Wilt on High

'At least you're teaching something. You want to try Expressive Attainment with Motor Mechanics Three. Expressive Attainment! The sods know all there is to be known about cars in the first place, and I haven't a clue what Expressive Attainment means. Talk about wasting the taxpayers' money. And anyway, I spend more of my time on committees than I do supposedly teaching. That's what galls me.'

'How's Eva?' asked Braintree, recognizing Wilt's mood and trying to change the subject.

'Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Mind you, that's not entirely true. At least she's off Suffrage for Little Children and Votes at Eleven Plus. After those two blokes from PIE came round soliciting and went away with thick ears.'

'Pie?'

'Paedophile Information Exchange. Used to be called child molesters. These two sods made the mistake of trying to get Eva's support for lowering the age of consent to four. I could have told them four was an unlucky number round our way, considering what the quads get up to. By the time Eva had finished with them, they must have thought 45 Oakhurst Avenue was part of some bloody zoo, and they'd broached the topic with a tigress in cub.'

'Serve the swine right.'

'Didn't serve Mr Birkenshaw right though. Samantha promptly organized the other three into CAR, otherwise known as Children Against Rape, and set up a target in the garden. Luckily the neighbours put their communal feet down before one of the little boys in the street got himself castrated. The quads were just warming up with penknives. Well, actually, they were Sabatier knives from the kitchen, and they'd got quite good with them. Emmeline could hit the damned thing's scrotum at eighteen feet, and Penelope punctured it at ten.'

'It?' said Braintree faintly.

'Mind you, it was a bit oversize. They made it out of an old football bladder and two tennis balls. But it was the penis that got the neighbours up in arms. And Mr Birkenshaw. I didn't know he had a foreskin like that. Come to think of it, I doubt if anyone else in the street did either. Not until Emmeline wrote his name on the damned French letter and fixed wrapping paper from the Christmas cake round the end and the wind carried it ten gardens at peak viewing time on Saturday afternoon. It ended up hanging from the cherry tree in Mrs Lorrimer's on the corner. That way you could see BIRKENSHAW down all four streets quite clearly.'

'Good Lord,' said Braintree. 'What on earth did Mr Birkenshaw have to say about it?'

'Not much yet,' said Wilt, 'he's still in shock. Spent most of Saturday night at the cop shop trying to convince them he isn't the Phantom Flasher. They've been trying to catch that lunatic for years and this time they thought they'd got him.'

'What? Birkenshaw? They're out of their tinies, the man's a Town Councillor.'

'Was,' said Wilt. 'I doubt if he'll stand again. Not after what Emmeline told the policewoman. Said she knew his prick looked like that because he'd lured her into his back garden and waggled the thing at her.'

'Lured her?' said Braintree dubiously. 'With all due respect to your daughters, Henry, I wouldn't have said they were exactly lurable. Ingenious, perhaps, and...'

'Diabolical,' said Wilt. 'Don't think I mind what you say about them. I have to live with the hell-cats. Of course she wasn't lured. She's had a vendetta with his little pussy for months because it comes and knocks the stuffing out of ours. She was probably trying to poison the brute. Anyway, she was in his garden and according to her he waggled it. Not his version of course. Claimed he always pees on the compost heap and if little girls choose to lurk...Anyway, that didn't go down with the policewoman very well either. Said it was unhygienic.'

'Where was Eva while this was going on?'

'Oh, here and there,' said Wilt airily. 'Apart from practically accusing Mr Birkenshaw of being related to the Yorkshire Ripper...I managed to stop that one going down in the police report by saying she was hysterical. Talk about drawing fire. At least I had the policewoman there to protect me and as far as I know the law of slander doesn't apply to ten-year-olds. If it does, we'll have to emigrate. As it is, I'm having to work nights to keep them at that blasted school for so-called gifted children. The cost is astronomic.'

'I thought Eva was getting something off by helping out there.'

'Helped out is more accurate. In fact, ordered off the premises,' said Wilt and asked for two more pints.

'What on earth for? I'd have thought they'd have been only too glad to have someone as energetic as Eva as an unpaid ancillary cleaning up and doing the cooking.'

'Not when the said ancillary takes it into her head to brighten up their micro-computers with metal polish. Anyway, she screwed the lot and it was a miracle we didn't have to replace them. Mind you, I wouldn't have minded handing over the ones we've got in the house. The place is a deathtrap of I triple E cables and floppy discs, and I can never get near the TV. And when I do, something called a dot matrix printer goes off somewhere and sounds like a hornets' nest in a hurry. And all for what? So that four girls of average if fiendish intelligence can steal a march on snotty-nosed small boys in the scholastic rat-race.'

'We're just old-fashioned,' said Braintree with a sigh. 'The fact is the computer's here to stay and children know how to use them and we don't. Even the language.'

'Don't talk to me about that gobbledygook. I used to think a poke was a crude form of sex. Instead it's something numerical in a programme and a programme's not what it was. Nothing is. Even bugs and bytes. And to pay for this electronic extravaganza, I spend Tuesday night at the prison teaching a bloody gangster what I don't know about E. M. Forster and Fridays at Baconheath Airbase giving lectures on British Culture and Institutions to a load of Yanks with time on their hands till Armageddon.'

'I shouldn't let the news of that leak out to Mavis Mottram,' said Braintree as they finished their beer and left the pub. 'She's taken up Banning the Bomb with a vengeance. She's been on to Betty about it and I'm surprised she hasn't roped Eva in.'

'She tried but it didn't work, for a change. Eva's too busy worrying about the quads to get involved in demonstrations.'

'All the same, I'd keep quiet about the airbase job. You don't want Mavis picketing your house.'

But Wilt wasn't sure. 'Oh, I don't know. It might make us slightly more popular with the neighbours. At the moment they've got it into their thick heads that I'm either a potential mass-murderer or a left-wing revolutionary because I teach at the Tech. Being picketed by Mavis on the wholly false grounds that I'm in favour of the Bomb might improve my image.' They walked back to the Tech by way of the cemetery.

At 45 Oakhurst Avenue, it was one of Eva Wilt's better days. There were days, better days and one of those days. Days were just days when nothing went wrong and she drove the quads to school without too much quarrelling, and came home to do the housework and went shopping and had a tuna-fish salad for lunch and did some mending afterwards and planted something in the garden and picked the children up from school and nothing particularly nasty happened. On one of those days everything went wrong. The quads quarrelled before, during and after breakfast, Henry lost his temper with them and she found herself having to defend them when she knew all the time he was right, the toast got stuck in the toaster and she was late getting the girls to school and something went wrong with the Hoover or the loo wouldn't flush and nothing seemed to be right with the world, so that she was tempted to have a glass of sherry before lunch and that was no good because then she'd want a nap afterwards and the rest of the day would be spent trying to catch up with what she had to do. But on one of her better days she did all the things she did on days and was somehow uplifted by the thought that the quads were doing wonderfully well at The School for The Mentally Gifted and would definitely get scholarships and go on to become doctors or scientists or something really creative, and that it was lovely to be alive in an age when all this was possible and not like it had been when she was a girl and had to do what she was told. It was on such days that she even considered having her mother to live with them instead of being in the old people's home in Luton and wasting all that money. Only considered it, of course, because Henry couldn't stand the old lady and had threatened to walk out and find himself digs if she ever stayed more than three days in the house.