But it wasn’t anyone. It was Clive, and that changed everything. Karen didn’t matter to me, but Clive did. Clive and I went way back. We had scores to settle. I don’t just mean his shabby treatment of me at the school. That particular Clive Phillips was merely the latest model in a continuing series which had haunted my life. Back in the sixties, when I was demonstrating against the Vietnam War, having meaningful relationships, pondering the purpose of life and seeing God in a grain of sand, the Clives were out there wheeling and dealing, cheating and hustling, packaging my dreams and hopes and selling them back to me at a profit. It didn’t bother me, not then. From the lofty parapets of my ivory tower, I looked down on them going about their mean, grubby business in the mire far below and reminded myself that they hadn’t enjoyed my advantages in life and were thus to be pitied rather than despised, difficult though this was.
Most of my peers came down to earth during the seventies, but I kept floating. OK, the acid dream was dead, flower power a flop, but hey, it’d been a learning experience, right? And the alternative still stank. I got into booze and books, travelled widely, did a bit of casual work to make ends meet, and had less and less meaningful affairs. The Clives were a lot closer now. I had dealings with them as employee and tenant. I felt their contempt for me, and it shook me. So I went abroad, insulating myself in the cocoon of expatriation. On my return to this country ten years later, I found the Clives in charge. They’d been there all along, of course, but keeping their heads down, disguising their true nature. Now the wind had changed and they’d come out of the woodwork, big and hungry and confident. I was tossed to them like a badger to dogs. When Clive Phillips condescended to use me, I was grateful, and when he turned me out I went quietly, because by then I had finally accepted the rules of the game. Instead of making vain protests to the referee or sulking on the sidelines, I set out to win. As we have seen, I succeeded.
Now I found myself humiliated and despoiled once more. Clive wasn’t to know that he was doing me a favour by giving me a motive to divorce Karen. Clive didn’t do anyone any favours. Like all free enterprise propagandists, he hated competition in any form, and took a particularly dim view of any of his employees trying to emulate his success. When three of his teachers left to open a school of their own, Clive told everyone that giving the consumer a choice kept everyone honest and he wished the lads well. Then he got his Italian agents to make block bookings at the new school for the next six months in the name of a fictitious company. The owners of the new school were ecstatic at this stroke of luck, and having spent a lot of money on advertising they were forced to turn down all requests for places as the school was full until Christmas. At the last moment the Italian company mysteriously cancelled its bookings, and that summer the school had more teachers than students. In October the bank foreclosed on the loan, and in November the teachers asked Clive for their jobs back. He said he would put their names on the list, but it was first come first served, fair was fair.
In short, Clive was not only a prick, he was a vindictive prick. Since he could no longer reach me in any other way, he’d reached me through my wife. It wasn’t Karen that Clive was fucking, it was me. A terrible fury swept over me, a rage so intense it was physically painful. But anger would avail me nothing, I knew. The teachers who had taken Clive’s on-your-bike homilies at face value got angry when they discovered how they’d been bought and sold, but their anger didn’t repay their bank loan or give them their jobs back. It merely confirmed what losers they were. While they got mad, Clive got even. That’s what I would do, I decided. I wasn’t an ineffective dreamer any more. If Clive wanted to play dirty, that was fine with me. With Garcia on my side, I could play dirty in ways that Clive had never even imagined.
Over dinner that evening, Karen announced that her mother had to go into hospital for observation as her chronic back complaint had taken a turn for the worse. She felt she should go up to Liverpool for the weekend to be with her. I generously offered to drive her, but she said she preferred to go by train. I would only be in the way, she went on, becoming rather flustered, there was really no point in it. I conceded the point, but insisted on at least driving her to the station. This she accepted. She would be getting the 10.14, she said. I already knew this, having overheard her and Clive arranging to meet at Banbury, where the train stopped twenty minutes later. I thought it was quite a wheeze getting your husband to drive you to the train and your lover to meet you off it, but Karen did not seem unduly impressed. Ever the pragmatic scrubber at heart, she saw no more in this arrangement than its convenience.
Next morning I was up betimes. First stop was the railway station, where I consulted timetables. Then it was back in the BMW and up the road to Banbury, a pleasant market town some twenty miles north of Oxford. Its railway station proved to be a charmless sixties structure with a large car park tarmacked over uprooted sidings. Once the morning rush hour had subsided it appeared little-used, and between trains was almost completely deserted. It only remained to locate the facility which I thought of abstractly as ‘the site’. After driving around the countryside for several hours, I eventually settled on a disused quarry a few miles outside Banbury. A lorry-load of broken concrete fence-posts and other construction waste had been tipped near the entrance, but there was no other sign that anyone had been there recently. There were no houses in the vicinity, and once inside one was completely hidden from the road.
When Garcia appeared at our rendezvous that lunchtime, he was almost beside himself with furtive cockiness and suppressed self-satisfaction. The manifest reason for this was that he had filled the order and was about to deliver the goods, but the real cause was malicious glee. Not only wasn’t he the cuckold, but he knew who had made me one. I swiftly pulled the rug from under his feet by revealing that I did too.
Garcia’s first thought was that I was trying to get out of paying him. He was therefore pleasantly surprised when I handed over the agreed sum without a murmur. I then asked how much he still needed. His face fell. It was quite a lot. When I asked how he’d like to have it on Monday he looked at me like the pooch in the Pedigree Chum commercials.
‘You want me to keep watching? Take some photographs maybe?’
By now we were driving around the ring road, Garcia munching his way through a pack of sandwiches I’d bought at a garage. With what I had in mind, we couldn’t risk being seen together, even at a roadside eatery with a high turnover.
‘There’s no need for that. I know enough. It’s time to act, to punish those responsible.’
‘Your wife?’
I shook my head.
‘I’ll deal with her. No, I’d like to put your professional skills to use.’
He looked suitably flattered.
‘Clive has hurt me. He’s hurt my pride, my honour. All I can do in return is hurt his body. It’s not much, but it’ll have to do for now. I would handle it myself, but I’m afraid I’d get carried away. He’d call the police and I’d be charged with assault.’
Garcia shook his head in disgust. The discovery that British justice offered no protection to husbands who took revenge on the man who had dishonoured them confirmed his worst suspicions about his country of exile.
‘But for me it’s an even bigger risk,’ he pointed out.
‘I’ll make it worth your while. Everything you need to leave, plus a hundred pounds fun money.’
‘Two hundred.’
We haggled amicably for some time.
‘Clive is planning to go away with my wife this weekend,’ I explained, once Garcia’s scruples had been overcome. ‘She’s taking the train to a town called Banbury, where Clive is meeting her. I’ll drive her to the station and put her on an earlier train. She won’t dare refuse for fear of making me suspicious. What she won’t know is that this train doesn’t stop at Banbury. My wife will thus have been sent to Coventry, a phrase which you may recall from our work on idioms but which in the present case is to be interpreted literally.
‘As soon as I’ve seen her off, I’ll come and collect you. The train Clive is meeting doesn’t arrive till ten forty, which will give us plenty of time. When we reach Banbury, you lie down in the back of the car with a blanket over you. I’ll go and find Clive and tell him that I know all about him and Karen, and I think we should have a little talk. In broad daylight, in a public place, he’ll have no reason to be suspicious. I’ll get him to come and sit in the car so that we can discuss the situation without being overheard. Then, when the coast’s clear, I’ll turn on the radio. That’s your signal to come out of hiding and disable him.’
‘Forget the radio. Just punch him in the balls, like this.’
He made a fist and brought it down like a hammer between my thighs, pulling up at the last moment. I stifled a premature gasp of pain.
‘While he’s busy counting his nuts,’ Garcia continued unperturbed, ‘I give him a little tap on the head.’
By way of illustration, he skimmed my scalp with the open palm of his right hand.
‘I knew you were the man for the job.’
