Dirty Tricks Read online

  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.

  This wasn’t quite what I told Dennis when he brought the matter up.

  ‘Clive tells me he’s had to let you go.’

  I assumed a sphinx-like smile, as though my present situation were part of a long-term career strategy which would yield staggering results when it finally matured.

  ‘Let’s say we agreed to go our separate ways.’

  ‘So what are you up to now?’

  ‘On a day-to-day basis? I’ve gone freelance. A little angle I’ve worked out. Can’t say more at the moment. You know how it is.’

  Dennis laughed knowingly.

  ‘Too right. Half my clients don’t even want to let me know what they’re up to. Think of me as your psychiatrist, I say. If you don’t tell me your dirty little secrets, how can I help you?’

  He topped up our glasses.

  ‘Got a pension plan, have you?’

  I admitted that I hadn’t quite got around to organizing that aspect of my life yet.

  ‘When you’re ready, just let me know. I know someone, doesn’t work for us, quite independent, nothing in it for me, don’t worry about that. Absolutely brilliant though. Put together a beauty for me, tailored exactly to my needs. Most plans are like off-the-peg suits, they fit everyone more or less and no one perfectly. With this bloke, it’s all bespoke. Costs a shade more now, but when it’s time to cash in you’ll be glad you did, believe you me.’

  His fingers jabbed and sketched as he explained the details. Dennis was a genuine enthusiast for financial matters. A well-made pension plan inspired in him the same emotions as an estate-bottled single-vineyard wine of a good year, and about the same amount of waffle. I had to listen for a good hour while he burbled on about variably apertured annuity options and the like. But in his eagerness to demonstrate how wonderful the scheme was, he let drop the fact that in the event of his death Karen would inherit not only the house, fully paid-off under the terms of their endowment mortgage, but also a lump sum amounting to almost half a million pounds. He was unwilling to disclose the still more impressive amount accruing on his retirement at age fifty-five, but this was of purely theoretical interest to me. I didn’t really rate his cha
nces of living that long. The fact is that I had already begun to give serious consideration to the possibility of doing away with Dennis Parsons.

  I foresee that this statement will excite a certain amount of comment. Indeed, my legal representative has strongly advised me against making it. All I can say to that is that I have a higher opinion of your judgement than he has. A hundred years ago, most people would have violently and indignantly denied that they ever felt the desire to make love with anyone other than their marital partner. To do otherwise would have been tantamount to branding yourself an obscene, inhuman monster, an outcast from civilized society. Yet we now know that everyone has promiscuous sexual fantasies all the time. The people we worry about these days — the monsters, the ogres, the threats to society — are the ones who refuse to admit it.

  The same applies, I believe, to the question under discussion, except that while our sexual desires are now the subject of free and frank discussion, our homicidal ones still dare not speak their name. It is striking that at a time when just about every other human value has been called in question, the value of life is still universally accepted as an absolute. Despite this, I have no qualms about admitting to men of your culture and experience that the demise of Dennis Parsons seemed to me to be jolly desirable. I just couldn’t work out how to bring it about. What it comes down to is that most people, myself included, are just not up to murder. We make a big show of our moral objections, but what really puts us off are the technical ones. Most of us couldn’t stick a pig either, but that doesn’t stop us eating pork. If we didn’t have butchers to do the necessary, we’d be vegetarians out of sheer ineptitude.

  Perhaps it helps if you hate the intended victim, but I had no reason to hate Dennis. I rather liked him, in fact. My objections to his existence were purely utilitarian. I wanted to make large-scale improvements and extensions to my life, and to do so Dennis would have to be demolished. But how? It would have been easier if I could have discussed it with Karen. After all, it was in her interests as much as mine. If Dennis discovered that we were committing adultery, as he was bound to eventually, we would both end up in poverty. If he died before finding out, on the other hand, Karen got everything and I got Karen. So when she asked me where we’d be without him, my urge was to reply, ‘Rich.’ But despite her impeccable bed-cred, Karen was in most respects a very conventional person compared to someone like Manuela.

  It’s really about time we tackled Manuela, who seems to have become a recurring reference point in this story. I met her on a colectivo here in the capital, standing face to face in the rush-hour crowds. What sort of face did she have? She must have had one. I’m sure of that. I’d have noticed if it had been missing. No question about it, she had a face, but I’m buggered if I can remember what it looked like. I recall her bum, though, in vivid detail. It was one of those long drawn-out Latin bums, the ones that start just above the knees and peter out somewhere round about the coccyx. Apart from that she was unremarkable, short and stocky, solid-breasted, round-shouldered, with sturdy hips and ankles, not yet fat but genetically programmed for early obesity. The foreknowledge of that fate gave her flesh a deliciously transient ripeness, a brief doomed perfection on which I loved to gorge myself. Her lips were satisfyingly full, tensed to one side as though expecting a blow at any moment. I expected her to limp slightly. She didn’t, but something about the way she moved confirmed my suspicion that she saw herself as damaged goods.

  Even before we’d exchanged a word, I knew that she would let me do anything I wanted to her. Not that she would like it. She would hate it, and me, and herself most of all. But she wouldn’t say no. Manuela was the product of a relationship between the sexes firmly grounded in the realities of the marketplace. In the last resort, anything is preferable to spinsterhood. If you can’t get loved, get laid. If even that fails, get raped. That’s the bottom line. There were no doubt tribes whose females thought differently, but they died out. We’re the survivors. We may not be very nice, but we’re here.

  Manuela no doubt had her personal preferences and tastes, like everyone else, but she didn’t make the mistake of thinking that they were of any importance in the matter. She knew that men were total shits, that there were no limits to their depravity, selfishness or filthy desires. But she wanted a man, so she knew she’d have to pay a price, any price. That was why I had to break off our relationship in the end. I had to live with myself for the rest of my life. I didn’t want to know what I was capable of, given the opportunity she was offering me.

  But while Manuela was a mirror in which I glimpsed troubling facets of my own personality, hers presented no problems. Her licentiousness was entirely passive, reflecting not her own desires but those of the man she was with. What did she want? I never asked her, but I don’t imagine oral penetration figured as high on her list of priorities as it did on mine, and she could probably have done without the anal variety altogether. In fact at the risk of sounding patronizingly sexist, I would be prepared to bet that what Manuela really wanted was to get married, settle down and have lots of children. But she knew that no man was going to suggest that, not to her. The best she could hope for was that someone would come along and abuse her in various disgusting and incomprehensible ways. Then just possibly — there were no guarantees with this sort of investment — he might let her have a child in return, if only to give him someone to abuse when they both got older.

  A wish for children was about the only thing Karen and Manuela had in common, apart from their interest in me. Even where the sexual acts were identical, there was an essential difference. I did them to Manuela, but with Karen. Objectively, Karen was prepared to go almost as far as her predecessor, and her eager greed more than made up for the thrill I used to get from subjecting dogged, cow-like Manuela to the same routines. But Karen’s sexual behaviour was in marked contrast to her rigid conventionality in all else. For people of my generation, children of the sixties, sex and freedom are so inextricably connected that it is difficult for us to accept that someone can be totally uninhibited in bed and still have a Reader’s Digest mentality. For Karen, though, good sex was just one of the amenities to which everyone aspired. Like videos, satellite TV, whirlpool baths and microwaved paella, it was a form of in-home entertainment, an affordable luxury to enhance your lifestyle. Karen kept The Joy of Sex by the bed and The Joy of Cooking by the stove, and approached both activities with the same brash, cheerful, unsubtle gusto. If I’d suggested to Manuela that we murder someone, she would no doubt have gone along with it as she went along with everything else I suggested. She might have drawn the line if I’d suggested murdering her, but even then I wouldn’t have counted on her being able to break the habit of a lifetime. But with Karen such frankness was out of the question, and without her co-operation, getting rid of Dennis looked like just another of the many pipe-dreams I had indulged in over the years. But this one was to come true almost immediately, without my even lifting a finger.

  The first thing to say about what happened is that it was Dennis’s idea from the start. So much for the jerk-off theories put forward by the police, in which I figure as an adulterous version of George Joseph Smith — not the brides in the bath but the wittol in the water. I would be tempted to suggest that the Thames Valley CID read too many detective stories, except that I doubt whether they read at all. Late-night TV is more their speed. Wee-hours brain-numbers, junk videos from the 8-till-late take-out, that’s what’s formed their model of reality. The trouble with that stuff is not that it’s bad, but that it’s not bad enough. Life makes the worst video you’ve ever seen look like a masterpiece, and the episode I’m about to relate was well down to par in this respect.

  One of the many alienating features of unemployment is that weekends lose their magic. On the contrary, I was coming to dread them. Not only was there no chance of seeing Karen, but Trish and Brian took over the house with heavy hints about housework that needed doing or how if only the back garden was cleared we could plant organic vegetables. To avoid this aggravation, I used to spend my weekends going for long walks by the river. I joined it at Donnington Bridge and walked downstream, past Iffley Lock and under the by-pass to Radley, or up to Folly Bridge and through the back-streets of Osney to Port Meadow and Godstow. In summer the water is home to huge plastic bathtubs in which unhappy families sit self-consciously picking at their dog’s dinners, or pudgy louts grow raucous on tinned beer. By October, though, these wally wagons had given way to splinter-thin rowing shells in which muscular lads sweated and gasped over their oars while a weedy wimp goaded them on to still greater suffering. I always relished this sight, which closely resembled the fantasies I had harboured at school, a gang of jocks and bullies tormented by a puny swot. A different pleasure was afforded when the cox was female. Not seldom were my solitary walks enlivened by the spectacle of some plain Jane on her back in the stern of the boat, imploring the team of half-naked, sweat-drenched males to keep it coming, watch their finishing, keep it firm, keep it hard.