Often characterized as the bad boy of English literature, Will Self has earned his reputation through a body of innovative, experimental and - to some - disturbing work. All his fiction is available in Penguin, and the two stories collected in Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo illustrate Self's gift for finding the extraordinary, the surreal and the downright absurd amidst the mundanities of modern life.
Welcome to the terrifying world of the urban adulterer. Bill Bywater has been snogging with a woman called Serena. Giving and receiving as much tongue as possible - exactly at the point where Sussex Gardens terminate, and the steams of traffic whip around the dusty triangular enclosure of trees and grass, before peeling away in the direction of Hyde Park, or Paddington, or the M40.
Bill has been snogging - and the adolescent term is quite appropriate here - in a way he remembers from youth. Not that the palpings of lip-on-lip, tongue-on-lip, and tongue-on-tongue have been any less accomplished, or plosively erotic, than we have come to expect from the man. It's just that Serena has recently had an operation on a benign cyst in her cheek. Bit of Lidocaine. Slit and suck - two stitches. Bosh-bosh. 'Perhaps it would be wise' - the surgeon had said, admiring the creamy skin of her cleavage, the standing into being of her ever-so-slightly large breasts -'if you were to avoid using your mouth for anything much besides eating over the next week or so?'
He was right to make the statement interrogative - almost verging on the rhetorical, because Serena hardly uses her mouth for eating at all, preferring dietary supplements and cocaine to get by on. Serena used to be an 'it' girl - but now she's 'that' woman. A socialite - she went to a finishing school in Switzerland where they taught her how to fellate. She'd set her cap at Bill months ago. Not that he wasn't ripe for it.
Serena says, 'I've had a small operation on my cheek.' The eyelashes perturb the polluted air, monoxide and burnt rubber. 'Try and be gentle with this side'. She caresses her own elastoplasted cheek. Their bodies marry. Her thighs part slowly to receive the buttressing of his thigh. Her lips begin to worry at his mouth - so adept that Bill wonders if they might be prehensile. He allows his hands to link the region of her coccyx. A thumb lazily traces the rivulets and curves between her arse and the small of her back. She moans into his mouth. The traffic groans into his ear. He concentrates on stimulating the side of her which isn't numb.
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