Cock and Bull by Will Self Read Free Book Online Page A

conduit to direct them into the corpuscular circulation of society, while the current was on they flew like filings towards the healing magnet.
    Each evening at their respective meetings Carol and Dave blossomed and then they raced home to receive a little Potterton-side sermon from Dave 2, who would depart punctually at 11.10 pm to get the last 114 bus heading north into the fastness of Friern Barnet, where he had a little quasi-serviced flatlet.
    They hardly had time to nauseate one another. Padding passers-by in the alcove by the bathroom, bath-robed like Rock Hudson and Doris Day, their lips were sealed. I could almost say that Carol didn’t have time to examine the gristly frond. I could almost say that, and I know that in a way, despite your enquiring fucking mind, you’d rather like me to do that,
n’est ce pas
? But you would also know I was lying, wooden d’jew? Of course Carol had time, no, took time to check out that little priser. Because that’s what it was, a little priser. At odd moments she could feel it prising her apart below; sitting in the group listening to someone share, or else standing at the library counter, crotch bumping against the veneer slab, which, peeling away from its restraining rivet, clacked mournfully.
    And how could we forget pissing and shitting? We mustn’t forget those. Sometimes
I
feel that my body is nothing but one enormous, snaking bowel, stuffed full of ordure and but thinly covered with skin. Nietzsche, youknow, suffered agonies on the toilet. In
Ecce Homo
he damns the Germans for their beer and sausage, bum-concretising cuisine. Like Gogol, another neuro-neuter, he roamed the cities of Northern Italy, seeking digestive relief in huge antacid bowls of pasta.
    I digress. On the toilet then, Carol’s usual sense of micturation was muted, she felt the stream somehow tramelled—funnelled externally. Looking down she would catch sight of a bead of flesh and set into it a bead of urine. Then Carol’s fingers would brush and freeze as if skewered, on confirming the testimony of her eyes: it was
still there.
And now poking forward, out from the lips. She could hardly bear to encompass it with shaking thumb and forefinger. She could see herself, outlined in avocado, framed in the half-length mirror over the sink. Legs akimbo, underclothes like twisted fan belts between her splayed shanks, she sweated and twisted on her plastic horseshoe of a torture throne.
    But grasp it she did. And feeling the, by now, wormlet of flesh and gristle between her fingers did something to her. On the one hand it hardened an awful bone of knowledge, a hard white femur or tibia torn from a pirate flag and shoved through her life, cutting her out from the herd, along with her secret. (Although it can be said with certainty that, as yet, Carol did not view this secret as having any greater import or connotation of the bizarre than an adulterous liaison or a dumped foetus.) But on the other hand, or
in
the other hand, the wormlet was there. It was, as it were, accomplished. And when,clothes still half off herself, she shiveringly, retchingly pulled it out and held it hard against the edge of a perspex six-inch ruler, the memory of capturing her brother Steven doing the same with his willy, some fifteen years before, came to her involuntarily. It wasn’t an inference that she could slap aside. The wormlet was clearly not that strange after all, it was something that she had had an acquaintance with before, albeit in quite a different context.
    ‘Monday, 9.45 am. Length: 7mm. Appearance: that of an extended clitoris, sac-like but containing an interior twistle of nerve-ending-packed gristle. Remarks: sort of a second fun button really.
    ‘Tuesday, 11.45 am. Length: 8.5mm. Appearance: as yesterday but more distended still, clearly poking out from the
labia minora
now. The wormlet seems to quest for the light, just as the clitoris above retreats under its fleshy hood. Remarks: the increment in length of