'Damn,' said Wilt. 'I must have been drunker than I thought. When the hell did I put that on?' There was a gap in his memory. He sat down on the toilet and wondered how on earth to get the bloody thing off without doing himself any more injury. From past experience of sticking-plaster he knew the best method was to wrench the stuff off with one jerk. It didn't seem advisable now.
'Might pull the whole bloody lot off,' he muttered. The safest thing would be to find a pair of scissors. Wilt emerged cautiously from the toilet and peered over the banisters. Just so long as he didn't meet Irmgard coming down from the flat in the attic. Considering the hour she had got back it was extremely unlikely. She was probably still in bed with some beastly boyfriend. Wilt went upstairs and into the bedroom. Eva kept some nail-scissors in the dressing table. He found them and was sitting on the edge of the bed when Eva returned. She headed upstairs, hesitated a moment on the landing and then entered the bedroom.
'I thought I'd find you here,' she said crossing the room to the curtains. 'I knew the moment my back was turned you'd sneak into the house. Well don't think you can worm your way out of this one because you can't. I've made up my mind.'
'What mind?' said Wilt.
'That's right. Insult me,' said Eva, pulling the curtains back and flooding the room with sunshine.
'I am not insulting you,' snarled Wilt, 'I am merely asking a question. Since I can't get it into your empty head that I am not a raving arse-bandit '
'Language, language,' said Eva.
'Yes, language. It's a means of communication, not just a series of moos, coos and bleats the way you use it.'
But Eva was no longer listening. Her attention was riveted on the scissors 'That's right. Cut the horrid thing off,' she squawked and promptly burst into tears. 'To think that you had to go and...'
'Shut up,' yelled Wilt. 'Here I am in imminent danger of bursting and you have to start howling like a banshee. If you had used your bloody head instead of a perverted imagination last night I wouldn't have been in this predicament.
'What predicament?' asked Eva between sobs.
'This,' shouted Wilt waving his agonized organ.
Eva glanced at it curiously. 'What did you do that for?' she asked.
'To stop the damned thing from bleeding. I have told you repeatedly that I caught it on a rosebush but you had to jump to idiotic conclusions. Now I can't get this bloody sticking-plaster off and I've got a gallon of beer backed up behind it.'
'You really meant it about the rose bush then?'
'Of course I did. I spend my life telling the truth and nothing but the truth and nobody ever believes me. For the last time I was having a pee next to a rosebush and I got snagged in the fucking thing. That is the simple truth, unembroidered, ungarnished and unexaggerated.'
'And you want the sticking-plaster off?'
'What the hell have I been saying for the last five minutes? I not only want it off. I need it off before I burst.'
'That's easy,' said Eva. 'All you've got to do...'
Chapter 7
Twenty-five minutes later Wilt hobbled through the door of the Accident Centre at the Ipford Hospital, pale, pained and horribly embarrassed. He made his way to the desk and looked into the unsympathetic and obviously unimaginative eyes of the admissions clerk.
'I'd like to see a doctor,' he said with some difficulty.
'Have you broken something?' asked the woman.
