Cock and Bull Read Free

social observers to tear away the moulded panels of his accent, in order to reveal the very chassis of his diction. Which had
perhaps been spot-welded by elocution lessons, some forty years before.
    From where I sat I could watch the sun, which, in sinking, touched the edge of the Number Three cooling tower at Didcot Power Station. This rose up, over the rape, like some malevolent piece of statuary—an Easter Island god—in all its monumental bulk, evidence of some sterile and unproductive culture. The don sat in silence, his plump little arms folded.
    I don’t know why; I have no explanation for what I did next. I certainly had no liking for the don’s story, but perhaps I felt like a disappointed cinemagoer— having paid for my ticket I’d be buggered if I was going to walk out of the film. If I couldn’t have less, I would make do with more. You can see therefore, how the copula naturally insinuated itself, so:
    ‘And…?’
I ventured after some time.
    ‘What!’
He started.
    ‘And—having cornered her suspect?’
What a fool! I wilfully goaded him. He thrashed at the cue, a small seal with a large fish.
    ‘Her suspect…? Oh yes, I’m sorry, I went into a kind of reverie just then, it comes upon me unexpectedly. Just as it did then—when I am in full flood…’
And he was off again, the train jerked into motion and the don and I were utterly alone, yellow-islanded by low wattage in the jolting darkness.
    ‘I don’t know what it is,’
he continued. His little hands held either side of his head, as if they were contacts between which the current of thought leapt and fizzed.
‘A lapse, afugue, a thought jamming and sparking like a severed high-tension cable between the two lobes…’
    Dan, then…Dan had always drunk and always got drunk. It was just another of those things that in the beginning had made him endearing to Carol. He lost himself charmingly and entirely, like a Dervish in a whirl or a swami in a trance, and then he would recover himself the next morning at breakfast, pulling on his identity like a woolly.
    ‘I really tied one on last night,’ he’d say, mockshamefaced, his deft fingers tucked away in the tops of his jeans pockets, his hair all tousled. ‘What! Doncha remember what happened?’ And whichever of Dan’s floating crowd of mates had happened to be along on this particular crawl would recount its dénouement. ‘You were standing by the rack, right on the bloody forecourt of the garage, man! And you’d grabbed one of those big two-litre cans of oil. You kept shouting…’
    ‘Come over here and get greased…yeah, I know.’ Dan would break in in tones of genuine remorse, the one acute phrase somehow surfacing out of the sewage morass that was his memory of the previous night.
    To begin with, Carol not only tolerated, she even welcomed, the mates. ‘Mates’ who were elements of Dan’s Stourbridge boozing set, now transplanted to London. Mates, who for convenience’s sake we shallcall: Gary, Barry, Gerry, Derry and Dave 1 (Dave 1 because Dave 2 comes later). On most evenings Carol counted them all out of the flat and, five or six hours later, counted them back in again. And in the morning, when Barry lay, his fat freckled forearms slapped down on the flower-patterned spare duvet, and raw, yellow callused feet sticking out over the end of the spare futon divan bed, Carol would wish him a cheerful ‘good morning’ and bring him a mug of tea. Then she would cook Barry (or Gary, Gerry, Derry, Dave 1—she was quite fair) an enormous fry-up. Bacon, eggs and sausages with all the trimmings, including black pudding, for which they had all gained a taste in the Midlands. Some way through the breakfast ritual Dan would make the kind of appearance I have described above.
    But then, somehow, Carol lost patience. Either that, or the character of Dan’s boozing sessions with his mates changed. It was difficult to say which came first. Naturally, this very issue was the grist of