Cock and Bull Read Online Free PDF

Cross railway bridge.
    Dan returned from his consultation with Flaherty with two bits of information. Firstly Flaherty told him that what he had experienced was an alcoholic blackout, otherwise known as an instance of Korsakov’s Syndrome. And secondly, Flaherty urged Dan not to worry. ‘My dear boy,’ wheezed the patchy and varicoloured old medic, ‘you don’t have a drink problem. No man has a drink problem until he drinks more than his doctor!’ And then he filled the surgery with great gusts of evil, shit-smelling laughter.
    Now medicine is the modern religion and doctors are our shamen, possessed of arcane knowledge and imbued with the necessary wisdom, and commensurate powers, to decoct the auguries and then to cast out the evil spirits that plague us, whether they be spirits that infest the body, or worse, spirits that infest the mind. But once one has abandoned the idea of seeking assistance from adoctor, one has instantly entered a twilight zone, a crepuscular territory, where the anatomy and its corruption through disease becomes fantastical and phantasmagoric.
    Over the next forty-eight hours, Carol agonised over whether or not to see Flaherty; or to call Beverley and ask for advice; or to do nothing at all, in the hope that whatever the gristly frond was, it would just shrivel up, wither, collapse in on itself. In a word: just plain disappear. Leaving her genitals pristine, smooth, a delight to find and find again, just as she had been doing in the few short weeks since she had discovered the joy of wanking.
    Carol would be ironing, or tucking in a bedcover, or making free with the Shake ’n’ Vac, when the gristly frond would come teasing its way back into her mind. Her agitated claw, seemingly against its mistress’s will, would once again make its exploratory journey. The frond would still be there. It could be her imagination, inflamed by anxiety, but each time her fingers prised her labia apart, the frond seemed a little larger, a little more gristly.
    After forty-eight hours Carol, despite her insipid nature, was really quite upset. She resolved that in the morning she would either call Beverley, or make an appointment with Flaherty; one or the other—if not both. What swayed her and buried the issue for the foreseeable future (what a trite expression! How can a future be ‘foreseeable’, especially when you’re growing some ghastly frond between your soft thighs), was a greatlife change that swept over both Carol and Dan. The herald of this life change was Dave 2, and its harbinger was Dan’s mother.
    Morning came, and a grey wash of light found Dan, his cheek thrust hard in the carpeted right-angle of the bottom stair. The vomit had got into his hair and down the round collar of his fashionable leather blouson. He cried over his Alpen. Those folded corners were turned into raw gutters, the better to funnel the salty stream into the Swiss cereal. Carol was not unsympathetic but she wasn’t sympathetic either. She pulled the sides of her terrytowelling robe tighter around her slim shoulders, and idly noted that the TV-AM weatherman, an effete creature missing from the screen for these past two months, had now reappeared on BBC Breakfast Time, wearing a suit.
    Dan blubbed as he dialled his mother. And then he blubbed to Carol that this would be the last time—the last time he would ask her to phone work on his behalf— and the last time that his behaviour would make it necessary.
    ‘I’m stopping boozing, Carol,’ he blubbed, and his deft fingers scouted and shaped the edge of the breakfast counter, as if it were some benchmark of sobriety, soon to be attained. ‘I’ve asked Mum for help. I knew that she would know what to do. She’s sending someone to see me this evening, someone called Dave. He’s going to take me to a kind of meeting.’
    All day Dan lurked around the house, propping hispounding head against door jambs and patterned cushion covers. God, how his hangdog look