Michael Dibdin - Dirty Tricks

I thought I had just about run the gamut of sexual experiences, but nothing like this had ever happened to me before. I found it incredibly erotic, and the more Dennis maundered on about boiled sweets on the nose, the more erotic it became. His wife’s head gradually fell back, her mouth open and her eyes still pinned to my face, the whites showing like a frightened horse. Her legs were slightly parted and her toes curled convulsively, as though trying to find some support to relieve her vertiginous predicament.

‘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.