Michael Dibdin: Dirty Tricks

That term, the second half of each morning consisted of a two-hour mental sauna with my ‘Fake’ Early Intermediates. There were seven of them, and it was a source of perpetual wonder to me that they’d ever learned to speak their own languages, never mind anyone else’s. The exception was Helga, a Euro-slut from Cologne who should have been several grades higher but kept deliberately failing the aptitude tests so as to be with Massimo. A Latin looker whose stock response to any correction was an impatient ‘Izza same!’, Massimo combined staggering conceit, total ineptitude and a winsome, self-ingratiating charm which would have been hard to take in a toddler, never mind a beefy twenty-year-old. He and Helga sat at the back of the class, groping each other up in a flurry of smirks and giggles. In front of them sat Tweedledum and Tweedledee, a pair of Turkish twins whose soft, pale, shapeless, perfumed flesh irresistibly suggested the cloying sweetmeats of their native land. Then there was Kayoko, the Girl Who Couldn’t Say No. Asked, for example, if she was from New York, the Tokyo-born lass would blushingly reply, ‘Yes, I’m not.’ Yolanda and Garcia rounded out this select group. Yolanda was a spotty, bespectacled girl from Barcelona who spent her time translating every word I said into Spanish for the benefit of Garcia, a missing-link anthropoid from one of your immediate neighbours. For reasons which will become clear in due course, I prefer not to specify which one. Nor is Garcia his real name. In fact, given his track record, even his real name probably wasn’t his real name.

It wasn’t like working here, where I could slip into Spanish when things got ropey, and afterwards we’d all go to the bar and tone up the group dynamics over a few drinks. The only lingua franca this lot shared was English, and they didn’t speak English. Not only that, but they were never going to speak it. I knew it and they knew it, but we couldn’t admit that we knew it. We wouldn’t have understood each other, for one thing. So all I could do was to prance about waving flashcards and realia like a second-rate conjuror at a children’s party, and try not to glance at my watch more than once a minute.

The main item on the agenda the following Monday was a listening comprehension exercise based around a tape-recorded ‘authentic’ conversation. In fact I’d carefully scripted the whole thing, grading the language to keep it within the students’ capabilities. ‘Fake’ Intermediates were students who had done the Beginners’ course but learned nothing from it. Indeed most of them had made a kind of negative progress. Not only were they still ignorant of the language, but they now had a sense of personal inadequacy — totally justified, I might add — which manifested itself in a stubborn refusal to learn anything. The aim of the gist-listening session was to try and break down this hostility by showing the group that they could understand two native speakers talking ‘naturally’, in this case about a shopping expedition. Ideally they were supposed to pick up that the woman (Trish) was asking the man (me) for money — an all-too-authentic situation, this. The first run-through was a complete failure. Even my most basic pre-set question (‘How many people are talking?’) proved to be over their heads, so I rewound the tape and tried again. If all else failed I could usually rely on Massimo getting an ego-boosting tip from Helga, who wasn’t allowed to take part herself. We were about half-way through the second audition when the door opened and Karen Parsons walked in.

I wasn’t best pleased to see her. It was bad enough to have to spend my days acting as occupational therapist to a bunch of linguistic basket-cases without having my social acquaintances dropping in to witness my degradation. Moreover one of Clive’s many draconian rules was an absolute ban on personal visitors during school hours. There was even a story, not necessarily apocryphal, that when a message arrived to tell one of the teachers that his father had died, Clive had insisted on waiting until the lunch break before passing it on. I already had reason to suspect that I was by no means flavour-of-the-month at the Oxford International Language College. If Clive caught me entertaining a lady friend in the classroom, I would be out on my ear in no time at all.

So when I asked Karen what she thought she was up to, I was merely expressing my irritation and anxiety at this interruption. As usual, we were at cross-purposes from the start.

‘I won’t go behind his back,’ she said. ‘It may seem stupid, but that’s the way it is. What happened the other day was wrong. I was drunk and I …’

She fell silent, looking uncertainly at the students.

‘Don’t worry,’ I told her. ‘They won’t understand as long as you speak quickly.’

I was being tactful. Given Karen’s broken-nosed vowels and head-banger intonation, they wouldn’t have understood if she’d spelt it for them.

‘You mean I could say anything at all?’ she asked with a mischievous smile.

I glanced at Helga, but she was busy sticking her tongue in Massimo’s ear. Karen took something from her handbag and slipped it into her mouth like a communicant self-administering the host.

‘Just my knickers,’ she murmured, catching my eye.

‘Sorry?’

‘Nicorette. Denny won’t let me smoke. Kills the taste of the wine, he says.’

She fell silent. Then an internal bulkhead gave way somewhere and she blurted out, ‘We don’t do it any more, not really. Not enough. And I need it, and sometimes …’

She broke off.

‘Ooh, this is fun, isn’t it?’

As she eagerly scanned the blank faces turned like sunflowers towards us, I felt almost faint for a moment, overwhelmed by her excitement and my own desire. I no longer cared about Clive finding us together. I no longer cared about anything but the sexual charge passing between us.

‘I want you, Karen,’ I murmured. ‘I want you properly.’

She squirrelled away at the nicotine-laden gum.

‘I know. But I can’t. At the end of the day, he’s still my husband.’

‘What, so you’d be sick as a parrot if we went over the moon together?’

This was the tone to take with Karen, I decided. Coming on all awed and respectful would just put the wind up her. Most women don’t really have a very high opinion of themselves, so if you start treating them as something special they think, ‘Oh God, sooner or later he’ll find out the truth, and then he’ll despise me.’ Much better to make it clear from the start that you’ve seen through them, and you still fancy them rotten.

She shrugged stubbornly.

‘That’s the way it is.’

‘You interrupted my class just to tell me this?’

‘What? No, I just dropped by to invite you to dinner on Saturday. We haven’t got your number, you see. I was going to leave a note, but there was no one at Reception and then I heard your voice in here. Thomas and Lynn will be there. He’s Denny’s partner, you’ll like him. Half past seven for eight.’

I nodded curtly.

‘Fair enough.’

At the door she looked back.

‘And I am sorry. About the other. I just can’t. I do like you, but I can’t.’

The door closed behind her. I looked round at the class, my finger hovering above the tape-recorder.

‘All right, let’s try again. How many people are there and what are they talking about?’

Helga put her hand up.

‘There is a man and a woman,’ she enunciated fastidiously. ‘He wants to — how do you say? — “fuck” her? And she, I think, also wants to fuck him. Yes, I’m sure she does. But her husband is a problem.’

I nodded coolly.

‘I see. And why is her husband a problem?’