Cock and Bull by Will Self

underwear scented by a fucking lavender cushion. Christ, it makes me sick! Ga!’
I could see he was physically biting back the cud of his nausea.
    ‘So, anyway, stick with us for the end of the story, now won’t you, my sweet? Won’t you, my precious jewelkin? Pleaseums?’
His aged baby-face creased up with a sickly grin and then relaxed once more into dolly automatism.
‘Goody gumdrops!’
    Carol’s hand then, plucking once more at the hem, and then lifting up the whole bell of the dress bottom, scrunging it up to her waist, whilst she remained seated on the bench. Her fleshy tights sandwiched her blouse and underwear as if they were thick fungal petals in a transparent press. Carol took down the tights—freed them. She was wearing a neat pair of Y-fronts, they tented over her pubis, but still there was no satisfying sac dangling below. At any rate, this is what Carol thought, catching sight of herself, from the waist down, in the sheeny glass door of the music centre cabinet that Dan built.
    Carol moved about the rooms, swivel-hipped, legs swinging out to each side, buttocks centred. She leaned against the doorjamb and tried punching a few imaginary upper arms with easy bonhomie. From outside the maisonette came the sound of the heavy wheeled canisters that contained the detritus of Melrose Mansions being shifted on to the garbage truck. Carol froze. Perhaps, she thought, perhaps I should go and show myself to them? After all, I have nothing to feel ashamed of, it’s not my fault. And anyway they might find me attractive… I bet all of them have dreamed of finding a woman like me, a woman with just that little bit extra… to make them feel truly at home.
    The Y-fronts fell down to her ankles and Carol stood as Nature intended her. She took her penis in her hand. It was small, brown-pinkly insignificant. She looked at it and thought What’s all the fuss? But then it began to swell, to pump itself up, to inflate. And what a magnificent sight that was! For it didn’t lift itself up in any ungainly fashion, there was nothing mechanical in its sudden growth, nothing wooden. Rather, like a flower opening in a stop-action film, the penis grew all at once, every part of it moving together, in concert, in harmony. It unfolded, spread itself to the sun. Lifted up its slim, supple length so that its smooth skin covering became taut, velvety. And as the head appeared, pulsing and bobbing, with a tear of semen in its slashed eye, Carol felt a surge of exultation. She clenched her buttocks and leaned back on her heels.
    Some people say that the penis is an ugly thing, one of God’s creative afterthoughts. They draw comparisons between its dangling extraneousness and the neat, fitted design of the female snatch. A pox on such pundits with their envious carpings. We know all about their pendulous labia, their cetacean clitorises and Moby Dick odours! Oh, Carol’s penis, I could write an ode to it. The penis anyway is such a powerful thing, a solid rod packed with the fluids of life…
    ‘Hold up! I sense something, my laddie. I sense that as I describe the glories of the newest member you are thinking along different lines…that you are placing different interpretations on what I am saying. Is this not so, my friend? My little cottager… Well educated are we?’
    I demurred frantically.
    ‘Good, because I hope for your sake that you aren’t regarding Carol’s penis as anything but what it is. I hope you aren’t deriving any signifiers or symbols from Carol’s penis. I hope you aren’t undertaking some convoluted analysis of this story in your sick sheeny mind. And you know when I refer to “sheeny” I’m not talking about glass, don’t you, my sweet? Only a faggot would do such a thing—and he would prettily lisp “it takes one to know one”. Not so. Sometimes you don’t even know who it is, right up to the moment when you feel the hot headbatter against your dry sphincter…or so people tell me…’
    Carol