Michael Dibdin - Dirty Tricks

You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you? ‘Watch out!’ you yelled as I set off on holiday. ‘Look behind you!’ You saw it coming a mile off. I didn’t. I really didn’t. When I put that phone down, I was in tears. I couldn’t believe the universe could do this to me. Deep down inside, you see, I still believed that life was basically benevolent . I wasn’t naive enough to expect the goodies to win every time, but over the long-haul, and certainly in the last reel, I sort of weakly, vaguely, wetly assumed that things would come right. I should have realized that Clive would dump me at the first opportunity, that he had in fact been looking for an excuse to do so. Clive didn’t want quality or experience in his teachers. Quality expects rewards, experience makes comparisons. What Clive wanted was callow youth.

At such moments of crisis, some people resort to drink. I couldn’t afford drink, so I resorted to Karen instead. The only advantage of being dumped by Clive was that it made this a lot simpler. Dennis’s mornings were fully taken up meeting clients, delegating responsibilities, processing figures and accessing data. His afternoons were much less predictable, and that was also when the bulk of Karen’s contact hours were timetabled. So if I’d still been giving Clive the best part of my days, occasions for dalliance would have been rare and risky. As a gentleman of leisure it was a breeze. Dennis Parsons was blessed with behavioural patterns which were etched into his brain like circuits in a microchip. When it comes to the detail of everyday life most of us just muddle through somehow, but Dennis was a Platonist. When he went to the toilet, for example, his aim wasn’t just any old crap but the closest possible approximation in this imperfect world to the Eternal Idea of Dennis-Going-to-the-Toilet. This had been of something more than philosophical interest to Karen and I in our pre-coital phase, since it meant that we could count on at least a minute thirty seconds before he reappeared, or as much as three minutes forty-five seconds if we heard the seat go down for a big jobby.

Now we had moved on to bigger and better things, this predictability still stood us in good stead. At 8.57 every weekday, Dennis went out to fetch the BMW from the garage. Exactly one minute later, he backed it out on to the drive and turned round. Leaving the engine running, he then returned to the house to collect his executive briefcase and other relevant impedimenta. At 9 o’clock precisely, just as the pips ended and the news began, he got back into the car and drove off. I observed this routine the day after I learned that my services were no longer required at the Oxford International Language College, and I knew that barring an Act of God I could set my watch by it thereafter. As soon as Dennis had roared off towards the offices of Osiris Management Services I strolled down Ramillies Drive to the Parsonage and rang the bell.

Karen came to the door in her dressing-gown. I pushed past her into the hall and closed the door behind us.

‘What are you doing?’

I untied the belt of her dressing-gown and got my hands inside.

‘Don’t!’

To my surprise, she was wearing panties underneath her nightdress.

‘Stop it! Don’t! I can’t!’

‘You already have.’

‘No, I mean I really can’t.’

I stared at her.

‘I’ve got my period,’ she said.

‘So what?’

She frowned.

‘Don’t you mind?’

‘Not if you don’t.’

To prove it, I gave her head. The effect was electric. Overwhelmed by this proof of my devotion, Karen abandoned herself as never before. The fact that we were making love in the Parsons’ matrimonial bed, the sheets still warm and smelly from their previous occupant, may have had something to do with it as well. Unavoidably detained in a traffic snarl-up in Park End Street, Dennis couldn’t be with us in person, but he was present in spirit, and the result was quite literally indescribable.

That morning set the pattern for our love-making. Outwardly, my habits hardly changed at all. I still left Winston Street every morning for the long cycle ride through town and up the Banbury Road. At about ten to nine I tethered the bike to a lamp-post and proceeded at a leisurely pace on foot to the Parsons’. I had to wait at most a couple of minutes before Dennis opened the back door, walked across to the garage, unlocked it, swung the door up and stepped inside. While he was out of sight of the gate I walked up the drive, opened the front door with the key Karen had given me, and ran upstairs. After that it was a race. I reduced the odds by wearing a pullover, slip-off shoes and no underwear, but it was still touch and go. The idea was to be in Karen’s bed, in Karen’s arms and, ideally, in Karen, by the time Dennis paused to call ‘Goodbye, darling’ from the foot of the stairs.

Dennis’s unwitting participation in our mating was so exciting that we soon overcame any lingering doubts about the risks involved. So far from abandoning our folly, we started pushing it as far as it would go. This was made perfectly clear by our spontaneous reaction one morning when it seemed that the game was finally up. Dennis had shouted goodbye and gone out as usual, closing the front door loudly behind him. In the bedroom upstairs his wife and I were making love slowly. But instead of the genteel growl as the BMW drove off, Dennis’s footsteps crunched back across the gravel to the house and the front door opened.

‘Kay!’

He started to climb the stairs. Karen thrust her pelvis against me and raked my buttocks with her fingernails.

‘Did you call Roger about Saturday?’

‘Forgot.’

‘Oh for God’s sake, Karen. Have you got any idea of the number of things I have to keep track of every day? Calls to make, people to see, papers to consign? All I ask of you is to make one phone call to firm up a social event, and you can’t even get that together!’

While Dennis maundered on, Karen filled her mouth with my shoulder and neck, then broke away to shout her brief replies in as normal a voice as possible. I was working her hard by now, trying to make her lose control. With Dennis just a few feet away on the stairs, it was the sexual equivalent of Russian roulette.

‘Sorry.’

‘It’s no use being bloody sorry, just get it done. Today, all right? This morning. Phone him at work. Have you got the number?’

‘Nah!’

‘Well it’s in the book. Acme Media Consultants. Just don’t forget again, understand?’

‘Wanna!’

‘What?’

There was a pause. Dennis squeaked up another couple of steps.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Flubbadub.’

‘You sound a bit funny.’

‘Gawn,’ Karen squawked. ‘Slate!’

This was an appeal Dennis couldn’t ignore. After a moment we heard his footsteps descending the stairs again.

‘Just don’t forget to make that call!’ he shouted from the hallway.

By now Karen’s neck was a tree trunk of muscles that branched out across her face, slitting her eyes, tauting her lips, draw-stringing her throat. As the BMW finally drove away they all let go at once, releasing an answering roar that seemed to come all the way from her sex and anus, rippling up her spine and out of her gaping mouth.

‘That was the best ever,’ she gasped as we lay side by side, our arms and hips touching lightly. ‘Whatever would we do without him?’

I had my ideas about that.

Like the brick she was, Trish had kindly offered to subsidize my share of the rent until I found another job. Thanks to her I still had a roof over my head, but this economic patronage subtly altered relations between us in a way that did nothing to improve my self-respect. I had finally hit rock-bottom, down there with the bums and dossers, unable even to pay my own way in Winston Street. The only work I could find was with Clive’s main sharp-end competitor, a school offering short courses to businessmen on company accounts. They paid through the nose for ‘one-to-one intensive tuition from qualified experts supported by sophisticated resources incorporating the latest technology’. The fees worked out at?25 an hour. I got?6.50, or rather less than a fiver after deductions. The director of studies, an obnoxious little shit who knew exactly where we both stood, received me in audience after I had waited for three-quarters of an hour. With an air of great condescension he told me that he was ‘prepared to give me a try-out’ for a few hours a week. If this was satisfactory, he might ‘exploit me more extensively’ in the new year.