No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

outside his door and began to cry.
    He wasn’t sure what to do. That was two of them in tears, one inside, one out. He thought how ill the Finn’s tears became her, compared to the Swede’s. Whereas when it came to screaming, the Finn was without equal. He felt suddenly sad for her and for him and for the thing he’d betrayed. You can dishonour a fuck. But if he asked the Finn to come in, and asked the Swede to go home, and fucked the Finn, would he then feel he’d dishonoured the aesthetics of his feelings for the Swede? Not Solomon in all his wisdom could settle the dissension between the dick and heart. Polygamy, that was the only answer Solomon had been able to come up with for himself.
    Frank leaned against the door frame, wondering how to act honourably, bearing in mind that he didn’t like to wake up in an empty bed. Now he really did have a headache. He rubbed his temples and put his hands over his eyes. When he removed them he saw the Swede on her knees with her arms round the Finn. She was stroking her hair. The princess and the frog. Who was going to turn into what?
    ‘Tea,’ the Swede said at last. ‘Can you make tea.’
    ‘I have wine …’ Wild thoughts of a party crossed his mind.
    ‘Not wine. Tea.’
    It meant going downstairs to the communal kitchen,looking for kettles, gas taps, matches, tea-pots, stuff he didn’t normally bother with in the daylight let alone in the dead of night, but he went anyway. The thing might sort itself out better without him. And it did. When he returned, bearing a tray of tea and chocolate biscuits – it behoved him, he believed, once he was down there, to go to some trouble – they were lying on his narrow bed together, as blameless as Hansel and Gretel; the Finn turned to the wall, the Swede stroking her thin hair and crooning to her in Norse. Frank poured them tea, put a biscuit in their saucers, turned off the light, and went to sleep in an armchair. When he woke in the morning they were both gone.
    Neither of them spoke to him again. Worse than that, neither of them fucked him again.
    Two days later he stood outside the school, across from the Dewdrop, and watched them climb aboard the bus chartered to take them all to Heathrow. The girls hadn’t become friends, they weren’t talking, they were back in their original parties, Finns here, Swedes there; but they were united in their heedlessness of him.
    ‘Goodbye the loveliest little arse I’ll ever see,’ Josh Green lamented.
    All the tutors were there, the principal, the head of studies, all the social committee, even the staff minibus driver, lined up to wave goodbye. The three weeks of acclimatisation to the idiom of English ways were over. The final morning had been a terrible ordeal. Knowing that they were taking leave of one another on the banks of the River of Eternal Separation, they had indulged one last reckless orgy of oath swearing and heart swapping. Addresses and phone numbers, photographs, rings and necklaces, items of apparel, books that told their story, records that played their music, objects that were themselves love-tokens from others, passed from hand to hand. So extensive and surreptitious had been the passingthat sometimes you received your own offering back. But nothing took from the augustness of the ritual. It was like throwing gifts into a grave. Everyone promised never to forget. Some promised to leave their wives and abandon their children. For the space of a morning no earlier allegiance was secure. For the space of a morning at least a dozen innocent English children were fatherless.
    They watched the bus pull away, the golden faces recede, then they returned in silence to the staff room. No one spoke for an hour. Just occasionally someone coughed. A fat summer fly buzzed in the pane. You could hear it cleaning its mandibles. Then the throb of a diesel engine and sounds of activity coming from the office told them that the new crop had arrived. They hurried out on to the