Dirty Tricks Read Online Free Page B

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.
    Clive was twenty-nine years old.
    Still, money’s not important, is it? That’s what I was brought up to believe. Niceness was what counted in life, not money. I was brought up to believe in niceness the way other people believe in God. I lost my faith when my parents died. They’d taken pride in planning for every eventuality, but there was nothing much they could do when an oncoming driver had a heart attack at the wheel and steered straight into the path of their Rover saloon. The estate turned out to be worth considerably less than I had hoped. My principal inheritance was a justification for any irresponsibility I cared to indulge in thereafter. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake as my parents, forever denying themselves what they wanted now so that they could look forward to their retirement with complete peace of mind.