by Tom Sharpe
‘You know, birth control. Well, he used to be a Catholic, didn’t he? And now he’s not, he’s making up for lost time,’ said a small pale-faced youth, unwrapping a Mars Bar.
‘Someone should tell him about the Pill,’ said another youth, lifting his head somnolently from the desk. ‘You can’t feel a thing with a Frenchie. You get more thrill with the Pill.’
‘I suppose you do,’ said Wilt, ‘but I understood there were side-effects.’
‘Depends which side you want it,’ said a lad with sideburns.
Wilt turned back to The Lord of the Flies reluctantly. He had read the thing two hundred times already.
‘Now Piggy goes into the forest …’ he began, only to be stopped by another butcher, who evidently shared his distaste for the misfortunes of Piggy.
‘You only get bad effects with the Pill if you use ones that are high in oestrogen.’
‘That’s very interesting,’ said Wilt. ‘Oestrogen? You seem to know a lot about it.’
‘Old girl down our street got a bloodclot in her leg …’
‘Silly old clot,’ said the Mars Bar.
‘Listen,’ said Wilt. ‘Either we hear what Peter has to tell us about the effects of the Pill or we get on and read about Piggy.’
‘Fuck Piggy,’ said the sideburns.
‘Right,’ said Wilt heartily, ‘then keep quiet.’
‘Well,’ said Peter, ‘this old girl, well she wasn’t all that old, maybe thirty, she was on the Pill and she got this bloodclot and the doctor told my auntie it was the oestrogen and she’d better take a different sort of Pill just in case and the old girl down the street, her old man had to go and have a vasectomy so’s she wouldn’t have another bloodclot.’
‘Buggered if anyone’s going to get me to have a vasectomy,’ said the Mars Bar, ‘I want to know I’m all there.’
‘We all have ambitions,’ said Wilt.
‘Nobody’s going to hack away at my knackers with a bloody great knife,’ said the sideburns.
‘Nobody’d want to,’ said someone else.
‘What about the bloke whose missus you banged,’ said the Mars Bar. ‘I bet he wouldn’t mind having a go.’
Wilt applied the sanction of Piggy again and got them back on to vasectomy.
‘Anyway, it’s not irreversible any more,’ said Peter. ‘They can put a tiny little gold tap in and you can turn it on when you want a nipper.’
‘Go on! That’s not true.’
‘Well, not on the National Health you can’t, but if you pay they can. I read about it in a magazine. They’ve been doing experiments in America.’
‘What happens if the washer goes wrong?’ asked the Mars Bar.
‘I suppose they call a plumber in.’
Wilt sat and listened while Meat One ranged far and wide about vasectomy and the coil and Indians getting free transistors and the plane that landed at Audley End with a lot of illegal immigrants and what somebody’s brother who was a policeman in Brixton said about blacks and how the Irish were just as bad and bombs and back to Catholics and birth control and who’d want to live in Ireland where you couldn’t even buy French letters and so back to the Pill. And all the time his mind filled itself obsessively with ways and means of getting rid of Eva. A diet of birth-control pills high on oestrogen? If he ground them up and mixed them with the Ovaltine she took at bedtime there was a chance she’d develop bloodclots all over the place in no time at all. Wilt put the notion out of his head. Eva with bloodclots was too awful to stomach, and anyway it might not work. No, it would have to be something quick, certain and painless. Preferably an accident.
At the end of the hour Wilt collected the books and made his way back to the Staff Room. He had a free period. On the way he passed the site of the new Administration block. The ground had been cleared and the builders had moved in and were boring pile holes for the foundations. Wilt stopped and watched as the drilling machine wound slowly down into the ground. They were making wide holes. Very wide. Big enough for a body.
‘How deep are you going?’ he asked one of the workmen.
‘Thirty feet.’
‘Thirty feet?’ said Wilt. ‘When’s the concrete going in?’
‘Monday, with any luck,’ said the man.
Wilt passed on. A new and quite horrible idea had just occurred to him.
2
It was one of Eva Wilt’s better days. She had days, better days, and one of those days. Days were just days when nothing went wrong and she got the washing-up done and the front room vacuumed and the windows washed and the beds made and the bath Vimmed and the lavatory pan Harpicked and went round to the Harmony Community Centre and helped with Xeroxing or sorted old clothes for the Jumble Sale and generally made herself useful and came home for lunch and went to the library and had tea with Mavis or Susan or Jean and talked about life and how seldom Henry made love to her even perfunctorily nowadays and how she had missed her opportunity by refusing a bank clerk who was a manager now and came home and made Henry’s supper and went out to Yoga or Flower Arrangement or Meditation or Pottery and finally climbed into bed with the feeling that she had got something done.
On one of those days nothing went right. The activities were exactly the same but each episode was tainted with some minor disaster like the fuse blowing on the vacuum-cleaner or the drain in the sink getting blocked with a piece of carrot so that by the time Henry came home he was either greeted by silence or subjected to a quite unwarranted exposé of all his faults and shortcomings. On one of those days Wilt usually took the dog for an extended walk via the Ferry Path Inn and spent a restless night getting up and going to the bathroom, thus nullifying the cleansing qualities of the Harpic Eva had puffed round the pan and providing her with a good excuse to point out his faults once again in the morning.
‘What the hell am I supposed to do?’ he had asked after one of those nights. ‘If I pull the chain you grumble because I’ve woken you up and if I don’t you say it looks nasty in the morning.’
‘Well, it does, and in any case you don’t have to wash all the Harpic off the sides. And don’t say you don’t. I’ve seen you. You aim it all the way round so that it all gets taken off. You do it quite deliberately.’
‘If I pulled the chain it would all get flushed off anyway and you’d get woken up into the bargain,’ Wilt told her, conscious that he did make a habit of aiming at the Harpic. He had a grudge against the stuff.
‘Why can’t you just wait until the morning? And anyway it serves you right,’ she continued, forestalling his obvious answer, ‘for drinking all that beer. You’re supposed to be taking Clem for a walk, not swilling ale in that horrid pub.’
‘To pee or not to pee, that is the question,’ said Wilt, helping himself to All-Bran. ‘What do you expect me to do? Tie a knot in the damned thing?’
‘It wouldn’t make any difference to me if you did,’ said Eva bitterly.
‘It would make a hell of a lot of difference to me, thank you very much.’
‘I was talking about our sex life and you know it.’
‘Oh, that,’ said Wilt.
But that was on one of those days.
On one of her better days something unexpected happened to inject the daily round with a new meaning and to awake in her those dormant expectations that somehow everything would suddenly change for the better and stay that way. It was on such expectations that her faith in life was based. They were the spiritual equivalent of the trivial activities that kept her busy and Henry subdued. On one of her better days the sun shone brighter, the floor in the hall gleamed brighter and Eva Wilt was brighter herself and hummed ‘Some day my prince will come’ while Hoovering the stairs. On one of her better days Eva went forth to meet the world with a disarming goodheartedness and awoke in others the very same expectations that so thrilled her in herself. And on one of her better days Henry had to get his own supper and if he was wise kept out of the house as long as possible. Eva Wilt’s expectations demanded something a
sight more invigorating than Henry Wilt after a day at the Tech. It was on the evenings of such days that he came nearest to genuinely deciding to murder her and to hell with the consequences.
*
On this particular day she was on her way to the Community Centre when she ran into Sally Pringsheim. It was one of those entirely fortuitous meetings that resulted from Eva making her way on foot instead of by bicycle and going through Rossiter Grove instead of straight down Parkview Avenue which was half a mile shorter. Sally was just driving out of the gate in a Mercedes with a P registration which meant it was brand new. Eva noted the fact and smiled accordingly.
‘How funny me running into you like this,’ she said brightly as Sally stopped the car and unlocked the door.
‘Can I give you a lift? I’m going into town to look for something casual to wear tonight. Gaskell’s got some Swedish professor coming over from Heidelberg and we’re taking him to Ma Tante’s.’
Eva Wilt climbed in happily, her mind computing the cost of the car and the house and the significance of wearing something casual at Ma Tante’s (where she had heard that starters like Prawn Cocktails cost 95p) and the fact that Dr Pringsheim entertained Swedish professors when they came to Ipford.
‘I was going to walk to town,’ she lied. ‘Henry’s taken the car and it’s such a lovely day.’
‘Gaskell’s bought a bicycle. He says it’s quicker and it keeps him fit,’ said Sally, thus condemning Henry Wilt to yet another misfortune. Eva made a note to see that he bought a bike at the police auction and cycled to work in rain or snow. ‘I was thinking of trying Felicity Fashions for a shantung poncho. I don’t know what they’re like but I’ve been told they’re good. Professor Grant’s wife goes there and she says they have the best selection.’
‘I’m sure they must have,’ said Eva Wilt, whose patronage of Felicity Fashions had consisted of looking in the window and wondering who on earth could afford dresses at forty pounds. Now she knew. They drove into town and parked in the multi-storey car park. By that time Eva had stored a lot more information about the Pringsheims in her memory. They came from California. Sally had met Gaskell while hitch-hiking through Arizona. She had been to Kansas State but had dropped out to live on a commune. There had been other men in her life. Gaskell loathed cats. They gave him hay fever. Women’s Lib meant more than burning your bra. It meant total commitment to the programme of women’s superiority over men. Love was great if you didn’t let it get to you. Compost was in and colour TV out. Gaskell’s father had owned a chain of stores which was sordid. Money was handy and Rossiter Grove was a bore. Above all, fucking had to be, just had to be fun whichever way you looked at it.
Eva Wilt received this information with a jolt. In her circle ‘fuck’ was a word husbands used when they hit their thumbs with hammers. When Eva used it she did so in the isolation of the bathroom and with a wistfulness that robbed it of its crudity and imbued it with a splendid virility so that a good fuck became the most distant and abstract of all her expectations and quite removed from Henry’s occasional early morning fumblings. And if ‘fuck’ was reserved for the bathroom, fucking was even more remote. It suggested an almost continuous activity, a familiar occurrence that was both casual and satisfying and added a new dimension to life. Eva Wilt stumbled out of the car and followed Sally to Felicity Fashions in a state of shock.
If fucking was fun, shopping with Sally Pringsheim was a revelation. It was marked by a decisiveness that was truly breathtaking. Where Eva would have hummed and haaed, Sally selected and having selected moved on down the racks, discarded things she didn’t like leaving them hanging over chairs, seized others, glanced at them and said she supposed they would do with a bored acceptance that was infectious, and left the shop with a pile of boxes containing two hundred pounds’ worth of shantung ponchos, silk summer coats, scarves and blouses. Eva Wilt had spent seventy on a pair of yellow lounging pyjamas and a raincoat with lapels and a belt that Sally said was pure Gatsby.
‘Now all you need is the hat and you’ll be it,’ she said, as they loaded the boxes into the car. They bought the hat, a trilby, and then had coffee at the Mombasa Coffee House where Sally leant across the table intensely, smoking a long thin cigar, and talking about body contact in a loud voice so that Eva was conscious that the women at nearby tables had stopped talking and were listening rather disapprovingly.
‘Gaskell’s nipples drive me wild,’ Sally said. ‘They drive him wild too when I suck them.’
Eva drank her coffee and wondered what Henry would do if she took it into her head to suck his nipples. Drive him wild was hardly the word and besides she was beginning to regret having spent seventy pounds. That would drive him wild too. Henry didn’t approve of credit cards. But she was enjoying herself too much to let the thought of his reaction spoil her day.
‘I think teats are so important,’ Sally went on. Two women at the next table paid their bill and walked out.
‘I suppose they must be,’ said Eva Wilt uneasily. ‘I’ve never had much use for mine.’
‘Haven’t you?’ said Sally. ‘We’ll have to do something about that.’
‘I don’t see that there is much anyone can do about it,’ said Eva. ‘Henry never takes his pyjamas off and my nightie gets in the way.’
‘Don’t tell me you wear things in bed. Oh you poor thing. And nighties, God, how humiliating for you! I mean it’s typical of a male dominated society, all this costume differentiation. You must be suffering from touch deprivation. Gaskell says it’s as bad as vitamin deficiency.’
‘Well, Henry is always tired when he gets home,’ Eva told her. ‘And I go out a lot.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ said Sally, ‘Gaskell says male fatigue is a symptom of penile insecurity. Is Henry’s big or small?’
‘Well it depends,’ said Eva hoarsely. ‘Sometimes it’s big and sometimes it isn’t.’
‘I much prefer men with small ones,’ said Sally, ‘they try so much harder.’
They finished their coffee and went back to the car discussing Gaskell’s penis and his theory that in a sexually undifferentiated society nipple stimulation would play an increasingly important role in developing the husband’s sense of his hermaphroditic nature.
‘He’s written an article on it,’ Sally said as they drove home. ‘It’s called “The Man As Mother”. It was published in Suck last year.’
‘Suck?’ said Eva.
‘Yes, it’s a journal published by the Society for Undifferentiated Sexual Studies in Kansas. G’s done a lot of work for them on animal behaviour. He did his thesis on Role Play in Rats there.’
‘That sounds very interesting,’ said Eva uncertainly. Roll or role? Whichever it was it was impressive and certainly Henry’s occasional pieces on Day Release Apprentices and Literature in the Liberal Studies Quarterly hardly measured up to Dr Pringsheim’s monographs.
‘Oh I don’t know. It’s all so obvious really. If you put two male rats together in a cage long enough one of them is simply bound to develop active tendencies and the other passive ones,’ said Sally wearily. ‘But Gaskell was absolutely furious. He thought they ought to alternate. That’s G all over. I told him how silly he was being. I said, “G honey, rats are practically undifferentiated anyway. I mean how can you expect them to be able to make an existential choice?” and you know what he said? He said, “Pubic baby, rats are the paradigm. Just remember that and you won’t go far wrong. Rats are the paradigm.” What do you think of that?’
‘I think rats are rather horrid,’ said Eva without thinking. Sally laughed and put her hand on her knee.
‘Oh Eva, darling,’ she murmured, ‘you’re so adorably down to earth. No, I’m not taking you back to Parkview Avenue. You’re coming home with me for a drink and lunch. I’m simply dying to see you in those lemon loungers.’
They turned into Rossiter Grove.
*
If rats were a paradigm for Dr Pringsheim, Printers Three were a paradigm for Henry Wilt, th
ough of a rather different sort. They represented all that was most difficult, insensitive and downright bloodyminded about Day Release Classes and to make matters worse the sods thought they were literate because they could actually read and Voltaire was an idiot because he made everything go wrong for Candide. Coming after Nursery Nurses and during his Stand-In period, Printers Three brought out the worst in him. They had obviously brought out the worst in Cecil Williams who should have been taking them.
‘It’s the second week he’s been off sick,’ they told Wilt.
‘I’m not at all surprised,’ said Wilt. ‘You lot are enough to make anyone sick.’
‘We had one bloke went and gassed himself. Pinkerton his name was. He took us for a term and made us read this book Jude the Obscure. That wasn’t half a depressing book. All about this twit Jude.’
‘I had an idea it was,’ said Wilt.
‘Next term old Pinky didn’t come back. He went down by the river and stuck a pipe up the exhaust and gassed himself.’
‘I can’t say I blame him,’ said Wilt.
‘Well I like that. He was supposed to set us an example.’
Wilt looked at the class grimly.
‘I’m sure he had that in mind when he gassed himself,’ he said. ‘And now if you’ll just get on and read quietly, eat quietly and smoke so that no one can see you from the Admin block, I’ve got work to do.’
‘Work? You lot don’t know what work is. All you do is sit at a desk all day and read. Call that work? Buggered if I do and they pay you to do it …’
‘Shut up,’ said Wilt with startling violence. ‘Shut your stupid trap.’
‘Who’s going to make me?’ said the Printer.
Wilt tried to control his temper and for once found it impossible. There was something incredibly arrogant about Printers Three.
‘I am,’ he shouted.
‘You and who else? You couldn’t make a mouse shut its trap, not if you tried all day.’
Wilt stood up. ‘You fucking little shit,’ he shouted. ‘You dirty snivelling …’