Cock and Bull

Cock and Bull by Will Self Page B

Book: Cock and Bull by Will Self Read Free Book Online
Authors: Will Self
Tags: Fiction
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that much reaction (and in truth Carol’s orgasm had been a muted tea-break affair) assaulted his passivity.
    And now he was in recovery, instead of resolving to ‘talk through’ his relationship with Carol, to ‘openly and honestly’ share his feelings with her, Dan was caught up on an almost continual basis in the most insipid of sexual fantasies. What he really wanted was to be gently wanked off, with a warm towel, by his female, emotionally inadequate counterpart. She wouldn’t even have to take her clothes off to arouse him. To give Dan credit, he beamed this fantasy at all the women in the AA group(even the quasi-bag lady with her formaldehyde face), and sensing it, they ever so quietly drew away and avoided him.
    It’s lucky that Carol had taken the precaution of obtaining some cantharides; without them the evening might have been a dead loss. The man in the tight T-shirt in the shop where she had bought them had looked down the sides of his moustache at Carol. He rippled his pecs, as if he were about to start breast feeding her with testosterone and admonished her quite severely against giving him more than one. But looking at Dan again, from the vantage point of her own self-erecting scaffold, Carol was acutely aware of his flabby aura. While he went for a wash she crumbled two of the golden bugs into his Coke. They were funny little things, dry and desiccated, but golden red in colour, their wings and legs tightly folded into the body, as if they had arranged themselves on purpose for an eternal internment in some insectoid mausoleum. Instead, their heads, thoraxes and abdomens were pulverised by Carol’s fingers. Dan came back from his wash and went on swigging the coke. He was thirsty, he had beaten balls with Barry after work.
    They ate the steak, the sautéed potatoes and the green salad in silence. A candle burned down between them, timing their failure to communicate. Dan didn’t so much as glance into Carol’s (admittedly meagre) décolletage. Instead he read a copy of
Design Week,
paying more attention to the pictures than the words. Carol didn’t mind, she was no conversationalist herself. She sat andmasticated forty times before each swallow, and wondered what would happen next.
    In truth she too was preoccupied, preoccupied by her penis. The afternoon’s wanking had left her feeling bruised, numb. But now the blood started to beat up again. Carol was wearing quite tight satin knickers, but even so she could feel her pole stirring, attempting to tent the restraining fabric. On more than one occasion, as she was cooking the dinner, Carol had to turn away, lest Dan see something he shouldn’t. And even when the todger wasn’t seeking the light, Carol was visited by shocked intimations of its very furled quietude. But that’s what it’s like when you’ve got a John Thomas, isn’t it? I mean to say that there are times when, even as a career-man, one double-takes on its very existence. They go so quiet don’t they, curled up in their little cotton burrow, that one forgets them—and then remembers, what a revelation! A continual revelation, a never-ending story!
    Carol had over-salted the potatoes and over-salted the salad dressing. She got her result towards the end of the meal. Dan looked up from his magazine and flicked back his forelock: ‘Blimey I’m thirsty,’ he said, ‘I could really use another Coke.’
    ‘Sorry love,’ Carol replied. ‘That was the last one.’ And then entirely innocently, just as if it were an odd afterthought, she said, ‘How about a beer?’
    Dan stared at her. And then stared at her again. It was that quiet in the kitchenette that you could have heard a cock crow a mile off.
    ‘You know I can’t have a beer, Carol. And you know why.’ His voice wasn’t rancorous, and that was a good sign, rather it was weary.
    ‘Yeah, yeah, sorry, I was forgetting, just for a moment. Anyway I thought just the one…perhaps it wouldn’t matter?’
    Ohhh… She was

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