Read Dirty Tricks for Free Online Page A

aperitivo , that sense of the whole city beginning to wind down towards lunch, which I took at any one of a dozen excellent and welcoming restaurants where I was sure to be hailed and called over to one table or another. After a leisurely meal it was out into the sun-drenched streets again, replete and relaxed, in boisterous good-natured company, for an excellent coffee and a cigar.
    Sated with a whole morning of freedom and indulgence, work seemed almost a pleasure, the more so in that my students were in the same post-prandial daze as myself. All serious business was dispatched in the morning. No one expected to achieve anything much after lunch, so the mood was languid and light-hearted, as though we were just pretending. The hours slipped past almost unnoticed. Outside the window dusk had fallen, the sky glowed in exuberant shades of green and pink. Soon my working day was over, but the night had only just begun, the streets and piazzas just beginning to hum with life. Where would I spend those precious, unforgettable hours tonight, and with whom?
    Since his return home, the prodigal’s life had been rather different. Classes were no longer in the afternoon and evening, after work. They were work, and the students, who were paying through the nose for them, were grim, resentful and bloody-minded. My day began at seven with unwanted glimpses of Trish and Brian’s intimacies, followed by slurped tea and munched toast in the communal kitchen. Then it was on to my bike and off to spend the rest of my day banged up with a bunch of sullen, spoilt brats in order to make Clive Phillips even richer than he already was. ‘The eternal student,’ Dennis had joked. The joke, of course, was that the real students were currently being head-hunted for posts with starting salaries in excess of 20K.
    That term, the second half of each morning consisted of a two-hour mental sauna with my ‘Fake’ Early Intermediates. There were seven of them, and it was a source of perpetual wonder to me that they’d ever learned to speak their own languages, never mind anyone else’s. The exception was Helga, a Euro-slut from Cologne who should have been several grades higher but kept deliberately failing the aptitude tests so as to be with Massimo. A Latin looker whose stock response to any correction was an impatient ‘Izza same!’, Massimo combined staggering conceit, total ineptitude and a winsome, self-ingratiating charm which would have been hard to take in a toddler, never mind a beefy twenty-year-old. He and Helga sat at the back of the class, groping each other up in a flurry of smirks and giggles. In front of them sat Tweedledum and Tweedledee, a pair of Turkish twins whose soft, pale, shapeless, perfumed flesh irresistibly suggested the cloying sweetmeats of their native land. Then there was Kayoko, the Girl Who Couldn’t Say No. Asked, for example, if she was from New York, the Tokyo-born lass would blushingly reply, ‘Yes, I’m not.’ Yolanda and Garcia rounded out this select group. Yolanda was a spotty, bespectacled girl from Barcelona who spent her time translating every word I said into Spanish for the benefit of Garcia, a missing-link anthropoid from one of your immediate neighbours. For reasons which will become clear in due course, I prefer not to specify which one. Nor is Garcia his real name. In fact, given his track record, even his real name probably wasn’t his real name.
    It wasn’t like working here, where I could slip into Spanish when things got ropey, and afterwards we’d all go to the bar and tone up the group dynamics over a few drinks. The only lingua franca this lot shared was English, and they didn’t speak English. Not only that, but they were never going to speak it. I knew it and they knew it, but we couldn’t admit that we knew it. We wouldn’t have understood each other, for one thing. So all I could do was to prance about waving flashcards and realia like a second-rate conjuror at a children’s