Read Cock and Bull for Free Online Page A

Simon’s group, he was set to work by Dave 2, labouring, with a magic marker in his fine hands, to create a series of signs. In some, the acronym and its interpretation was written in sans serif characters, in others in serif script. It was all rather like what Dan did for a living anyway.
    So, Dave 2 pressed on, undeterred: ‘You say it hasn’t been too bad, m’dear, but I can see that in here you’re hurting.’ Dave 2 removed the large hand from Carol’s forearm and placed it in the vague area of his heart. His great chin filled up with dimples and his cheeks creased as his long face took on an expression that was obviously intended to betoken deep sympathy, or even empathy… yes empathy, for Dave 2, unchallenged by Carol, followed on: ‘I can identify with your hurt, Carol. I’ve felt as you have—utterly indifferent to the fate of someone I once thought I loved. Utterly indifferent. Now that’s what this awful disease can do to us, my love…’ That was clever. Even Carol couldn’t help but be jarred, and appalled, by the accuracy of Dave 2’s probing spiritual diagnosis. In that moment of shared feeling Dave 2 hooked his nail under the scab of Carol’s indifference and prised it up, exposing an area of pain. Of course Dave 2 could hardly have been expected to know that her real and abiding anxiety was centred not on Dan, nor even on the fact of her marriage, but entirely on the gristly frond that lay in wait at the very juncture of her thighs.
    Instant coffee downed and a thin and wispy Dan buckled into his fashionable leather blouson, there was but token resistance on Carol’s part to the suggestion that she accompany Dave 2 and his charge to St Simon’s, and while they attended the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting she should attend an adjacent and highly congruent meeting for the relatives of alcoholics.
    The atmosphere of the Al Anon meeting was a revelation to Carol. Here was the intimacy and sense of shared purpose that she had been exposed to when attempting to raise her consciousness with Beverley at Llanstephan, but united with a social veneer and sense of organisation that reminded her more of her father’s allotment society.
    She was shocked by the candour of these very English people in macs and cardigans who described in a matter-of-fact, if confessional, manner, episodes of the most disgusting drunkenness, domestic violence and sexual abuse.
    A long, sad lady in a fawn suit recounted in a breathless rush the frenzied assaults that her husband, a bibulous and failed salesman, had made on her several orifices with various hard and vitreous objects, beer bottles and the like.
    A middle-aged educationalist, intellectual with thinning hair and tortoiseshell bifocals, did his best to describe, plainly and directly, the obsessive dossier he had felt compelled to compile of the vomitings, douchings, colonic purges and gratuitous sexual acts that his sixteen-year-old daughter had engaged in, while he stood by madly impotent on two counts.
    Not that evening, nor the next, but the one after that, did Carol feel relaxed enough to offer her own version, pallid and softcore by comparison, of Dan’s pukings,
his
muttered obscene eructations and occasional beery gropings. The outrage may have been slight, but Carol’s description of her own pallid indifference, and anemone-like withdrawal from Dan’s distress, was wholly authentic. And when she had finished speaking, or ‘sharing’ as the group called their version of bearing witness to the Truth, she looked up from the linoleum to see the equine visage of Dave 2, who had joined the group from next door, and who was now looking at her with an expression of undiluted sympathy, compounded by admiration and something that might have been, but wasn’t, love.
    Over that week both Dan and Carol attended six of their respective meetings. And both of them felt the ideology of Alcoholics Anonymous swimming in to form a structure for their lives. There was