while she gazed in pained abstraction at an arty poster. It was the first orgasm she had ever had with a man inside her. Later, in a disoriented, boozy blackout, she squatted and peed on a pile of Dan’s textbooks that lay in a corner of the room.

When she returned to the numb mattress and hunkered into a foetal curl, she felt Dan’s forelock brush between her shoulderblades, his neat mouth nuzzled her back flesh. She responded, millimetrically.

Dan and Carol were married a year or so later, and just about everyone who knew them reckoned that she had
to be pregnant—but it wasn’t so. It was that brief, ecstatic lancing and subsequently balmy wave that had wedded Carol to Dan, and despite the fact that the experience had not been repeated Carol still felt obscurely bonded to him. She felt certain that the feeling she had for his slight, slab-sided white body with its little brown moles was love. And his sandy hair which naturally fell into a twenties crop—the forelock arching over his sensitive brows—that too was lovable. And Carol also responded to Dan’s deftness. Like many other design-oriented people Dan was good with his hands and made amusing little things out of paper and card. Their wedding invitation was in the form of a paper sculpture. On opening the card a church created itself; the little paper doors opened and disgorged a cut-out wedding party—it was terribly clever.

Carol dropped out of Llanstephan and went into digs near Stourbridge to be with Dan. She had never really got to grips with sociology anyway. It had been the only course for which she could fulfil the matriculation requirements, and Llanstephan had been the choice of the UCCA computer rather than her own. Carol’s autodidactic, electrical engineer father was disappointed, and made his displeasure felt in a rancorous wedding speech, full of twists of convoluted and pedantic irony that were lost entirely on Dan’s family and guests, who, coming from more solid, middle-class homes, thought he was trying to be funny. Neither of them was religious—and the list was at Heal’s.

Carol’s mother was less disappointed. She knew Carol to be like herself, good when subjected to the influence of the same, but lazy and with no profound convictions. As Carol was also lithe, and pretty in the mean-featured English provincial way, it was best that she married young and was subjected to a steadying influence.

Carol was nineteen when she married Dan. Dan was twenty-one—with a year to go before completing his HND. After he had qualified, he managed to get a job with a consultancy in London that specialised in corporate identity. They moved from their one-room flat in Stourbridge to a two-bedroom maisonette in Muswell Hill, North London.

It was about this time that Carol realised that she felt less of a woman when Dan was around. That she hadn’t articulated this feeling was really down to that strange loyalty engendered by their single, simple drunken coming-together. That she was unable to put it into more abstract and potentially empowering terms was due, as we have said, to Beverley’s failed influence.

But in London Dan, exact in denim blouson and leather trousers, brought home fellow designers for supper or drinks. These creatures, with their padded kapok jackets and modular plastic accessories replete with winking LCDs, spoke a new language to Carol. As she learnt the vocabulary she began to understand that this world was one of potentially unambiguous satisfaction, sexual or otherwise.

And so Carol began to see Dan for what he was: slight, sour, effete, unsure of himself. She began to let it sink home that those three sudden strokes really had been nothing but a fluke.