Cock and Bull Read Online Free PDF Page A

Carol’s mother was too inhibited ever to even say words like ‘sanitary’ and ‘towel’. This left Carol to discover her own biology in the fullness of time. The fullness was reached in the showers at school, where Carol had the misfortune to start with a bang rather than a whimper; a thick and bloody discharge splashing over her wet shanks. Some of the other girls screamed, Carol was mortified. Hermother, fidgeting like a rat, fixed her up with ‘STs’ that evening.
    At Llanstephan Beverley had been astonished by Carol’s ignorance of her own biology. ‘The female body is incredible,’ she breathed at Carol, using her enthusiasm for it as a rope with which to pull herself closer. ‘It is an ever-changing, self-regulating mechanism. A kind of chemical factory really. Totally unlike a man’s body, which never changes, which is static and lifeless.’
    That night in her blond-wood study bedroom, half wired still on instant coffee, Carol dreamt that she was an enormous chemical factory; like the ICI refinery near her parents’ house in Dorset. Great twisted ganglia of pipes burst forth from her vagina, some of them emitting vast plumes of dry ice spume, others winking with warning lights protected by metal basketry. Her head was marooned far away on the esturine sand; her great buttocks were shoved up against the concrete causeway. Little men, wearing hard yellow hats and driving little yellow trucks, hovered around her anus and vagina. Carol awoke screaming.
    Subsequently she was persuaded by Beverley to attend a well woman group, which met in the house of an active and sympathetic faculty member.
    Here female undergraduates were encouraged to probe their breasts, their genitals, and even to worm their fingers upwards, towards their gonads. It was all designed to help them to appreciate the wonder of their own biology. Carol learned to palp for cancerous lumps,and to utilise a hand mirror in the search for cell dysplasia; so as to obviate the need for some man to perform the ritual humiliation of dilation and curettage.
    Carol stuck it out for three sessions, but baulked after a demonstration of the application of a poultice of comfrey and live yoghurt to a large, inflamed pudenda. It wasn’t that Carol felt that the poor girl was being hurt, exposed or humiliated (although she was all three). It was rather that some atavistic impulse led Carol to feel, suddenly but with absolute conviction, that such things were better left in the dark, where they belonged.
    So, Carol had no sympathetic woman GP, friendly, and determined to adopt a holistic approach. Instead she had Dr Flaherty, the local doctor, with whom both she and Dan had registered as a matter of course within a month of moving to Muswell Hill.
    Carol had been to see him once, on account of a dry heave of a cough. She judged that he was just the doctor for Dan as soon as she clapped eyes on him; poking his cropped and buffeted head around the door of the waiting room, ushering her through to his inner sanctum. For Flaherty was stinking. Stinking at three o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon. Stinking as if his whole body had been dipped in a mixture of cooking sherry and Rémy Martin. Flaherty was stinking, arsing, fucking drunk. Drunk, drunk.
    He made a half-hearted attempt to persuade Carol that she needed a chest examination, but it was a feeble effort. As she left the surgery, clutching her prescriptionfor linctus simplex, the ancient receptionist, clad in white like a nun, but with the withered face and beady eyes of a Neapolitan procuress, looked at Carol as if she were personally to blame for the distempered premises with their foetid odour.
    Needless to say, Carol had not been back. But she did send Dan. It was after the occasion when he had gone missing for a full thirty-six hours. And Derry, by dint of working backwards from fuddled supposition to more lucid fact, had eventually discovered him, cuddling a bottle of Night Train, underneath Charing