Cock and Bull by Will Self

Author:Will Self [Self, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-09-01T16:00:00+00:00

Alan pulled the heavy front door shut firmly enough for the little panes of coloured glass set into it to rattle. He flexed his shoulders and set off on the one-hundred-and-fifty-yard walk to the Grove Health Centre.

Alan Margoulies was what is known as a ‘conscientious man’. This is at least a third of the way up the career path to being a saint. Conscientious men (and women for that matter) often hear a sort of susurration in their ears when they achieve this prebendary status. If they concentrate hard on this susurration they can just about hear the words ‘Ooh, he’s a saint’, repeated over and over again.

Alan Margoulies was a general practitioner who actually cared about his patients. His professional rise had been sufficiently speedy to hold at bay the cynicism and alienation that dance attendance on the healing art. Only thirty-two and already in line to become the practice head when old Dr Fortis retired; no wonder he had so much love for his patients, they were working so hard on his behalf. Lobbying all and sundry with their chance declarations: ‘Ooh, that nice Dr Margoulies,’ they said, in that very emphatic way that invariably makes one think that this Dr Margoulies must be a veritable ‘Doctor of Niceness’.

And let us not forget that great moral and emotional template: home life. We’ve seen Alan Margoulies at home already. Not very nice perhaps. In fact not nice at all—egotistic, domineering, aggressive and duplicitous. But conscientious—blindingly, achingly conscientious, as Naomi could no doubt testify. After all, who else but Alan would have read her passages from Leach and Jolly whilst she was actually eggy-puking, lost in the great fastness of her first morning-sick session?

Alan walked briskly. His tapering body, clad in what he imagined was tan-fashionable suit bagginess, flexed and rippled in the sharp light that fell from between the clouds scudding over Archway Hill. If Alan looked upward from the petrified trench of the street he could see the steel bridge that crossed the sharp cutting of Archway Road. Alan knew that a lot of unhappy people committed suicide by jumping off that bridge. The impact on the road below, according to a doctor Alan knew who worked in Casualty at the Whittington, sent their femurs shooting up into their stomachs like crossbow bolts. If, that was, they were lucky enough to avoid being hit by a speeding vehicle on the way down. While contemplating these people’s action-packed demise his fine face became overcast with sadness and back-lit by sympathy. In two words: genuine caring. That is, until a little voice whispered in his ear: ‘He’s a saint.’

Alan stopped, and scratched back a long strand of hair that had become unhooked from his ear. I mustn’t keep thinking like that. He rapped the thought out as type-punched words in his mind’s eye. In some ways I do try to be really caring and selfless, but in others I am utterly selfish, utterly egotistic and very much a typical man. He continued: I have foibles and real failings.

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