didn’t want to be emotionally and sensationally immature and if the revulsion she felt lying naked in the arms of another woman was anything to go by and in Eva’s view the nastier a medicine tasted the more likely it was to do you good, then she was certainly improving her psycho-sexual behaviour pattern by leaps and bounds. On the other hand she wasn’t altogether convinced that Touch Therapy was quite nice. It was only by the application of considerable will-power that she overcame her objections to it and even so there was an undertow of doubt about the propriety of being touched quite so sensationally. It was all very puzzling and to cap it all she was on the Pill. Eva had objected very strongly and had pointed out that Henry and she had always wanted babies and she’d never had any but Sally had insisted.
‘Eva baby,’ she had said, ‘with Gaskell one just never knows. Sometimes he goes for months without so much as a twitch and then, bam, he comes all over the place. He’s totally undiscriminating.’
‘But I thought you said you had this big thing between you,’ Eva said.
‘Oh, sure. In a blue moon. Scientists sublimate and G just lives for plastic. And we wouldn’t want you to go back to Henry with G’s genes in your ovum, now would we?’
‘Certainly not,’ said Eva horrified at the thought and had taken the pill after breakfast before going through to the tiny galley to wash up. It was all so different from Transcendental Meditation and Pottery.
On deck Sally and Gaskell were still wrangling.
‘What the hell are you giving brainless boobs?’ Gaskell asked.
‘TT, Body Contact. Tactile Liberation,’ said Sally. ‘She’s sensually deprived’
‘She’s mentally deprived too. I’ve met some dummies in my time but this one is the dimwittiest. Anyway, I meant those pills she takes at breakfast.’
Sally smiled. ‘Oh those,’ she said.
‘Yes those. You blowing what little mind she’s got or something?’ said Gaskell. ‘We’ve got enough troubles without Moby Dick taking a trip.’
‘Oral contraceptives, baby, just the plain old Pill.’
‘Oral contraceptives? What the hell for? I wouldn’t touch her with a sterilised stirring rod.’
‘Gaskell, honey, you’re so naive. For authenticity, pure authenticity. It makes my relationship with her so much more real, don’t you think. Like wearing a rubber on a dildo.’
Gaskell gaped at her. ‘Jesus, you don’t mean you’ve…’
‘Not yet. Long John Silver is still in his bag but one of these days when she’s a little more emancipated…’ She smiled wistfully over the bullrushes. ‘Perhaps it doesn’t matter all that much us being stuck here. It gives us time, so much lovely time and you can look at your ducks…’
‘Waders,’ said Gaskell, ‘and we’re going to run up one hell of a bill at the Marina if we don’t get this boat back in time.’
‘Bill?’ said Sally. ‘You’re crazy. You don’t think we’re paying, for this hulk?’
‘But you hired her from the boatyard. I mean you’re not going to tell me you just took the boat,’ said Gaskell. ‘For Chrissake, that’s theft’
Sally laughed. ‘Honestly, G, you’re so moral. I mean, you’re inconsistent. You steal books from the library and chemicals from the lab but when it comes to boats you’re all up in the air.’
‘Books are different.’ said Gaskell hotly.
‘Yes,’ said Sally, ‘books you don’t go to jail for. That’s what’s different. So you want to think I stole the boat, you go on thinking that.’
Gaskell took out a handkerchief and wiped his glasses. ‘Are you telling me you didn’t?’
