The Sweet Smell of Psychosis Read Free

Campanology – was broadcast at peak viewing time on Friday night, live to some fifteen million viewers. His dead-zone phone-in show on Talk Radio may have gone out between two and four a.m. on a Sunday morning (although recorded six hours previously), but it none the less managed to buzz in the ears of some four hundred thousand lost souls.
    Given the Venn intersections implied by this saturation coverage, one of Bell's most sycophantic acolytes had established – through certain arcane statistical computations – that there must, logically, be at leasttwo hundred thousand people in Britain who did nothing else but listen to Bell's voice, watch Bell's face, or read his words, for every waking hour of their lives. The same sycophant had once earned a week of his mentor's approval by seriously floating the idea that Bell should act now to broadcast to the subconscious and thus colonise the dreamscape.
    Bell was a heavily-built man in his late thirties. He was thick both straight through and transversely. This would have made him curiously blocky and four-square, had it not been for the fact that his façade was so flat, so two-dimensional, as to cheat the eye. Hardly anyone ever looked at Bell and thought in terms of his mass, his solidity; rather, it was the front that bewitched the eye. Given his reputation, no one could have expected it when seeing him in the flesh, but Bell was good-looking, neat, nicely clean in appearance. His torso was one rectangle, his arms two thinner ones. His legs were congruent with his arms. He wore plain, well-cut suits that emphasised these planes.
    This was just as well. More perspicacious, trained observers who managed to stay athwart Bell – in, as it were, a potential boarding position – for long enoughcould gain some sense of his true heft. Beneath the finely woven wool was a body of awesome strength. A minotaur body, half-bull, half-man, thick of bone and intractable of muscle. Bell even held himself as the Minotaur might have done: bent forward from the waist, legs braced against the deck of the Sealink, arms pushed out and forward, so as to occupy the most propitious pyramid of space, so as to make good any lack of gravitas with a perfect centre of gravity.
    Then there was the head. Once more, all the angles were well exploited by the man. Hardly anyone really knew that Bell was more or less neckless, that a lithic tier of fat ‘n’ muscle made a pagoda of his upper storey. Hardly anyone – not even those who had slept with Bell, who had had those jutting jaws clamped on their remote (or proximate) sensors – had noticed the prognathous, not to say primitive, cast of that face. Rather, encountering it from the public, the front-of-house angle, they often found him . . . surprisingly pretty.
    Glossy black hair hung in loose bangs around a high, white forehead. The eyes were black – but warmly so. The flawless complexion was pointed up by a small, bell-shaped birthmark on the edge of his jaw.The lips were red – but not wet. The nose, though broad-bridged, had fine nostrils. And there was more than enough bone in cheek and chin to supply the suffix. No wonder that Bell scored – and scored often. Scored, more or less, whenever and with whomever he wanted.
    Even in a rout of rutting like the Sealink, Bell's penchant for cunt and cock stood out. He liked them both. Some bar dross said the former more, others the latter. Whatever the case, Bell had no difficulties in obtaining supplies. Of course, in his line of work there were the facile, the futile, and the febrile seductions: those loose enough, insubstantial enough, and weak enough for their heels to round under the man's hooded gaze, to find themselves tipping over backwards, knees and thighs arranged automatically into the correct position for effective penetration.
    But Bell didn't simply forage on the herbage within reach of his big mouth, oh no. He was also capable of seducing those who attempted to evade him, to outrun