Dirty Tricks (19 page)

‘So did you manage to get through to station information in the end?’

‘Don’t try and change the subject!’

‘Oh I’m not, Karen. It’s very much the same subject, isn’t it?’

She looked hesitant, unsure as yet whether there was anything to be worried about.

‘What exactly did you want to know?’ I inquired archly.

‘About the trains, of course.’

‘The trains to Liverpool, or to Banbury?’

Something flared briefly in her eyes, like a dud firework.

‘How did you find out?’

In other circumstances I would have stood up and cheered. Her response had not only put mine to shame, she had also returned my volley with awkward bounce and heavy top-spin. If I admitted bugging the phone, she would want to know what had made me suspicious. The answer, of course, was her pregnancy, but I couldn’t tell her that without revealing the truth about my vasectomy, which was far more than I was prepared to admit at this stage of the game. So I said the first thing that came into my head.

‘Clive told me.’

He eyes opened wide in shock.

‘No!’

I held my tongue.

‘He wouldn’t do that!’ she cried.

‘I can’t help wondering just how well you know him, Karen. Other than in the biblical sense, of course.’

She scrabbled in her handbag and popped a couple of 4 mg slaps of nicotine-rich gum.

‘I dropped by the school this morning to sound Clive out about the EFL business idea. We chatted for a while about how much he’d want in return for letting me access his network of overseas contacts and so on. Then he suddenly turned to me and said, “Look here, I think you’d better know that I’ve been stuffing your wife.” ’

Karen flinched as though the child she was carrying had suddenly kicked her.

‘I told him I didn’t believe him. “You don’t need to take my word for it,” he said. “You see she’s carrying my child.” ’

‘But he doesn’t even know! I never told him.’

‘You don’t need to
tell
him, Karen. There are lots of little signs which a man as sexually active as our Clive has doubtless seen before. Anyway, that’s all a bit beside the point, which is that while you’ve supposedly been working on your yoga every Wednesday night, you’ve actually been practising positions of a rather different kind.’

‘That’s not true! I only saw him once or twice, when things were going so badly between us two. We had a thing together before, when I was with Dennis. The only reason anything happened this time was because you were being so horrible to me. I wanted to reassure myself that I was still desirable.’

I laughed savagely.

‘Oh I see, it was all my fault!’

‘It was both our faults. But it wasn’t important. It was just a bit of fun as far as I was concerned. It meant more than that to him, though. That’s why I agreed to go away with him this weekend, to tell him that it’s all over.’

‘Seems rather a long way to go for that.’

Karen adroitly brought the waterworks on stream.

‘I was afraid! Afraid for
us
. Clive can’t accept that I don’t love him. I quite fancy him, but I don’t love him. I was terrified about what he might do when I told him I was pregnant by you. He’d been asking me to go away with him for ages, so I finally agreed, just so as to have time to explain things properly, to make him understand that if he cared for me he had to let me go.’

‘Sure, Karen.’

‘I wasn’t going to sleep with him! Do you think I could do that, knowing that I’m carrying your child inside me?’

‘Speaking of which …’

‘Look, let’s forget Clive. Let’s forget this woman you’ve been seeing. This is between you and me. Nothing else matters but this life we’ve created together. The rest is just play, but this is real. I know it won’t be easy. We’re too different for that. But we’ve got to try and make it work. We owe it to our child!’

I recognized this tune. I’d sung it myself once, back in the days when I was a penniless suitor and Karen a wealthy widow. But times had changed,
nos et
, it goes without saying,
mutamur in illis
. Karen was the suitor now, and I was not in the giving vein.

‘I’m afraid the prospect of surrogate fatherhood doesn’t attract me, Karen.’

As usual, she skipped the word which did not compute.

‘But you said you
were
! You said you wanted us to get married and have a child …’

‘Yes, but I was rather taking it for granted that it would be
my
child.’

She stared at me aghast.

‘It
is
!’

‘That’s not what Clive says.’

‘What does he know?’

‘What do
you
know? You can’t have been on the pill because you were trying to get pregnant with me.’

‘We used something else.’

‘What?’

She hesitated. Close-ups of Clive unrolling a sheath over his engorged member were definitely unsuitable for the family audience to which she was hoping to appeal.

‘An old balloon?’ I suggested. ‘Cavity wall insulation foam? Herbal pessaries? Whatever it was, it didn’t work. Be honest, Karen, you didn’t even
want
it to work. You were so desperate to get pregnant you were beyond caring who the father was. You’d probably have preferred it to be me, all other things being equal. But you weren’t really unduly worried about that aspect of it, were you?’

‘That’s not true! It’s your child! I know it is. Women know these things.’

‘OK, let’s get a paternity test done.’

‘No!’

She glared furiously at me. I shrugged.

‘I rest my case.’

‘Those tests can be dangerous! I’m not letting some doctor mess around with the foetus just because you’re a heartless shit who won’t believe what I say.’

‘If you think
I’m
a heartless shit, just wait till you tell Clive that he’s going to have to assume his responsibilities because we’re getting divorced.’

She stood up, her hands over her ears, rocking back and forth on her heels, muttering something I couldn’t make out. Then she sighed deeply and stroked her midriff, as though to reassure the foetus.

‘You can’t wriggle out of it that easily, you bastard! I’ll bring a paternity suit. I’ll get those tests done all right, once the child is born.’

‘As many as you like, Karen. All they’ll prove is that the only bastard round here is the one in your womb.’

That did it. She threw herself at me, shrieking and spitting, battering me with her fists and shoes. Women get a good press these days. It’s become intellectually respectable, even among those who otherwise reject gender-based distinctions, to suggest that they’re somehow intrinsically nicer than men and that the problems of the world would magically resolve themselves if we all became more womanly. In my view this is sexist bullshit. Given the chance, woman can be every bit as unpleasant as men. Karen’s expression as she attacked reminded me of photographs of Ilsa Koch and Myra Hindley. She looked quite literally devilish.

‘You cunt!’ she screamed.

The inappropriacy of this term of abuse was lost on both of us, I fear. Irony was never Karen’s strong suit, and I was too busy staving off her frenzied assault to appreciate it. Karen was smaller and lighter than me, but fitter and much more highly-motivated. She kneed me in the groin, savaged my face with her nails and battered my shins and ankles with her sharply pointed shoes. Her energy was demonic, the sudden release of months of pent-up hatred and frustration. I tried to contain her, but my defences were swiftly overwhelmed.

She wanted me to hit her, of course. That would prove her right, prove me to be the heartless bastard she said I was. What worried me was that it would prove it not just to her but to everyone. She could have her bruises examined and described and then produce photographs and medical witnesses in court to discomfort me. Those marital stigmata would transfigure Karen from promiscuous bitch into battered wife, while I would appear a sadistic adventurer who was not content with taking her money but had to beat her up as well. I would be lucky to get off with a suspended sentence, and I could certainly kiss goodbye to any hope of favourable settlement. And to Alison, needless to say.

I
did
hit out, but not physically. Garcia would have been proud of me. I chose a blow that hurt her worse than any punch, but left no marks at all.

‘Do you know what a vasectomy is, Karen?’

She kicked me viciously on the ankle. I gritted my teeth, wrenched her arm painfully and repeated my question.

‘Of course I bloody well know!’

‘Well here’s something else you should know. I’ve had one.’

It took a moment for this to sink in. Then her body went limp in my arms.

‘What you mean?’

‘I mean that I’m incapable of fatherhood. I’ve been surgically sterilized. Cut, snipped, gelded.’

Her eyes were wide open, but she was looking inward now, assessing the damage. Reports were still coming in, but already she could tell that it was very bad, a major disaster.

‘Then it was all lies.’

I said nothing. I’d made my point, and I wasn’t in the mood to chat. She turned away, mumbling the same phrase I’d heard earlier, but louder now, more urgently.

‘No love, no love, no love, no love, no love.’

Yes, well, it was all very sad. It would be nice if there was more love around. We thought we could make it happen, back in the sixties. We were wrong. Love’s gone the way of Father Christmas, the tooth fairy and the man in the moon. It’s for the kiddies, that stuff. We’ve grown up now. We don’t believe in love any more.

I left Karen to her maudlin reveries and went upstairs to lie down for a bit before she came back for the next round. It didn’t seem likely that either of us would get much sleep that night.

When I awoke the room was dark. Through the uncurtained window the upper branches of a tree outside the house were backlit by the streetlamp opposite. I was lying fully dressed on top of the covers. Karen’s side of the bed had not been disturbed at all. In addition to a totally irrelevant erection, I was suffering from a splitting headache and a nasty case of heartburn. The clock was in one of those positions – ten past two, in this case – where it seems to have only one hand.

I got up and went to the bathroom, where I took some paracetamol and Alka Seltzer. The upper landing was illuminated by the glow of the hallway light. Karen, I assumed, was drowning her sorrows in the dusk-to-dawn movies accessible via the satellite dish which Dennis had installed. She might even have fallen asleep in front of the set. It wouldn’t have been the first time. I leant over the banister and peered down the stairs.

For the past week, a magazine wrapped in a plastic cover had been resting on the third step from the bottom, a professional journal which Dennis had subscribed to and which kept arriving despite our attempts to convince the publisher’s computer that the intended recipient was beyond caring about such topics as ‘1992: The Implications for Your Clients’. Now, however, the glossy package was no longer on the step but lying on the floor in the middle of the hallway.

It was the very triviality of this fact which drew me downstairs to investigate. The displacement of the magazine seemed such a meaningless gesture that my curiosity was aroused. I was about half-way down the stairs – almost exactly where Dennis must have been standing the morning he almost caught us in bed together, in fact – when I spotted one of Karen’s shoes lying in the doorway to the living room. Even more interesting, her foot was still in it.

A few steps more and I could make out the rest of the body sprawled on the parquet flooring a few inches away from the hideous neo-Spanish cabinet which the Parsons had chosen to ‘add a bit of character’ to their hallway, an over-elaborate mock-antique affair with metal strengthenings at the corners, cast-iron handles with sharp edges and a massive key protruding from the cupboard doors. Dennis had remarked jocularly that someone would do themselves an injury on it sooner or later. At the time this had seemed just like one of those things you say.

I knelt down beside Karen and shook her about a bit. She looked pale, but not any more than was to be expected after the amount she had drunk. There was a nasty-looking bruise, all puffy and yellow, high up on her right temple, just below the hairline. It was clear what had happened. After a further bout of solitary boozing in the living room she had headed for the stairs, intent either on sleep or another confrontation with me. In her maudlin stupor she had failed to notice the plastic-wrapped magazine, which had performed the same function as the banana skin in the traditional joke. Karen had toppled backwards and fallen head-first against the Spanish chest, knocking herself out.

I felt a heavy sinking of the stomach, as when the washing machine backs up and floods the kitchen, or the car breaks down in a contraflow on the M25. It never occurred to me that her injuries might be serious. All I could think of was the fuss and bother involved, the fact that I wouldn’t be able to go straight back to bed. What a bore!

I grabbed her under the armpits and dragged her into the living room. An open bottle stood on the side-table next to a fallen tumbler and a puddle of spilt whisky. I dumped Karen on the sofa. She flopped sideways, totally limp. I slapped her face a few times. I called her name loudly. There was no response.

After a while I became aware of another sound in the room, a mechanical whine I had hitherto associated with the fridge or central heating. After a brief search I traced it to the telephone, which was lying underneath the sofa. Had Karen just knocked it over, or had she phoned someone? And if so, who? I was half-way through making some coffee when I remembered that every conversation on that line was being monitored on the tape-recorder I kept in the spare bedroom. I raced upstairs and rewound the tape to the beginning of the last call.

‘This is Oxford 46933. I’m afraid I can’t make it to the phone just now, but if you want to leave a message I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Please speak after the tone.’