Cock and Bull (19 page)

Juniper and Razza Rob faced one another across the cool pool of highly-focused greenish light. Juniper pushed her plate to one side and sighed contentedly.

‘Mmm,’ she said. ‘Razza, that was fantastic. You’ll have to give me the recipe before I go. I never imagined that anybody could do so much with nuts and mushrooms.’

‘Actually almonds, boletus and truffles. The topping was fresh ricotta, teased and shaped.’ Razza’s voice betrayed not irritation at this philistine’s crude appreciation of his cuisine, but a wry love of bringing on the untutored, who he enjoyed precisely because of their lack of sophistication.

‘I just didn’t expect to be fed at all, let alone so magnificently. Usually someone I’m interviewing expects
me
to feed
them.
And anyway how did you know that I was a vegetarian?’

Razza gestured enigmatically. ‘No one who appreciates the subtleties of my work as you do could possibly feed on carrion.’

Juniper looked at Razza Rob with frank admiration. It
had been just as she had suspected. Arriving at Razza Rob’s unprepossessing council block in Grays Thurrock, Juniper had been beckoned into a Tardis of high culture. Behind the chipboard veneer of his front door this secretive, almost reclusive mortgage-broker had created a temple to the avant garde.

Naturally what struck Juniper most forcefully was the disjunction between Razza Rob’s stage persona — all wiry aggression; gimcrack obscenity; dangerous, frustrated lust—and the quiet, almost refined man who ushered her in.

Shorn of his spangled jockstrap, clothed in autumnal beiges and browns, Razza Rob’s face in repose was serious and thoughtful. As the tape recorder whirred he steepled his fingers and gave each of her questions deep and serious thought.

‘I would say that since “outrage”, or “repulsion” only really exists in the mind of the beholder, it is foolish to try and generally distinguish the things that provoke these feelings, from those that don’t. Furthermore, the mind-set that observes and considers this “thing”, is itself chronically relativised by a whole panoply of other factors. The analogy would be to ask someone to take an accurate reading with a theodolite when both they, and the object they wish to take the reading from, are both in constant motion.’ This little
aperçu
came from Razza Rob in response to Juniper’s slightly more basic question: ‘Tell me, Razza, do you think your critics are right when they describe your cunt jokes as obscene?’

Despite the challenge presented to her by this doyen of the smutty, Juniper couldn’t stop her attention from wandering from what Razza said to the magnificent decor of his flat. It was astonishing, but in this cramped and narrow space, with its front door opening directly on to the kitchen, and the other rooms leading off an abrupt corridor, Razza Rob had managed to create a sense of light airiness which engendered an atmosphere of aesthetic optimism. The walls, Juniper noted, were coated in steel-grey hessian, just the material she herself would have chosen…

No, not true. None of the above, that is. It would be nice if it were. It would, in fact, be a nicer world altogether.

‘You fucking anybody regular then?’ asked Razza Rob. But rather than answer the question Juniper found that she couldn’t lift her eyes from the spectacle of his pullover cuffs, dabbling in the pool of tomato ketchup that occupied half of his oval platter.

‘They do provide forks, you know,’ said Juniper. She still couldn’t decide which was worse; watching him eat, or averting her eyes but
knowing
what he was doing.

‘Forks for forking. Issat what you mean? Her, her, her, her.’ It was appropriate that the sound of the cunt comic’s guffaws should be so gender-specific.

‘Look, Razza, we’re here to do an interview, so let’s talk about your comedy, shall we, and not my sex-life.’

‘Yeah, all right, but y’know, they’re…they’re sort of, umm. I mean…right, I make cunt jokes right? And, like, well, you’ve…you’ve got a…’

‘A cunt, yes. So, what of it?’ But then it dawned on Juniper what the runtish jester was aiming at. ‘Oh, I see. You mean to say that there is an inextricable relationship between the very
fact
of my genitals, and the
fact
of your comedy. And that furthermore the telling of cunt jokes, whatever their nature or provenance, is a valid cultural pursuit because it helps to reify something that otherwise would be entirely vitiated by the phallocentric discourse? Is that it?’

‘Well, er, yeah, sort of.’ Razza Rob looked around the steak house balefully. No matter what kind of crudities he flung at this woman, they bounced off her. Then she grabbed them out of the air and incorporated them into this ghastly spiel. Parts of which she kept breaking off from eating in order to scribble down in her notebook.

Juniper had been disappointed by Razza Rob, but not half as disappointed as he had been by her. Felix Brownlow, Razza’s agent, had told him, ‘Just chuck more cunt jokes at ’em. Specially if they’re women. Women, deep down, can’t stand those cunt jokes. And women journalists hate them more than anything else. Remember that you’re meant to be controversial. Remember that, Razza. The more people you upset the better.’

But Juniper wasn’t about to be upset by a squitty little mortgage broker from Grays Thurrock, especially one who insisted on being interviewed in a steak house on the Mile End Road. Not now she was the cabaret editor of London’s bestselling listings magazine,
Get Out!
No, she was going to take this dross and transmute it into gold. She’d even flatter the little jerk to do it. If she had to, that is.

Razza tried another conversational gambit. ‘Doncha’ wanna know why women have legs?’

Bull faced Alan across the Crystal of Nargon table. Beneath its glass surface little televisual pellets plunged in furious, colourful trajectories towards electronic oblivion. It was the only table the couple could find in the main bar of the De La Warr Pavilion. The others were all packed. There was a convention being held in the vast Modernist building, and the conventioneers thronged its flight-deck landings. They stood in staring lines, their faces turned to the sea, their gaze blank against the windscreen windows. Both Bull and Alan felt conspicuous without plastic name-bages. Both of them were drinking the indifferent local bitter. Both of them were in lust again.

‘I’m not sure I can take much more of this.’ Alan’s hand (fine and tapering, as has been remarked before) shook something fierce. Beer sloshed on to the games
table and temporarily provided the Crystal of Nargon with another not-so-special effect. ‘I feel really guilty about it all. I’m deceiving my wife, I’m in breach of the medical ethics I’m sworn to uphold and most importantly I’m using you…’

‘…Using me? Whaddya mean, using me?’ Bull was querulous once more. He had had to wait half an hour before Alan turned up. Just enough time for him to put away a couple more pints to add to the couple he had downed with his team mates after the match. Bull was tipsy enough to feel assertive. Now he didn’t even wait for Alan to reply. He upped and offed to the gents, guiding his big sportsman’s body through the archipelago of tables as if it were an autonomous drunk person that he was escorting.

In the gents Bull took out his stubby cock and peed hard, peed like a fireman hosing a chemical incident with fuzzy foam. And as he peed he regarded his original genitals. Regarded them with the puzzled stare of a stranger. Why, I can’t say I’ve really paid much attention to these recently. And he emphasised the ‘these’ by shaking himself dry and repocketing the limp assemblage. And it was true. Ever since his startling metamorphosis Bull had all but forgotten about his most obvious masculine attribute.

True, when he had made love with Alan there had been a cock-rubbing aspect to the whole thing, but it was purely secondary to the fact of penetration. It was as if his penis had gracefully stepped aside, like a retiring
diva introducing her successor to the adoring audience at La Scala. Together they sang one final aria, before the older woman bowed out.

Oh Christ. What if my cock and balls were to wither up and drop off, thought Bull, splashing his anxious countenance with tepid water. He had seen something of the sort happen when sheep were castrated. A gadget put a tight rubber band around the base of the scrotal sac. In time the sac blackened and then simply fell off. I shouldn’t want that… The beer in his brain kept him buoyant, able to contemplate the most horrible involutions of his gender with a certain archness. He returned to where Alan sat, and the tipsiness easily shifted gear back to a tingling lust.

Alan looked up, hooking his lank hair behind his ears. His face was tense with contemplating the awful truth that they had to, just
had
to deal with. Gone was the
Übermensch
who had so cheerfully powered his way to Wincanton; gone was Sybil’s lover; gone was the Good Doctor, the prebendary saint. Alan was thinking of going to the head of his practice, old Dr Fortis, and confessing the lot. A GP as old as Fortis would have seen myriad odd things in his time. Bull’s vagina and Alan’s response to it. His breach of professional ethics. It couldn’t be the oddest thing that he’d ever heard of…could it?

Perhaps he would then have to go with Fortis and see some higher authorities. Certainly the senior administrator and perhaps even the Minister herself. Alan accepted that he would be unable to practise at the
Grove any more, and that his chances of promotion were likely to be annihilated. But need it necessarily be the end of his career? For heaven’s sake, these were the nineties, not the twenties. People were far more understanding nowadays of the weaknesses of the flesh. Perhaps he would be allowed to move away quietly. Naturally Naomi would have to be told everything, but she was an enlightened woman. She campaigned for homosexual rights…perhaps the revelation of his conduct with Bull would be just what was needed to revive their own flagging, emphatically marital sex-life?

But then Bull’s freckled face appeared once more on the other side of the electronic games table. It was reddened by beer and had that underlying vascular dilation that comes either from exercise, or from its anticipation. Clapping eyes on him was just like clapping hands on him. And once again Alan felt the raw erotic edge of the forbidden. He remembered the stiff and complex sexiness of his last coupling with Bull. His resolution was abandoned. It bent, buckled, shrank and then melted, like a crisp packet chucked on a fire.

Within the half hour the two men were embracing in room five of the Ancaster Guest House, prop. Mrs Turvey. Mrs Turvey had been surprised by Bull’s early return from the De La Warr Pavilion. She had tagged him, rightly, as a rugby player, and assumed that he would be out on the piss until the small hours. She was surprised, and a little suspicious as well, at the sight of Alan, who certainly
didn’t
look like a rugby player. But
she was reassured when the two men asked if she had a pack of cards that they could borrow. She did. And a cribbage board. They seemed very pleased—and so was she. In twenty years of keeping the guest house, Mrs Turvey had never known anybody who played cribbage to be involved in immoral goings on.

So it was that the long weekend passed. By day Bull played rugby. By night he made love with Alan. And in the small hours Alan drove his large black car back across the blackened countryside of southern England to Wincanton.

Alan’s dark and handsome face became still darker. Violet shadows appeared under his fine eyes. The stress was getting to him, but he just couldn’t stop.

On Saturday evening they met in the snug of the Old Ship on the seafront at Brighton. As Alan came in Bull was shamelessly blubbing into a schooner of sherry. It took twenty minutes for Alan to get the story out of him.

‘The game was going brilliantly. Dave Gillis had scored twice straight from the line out and we’d picked up a couple of other tries by sheer hard rucking. I just wasn’t thinking, I suppose. I’d been late into the dressing-room, I couldn’t find the ground. All the rest of the team were there already. I suppose I didn’t take enough care with my knee protector…’

They had scrummed down. Bull had felt the hard
head of Gillis the lock forward ram against his hip; he then heard an audible ‘oomph’ as Masher Morton, the Wanderers’ number eight, plunged his head between the hard haunches of the two locks. Sixteen men strained together, sixteen pairs of eyes searched the turf, waiting for the scrum half to feed the ball in, thirty-two boots twitched with anticipation, waiting to delve and hack.

‘It was awful, Alan. I’d never thought about it before. I’d never seen the scrum for what it was: a sexual thing. I mean all those men, hugging each other, straining together. And then the ball being shoved in, like a… like a…’ Bull couldn’t get the words out but Alan caught his drift. ‘…Anyway, when the ball came in it fell straight at my feet. I hooked hard for it with my right boot, and just then I felt my knee protector slipping…’

Bull had looked down horrified. His extra jock-strap was lying in the mud. His kneepit was completely exposed. Caught like that, in the scrum, he was utterly unable to move. He was, however, able to look back and catch sight of the appalled face of Masher Morton, the Wanderers’ number eight. There was no need for Bull to even speculate as to what it was that Masher had seen.

‘So what did you do?’ Alan asked breathlessly. ‘What could I do.’ Bull snapped. It was clear to Alan that Bull felt a measure of the blame was his. ‘I had to get the jockstrap and the knee protector back on and play out the rest of the game.’

‘But what about Morton? Didn’t he say anything?’

And there was the good fortune in the whole story.
Morton was a boozer. In fact he was the Wanderers’ principal boozer. Prone to mixing his drinks into dreadful gut-curdling combinations: port and gin; bourbon and vermouth; beer and Polish spirit. Morton had seen Bull’s vagina. Seen it as clearly as he saw the ball. But then he had also seen a werewolf stealing his underwear in the small hours of that morning. Morton was shaken. He retired to the dressing-room to contemplate abstinence.

When the rest of the Wanderers joined him in the plunge bath after the match, there was much goodnatured badinage. ‘Masher says he saw a cunt on the back of John’s leg! Ha, ha, ha!’ ‘One over the eighty last night, eh Masher!’ ‘Show us yer oyster bed then, John me old darling!’ And much other ribaldry as well. Bull had escaped, shaken, but his secret intact.

‘I’m not sure that I’ll be able to play tomorrow. They may remember. They’ve been asking me why I don’t stick around in the evenings. It’s not like me, you see. I’m normally really cheerful. I normally go out and socialise with them.’

But that wasn’t all. And as Alan teased the rest of Bull’s sorry story out of him, he was aware of how like his marriage his relationship with Bull was already becoming. For it was the same when something happened to upset Naomi. Alan would have to spend a long time getting her confidence, making the right sympathetic noises, before eventually she would tell him what little slight, what small contretemps during the day, had made her so weepy.

‘It was a shitty day.’ Bull was still blubbing; the snotty sheen on his upper lip was unattractive, as were his reddened, piggy little eyes. ‘After you left this morning I called a girlfriend of mine in London. I’d made a tentative plan to go out with her this evening…’

‘…And she wouldn’t?’ Alan couldn’t help snapping. Bull came back hard. ‘What are you saying? That a woman wouldn’t find me attractive. Is that what you’re saying?’

‘Now calm down, John. Of course I’m saying nothing of the sort. But you have to get all of this in proportion, don’t you.’

‘Anyway. I suppose I may as well tell you. After all, I’ve nobody else…’

Bull went on and told Alan how Juniper had not only rejected him, but how she had also, far from inadvertently, let slip the fact that she had taken Bull’s job. In fact she intimated to Bull that it was due to her intervention that Bull had been fired. Bull was gutted. But Alan wasn’t paying attention to what Bull said about Juniper; about the job; about their frenzied floor-bound couplings; about Juniper’s silly views, her patronage of Razza Rob. Alan had picked up on something else altogether. Something that Bull was wholly unaware of having said: ‘After all, I’ve nobody else.’

This was what stuck with Alan. And stayed with him as, in the small hours, he headed fast along the coast road, en route for Southampton. For he knew it to be true. Bull had told him of parents who had moved out to
Portugal to spend their retirement golfing on the Algarve. And how his father had met his end climbing out of a golf buggy one day. He had tripped, rolled across the immaculate sward of a steeply raked green, and died, choleric and twitching, in a bunker. Bull had little contact with his mother, who had married the club chairman. There were no Bull siblings.

‘It’s my word against his.’ That’s what Alan kept thinking. He beat out the words in time with his fine finger-flicks against the black leatherette cover of the steering wheel. ‘That’s all there is to it: my word against his. If he says I did it I can simply deny it. Why need an
Übermensch
be destroyed by fate in this fashion? I must rise above it, master it.’

And although he lay once more with Bull the next night at the Crown Hotel in Shoreham, Alan’s mind was elsewhere. And when they parted and headed back to London separately the following day, Alan had no intention of ever seeing Bull again. And even if he were to feel a poignant pang, no, a multitude of poignant pangs, each time he passed a sports shop, or a playing field, or saw a child on its way home from school, duffel bag bulging with soiled kit, he would not relent. Alan saw his lust for what it was: a closet queen, parading in the assumed pasteboard finery of love.