Cock and Bull Read Online Free

to someone receiving a back-handed compliment. Dan’s mother went on. ‘I see my son is becoming an alcoholic. It doesn’t surprise me—it’s in the family. My father died on a mental ward. He had been a celebrated high court judge. He had what they called a “wet brain”.
    ‘The day he died I went to visit him. He was terribly thin and his eyes glittered. He grabbed my wrist and said,“D’ye see them?” “What?” said I. “The peacocks,” he said. “They are beautiful with their radiant plumage, but why does matron let them run about the ward, it can’t be hygienic.” He died an hour later. My son is the same, although I cannot imagine that he is sufficiently grandiose to hallucinate peacocks. There’s no reason for it, you see—it’s hereditary. Try and hold out, my dear, if he asks for it I’ll arrange for some help. But if things get too bad, my advice would be to leave him.’
    And with that she left herself. Heading back to Burford with all sorts of goodies she had tracked down in the West End. Goodies she hadn’t bothered to show Carol.
    It was two nights after her departure that Carol masturbated for the first time. It is true that she had been thinking about masturbation, albeit in a rather woolly way, for some time. But she hadn’t concretely imagined what it would be like, or indeed what she would have to do.
    Dan was out with Derry. They had heard about some pub on the Pentonville Road where a man had been killed the preceding weekend: this was their macabre excuse for an unseasonal Oktoberfest. ‘I shan’t expect you,’ said Carol, standing in her nightie and dressing-gown, unaware of cliché or irony. She retired to bed with a Jilly Cooper. In the book, a woman was wanked off with great expertise by a Venezuelan banker. Carol, who was no connoisseur, found the description exciting, and more importantly, technically illuminating. She putthe book aside. Her hand crawled down under the covers to the crackling hem of her nightie, and lifted it. Her fingers flowed up the smooth runnel between her thighs. She cupped her vulva and then kneaded it a little. One finger slipped inside the puckered lips and sought out the damp pit of her vagina.
    The access of power thrilled Carol to the tips of her carmined toenails. Of course she had been aware of the act, but the liberation from being climbed on board, or pummelled by Beverley’s exhausting manipulations, was ecstatic. Carol orgasmed within seconds, one finger on the slick dewlap of her clitoris, another inside herself. The
News at Ten
theme tune drummed a counterpoint to her subsiding sighs.
    This, then, was the pattern that they established: Dan went out drinking, and Carol, as soon as he was out of the way, treated herself to a really big wank. Over a period of some eight or ten weeks, she staged productions of a number of masturbatory playlets, all of her own devising. Her imagination wasn’t that fertile, but we mustn’t laugh at her legions of buck niggers, priapic and grinning; nor at her Latino playboys, who bore down on her riding foam-flecked polo ponies, and dismounted only to remount…Carol.
    How those fingers flew! And how Carol discovered herself; every millimetre of damp erogenous site was mapped out. How peculiar that Dan, with his deft hands, had never bothered to discover
this
spot, had never chanced to trail his fingers
here,
or
there
.
    One night Dan, Gary, Barry, Gerry, Derry and Dave 1 all took off for Ilford. Their goal was an enormous nightclub, famous for its ‘caged’ bar. This was mounted on concrete, enabling the young men and women who patronised it to reach fabulous levels of intoxication, and to indulge in commensurate behaviour without being able to trash, vandalise or
bemerde
. At dawn they were hosed down by thick-set men wearing dinner jackets.
    In Barry’s car on the way there, Dan was clearly troubled and more than usually silent. The others asked him what the problem was, but he wouldn’t reply. So,