Wilt (6 page)

‘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.

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 mane. 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
Pringsheim’s.

‘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 boil-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 snares. 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 to 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.

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 Misses-in-between. Operative word misses,’ said Gaskell bumping the
boat into the lock.

‘But that’s the whole point’

‘What is?’ said Gaskell.

‘Messing with Misses-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 realised 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 whew 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 half 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.