Cock and Bull by Will Self Page A

have a trompe l’oeil naked body printedon the front. But it couldn’t conceal the stiletto heels, or the sheer stockings. And it was so uncharacteristic. Not that Carol had ever neglected her marital duties, as far as
nettoyage
and cuisine was concerned. She was far too well acculturated even to consider not getting Dan his evening meal, however much she despised him. But the sexy trimmings and the obvious affection, now that was a surprise.
    ‘What’s up?’ asked Dan, sitting down to read the showbiz gossip in the
Standard
with a can of Coke from the fridge.
    ‘It’s our third anniversary, dummy,’ replied Carol, moving from stove, to fridge, to work surface in the steps of a solo waltz. ‘I thought we ought to celebrate.’
    ‘Whaddya mean anniversary? We were married in April—it’s now late September.’
    ‘No, not that anniversary, dummy, the anniversary of the night we met, the anniversary of the first night we… you know.’ Carol did her best to blush, but all it really amounted to was a beige tinge at the edges of her foundation.
    ‘Oh, oh, that.’ Dan was far better at it, he went puce to the roots.
    And of course, as we know, Dan’s macho bravado about sex, his ‘climbing on board’ and his former drunken rantings had all been show. In reality Dan was scared stiff of it. He feared that he didn’t have what it took to satisfy a woman. Every time he had climbed on board Carol, penetrated her, and then wetly withered,he had lain, feeling her hips dig into him, conscious of his dwindling virility. His whole cock area was plunged in the sensual equivalent of muzzy darkness. He had tried to pull his cock into attention by tensing and relaxing his pubic and buttock muscles, but they seemed connected to nothing. With his mind attuned to the mechanical, Dan pictured the muscles as steel hawsers, that should have been linked up to the motive force for the great battering ram, but instead had been hacked away at, until their frayed ends pulled on nothing.
    On occasion, although Carol had never seen fit to notice, Dan had leaked warm tears during this post-coital
tristesse
. He knew he ought to say something to Carol, to discuss frankly and openly the interface between his feelings and his penis. He had heard enough phone-in programmes to be familiar with the vocabulary, but he had never had the balls to do it. It was so much easier to sleep. And what if he could have got another erection? What would have come of it? Surely just another minute or so of pelvic bicycling on top of Carol’s wan form… to be followed by more spent impotence.
    And now that Dan was ‘in recovery’, as they said in Alcoholics Anonymous, his sexual feelings, if they can be dignified with that name, had taken a turn for the worse.
    Dave 2 had told Dan that he could expect to find himself feeling intensely vulnerable, childlike and sentimental, as the feelings he had repressed with alcohol came surging back. These would be the perfectly normal feelings he should have had in adolescence, but which hehad prematurely knocked down and dragged out of his psyche, with the assistance of the lager of Lamot.
    Dan’s sexual feelings had never been anything but intensely vulnerable, childlike and sentimental. That fabled coupling when he had accidentally sandpaper-stroked Carol into orgasm had almost scared the life out of him. Drunk as he was, the moans and cries shocked him into the peculiar sensation that his triple thrust had hurt her, damaged her soft internality. This sensation summoned up as well an awareness of his little penis as a hard tool, a bludgeon, a corrector.
    Dan recoiled from this; and this repulsion gives the lie to their true circumstance. You see, his relationship with Carol was a tragedy borne not of real circumstance necessarily, but of failure to communicate. What she could never have known was that after that night on the thin mattress in Stourbridge, Dan positively avoided the possibility of her orgasming; even