by Tom Sharpe
6
Sally lay naked on the deck of the cabin cruiser, her tight breasts pointing to the sky and her legs apart. Beside her Eva lay on her stomach and looked downriver.
‘Oh God, this is divine,’ Sally murmured. ‘I have this deep thing about the countryside.’
‘You’ve got this deep thing period,’ said Gaskell steering the cruiser erratically towards a lock. He was wearing a Captain’s cap and sunglasses.
‘Cliché baby,’ said Sally.
‘We’re coming to a lock,’ said Eva anxiously. ‘There are some men there.’
‘Men? Forget men, darling. There’s just you and me and G and G’s not a man, are you G baby?’
‘I have my moments,’ said Gaskell.
‘But so seldom, so awfully seldom,’ Sally said. ‘Anyway what does it matter? We’re here idyllicstyle, cruising down the river in the good old summertime.’
‘Shouldn’t we have cleared the house up before we left?’ Eva asked.
‘The secret of parties is not to clear up afterward but to clear off. We can do all that when we get back.’
Eva got up and went below. They were quite near the lock and she wasn’t going to be stared at in the nude by the two old men sitting on the bench beside it.
‘Jesus, Sally, can’t you do something about soulmate? She’s getting on my teats,’ said Gaskell.
‘Oh G baby, she’s never. If she did you’d Cheshire cat.’
‘Cheshire cat?’
‘Disappear with a smile, honey chil’, foetus first. She’s but positively gargantuanly uterine.’
‘She’s but positively gargantuanly boring.’
‘Time, lover, time. You’ve got to accentuate the liberated, eliminate the negative and not mess with Mister-in-between.’
‘Not mess with Missus-in-between. Operative word missus,’ said Gaskell, bumping the boat into the lock.
‘But that’s the whole point.’
‘What is?’ said Gaskell.
‘Messing with Missus-in-between. I mean it’s all ways with Eva and us. She does the housework. Gaskell baby can play ship’s captain and teatfeast on boobs and Sally sweetie can minotaur her labyrinthine mind.’
‘Mind?’ said Gaskell. ‘Polyunsaturated hasn’t got a mind. And talking of cretins, what about Mister-in-between?’
‘He’s got Judy to mess with. He’s probably screwing her now and tomorrow night he’ll sit up and watch Kojak with her. Who knows, he may even send her off to Mavis Contracuntal Mottram’s Flower Arrangement evening. I mean they’re suited. You can’t say he wasn’t hooked on her last night.’
‘You can say that again,’ said Gaskell, and closed the lock gates.
As the cruiser floated downwards the two old men sitting on the bench stared at Sally. She took off her sunglasses and glared at them.
‘Don’t blow your prostates, senior citizens,’ she said rudely. ‘Haven’t you seen a fanny before?’
‘You talking to me?’ said one of the men.
‘I wouldn’t be talking to myself.’
‘Then I’ll tell you,’ said the man, ‘I’ve seen one like yours before. Once.’
‘Once is about right,’ said Sally. ‘Where?’
‘On an old cow as had just dropped her calf,’ said the man, and spat into a neat bed of geraniums.
In the cabin Eva sat and wondered what they were talking about. She listened to the lapping of the water and the throb of the engine and thought about Henry. It wasn’t like him to do a thing like that. It really wasn’t. And in front of all those people. He must have been drunk. It was so humiliating. Well he could suffer. Sally said men ought to be made to suffer. It was part of the process of liberating yourself from them. You had to show them that you didn’t need them and violence was the only thing the male psyche understood. That was why she was so harsh with Gaskell. Men were like animals. You had to show them who was master.
Eva went through to the galley and polished the stainless-steel sink. Henry would have to learn how important she was by missing her and doing the housework and cooking for himself and when she got back she would give him such a telling-off about that doll. I mean, it wasn’t natural. Perhaps Henry ought to go and see a psychiatrist. Sally said that he had made the most horrible suggestion to her too. It only went to show that you couldn’t trust anyone. And Henry of all people. She would never have imagined Henry would think of doing anything like that. But Sally had been so sweet and understanding. She knew how women felt and she hadn’t even been angry with Henry.
‘It’s just that he’s a sphincter baby,’ she had said. ‘It’s symptomatic of a male-dominated chauvinist pig society. I’ve never known an MCP who didn’t say “Bugger you” and mean it.’
‘Henry’s always saying “Bugger”,’ Eva had admitted. ‘It’s bugger this, and bugger that.’
‘There you are, Eva baby. What did I tell you? It’s semantic degradation analwise.’
‘It’s bloody disgusting,’ said Eva, and so it was.
She went on polishing and cleaning until they were clear of the lock and steering downriver towards the open water of the Broads. Then she went up on deck and sat looking out over the flat empty landscape at the sunset. It was all so romantic and exciting, so different from everything she had known before. This was life as she had always dreamt it might be, rich and gay and fulfilling. Eva Wilt sighed. In spite of everything she was at peace with the world.
*
In the car park at the back of the Tech Henry Wilt wasn’t at peace with anything. On the contrary, he was at war with Eva’s replica. As he stumbled drunkenly round the car and struggled with Judy he was conscious that even an inflatable doll had a will of its own when it came to being dragged out of small cars. Judy’s arms and legs got caught in things. If Eva behaved in the same way on the night of her disposal he would have the devil’s own job getting her out of the car. He would have to tie her up in a neat bundle. That would be the best thing to do. Finally, by tugging at the doll’s legs, he hauled her out and laid her on the ground. Then he got back into the car to look for her wig. He found it under the seat and after rearranging Judy’s skirt so that it wasn’t quite so revealing, he put the wig on her head. He looked round the car park at the terrapin huts and the main building but there was no one to be seen. All clear. He picked the doll up and carrying it under his arm set off towards the building site. Halfway there he realized that he wasn’t doing it properly. Eva drugged and sleeping would be far too heavy to carry under his arm. He would have to use a fireman’s lift. Wilt stopped and hoisted the doll on to his back, and set off again weaving erratically, partly because, thanks to the gin, he couldn’t help it, and partly because it added verisimilitude to the undertaking. With Eva over his shoulder he would be bound to weave a bit. He reached the fence and dropped the doll over. In the process the wig fell off again. Wilt groped around in the mud and found it. Then he went round to the gate. It was locked. It would be. He would have to remember that. Details like that were important. He tried to climb over but couldn’t. He needed something to give him a leg up. A bicycle. There were usually some in the racks by the main gate. Stuffing the wig into his pocket Wilt made his way round the terrapin huts and past the canteen and was just crossing the grass by the Language Lab when a figure appeared out of the darkness and a torch shone in his face. It was the caretaker.
‘Here, where do you think you’re going?’ the caretaker asked. Wilt halted.
‘I’ve … I’ve just come back to get some notes from the Staff Room.’
‘Oh it’s you, Mr Wilt,’ said the caretaker. ‘You should know by now that you can’t get in at this time of night. We lock up at nine thirty.’
‘I’m sorry. I forgot,’ said Wilt.
The caretaker sighed. ‘Well, since it’s you and it’s just this once …’ he said, and unlocked the door to the General Studies building. ‘You’ll have to walk up. The lifts don’t work at this time of night. I’ll wait for you down here.’
Wilt staggered slowly up five flights of stairs to the Staff Room and went to his locker. He took out a handful of papers and a copy of Bleak House he’d been meaning to take home for some months and hadn’t. He stuffed the notes into his pocket and found the wig. While he was about it he might as well pick up an elastic band. That would keep the wig on Judy’s head. He found some in a box in the stationery cupboard, stuffed the notes into his other pocket and went downstairs.
‘Thanks very much,’ he told the caretaker. ‘Sorry to have bothered you.’ He wove off round the corner to the bike sheds.
‘Pissed as a newt,’ said the caretaker, and went back into his office.
Wilt watched him light his pipe and then turned his attention to the bicycles. The bloody things were all locked. He would just have to carry one round. He put Bleak House in the basket, picked the bike up and carried it all the way round to the fence. Then he climbed up and over and groped around in the darkness for the doll. In the end he found it and spent five minutes trying to keep the wig on while he fastened the elastic band under her chin. It kept on jumping off. ‘Well, at least that’s one problem I won’t have with Eva,’ he muttered to himself, when the wig was secured. Having satisfied himself that it wouldn’t come off he moved cautiously forward skirting mounds of gravel, machines, sacks and reinforcing rods when it suddenly occurred to him that he was running a considerable risk of disappearing down one of the pile holes himself. He put the doll down and fumbled in his pocket for the torch and shone it on the ground. Some yards ahead there was a large square of thick plywood. Wilt moved forward and lifted it. Underneath was the hole, a nice big hole. Just the right size. She would fit in there perfectly. He shone the torch down. Must be thirty feet deep. He pushed the plywood to one side and went back for the doll. The wig had fallen off again.
‘Fuck,’ said Wilt, and reached in his pocket for another elastic band. Five minutes later Judy’s wig was firmly in place with four elastic bands fastened under her chin. That should do it. Now all he had to do was to drag the replica to the hole and make sure it fitted. At this point Wilt hesitated. He was beginning to have doubts about the soundness of the scheme. Too many unexpected contingencies had arisen for his liking. On the other hand there was a sense of exhilaration about being alone on the building site in the middle of the night. Perhaps it would be better if he went home now. No, he had to see the thing through. He would put the doll into the hole to make quite sure that it fitted. Then he would deflate it and go home and repeat the process until he had trained himself to kill by proxy. He would keep the doll in the boot of the car. Eva never looked there. And in future he would only blow her up when he reached the car park. That way Eva would have no idea what was going on. Definitely not. Wilt smiled to himself at the simplicity of the scheme. Then he picked Judy up and pushed her towards the hole feet first. She slid in easily while Wilt leant forward. Perfect. And at that moment he slipped on the muddy ground. With a desperate effort which necessitated letting go of the doll he hurled himself to one side and grabbed at the plywood. He got to his feet cautiously and cursed. His trousers were covered with mud and his hands were shaking.
‘Damned near went down myself,’ he muttered, and looked around for Judy. But Judy had disappeared. Wilt reached for his torch and shone it down the hole. Halfway down the doll was wedged lightly against the sides and for once the wig was still on. Wilt stared desperately down at the thing and wondered what the hell to do. It – or she – must be at least twenty feet down. Fifteen. Anyway a long way down and certainly too far for him to reach. But still too near the top not to be clearly visible to the workmen in the morning. Wilt switched off the torch and pulled the plywood square so that it covered the hole. That way he wouldn’t be in danger of joining the doll. Then he stood up and tried to think of ways of getting it out.
Rope with a hook on the end of it? He hadn’t a rope or a hook. He might be able to find a rope but hooks were another matter. Get a rope and tie it to something and climb down it and bring the doll up? Certainly not. It would be bad enough climbing down the rope with two hands but to think of climbing back up with one hand holding the doll in the other was sheer lunacy. That way he would end up at the bottom of the hole himself and if one thing was clear in his mind it was that he didn’t intend to be discovered at the bottom of a thirty-foot pile hole on Monday morning clutching a plastic fucking doll with a cunt dressed in his wife’s clothes. That way lay disaster. Wilt visualized the scene in the Principal’s office as he tried to explain how he came to be … And anyway they might not find him or hear his yells. Those damned cement lorries made a hell of a din and he bloody well wasn’t going to risk being buried under … Shit. Talk about poetic justice. No, the only thing to do was to get that fucking doll down to the bottom of the hole and hope to hell that no one spotted it before they poured the concrete in. Well, at least that way he would learn if it was a sensible method of getting rid of Eva. There was that to be said for it. Every cloud had …
Wilt left the hole and looked around for something to move Judy down to the bottom. He tried a handful of gravel but she merely wobbled a bit and stayed put. Something weightier was needed. He went across to a pile of sand and scooped some into a plastic sack and poured it down the hole, but apart from adding an extra dimension of macabre realism to Mrs Wilt’s wig the sand did nothing. Perhaps if he dropped a brick on the doll it would burst. Wilt looked around for a brick and ended up with a large lump of clay. That would have to do. He dropped it down the hole. There was a thump, a rattle of gravel and another thump. Wilt shone his torch down. Judy had reached the bottom of the hole and had settled into a grotesque position with her legs crumpled up in front of her and one arm outstretched towards him as if in supplication. Wilt fetched another lump of clay and hurled it down. This time the wig slid sideways and her head lolled. Wilt gave up. There was nothing more he could do. He pulled the plywood back over the hole and went back to the fence.
Here he ran into more trouble. The bicycle was on the other side. He fetched a plank, leant it against the fence and climbed over. Now to carry the bike back to the shed. Oh bugger the bicycle. It could stay where it was. He was fed up with the whole business. He couldn’t even dispose of a plastic doll properly. It was ludicrous to think that he could plan, commit and carry through a real murder with any hope of success. He must have been mad to think of it. It was all that blasted gin.
‘That’s right, blame the gin,’ Wilt muttered to himself, as he trudged back to his car. ‘You had this idea months ago.’ He climbed into the car and sat there in the darkness wondering what on earth had ever possessed him to have fantasies of murdering Eva. It was insane, utterly insane, and just as mad as to imagine that he could train himself to become a cold-blooded killer. Where had the idea originated from? What was it all about? All right, Eva was a stupid cow who made his life a misery by nagging at him and by indulging a taste for Eastern mysticism with a frenetic enthusiasm calculated to derange the soberest of husbands, but why his obsession with murder? Why the need to prove his manliness by violence? Where had he got that from? In the middle of the car park, Henry Wilt, suddenly sober and clear-headed, realized the extraordinary effect that ten years of Liberal Studies had had upon him. For ten long years Plasterers Two and Meat One had been exposed to culture in the shape of Wilt and The Lord of the Flies, and for as many years Wilt himself had been exposed to the barbarity, the unhesitating readiness to commit violence of Plasterers Two and Meat One. That was the genesis of it all. That and the unreality of the literature he had been forced to absorb. For ten years Wilt had been the duct along which travelled creatures of imagination, Nostromo, Jack and Piggy, Shane, creatures who acted and whose actions effected something. And all the time he saw himself, mirrored in their eyes, an ineffectual passive person responding solely to the dictates of circumstance. Wilt shook his head. And out of all that and the traumas of the past two days had been born this acte gratuit, this semi-crime, the symbolic murder of Eva Wilt.
He started the car and drove out of the car park. He would go and see the Braintrees. They would still be up and glad to see him and besides he needed to talk to someone. Behind him on the building site his notes on Violence and the Break-Up of Family Life drifted about in the night wind and stuck in the mud.
7
‘Nature is so libidinous,’ said Sally, shining a torch through the porthole at the reeds. ‘I mean take bull-rushes. I mean they’re positively archetypally phallus. Don’t you think so, G?’
‘Bullrushes?’ said Gaskell, gazing helplessly at a chart. ‘Bullrushes do nothing for me.’
‘Maps neither, by the look of it.’
‘Charts, baby, charts.’
‘What’s in a name?’
‘Right now, a hell of a lot. We’re either in Frogwater Reach or Fen Broad. No telling which.’
‘Give me Fen Broad every time. I just adore broads. Eva sweetheart, how’s about another pot of coffee? I want to stay awake all night and watch the dawn come up over the bullrushes.’
‘Yes, well I don’t,’ said Gaskell. ‘Last night was enough for me. That crazy guy with the doll in the bath and Schei cutting himself. That’s enough for one day. I’m going to hit the sack.’
‘The deck,’ said Sally, ‘hit the deck, G. Eva and I are sleeping down here. Three’s a crowd.’
‘Three? With boobs around it’s five at the least. OK, so I sleep on deck. We’ve got to be up early if we’re to get off this damned sandbank.’
‘Has Captain Pringsheim stranded us, baby?’
‘It’s these charts. If only they would give an exact indication of depth.’
‘If you knew where we were, you’d probably find they do. It’s no use knowing it’s three feet—’