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

1.5mm is not altogether credible. With such small increments we doubt the accuracy of the Oxford Geometry Kit six-inch perspex ruler.
    ‘Wednesday, 3.30 pm. (In the library toilet, hence the brevity of this entry) Length: 10mm. Appearance: repulsive, it has a little eye. Remarks: I feel sick, very sick.’
    Such might have been the entries if Carol had troubled to keep a written log detailing all the steps of its development. Of course she did no such thing. But strange to relate, within the context of her relationship with
it,
it was as if she had kept a matter-of-fact account.Moreover this strand of Carol’s character, the matter-of-fact, pragmatic, practical qualities—qualities one primary-school teacher had once reported that she possessed, but which, to my knowledge at least, she had never before exhibited—began to come to the fore in other ways as well.
    Dan was set to work to build a cabinet for the CD/video module. Carol went off on the Thursday morning after her first Al Anon meeting and purchased the required rivet gun and composite wood slabbing from a DIY superstore in Wood Green. Work was scheduled to commence on Saturday morning. On the same trip to Wood Green Carol did something else she had been meaning to do for a while. She signed up for a course of driving lessons.
    But Saturday came and as Dan outlined the shape of the cabinet on a sheet of tracing paper with a special pencil, Carol gibbered and cowered upstairs on her bed. A TV interview with Julio Iglesias’s father, a prominent Spanish gynaecologist, was the trigger point that set her off. She inadvertently opened her fly buttons and took
it
out. ‘Jesus Christ! I did that. I took
it
out!’ Awareness screamed. She retched and up came All Bran, an irregular and unscheduled appearance for this most regulatory of breakfast cereals. Carol staggered off the bed to find the security of the carpet.
It
was rasped against the thick denim of her jeans by the move, and imperceptibly — thank God, because personally I don’t think she could have taken much more at this stage—hardened.
    Despite her so recent distress, Carol was nonethelesstotally unresponsive to yet another nuzzling interception from Dan, as she crossed the living room en route for the kitchen. And she continued to keep his nose to the grindstone for the rest of the day. For, the separate compartments of Carol’s mind, which had always been strung out along a lurching, ill-lit corridor, had now begun to detach themselves from one another altogether. They were much like this compartment we are sitting in now. It is part of the train, yes, but we cannot access any other part of the train from it. And in that sense I suppose it isn’t part of the train at all…
    The don interleaved his plump little fingers and basketed a flannel knee as if well pleased with this piece of sophistry. Somehow I had failed to notice the pre-war rolling stock when I boarded the train. But what he said was true. The compartment was self-contained, with no access to the rest of the train. It belonged to an earlier age. An age when sexual assault was collectively believed to be something undertaken solely by those without the wherewithal to buy a train ticket. I wanted to discuss this oddity, this example of British Rail underfunding with the don, but he was off again.
    …Carol had always been subject to a time delay between emotional event and emotional response. Andtherein, of course, lay the essence of her neurosis. But however attenuated, the connection did always exist, and, if you like, her failure adequately to explain why such and such an event might make her cry, while another might make her angry, was a guarantee of her real stability.
    The proof of this assertion is in what began to happen to her next. With increased detachment came increased awareness. Carol flitted in the darkness along the gravelly grading, peeking into the lighted compartments of her mind. In one she saw herself at an Al Anon