‘And what good would that do? Buy you another?’ said Sally and went into the cabin where Eva was wondering what they were going to have for supper. ‘Tarbaby is still tinkering with the motor. He says it’s the con rod.’
‘Con rod?’ said Eva.
‘Only connect, baby, only connect’
‘With what?’
‘The thigh bone’s connected to the knee bone. The con rod’s connected to the piston and as everyone knows pistons are penis symbols. The mechanised male’s substitute for sex. The Outboard Motor Syndrome. Only this happens to be inboard like his balls never dropped. Honestly, Gaskell is so regressive’
‘I’m sure I don’t know,’ said Eva.
Sally, lay back on the bunk and lit a cigar. ‘That’s what I love about you, Eva. You don’t know. Ignorance is blissful, baby. I lost mine when I was fourteen.’
Eva shook her head. ‘Men,’ she said disapprovingly.
‘He was old enough to be my grandfather,’ said Sally. ‘He was my grandfather.’
‘Oh no. How awful.’
‘Not really,’ said Sally laughing, ‘he was an artist. With a beard. And the smell of paint on his smock and there was this studio and he wanted to paint me in the nude. I was so pure in those days. He made me lie on this couch and he arranged my legs. He was always arranging my legs and then standing back to look at me and painting. And then one day when I was lying there he came over and bent my legs back and kissed me and then he was on top of me and his smock was up and…’
Eva sat and listened, fascinated. She could visualise it all so clearly, even the smell of paint in the studio and the brushes, Sally had had such an exciting life, so full of incident and so romantic in a dreadful sort of way. Eva tried to remember what she had been like at fourteen and not even going out with boys and there was Sally lying on a couch with a famous artist in his studio.
‘But he raped you,’ she said finally. ‘Why didn’t you tell the police?’
‘The police? You don’t understand. I was at this terribly exclusive school. They would have sent me home. It was progressive and all that but I shouldn’t have been out being painted by this artist and my parents would never have forgiven me. They were so strict.’ Sally sighed, overcome by the rigours of her wholly fictitious childhood. ‘And now you can see why I’m so afraid of being hurt by men. When you’ve been raped you know what penile aggression means.’
‘I suppose you do,’ said Eva, in some doubt as to what penile aggression was.
‘You see the world differently too. Like G says, nothing’s good and nothing’s bad. It just is.’
‘I went to a lecture on Buddhism once,’ said Eva, ‘and that’s what Mr Podgett said. He said–’
‘Zen’s all wrong. Like you just sit around waiting. That’s passive. You’ve got to make things happen. You sit around waiting long enough, you’re dead. Someone’s trampled all over you. You’ve got to see things happen your way and no one else’s’
‘That doesn’t sound very sociable,’ said Eva. ‘I mean if we all did just what we wanted all the time it wouldn’t be very nice for other people.’
‘Other people are hell,’ said Sally. ‘That’s Sartre and he should know. You do what you want is good and no moral kickback. Like G says, rats are the paradigm. You think rats go around thinking what’s good for other people?’
‘Well no, I don’t suppose they do,’ said Eva.
‘Right. Rats aren’t ethical. No way. They just do. They don’t get screwed up thinking.’
‘Do you think rats can think?’ asked Eva, now thoroughly engaged in the problems of rodent psychology.
‘Of course they can’t. Rats just are. No Schadenfreude with rats.’
‘What’s Schadenfreude?’
‘Second cousin to Weltschmerz,’ said Sally, stubbing her cigar out in the ashtray. ‘So we can all do what we want whenever we want to. That’s the message. It’s only people like G who’ve got the know bug who get balled up.’
‘No bug?’ said Eva.
‘They’ve got to know how everything works. Scientists. Lawrence was right. It’s all head and no body with G.’
‘Henry’s a bit like that,’ said Eva. ‘He’s always reading or talking about books. I’ve told him he doesn’t know what the real world is like.’
In the Mobile Murder Headquarters Wilt was learning. He sat opposite Inspector Flint whose face was registering increasing incredulity.
‘Now, we’ll just go over that again,’ said the Inspector. ‘You say that what those men saw down that hole was in actual fact an inflatable plastic doll with a vagina.’
‘The vagina is incidental,’ said Wilt, calling forth reserves of inconsequence.
‘That’s as maybe,’ said the Inspector. ‘Most dolls don’t have them but…all right, we’ll let that pass. The point I’m trying to get at is that you’re quite positive there isn’t a real live human being down there.’
‘Positive,’ said Wilt, ‘and if there were it is doubtful if it would still be alive now.’
The Inspector studied him unpleasantly. ‘I don’t need you to point that out to me,’ he said. ‘If there was the faintest possibility of whatever it is down there being alive I wouldn’t be sitting here, would I?’
‘No.’ said Wilt.
‘Right. So now we come to the next point. How is it that what those men saw, they say a woman and you say a doll…that this thing was wearing clothes, had hair and even more remarkably had its head bashed in and one hand stretched up in the air?’
‘That was the way it fell,’ said Wilt. ‘I suppose the arm, got caught up on the side and lifted up’
‘And its head was bashed in?’
Well, I did drop a lump of mud on it.’ Wilt admitted, ‘that would account for that.’
‘You dropped a lump of mud on its head?’
‘That’s what I said,’ Wilt agreed.
‘I know that’s what you said. What I want to know is why you felt obliged to drop a lump of mud on the head of as inflatable doll that had, as far as I can gather, never done you any harm.’
Wilt hesitated. That damned doll had done, him a great deal of harm one way and another but this didn’t seem an opportune moment to go into that. ‘I don’t know really,’ he said finally, ‘I just thought it might help.’
‘Help what?’
‘Help…I don’t know. I just did it, that’s all. I was drunk at the time.’
‘All right, we’ll come back to that in a minute. There’s still one question you haven’t answered. If it was a doll, why was it wearing clothes?’
Wilt looked desperately round the caravan and met the eyes of the police stenographer. There was a look in them that didn’t inspire confidence. Talk about lack of suspension of disbelief.
‘You’re not going to believe this,’ Wilt said. The Inspector looked at him and lit a cigarette.
‘Well?’
‘As a matter of fact I had dressed it up,’ Wilt said, squirming with embarrassment’
‘You had dressed it up?’
‘Yes,’ said Wilt.
‘And may one enquire what purpose you had in mind when you dressed it up?’
‘I don’t know exactly.’
The Inspector sighed significantly. ‘Right. We go back to the beginning. We have a doll with a vagina which you dress up and bring down here in the dead of night and deposit at the bottom of a thirty-foot hole and drop lumps of mud on its head. Is that what you’re saying?’
‘Yes,’ said Wilt.
‘You wouldn’t prefer to save everyone concerned a lot of time and bother by admitting here and now that what is at present resting, hopefully at peace, under twenty tons of concrete at the bottom of that pile is the body of a murdered woman?’
‘No,’ said Wilt, ‘I most definitely wouldn’t.’