Wilt (5 page)

‘Because you haven’t the courage of your instincts? Because yours a psychic virgin?
Because you’re not a man? Because you can’t take a woman who thinks?’

‘Thinks?’ yelled Wilt, stung into action by the accusation that he wasn’t a man.
‘Thinks? You think? You know something? I’d rather have it off with that plastic mechanical
do than you. It’s got more sex appeal in its little finger than you have in your whole
rotten body. When I want a whore I’ll buy one.’

‘Why you little shit’ said Sally, and lunged at him. Wilt scuttled sideways and
collided with the punchbag. The next moment he had stepped on a model engine and was
hurtling across the room. As he slumped down the wall on to the floor Sally picked up the doll
and leant over him.

In the kitchen Eva had finished the fruit salad and had made coffee. It was a lovely
party. Mr Osewa had told her all about his job as underdevelopment officer in
Cultural Affairs to UNESCO and how rewarding he found it. She had been kissed twice on
the back of the neck by Dr Scheimacher in passing and the man in the Irish Cheese loincloth
had pressed himself against her rather more firmly than was absolutely necessary to
reach the tomato ketchup. And all around her terribly clever people were being so
outspoken. It was all so sophisticated. She helped herself to another drink and looked
around for Henry. He was nowhere to be seen.

‘Have you seen Henry?’ she asked when Sally came into the kitchen holding a bottle of
Vodka and looking rather flushed.

‘The last I saw of him he was setting with some dolly bird,’ said Sally, helping
herself to a spoonful of fruit salad. ‘Oh, Eva darling, you’re absolutely Cordon Bleu
baby.’ Eva blushed.

‘I do hope he’s enjoying himself, Henry’s not awfully good at parties.’

‘Eva baby, be honest. Henry’s not awfully good period.’

‘It’s just that he…’ Eva began but Sally kissed her.

‘You’re far too good for him,’ she said. ‘we’ve got to find you someone really
beautiful.’ While Eva sipped her drink, Sally found a young man with a frond of hair falling
across his forehead who was lying on a couch with a girl, smoking and staring at the
ceiling.

‘Christopher precious,’ she said, ‘I’m going to steal you for a moment. I want you to do
someone for me. Go into the kitchen and sweeten the woman with the boobies and the awful
yellow pyjamas.’

‘Oh God. Why me?’

‘My sweet, you know you’re utterly irresistible. But the sexiest. For me, baby, for
me.’

Christopher got off the couch and went into the kitchen Sally stretched out beside the
girl.

‘Christopher is a dreamboy,’ she said.

‘He’s a gigolo.’ said the girl. ‘A male prostitute.’

‘Darling,’ said Sally, ‘it’s about time we women had them.’

In the kitchen Eva stopped pouring coffee. She was feeling delightfully tipsy.

‘You mustn’t.’ she said hastily.

‘Why not?’

‘I’m married.’

‘I like it. I like it.’

‘Yes but…’

‘No buts, lover.’

‘Oh.’

Upstairs in the toy room Wilt, recovering slowly from the combined assaults on his
system of Pringsheim Punch, Vodka, his nymphomaniac hostess and the corner of the
cupboard against which he had fallen, had the feeling that something was terribly wrong.
It wasn’t simply that the room was oscillating, that he had a lump on the back of his head
or that he was naked. It was rather the sensation that something with all the less
attractive qualities of a mousetrap, or a vice, or starving clam, had attached itself
implacably to what he, had up till now always considered to be the most private of
parts. Wilt opened his eyes and found himself staring into smiling if slightly swollen
face. He shut his eyes again, hope against hope, opened them again, found the face still there
and made an effort to sit up.

It was an unwise move. Judy, the plastic doll, inflated beyond her normal pressure,
resisted. With a squawk Wilt fell back on to the floor. Judy followed. Her nose bounced on
his face and her breasts on his chest. With a curse Wilt rolled onto his side and considered
the problem. Sitting up was out of the question. That way led to castration. He would have
to try something else. He rolled the doll over further and climb on top only to decide that
his weight on it was increasing pressure on what remained of his penis and that if he
wanted to get gangrene that was the way to go about getting it. Wilt rolled off
precipitately and groped for a valve. There must be one somewhere if he could only find
it. But if there was a valve it was well hidden and by the feel of things he hadn’t got time
to waste finding it. He felt round on the floor for something to use as a dagger, something
sharp, and finally broke off a piece of railway track and plunged it into his assailant’s
back. There was a squeak of plastic but Judy’s swollen smile remained unchanged and her
unwanted attentions as implacable as ever. Again and again he stabbed her but to no
avail. Wilt dropped his makeshift dagger and considered other means. He was getting
frantic, conscious of a new threat. It was no longer that he was the subject of her high air
pressure. His own internal pressures were mounting. The Pringsheim Punch and the vodka
were making their presence felt. With a desperate thought that if he didn’t get out of her
soon he would burst, Wilt seized Judy’s head, bent it sideways and sank his teeth into her
neck. Or would have had her pounds per square inch permitted. Instead he bounced off and
spent the next two minutes trying to find his false tooth which had been dislodged in the
exchange.

By the time he had got it back in place, panic had set in. He had to get out of the doll.
He just had to. There would be a razor in the bathroom or a pair of scissors. But where on
earth was the bathroom? Never mind about that. He’d find the damned thing. Carefully, very
carefully he rolled the doll on to her hack and followed her over. Then he inched his knees
up until he was straddling the thing. All he needed now was something to hold on to while
he got to his feet. Wilt leant over and grasped the edge of a chair with one hand while
lifting Judy’s head off the floor with the other. A moment later he was on his feet.
Holding the doll to him he shuffled towards the door and opened it. He peered out into the
passage. What if someone saw him? To hell with that. Wilt no longer cared what people
thought about him. But which way was the bathroom? Wilt turned right, and peering
frantically over Judy’s shoulder, shuffled off down the passage.

Downstairs, Eva was having a wonderful time. First Christopher, then the man in the
Irish Cheese loincloth and finally Dr Scheimacher, had all made advances to her and been
rebuffed. It was such a change from Henry’s lack of interest showed she was still
attractive. Dr Scheimacher had said that she was an interesting example of latent
steatopygia, Christopher tried to kiss her breasts and the man in the loincloth had made the
most extraordinary suggestion to her. And through it all, Eva had remained entirely
virtuous. Her massive skittishness, her insistence on dancing and, most effective of
all, her habit of saying in a loud and not wholly cultivated voice, ‘Oh you are awful’ at
moments of their greatest ardour, had had a markedly deterrent effect. Now she sat on
the floor in the living-room, while Sally and Gaskell and the bearded man from the
institute of Ecological Research argued about sexually interchangeable
role-playing in a population-restrictive society. She felt strangely elated.
Parkview Avenue and Mavis Mottram and her work at the Harmony Community Centre seemed
to belong to another world. She had been accepted by people who flew to California or
Tokyo to conferences and Think Tanks as casually as she took the bus to town. Dr
Scheimacher had mentioned that he was flying to New Delhi in the morning, and Christopher
had just come back from photographic assignment in Trinidad. Above all, there was an aura
of importance about what they were doing, a glamour that was wholly lacking in Henry’s
job at the Tech. If only she could get him to do something interesting and adventurous.
But Henry was such a stick-in-the-mud. She had made mistake in marrying him. She
really had. All he was interested in was books, but life wasn’t to be found in books. Like
Sally said, life was for living. Life was people and experiences and fun. Henry would
never see that.

In the bathroom Wilt could see very little. He certainly couldn’t see any way of
getting out of the doll. His attempt to slit the beastly thing’s throat with a razor had
failed, thank largely to the fact that the razor in question was a Wilkinson bonded blade.
Having failed with the razor be had tried shampoo as a lubricant but apart from working
up a lather which even to his jaundiced eye looked as though he had aroused the doll to
positively frenzied heights of sexual expectation the shampoo had achieved nothing.
Finally he had reverted to a quest for the valve. The damned thing had one somewhere if
only he could find it. In this endeavour he peered into the mirror on the door of the
medicine cabinet but the mirror was too small. There was a large one over the washbasin.
Wilt pulled down the lid of the toilet and climbed on to it. This way he would be able to get
a clear view of the doll’s back. He was just inching his way round when there were footsteps
in the passage. Wilt stopped inching and stood rigid on the toilet lid. Someone tried the
door and found it locked. The footsteps retreated and Wilt breathed a sigh of relief. Now
then, just let him find that valve.

And at that moment disaster struck. Wilt’s left foot stepped in the shampoo that had
dripped on to the toilet seat, slid sideways off the edge and Wilt, the doll and the door of
the medicine cabinet with which he had attempted to save himself were momentarily
airborne. As they hurtled into the bath, as the shower curtain and fitting followed, as
the contents of the medicine cabinet cascaded on to the washbasin, Wilt gave a last
despairing scream. There was a pop reminiscent of champagne corks and Judy, finally
responding to the pressure of Wilt’s eleven stone dropping from several feet into the
bath, ejected him. But Wilt no longer cared. He had in every sense passed out. He was only
dimly aware of shouts in the corridor, of someone breaking the door down, of faces
peering at him and of hysterical laughter. When he came to be was lying on the bed in the
toy room. He got up and put on his clothes and crept downstairs and out of the front door. It
was 3 AM.

Eva sat on the edge of the bed crying.

‘How could he? How could he do a thing like that? she said, ‘in front of all these
people.’

‘Eva baby, men are like that. Believe me,’ said Sally.

‘But with a doll…’

‘That’s symbolic of the male chauvinist pig attitude to women. We’re just fuck
artefacts to them. Objectification. So now you know how Henry feels about you.’

‘It’s horrible,’ said Eva.

‘Sure it’s horrible. Male domination debases us to the level of objects.’

‘But Henry’s never done anything like that before,’ Eva wailed.

‘Well, he’s done it now.’

‘I’m not going back to him. I couldn’t face it. I feel so ashamed.’

‘Honey, you just forget about it. You don’t have to go anywhere. Sally will look after
you. You just lie down and get some sleep.’

Eva lay back, but sleep was impossible. The image of Henry lying naked in the bath on
top of that horrible doll was faced in her mind. They had to break the door down and Dr
Scheimacher find cut his hand on a broken bottle trying to get Henry out of the bath…Oh,
it was all too awful. She would never be able to look people in the face again. The story
was bound to get about and she would be known as the woman whose husband went around…With a
fresh paroxysm of embarrassment Eva buried her head in the pillow and wept.

‘Well that sure made the party go with a bang,’ said Gaskell. ‘Guy screws a doll in the
bathroom and everyone goes berserk.’ He looked round the living-room at the mess. ‘If
anyone thinks I’m going to start clearing this lot up now they’d better think again. I’m
going to bed.’

‘Just don’t wake Eva up. She’s hysterical,’ said Sally.

‘Oh great. Now we’ve got a manic obsessive compulsive woman with hysteria in the
house.’

‘And tomorrow she’s coming with us on the boat.’

‘She’s what?’

‘You heard me. She’s coming with us on the boat.’

‘Now wait a bit…’

‘I’m not arguing with you, G. I’m telling you. She’s coming with us.’

‘Why, for Chrissake?’

‘Because I’m not having her go back to that creep of a husband of hers. Because you
won’t get me a cleaning-woman and because I like her.’

‘Because I won’t get you a cleaning-woman. Now I’ve heard it all.’

‘Oh no you haven’t,’ said Sally, ‘you haven’t heard the half of it. You may not know it but
you married a liberated woman. No male pig is going to put one over on me…’

‘I’m not trying to put one over on you,’ said Gaskell. ‘All I’m saying is that I don’t
want to have to…’

‘I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about that creep Wilt. You think he got into that
doll by himself? Think again, G baby, think again.’

Gaskell sat down on the sofa and stared at her.

‘You must be out of your mind. What the hell did you want to do a thing like that for?’

‘Because when I liberate someone I liberate them. No mistake.’

‘Liberate someone by…’ he shook his head. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

Sally poured herself a drink. ‘The trouble with you, G, is that you talk big but you
don’t do. It’s yakkity yak with you. “My wife is a liberated woman. My wife’s free.”
Nice-sounding talk but come the time your liberated wife takes it into her head to do
something, you don’t want to know.’

‘Yeah, and when you take it into your goddam head to do something who takes the can back?
I do. Where’s petticoats then? Who got you out of that mess in Omaha? Who paid the fuzz in
Houston that time…’

‘So you did. So why did you marry me? Just why?’

Gaskell polished his glasses with the edge of the chef’s hat. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ’so
help me I don’t know.’

‘For kicks, baby, for kicks. Without me you’d have died of boredom. With me you get
excitement. With me you get kicks in the teeth.’

Gaskell got up wearily and headed for the stairs. It was at times like these that he
wondered why he had married.

Wilt walked home in agony. His pain was no longer physical. It was the agony of
humiliation, hatred and self-contempt. He had been made to look a fool, a pervert and an
idiot in front of people he despised. The Pringsheims and their set were everything he
loathed, false, phoney, pretentious, a circus of intellectual clowns whose antics had
not even the merit of his own, which had at least been real. Theirs were merely a parody of
enjoyment. They laughed to hear themselves laughing and paraded a sensuality that had
nothing to do with feelings or even instincts but was dredged up from shallow
imaginations to mimic lust. Copulo ergo sum. And that bitch, Sally, had taunted him with
not having the courage of his instincts as if instinct consisted of ejaculating into
the chemically sterilized body of a woman he had first met twenty minutes before. And
Wilt had reacted instinctively, shying away from a concupiscence that had to do with
power and arrogance and an intolerable contempt for him which presupposed that what he
was, what little he was, was a mere extension of his penis and that the ultimate
expression of his thoughts, feelings, hopes and ambitions was to be attained between the
legs of a trendy slut. And that was being liberated.

‘Feel free,’ she had said and had knotted him into that fucking doll. Wilt ground his
teeth underneath a streetlamp.

And what about Eva? What sort of hell was she going to make for him now? If life had been
intolerable with her before this, it was going to be unadulterated misery now, she
wouldn’t believe that he hadn’t been screwing that doll, that he hadn’t got, into it of his
own accord, that he had been put into it by Sally. Not in a month of Sundays. And even if
by some miracle she accepted his story, a fat lot of difference that would make.

‘What sort of man do you think you are, letting a woman do a thing like that to you?’ she
would ask. There was absolutely no reply to the question. What sort of man was he? Wilt
had no idea. An insignificant little man to whom things happened and for whom life was a
chapter of indignities. Printers punched him in the face and he was blamed for it. His
wife bullied him and other people’s wives made a laughing-stock out of him. Wilt wandered
on along suburban streets past semi-detached houses and little gardens with a mounting
sense of determination. He had had enough of being the butt of circumstance. From now on
things would happen because he wanted them to. He would change from being the recipient
of misfortune. He would be the instigator. Just let Eva try anything now. He would knock
the bitch down.

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 gradbashing.

‘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 boat 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 got’ 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 same lawyer’s office filing a petition for divorce right
now.’