by Tom Sharpe
‘If you ask me,’ said Miss Hare, ‘the whole thing’s a fabrication. I was in there ten minutes …’
‘Doing what?’ asked Wilt. ‘Apart from attacking me.’
‘Something feminine, if you must know.’
‘Like taking steroids. Well, let me tell you that when I went down there and I wasn’t there more than …’
It was Mrs Bristol’s turn to intervene. ‘Down, did you say down?’
‘Of course I said down. What did you expect me to say? Up?’
‘But the toilet’s on the fourth floor, not the second. That’s where she was.’
‘Now you tell us. And where the hell do you think I went?’
‘But I always go upstairs,’ said Mrs Bristol. ‘It keeps me in trim. You know that. I mean one’s got to get some exercise and …’
‘Oh, belt up,’ said Wilt, and dabbed his nose with a bloodstained handkerchief.
‘Right, let’s get this straight,’ said the Principal, deciding it was time to exercise some authority. ‘Mrs Bristol tells Wilt here there is a girl upstairs injecting herself with something or other and instead of going upstairs, Wilt goes down to the toilet on the second floor and …’
‘Gets beaten to a pulp by Ms Blackbelt Burke here,’ said Wilt who was beginning to regain the initiative. ‘And I don’t suppose it’s occurred to anyone to go up and see if that junkie’s still there.’
But the Vice-Principal had already left.
‘If that little turd calls me Burke again …’ said Miss Hare menacingly. ‘Anyway, I still think we should call the police. I mean, why did Wilt go downstairs instead of up? I find that peculiar.’
‘Because I don’t use the Ladies’ or, in your case, the Bisexual Toilets, that’s why.’
‘Oh for God’s sake,’ said the Principal, ‘there’s obviously been some mistake and if we all keep calm …’
The Vice-Principal returned. ‘No sign of her,’ he said.
The Principal got to his feet. ‘Well, that’s that. Evidently there’s been some mistake. Mrs Bristol may have imagined …’ But any aspersions on Mrs Bristol’s imagination he was about to make were stopped by the V-P’s next words.
‘But I did find this in the trash can,’ he said, and produced a blood-stained lump of paper towel, which looked like Wilt’s handkerchief.
The Principal regarded it with disgust. ‘That hardly proves anything. Women do bleed occasionally.’
‘Call it a jamrag and be done with it,’ said Wilt viciously. He was getting fed up with bleeding himself. Miss Hare turned on him.
‘That’s typical, you foulmouthed sexist,’ she snapped.
‘I was merely interpreting what the Principal was …’
‘And more conclusively, this,’ interrupted the V-P, this time producing a hypodermic needle.
It was Mrs Bristol’s turn to bridle. ‘There, what did I tell you. I wasn’t imagining anything. There was a girl up there injecting herself and I did see her. Now what are you going to do?’
‘Now we mustn’t jump to conclusions just because …’ the Principal began.
‘Call the police. I demand that you call the police,’ said Miss Hare, determined to take this opportunity for airing her opinions about Wilt and Peeping Toms as widely as possible.
‘Miss Burke,’ said the Principal, flustered into sharing Wilt’s feelings about the PE lecturer, ‘this is a matter that needs cool heads.’
‘Miss Hare’s my name and if you haven’t the decency … And where do you think you’re going?’
Wilt had taken the opportunity to sidle to the door. ‘To the men’s toilet to assess the damage you did, then the Blood Transfusion Unit for a refill and after that, if I can make it, to my doctor and the most litigious lawyer I can find to sue you for assault and battery.’ And before Miss Hare could reach him, Wilt was off down the corridor and had closeted himself in the Men’s toilet.
Behind him Miss Hare vented her fury on the Principal. ‘Right, that does it,’ she shouted. ‘If you don’t call the police, I will. I want the facts of this case spelt out loud and clear so that if that little sex-maniac goes anywhere near a lawyer, the public are going to learn the sort of people who teach here. I want this whole disgusting matter dealt with openly.’
It was the last thing the Principal wanted. ‘I really don’t think that’s wise,’ he said. ‘After all, Wilt could have made a natural mistake.’
Miss Hare wasn’t to be mollified. ‘The mistake Wilt made wasn’t natural. And besides, Mrs Bristol did see a girl taking heroin.’
‘We don’t know that. There could be some quite ordinary explanation.’
‘The police will find out soon enough once they’ve got that syringe,’ said Miss Hare adamantly. ‘Now then, are you going to phone them or am I?’
‘If you put it like that, I suppose we’ll have to,’ said the Principal, eyeing her with loathing. He picked up the phone.
4
In the Men’s toilet, Wilt surveyed his face in the mirror. It looked as unpleasant as it felt. His nose was swollen, there were streaks of blood on his chin and Miss Hare had managed to open an old cut above his right eye. Wilt washed his face in a basin and thought dismally about tetanus. Then he took his false tooth out and studied his tongue. It was not, as he had expected, twice its normal size, but it still tasted of disinfectant. He rinsed his mouth out under the tap with the slightly cheering thought that if his taste buds were anything to go by a tetanus germ wouldn’t stand an earthly of surviving. After that, he put his tooth back and wondered yet again what it was about him that invited misunderstanding and catastrophe.
The face in the mirror told him nothing. It was a very ordinary face and Wilt had no illusions about it being handsome. And yet for all its ordinariness, it had to be the façade behind which lurked an extraordinary mind. In the past he had liked to think it was an original mind or, at the very least, an individual one. Not that that helped much. Every mind had to be individual and that didn’t make everyone accident-prone, to put it mildly. No, the fact of the matter was that he lacked a sense of his own authority.
‘You just let things happen to you,’ he told the face in the mirror. ‘It’s about time you made them happen for you.’ But as he said it, he knew it would never be like that. He would never be a dominating person, a man of power whose orders were obeyed without question. It wasn’t his nature. To be more accurate, he lacked the stamina and drive to deal in details, to quibble over procedure and win allies and out-manoeuvre opponents, in short, to concentrate his attention on the means of gaining power. Worse still, he despised the people who had that drive. Invariably, they limited themselves to a view of the world in which they alone were important and to hell with what other people wanted. And they were everywhere, these committee Hitlers, especially at the Tech. It was about time they were challenged. Perhaps one day he would …
He was interrupted in this daydream by the entrance of the Vice-Principal. ‘Ah, there you are, Henry,’ he said, ‘I thought I’d better let you know that we’ve had to call in the police.’
‘About what?’ asked Wilt, suddenly alarmed at the thought of Eva’s reaction if Miss Hare accused him of being a voyeur.
‘Drugs in the college.’
‘Oh, that. A bit late in the day, isn’t it? Been going on ever since I can remember.’
‘You mean you knew about it?’
‘I thought everyone did. It’s common knowledge. Anyway, it’s obvious we’re bound to have a few junkies with all the students we’ve got,’ said Wilt, and made good his escape while the Vice-Principal was still busy at the urinal. Five minutes later, he had left the Tech and was immersed once more in those speculative thoughts that seemed to occupy so much of his time when he was alone. Why was it, for instance, that he was so concerned with power when he wasn’t really prepared to do anything about it? After all, he was earning a comfortable salary – it would have been a really good one if Eva hadn’t spent so much of it on the quads’ education –
and objectively he had nothing to complain about. Objectively. And a fat lot that meant. What mattered was how one felt. On that score, Wilt came bottom even on days when he hadn’t had his face mashed by Ms Hare.
Take Peter Braintree for example. He didn’t have any sense of futility or lack of power. He had even refused promotion because it would have meant giving up teaching and taking on administrative duties. Instead, he was content to give his lectures on English literature and go home to Betty and the children and spend his evenings playing trains or making model aeroplanes when he’d finished marking essays. And at the weekends, he’d go off to watch a football match or play cricket. It was the same during the holidays. The Braintrees always went off camping and walking and came back cheerful, with none of the rows and catastrophes that seemed an inevitable part of the Wilt family excursions. In his own way, Wilt envied him, while having to admit that his envy was muted by a contempt he knew to be wholly unjustified. In the modern world, in any world, it wasn’t enough just to be content and hope that everything would turn out for the best in the end. In Wilt’s experience, they turned out for the worst, e.g. Miss Hare. On the other hand, when he did try to do something the result was catastrophic. There didn’t seem to be any middle way.
He was still puzzling over the problem when he crossed Bilton Street and walked up Hillbrow Avenue. Here too, the signs told him that almost everyone was content with his lot. The cherry trees were in bloom, and pink and white petals littered the pavement like confetti. Wilt noted each front garden, most of them neat and bright with wallflowers, but some, where academics from the University lived, unkempt and overgrown with weeds. On the corner of Pritchard Street, Mr Sands was busy among his heathers and azaleas, proving to an uninterested world that it was possible for a retired bank manager to find satisfaction by growing acid-loving plants on an alkaline soil. Mr Sands had explained the difficulties to Wilt one day, and the need to replace all the topsoil with peat to lower the pH. Since Wilt had no idea what pH stood for, he hadn’t a clue what Mr Sands had been talking about, and in any case, he had been more interested in Mr Sands’ character and the enigma of his contentment. The man had spent forty years presumably fascinated by the movement of money from one account to the other, fluctuations in the interest rate and the granting of loans and overdrafts, and now all he seemed prepared to talk about were the needs of his camellias and miniature conifers. It didn’t make sense and was just as unfathomable as the character of Mrs Cranley who had once figured so spectacularly in a trial to do with a brothel in Mayfair, but who now sang in the choir at St Stephens and wrote children’s stories filled with remorseless whimsy and an appalling innocence. It was all beyond him. He could only deduce one fact from his observations. People could and did change their lives from one moment to the next, and quite fundamentally at that. And if they could, there was no reason why he shouldn’t. Fortified with the knowledge, he strode on more confidently and with the determination not to put up with any nonsense from the quads tonight.
As usual he was proved wrong. He had no sooner opened the front door, than he was under siege. ‘Ooh, Daddy, what have you done to your face?’ demanded Josephine.
‘Nothing,’ said Wilt, and tried to escape upstairs before the real inquisition could begin. He needed a bath and his clothes stank of disinfectant. He was stopped by Emmeline who was playing with her hamster halfway up.
‘Don’t step on Percival,’ she said, ‘she’s pregnant.’
‘Pregnant?’ said Wilt, momentarily nonplussed. ‘He can’t be. It’s impossible.’
‘Percival’s a she, so it is.’
‘A she? But the man at the petshop guaranteed the thing was a male. I asked him specifically.’
‘And she’s not a thing,’ said Emmeline. ‘She’s an expectant mummy.’
‘Better not be,’ said Wilt. ‘I’m not having the house overrun by an exploding population of hamsters. Anyway, how do you know?’
‘Because we put her in with Julian’s to see if they’d fight to the death like the book said, and Percival went into a trance and didn’t do anything.’
‘Sensible fellow,’ said Wilt, immediately identifying with Percival in such horrid circumstances.
‘She’s not a fellow. Mummy hamsters always go into a trance when they want to be done.’
‘Done?’ said Wilt inadvisedly.
‘What you do to Mummy on Sunday mornings and Mummy goes all funny afterwards.’
‘Christ,’ said Wilt, cursing Eva for not shutting the bedroom door. Besides, the mixture of accuracy and baby-talk was getting to him. ‘Anyway, never mind what we do. I want to …’
‘Does Mummy go into a trance, too?’ asked Penelope, who was coming down the stairs with a doll in a pram.
‘It’s not something I’m prepared to discuss,’ said Wilt. ‘I need a bath and I’m going to have one. And now.’
‘Can’t,’ said Josephine. ‘Sammy’s having her hair washed. She’s got nits. You smell funny too. What’s that on your collar?’
‘And all down the front of your shirt.’ This from Penelope.
‘Blood,’ said Wilt, endowing the word with as much threat as he could. He pushed past the pram and went into the bedroom, wondering what it was about the quads that gave them some awful sort of collective authority. Four separate daughters wouldn’t have had the same degree of assertiveness and the quads had definitely inherited Eva’s capacity for making the worst of things. As he undressed, he could hear Penelope bearing the glad tidings of his misfortune to Eva through the bathroom door.
‘Daddy’s come home smelling of disinfectant and he’s cut his face.’
‘He’s taking off his trousers and there’s blood all down his shirt,’ Josephine chimed in.
‘Oh, great,’ said Wilt. ‘That ought to bring her out like a scalded cat.’
But it was Emmeline’s announcement that Daddy had said Mummy went into a trance when she wanted a fuck that caused the trouble.
‘Don’t use that word,’ yelled Wilt. ‘If I’ve told you once I’ve told you a thousand times and I never said anything about your bleeding mother going into a trance. I said –’
‘What did you call me?’ Eva shouted, storming out of the bathroom. Wilt pulled up his Y-fronts again and sighed. On the landing, Emmeline was describing with clinical accuracy the mating habits of female hamsters, and attributing the description to Wilt.
‘I didn’t call you a bloody hamster. That’s a downright lie. I don’t know the first thing about the fucking things and I certainly never wanted them in –’
‘There you go,’ shouted Eva. ‘One moment you’re telling the children not to use filthy language and the next you’re using it yourself. You can’t expect them to –’
‘I don’t expect them to lie. That’s far worse than the sort of language they use and anyway Penelope used it first. I –’
‘And you’ve absolutely no right to discuss our sex life with them.’
‘I don’t and I wasn’t,’ said Wilt. ‘All I said was I didn’t want the house overrun by blasted hamsters. The man in the shop sold me that mentally deficient rat as a male, not a bloody breeding machine.’
‘Now you’re being disgustingly sexist as well,’ yelled Eva.
Wilt stared wildly round the bedroom. ‘I am not being sexist,’ he said finally. ‘It just happens to be a well-known fact that hamsters –’
But Eva had seized on his inconsistency. ‘Oh yes you are. The way you talk anyone would think women were the only ones who wanted you-know-what.’
‘You-know-what my foot. Those four little bints out there know what without you-know-whating –’
‘How dare you call your own daughters bints? That’s a disgusting word.’
‘Fits,’ said Wilt, ‘and as for their being my own daughters, I can tell you it’s –’
‘I shouldn’t,’ said Eva.
Wilt didn’t. Push Eva too far and there was no knowing what would happen. Besides, he’d had enough of women’s powe
r in action for one day. ‘All right, I apologize,’ he said. ‘It was a stupid thing to say.’
‘I should think it was,’ said Eva, coming off the boil and picking his shirt off the floor. ‘How on earth did you get all this blood on your new shirt?’
‘Slipped and fell in the gents,’ said Wilt, deciding the time was hardly appropriate for a more accurate account. ‘That’s why it smells like that.’
‘In the gents?’ said Eva suspiciously. ‘You fell over in the gents?’
Wilt gritted his teeth. He could see any number of awful consequences developing if the truth leaked out but he’d already committed himself.
‘On a bar of soap,’ he said. ‘Some idiot had left it on the floor.’
‘And another idiot stepped on it,’ said Eva, scooping up Wilt’s jacket and trousers and depositing them in a plastic basket. ‘You can take these to the dry-cleaners on the way to work tomorrow.’
‘Right,’ said Wilt, and headed for the bathroom.
‘You can’t go in there yet. I’m still washing Samantha’s hair and I’m not having you prancing around in the altogether …’
‘Then I’ll wear my pants in the shower,’ said Wilt and was presently hidden behind the shower curtain listening to Penelope telling the world that female hamsters frequently bit the male’s testicles after copulating.
‘I wonder they bother to wait. Talk about having your cake and eating it,’ muttered Wilt, and absentmindedly soaped his Y-fronts.
‘I heard that,’ said Eva and promptly turned the hot tap on in the bath. Behind the shower curtain Wilt juddered under a stream of cold water. With a grunt of despair, he wrenched at the cold tap and stepped from the shower.
‘Daddy’s foaming at his panties,’ squealed the quads delightedly.
Wilt lurched at them rabidly. ‘Not the only fucking place he’ll be foaming if you don’t get the hell out of here,’ he shouted.
Eva turned the hot tap in the bath off. ‘That’s no way to set an example,’ she said, ‘talking like that. You should be ashamed of yourself.’