Wilt by Tom Sharpe Page A

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