Read Wilt for Free Online Page B

went through to the bathroom. Wilt sat on the

    bed and looked at the card. The beastly thing was shaped like a…What the hell was it shaped

    like? Anyway it was pink and opened out and inside were all these ambiguous words. Come and

    Touch and Come. Anyone touched him and they’d get an earful. And what about pot luck? A lot

    of trendy dons smoking joints and talking about set-theoretic data-manipulation

    systems or the significance of pre-Popper Hegelianism in the contemporary

    dialectical scene, or something equally unintelligible, and using fuck and cunt

    every now and then to show that they were still human.
    ‘And what do you do?’ they would ask him.
    ‘Well, actually I teach at the Tech.’
    ‘At the Tech? How frightfully interesting,’ looking over his shoulder towards more

    stimulating horizons, and he would end the evening with same ghastly woman who felt

    strongly that Techs fulfilled a real function and that intellectual achievement was

    vastly overrated and that people should be, oriented in a way that would make them

    community coordinated and that’s what Techs were doing, weren’t they? Wilt knew what

    Techs were doing. Paying people like him £3500 a year to keep Gasfitters quiet for an

    hour.
    And Pringsheim Punch. Planters Punch. Printers Punch. He’d had enough punches

    recently.
    ‘What the hell am I to wear?’ he asked.
    ‘There’s that Mexican shirt you bought on the Costa del Sol last year,’ Eva called from

    the bathroom. ‘You haven’t had a chance to wear it since’
    ‘And I don’t intend to now,’ muttered Wilt, rummaging through a drawer in search of

    something nondescript that would demonstrate his independence. In the end he put on a

    striped shirt with blue jeans.
    ‘You’re surely not going like that?’ Eva told him emerging from the bathroom largely

    naked. Her face was plastered with white powder and her lips were carmine.
    ‘Jesus wept,’ said Wilt, ‘Mardi Gras with pernicious anaemia.’
    Eva pushed passed him. ‘I’m going as The Great Gatsby,’ she announced,’ ‘and if you had

    any imagination you’d think of something better than a business shirt with blue jeans’
    ‘The Great Gatsby happened to be a man,’ said Wilt.
    ‘Bully for him,’ said Eva and put on her lemon loungers.
    Wilt shut his eyes and took off his shirt. By the time they left the house he was wearing a

    red shirt with jeans while Eva, in spite of the hot night, insisted on putting on her new

    raincoat and trilby.
    ‘We might as well walk.’ said Wilt.
    They took the car. Eva wasn’t yet prepared to walk down Parkview Avenue in a trilby, a

    belted raincoat and lemon loungers. On the way they stopped at an off-licence where Wilt

    bought a bottle of Cyprus red.
    ‘Don’t think I’m going to touch the muck,’ he said, ‘and you had better take the car keys

    now. If it’s as bad as I think it will be, I’m walking home early.’
    It was. Worse. In his red shirt and blue jeans Wilt looked out of place.
    ‘Darling Eva,’ said Sally, when they finally found her talking to a man in a loincloth

    made out of a kitchen towel advertising Irish cheeses, ‘you look great. The twenties suit

    you. And so this is Henry.’ Henry didn’t feel Henry at all. ‘In period costume too.

    Henry meet Raphael.’
    The man in the loincloth studied Wilt’s jeans. ‘The fifties are back,’ he said

    languidly, ‘I suppose it was bound to happen.’
    Wilt looked pointedly at a Connemara Cheddar and tried to smile.
    ‘Help yourself, Henry,’ said Sally, and took Eva off to meet the freest but the most

    liberated woman who was simply dying to meet booby baby. Wilt went into the garden

    and put his bottle on the table and looked for a corkscrew. There wasn’t one. In the end he

    looked into a large bucket with a ladle in it. Half an orange and segments of bruised

    peach floated in a purple liquid. He poured himself a paper cup and tried it. As he had

    anticipated,