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Michael Dibdin: Dirty Tricks

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I glanced down at the limb I was illustratively wiggling, only to find an involuntary erection making my trousers stick out like an accusing finger.

‘Not Roger,’ Dennis replied dismissively. ‘Too busy giving it to his secretary, by all accounts.’

I shrugged.

‘I suppose he might have had cramp or something. Still, I thought I ought to let you know.’

‘Oh yes, right, fair enough. Seen Kay, by the way?’

‘She went upstairs, I think.’

I’d heard the door spring open and the stairs groan as she made good her escape. She’d be sluicing her face down with cold water, I assumed, vowing never again to drink so much that she lost control of herself in such an embarrassing, such an appallingly dangerous and potentially disastrous way.

Ah Karen, how I misjudged you! But I’d never met anyone quite like her before, you see. Even little Manuela, of whom more anon, wasn’t in the Karen Parsons league. Knowing what I know now, I imagined she was stretched out on the marital bed finishing the job. She would have left the door open and the landing light on so that she was clearly visible from the stairs. If Dennis came looking for her, she might hear him in time, or she might not. That would have done it for her, the uncertainty.

Something had, at any rate, when she returned to the dining room a few minutes later. The frantic animation, the barely-suppressed hysteria, had been replaced by a languid, dopey calm. At the time I thought that the drink had finally taken its toll. The stuff circulating in her veins by then must have been a cocktail in which blood was a fairly minor ingredient. It didn’t seem at all surprising that she’d slowed down a little. It was a wonder she wasn’t in a coma. She paid me no particular attention. For my part, I had other preoccupations. Thanks to Karen’s attack I hadn’t been able to pee, and when my organ switched from reproductive to urinary mode I realized that my bladder was bursting. In the end I pretended to be worried that I had left my bicycle lamp on and dashed outside to relieve myself in a flower-bed.

Through the dining-room window I heard someone inside say, ‘… on a bicycle!’

‘The eternal student,’ Dennis remarked. They all laughed.

I stood there trembling with humiliation and anger. For a moment I thought of getting on my joke transport and heading back to the East Oxford slums where I belonged. Only I didn’t belong there, that was the whole trouble. If I belonged anywhere, it was with these people, the lumpenbourgeoisie, in whose eyes I’d lost caste, fatally and irrevocably. Besides, it had come on to rain, and the prospect of arriving home soaking wet to find my housemates Trisha and Brian curled up in a post-coital stupor in front of the TV was more than I could bear, so I swallowed my pride and went back inside.

Nevertheless, Dennis’s comment still rankled, and looking back on what had happened earlier I pondered the possibility of evening the score by seducing his wife. She fancied me, that was clear. The problem was my end. To drag Karen’s personality into it would be an unfair handicap, but even from a purely physical point of view she wasn’t my type. I like my women big and round and female. Karen Parsons wasn’t like that at all. She was anorexically skinny, her bosom almost imperceptible, her rump flat and hard. As for her face, it was one I had seen countless times in buses and supermarkets, dole queues and pubs, waiting outside schools or factories, at all ages from fifteen to fifty. Its only striking feature was a large, predatory mouth, like the front-end grille on a cheap flash motor. Definitely not my type, I decided, even if it did mean getting even with Dennis. I just didn’t fancy her and that was all there was to it.

How simple life would be, if it was as simple as we think!



The rain was falling harder than ever as I cycled home down the Banbury Road, through the science ghetto on Parks Road and into a time-warp. It was 1964, and I was on my way back from seeing Jenny, a very lovely, very sweet and gentle first-year history major at Somerville. I had rooms in college that year, so instead of turning east along the High I carried on down Magpie Lane and round the corner into Merton Street, taking care over the cobbles, treacherous when wet. The half-hour was just ringing from the massive bell tower, there was a muffled sound of organ practice from the chapel, the light was burning in the porter’s lodge and the gate lay open — but not to me.

I pedalled back to the High Street, past Magdalen and across the bridge to the Plain. It was now a year later. Jenny had digs on the Iffley Road and I was going there to see her, to tell her, to break it to her, to break her fragile, trusting heart. I had conceived a passion for another, you see. Liza wasn’t at university. That was one of her main attractions, quite frankly. Universities weren’t where it was happening, and particularly not Oxford. It was happening in Liverpool, where giggly Karen had just started at the local secondary mod, and in London, where Dennis Parsons was fast learning that the prime number is number one, and where Liza was studying art at the Slade. The things that were going down were urban things, street things, classless things. Oxford felt like a transatlantic liner in the age of bucket shops and cut-price charters.

I almost didn’t bother to take a degree, it seemed so pointless. Liza agreed. Francis Bacon never went to art college, she pointed out. In the end I went along and scraped a pass, largely to avoid the horrendous scenes with my parents that would ensue if I came away from the temple of learning empty-handed. They’d been considerably bucked when I got a place at Merton, you see. We were respectable Home Counties middle class, but nothing special, nothing to brag about. Not that our sort is given to bragging in any case, but it had given my dad — a branch manager for one of the High Street banks — a certain quiet satisfaction to be able to let his staff know that his son was ‘going up’ to Oxford. In fact he got more out of it than I did, I think. He’d missed out on all that because of the war, and he never tired of dropping references to ‘noughth week’ and ‘encaenia’ and ‘schools’ and May Balls. But it wasn’t those balls that were important to me, and timid undemanding Jenny couldn’t compete with Liza’s inspired experimentation, nor a damp drab flop on the Iffley Road with the joss-stick-scented nest lined with Liza’s fauvist daubs where she and I lay after our bouts of dirty love, toking and talking, turning the world inside out.

That was where I had made my bed, back in the mid-sixties. Now, a quarter of a century later, I was still lying in it. I’d chosen London over Oxford, and that’s what I’d got. The Cowley Road isn’t Oxford, it’s South London without the glamour. But even that was too chic for me, so I turned off into Winston Street. Winston Street made the Cowley Road seem pacey and sharp. Winston Street was where I lived. I chained my bicycle to the railings and climbed the north-facing steps, slimy with moss, where the puddles never dried. Trish and Brian had gone to bed. I made a mug of decaf and sat looking round at the crumbling plaster ceiling, the curdled paintwork, the tatty carpet and the flophouse furnishings.

The place belonged to Clive Phillips, who also owned the school where the three of us taught. Indeed for all practical purposes he owned us. Our rent was?120 a month each, exclusive of gas, electricity and water. Clive had bought the house five years earlier, before prices soared. Even if he was still paying off a mortgage, he had to be making at least?2,500 a year out of us, not counting the fact that the property had quadrupled in value. He was rumoured to own upwards of a dozen such houses in various parts of East Oxford, all let on short leases to students or teachers, in addition to his own home in Divinity Road. What with all those houses, plus the school, he must have been worth close to a million pounds, give or take the odd thousand.

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