Wilt on High (2 page)

‘Good Lord,’ said Braintree. ‘What on earth did Mr Birkenshaw have to say about it?’

‘Not much yet,’ said Wilt, ‘he’s still in shock. Spent most of Saturday night at the cop shop trying to convince them he isn’t the Phantom Flasher. They’ve been trying to catch that lunatic for years and this time they thought they’d got him.’

‘What? Birkenshaw? They’re out of their tinies, the man’s a Town Councillor.’

‘Was,’ said Wilt. ‘I doubt if he’ll stand again. Not after what Emmeline told the policewoman. Said she knew his prick looked like that because he’d lured her into his back garden and waggled the thing at her.’

‘Lured her?’ said Braintree dubiously. ‘With all due respect to your daughters, Henry, I wouldn’t have said they were exactly lurable. Ingenious, perhaps, and …’

‘Diabolical,’ said Wilt. ‘Don’t think I mind what you say about them. I have to live with the hell-cats. Of course she wasn’t lured. She’s had a vendetta with his
little pussy for months because it comes and knocks the stuffing out of ours. She was probably trying to poison the brute. Anyway, she was in his garden and according to her he waggled it. Not his version of course. Claimed he always pees on the compost heap and if little girls choose to lurk … Anyway, that didn’t go down with the policewoman very well either. Said it was unhygienic.’

‘Where was Eva while this was going on?’

‘Oh, here and there,’ said Wilt airily. ‘Apart from practically accusing Mr Birkenshaw of being related to the Yorkshire Ripper … I managed to stop that one going down in the police report by saying she was hysterical. Talk about drawing fire. At least I had the policewoman there to protect me and as far as I know the law of slander doesn’t apply to ten-year-olds. If it does, we’ll have to emigrate. As it is, I’m having to work nights to keep them at that blasted school for so-called gifted children. The cost is astronomic.’

‘I thought Eva was getting something off by helping out there.’

‘Helped out is more accurate. In fact, ordered off the premises,’ said Wilt and asked for two more pints.

‘What on earth for? I’d have thought they’d have been only too glad to have someone as energetic as Eva as an unpaid ancillary cleaning up and doing the cooking.’

‘Not when the said ancillary takes it into her head to brighten up their micro-computers with metal polish. Anyway, she screwed the lot and it was a miracle we didn’t have to replace them. Mind you, I wouldn’t have
minded handing over the ones we’ve got in the house. The place is a deathtrap of I triple E cables and floppy discs, and I can never get near the TV. And when I do, something called a dot matrix printer goes off somewhere and sounds like a hornets’ nest in a hurry. And all for what? So that four girls of average if fiendish intelligence can steal a march on snotty-nosed small boys in the scholastic rat-race.’

‘We’re just old-fashioned,’ said Braintree with a sigh. ‘The fact is the computer’s here to stay and children know how to use them and we don’t. Even the language.’

‘Don’t talk to me about that gobbledygook. I used to think a poke was a crude form of sex. Instead it’s something numerical in a programme and a programme’s not what it was. Nothing is. Even bugs and bytes. And to pay for this electronic extravaganza, I spend Tuesday night at the prison teaching a bloody gangster what I don’t know about E. M. Forster and Fridays at Baconheath Airbase giving lectures on British Culture and Institutions to a load of Yanks with time on their hands till Armageddon.’

‘I shouldn’t let the news of that leak out to Mavis Mottram,’ said Braintree as they finished their beer and left the pub. ‘She’s taken up Banning the Bomb with a vengeance. She’s been on to Betty about it and I’m surprised she hasn’t roped Eva in.’

‘She tried but it didn’t work, for a change. Eva’s too busy worrying about the quads to get involved in demonstrations.’

‘All the same, I’d keep quiet about the airbase job. You don’t want Mavis picketing your house.’

But Wilt wasn’t sure. ‘Oh, I don’t know. It might make us slightly more popular with the neighbours. At the moment they’ve got it into their thick heads that I’m either a potential mass-murderer or a left-wing revolutionary because I teach at the Tech. Being picketed by Mavis on the wholly false grounds that I’m in favour of the Bomb might improve my image.’ They walked back to the Tech by way of the cemetery.

At 45 Oakhurst Avenue, it was one of Eva Wilt’s better days. There were days, better days and one of those days. Days were just days when nothing went wrong and she drove the quads to school without too much quarrelling, and came home to do the housework and went shopping and had a tuna-fish salad for lunch and did some mending afterwards and planted something in the garden and picked the children up from school and nothing particularly nasty happened. On one of those days everything went wrong. The quads quarrelled before, during and after breakfast, Henry lost his temper with them and she found herself having to defend them when she knew all the time he was right, the toast got stuck in the toaster and she was late getting the girls to school and something went wrong with the Hoover or the loo wouldn’t flush and nothing seemed to be right with the world, so that she was tempted to have a glass of sherry before
lunch and that was no good because then she’d want a nap afterwards and the rest of the day would be spent trying to catch up with what she had to do. But on one of her better days she did all the things she did on days and was somehow uplifted by the thought that the quads were doing wonderfully well at The School for The Mentally Gifted and would definitely get scholarships and go on to become doctors or scientists or something really creative, and that it was lovely to be alive in an age when all this was possible and not like it had been when she was a girl and had to do what she was told. It was on such days that she even considered having her mother to live with them instead of being in the old people’s home in Luton and wasting all that money. Only considered it, of course, because Henry couldn’t stand the old lady and had threatened to walk out and find himself digs if she ever stayed more than three days in the house.

‘I’m not having that old bag polluting the atmosphere with her fags and her filthy habits,’ he had shouted so loudly that even Mrs Hoggart, who had been in the bathroom at the time, didn’t need her hearing aid to get the gist of the message. ‘And another thing. The next time I come down to breakfast and find she’s been lacing the teapot with brandy, and my brandy at that, I’ll strangle the old bitch.’

‘You’ve got no right to talk like that. After all, she is family –’

‘Family?’ yelled Wilt, ‘I’ll say she’s family. Your fucking
family, not mine. I don’t foist my father on you –’

‘Your father smells like an old badger,’ Eva had retaliated, ‘he’s unhygienic. At least Mother washes.’

‘And doesn’t she need to, considering all the muck she smears on her beastly mug. Webster wasn’t the only one to see the skull beneath the skin. I was trying to shave the other morning …’

‘Who’s Webster?’ demanded Eva before Wilt could repeat the disgusting account of Mrs Hoggart’s emergence from behind the shower curtain in the altogether.

‘Nobody. It’s from a poem, and talking about uncorseted breasts the old hag …’

‘Don’t you dare call her that. She’s my mother and one day you’ll be old and helpless and need –’

‘Yes, well maybe, but I’m not helpless now and the last thing I need is that old Dracula in drag haunting the house and smoking in bed. It’s a wonder she didn’t burn the place down with that flaming duvet.’

It was the memory of that terrible outburst and the smouldering duvet that had prevented Eva from giving in to her better-day intentions. Besides, there had been truth in what Henry had said, even if he had put it quite horribly. Eva’s feelings for her mother had always been ambiguous and part of her wish to have her in the house sprang from the desire for revenge. She’d show her what a really good mother was. And so on one of her better days, she telephoned her and told the old lady how wonderfully the quads were getting on and what a happy atmosphere there was in the home and how even Henry
related to the children – Mrs Hoggart invariably broke into a hacking cough at this point – and on the best of days, invited her over for the weekend only to regret it almost as soon as she’d put the phone down. By then it had become one of those days.

But today she resisted the temptation and went round to Mavis Mottram’s to have a heart-to-heart with her before lunch. She just hoped Mavis wouldn’t try recruiting her for the Ban the Bomb demo.

Mavis did. ‘It’s no use your saying you have your hands full with the quads, Eva,’ she said, when Eva had pointed out that she couldn’t possibly leave the children with Henry, and what would happen if she were sent to prison. ‘If there’s a nuclear war you won’t have any children. They’ll all be dead in the first second. I mean Baconheath puts us in a first-strike situation. The Russians would be forced to take it out to protect themselves and we’d all go with it.’

Eva tried to puzzle this out. ‘I don’t see why we’d be a first-strike target if the Russians were being attacked,’ she said finally, ‘wouldn’t it be a second strike?’

Mavis sighed. It was always so difficult to get things across to Eva. It always had been, and with the barrier of the quads behind which to retreat, it was practically impossible nowadays. ‘Wars don’t start like that. They start over trivial little things like the Archduke Ferdinand being assassinated at Sarajevo in 1914,’ she said, putting it as simply as her work with the Open University allowed. But Eva was not impressed.

‘I don’t call assassinating people trivial,’ she said. ‘It’s wicked and stupid.’

Mavis cursed herself. She ought to have remembered that Eva’s experience with terrorists had prejudiced her against political murders. ‘Of course it is. I’m not saying it isn’t. What I’m –’

‘It must have been terrible for his wife,’ said Eva, pursuing her line of domestic consequences.

‘Since she happened to be killed with him, I don’t suppose she cared all that much,’ said Mavis bitterly. There was something quite horribly anti-social about the whole Wilt family but she ploughed on. ‘The whole point I’m trying to make is that the most terrible war in the history of mankind, up till then, happened because of an accident. A man and his wife were shot by a fanatic, and the result was that millions of ordinary people died. That sort of accident could happen again, and this time there’d be no one left. The human race would be extinct. You don’t want that to happen, do you?’

Eva looked unhappily at a china figurine on the mantelshelf. She knew it had been a mistake to come anywhere near Mavis on one of her better days. ‘It’s just that I don’t see what I can do to stop it,’ she said and threw Wilt into the fray. ‘And anyway, Henry says the Russians won’t stop making the bomb and they’ve got nerve gas too, and Hitler had as well, and he’d have used it if he’d known we hadn’t during the war.’ Mavis took the bait.

‘That’s because he’s got a vested interest in things staying the way they are,’ she said. ‘All men have. That’s why they’re against the women’s peace movement. They feel threatened because we’re taking the initiative and in a sense the bomb is symbolic of the male orgasm. It’s potency on a mass destruction level.’

‘I hadn’t thought of it like that,’ said Eva, who wasn’t quite sure how a thing that killed everyone could be a symbol of an orgasm. ‘And after all, he used to be a member of CND.’

‘“Used to”,’ sniffed Mavis, ‘but not any longer. Men just want us to be passive and stay in a subordinate sex role.’

‘I’m sure Henry doesn’t. I mean he’s not very active sexually,’ said Eva, still preoccupied with exploding bombs and orgasms.

‘That’s because you’re a normal person,’ said Mavis. ‘If you hated sex he’d be pawing you all the time. Instead, he maintains his power by refusing you your rights.’

‘I wouldn’t say that.’

‘Well, I would, and it’s no use your claiming anything different.’

It was Eva’s turn to look sceptical. Mavis had complained too often in the past about her husband’s numerous affairs. ‘But you’re always saying Patrick’s too sex-oriented.’

‘Was,’ said Mavis with rather sinister emphasis. ‘His days of gadding about are over. He’s learning what the male menopause is like. Prematurely.’

‘Prematurely? I should think it must be. He’s only forty-one, isn’t he?’

‘Forty,’ said Mavis, ‘but he’s aged lately, thanks to Dr Kores.’

‘Dr Kores? You don’t mean to say Patrick went to her after that dreadful article she wrote in the
News
? Henry burnt the paper before the girls could read it.’

‘Henry would. That’s typical. He’s anti freedom of information.’

‘Well, it wasn’t a very nice article, was it? I mean it’s all very well to say that men are … well … only biological sperm banks but I don’t think it’s right to want them all neutered after they’ve had two children. Our cat sleeps all day and he’s –’

‘Honestly, Eva, you’re so naïve. She didn’t say anything about neutering them. She was simply pointing out that women have to suffer all the agonies of childbirth, not to mention the curse, and with the population explosion the world will face mass starvation unless something’s done.’

‘I can’t see Henry being done. Not that way,’ said Eva. ‘He won’t even let anyone talk about vasectomy. Says it has unwanted side-effects.’

Mavis snorted. ‘As if the Pill didn’t too, and far more dangerous ones. But the multi-national pharmaceutical corporations couldn’t care less. All they are interested in is profits and they’re controlled by men too.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Eva, who’d got used to hearing about multi-national companies though she still didn’t
know exactly what they were, and was completely at a loss with ‘pharmaceutical’. ‘All the same, I’m surprised Patrick agreed.’

‘Agreed?’

‘To have a vasectomy.’

‘Who said anything about him having a vasectomy?’

‘But you said he went to Dr Kores.’

‘
I
went,’ said Mavis grimly. ‘I thought to myself, “I’ve had just about enough of you gallivanting about with other women, my boy, and Dr Kores may be able to help.” And I was right. She gave me something to reduce his sex drive.’