inhibitory depression was a perfectly natural reaction to Touch Therapy at first.
‘You’ll find it comes naturally after the first few sessions. You’ll probably break down and cry and scream and then feel tremendously liberated and relieved.’
‘Do you think so? I’m sure I don’t know.’
Sally had driven her home. ‘You and Henry must come to our barbecue Thursday night,’ she said. ‘I know G baby will want to meet you. You’ll like him. He’s a breast baby. He’ll go crazy about you.’
‘I tell you she was pissed,’ said Wilt as he sat in the Braintrees’ kitchen while Peter Braintree opened a bottle of beer for hint. ‘Pissed and wearing same Godawful yellow pyjamas,’ and smoking a cigarette in a long bloody holder.’
‘What did she say?’
Well if you must know, she said, “Come here…” No, it’s too much. I have a perfectly foul day at the Tech. Morris tells me I haven’t got my senior lectureship. Williams is off sick again so I lose a free period. I get punched in the face by a great lout in Printers Three and I come home to a drunk wife who calls me penis baby.’
‘She called you what?’ said Peter Braintree, staring at him.
‘You heard me.’
‘Eva called you penis baby? I don’t believe it.’
‘Well you go round there and see what she calls you,’ said Wilt bitterly, ‘and don’t blame me if she sucks your nipples off oralwise while she’s about it.’
‘Good Lord. Is that what she threatened to do?’
‘That and more,’ said Wilt.
‘It doesn’t sound like Eva. It really doesn’t.’
‘It didn’t fucking look like her either, come to that. She was all dolled up in yellow beach pyjamas. You should have seen the colour. It would have made a buttercup look drab. And she’d got some ghastly scarlet lipstick smeared round her mouth and she was smoking…She hasn’t smoked for six years and then all this penis baby nipple-sucking stuff. And oralwise.’
Peter Braintree shook his head. ‘That’s a filthy word,’ he said.
‘It’s a perfectly filthy act too, if you ask me’ said Wilt.
‘Well, I must say it all sounds pretty peculiar,’ said Braintree, ‘God knows what I’d do if Susan came home and started insisting on sucking my teats.’
‘Do what I did. Get out of the house,’ said Wilt. ‘And anyway it isn’t just nipples either. Damn it, we’ve been married twelve long years. It’s a bit late in the day to start arsing about oralwise. The thing is she’s on this sexual liberation kick. She came home last night from Mavis Mottram’s flower arrangement do jabbering about clitoral stimulation and open-ended freewheeling sexual options.’
‘Freewheeling what?’
‘Sexual options. Perhaps I’ve got it wrong. I know sexual options came into it somewhere. I was half asleep at the time.’
‘Where the hell did she get all this from?’ asked Braintree.
‘Some bloody Yank called Sally Pringsheim,’ said Wilt. ‘You know what Eva’s like. I mean she can smell intellectual claptrap a mile off and homes in on it like a bloody dung-beetle heading for an open sewer. You’ve no idea how many phone “latest ideas” I’ve had to put up with. Well, most of them I can manage to live with. I just let her get on with it and go my own quiet way, but when it comes to participating oralwise while she blathers on about Women’s Lib, well you can count me out.’
‘What I don’t understand about Sexual Freedom and Women’s Lib is why you have to go back to the nursery to be liberated,’ said Braintree. ‘There seems to be this loony idea
