Cock and Bull (7 page)

THERE IS A CERTAIN kind of off-licence, which although always absolutely and spotlessly clean, is nonetheless ever saturated with coils of cigarette smoke that hang around the interior, as stiff and desiccated as dried dog turds. In such establishments the proprietor is invariably to be found behind the cash register, ram-rod straight, fag fuming in face, and perhaps the corpse of its predecessor still smoking in the tin ashtray on the counter.

These offie proprietors are more often than not cardigan wearers, hair slickers, Fellows of the Ancient Antediluvian Order of Buffalos. They are men of a certain gravitas, usually with a half-hunter for any occasion that promises to be waistcoated. Years of Remembrance Sunday parades have left these men with a straight bearing; on the other hand, years of envy and resentment have almost certainly rounded their shoulders. Latterly, years of Lamot tend to have exploded mines of capillaries across their faces, faces that are frequently tensed up like clenched fists with aching disapproval.

You always take these men for the Proprietor—they look so proprietorial. Indeed that is their aim. They want
you to forget the name of the chain above the shopfront and make the profound mistake of enquiring after business.

A selection of unfortunate entrées might be:

And so on. The fag never leaves the mouth, the hand stays on the counter. The mouth opens and out comes a flat, weary litany of dissatisfaction.

Such an off-licence was Dan and Carol’s local. The manager, a Mr Wiggins, and his wife, also called Carol (let’s call her ‘Ur-Carol’ to distinguish her from Our Carol), were always firm allies in Dan’s fight to consume.

Ted Wiggins would even step down from the dais of his cash register to hold the door open so that Dan or Carol could stagger through, laden with characteristic blue and silver canisters that contained their favourite brew. More often than not, Gary, Barry, Gerry, Derry or Dave 1 would accompany Dan to Wiggins’s off-licence; and on these occasions half bottles of Dewars or White Horse might be purchased.

In addition to the normal range, the Wigginses also had a large selection of the cheaper bevvies on the market. These were products specially packaged— indeed branded—for alcoholics: syrupy beers, brewed in the vast steel vats of the East Midlands; re-labelled Philippino cooking sherries; toxically war-damaged
Yugoslavian Riesling and various other sweet wines from sour places.

This sector of the sanitised emporium was Ur-Carol’s concern; indeed her domain. Ted was on his dais, Ur-Carol behind an unpainted, but spotless, plywood door. Whenever anyone strayed into that part of the off-licence, Ur-Carol would emerge from the door, looking for all the world like the plastic dog on the collecting box Ted kept by the till, going after its 2p offering. Shabby alcoholics, no matter how dirty, ravaged or potentially violent, she barred with absolute firmness: ‘Get out! You’re barred from these premises,’ she would shrill. ‘If I see you around this area again I’ll call the police, now bugger off!’ It always seemed likely that she might add to this: ‘This is a respectable neighbourhood.’ She was that sort of a woman.

But in truth, no part of London is entirely respectable. And even here, high on a hill, among the Edwardian villas with their snot-coloured masonry and their monkey puzzle trees, came filtering gyppos, tinkers, tramps and worse. Unspeakable travelling men wearing two donkey jackets and boots lashed in place with nylon towrope. Young men reared on morning glory seeds and regular inhalations of EvoStick, who had managed to reach maturity with huge lacunae in their minds. They parked their moribund buses and leper wagons on a piece of waste ground by the abandoned railway line and sought out the lager of Lamot. They were barred.

But on the other hand anyone who looked even
superficially respectable to Ur-Carol was welcomed with folded arms and remorseless chatter which issued forth in a flat drone from between yellow dentures.

Dan had long since joined Ur-Carol’s temple of low-rent sedation. Many times she had thought to herself how much she liked a young man who had diverse tastes, for Dan would drink anything, he would go all the way from Château Haut Brion to Emu Export and back again. So it was that after three whole days had passed without seeing him, Ur-Carol went so far as to voice concern:

‘Father,’ she said, ‘that nice young designer boy hasn’t been in for a while.’ (She always addressed Ted Wiggins as ‘Father’, although in truth, the only creature they had ever managed to nurture was a yapping Yorkshire terrier that frequently bemerded the spotless linoleum.) Wiggins grunted non-committally. Like so many of his co-cardigan wearers Ted Wiggins couldn’t have given a dollop of trappist’s toss fluid for Dan, but he
would
have given a whole gross of packets of tortilla chips to shag the arse off his young and slim wife.

Carol could do that to a man. As I have said before she had the kind of cramped, mean, English provincial prettiness that could encourage even a buffalo as long in the tooth as Ted Wiggins to dare imagine that he might place his scrawny shanks inside her scrawny shanks.

But Ur-Carol’s concern at the disappearance of Dan and her namesake was far more straightforward still. In an
area where fading gentility segued with the new health consciousness, the Dans of this world were easily her best customers. Give Ur-Carol an alcoholic in a pac-a-mac, a Gannex raincoat, even a herringbone crombie, and she’d be happy for months. She was like an old junkie, or a withered procuress, coaxing on these sherry-drinking widows and wine-supping travel-agency clerks. Dan had been her most promising protégé.

After about a fortnight, Carol passed the off-licence, seemingly by chance, and was snagged in by Ted Wiggins. ‘Haven’t seen you in ages,’ he shouted at her through the half open, sticker-laden door, so anxious was he to detain this vision in a
Mail on Sunday
Readers’ Offer raincoat. She came in, slightly, and explained what had happened. Ur-Carol emerged from behind her plywood door and, advancing as far as the circular niblets merchandising display in the centre of the shop—the outermost limit of her fiefdom—she tut-tutted as Carol told them both that Dan had become a member of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Ur-Carol knew all about AA. But she regarded it purely as a competitor, paying no heed at all to its dogma. As far as Ur-Carol was concerned, AA grabbed away thirsty throats, throats that needed and deserved to be slaked.

So Ur-Carol kept her thin lips zipped up and our Carol went away. But Ur-Carol knew that they would both be back. She twisted the copper bracelet around her lolly-stick wrist and willed it.

So it was no wonder that Carol chose the Wigginses’ off-licence as the logical place to seek out the lager of Lamot. Just going there, walking along Fortune Green Road to the head of the parade of shops leading to the Quadrant, was second nature to her after living in Muswell Hill for two years. And when she got to the boozers’ bureau it was the same as ever, occupying the very prong position, with glass frontage extending down both boulevards.

On this occasion, as Carol entered through the door on one side of the shop, her namesake exited from the other in hot pursuit of one of the mutant waste boys. ‘You’re barred!’ screeched the harridan. ‘Don’t come back here again, if I even see you in the neighbourhood I’ll call the police!’ The mutant boy staggered on the pavement and regarded her with a fuzzy expression, which resolved itself within seconds into a visage of brutal irresponsibility. Ur-Carol had caught him off guard and hustled him out the door. He now managed to compose himself and with great deliberation his hand went to his fly.

Carol meanwhile stood alongside Ted Wiggins. Both of them were transfixed, viewing the action framed by the plate glass window as if it were being projected from behind them and they had paid to see it.

Although only newly accustomed to casually leaning side-on to a counter and hooking a hand into her jeans’ pocket, Carol had graduated with commendable speed to using her fingers as an instrument with
which to stroke, tug and generally hang on to her penis.

Men like to do that, don’t they? They like to hang on. It’s like genital thumb-sucking. Stroking the old todge in its 65% cotton housing doesn’t really produce a sexual feeling, it’s more like keeping the sensual rev counter at a steady 10,000 revs. But somehow or other, Ted Wiggins sensed Carol’s arousal, an arousal that crept up the dial as the convoy man confronting Ur-Carol Wiggins pulled out his pride—a queer thing with a shaft as long and shiny as the ferrule of an alpenstock—and steamily pissed on the autumn pavement.

Wiggins used the distraction. Forever after he couldn’t say exactly
why
he did it. All right, he’d been known to grope the odd woman, servitors or foreigners usually, but he didn’t consider himself to be a molester in the proper sense, just an enthusiast. But perhaps he despaired. Despaired on realising that he would never provoke a sexual response from Carol, that he wasn’t even as much of a turn-on as this perverse spectacle. And anyway, since the spectacle was afforded courtesy of the enterprise he commanded, perhaps he concluded that he too was entitled to a share of the dividend.

He stepped down from his dais and sidled up behind Carol. Outside, there was no dénouement in sight. Far from being intimidated or repulsed by the spluttering spout, Ur-Carol was pouring on more invective. The bemused wild man staggered and righted himself under her verbal strafing, but not before an arc of toxic pee
had flown across both the shop window and his own trousers.

From behind Ted Wiggins gently inserted his hand between the warm denim tubes that sheathed Carol’s upper thighs. He froze, in his mind’s eye seeing the bench passing sentence, and then reached up and grabbed at Carol’s penis…

Wiggins had intended to lurch into her at the same time and then claim that it was an accident—that he had cannoned into her out of desperation to reach the unfolding action in the street. But what happened next was determined entirely by Carol and her quickening reflexes. Sensing her penis under threat, Carol grabbed a bottle of Emva Cream that one of the fuddled pac-a-mac brigade had left on the counter, and, whirling round, she dealt Ted Wiggins a glancing blow on the side of the head. Such was the force of the blow that the follow-through took the bottle on to the steel casing of the sacred cash register, where it gloriously shattered.

You might have thought that this explosive and sticky incident would have sent Carol scampering out of the door of the shop, while Wiggins was still lying dazed on the lino, scampi fries rustling down about his ears. But no. Carol felt an access of phlegm so palpable that she almost harrumphed—and stood her ground. The shattering bottle, clearly audible outside, had given the wild man the opportunity to wrench himself away and head off, skittering and batting against parked cars, towards Ally Pally. Ur-Carol shot back inside the shop.

‘What the fuck’s going on?’ she exclaimed, seeing her brilliant(ined) husband felled.

‘He just tripped right over the counter trying to get to you…’ explained Carol, trying desperately to inject a note of shock into what she was saying. They both stood and stared at Wiggins as, slowly, he struggled to his knees and shook his head like an old sheepdog.

The two Carols met each other’s level stares over the collapsed spine of the tedious vintner, and there was great complicity in that eye contact—which meant that Carol’s version of events was logged and not disputed by any of the parties involved. Not disputed at the time, that is.

‘Oooergh. Fuck,’ said Wiggins—he was clearly fine. During the Second War an entire case of Klim had fallen on his head while he was posted to guard a NAAFI storage dump at Acton. Ted Wiggins had barely stopped smoking for thirty seconds: the Wigginses were a thick-skulled breed.

When he was recovered enough to stand, Ur-Carol sent him off with an anaemic shopgirl from next door to get the wound dressed at the Whittington. Ur-Carol would, of course, have gone herself, but she had to mind the shop.

It’s lucky that Ur-Carol did stick around, because once Ted was gone she made one of the great sales of her life. Carol flitted across the linoleum checkerboard from one glass side of the shop to the other, hands dipping down and diving up to reach out bottles and cans. On
the wide counter—which was still being mopped and doused with Flash to eliminate the sweet smell of Carol’s violent success—she ranked them in an orderly phalanx: first the Pilsners, Czechoslovakian, German, Austrian and the domestically brewed varieties; then the esoterica: Elephant from Denmark, Wildebeeste from the Republic of South Africa, Simpatico and Sol from down Mexico way; some Nigerian Gulder, a few high-waisted silvery cans of Japanese Sapporo; Carol even picked out a four-pack of a very obscure beer called Black Mambo, brewed in Mauretania, which no one, to Ur-Carol’s knowledge, had ever bought before. On top of the esoterica Carol piled a squat pyramid of products whose branding aimed them at that tight sector of society between early adopters, ethnic minorities and rank piss-artists. The beers in this section were sickly sweet and double strength, they had names like ‘Radical Stout’ and ‘Safe Haven’. Carol knew that Dan was a particular fan of one called ‘Premier Class’. This came in a burnished copper can with a baroque coat of arms emblazoned right the way round the can. Below this was the motto of the English royal house: ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’. Before you think it, let me trouble to reassure you that the irony of this was lost entirely on its brewer.

After the esoterica and the poor people’s liquid sedatives, Carol moved back to more familiar ground— taking a swing through that fictitious Asgard that must provide the provenance for the nomenclature so beloved by the East Midlands breweries’ marketing men. From
this branding zone Carol pulled out green cans of Odin, fiery orange cans of Wotan, the iridescent mauve bottles of Brunnhilde Brew, a plastic demijohn of Loki Lager and—naturally—plenty of the lager of Lamot.