big bedroom
with the big bed and the big mirror in the ceiling.
‘It’s time for TT,’ she said adjusting the slats of the Venetian blinds.
‘Tea tea,’ Eva mumbled. ‘but we’ve just had din din.’
‘Touch Therapy, darling,’ said Sally and pushed her gently back on to the bed. Eva Wilt
stared up at her reflection in the mirror; a large woman, two large women in yellow
pyjamas lying on a large bed, a large crimson bed; two large women without yellow
pyjamas on a large crimson bed; four women naked on a large crimson bed.
‘Oh Sally, no Sally.’
‘Darling,’ said Sally and silenced her protest oralwise. It had been a startlingly new
experience though only partly remembered. Eva had fallen asleep before the Touch
Therapy had got well under way and had woken an hour later to find Sally fully dressed
standing by the bed with a cup of black coffee.
‘Oh I do feel bad,’ Eva said, referring as much to her moral condition as to her
physical.
‘Drink this and you’ll feel better.’
Eva had drunk the coffee and got dressed while Sally explained that post-contact
inhibitory depression was a perfectly natural reaction to Touch Therapy at first.
‘You’ll find it comes naturally after the first few sessions. You’ll probably break
down and cry and scream and then feel tremendously liberated and relieved.’
‘Do you think so? I’m sure I don’t know.’
Sally had driven her home. ‘You and Henry must come to our barbecue Thursday night,’
she said. ‘I know G baby will want to meet you. You’ll like him. He’s a breast baby. He’ll go
crazy about you.’
‘I tell you she was pissed,’ said Wilt as he sat in the Braintrees’ kitchen while Peter
Braintree opened a bottle of beer for hint. ‘Pissed and wearing same Godawful yellow
pyjamas,’ and smoking a cigarette in a long bloody holder.’
‘What did she say?’
Well if you must know, she said, “Come here…” No, it’s too much. I have a perfectly foul
day at the Tech. Morris tells me I haven’t got my senior lectureship. Williams is off sick
again so I lose a free period. I get punched in the face by a great lout in Printers Three
and I come home to a drunk wife who calls me penis baby.’
‘She called you what?’ said Peter Braintree, staring at him.
‘You heard me.’
‘Eva called you penis baby? I don’t believe it.’
‘Well you go round there and see what she calls you,’ said Wilt bitterly, ‘and don’t blame
me if she sucks your nipples off oralwise while she’s about it.’
‘Good Lord. Is that what she threatened to do?’
‘That and more,’ said Wilt.
‘It doesn’t sound like Eva. It really doesn’t.’
‘It didn’t fucking look like her either, come to that. She was all dolled up in yellow
beach pyjamas. You should have seen the colour. It would have made a buttercup look drab.
And she’d got some ghastly scarlet lipstick smeared round her mouth and she was smoking…She
hasn’t smoked for six years and then all this penis baby nipple-sucking stuff. And
oralwise.’
Peter Braintree shook his head. ‘That’s a filthy word,’ he said.
‘It’s a perfectly filthy act too, if you ask me’ said Wilt.
‘Well, I must say it all sounds pretty peculiar,’ said Braintree, ‘God knows what I’d do
if Susan came home and started insisting on sucking my teats.’
‘Do what I did. Get out of the house,’ said Wilt. ‘And anyway it isn’t just nipples
either. Damn it, we’ve been married twelve long years. It’s a bit late in the day to start
arsing about oralwise. The thing is she’s on this sexual liberation kick. She came home
last night from Mavis Mottram’s flower arrangement do jabbering about clitoral
stimulation and open-ended freewheeling sexual options.’
‘Freewheeling what?’
‘Sexual options. Perhaps I’ve got it wrong. I know sexual options came into it
somewhere. I was half asleep at the time.’
‘Where the
Richard Ellis Preston Jr.