Dirty Tricks (7 page)

‘Your glass is empty,’ yawned Dennis. ‘Kay asleep?’

‘I don’t think so.’

She was staring at me imploringly, unable to move the way she wanted, the way she needed to. She couldn’t quite get there on her own, not with having to lie so still and make no noise. Neither, of course, could she stop. I raised my hand to my mouth, as though politely concealing a yawn. My eyes clamped to Karen’s, I extended my tongue and flicked the tip rapidly up and down, flutter-tonguing the air. She came almost at once, in a series of tense repressed tremors that forced a dulled gasp from her.

‘Oh, you still with us?’ Dennis murmured.

‘Till death do us part.’

Her husband squinted at her blearily.

‘Thought you were going to start doing your imitation of a sleeping sow any moment.’

The tone of voice revealed the intensity of his disgust, not just with his wife’s snores, but with her physicality as such. ‘We don’t do it any more,’ Karen had said. I could believe it.

She rose unsteadily to her feet.

‘Good night,’ she said.

‘Don’t bother waiting up,’ Dennis told her. ‘It’ll only be me, I’m afraid.’

He fetched a bottle from the sideboard.

‘Now then, this’ll see us right. Thirty-year-old armagnac. Landed and bottled. Over a grand’s worth you’re looking at here, and you know how much it cost me? Not one penny. Friend of a friend. You scratch mine and vice versa. Payment in kind. Lot of it goes on.’

Bloody typical, I thought. It’s not enough for the rich to be rich, they have to boast about their perks and fiddles and scams as well. That way they screw you twice over. They’re rich enough to pay for it and smart enough to get it for free. As for you, you’re not only poor, you’re stupid. Which is why you’re poor, stupid.

‘What was that about not waiting up?’

‘What?’

‘You told Karen not to wait up, it would only be you. I mean who else would it be?’

I thought he’d sussed what was going on, of course.

‘Didn’t you notice?’ he smiled archly. ‘As soon as he left, all the air went out of her.’

At the far end of the room, Karen appeared in the kitchen doorway, a glass in her hand.

‘You mean there’s something going on between her and Thomas?’ I asked.

Dennis shook his head, then tapped it with two fingers.

‘All up here. Takes some of them that way. It would all have been different if we’d been able to have children.’

I frowned.

‘You mean Karen …?’

Dennis nodded.

‘Poor kid. Tough on her.’

I glanced down at the kitchen. Karen had disappeared again.

‘Shame to dump this on the dregs,’ said Dennis, surveying his glass moodily.

‘I’ll get fresh ones.’

As soon as I rounded the line of fitted units screening off the kitchen I saw her slumped on the floor in the corner, huddled up as though against the cold. For a moment I thought she had passed out. Then her eyes registered my presence, and started to water. She looked so utterly pathetic that I bent down and comforted her silently, stroking her hair, kissing her face. She kissed me back, and then she wasn’t pathetic any more.

‘To the left of the sink,’ Dennis called loudly.

I straightened up, opened a cupboard at random and took out two tumblers. As I did so, Karen unzipped my fly.

My first reaction was of embarrassment. I hadn’t even had a chance to
wash
it! My mother always told me to put on clean underwear in case I got knocked over and taken to hospital, but the possibility that someone’s drunken wife might decide to revenge herself on her husband by going down on me was not a scenario we had ever discussed. The other source of embarrassment was the very real possibility that Dennis would stroll over at any moment and catch us at it. Already I could see myself standing there, tongue-tied and grinning sheepishly, the star of a bedroom farce which had gone badly off the rails. So while it would clearly be an exaggeration to say that I didn’t enjoy the experience at all, my main preoccupation was to get it over. Only I couldn’t. And while there are situations in which it is possible for the male to simulate orgasm, fellatio is not one of them.

‘No, no!’ Dennis shouted. ‘The
snifters
, man! The
snifters.’

He had swivelled round in the armchair and was staring at me irritably. Dennis hated being kept waiting for his drink. Feeling like a character in a split-screen movie, I opened another cupboard and took out two brandy glasses. But I still couldn’t come, and to withdraw without doing so would, I felt, be the height of bad manners. I pretended to find a smudge on the glasses, rinsed them, dried them and held them up to the light.

‘You going to be there all night?’ Dennis demanded.

‘Just coming.’

It wasn’t much of a joke, but then it didn’t take much to make Karen laugh. Laugh she did, at any rate, and those convulsive movements succeeded where her more calculated efforts had failed. I grasped her hair with both hands, binding her head against my loins while I came in her mouth, loudly and at some length.

‘What on earth’s the matter?’

He was on his feet now, and walking towards us. I waved him away as Karen thoughtfully tucked me in and zipped me up.

‘Cramp. It’s OK, it’s passed.’

A few moments later, balloon of armagnac in hand, I was listening to Dennis recount with great self-satisfaction how he’d come by the priceless spirit, when our attention was drawn by the sound of running water from the kitchen. Karen stood there filling a glass of water.

‘I thought you were in bed,’ said her husband.

Karen rinsed her mouth out and spat in the sink.

‘Just been clearing up a bit.’

‘You mean eating up! Never happy unless she has something in her mouth,’ he confided to me. ‘You wouldn’t think it to look at her, would you?’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’

Karen giggled hysterically, spluttering water all over the counter.

I knew then that we were bound to go all the way, wherever it might lead, whether we wanted to or not. As for Dennis, well, after that killing him would have been a kindness, wouldn’t it?

There are times, frankly, when one longs for a video camera. All these words! It’s absurd, these days, like submitting a portrait in oils with your passport application. Oh yes, very tasteful, sir, a very speaking likeness I’m sure, and such tactility in the brushwork, but what we really wanted was a while-you-wait snapshot, a quid the strip of four down the machine. The kids these days don’t bother with language. Even life doesn’t do much for them. It’s just not state-of-the-art any more, life. How can you be sure what really happened unless you can rerun it in slo-mo? To say nothing of mashing the boring bits down to a slurry of images, hosing them away with a touch of your finger.

Which is what I’d like to do now, ideally. What would you see? Karen and I on the sofa, Karen and I in the back seat of the BMW, Karen and I at the river, up the alley, down the garden, round the corner, in the pub. Our movements are furtive, frantic and compulsive. Our pleasures are brief and incomplete. Our frustrations are enormous. Because if you look closely at the background of every scene, you’ll see Dennis.

Do you believe this? I didn’t, and I was there. Even while it was happening to me, I couldn’t believe it. Here was a woman who would go down on me in her husband’s presence, but wouldn’t touch me, wouldn’t speak to me, wouldn’t see me, unless he was there. And when I asked her why …

‘He’s my husband, isn’t he?’

‘Karen, you blew me. Remember? You stroked yourself off in front of me. It’s a bit late to be coming on like the Angel in the House now.’

‘I won’t cheat on him, I don’t care what you say. I just won’t. I like you ever such a lot, I really do, but the bottom line is I’m still married to Denny.’

The wonder of it is I didn’t kill her
then
, never mind later. It was bad enough being mercilessly teased and tantalized, without having to listen to this sort of humbug. Because what all the fine talk came down to was hard cash. If Dennis dumped her, Karen and I would be another Trish and Brian. I could quite appreciate that she didn’t want that.
I
didn’t want it either. I just wished she’d cut out the bullshit about cheating on Dennis. We could have saved ourselves so much time and grief.

My relationship with Karen may have been stormy, but her husband and I got on perfectly. I had finally worked out why Dennis was so keen on me. Although a barrow boy at heart, he had a yen for the finer things in life. The condition was that the transaction be conducted in whorehouse terms: he paid the trick, he called the shots. There was nothing very remarkable about him in this respect. You only have to walk into any art gallery these days to see that the real action is in the shop. Most people want to like art – they know it’s good for you, or at any rate looks good on you – but face to face with a great painting they feel like gate-crashers at a Mayfair reception. Back in the gallery supermarket they can happily check out the product like so many pin-ups, wallet in hand, the big spender, in control again.

That’s how Dennis felt about me. I was everything he would never be: Oxford educated, widely travelled, still more widely read, a man of the world at ease in several languages. My saving grace was poverty. With the cash to match my pretensions I’d have been a menace for our Dennis. As it was, I was cheap at the price. An extra bottle of wine and some spare grub and he had himself a harmless court jester whose sallies were guaranteed to shock or amuse. Roll up, roll up! See the Eternal Student! Watch him go through his repertoire of quotes and quips. Listen to him sing for his supper. Didn’t he do well? Now watch him cycle home in the rain. He’s nearly forty-two, you know, and still living in digs!

I couldn’t have cared less what Dennis Parsons thought of me, of course. If his judgement rankled, it was only because it accorded perfectly with my own. It was that inner voice that made me cringe as I lay sleepless on my lumpy mattress listening to the pogoing of the bedstead against the wall next door, where my co-tenants were pursuing their nightly quest for the elusive grail of Trish’s orgasm. I was merciless with myself, but the only thing I envied Dennis was his money. We thus had a perfect relationship: each of us felt that he could patronize the other.

OK, let’s roll it. The hands of the clock spin round, the pages drop off the calendar, shots of punting and cricket replace those of rowing and rugby. It’s summer, and the English middle class prepare for their annual pilgrimage to the land of their putative forebears. Actually Dennis and Karen’s ancestors most likely dwelt among the cattle and kine in a wattle-and-daub
barrio
beneath the castle jakes, but their descendants cultivated a taste for wine and continental cooking, went riding and spent the obligatory two weeks a year in a rented villa in the Dordogne. They and the Carters were to have shared it that year with the computer analyst and his wife, but one of this couple’s children was involved in an accident and they had to cancel at the last minute. Very much to my surprise, Dennis asked me if I wanted to go instead.

‘It won’t cost you anything except for booze and eats. Their holiday insurance will cover the rent, and since Thomas and I are both taking cars there’ll be plenty of room. It’s just to make up the numbers, really. It gets a bit dull with just the four of you, and of course everyone else has already made plans.’

The only problem was my work. June to September is open season for EFL students. During the winter Clive scraped by as best he could, bagging a rich brat here, a group of businessmen there, but come summer he cleaned up, netting the poor startled witless kids in droves. To pack and process them he needed staff, so our terms stipulated a minimum of two months’ summer work, the understanding being that when contracts came up for renewal, priority would be given to those who had put in most time on the slime-line.

But I was no longer in awe of Clive. Had we not dined together? And had I not wiped the floor with the little squirt, conversationally speaking? Judging by his expression, Clive had not been best pleased to find me ensconced in the Parsons’ sitting room that night. He didn’t mind socializing with his staff as long as it was on his terms and at their expense, but to meet them as equals on neutral ground was another matter. None are so ruthlessly exclusive as those who have worked their way up from the ranks. That evening Clive could only grin and bear it, but when I told him I wouldn’t be able to do the second summer course he was distinctly cool. I explained that I’d found someone to substitute for me – one of the Carter boys was looking for holiday work – but he kept making objections about unqualified staff, mentioning a notorious case a few years earlier when one malcontent teacher wreaked his revenge by teaching a group of teenage Italians that the English greet each other in the street with the phrase ‘Piss off, wanker.’ Half the class had to be invalided home, and Clive’s name was still mud in Emilia-Romagna. I assured him that Nigel Carter wouldn’t dream of playing tricks like that, but the discovery that my replacement was the son of the friend of a friend, one of his own kind, was a further blow. Nor was he at all happy with the idea of me swanning off to France with the Parsons.

‘Do I detect a wick-dipping situation?’

‘I
beg
your pardon?’

Contrary to what the course books say, we do distinguish between familiar and formal modes of address in English, between
tu
and
usted
. It’s just that we don’t do it grammatically.

‘SAS training, isn’t it? Who dares wins. Faint fart never won hairy lady.’

‘What
are
you talking about?’

Clive ran a hand through his hair and gave me his wide-boy grin.

‘Our K.P. Sauce. Nice lips, shame about the teeth. Abandon hope all ye who enter here. Asbestos sheath time.’

He kept up this sort of thing a while longer, but I refused to be provoked and in the end he had to let me go. I rushed out to a payphone to break the good news to Karen. Her reaction was less than ecstatic.