Cock and Bull (18 page)

Alan felt a lot better after a hot shower. He had got atrociously wet and cold during the afternoon’s learning exercises. He half suspected he might be coming down with a cold, for if there is anywhere worse for contagion than a hospital ward it has to be a gathering of GPs.

Alan, naturally enough, had taken control of the orienteering group he had been placed in by the bland and inefficient facilitator. Leadership came easily to Alan. Indeed, if he wasn’t given the opportunity to lead he became apathetic very quickly. The other GPs sensed this and gave in rather than face his irritation.

Today’s exercise had centred around the need to avoid bureaucratic entanglements when it came to implementing the new NHS reforms. The GPs split into groups, each of whom had an objective, to reach a given depot point where they would acquire symbolic
‘patients’. These ‘patients’ (really little loops of coloured string) then had to be transported to the right ‘hospital’ (really a copse) for treatment. Along the way there were various opportunities either to increase the group’s budget for hospital treatment, or for the patients’ waiting-list time to be increased by falling foul of bureaucratic mire (really
actual
mire).

In their orange cagoules the GPs grappled with their maps and orienteering compasses. It was lucky they had Alan. At least under his leadership they managed to get all their ‘patients’ into their requisite ‘hospitals’ before dark. Other groups were less fortunate and were still wandering the Somerset countryside far into the night. Facilitators armed with high-powered torches had to be sent out to look for them. One of the older GPs even had a touch of exposure and had to miss out on the paint-gun event the following day.

The shower may have been hot, but it was still the same depressing trickle of water Alan had come to expect of provincial bed and breakfasts. Still, he had been pleased to discover that Krishna was putting up at Mrs Critchley’s as well. All he needed to do now was make a quick call to Naomi, and then he and Krishna would be free for the evening.

Alan ran into Krishna in the humped corridor of the establishment. The wily medic was looking burnished and venal. Earlier in the day the chilly conditions on the orienteering course had nearly turned him as blue as his namesake. But now, warm and properly dressed,
Naipaul was looking forward to an evening of sordid encounters. As far as he was concerned the more sordid the better.

The two doctors left Mrs Critchley’s B&B on East Street at ten minutes past eight. She had armed them with a Yale key looped on to a bit of gardening twine, should they find themselves carried away by the bright lights of Wincanton and wish to return after ten, when she locked up for the night. But even by half past eight they seemed to have exhausted the entertainment possibilities of the town.

The pubs were all so segregated that, for Alan and Krishna, entering them was like being displayed a series of
tableau vivantes
in a museum of local history. In the White Hart there were genteel alcoholics, drinking sweet wines and gin with flat tonic; in the Unicorn there were rural headbangers—chicken sexers with their dirty girlfriends, all plump but rendered piscine by the startlingly tight fit of their stonewashed jeans. Alan and Krishna stayed long enough for a half in both these places, weathering the hostility that emanated from both groups. They then crossed the broad High Street and passed by the clock tower, around which a small knot of aspiring underage drinkers cursed on the handlebars of their mopeds.

‘The
jeunesse dorée,
’ Krishna quipped in mock-Oxford tones.

‘Whossat, youse darky cunt?’ came back from the middle of the knot as quick as a thrown knife. The two
minority group medics hurried on, all snobbery temporarily eaten up by fear.

In the Piebald Plover the Wincanton branch of MENSA was having its monthly meeting. Alan and Krishna poised moodily by the bar and eavesdropped on conversations of staggering autodidactic pretension. They supped moodily on Scotch.

‘I thought you would have some angle on Wincanton,’ said Alan at length. To his left a tiny woman in tweed was banging on about Etruscan wall painting. ‘This place is dead, dead, dead.’ Krishna snorted with laughter.

‘Yeah, not exactly Bangkok is it? Still, if we want a little action, a guy I know called James Poole recommended we go and see somebody he knows here…’

‘Well why didn’t you say so before? You could have spared us all this tedious pub-crawling.’

‘We-ell…’ Krishna had gone into a debauched drawl. ‘I did think you might find the scene a little bit
outré
.’ He shifted against the bar, one slim brown hand went to his crotch where he lightly and lovingly arranged his slim brown genitals inside their slim brown tailored housing. Alan thought at once of fucking Bull, and couldn’t prevent himself from laughing at the idea that anything Krishna Naipaul could come up with on a Thursday evening in Wincanton could be remotely
outré
in comparison.

‘Oh, I think I can stand the pace, Krishna.’ Alan turned the laughter into a dirty giggle for his benefit.

‘OK. If you’re up for it, then let’s go.’ He banged his whisky glass down on the bar and beckoned to the mutton-chopped landlord. ‘Excuse me, do you know of anywhere that we might get something to eat around here?’

‘Let me think…’ said the landlord, although he hardly looked capable of it. ‘There’s bar food at the White Hart but they stop serving at 8.30. Otherwise you might be better off driving into Yeovil.’

‘What about that new place?’ This came from one of the MENSA crowd, a compliance clerk who had once translated a John Le Carré novel into Esperanto.

‘Oh yairs.’ This jogged the landlord’s memory. ‘If you like that sort of thing, there’s a new sort of Greeky place on Bell Lane.’

‘That sounds fine,’ said Krishna. ‘Where do we find Bell Lane?’

They got the directions and exited. Alan was intrigued.

‘If this Poole bloke knows about this place, why did you go through all that rigmarole?’

‘Cover, Alan, cover. We must mind our backs in a place like this.’ They tromped off down the wet provincial streets.

The ‘Greeky place’ turned out to be the Tiresias Kebab Bar. A fat porky pole of kofta kebab twirled a greasy pirouette in the window. The place was undistinguished in the extreme. Things were pickled in big jars on the counter. Behind, and above the spluttering
range, was a backlit cabinet that showed garish photographs of indigestible meals. Through a fretworked archway Alan could see a few small tables covered with gingham-patterned oilcloth. No one was eating at them. In the takeaway section of the Kebab Bar there were only two customers, grub-white girls whom Alan thought he recognised from the crowd in the Unicorn. They were slobbering on saveloys when the two doctors came in.

Seated at the back Alan and Krishna ordered their meal from Tiresias himself. The
patron
was so buxom in his white singlet that Alan mentally diagnosed him as gynaecomastic. But the food was surprisingly good. Both Alan and Krishna had stuffed vine leaves and they downed two fine, lemony bottles of retsina. They declined the ‘Tiresias Special Kebab’, which, it was explained to them, was ‘a mans on the bottom, a womans on the top, and a skewer through both of them’. And for the rest of the meal they managed to avoid catching their busty host’s eye.

Tiresias brought them tiny cups of thick Greek coffee. Krishna sat back from the table with a contented sigh. ‘Well, now we’ve eaten I suppose we ought to fuck,’ he said, sipping his coffee.

‘Fuck what exactly?’ Alan’s bemused gesture encompassed the plump proprietor and the two ghastly girls who still lingered. Krishna huddled forward over the little table, gathering Alan into his conspiracy. His cultivated tones fluted with dirty enthusiasm.

‘Poole told me that there’s more to this chap Tiresias than meets the eye. This is a front, Alan.’

‘A front? A front for what?’

‘Only one of the biggest pornography and prostitution rings in the South West.’

‘Golly!’ Alan was incredulous. He waited for there to be a scene as Krishna beckoned Tiresias over.

‘I’m a friend of “Mr Poole”.’ Krishna pronounced the name like a password.

‘Oh, Meester Poole,’ the Greek seemed to be playing his part as well, ‘Meester Poole is very good friend of mine. And friends of Meester Poole are friends of mine. Would youse gentlemens like some raki?’

‘We would love some raki.’ Krishna was now puffed up with the success of his underworld contact. ‘And we would also like some company for the night.’

‘Some company? Offcourse. To be alone it is a bad thing I think. We wish always to be togethers, to live lifes to the full. That is how we do things in Greece you knows. We lives lifes to the full!’ Tiresias was so emphatic and Zorba-ish about this that Alan half expected him to start dancing, his big tits bouncing in the yellow confines of the kebab bar. But instead the Greek pulled up a chair and bringing a bottle of raki from the back of the dusty bar cabinet joined them in their prurient conspiracy.

So it was that two hours later Alan found himself being vigorously but dispassionately fellated, in the covered dustbin area of Mrs Critchley’s B&B, by one of the chicken-sexers’ girlfriends who had been hanging around the kebab bar. Krishna, who was unmarried and seemed to have no fear of the Medical Council, had smuggled his tart up to his room, there to thrash on nylon sheets. But Alan, shaking with unnatural lust, had paid up front for this sad experience. Even the thought of the scorn he would pour on Naipaul the following morning failed to counteract the painful rasp of the flat back of his head against the pebbledash of the wall he was leaning on.

‘Nyum, nyum, nyum,’ gobbled the girl. And, looking down at the dark roots of her peroxided hair, Alan realised that, let alone remember her name, he couldn’t even recall what her face looked like, so completely, since she had unzipped his fly and got to work, had his mind been filled with images of Bull.

The Wanderers were all aboard their minibus. There was much good-natured badinage and some jolly singing as they bowled down the A22 towards Bexhill-on-Sea. It might surprise the gentle reader (and even the vicious and unprincipled reader) to know that Bull was among the loudest of the singers, and the readiest of the quippers. His fellow-players were astonished by his good humour, and most of them put it down to his being de-mob happy, having lost his awful job at
Get Out!

But the truth, as we know, was far stranger. Bull had, he thought, reached a new equilibrium, a new acceptance of himself. He understood as soon as he got home why Ramona had screamed at the sight of his vagina. He understood also the strange and nameless tension and anxiety that had gripped him throughout the day. He was getting his period.

No wonder he had bought the panty-liners and the
Feminax in Boots, his feminine unconscious knew what was coming. Standing once more in the Council’s orange light, he had dabbed away the brown stains on his calf and applied the panty-liner, using one of his jockstraps to create a parody of a mono-knicker. The very assemblage, the idea of which had so excited Alan Margoulies at the outset of their strange affair.

And despite stomach cramps in the night, Bull was still full of resolution the following morning. He would, he decided, break entirely with Margoulies. He would continue as he was. And so what if he had to conceal his vagina for the rest of his life? So what if he could never marry? These were things he could accept. This was the decent thing to do: keep one’s personal and vile idiosyncrasies to one’s self, not inflict them on a blameless world.

So Bull outsang and outjoshed the rest. The minibus bowled through the shocking green of a bright English spring day, and all aboard felt a gleeful anticipation of the match to come.

In the changing-rooms Bull was especially careful to mind his back. But he’d sussed out his
modus operandi
well in advance. An elasticated knee-protector, of the kind commonly worn by sportspeople, neatly encapsulated the jock-strap and panty-liner assemblage. And in case that wasn’t sufficient, Bull also took the precaution of wearing particularly long socks, and on his left leg a very tight garter. None of his team mates suspected anything. They took his explanation of a ‘troublesome gash’ at face value.

The match was an overwhelming success. The visitors won with a remarkable try in the eighty-second minute of the game. The try was scored by Bull.

He had been in the scrum, locked into that strange, straining phalanx of heavy men, his shoulders grating against both those of the opposing prop forwards, and against the little bony collarbone of Mickey Minto, the Wanderers’ Maltese hooker. The ball came in fast, straight across to where Bull heaved, his big ear Legolocking into the big ear of the opposing left prop. One swift slash of Bull’s boot immobilised his opponent (who howled at the unfairness), another took it back to the wing forward, Dougie MacBeath, who broke hard and fast down the left wing. He was brought down within ten yards by a gaggle of Bexhill Bears, but before he fell he managed to flick the ball back to Bull, who was following on at the head of the Wanderers’ pack.

Bull hugged the warm ball to his chest. The score stood at forty-two points all. Seagulls swooped and screamed over the Bears’ goalposts. Beyond them Bull could see the lambent play of sunlight on green sea. The Bears’ ground was superbly situated on a chalk bluff, high above the Channel. What with the crispness of the day, and the firmness of his new resolution, Bull felt capable of flying, taking off and soaring over the defenders who, within seconds of Bull receiving the ball, had ranged themselves between him and the touchline.

Bull feinted, Bull dodged, Bull stuck his broad palm — hard and cold like a defrosting chicken—into the
expectant faces of the defenders. Bull felt as if his boots had acquired turbochargers. He revved over the turf. Behind him there were cries: ‘Over ’ere, John!’, ‘Manon, John!’, ‘My ball, John!’ Bull paid them no mind. This was clearly his moment. He could tell it by the way that the defenders seemed to be moving in slow motion — backwards. It was as if they ran away from him and then leapt up from the ground, gratefully pressing his palm to their bruised faces, scrofulously receiving the King’s touch. It was that easy and sanctified a moment.

And then, when he actually crossed the touchline, Bull found that he had to make a decision. With this fantastic turn of speed perhaps he ought to make the leap? Over those two boy spectators, ano-racked by adolescence, and away. This was the Channel speaking. Speaking directly, imagistically, to that other
manche.
Bull felt deep, buried sensations, under sock and jockstrap and panty-liner. The two channels seemed to speak to one another, figuring the possibilities of an alignment, or alliance.

But Bull didn’t jump. He swerved beautifully — dipping down like a yacht—kinked slightly to avoid his final challenger, and finally placed the ball precisely on the sward, bang between the posts.

Against precedent Towser Bridges, the Wanderers’ captain, allowed Bull to do the conversion (for Bull was not known as the greatest of kickers). This was the ‘chonk’ of boot into turf Bull had so longingly anticipated during those two, dark, cunt-riven, London days.
This was the free play of muscle and youthful vigour that Bull had set against the bogus credo of Juniper, and the pallid aestheticism of his ex-boss…Ach! But it didn’t work. Even as the ball lifted, and converted as surely as Wesley, Bull knew in his heart of hearts that the joy of rugby might distract him, but it could not cancel out what had happened between him and Alan Margoulies. It could not fill in the gnawing genital gulf.

So it was that after the match, once Bull had allowed himself to be bought a few congratulatory pints, he slipped away from his mates. He was glad to do so; never before had he felt quite so oppressed by their self-assurance, their seemingly unquestioning masculinity.

Bull walked the streets of Bexhill, moving towards the De La Warr Pavilion on the seafront, and his rendezvous with his lover.

Alan had had another tiring day at the Learning Jamboree. At least the weather had held up. But if anything the exercises designed by the facilitators were even more asinine than they had been the day before. They involved roleplay. The various GPs had to adopt the perspective of their patients and act out their anxieties and frustrations.

Alan was honest enough to admit to himself that in the roleplay he found a sinister congruence with the
doctor-patient charade he had so recently enacted with Bull. But as we have remarked before, Alan’s sense of irony had long since become so rampant that anything was grist to its mill. Nonetheless the day was given over to images of Bull, just as the previous night’s ‘fun’ had been so awfully compromised.

I’ve never behaved like that before, thought Alan. He had his pride, after all. There is a big difference between gaily porking some squeaking nurselet in a studio flat in Chiswick, and allowing the prostituting girlfriend of a retarded chicken-sexer to suck you off in the dustbin area of a provincial guesthouse. Clearly the Bull-thing was to blame. But maybe he is as anxious to get back into society as I am, thought Alan, and resurrected the first view he had taken of Bull’s genital abnormality. Namely that it might make his clinical reputation, just as the Siamese perpetual-cunnilingus machine had done for Nicholson. ‘And if not…perhaps…perhaps…’ Perhaps what? Perhaps the kindest thing to do would be to
kill
Bull. Alan couldn’t quite formulate the thought, but it lay in his mind nonetheless. Heavily, like a poorly digested meal.

But while all this was thought, action was something else. More dissembling to Naomi on the telephone; more carefully cultivated images of his sweet daughter’s sweet burblings, as if they could somehow undercut all the weird shit he was bound up in. At the end of the day Alan gave Krishna Naipaul the slip. The dirty doctor hadn’t been sated by his activities of the previous night
and at fishpaste sandwich time he had suggested to Alan a return trip to Tiresias’s establishment.

Alan drove back into Wincanton and hurriedly changed at Mrs Critchley’s. If he put his foot down he could make Bexhill by eight-thirty.