‘We’ve been drinking Bill’s health,’ they told him when they drifted in at ten past two.
‘Really?’ said Wilt, handing out copies of The Lord of the Flies. ‘And how is he?’
‘Bloody awful,’ said a large youth with ‘Stuff Off painted across the back of his leather jacket. ‘He’s puking his guts out. It’s his birthday and he had four Vodkas and a Babycham…’
‘We’d got to the part where Piggy is in the forest,’ said Wilt, heading them off a discussion of what Bill had drunk for his birthday. He reached for aboard duster and rubbed a drawing of a Dutch Cap off the blackboard.
‘That’s Mr Sedgwick’s trademark,’ said one of the butchers, ‘he’s always going on about contraceptives and things. He’s got a thing about them.’
‘A thing about them?’ said Wilt loyally.
‘You know, birth control. Well, he used to be a Catholic, didn’t be? And now he’s not, he’s making up for lost time,’ said a small pale-faced youth unwrapping a Mars Bar.
‘Someone should tell him about the pill,’ said another youth lifting his head somnolently from the desk. ‘You can’t feel a thing with a Frenchie. You get more thrill with the pill.’
‘I suppose you do,’ said Wilt, ‘but I understood there were side-effects.’
‘Depends which side you want it,’ said a lad with sideburns.
Wilt turned back to The Lord of the Flies reluctantly. He had read the thing two hundred times already.
Now Piggy goes into the forest…’ he began, only to be stopped by another butcher, who evidently shared his distaste for the misfortunes of Piggy.
‘You only get bad effects with the pill if you use ones that are high in oestrogen.’
‘That’s very interesting,’ said Wilt. ‘Oestrogen? You seem to know a lot about it.’
‘Old girl down our street got a bloodclot in her leg…’
‘Silly old clot,’ said the Mars Bar.
‘Listen,’ said Wilt. ‘Either we hear what Peter has to tell us about the effects of the pill or we get on and read about Piggy.
‘Fuck Piggy,’ said the sideburns.
‘Right,’ said Wilt heartily, ‘then keep quiet.’
‘Well,’ said Peter, ‘this old girl, well she wasn’t all that old, maybe thirty, she was on the pill and she got this bloodclot and the doctor told my auntie it was the oestrogen and she’d better take a different sort of pill just in case and the old girl down the street, her old man had to go and have a vasectomy so’s she wouldn’t have another bloodclot.’
‘Buggered if anyone’s going to get me to have a vasectomy,’ said the Mars Bar, ‘I want to know I’m all there.’
‘We all have ambitions,’ said Wilt.
‘Nobody’s going to hack away at my knackers with a bloody great knife,’ said the sideburns.
‘Nobody’d want to,’ said someone else.
‘What about the bloke whose missus you banged,’ said the Mars Bar. ‘I bet he wouldn’t mind having a go.’
Wilt applied the sanction of Piggy again and got them back on to vasectomy.
‘Anyway, it’s not irreversible any more,’ said Peter. ‘They ran put a tiny little gold tap in and you can turn it as when you want a nipper.’
‘Go on. That’s not true.’
‘Well, not on the National Health you can’t, but if you pay they can read about it in a magazine. They’ve been doing experiments in America’
‘What happens if the washer goes wrong?’ asked the Mars Bar.
‘I suppose they call a plumber in.’
Wilt sat and listened while Meat One ranged far and wide about vasectomy and the coil and Indians getting free transistors and the plane that landed at Audley End with a lot of illegal immigrants and what somebody’s brother who was a policeman in Brixton said about blacks and how the Irish were just as bad and bombs and back to Catholics and birth control and who’d want to live in Ireland where you couldn’t even buy French letters and so back to the Pill. And all the time his mind filled itself obsessively with ways and means of getting rid of Eva. A diet of birth-control pills high on oestrogen? If he ground them up and mixed them with the Ovaltine she took at bedtime there was a chance she’d develop bloodclots all over the place in no time at all. Wilt put the notion out of his head. Eva with bloodclots was too awful to stomach, and anyway it might not work. No, it would have to be something quick, certain and painless. Preferably an accident.
At the end of the hour Wilt collected the books and made his way back to the Staff Room. He had a free period. On the way he passed the site of the new Administration block. The ground had been cleared and the builders had moved in and were boring pile holes for the foundations. Wilt stopped and watched as the drilling machine wound slowly down into the ground. They were making wide holes. Very wide. Big enough for a body.
‘How deep are you going?’ he asked one of the workmen.
‘Thirty feet.’
‘Thirty feet?’ said Wilt. ‘When’s the concrete going in?’
‘Monday, with any luck,’ said the man.
Wilt passed on. A new and quite horrible idea had just occurred to him.
Chapter 2
It was one of Eva Wilt’s better days. She had days, better days, and one of those days. Days were just days when nothing went wrong and she got the washing-up done and the front room vacuumed and the windows washed and the beds made and the bath Vimmed and the lavatory pan Harpicked and went round to the Harmony Community Centre and helped with Xeroxing or sorted old clothes for the Jumble Sale and generally made herself useful and came home for lunch and went to the library and had tea with Mavis or Susan or Jean and talked about life and how seldom Henry made love to her even perfunctorily nowadays and how she had missed her opportunity by refusing a bank clerk who was a manager now and came home and made Henry’s supper and went out to Yoga or Flower Arrangement or Meditation or Pottery and finally climbed into bed with the feeling that she had got something done.
On one of those days nothing went right. The activities were exactly the same but each episode was tainted with some minor disaster like the fuse blowing on the vacuum-cleaner or the drain in the sink getting blocked with a piece of carrot so that by the time Henry came home he was either greeted by silence or subjected to a quite unwarranted exposé of all his faults and shortcomings. On one of those days Wilt usually took the dog for an extended walk via the Ferry Path Inn and spent a restless night getting up and going to the bathroom, thus nullifying the cleansing qualities of the Harpic Eva had puffed round the pan and providing her with a good excuse to point out his faults once again in the morning.
‘What the hell am I supposed to do?’ he had asked after one of those nights. ‘If I pull the chain you grumble because I’ve woken you up and if I don’t you say it looks nasty in the morning.’
‘Well, it does, and in any case you don’t have to wash all the Harpic off the sides. And don’t say you don’t. I’ve seen you. You aim it all the way round so that it all gets taken off. You do it quite deliberately.’
‘If I pulled the chain it would all get flushed off anyway and you’d get woken up into the bargain,’ Wilt told her, conscious that he did make a habit of aiming at the Harpic. He had a grudge against the stuff.
‘Why can’t you just wait until the morning? And anyway it serves you right,’ she continued, forestalling his obvious answer, ‘for drinking all that beer. You’re supposed to be taking Clem for a walk, not swilling ale in that horrid pub.’