Will selfs collected fic.., p.38
Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 1 (2014), page 38
part #1 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
The shockin-the-leg sensation reminded Bull of his wound. He had been lost in a daydream. He felt woozy and relaxed. The valium did its job. Bull continued to function for the rest of the day while the sedative kept him calm.
At lunchtime Bull went out for a drink with a couple of his colleagues. One of them noticed him limping. ‘What’s up, John,’ he said, ‘pulled a muscle playing five-a-side?’
‘No,’ Bull replied, suddenly self-conscious. ‘It’s nothing, really.’
Margoulies took the smelly lift down into the sub-basement of the hospital. It smelt of the dead forefathers of old school dinners. The sub-basement had an oppressively low ceiling, and immediately outside the door of the lift the linoleum on the floor had started to decompose, breaking up into ragged, isolated island shapes, as if the surface had been subject to some tectonic shift. A porter with the face of a medieval villein – all warty wattle and Cyrano nose – directed Margoulies to where the closed stacks were housed, and opened the wire cage for him with a Yale key.
Margoulies snapped on the Anglepoise that stood on the small metal reading desk and went ranging along the shelves, peering at the spines of the thick medical reference works and bound journals, occasionally pulling one out.
It was Margoulies’s lunch hour. The rest of the morning, after Bull’s visitation at his surgery, had been an odd one for Margoulies. Alan had palpably felt his ethics and his restraint draining out of his mind like bath water. Round and round in his tortured brow went the arguments and considerations, until they disappeared with a ferocious gurgle. Only to be replaced by still more arguments and more considerations.
Alan’s conscience told him that he was doing something wrong. Something very, very wrong. Something, in fact, that might seriously undermine his candidacy for canonisation.
Alan’s reason also told him that when a man walks into your office with a vagina tucked behind his knee, the first thing you must do in order to preserve both your sanity, and his, is tell someone else. The abnormal becomes normal through its inclusion in the worlds of others. Exclude it and it begins to take on a penumbra of sinister otherness.
But the problem was this: Alan was already functioning within the dramatic irony of betrayal. His adulterous liaisons had opened up a gulf between what he knew and what others knew about him. Into this gulf came Bull … and his cunt. And worse luck for Bull, quite filled it.
Alan couldn’t understand the why, but the more he tried to think about what he should do to help Bull, the more images of Bull that were strictly non-scientific started to flood him.
Bull was so vulnerable, so trusting. There was something rather pathetically sweet about his lumpy features and expression of huge and baffled sincerity. And he wasn’t unattractive … Lots of women like men who are well built; especially with a rugby player’s flabby solidity.
And the vagina. What an orifice! So seldom is it aesthetically appreciated. Men shy away from its very fleshly reality. They’ll lick it and prod it, but they’ll seldom take a really long, loving look. They prefer to regard it with children’s eyes as the secret trap door leading to a room full of sweeties.
Perhaps it’s because babies come out of it, Alan had mused, toying with his clay blobs while waiting for another tortured arthritic to crawl in from the reception area. Alan, for all his vaunted intellect, had a rather nauseous and jejune style of internal monologue. Is it another twist in the male psyche of the virgin/whore complex? We cannot bear to acknowledge the cunt’s visual reality because to do so would be to acknowledge pissing, periods and the bloody, pushing heads of babies?
Of course Alan wasn’t so sheltered as not to know that there are heaps of porno mags absolutely groaning with crotch shots. Full of cunts delineated with forensic precision; plastered on to the page, their silk thread slash and surrounding furze flattened like a river valley photo graphed from the air … But he was also perceptive enough to realise that these aren’t intended to beautify the women who pose for them … they are intended to humiliate them, to expose them.
Alan was subjected to these reveries mercilessly. And even when they seemed to be taking an honestly reflective turn, as above – a direction that might lead him out of the psychological labyrinth into which he had descended at ten minutes to ten – he would be brought up sharply by another surge of lust. A surge that pushed Bull’s anatomy before Alan’s eyes bathed in an entirely different light: roseate, pulsing, undulant, sweetly erotic …
… Alan saw Bull posing naked in the striped shadow of a venetian blind – rather like Richard Gere in American Gigolo. He was swivelled prettily on one thick leg, like a discus thrower, pushing the back of his knee towards the silent voyeur. His pubis nouveau was sheathed tightly in a little pouch, a sort of mono-knicker. Wisps of hair poked out of the edges. Alan could just make out … those lips, delineated by the soft sheen of the silk.
It was in order to shake these images out of his mind – the awful cross-fertilisation between his fantasy life and Bull’s genital abnormality – that Alan had repaired to the library of the local teaching hospital at lunchtime.
The receptionists, seeing Alan leaving the Grove looking harassed and preoccupied, tut-tutted to each other. ‘Shee …’ said the black and conical Gloria who had just come on shift ‘… the man done wo-ork ‘imself down t’ the bone y’know. Shee! ‘N he’s saint, ain’t that the truth.’
The Saint’s mind was full of chimeras as he walked towards the centre of town. Images of the marriage of organ and organ grinder into the most surreal and frenzied of combinations. But down in the sub-basement the closed stack of the library brought him some relief. Here the mind’s eye changed to eyes on page, as Alan flicked over leaf after leaf of the Journal of Abnormal Physiology.
The faded half-tones, and worse, chromatically distorted colour plates, showed the most fantastic profusion of physical confusion: a man posed shyly – naked white belly billowing–his hand on the back of a kitchen chair, his chest a veritable palimpsest of nipples, some half-cancelling others, some saucer-large; another man screwed up the side of his head towards the camera, the Dürer whorls of his inner-ear containing a scrap of a penis; a woman, pear-shaped and otherwise chillingly ordinary, lay back to give the ultimate crotch shot: double-decker vaginas.
There was more. Much, much more. Alan flipped over page after page. He pulled down Nicholson’s classic Distortions of the Sex, a book that had been rented out by those who could get their hands on it when Alan was at medical school. He laid it alongside the Journal and compared weird with weirder. In Nicholson, Siamese twins lay cunt-to-mouth, trapped by a webbing of flesh into a life-long act of cunnilingus; a perfectly ordinary man’s penis had another perfectly ordinary man’s penis, growing out of it at right angles; a young woman, not unattractive in a pinched and mean English provincial way, had a clitoris the size of a parsnip.
But however many pages he turned, however much of this fleshly phantasmagoria Alan took on board, he could not find anything that even approximated to Bull’s condition. Sure, there were plenty of hermaphrodites, but their vaginas were invariably distorted simulacra, tucked in alongside their penises. There was no one like Bull, with a vagina perfectly and beautifully formed, albeit in an entirely unexpected place. And furthermore, as Alan read Nicholson’s text, although he came across some utterly bizarre stories of genital abnormality, none of them were remotely similar to Bull’s genital nativity.
Plenty of little girls had, according to Nicholson, reached puberty only to have a wash of testosterone push their clitorises into penises and pull out balls from their crotches. But the same could not be said of little boys. If they weren’t given a vagina from the off they never subsequently acquired one. And indeed this conforms to what we know intuitively. For the male physiology is a static and lifeless thing, a metabolic Empty Quarter, unaffected by the tremendous lunar pulls and washes of hormonal gunk that stream through its sister form.
Alan closed up the books with grim finality. He called for the porter to lock the stack, and ascended via the stinking lift to ground-floor London.
So, instead of the trip to the library acting as a catharsis, it ultimately only served to exacerbate Alan’s condition. Images of Bull began to flood into him like some sort of meditational illness. Alan found he could hardly concentrate on what his patients were saying during afternoon surgery. (Poor Dr Margoulies, they thought to themselves, the man works far too hard, he’s so conscientious).
At the end of the day Alan took his housecall bag and went back home. Naomi was feeding the baby in the kitchen, just as she had been when Alan left that morning.
Alan cupped Naomi’s cheek with one of his fine tapering hands and the baby’s cheek with the other. He kissed them both and told them he loved them. Suddenly, the contrast between the grotesque images that had been projected into his mind for most of the day and the utter wholesomeness of this domestic scene struck him like a rabbit punch in the gut. It was all he could manage not to hang on the chestnut pelt of his wife’s lovely hair and sob the whole story out into her neat ear. But manage he did. Alan knew that the first aid he had done on Bull that morning would only serve as a temporary measure. Alan felt devoid of ideas of how to help Bull, but he knew that he had to see him and do something.
‘I’ve booked a sitter,’ said Naomi. ‘She’s coming around eight.’
‘Fine, fine,’ said Alan. Not at all in a distracted manner, but with genuine emphasis. He had that ability: turning on immediacy, seeming intimacy, for Naomi; so that she felt that he was with her and her alone. And then he remembered the cancellation that had furnished him with Bull that morning. It was the perfect opportunity and it prompted him to say: ‘I have to pop up to Archway and see a patient.’ Naomi was surprised and a little put out.
‘I didn’t know that you had a patient in Archway.’
‘Yeah. An old guy called Gaston. Strictly speaking he shouldn’t be registered with me, but for some reason I’m the only doctor that he’ll see.’
‘Will you be long?’ asked Naomi. Alan looked at his watch, it was six-thirty.
‘If I hurry I can make it back by eight. I may have to drain his cyst.’
‘You know Alan, you haven’t put Cecile to bed for a week now …’
‘I know, I know. I’m sorry, darling. I’ll make it up to you both at the weekend.’
And he was gone. Out the door before another exchange with Naomi, lawfully wedded Naomi, could challenge the forgetfulness of habit.
Alan hung on to the image of his daughter a little bit longer. For as long, in fact, as it took him to find and start his car. He used the image the way that so many duplicitous and driven men do: to produce guilt in lieu of conscience.
As Alan wheeled the car out of the terraced street where he lived and on to the High Road he felt the urgency of his house call, but underlying that was a deeper urgency, an urgency Alan could barely acknowledge. The road north to Mr Gaston’s house followed on to where Alan knew that Bull lived.
3
Seduction
Bull sat in the stuffy dusk of his bedroom. The occasional artic soughed down East Finchley High Road, its double bogeys clacking hard against the rubber strip of the pelican crossing.
Bull felt tired and woozy. Towards the end of the working day he had considered going back to the Grove to see Margoulies again. Perhaps he was allergic to the antibiotic? But he thought better of it. It wouldn’t do to be a trouble to the Good Doctor. He would get a good night’s sleep, and if he still felt the same in the morning he would make another appointment. Alan had told Bull to come in and see the nurse in another couple of days anyway, so that she could change Bull’s dressing.
The truth was that the dressing had started to trouble Bull already. Because of the awkward location of the wound Margoulies had been unable to place flat coils of crêpe across it. Instead he had tried to brace the wound with a series of bandage buttresses running up and over the knee. Even when wounded and drugged Bull was a vigorous creature. The constant movements of his meaty leg throughout the day had partially displaced the bandage; and the delightful, cool sensation Bull had had at the surgery, as the wound was swabbed with distilled water and coated with Vaseline, had faded, first into no sensation at all, and now into irritation.
Bull knew he should take another pill but somehow he couldn’t rouse himself from where he sat, leg outstretched, in front of the window, looking down towards the statue of the bald-faced stag that surmounted the portico of the Bald-Faced Stag. Perhaps I should go for a drink? mused Bull to himself. He felt a little lonely this evening, washed up. He was still young enough to associate illness with people being nice to him. He wished his mother were there to re-dress the wound and make him some supper.
But even the thought of drinking alcohol was sick-making. And going into a pub, how could he? Bull visualised the interior of the Bald-Faced Stag. It was dark and thick with acrid smoke. Big-pig men stood about in suits, leaning against things. As the swing door swung open to reveal Bull, their dead brown eyes tracked him across the carpet tiles, stripping away his clothes …
… That was it! I feel really vulnerable, realised Bull with a shock. I’ve lost some element of my basic bottle. Perhaps it’s this injury? Or that terrible night last night, that really did depress me …
Actually it wasn’t so much the Razza Rob act that had depressed Bull. As long as he felt confident of publishing a coruscating review of it – an utterly comprehensive panning, in the next issue of Get Out!–Bull didn’t pay any mind to Razza’s ribbing. But as he had struggled to compose the review that day, preoccupied by his leg and partially stupefied by the valium, Bull’s editor had appeared at his shoulder.
The first Bull had been aware of it was the strong smell of Cellini Per L’Uomo, one of the Harold Acton range of male toiletries and fragrances. The Editor believed strongly in self-promotion. After the waft of aftershave, which was not dissimilar to an olfactory version of Fernet Branca, the Editor’s blue spectacle frames had appeared in the periphery of Bull’s vision. He scanned the twenty lines of green copy on the screen of Bull’s word processor.
‘Ah, um, John,’ he managed to say at last. ‘This Razza Rob review … Ahh we um, won’t really need to run it.’ Bull was uncharacteristically snappy.
‘Whyzzat?’
‘ ‘Cos um, er … Y’know Juniper has written up a little feature about Razza Rob and that will, like, include a review of his act.’
‘What!’ Bull was incredulous. ‘The man doesn’t warrant fifty words, let alone a feature. He’s stupid, obscene, boorish and utterly unfunny.’ Bull rocked back in his swivel chair and turned to face the Editor, who dissembled frantically.
‘That’s as may be, John, but he’s getting a real following. This particular kind of comedy is really taking off at the moment. You know, we’re not here to prescribe for our readers, John, we’re here to describe what they’re into. We should never tell them what to do.’
Bull groaned. This was the Editor’s catchphrase. He’d even had it incorporated into a ‘Mission Statement’ for Get Out! which, in the form of a plastic encapsulated card with five bullet points, had been distributed to the uninspired and uninspiring hacks. The catchphrase formed point 3: ‘Never Prescribe – Describe. Art is the mirror of life.’ The Editor also had pretensions to being a Stendhalian. He had called his son ‘Julien’ and his son’s pony ‘Sorel’.
As soon as the Editor had gone Bull called Juniper. Juniper wrote regular freelance features for Get Out! She had also slept with Bull on a number of significant occasions. Significant for Bull that is – not for Juniper. Juniper had sexual intercourse the way that some people eat dry-roasted peanuts: compulsively, in large quantities and with progressively less pleasure.
Dialling her number Bull remembered a drunken evening three weeks previously when Juniper had consented to come back to Bull’s flat. She had eschewed the sagging bed in favour of the kitchenette floor. She had gone on top. Bull had found himself contemplating a thick yellow rheum of grease and crumbs that formed an actual ledge under the edge of the gas cooker, while Juniper’s hard chassis of crotch ‘n’ bum ‘n’ thighs had hammered down on to him. Her vagina had gripped Bull’s poor penis with the riffling handclasp of an aspirant mason. Her chinless face had zoomed over Bull with Vorticist foreshortening.
‘Hello?’
‘Juniper, it’s John,’ said Bull.
‘John?’
‘John Bull.’
‘John Bull? Is this some kind of a joke?’
Bull became flustered. ‘No, it isn’t. You know me, I do the cabaret listings and reviews for Get Out!’
‘Oh, John. Of course, I am sorry, I must have been miles away. You know, dreaming and stuff.’
‘What stuff?’
‘Well … er you know, stuff.’
Bull pictured Juniper, with her bum, hips, U-bend crotch and flat tummy sheathed in mannequin-tight Lycra bicycling shorts. Her hairless ankles were as brown and symmetrically columnar as thick fifties chairlegs and her hard little chest was begirt with synthetic knobbled belts and bandoliers. All around her on the artfully stained floorboards of her studio flat, there was her stuff – the stuff in question. What stuff it was! Platform-soled shoes and lamé dresses; ostrich feathers and film posters; patchouli bottles and chillums; lapel badges and album covers; guitars and goatskin drums; hula-hoops and Ouija boards; compact discs and concert posters; headbands and armbands; drumsticks and frisbees. All the detritus of forty years of popular youth culture … Juniper’s stuff.
That’s how Bull pictured it at any rate. The truth was that Juniper’s studio flat was relentlessly minimalist. In keeping with contemporary ideas of style. For Juniper was one of those people, lost in their late thirties, who have gone on troubling to assume each little style and youth cult, even as it has been stillborn.
For people like Juniper have a sense of cultural history as radically foreshortened as the bonnet of a bubble car. And for them, each new wave of teeny trippers and boppers seems as significant as the decline of Ancient Sumer, or the expansion of the Russian empire under Peter the Great.
