Read Online The Wilt Alternative by Tom Sharpe - Free Book Online Page B

any luck it'll be asleep by the time I get back.'
    And he wobbled off in the direction of Willington Road, stopping occasionally to steady

himself against a gatepost and twice to pee into someone else's garden. On the second occasion he

mistook a rosebush for a hydrangea and scratched himself rather badly and was sitting on the

grass verge attempting to use a handkerchief as a tourniquet when a police car pulled up beside

him. Wilt blinked into the flashlight which shone in his face before travelling down to the

bloodstained handkerchief.
    'Are you all right?' asked the voice behind the flashlight, rather too obsequiously for Wilt's

taste.
    'Does it look like it?' he asked truculently. 'You find a bloke sitting on the kerb tying a

handkerchief round the remains of his once-proud manhood and you ask a bloody fool question like

that?'
    'If you don't mind, sir, I'd lay off the abusive language,' said the policeman. 'There's a law

against using it on the public highway.'
    'There ought to be a law about planting ruddy rosebushes next to the fucking pavement,' said

Wilt.
    'And may one ask what you were doing to the rose, sir?'
    'One may,' said Wilt, 'if one can't bloody well surmise for one's ruddy self, one may

indeed.'
    'Mind telling me, then?' said the policeman taking out a notebook. Wilt told him with a wealth

of description and a volubility that brought the lights on in several houses down the road. Ten

minutes later he was helped out of the police car into the station. 'Drunk and disorderly, using

abusive language, disturbing the peace...'
    Wilt intervened. 'Peace my bloody foot,' he shouted. 'That was no Peace. We've got a Peace in

our front garden and it hasn't got thorns a foot long. And anyway I wasn't disturbing it. You

want to try partial circumcision on flaming floribunda to find out what disturbs what. All I was

doing was quietly relieving myself or in plain language having a slash when that infernal thicket

of climbing cat's claws took it into its vegetable head to have a slash at me and if you don't

believe me, go back and try for yourselves...'
    'Take him down to the cells,' said the desk sergeant to prevent Wilt upsetting an elderly

woman who had come in to report the loss of her Pekinese. But before the two constables could

drag Wilt away to a cell they were interrupted by a shout from Inspector Flint's office. The

Inspector had been called back to the station by the arrest of a long-suspected burglar and was

happily interrogating him when the sound of a familiar voice reached him. He erupted from his

office and stared lividly at Wilt.
    'What the hell is he doing here?' he demanded.
    'Well, sir...' one constable began but Wilt broke loose.
    'According to your goons I was attempting to rape a rosebush. According to me I was having a

quiet pee.'
    'Wilt,' yelled the Inspector, 'if you've come down here to make my life a misery again, forget

it. And as for you two, take a good look at this bastard, a very good, long look and unless you

catch him in the act of actually murdering someone, or better still wait until you've seen him do

it, don't lay a finger on the brute. Now get him out of here.'
    'But, sir '
    'I said out,' shouted Flint. 'I meant out. That thing you've just brought in is a human virus

of infective insanity. Get him out of here before he turns this station into a madhouse.'
    'Well, I like that,' Wilt protested. 'I get dragged down here on a trumped-up charge...'
    He was dragged out again while Flint went back to his office and sat abstractedly thinking

about Wilt. Visions of that damned doll still haunted his mind and he would never forget the

hours he had spent interrogating the little sod. And then there was Mrs Eva Wilt whose corpse he

had supposed to be buried under thirty tons of concrete while all the time the wretched woman was

drifting down the river on a motor cruiser. Together the Wilts had made him look an idiot and

there