by Tom Sharpe
It was a most appalling call. The fifteen others that came in during the rest of the morning weren’t any better. Cancellation orders poured in accompanied by physical threats. So did obscene hate emails.
The deputy CEO told the secretary to leave the phone off the hook. ‘And while you’re about it you’d better be looking for another job. I sure as shit am. Immelmann’s gone crazy. He’s lost every customer we ever had,’ he shouted as he dashed out to his car.
In the Sheriff’s office Harry Stallard refused to believe Baxter’s report. ‘A new sniffer dog died after licking the water in the swimming-pool? Why in the name of God should they empty the pool? The dog probably fell in and drowned.’
But Baxter was adamant. ‘There was something dissolved down the bottom and they wanted to see what it was.’
‘Sure. One drowned hound dog.’
‘All I know is they had special wet suits and masks. And there was this special container to put it in to fly it up to the Chemical Warfare Research Center in Washington for analysis,’ Baxter told him. ‘They reckon it could be linked to Al Qaeda it’s that toxic.’
‘In Wilma? In Wilma? That’s out-of-this-world crazy. Who the hell’s going to use a highly toxic substance in a one-horse town like Wilma?’
Baxter pondered the question. ‘Could be that Saddam Hussein bastard. Got to test it someplace, I guess,’ he said finally.
‘So why choose Wilma; he’s got all those Kurds he gassed? You tell me that.’
‘Or that other guy Ossam been…The one who did the Twin Towers.’
‘Bin Laden,’ said the Sheriff. ‘Sure. So he chooses Wally Immelmann’s swimming-pool and takes out a hound dog? And that makes sense?’
‘Shit, I don’t know. Nothing makes sense. Hooking the toilets and all up to that tanker back of the old drive-in was crazy.’
Sheriff Stallard pushed his hat back and wiped the sweat from his face. ‘I don’t believe what I’m hearing. This isn’t happening. Not in Wilma it’s not. It can’t be. Wally Immelmann’s in with goddam terrorists. And that ain’t possible, no way, Billy, no way. I mean it’s way out impossible.’
Baxter shrugged. ‘That mega-decibel sound system was impossible too. You heard it. You know.’
The Sheriff did know. He was never going to forget it. He sat thinking. Or trying to. In the end he succeeded and the impossible became slightly more possible and his own position less insecure. People did go loco. ‘Get me Maybelle,’ he said. ‘Bring her in. She’s the one who’ll know.’
One person who definitely didn’t know was Eva. She had finally been allowed out of the Visitors’ Room only to be told that the patient Wilt was still unconscious but she could go and see him provided Mavis Mottram didn’t accompany her. Having been in Eva Wilt’s maudlin company for three hours Mavis had no intention of spending any more time or sympathy on her. She slunk out of the hospital a broken woman, cursing the day she’d met anyone so stupid and mawkishly sentimental. Eva’s feelings about Mavis had changed too. She was all bluff and bravado and a bully to boot and had no staying power.
Through the door of the ward Eva had glimpsed Inspector Flint sitting by the bed, apparently reading a newspaper. In fact he wasn’t reading it at all; he was using it as a shield to hide what was being done to a man who, if appearances were anything to go by, had recently been trepanned or had had an exceedingly nasty accident with some sort of circular saw. Whatever it was Flint didn’t want to see it. He had never been a particularly squeamish man and his experience of mutilated corpses had hardened him to inanimate horrors, but he was less able to cope with those involving modern surgery and in particular found pulsing brains in adult males (babies were different) decidedly unnerving.
‘Can’t you put a screen round the bed while you’re doing whatever you are doing to that poor bloke?’ he’d asked only to be told he could leave the ward if he was so wimpish and anyway it wasn’t a bloke but a woman and this was a unisex ward.
‘You could have fooled me,’ Flint retorted. ‘Though come to think of it, I daresay unisex is about right. It’s impossible to tell what sex anyone is in here.’
It was not a remark that endeared him to three women nearby who had been under the illusion that they were still relatively attractive and sexy. Flint didn’t care. He tried to interest himself more vicariously in a scandal involving a well-known rugby player who had gone to a massage parlour in Swansea only to find his wife working there and had tackled the owner or, as the latter had put it from the witness box, ‘had gone apeshit’, when he saw Wilt looking at him.
Flint put the paper down and smiled. ‘Hello, Henry. Feeling any better?’
From the pillow Wilt studied that smile and found it difficult to interpret. It wasn’t the sort of smile to give him any confidence. Inspector Flint’s false teeth were too loose for that and besides, he had seen Flint smile maliciously in the past too often to find the sight at all reassuring. He didn’t feel any better.
‘Better than what?’ he asked.
Flint’s smile disappeared and with it most of his sympathy. He began to doubt whether Wilt’s brain had been affected at all by being mugged. ‘Well, better than you did before.’
‘Before what?’ said Wilt, fighting for time to find out what was going on. It was obvious he was in hospital and that he had bandages round his head but that was about all that was obvious.
Flint’s hesitation before replying did nothing to give him any confidence in his own innocence. ‘Before this thing happened,’ he said finally.
Wilt tried to think. He had no idea what had happened. ‘I can’t say I do,’ he replied. It seemed a reasonable answer to a question he didn’t understand.
That wasn’t the way Inspector Flint saw it. He was already beginning to lose the thread of the conversation and as always with Wilt he was being led into a swamp of misunderstanding. The sod never did say anything that was at all clear-cut. ‘When you say you can’t say you do, just exactly what do you mean?’ he enquired and tried to smile again. That didn’t help.
Wilt’s caution went into overdrive. ‘Just that,’ he said.
‘And ‘just that’ means?’
‘What I said. Just that,’ Wilt said.
Again Flint’s smile vanished. He leant forward. ‘Listen, Henry, all I want to know is–’
He got no further. Wilt had decided on new avoiding tactics. ‘Who’s Henry?’ he asked abruptly.
A new look of doubt came on Flint’s face and his lean forward ground to a halt. ‘Who’s Henry? You want to know who Henry is?’
‘Yes. I don’t know of any Henrys. Except kings and princes of course and I wouldn’t know any of them, would I? Never met one and I’m not likely to. Have you ever met a king or a prince?’
For a second the look on the Inspector’s face had changed from doubt to certainty. Now it swung back again. With Wilt nothing was certain and even that was doubtful in these circumstances. Wilt was uncertainty personified. ‘No. I haven’t met a king or a prince and I don’t want to. All I want to know–’
‘That’s the second time you’ve said that,’ said Wilt. ‘And what I want to know is who I am.’
At that moment Eva shoved her way into the room. She had waited long enough and she wasn’t spending another two hours in that revoltingly dirty waiting room. She was going to her husband’s side.
‘Oh, darling, are you in terrible pain, my pet?’
Wilt opened his eyes with a silent curse. ‘What’s it got to do with you? And who are you calling “darling”?’
‘But…oh, God! I’m your Eva, your wife.’
‘Wife? What do you mean? I haven’t got a wife,’ Wilt moaned. ‘I’m a…I’m a…I don’t know what I am.’
In the background Inspector Flint agreed wholeheartedly. He didn’t know what Wilt was either. Never had and never would. About the nearest he’d ever got to it was that Wilt was the most devious bastard he’d come across in all the years he’d been in the police force. With Eva, now weeping c
opiously, you knew precisely where you stood. Or lay. At the bottom of the pile. To that extent Wilt had told the truth. Family first with those ghastly quads; Eva second, along with her material possessions–or, as Wilt’s solicitor had once put it, ‘like living with a dishwasher cum vacuum cleaner that thinks it thinks’–and finally whatever latest fad or so-called philosophical twaddle she had heard about. Even Greenpeace had found her militancy too much. The Keeper of the Seal Culling Station at Worthcombe Bay had, in giving evidence in court against her from his wheelchair, said that if she represented Greenpeace, he shuddered to think what Greenwar would be like. In fact the man’s language had been so filthy that only his injuries prevented the magistrate from holding him in contempt. And finally at the very bottom of the pile was Mr Henry Wilt, lawfully wedded husband of Mrs Eva Wilt, poor bugger. No wonder he deliberately refused to recognise her.
He was distracted from these considerations by one last desperate appeal from Eva to her Henry to acknowledge her as his devoted wife and mother of his lovely daughters, and Wilt’s refusal to do anything so utterly insane, as well as his complaint that he was sick and didn’t want to be harassed by strange women he’d never seen before. The effect of this statement was that the weeping Eva was helped from the ward. Her sobs could be heard from the corridor as she went in search of a doctor.
Inspector Flint seized the opportunity to go back to the bedside and bend over Wilt. ‘You’re a cunning bugger, Henry,’ he whispered. ‘Cunning as hell but you don’t fool me. I saw the nasty little glint in your eye when your missis took off. I’ve known you too long to be fooled by your tricks. You just remember that.’
For a moment he thought Wilt was about to smile but the gormless expression returned and Wilt closed his eyes. Flint gave up. He wasn’t going to get anything useful out of him in these awful circumstances. And the circumstances were getting more awful by the minute. The woman with the pulsating skull was having some sort of fit and one of the shaven multi-sexes was protesting to a nurse that he, she or it had already been given a forty-five-minutes oil enema and definitely didn’t need another. The whole thing was a bloody nightmare.
In Wilma Sheriff Stallard shared Inspector Flint’s horror though for very different reasons. It wasn’t so much that Maybelle was refusing to give him information about what had been going on at the Starfighter Mansion. She was giving far too much and he’d have preferred not to hear it.
‘They asked you what?’ he gasped when she told him the quads had asked her how many times a week Wally Immelmann fucked her and how many other gays there were in Wilma. ‘The filthy bitches. And they used the words ‘fucked’ and ‘asswise’?’
Maybelle nodded. ‘Yessir, they sure did.’
‘What in God’s name did they ask that for? It’s crazy. It’s not possible.’
‘Said they were doing a project on exploitation of coloured folk in the South for the school they go to back in Britain and they had to fill in a questionnaire,’ Maybelle said.
‘And what did you tell them, for Chrissake?’
‘I’d rather not say, Sheriff. Nothing more than the truth.’
The Sheriff shuddered. If the truth was anything like what he’d heard at a thousand decibels up near the lake, Wally Immelmann would have to get the hell out of Wilma but fast. Either that or be lucky to die in the Coronary Unit.
Chapter 30
Two days later Wilt was sitting in a chair explaining what it felt like not to know who he was to a doctor who seemed to find Wilt’s symptoms quite common and of rather less interest than Wilt himself.
‘And you really don’t know who you are? Are you quite sure about that?’ the psychiatrist asked for the fifth time. ‘Are you absolutely certain?’
Wilt considered the question very carefully. It wasn’t so much the question as the way it was put that concerned him. It had a familiar tone to it. In his years of teaching confirmed and convincing liars he had used that tone himself too often not to recognise what it meant. Wilt changed his tactics.
‘Do you know who you are?’ he asked.
‘As a matter of fact, I do. My name is Dr Dedge.’
‘That’s not what I meant,’ said Wilt. ‘That is your identity. But do you know who you are?’
Dr Dedge regarded him with a new interest. Patients who distinguished between personal identity and who they were came into a rather different category from his usual ones. On the other hand, the fact that Wilt’s notes mentioned ‘Police inquiries following head injuries’ still inclined him to believe he was feigning amnesia. Dr Dedge took up the challenge.
‘When you say ‘who you are’ what exactly do you mean? ‘Who’ surely implies personal identity, doesn’t it?’
‘No,’ said Wilt. ‘I know perfectly well that I am Henry Wilt of 45 Oakhurst Avenue. That is my identity and my address. What I want to know is who Henry Wilt is.’
‘You don’t know who Henry Wilt is?’
‘Of course I don’t, any more than I know how I came to be in the ward.’
‘It says here that you suffered head injuries–’
‘I know that,’ Wilt interrupted. ‘I’ve got bandages round my head. Not that that is proof positive but even the most overworked NHS doctor would hardly make the mistake of treating my head when I’d broken my ankle. At least I don’t suppose so. Of course anything is possible these days. On the other hand, who I am is still a mystery to me. Are you sure you really know who you are, Dr Dredger?’
The psychiatrist smiled professionally. ‘My name happens to be Dedge, not Dredger.’
‘Well, mine is Wilt and I still don’t know who I am.’
Dr Dedge decided to go back to the safer ground of clinical questions. ‘Do you remember what you were doing when this neurological insult occurred?’ he asked.
‘Not offhand I don’t,’ said Wilt, after a moment’s hesitation. ‘When would that be, this neurological insult?’
‘When you suffered the head injuries.’
‘Bit more of an insult being beaten over the head, I’d have thought. Still, if that’s what you call it…’
‘That is the technical term for what occurred to you, Mr Wilt. Now do you know what you were doing just before the incident?’
Wilt pretended to think about the question. Not that it needed much thinking about. He had no idea. ‘No,’ he said finally.
‘No? Nothing at all?’
Wilt shook his head carefully. ‘Well, I can remember watching the news and thinking how wrong it was to stop Meals on Wheel to those old people in Burling just to save on the Council Tax. Then Eva–that’s my wife–came in and said supper was ready. I can’t remember much after that. Oh, and I washed the car some time and the cat had to go to the vet again. I can’t remember much after that.’
The psychiatrist made a number of notes and nodded encouragingly. ‘Any little thing will be of help, Henry,’ he said. ‘Take your time.’
Wilt did. He needed to find out how far back his memory would have been affected by a neurological insult. He’d nearly fallen into a trap when he’d said he didn’t know his own name. Clearly that didn’t fit the pattern. Not knowing who he was, on the other hand, still had some mileage to it. Wilt tried again.
‘I remember…no, you wouldn’t be interested in that.’
‘Let me be the one who decides that, Henry. You just tell me what you remember.’
‘I can’t, Doctor, I mean…well…I just can’t,’ he said, adopting the shifty whine he had heard so often in the Disadvantaged Single Sex Seminars he had been forced to attend as part of Ms Lashskirt’s Gender Affirmation Awareness Programme. Wilt was using that whine to his own advantage now.
In front of him Dr Dedge softened noticeably. He felt safer with that whine. It smacked of dependence. ‘I’m interested in anything you have to say,’ he said.
Wilt doubted it. What Dr Dedge was interested in was finding out if he was shamming. ‘Well, it’s just that I’m sitting in this room and suddenly I feel like I don’t
know why I’m here or who I am. It doesn’t make sense. Sounds so silly, doesn’t it?’
‘No, not at all. This is a not uncommon occurrence. Does this sensation last long?’
‘I don’t know, Doctor. I can’t remember. I just know I have it and it doesn’t make any sense.’
‘And have you discussed it with your wife?’ Dr Dedge asked.
‘Well, no. Can’t say I have,’ said Wilt sheepishly. ‘I mean, she’s got enough on her plate without me not knowing who I am. What with the quads and all.’
‘Mrs Wilt…? Are you telling me you have quadruplets?’ asked the psychiatrist.
Wilt gave a sickly smile. ‘Yes, Doctor, four of them. All girls. And even the cat’s neutered. Got no tail either. So I just sit there and try to think who I am.’
By the time Wilt went back to the ward, Dr Dedge had no doubt that he was a deeply disturbed man. As he explained to Dr Soltander, the neurological insult had resulted in the emergence of partial amnesia as a complicating factor to a preexisting depressive condition. And a bed had become available in an isolation room because the previous patient, a youth on a drug charge, had hanged himself. Dr Soltander was glad to hear it. He had had enough of Wilt and more importantly he had had far more than enough of Mrs Wilt who had been besieging his ward and disturbing the terminally ill patients. ‘Best place for him and those bloody policemen.’
‘He’s in Psychiatry, is he? Well, I can’t say I’m surprised,’ Inspector Flint said when he found Wilt was no longer in Geriatrics 3 next day. ‘If you ask me, he should have been certified years ago when he stuffed that inflatable doll down the hole. All the same, I don’t think he’s half as sick as he’s making out. I think he’s holding something back. I didn’t like the way he was acting when I was there.’
‘In what way, sir?’ Sergeant Yates asked.
‘Pretending he doesn’t know who he is and he’s never seen me in his life. Bullshit, Yates, pure Grade A unadulterated bullshit. And he doesn’t know Eva Wilt either? My eye and Betty Martin he doesn’t. He could have had half his brain removed and he’d still remember her. Mrs Wilt isn’t someone even a brain-damaged coma case would be capable of forgetting. No, our Henry was having her on. And me. Why, Yates, why? You tell me.’