Cock and Bull Read Free Page B

their lease. Dan slept throughout —but a man who sleeps with his head lying on a phone table can never really sleep with a clean conscience.

3
Frond
    THE MORNING AFTER the night when Dan tried to memorise STD codes by pressing his cheek hard against the booklet for eight hours, he woke up groaning. ‘Gor…’ he exclaimed to a sunfilled kitchen, ‘I really tied one on last night.’ There was no one to answer. Beverley and Derek had gone and Gary had never returned. Dan found Carol upstairs, watching TV-AM in bed. He cursed, seeing how the hands stood on the little clock in the corner of the screen, but he was interrupted in mid-curse. The lining of his stomach had been saturated like a sponge with alcohol, and then compressed beneath the waistband of his jeans for eight hours. He just made it to the bathroom. Carol blocked out the sound of his retching by humming, and affected not to notice when he came nuzzling back to her and slid his thin head up under the bedcovers. ‘Jeez, I feel awful,’ he said, ‘just awful.’ And then he fell asleep. Carol waited half an hour and then she called his work.
    So began the era of the sick calls. With monstrous regularity, once, twice and even three times a week, Dan would fail to make it to work. From what snippets of information Carol could glean, Dan was no longer theblue-eyed boy at the design agency. They were only snippets because Dan was as unforthcoming about his work as he was his feelings. Carol knew better than to risk a direct question; that would just precipitate a retucking of those hospital corners and a bob-bob out the door by that by now lank and tired forelock.
    Along with absenteeism came more drinking. Carol found suspect bottles of sticky liqueur and smoky aquavit in odd places: under the sink, in a hollow pouffe, behind a ventilation grille. But the novelty of unearthing Sambucca from the sock drawer, or Poire Guillaume from the pelmet, soon palled.
    About this time, Dan’s mother came on a visit. She was a formidable woman in late middle age. Dan had been the child of her latter, inferior marriage. Before Dan’s father she had been married to a man who had made his fortune out of sherbet fountains. She was possessed of the pear-shaped figure that English women of a certain class and disposition inevitably acquire. And to go with it she had astonishing tubular legs, encased in nylon of a very particular caramel shade. The effect was one of kneelessness, tendonlessness—Dan’s mother’s legs, one felt, if cut into, would not bleed. They were somehow synthetic, plasticised.
    She stayed for four nights. Night One: Carol cooked chilli con carne and they drank a bottle of Matéus Rosé. Night Two: Carol made shepherd’s pie with the leftover mince and they drank an odd six-pack of Mackesons that Dan ‘found’ at the back of the fridge. Night Three: Carolmade lamb chops and they drank a bottle of Valpolicella. Actually, it was a two-litre bottle that Dan had brought home especially, and he did most of the drinking. His mother didn’t really seem to notice. On the fourth night Carol didn’t bother to cook. Dan, maddened, shouted at her right in front of his mother, as if it were her presence that gave him the licence to behave in this appalling fashion. He stormed out of the maisonette and came back banging, crashing and ultimately puking at four a.m.
    In the morning, before she left, Dan’s mother took Carol to one side. She hadn’t addressed Carol directly more than ten times during her entire stay.
    ‘You remind me of myself as a young woman,’ said Dan’s mother. Carol looked into the uttermost denseness of her rigid coif. ‘You’re quiet, but you’re not stupid.’ Carol stared fixedly at a bad watercolour of Llanstephan that a be-scarfed admirer had once given her, willing Dan’s mother not to say anything too intimate. Embarrassment wasn’t an emotion that Carol was familiar with, but she did know when she should adopt a mien appropriate