Free Cock and Bull by Will Self Page A

aim. They wantyou to forget the name of the chain above the shopfront and make the profound mistake of enquiring after business.
    A selection of unfortunate entrées might be:
    1. ‘How’s business?’
    2. ‘Business slow?’
    3. ‘Business not so good at the moment?’
    4. ‘Quiet?’
    And so on. The fag never leaves the mouth, the hand stays on the counter. The mouth opens and out comes a flat, weary litany of dissatisfaction.
    Such an off-licence was Dan and Carol’s local. The manager, a Mr Wiggins, and his wife, also called Carol (let’s call her ‘Ur-Carol’ to distinguish her from Our Carol), were always firm allies in Dan’s fight to consume.
    Ted Wiggins would even step down from the dais of his cash register to hold the door open so that Dan or Carol could stagger through, laden with characteristic blue and silver canisters that contained their favourite brew. More often than not, Gary, Barry, Gerry, Derry or Dave 1 would accompany Dan to Wiggins’s off-licence; and on these occasions half bottles of Dewars or White Horse might be purchased.
    In addition to the normal range, the Wigginses also had a large selection of the cheaper bevvies on the market. These were products specially packaged— indeed branded—for alcoholics: syrupy beers, brewed in the vast steel vats of the East Midlands; re-labelled Philippino cooking sherries; toxically war-damagedYugoslavian Riesling and various other sweet wines from sour places.
    This sector of the sanitised emporium was Ur-Carol’s concern; indeed her domain. Ted was on his dais, Ur-Carol behind an unpainted, but spotless, plywood door. Whenever anyone strayed into that part of the off-licence, Ur-Carol would emerge from the door, looking for all the world like the plastic dog on the collecting box Ted kept by the till, going after its 2p offering. Shabby alcoholics, no matter how dirty, ravaged or potentially violent, she barred with absolute firmness: ‘Get out! You’re barred from these premises,’ she would shrill. ‘If I see you around this area again I’ll call the police, now bugger off!’ It always seemed likely that she might add to this: ‘This is a respectable neighbourhood.’ She was that sort of a woman.
    But in truth, no part of London is entirely respectable. And even here, high on a hill, among the Edwardian villas with their snot-coloured masonry and their monkey puzzle trees, came filtering gyppos, tinkers, tramps and worse. Unspeakable travelling men wearing two donkey jackets and boots lashed in place with nylon towrope. Young men reared on morning glory seeds and regular inhalations of EvoStick, who had managed to reach maturity with huge lacunae in their minds. They parked their moribund buses and leper wagons on a piece of waste ground by the abandoned railway line and sought out the lager of Lamot. They were barred.
    But on the other hand anyone who looked evensuperficially respectable to Ur-Carol was welcomed with folded arms and remorseless chatter which issued forth in a flat drone from between yellow dentures.
    Dan had long since joined Ur-Carol’s temple of low-rent sedation. Many times she had thought to herself how much she liked a young man who had diverse tastes, for Dan would drink anything, he would go all the way from Château Haut Brion to Emu Export and back again. So it was that after three whole days had passed without seeing him, Ur-Carol went so far as to voice concern:
    ‘Father,’ she said, ‘that nice young designer boy hasn’t been in for a while.’ (She always addressed Ted Wiggins as ‘Father’, although in truth, the only creature they had ever managed to nurture was a yapping Yorkshire terrier that frequently bemerded the spotless linoleum.) Wiggins grunted non-committally. Like so many of his co-cardigan wearers Ted Wiggins couldn’t have given a dollop of trappist’s toss fluid for Dan, but he
would
have given a whole gross of packets of tortilla chips to shag the arse off his young and slim