Read Online Wilt by Tom Sharpe - Free Book Online

your goddam head to do something who takes the can back?

    I do. Where’s petticoats then? Who got you out of that mess in Omaha? Who paid the fuzz in

    Houston that time…’
    ‘So you did. So why did you marry me? Just why?’
    Gaskell polished his glasses with the edge of the chef’s hat. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ’so

    help me I don’t know.’
    ‘For kicks, baby, for kicks. Without me you’d have died of boredom. With me you get

    excitement. With me you get kicks in the teeth.’
    Gaskell got up wearily and headed for the stairs. It was at times like these that he

    wondered why he had married.
    Wilt walked home in agony. His pain was no longer physical. It was the agony of

    humiliation, hatred and self-contempt. He had been made to look a fool, a pervert and an

    idiot in front of people he despised. The Pringsheims and their set were everything he

    loathed, false, phoney, pretentious, a circus of intellectual clowns whose antics had

    not even the merit of his own, which had at least been real. Theirs were merely a parody of

    enjoyment. They laughed to hear themselves laughing and paraded a sensuality that had

    nothing to do with feelings or even instincts but was dredged up from shallow

    imaginations to mimic lust. Copulo ergo sum. And that bitch, Sally, had taunted him with

    not having the courage of his instincts as if instinct consisted of ejaculating into

    the chemically sterilized body of a woman he had first met twenty minutes before. And

    Wilt had reacted instinctively, shying away from a concupiscence that had to do with

    power and arrogance and an intolerable contempt for him which presupposed that what he

    was, what little he was, was a mere extension of his penis and that the ultimate

    expression of his thoughts, feelings, hopes and ambitions was to be attained between the

    legs of a trendy slut. And that was being liberated.
    ‘Feel free,’ she had said and had knotted him into that fucking doll. Wilt ground his

    teeth underneath a streetlamp.
    And what about Eva? What sort of hell was she going to make for him now? If life had been

    intolerable with her before this, it was going to be unadulterated misery now, she

    wouldn’t believe that he hadn’t been screwing that doll, that he hadn’t got, into it of his

    own accord, that he had been put into it by Sally. Not in a month of Sundays. And even if

    by some miracle she accepted his story, a fat lot of difference that would make.
    ‘What sort of man do you think you are, letting a woman do a thing like that to you?’ she

    would ask. There was absolutely no reply to the question. What sort of man was he? Wilt

    had no idea. An insignificant little man to whom things happened and for whom life was a

    chapter of indignities. Printers punched him in the face and he was blamed for it. His

    wife bullied him and other people’s wives made a laughing-stock out of him. Wilt wandered

    on along suburban streets past semi-detached houses and little gardens with a mounting

    sense of determination. He had had enough of being the butt of circumstance. From now on

    things would happen because he wanted them to. He would change from being the recipient

    of misfortune. He would be the instigator. Just let Eva try anything now. He would knock

    the bitch down.
    Wilt stopped. It was all very well to talk. The bloody woman had a weapon she wouldn’t

    hesitate to use. Knock her down, my eye. If anyone went down it would be Wilt, and in

    addition she would parade his affair with the doll to everyone they knew. It wouldn’t be

    long before the story reached the Tech. In the darkness of Parkview Avenue Wilt shuddered

    at the thought. It would be the end of his career. He went through the gate of Number 34 and

    unlocked the front door with the feeling that unless he took some drastic action in the

    immediate future he was doomed.
    In bed an hour later he was still awake, wide awake and wrestling with the problem of Eva,

    his own