Dirty Tricks Read Online Free PDF Page B

say you had my wallet otherwise?’
    She shrugged pettishly.
    ‘You’re late. I thought Dennis would still be here.’
    I tried this on from various directions, but it still didn’t make sense.
    ‘Speak of the devil,’ said Karen.
    There was a swish of gravel as the BMW drew in. Dennis clambered out looking disgruntled.
    ‘Bloody thing’s on the blink. There’s another up your end of town somewhere, but I can’t be bothered.’
    Registering my look of bewilderment, but mistaking the cause, he added, ‘Car wash. I go every Saturday. Prevents grime build-up.’
    He grasped my elbow and led me through the hallway and into a long room knocked through the whole length of the house. A three-piece suite and coffee table occupied the front half, a fitted kitchen and dinette the rear. These were the real living quarters, as opposed to the receiving rooms on the other side of the house, where guests were entertained. Dennis apparently saw me as ‘family’, or at any rate as someone he didn’t have to impress. What I still couldn’t understand was why he wanted to see me at all.
    Almost the biggest shock of the many I had sustained on my return home was the loss of the social cachet I had enjoyed for so many years. In Spain, in Italy, in Saudi – well, no, forget Saudi – and above all here, among your warm-hearted and hospitable people, I had been sought-after, even lionized. As a foreigner and a teacher, I was the object of general interest and respect. At the end of the EFL training course I did in London, a British Council type gave us all a pep talk before we were packed off to Ankara or Kuala Lumpur. ‘Never forget, you’re not just teachers,’ he told us, ‘you’re cultural ambassadors.’
    The funny thing was that in a way the old fart was right. Socially, we benefited from a sort of diplomatic immunity. We were extraterritorial. The rules of the local game didn’t apply to us. I didn’t appreciate this freedom until I lost it. I took it for granted that I could associate with people from all walks of life, from every background. It seemed perfectly natural that I should spend one evening being waited on by uniformed retainers at the home of an important industrialist whose son I taught, and the next in a seedy bar drinking beer with a group of workers from the factory where I gave private courses in technical English. Someone rightly said that language exists to prevent us communicating, and of no country is that more true than my own. I never made more friends as easily as when I was among people whose language I spoke badly and who barely spoke mine at all. In a land where trendy cafés display neon signs reading SMACK BAR and SNATCH BAR, no one’s going to pick up the linguistic and social markers that pin the native Brit down like so many Lilliputian bonds. Subtle but damning variations of idiolect are unlikely to count for much in a country where people go around wearing tee-shirts inscribed with things like ‘The essence of brave’s aerial adventure: the flight’s academy of the American east club with the traditional gallery of Great Britain diesel’. Do you know what that means? I don’t. But it must have meant something to someone. You couldn’t just invent something like that.
    But things were very different back in the land of dinge and drab, of sleaze and drear and grot. Teachers are not figures of respect in my country. They’re the bottom of the professional heap, somewhere between nurses and prison warders. And I wasn’t even a real teacher. The only remarkable thing about me was the fact that I was still doing a holiday job at the age of forty. I was just damaged goods, another misfit, another over-educated, under-motivated loser who had missed his chance and drifted into the Sargasso Sea of EFL work.
    Yet here I was, in sedate and semi-exclusive Ramillies Drive, being urged to spend the rest of the afternoon with a successful chartered accountant and his wife, being plied with