Cock and Bull by Will Self

meeting, sharing; in another she was retching over
it;
in a third she listened attentively to Dave 2 and in a fourth she was turning away from Dan. The Carol in the darkness, the ghost, as it were,
ex machina,
smiled and passed on.
    Carol was also getting more aggressive. When a plasterer set aside his hawk and praised her svelte figure —in demotic terms—as she passed along Fortune Green Road, she turned back and spat at him, ‘Shove it up your fucking arsehole,’ and walked on happy. Dan didn’t notice the change, in part simply because he was used to her. Habit is such a great canceller-out of any reflective thought and Dan was nothing if not a creature of habit— and anyway it had never really been Carol that he was married to, but a simulacrum of her, spun from his own fantastic mental projections and the accident of his mother’s indifference. (‘She’s just a little chit of a girl but frankly I don’t think he could do much better.’ Thishad been the Empress’s response to the news of Dan and Carol’s engagement.)
    Anyway, Dan found himself sober in the clean, cold light of day, and remembered that once upon a time, before Barry, Gary, Derry, Gerry, Dave 1 and he had taken to regularly seeking out the lager of Lamot, they had gained much pleasure from squash, and all the mateyish towel-flicking, play-fighting and Lucozade-swigging that had accompanied it.
    The first four days of sobriety had been sheer hell for Dan. He was so naive and ignorant that he had never known that you could have physical withdrawal symptoms from alcohol. The sweating, retching, and puking, together with the unsettling peripheral hallucinations, took him entirely by surprise. Carol reacted by exiling the sweating grub of his body to the futon divan. There he lay, storms of electrons coursing behind his narrow forehead. And as he tossed, he was subject to waking dreams in which odd sexual chimeras—women with testicles instead of eyes and men with vaginal ears—stood about, unconcerned, in a delusional lounge bar.
    On the fifth day he rose from the futon and went to work. Apart from an odd tingling around the tips of his fingers and toes—as if he were a quadra-amputee, afflicted with the ghost memory of limbs long gone— he felt nothing. Not even a bat’s squeak of a craving for alcohol beset Dan. He had handed over his will and his life to a power greater than himself. According to the AA credo the power did not have to be God, it could be anyforce greater than one’s self, provided that it was benign and transcendent rather than phenomenal and temporal. Unfortunately, although Dan did try awfully hard not to personify his higher power, occasionally, being a vengeful God, it would manifest itself; appearing in Dan’s mind’s eye in the form of a heavyset middle-aged woman eating Battenburg cake, a woman not unlike Dan’s mother.
    Another week came and went at Melrose Mansions.
It
grew. Carol and Dan continued on their divergent courses, meeting up only in the short period before their respective meetings; and then afterwards in order to harken once more unto Brother Dave.
    Dave 2, it needs to be said, was playing his own very particular game. For Dave 2 was a parasite of the emotions. Dave 2 could gain no direct pleasure from any intimate relationship, but rather, like some honey-sucking bird with an obscenely elongated bill, he gained an intense and even sweetly erotic pleasure from sucking out the juice from the private parts of other people’s entanglements. And so, to this end, he encouraged each half of any given couple to regard him as their supreme and absolute confidant. When this ideal situation was achieved, Dave 2 attained his own strange nirvana.
    But with Carol and Dan, things were proving a little tough. Sure, both of them were willing to confide in Dave 2, but the nature of their confidences was entirely unsatisfying. Both of them were vague about their resentments, hurts and passions. And the precise