Cock and Bull Read Online Free Page A

in lieu of sympathy they offered him Jack Daniels.
    At home meanwhile, behind drawn, patterned blinds, Carol was getting down to business. She undressed in the living room. She had discovered that the juxtaposition between her own nakedness and the room’s bland formality really excited her. And furthermore, by moving around the room she could catch sight of herself in numerous mirrors and glass surfaces that had been vigorously Mr Sheened.
    She undid her blouse and ran her hands over her nylon cones, seeking out the gap between breast and cuirass. She undid the buttons of her slacks and let them swish to the floor. She kicked herself free of them.
A Whiter Shade of Pale
oozed from the CD player, Carol’s hand slid under the waistband of her pants…
    * * *
    ‘Do you believe in horror?’ The direct question threw me out completely. I had been utterly absorbed, and, despite myself, a voyeuristic party to Carol’s onanism. Now the don had broken off, without warning or explanation.
    The train lurched and clattered over points, I could see the modern lines of Reading station swimming towards us out of the dusk. The don repeated his question:
‘Do you believe in horror?’
    I summoned myself:
‘Do you mean the occult? Beasts, demons, ghouls, table turning, that kind of thing?’
    ‘Oh no, not that at all.’
The train juddered to a halt. People in nylon windcheaters and off-the-peg suits dis- and embarked. But even this profoundly workaday sight somehow failed to rupture the thickening atmosphere in the compartment.
‘Oh no, not outlandish horror. That’s chickenfeed, mere persiflage. What I’m talking about here is
real
horror. The horror that shadows each and every aspect of the ordinary, just as surely as the darkness shadows that vending machine over there.’
He pointed at a vending machine that hung about in the shadows on the platform. A whistle rose and fell, the train jolted and moved off once more. The don shifted on his buttocks and leant forward, adopting a didactic, tutorial posture.
‘You know that poem of Roethke’s, how does it go? “All the nausea of brown envelopes and mucilage, Desolation in hygienic public places…”
    ‘No, no, that’s not
quite
it. But you know what I mean …’
His faced bulged at me, as synthetic as injection-moulded plastic.
‘That’s the horror that interests me, the horror that we all feel, left alone in a living-room, in the mid-afternoon, in the centre of a densely populated city… that horror.
    ‘There is that horror and its interaction with another horror. The bloody horror of gynaecological fact. Modern horror films are all blood and the membranous stria of bio-goo. But really they have simply rendered external what is at the very core of our dearest friends. They have just turned inside out the sock of feminine biology.
    ‘So, while you wait for what is going to happen next, prepare yourself for these two kinds of horror and unite them in your mind. Then you will be able to calmly assure yourself, that the muffled “bong” of that ultimately distressed spring, as you subside alongside Carol on to one of the pieces of her suite, really
is
a reptilian alien tentacle, lunging through the soft upholstery.’
    Carol’s hand travelled down, through her furze, doctored to a socially acceptable flying vee. Her pinkies scampered ahead to truffle in the gashed loam. But here, where Carol had tactilely surveyed every pore, set the theodolite of her hand on every mound, she found something new. Her fingertips just skated over her clitoris, tucked as it was under the hood formed by her inner labia, like a tree growing in a gulley.
    But en route to her vagina, in that place where there should have been nothing but slippery anticipation, thetipping deck before the sea, she found instead a tiny nodule, a little gristly frond of flesh.
    Of course, had Carol troubled to wield her hand mirror as she had been instructed, had she placed it where Dan’s mouth had so seldom