Free Cock and Bull by Will Self

He had no choice, being such a doormat. But in his sensitive heart,even when Dave 2 was only away from him for an evening, he felt abandoned.
    ‘Now don’t you go feeling sympathetic for Dave 2. Don’t embrace the fallacy of imagining that I have in some way misjudged or misread Dave 2. That I have spun you a line. Either intentionally or otherwise. There is no hidden hand in this tail; there is no lurking, shadowy narrator. What I tell you—that is the truth.
Allah Akbar,
you understand? I am a man of God. I speak the truth—God’s truth.” ‘There is no God but God.”’
The don pronounced these Islamic phrases with the lilting cadence of a Sahel évolué. Then he reverted to the type I have to concede that I had defined for him and asked his pupil,
‘Why does this seem tautologous?’
But he ran on and answered his own question.
‘If we consider the Islamic notion of history we see a process of social evolution analogous to the Hegelian concept of the World Spirit. However, whereas for Hegel the
deus
was very much
ex,
for the Muslim the World Spirit and the World are the same thing. Thus we see a cosmological loop: that as the cock of progress thrusts through social form and change, it is at one and the same time taking itself from behind.’
    No, no. Listen to the truth: Dave 2 had already got his freckled hooks into another scene which he judged to befar, far juicier than Dan and Carol’s marriage. A young girl of only nineteen years had precociously sought out so much of the lager of Lamot that she found herself at St Simon’s with plenty of entertaining incidents to recount. She was banged up within weeks by an occasional group member, a Welsh ex-steel worker of dwarvish proportions but peculiar prettiness. There was a lot of brouhaha surrounding this scene, and convocations in coffee bars as the group divided into warring factions, each accusing the other of therapeutic as well as moral crimes. Dave 2 was in his element, hearing versions from one and all. These he held on to, as if they were long threads, trailing from barely stitched emotional wounds. Dave 2 waited— waited to tug.
    And Carol? Our dear little Carol, still attending Al Anon meetings, but mercifully freed from the attentions of the PEV crew, Dave 2 and Geena? Who can say? Who can mark the precise point where bad very definitely turned to worse? And who can get inside a mind that, vacillating to begin with, now found itself under the pressure of a strong and secret desire? I say ‘secret’ but really you would have to say that it was more than that. What she felt was, well, inexpressible. But guess what she
did
next.
    Well, Carol was entirely certain now of her mastery over Dan’s mind, but she still felt that his body might present a few problems. So she too sought once more the lager of Lamot.

7
The Lager of Lamot
    THERE IS A CERTAIN kind of off-licence, which although always absolutely and spotlessly clean, is nonetheless ever saturated with coils of cigarette smoke that hang around the interior, as stiff and desiccated as dried dog turds. In such establishments the proprietor is invariably to be found behind the cash register, ram-rod straight, fag fuming in face, and perhaps the corpse of its predecessor still smoking in the tin ashtray on the counter.
    These offie proprietors are more often than not cardigan wearers, hair slickers, Fellows of the Ancient Antediluvian Order of Buffalos. They are men of a certain gravitas, usually with a half-hunter for any occasion that promises to be waistcoated. Years of Remembrance Sunday parades have left these men with a straight bearing; on the other hand, years of envy and resentment have almost certainly rounded their shoulders. Latterly, years of Lamot tend to have exploded mines of capillaries across their faces, faces that are frequently tensed up like clenched fists with aching disapproval.
    You always take these men for the Proprietor—they look so proprietorial. Indeed that is their