Wilt Read Free

he?’
    ‘Bloody awful,’ said a large youth with ‘Stuff Off painted across the back of his leather

    jacket. ‘He’s puking his guts out. It’s his birthday and he had four Vodkas and a

    Babycham…’
    ‘We’d got to the part where Piggy is in the forest,’ said Wilt, heading them off a

    discussion of what Bill had drunk for his birthday. He reached for aboard duster and rubbed

    a drawing of a Dutch Cap off the blackboard.
    ‘That’s Mr Sedgwick’s trademark,’ said one of the butchers, ‘he’s always going on about

    contraceptives and things. He’s got a thing about them.’
    ‘A thing about them?’ said Wilt loyally.
    ‘You know, birth control. Well, he used to be a Catholic, didn’t be? And now he’s not, he’s

    making up for lost time,’ said a small pale-faced youth unwrapping a Mars Bar.
    ‘Someone should tell him about the pill,’ said another youth lifting his head

    somnolently from the desk. ‘You can’t feel a thing with a Frenchie. You get more thrill with

    the pill.’
    ‘I suppose you do,’ said Wilt, ‘but I understood there were side-effects.’
    ‘Depends which side you want it,’ said a lad with sideburns.
    Wilt turned back to The Lord of the Flies reluctantly. He had read the thing two hundred

    times already.
    Now Piggy goes into the forest…’ he began, only to be stopped by another butcher,

    who evidently shared his distaste for the misfortunes of Piggy.
    ‘You only get bad effects with the pill if you use ones that are high in oestrogen.’
    ‘That’s very interesting,’ said Wilt. ‘Oestrogen? You seem to know a lot about it.’
    ‘Old girl down our street got a bloodclot in her leg…’
    ‘Silly old clot,’ said the Mars Bar.
    ‘Listen,’ said Wilt. ‘Either we hear what Peter has to tell us about the effects of the

    pill or we get on and read about Piggy.
    ‘Fuck Piggy,’ said the sideburns.
    ‘Right,’ said Wilt heartily, ‘then keep quiet.’
    ‘Well,’ said Peter, ‘this old girl, well she wasn’t all that old, maybe thirty, she was on

    the pill and she got this bloodclot and the doctor told my auntie it was the oestrogen and

    she’d better take a different sort of pill just in case and the old girl down the street,

    her old man had to go and have a vasectomy so’s she wouldn’t have another bloodclot.’
    ‘Buggered if anyone’s going to get me to have a vasectomy,’ said the Mars Bar, ‘I want

    to know I’m all there.’
    ‘We all have ambitions,’ said Wilt.
    ‘Nobody’s going to hack away at my knackers with a bloody great knife,’ said the

    sideburns.
    ‘Nobody’d want to,’ said someone else.
    ‘What about the bloke whose missus you banged,’ said the Mars Bar. ‘I bet he wouldn’t mind

    having a go.’
    Wilt applied the sanction of Piggy again and got them back on to vasectomy.
    ‘Anyway, it’s not irreversible any more,’ said Peter. ‘They ran put a tiny little gold

    tap in and you can turn it as when you want a nipper.’
    ‘Go on. That’s not true.’
    ‘Well, not on the National Health you can’t, but if you pay they can read about it in a

    magazine. They’ve been doing experiments in America’
    ‘What happens if the washer goes wrong?’ asked the Mars Bar.
    ‘I suppose they call a plumber in.’
    Wilt sat and listened while Meat One ranged far and wide about vasectomy and the coil

    and Indians getting free transistors and the plane that landed at Audley End with a lot

    of illegal immigrants and what somebody’s brother who was a policeman in Brixton said

    about blacks and how the Irish were just as bad and bombs and back to Catholics and birth

    control and who’d want to live in Ireland where you couldn’t even buy French letters and so

    back to the Pill. And all the time his mind filled itself obsessively with ways and means

    of getting rid of Eva. A diet of birth-control pills high on oestrogen? If he ground them

    up and mixed them with the Ovaltine she took at bedtime