Cock and Bull (20 page)

It’s an everyday story, wouldn’t you say? This sad tale of Bull. Poor, poor Bull. Used and abandoned. There’s nothing new under this red dwarf emotional sun of ours. We grow up in sickly anticipation of love, romantic love. We sense with overweening joy that ours is but one amongst an infinity of unique sensibilities. What cruel irony that it is this very infinity that we later seem to find such a dreadful fag, and a bore to boot. We live out our lives with the studious, alienated politeness of big city dwellers: ‘I know you’re interesting,’ we seem to beam telepathically at our fellow sufferers, ‘and have hopes and fears of a unique quality, even views of some perspicacity. But none today please! Ting!’

So, in the light of the above, can we blame Alan? To be more precise, can we be bothered to blame Alan? Also can we be bothered to pity Krishna Naipaul, who, as Bull and Alan headed for London, was still trapped in the polymorphous perversities of the Tiresias Kebab Bar in Wincanton? In the neon wash from the freezer cabinet an odd triple-decker sexual sandwich twitched on the tiles. On the bottom was the flat white pudding of the chicken sexer’s girlfriend who gobbled Alan. Above her the corn-fed corpse of Tiresias himself flowed over her like hot fudge on to a sundae. And above both of them, arching back in fear and frenzy, the naughty doctor wriggled and scampered on the Greek’s big back, for all the world like the satyr that he so clearly was. Probably not. For in line with the disillusionment outlined above, we have jettisoned our capacity to judge the relationships
of others. In this world where all are mad and none are bad, we all know that the finger points backwards.

So, no nausea please as Alan returns on a Monday evening to the terraced house he calls home. Of course he is still anxious, he has yet to tell Bull of his decision. He also knows that there will be tough times ahead, when Bull, who is, after all, some kind of journalist, starts shooting his big mouth off. But Alan knows he can weather it, because in essence he is a family man. See him now opening the door with his key, tucking his black attaché case behind the coat-rack in the hall. And here’s Cecile, stomping towards him on chubby legs. Alan sweeps her up and kisses her sticky cheek. And here’s Naomi, looking committed. Towelled from the bath, she smells good.

They all smell good as they cuddle in the hall. And Naomi figures this has to be the right time to tell Alan that she’s pregnant again.

Bull had a farewell drink with the Wanderers in a roadhouse. Amidst plastic beams and hard against a fruit machine that had a microprocessor with a far larger and more efficient random access memory than the publican, Bull tried to salvage something of his relationship with his team mates.

‘I’m really cut up about losing my job,’ he told Dave Gillis for the umpteenth time. ‘It’s tough to find freelance work in a recession.’

‘Yeah, I know all that, John.’ Gillis was tetchy. After Bull’s performance during the mini-tour he, for one, would have liked to have seen him dropped from the team. After all, amateur rugby is as much to do with socialising with your mates as it is with playing the actual matches. Gillis had always rather suspected Bull. There was something too good to be true about his lack of side, his open and friendly features. Gillis wouldn’t have been surprised if Bull was a poof. ‘But where the hell have you been getting to the last few nights? We’ve been having a bloody good time. It’s been the most successful tour any of us can remember, but you’ve been buggering off every evening after a couple of pints.’

‘Yeah, well, Dave. I have got a bit of a confession to make. There’s this bird I’ve been seeing.’ (It was terribly easy for Bull mentally to change Alan’s clothing and shave his legs. In Bull’s mind’s eye he made rather a fetching damsel.) ‘And, well, she’s married like.’ Gillis surprised himself by being relieved. ‘Well why didn’t you say! For Christ’s sake, we all would of understood. Oi! Lads. Johnnie boy here has a bit of the old forbidden on the side. That’s why he’s been sloping off all over the tour.’

There were guffaws from the assembled Wanderers. Big, certain men in blazers. Bull was much praised for his athleticism. For scoring so many tries when he must have
been shagged out from the night before. There was much backslapping, and stiff punches to the upper arm. Bull felt enfolded once more by the smegmatic closeness of male camaraderie, and felt ghastly and fraudulent. He wasn’t able to get away to London for another couple of hours.

The journey was exhausting. What with the booze, the rugby, and the contorted sex he had been having with Alan for the last three nights, Bull could barely make it up the stairs, once he had managed to crawl up the hill from the tube station. He staggered into his flat and footed down the corridor to his bedroom, where he slumped down. Too weary to undress. He waited for oblivion to come.

But it wouldn’t. Bull felt the beer slop in his belly. Perhaps I need to go and drop some ballast before I sleep, he thought to himself, and rose from the bed. When he was on his feet, the tightness in his stomach changed to nausea. Bull hit the corridor at a run, and vomit was spurting from his mouth before he made it to the bathroom. Kneeling and wiping Bull pondered his nausea. He didn’t have more than five or six pints in the pub, certainly not enough to make him puke. And then the realisation tiptoed in, leaving the door ajar on that other world, that other hidden nature of Bull’s that he had done so well to deny for the past few hours.

For he knew by now that nausea danced attendance on those other parts of himself, those parts that lager simply could never reach.

Bull stripped, and stood once more before the full-length mirror where it had all begun, twisting himself to regard his vagina and its surround. Bull was aware now that his leg had developed a biology of its own. The period that had started in Ramona’s bedsit had ended within twenty-four hours. The night Bull had met Alan at the De La Warr Pavilion, he had had the added embarrassment of explaining that it was his ‘time of the month’, when Alan and he came to disrobe in the cramped confines of room five. Alan had scoffed at the very idea of Bull having a period, even after he had seen the dried and stiffened clouts. He had explained to Bull at great length that his vagina was an independent thing, cut out from its natural surround. He had pointed out to Bull that he had no urethra, and that the vagina itself was stopped by the back of his patella, as surely as an engine cylinder is capped by its big end.

And indeed, since Thursday, Bull had felt none of the inexplicable tremulousness that had characterised the two preceding days. He had assumed that his biology had ceased to dance in a lunar light. And so it had. What hubris of Alan to take his pleasure and not deploy his expertise! It would have only taken him a superficial examination, the tiniest admixture of business with pleasure, for him to have rumbled. For the truth was that in the mini-feminine world of Bull’s leg, everything was in perfect running order. It was all compressed, true enough, and distorted, not unlike the internal organs of a midget. But it was all in perfect running order. Bull’s
cervix that is; Bull’s ovaries; Bull’s tubes. Bull’s womb, which, as it dawned on him that the calf muscle cramps he had been having that day might have an origin other than muscular stress, was pushing out in a slow act of biological attrition.

Bull found himself dressed and in his car. He knew there was an all-night chemist open in West Hampstead, a chemist where he could buy a Predictor pregnancy testing kit.

Bull crouched in the cramped confines of the cubicle, and his face distorted into a crazy mirror grimace as he watched the bluish solution in the plastic beaker turn a violent pink.

So that was that. Seduced, traduced and banged up to boot. Well now it was time for Alan Margoulies to show just how conscientious he really was. Now was the time for the Good Doctor to put his money (and it was bound to cost an awful lot of money, unless, that is, he was prepared to do it himself) where his mouth had so recently, so lickedly been. Bull, back in his car, gripped the wheel with ferocious strength. He felt that he might easily have torn it from the steering column and thrown it out the window, were it not that he needed it to guide him towards his deceiver.

Bull knew where Alan lived. The fool had mentioned it in passing, as they had lain together one night, entangled and idly discussing mortgage depreciation and the interest-rate crisis. Now Bull drove there fast, parked up, and concealed himself in the privet of the tiny front
yard. Concealed himself in such a way that he could see in to the lighted kitchen without being seen. He peeked through the venetian blind slats and saw his lover, and with him his wife, Bull’s rival.

They were drinking champagne. Alan always kept a bottle in the fridge for special surprise occasions, and this was one. He and Naomi had always said that they wanted to have a large family. They had an awareness that although the world might not need that many more children, it did need children that were brought up by overwhelmingly conscientious and committed people. Since that clearly meant them, there was something of an obligation on them to fulfil a better than average quota.

And in this new life, he could find himself a new beginning. Alan raised his glass, toasting himself as much as Naomi. (We have remarked before on Alan’s awful soliloquies. And here was an excellent opportunity for one.) Shocking things still shot in front of the new father’s eyes, but they were fading. He knew that in time, once he had weathered Bull’s fury, that they would disappear altogether. He scrutinised the pretty features of his good wife. So that explained the eggy smell, she was creatin’. And Alan found that once he was actually aware of his wife’s pregnancy his physical repulsion began to abate. He could even imagine them making love again. Perhaps even very soon. Maybe as soon as they finished the champagne.

Outside in the garden Bull saw everything. He shifted, feeling cramp in his right leg, and the swelling discomfort
in his left. Hot tears rolled down his pudgy cheeks. A hot flush crept down from the roots of his ginger hair. He saw them smile together; he saw them hug one another; he saw them kiss; he saw them drink champagne. How the hell was he to know, as he watched the tragic dumb show, that this wasn’t just any old ordinary evening for the Margoulieses. So Alan had lied to him about his marriage as well! He had said that it was all over, that he felt nothing for his wife, that he would up sticks and live with Bull, were it not for the possible career repercussions. And here he was carousing, with that very look in his eyes that Bull had seen before. The look that immediately preceded Alan adopting a pseudo-rural accent and saying to Bull, ‘Why don’t you roll over now, m’dear’.

Bull crouched and shuffled backwards out of the yard. He felt shamed and ashamed. And as he straightened up in the dark street he looked up, and over towards Archway. There it was, arching across the night. Its single span perhaps offering some sweet relief. Suicide Bridge.

He parked in a nearby street and walked out on to the bridge. Below him the lights of London spread away in a wash of low wattage. Their dimness gave the lie to the very vastness of the city. Bull heard its distant roar, its night-time sough, its terminal cough.

It was the betrayal he couldn’t stand. Everything else he could have borne—even the ghastly thought of his coming, elephantiatic confinement—but not the betrayal. He no longer wanted to live in a world that harboured such duplicity. He clutched the thick, old bronze of the safety rail and made ready to hoist himself over in one, swift, practised bar vault (he was, after all, a fairly competent athlete). He was ready to meet him, or her. Whoever the sick joker was, whom he must perforce call his maker.