'What would I do that for?'
'We can't help you unless we know what sort of poison you took.'
'It didn't say what sort of poison it was on the bottle,' said Wilt. 'It was in a lemonade bottle in the garage. All I know is that it was poison.'
'How?'
'How what?'
'How do you know it was poison?'
'Because it didn't taste like lemonade,' said Wilt frantically, aware that he was getting deeper and deeper into a morass of diagnostic confusion.
'Because something doesn't taste like lemonade it doesn't necessarily mean it's poisonous,' said the woman, exercising an indefatigable logic. 'Only lemonade tastes like lemonade. Nothing else does.'
'Of course it doesn't But this stuff didn't simply not taste like lemonade. It tasted like deadly poison Probably cyanide.'
'Nobody knows what cyanide tastes like.' said the woman continuing to batter Wilt's defences. 'Death is instantaneous.'
Wilt glared at her bleakly. 'All right,' he said finally, 'forget the poison. I've still got a broken arm and a wound that requires immediate attention. I demand to see a doctor.'
'Then you'll have to wait your turn. Now where did you say this wound was?'
'On my backside,' said Wilt, and spent the next hour regretting it. To substantiate his claim he had to stand while the other patients were treated and the admissions clerk continued to eye him with a mixture of outright suspicion and dislike. In an effort to avoid her eye Wilt tried to read the paper over the shoulder of a man whose only apparent claim to be in need of urgent attention was a bandaged toe. Wilt envied him and, not for the first time, considered the perversity of circumstances which rendered him incapable of being believed.
It wasn't as simple as Byron had suggested with his 'Truth is stranger than fiction'. If his own experience was anything to go by, truth and fiction were equally unacceptable. Some element of ambiguity in his own character, perhaps the ability to see every side of every problem, created an aura of insincerity around him and made it impossible for anyone to believe what he was saying. The truth, to be believed, had first to be plausible and probable, to fall into some easy category of predigested opinion. If it didn't conform to the expected, people refused to believe it. But Wilt's mind did not conform. It followed possibilities wherever they led in labyrinths of speculation beyond most people's ken. Certainly beyond Eva's. Not that Eva ever speculated. She leapt from one opinion to another without that intermediate stage of bewilderment which was Wilt's perpetual condition. In her world, every problem had an answer; in Wilt's, every problem had about ten, each of them in direct contradiction to all the others. Even now in this bleak waiting-room where his own immediate misery might have been expected to spare him concern for the rest of the world, Wilt's febrile intelligence found material to speculate upon.
The headlines in the paper OIL DISASTER: SEA BIRDS THREATENED dominated a page filled with apparently minor horrors. Apparently because they occupied such little space. There had been another terrorist raid on a security truck. The driver had been threatened with a rocket launcher and a guard had been callously shot through the head. The murderers had got away with ?250,000 but this was of less importance than the plight of seagulls threatened by an oil slick off the coast. Wilt noted this distinction and wondered how the widow of the shot guard felt about her late husband's relegation to second place in public concern compared to the sea birds. What was it about the modern world that wildlife took precedence over personal misery? Perhaps the human species was so fearful of extinction that it no longer cared what happened to individuals, but closed collective ranks and saw the collision of two supertankers as a foretaste of its own eventual fate. Or perhaps...
Wilt was interrupted from this reverie by the sound of his name and looking up from the paper
