Michael Dibdin - Dirty Tricks

‘ “The Oxford International Language College is a non-ideological, non-denominational, profit-making organization dedicated to bring together people from many different cultures and walks of life. Nation shall speak peace unto nation, and I shall grab a piece of the action. Any member of staff who feels unable to live up to this high ideal is at perfect liberty to hand in his or her resignation. There were over forty applicants for the last post …” ’

For a moment, Trish’s laughter made me regret leaving the chummy, easy-going atmosphere of Winston Street. But only for a moment. Trish might have found my imitation of Clive’s cant amusing, but the fact remained that she was still in his power and I wasn’t. I had to keep reminding myself of that. All my life I had chosen the soft options: good times, good company, good fun. Now I was finally growing up. It might not be easy, but it was the only way forward.

Karen’s line on our ostracism was that everything would be all right once people heard she was pregnant. She may well have been right about this. It’s quite possible that people shunned us not so much as a mark of outrage at what we had done, but to avoid the frustration of not being able to satisfy their curiosity about what exactly it was. The questions our friends were dying to ask were those which the tabloids have trumpeted ever since the case came into the public domain. Since they couldn’t talk about that, they preferred not to talk at all. Having a baby would have taken us off the front pages, making us safe and dull again. Other people’s sexuality is always threatening, a hot dark secret from which we’re excluded. Birth brings it out in the open. Look, the proud parents exclaim, here’s our sexuality! Come and tickle its tiny toes and admire its baby-blue eyes! And everyone heaves a massive sigh of relief. There they were imagining satyrs and succubae and God knows what manner of obscene delights, and all the time it was just a baby !

The only problem with this pleasing scenario was that there wasn’t going to be any baby. This wasn’t for want of trying. If effort had counted for anything, we would have had a family of Catholic proportions. We were even using the papally approved contraceptive method, only in reverse. Karen carefully calculated the period when she was most fertile, and while that window of opportunity was open I was on standby twenty-four hours a day. Knowing it was all a pointless farce sapped my morale as much as the rigorous regime did my physique. I churned out orgasms to order, squawking and spluttering like Sylvester the Cat on acid. Karen was too desperate to notice. By now the soggy British spring was upon us. Purple and yellow crocuses were popping up all over the lawn, the hard winter outlines of shrubs and trees were blurred by new growth like the fuzz on an adolescent’s upper lip, even the rows of savagely pruned rosebushes at the front of the house, separated by concrete walkways like a cemetery of spider crabs buried upside-down, were shoving out shoots and buds. Nature was blooming and burgeoning, but poor Karen couldn’t get gravid for love or money. If fecundity continued to evade her, the question of responsibility was bound to come up sooner or later. Who was at fault? Was it Bill or was it Ben? Which of those two flowerpot men, her ovaries or my semen?

Up to now I’ve avoided mentioning our day-to-day domestic life, for much the same reason that ex-prisoners are reluctant to talk about their time inside. What brought Karen and I together was sex, but sex in Dennis’s shadow, agitprop sex, perilous, defiant and liberating. Now the tyrant was dead, sex was no longer a revolutionary gesture but establishment policy, with demanding productivity quotas and output targets. Our spare time was devoted to a vicious, unrelenting guerilla war inspired by Karen’s massive inferiority complex. Her tastes merely appalled me, but she felt threatened by mine. She couldn’t live and let live. She had to search and destroy, scorch and defoliate, and she made the most of her one point of advantage, namely that I was a kept man.

I had naively imagined that marriage would magically obliterate the origins of the wealth we shared, melting Dennis’s laboriously acquired treasures down into a common heap of anonymous gold. But there is notoriously no such thing as a free meal. Karen never let me forget that everything we owned was originally hers and hers alone, and that I had not only contributed nothing to our joint capital but wasn’t bringing in any income either. For appearances’ sake I maintained the fiction that I was setting up an independent enterprise in the EFL field. Under cross-examination I added a few more details about my supposed activities. The idea, I claimed, was to exploit my extensive network of influential contacts with a view to offering special courses for foreign businessmen involving saturation experience in an authentic English-speaking work environment. At the moment this innovatory scheme was still at the planning stage, but once it got off the ground I couldn’t fail to gross a minimum of fifty thou in the first year of operation, after which the sky was the limit. Every morning I climbed into the BMW and swept off, just as Dennis had once done, except that once I reached the Banbury Road I had nowhere to go. I told Karen that I was visiting factories and offices in the Oxford area and sounding out the management with a view to future co-operation, but in fact my mornings were spent driving aimlessly around the highways and byways of rural Oxfordshire. Then one day, just for old times’ sake, I paid a visit to Winston Street.

Someone here once told me a story about the most notorious of the dictators who ruled this country at the turn of the century. It was some time after the construction of the capital’s tramway system, and it may well be that the true origins of the tale lay in a superstitious dread of this foreign technology. On certain days, it was said, a tramcar of unusual design was seen circulating slowly along the lines which passed through the poorest and most deprived slums in the city. Its windows were silvered and the doors locked, and it never stopped to let passengers on or off. The official explanation was that the car contained instruments for monitoring the condition of the track. Some people, however, claimed that at the end of its run the mysterious tram disappeared on to a private spur line leading into the grounds of the presidential palace. Eventually the story spread that the dictator himself was aboard, observing his subjects through the mirror windows.

At first this was merely the usual paranoid rumour inevitable under a ruthless regime where informers abounded, but after a time a more imaginative version emerged. The dictator was indeed inside the tramcar. The purpose of his trip, however, was not spying but something more extreme, more perverse, more savagely contemptuous. The tyrant was bored. For years he had starved and destroyed, tortured and killed. What more could he inflict on his subjects? They had nothing left but their suffering, the pain and misery of their daily lives. So he determined to take that too. While they fought to draw water from a broken tap, he looked on from the safety of his armoured tram, sipping iced champagne. While they scavenged rotten vegetables from the rubbish tip, he gorged himself on imported delicacies. The poverty of their lives played across the silvered windows like a back-projection in a film, lending perspective and contrast to the satiated self-indulgence of his.

It doesn’t matter whether or not this story is true. What is significant is that it was universally believed, because, like a fairy tale, it embodies a profound truth. Only contrast can create value. At first the contrast is between what you have and what you want, but what do you do once you have what you want? That trip back to Winston Street taught me the answer. After a month or two at the wheel, the BMW had become completely transparent to me. It was just a car, a way of getting about. Daily visits to East Oxford soon restored it to its former glory. I would put on a tape of Tudor madrigals — a new interest — and lie back in the contoured leather seats, letting myself melt into the crevices of Morley’s sinuous six-part harmony and observing the surrounding misery with mounting satisfaction. To think that not so long ago I had been one of these creatures, peddling off through the drizzle to a dead-end job! From time to time a harassed mother might rap angrily on the window to complain that she couldn’t get her push-chair past the car, which I had parked blocking the pavement. I didn’t reply. There was no need. The car spoke for me. I simply stared into her eyes through the layer of toughened glass which divided her world from mine. Not only was I indulging a harmless pleasure, I was also doing her kids a favour. It was too late to save the mother, but by flaunting my privileges under her nose, taunting her with the contrast between my power and her weakness, my wealth and her poverty, I was helping to ensure that her children’s chances in life would never be blighted by the well-wishing do-goodism which had crippled me. What makes the world go round is not love or kindness, they’d learn, but greed and envy. The more those kids were deprived and maltreated, the more motivated they would be to get aboard the enterprise culture and start creating wealth.