Michael Dibdin - Dirty Tricks

I was aroused by a metallic clatter. To my unadapted eyes the scene looked as bleached-out as an over-exposed snapshot. I could just make out a figure wheeling a bicycle up the drive. It disappeared round the corner of the house. I sat up, rubbing a patch of raw skin where the sun had found out my shoulder. Inside the house doors opened and closed. Pipes hummed, drains slushed, the gas geyser whomped into action. I skipped across the baking flagstones, eyes clenched against the brutal light. In the living room, Dennis lay across the sofa on his stomach, face flabbed up at an angle on a cushion, mouth gaping. I padded past him, towards the bathroom. The door was ajar. In the shower cubicle, water hissed on ceramic tile or clattered on the green plastic curtain, according to the gyrations of the nude body within.

No one of the post- Psycho generation likes being surprised in the shower, so I closed the bathroom door loudly behind me. The curtain twitched aside and Karen’s face appeared.

‘Be finished in a mo.’

I stepped out of my swimming trunks. Her expression hardened.

‘I’ll scream!’ she warned.

I pulled back the shower curtain, exposing her fully. We stood inches apart, divided by the spray of lukewarm water, not touching, our eyes locked together with almost coital intensity. Then, without the slightest warning, just like that first time so many months before, Karen jumped me. Her legs hooked around mine, her arms clasped my neck. I’d had a soft erection before, but as our mouths collided — we hadn’t even been able to kiss all week! — it hardened up painfully. Even now I half-suspected that she was just teasing, but in the end it was she who wriggled and twisted until we docked.

After that I don’t remember very much, except that in our ecstasy the fatal word ‘love’ passed our lips for the first time. I don’t recall which of us spoke it first, but as the end approached we were both mouthing it imploringly, like a prayer, like a spell. By then our approaching orgasms had synchronized to form a freak wave of emotion which threatened to wipe our personalities clean. Then it peaked, and we were riding it, and now the words were exultant, incantatory. Whether it was that in that heightened state I had a premonition of what was to follow, or was simply recalling Dennis’s corpse-like stupor in the next room, I felt a perverted thrill, as though I were desecrating the most holy altar of all. For what we had just created was not a life but a death, and one that was to take far less than nine months to gestate.

‘Love’s dart, being barbed,’ to quote a couplet familiar to every schoolchild here, ‘cannot retract, only plunge more deeply i’ the panting breast.’ Or as they put it in the locker-room, once you’re in, you’re in. What happened that afternoon was the product of countless details, all of which had to be just right. If it hadn’t been so hot, if there had been no row the night before, if Dennis hadn’t passed out, if I’d fallen asleep, if any of the others had been there, if Karen had come back later, if she’d gone straight to the pool rather than taken a shower, if any or all of these had been the case, then intercourse would not have occurred.

Once it had, though, it was relatively simple to convince Karen that the whole thing had been inevitable. No one likes to be made to look like a mere creature of chance. It was simply too demeaning to believe that the experience we had shared had been dependent on such things as the amount of booze Dennis put away that lunchtime. We had to repossess what fate had handed us on a plate, and the only way to do this was to claim that we had willed it all along. When I broke the matter to Karen on the deck of the ferry going home, however, I sugared the locker-room logic in language more akin to the elegant formulas of your illustrious bard.

‘We can’t put the clock back, Karen. What’s happened has happened. Now we know how it feels to be together fully, how can we be content with anything less?’

Thick Britannic cloud massed overhead. The Channel swill chopped and slapped all around. Dennis and the others were propping up the bar, Karen was supposedly selecting duty-free perfume. No one cared what I was doing.

‘I know,’ she sighed.

Karen Parsons never ceased to astonish me. I’d been expecting her to put up a stiff rearguard action, protesting that holidays were one thing and everyday life another, that she had only surrendered to me in a moment of weakness which she would regret for the rest of her life, and so on and so forth. I was confident I could wear her down eventually, but I certainly never expected her to come across at the first time of asking. But instead of prevaricating and procrastinating she came over all gooey, stroking my hand and squeezing my arm and saying she didn’t want to lose me but she was frightened, frightened and confused, she didn’t know what to do.

This was a Karen I hadn’t seen before, and one I didn’t have much time for, to be frank. After my belated conversion from the outworn pieties of my youth what I wanted from Karen was a crash course in greed, voracity, cheap thrills and superficial emotion. What attracted me to her was her animality. The last thing I needed was her going all human on me. Karen was a magnificent bitch, but when she tried to be human she turned into a Disney puppy: trashy, vulgar and sentimental.

When I kissed her, she twisted against me urgently, and then I understood. Actions, not words, were the way to Karen’s heart. On the level of language she was frightened, confused and unsure what to do, but her body spoke loud and clear. I looked round. There was no one about apart from a couple of youths stoning the seagulls with empty beer bottles. I led Karen up a narrow companion-way marked ‘Crew Only’ to a constricted quarterdeck partially screened by the lifeboats hanging from their cradles. We did it on the sloping lid of a locker, our jeans and knickers round our ankles. It was what you might call a duty fuck. A pallid sun appeared like a nosy neighbour spying from behind lace curtains. The wind ricochetted about the deck, raising goose-bumps on our bare flesh. A seagull on one of the lifeboats regarded us with a voyeur’s eye. It wasn’t much fun, but we did it, and that was the main thing. Until we had made love again, that first occasion at the villa was in danger of becoming the exception which proved the rule. As a unique event, Karen could file it away in her snapshot album as one of the interesting things that had happened during her holiday in France. But as soon as it was repeated, its individuality merged into a series extending indefinitely into the future. By the time we returned to the bar Karen’s extramarital virginity had been lost beyond recall.

Back in Oxford, I discovered that I was not only broke but unemployed. Clive Phillips, the council estate dodger who had got on his bike and into the fast lane, had fired me. Well he didn’t need to fire me. Like all the teachers, I had a one-year contract renewable at Clive’s discretion, which in my case he found himself unable to exercise.

‘I don’t think I can do it,’ is how he put it when I phoned him. ‘I just don’t think it’s on, quite frankly, at this particular point in time.’

The technical term for the speech-like noise that babies produce before they learn to talk is ‘jargoning’. That’s what I did now.

‘The fact of the matter is, several of the teachers on the course you missed because of skiving off on holiday, a number of them have asked me if they can stay on for the autumn term. Comparisons are insidious, I know, but I have to say they’re good. Sharp, hungry, keen as mustard. Thatcher’s kids. Make me feel my age, tell you the truth! Anyway, what with you not being around and that, I felt constricted to give them a crack of the whip. Only fair, really.’