by Tom Sharpe
Wilt stopped. It was all very well to talk. The bloody woman had a weapon she wouldn’t hesitate to use. Knock her down, my eye. If anyone went down it would be Wilt, and in addition she would parade his affair with the doll to everyone they knew. It wouldn’t be long before the story reached the Tech. In the darkness of Parkview Avenue Wilt shuddered at the thought. It would be the end of his career. He went through the gate of Number 34 and unlocked the front door with the feeling that unless he took some drastic action in the immediate future he was doomed.
In bed an hour later he was still awake, wide awake and wrestling with the problem of Eva, his own character and how to change it into something he could respect. And what did he respect? Under the blankets Wilt clenched his fist.
‘Decisiveness,’ he murmured. ‘The ability to act without hesitation. Courage.’ A strange litany of ancient virtues. But how to acquire them now? How had they turned men like him into Commandos and professional killers during the war? By training them. Wilt lay in the darkness and considered ways in which he could train himself to become what he was clearly not. By the time he fell asleep he had determined to attempt the impossible.
*
At seven the alarm went. Wilt got up and went into the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror. He was a hard man, a man without feelings. Hard, methodical, cold-blooded and logical. A man who made no mistakes. He went downstairs and ate his All-Bran and drank his cup of coffee. So Eva wasn’t home. She had stayed the night at the Pringsheims’. Well that was something. It made things easier for him. Except that she still had the car and the keys. He certainly wasn’t going to go round and get the car. He walked down to the roundabout and caught the bus to the Tech. He had Bricklayers One in Room 456. When he arrived they were talking about grad-bashing.
‘There was this student all dressed up like a waiter see. “Do you mind?” he says. “Do you mind getting out of my way.” Just like that and all I was doing was looking in the window at the books …’
‘At the books?’ said Wilt sceptically. ‘At eleven o’clock at night you were looking at books? I don’t believe it.’
‘Magazines and cowboy books,’ said the bricklayer. ‘They’re in a junk shop in Finch Street.’
‘They’ve got girlie mags,’ someone else explained. Wilt nodded. That sounded more like it.
‘So I says “Mind what?”’ continued the bricklayer, ‘and he says, “Mind out of my way.” His way. Like he owned the bloody street.’
‘So what did you say?’ asked Wilt.
‘Say? I didn’t say anything I wasn’t wasting words on him.’
‘What did you do then?’
‘Well, I put the boot in and duffed him up. Gave him a good going-over and no mistake. Then I pushed off. There’s one bloody grad who won’t be telling people to get out of his way for a bit.’
The class nodded approvingly.
‘They’re all the bloody same, students,’ said another bricklayer. ‘Think because they’ve got money and go to college they can order you about. They could all do with a going-over. Do them a power of good.’
Wilt considered the implications of mugging as part of an intellectual’s education. After his experience the previous night he was inclined to think there was something to be said for it. He would have liked to have duffed up half the people at the Pringsheims’ party.
‘So none of you feel there’s anything wrong with beating a student up if he gets in your way?’ he asked.
‘Wrong?’ said the bricklayers in unison. ‘What’s wrong with a good punch-up? It’s not as if a grad is an old woman or something. He can always hit back, can’t he?’
They spent the rest of the hour discussing violence in the modern world. On the whole, the bricklayers seemed to think it was a good thing.
‘I mean what’s the point of going out on a Saturday night and getting pissed if you can’t have a bit of a barney at the same time? Got to get rid of your aggression somehow,’ said an unusually articulate bricklayer, ‘I mean it’s natural isn’t it?’
‘So you think man is a naturally aggressive animal,’ said Wilt.
‘Course he is. That’s history for you, all them wars and things. It’s only bloody poofters don’t like violence.’
Wilt took this view of things along to the Staff Room for his free period and collected a cup of coffee from the vending machine. He was joined by Peter Braintree.
‘How did the party go?’ Braintree asked.
‘It didn’t,’ said Wilt morosely.
‘Eva enjoy it?’
‘I wouldn’t know. She hadn’t come home by the time I got up this morning.’
‘Hadn’t come home?’
‘That’s what I said,’ said Wilt.
‘Well did you ring up and find out what had happened to her?’
‘No,’ said Wilt.
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’d look a bit of a twit ringing up and being told she was shacked up with the Abyssinian ambassador, wouldn’t I?’
‘The Abyssinian ambassador? Was he there?’
‘I don’t know and I don’t want to know. The last I saw of her she was being chatted up by this big black bloke from Ethiopia. Something to do with the United Nations. She was making fruit salad and he was chopping bananas for her.’
‘Doesn’t sound a very compromising sort of activity to me,’ said Braintree.
‘No, I daresay it doesn’t. Only you weren’t there and don’t know what sort of party it was,’ said Wilt, rapidly coming to the conclusion that an edited version of the night’s events was called for. ‘A whole lot of middle-aged with-it kids doing their withered thing.’
‘It sounds bloody awful. And you think Eva …’
‘I think Eva got pissed and somebody gave her a joint and she passed out,’ said Wilt. ‘That’s what I think. She’s probably sleeping it off in the downstairs loo.’
‘Doesn’t sound like Eva to me,’ said Braintree. Wilt drank his coffee and considered his strategy. If the story of his involvement with that fucking doll was going to come out, perhaps it would be better if he told it his way first. On the other hand …
‘What were you doing while all this was going on?’ Braintree asked.
‘Well,’ said Wilt, ‘as a matter of fact …’ He hesitated. On second thoughts it might be better not to mention the doll at all. If Eva kept her trap shut … ‘I got a bit slewed myself.’
‘That sounds more like it,’ said Braintree, ‘I suppose you made a pass at another woman too.’
‘If you must know,’ said Wilt, ‘another woman made a pass at me. Mrs Pringsheim.’
‘Mrs Pringsheim made a pass at you?’
‘Well, we went upstairs to look at her husband’s toys …’
‘His toys? I thought you told me he was a biochemist.’
‘He is a biochemist. He just happens to like playing with toys. Model trains and teddy bears and things. She says he’s a case of arrested development. She would, though. She’s that sort of loyal wife.’
‘What happened then?’
‘Apart from her locking the door and lying on the bed with her legs wide open and asking me to screw her and threatening me with a blow job, nothing happened,’ said Wilt.
Peter Braintree looked at him sceptically. ‘Nothing?’ he said finally. ‘Nothing? I mean what did you do?’
‘Equivocated,’ said Wilt.
‘That’s a new word for it,’ said Braintree. ‘You go upstairs with Mrs Pringsheim and equivocate while she lies on a bed with her legs open and you want to know why Eva hasn’t come home? She’s probably round at some lawyer’s office filing a petition for divorce right now.’
‘But I tell you I didn’t screw the bitch,’ said Wilt, ‘I told her to hawk her pearly somewhere else.’
‘And you call that equivocating? Hawk her pearly? Where the hell did you get that expression from?’
‘Meat One,’ said Wilt, and got up and fetched himself another cup of coffee.
&nb
sp; By the time he came back to his seat he had decided on his version.
‘I don’t know what happened after that,’ he said when Braintree insisted on hearing the next episode. ‘I passed out. It must have been the vodka.’
‘You just passed out in a locked room with a naked woman? Is that what happened?’ said Braintree. He didn’t sound as if he believed a word of the story.
‘Precisely,’ said Wilt.
‘And when you came to?’
‘I was walking home,’ said Wilt. ‘I’ve no idea what happened in between.’
‘Oh well, I daresay we’ll hear about that from Eva,’ said Braintree. ‘She’s bound to know.’
He got up and went off and Wilt was left alone to consider his next move. The first thing to do was to make sure that Eva didn’t say anything. He went through to the telephone in the corridor and dialled his home number. There was no reply. Wilt went along to Room 187 and spent an hour with Turners and Fitters. Several times during the day he tried to telephone Eva but there was no answer.
‘She’s probably spent the day round at Mavis Mottram’s weeping on her shoulder and telling all and sundry what a pig I am,’ he thought. ‘She’s bound to be waiting for me when I get home tonight.’
But she wasn’t. Instead there was a note on the kitchen table and a package. Wilt opened the note.
‘I’m going away with Sally and Gaskell to think things over. What you did last night was horrible. I won’t ever forgive you. Don’t forget to buy some dog food. Eva. P.S. Sally says next time you want a blow job get Judy to give you one.’
Wilt looked at the package. He knew without opening it what it contained. That infernal doll. In a sudden paroxysm of rage Wilt picked it up and hurled it across the kitchen at the sink. Two plates and a saucer bounced off the washing-up rack and broke on the floor.
‘Bugger the bitch,’ said Wilt inclusively, Eva, Judy, and Sally Pringsheim all coming within the ambit of his fury. Then he sat down at the table and looked at the note again. ‘Going away to think things over.’ Like hell she was. Think? The stupid cow wasn’t capable of thought. She’d emote, drool over his deficiencies and work herself into an ecstasy of self-pity. Wilt could hear her now blathering on about that blasted bank manager and how she should have married him instead of saddling herself with a man who couldn’t even get promotion at the Tech and who went around fucking inflatable dolls in other people’s bathrooms. And there was that filthy slut, Sally Pringsheim, egging her on. Wilt looked at the postscript: ‘Sally says next time you want a blow job …’ Christ. As if he’d wanted a blow job the last time. But there it was, a new myth in the making, like the business of his being in love with Betty Crabtree when all he had done was give her a lift home one night after an Evening Class. Wilt’s home life was punctuated by such myths, weapons in Eva’s armoury to be brought out when the occasion demanded and brandished above his head. And now Eva had the ultimate deterrent at her disposal, the doll and Sally Pringsheim and a blow job. The balance of recrimination which had been the sustaining factor in their relationship had shifted dramatically. It would take an act of desperate invention on Wilt’s part to restore it.
‘Don’t forget to buy some dog food.’ Well at least she had left him the car. It was standing in the carport. Wilt went out and drove round to the supermarket and bought three tins of dog food, a boil-in-the-bag curry and a bottle of gin. He was going to get pissed. Then he went home and sat in the kitchen watching Clem gulp his Bonzo while the bag boiled. He poured himself a stiff gin, topped it up with lime and wandered about. And all the time he was conscious of the package lying there on the draining board waiting for him to open it. And inevitably he would open it. Out of sheer curiosity. He knew it and they knew it wherever they were, and on Sunday night Eva would come home and the first thing she would do would be to ask about the doll and if he had had a nice time with it. Wilt helped himself to some more gin and considered the doll’s utility. There must be some way of using the thing to turn the tables on Eva.
By the time he had finished his second gin he had begun to formulate a plan. It involved the doll, a pile hole and a nice test of his own strength of character. It was one thing to have fantasies about murdering your wife. It was quite another to put them into effect and between the two there lay an area of uncertainty. By the end of his third gin Wilt was determined to put the plan into effect. If it did nothing else it would prove he was capable of executing a murder.
Wilt got up and unwrapped the doll. In his interior dialogue Eva was telling him what would happen if Mavis Mottram got to hear about his disgusting behaviour at the Pringsheims’. ‘You’d be the laughing stock of the neighbourhood,’ she said, ‘you’d never live it down.’
Wouldn’t he though? Wilt smiled drunkenly to himself and went upstairs. For once Eva was mistaken. He might not live it down but Mrs Eva Wilt wouldn’t be around to gloat. She wouldn’t live at all.
Upstairs in the bedroom he closed the curtains and laid the doll on the bed and looked for the valve which had eluded him the previous night. He found it and fetched a footpump from the garage. Five minutes later Judy was in good shape. She lay on the bed and smiled up at him. Wilt half closed his eyes and squinted at her. In the half darkness he had to admit that she was hideously lifelike. Plastic Eva with the mastic boobs. All that remained was to dress it up. He rummaged around in several drawers in search of a bra and blouse, decided she didn’t need a bra, and picked out an old skirt and a pair of tights. In a cardboard box in the wardrobe he found one of Eva’s wigs. She had had a phase of wigs. Finally a pair of shoes. By the time he had finished, Eva Wilt’s replica lay on the bed smiling fixedly at the ceiling.
‘That’s my girl,’ said Wilt and went down to the kitchen to see how the boil-in-the-bag was coming along. It was burnt-in-the-bag. Wilt turned the stove off and went into the lavatory under the stairs and sat thinking about his next move. He would use the doll for dummy runs so that if and when it came to the day he would be accustomed to the whole process of murder and would act without feeling like an automaton. Killing by conditioned reflex. Murder by habit. Then again he would know how to time the whole affair. And Eva’s going off with the Pringsheims for the weekend would help too. It would establish a pattern of sudden disappearances. He would provoke her somehow to do it again and again and again. And then the visit to the doctor.
‘It’s just that I can’t sleep, doctor. My wife keeps on going off and leaving me and I just can’t get used to sleeping on my own.’ A prescription for sleeping tablets. Then on the night. ‘I’ll make the Ovaltine tonight, dear. You’re looking tired. I’ll bring it up to you in bed.’ Gratitude followed by snores. Down to the car … fairly early would be best … around ten thirty … over to the Tech and down the hole. Perhaps inside a plastic bag … no, not a plastic bag. ‘I understand you bought a large plastic bag recently, sir. I wonder if you would mind showing it to us.’ No, better just to leave her down the hole they were going to fill with concrete next morning. And finally a bewildered Wilt. He would go round to the Pringsheims’. ‘Where’s Eva? Yes, you do.’ ‘No, we don’t.’ ‘Don’t lie to me. She’s always coming round here.’ ‘We’re not lying. We haven’t seen her.’ After that he would go to the police.
Motiveless, clueless and indiscoverable. And proof that he was a man who could act. Or wasn’t. What if he broke down under the strain and confessed? That would be some sort of vindication too. He would know what sort of man he was one way or another and at least he would have acted for once in his life. And fifteen years in prison would be almost identical to fifteen, more, twenty years at the Tech confronting louts who despised him and talking about Piggy and the Lord of the Flies. Besides he could always plead the book as a mitigating circumstance at his trial.
‘Me lud, members of the Jury, I ask you to put yourself in the defendant’s place. For twelve years he has been confronted by the appalling prospect of reading this dreadful book to classes of bored and hostile youths. He has had t
o endure agonies of repetition, of nausea and disgust at Mr Golding’s revoltingly romantic view of human nature. Ah, but I hear you say that Mr Golding is not a romantic, that his view of human nature as expressed in his portrait of a group of young boys marooned on a desert island is the very opposite of romanticism and that the sentimentality of which I accuse him and to which my client’s appearance in this court attests is to be found not in The Lord of the Flies but in its predecessor, Coral Island. But, me lud, gentlemen of the Jury, there is such a thing as inverted romanticism, the romanticism of disillusionment, of pessimism and of nihilism. Let us suppose for one moment that my client had spent twelve years reading not Mr Golding’s work but Coral Island to groups of apprentices; is it reasonable to imagine that he would have been driven to the desperate remedy of murdering his wife? No. A hundred times no. Mr Ballantyne’s book would have given him the inspiration, the self-discipline, the optimism and the belief in man’s ability to rescue himself from the most desperate situation by his own ingenuity …’
It might not be such a good idea to pursue that line of argument too far. The defendant Wilt had after all exercised a good deal of ingenuity in rescuing himself from a desperate situation. Still it was a nice thought. Wilt finished his business in the lavatory and looked around for the toilet paper. There wasn’t any. The bloody roll had run out. He reached in his pocket and found Eva’s note and put it to good use. Then he flushed it down the U-bend, puffed some Harpic after it to express his opinion of it and her and went out to the kitchen and helped himself to another gin.
He spent the rest of the evening sitting in front of the TV with a piece of bread and cheese and a tin of peaches until it was time to try his first dummy run. He went out to the front door and looked up and down the street. It was almost dark now and there was no one in sight. Leaving the front door open he went upstairs and fetched the doll and put it in the back seat of the car. He had to push and squeeze a bit to get it in but finally the door shut. Wilt climbed in and backed the car out into Parkview Avenue and drove down to the roundabout. By the time he reached the car park at the back of the Tech it was half past ten exactly. He stopped and sat in the car looking around. Not a soul in sight and no lights on. There wouldn’t be. The Tech closed at nine.