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
