Free Dirty Tricks by Michael Dibdin Page B

with your own lacklustre status. Both, in their different ways, were measuring the distance between themselves and others. Alison Kraemer simply didn’t seem conscious of it.
    Lunch was an omelette and a salad and cheese and bread, and it was the best meal we’d eaten all holiday. The eggs were from Alison’s hens, the leaves from her garden and hedgerow, the cheese from a neighbour’s goats, the bread chewy and wood-scented. Alison presided in a relaxed way, finding things for people to do, drawing them out, drawing them in. She did not offer us a tour of the house. She did not put on a tape of Vivaldi. She did not press drink on us. It was all most agreeable.
    I can imagine what’s going through your minds at this point. This answer is no, I didn’t fancy her. Not remotely. Not then, not later, not at any time. Alison was resolutely unerotic. This had nothing to do with her looks, which were traditional English upper-middle class, soft and rounded, sweet yet sturdy. If the daemon that fired Karen had invaded Alison’s body, locking its carapace to her face and swarming down her throat like some nifty parasitic alien, it would have had her coming on like Mae West in no time at all. The material was there, but Alison simply didn’t project, physically. Nevertheless, she had a strong effect on me, and an odd one. In her presence, after almost a year, and in a foreign country at that, I felt I had finally come home.
    When we returned to our gentrified cow-flop that afternoon everything seemed tawdry, vulgar and second-rate. More significantly, so did everybody. All the nagging discontents that had accumulated after ten days together burst out in a series of rows that increased in intensity and duration as the evening wore on. Broken corks and ineffective tin-openers sparked off major incidents. Unforgiveable things were said, and then repeated with morbid satisfaction by the aggrieved party in the manner of beggars displaying their sores. As darkness fell and the booze took its toll, people began to drop out. First Floss and Tibbs retired to their tent to dispel this foretaste of the middle-aged grossness that awaited them in the exercise of their healthy young bodies. Lynn sat slumped for a while in catatonic gloom, scratching bubo-like mosquito bites and reading about foreign horrors in an Amnesty International magazine, and then she too turned in. Only the Parsons stuck gamely to their gory sport, circling each other like bull terriers in a pit, with Thomas and I as spectators and referees.
    The nominal subject of such quarrels is of course secondary to the couple’s need to hurt each other, but in this case it appeared to centre on the Parsons’ childlessness. From Dennis’s drunken hints that memorable evening in Ramillies Drive I had gathered that the reason for this was Karen’s sterility, so I was somewhat surprised to find her going on the offensive.
    ‘God knows why you ever married me! It certainly wasn’t for sex.’
    Dennis grinned.
    ‘You reminded me of my mother, darling.’
    ‘Too bad you couldn’t make me a mother.’
    I held my breath, waiting for the knock-out punch. If what Dennis had told me was true, Karen was wide open. But he said nothing.
    ‘Time we got some sleep,’ said Thomas.
    Dennis drained his glass.
    ‘Right.’
    ‘Not with me you bloody don’t,’ Karen told him, striding into the house. The bedroom door slammed shut behind her.
    ‘You can have my room, if you like,’ I said.
    I made it easier for him by saying I wasn’t tired, I wanted to stay up and star-gaze, and anyway the sofa in the living area was very comfortable. All of these were lies. What I was really counting on was finding my way to the bed which Dennis had been denied. I needn’t have worried about him being too delicate to accept my offer. In fact he didn’t even seem to feel that it required any show of gratitude. Why shouldn’t he take my bed? I wasn’t paying for it, after all.
    I sat outside