Alligator Playground by Alan Sillitoe Read Free Book Online Page B

number?’
    He sounded petulant, but who wouldn’t? ‘You should know.’ ‘I don’t, though.’
    ‘Anyway,’ Diana said, ‘as long as she doesn’t find out where I live.’
    At the back of his address book was a seven-group, unlike any other, and she altered each digit a number ahead. Didn’t make sense. Changing them for the one behind produced a recognisable London number which, when dialled, got this posh trollop on the ansaphone. Naturally, she gave no name, but it must have been her.
    She had to laugh at how simple it was. He was piss poor at making codes, and that was a fact. In another part of the book Diana’s address was made plain by similar deciphering.
    He had promised, oh so easily, but she knew he wouldn’t stop seeing his Diana because if she had been in love no one would have spoiled her affair, certainly not him. In one way she couldn’t care less whether they broke it up or not, because if it weren’t the whore Diana he would be having somebody else.
    She would never trust or love him again, but fired herself to do the job nevertheless, because without much thought he had kicked her so brutally in the guts that the pain still brought tears and such a bumping of the heart that she wanted to vomit. It hadn’t been exciting enough for him to just have the woman but he had to plant the tape recorder where she was bound to play it back.
    He came home, and Angela wasn’t there. She so habitually was that the fact worried him. He sat in the kitchen eating bread and salami, a glass of red by his elbow. Diana had been too upset to feed him. And at the office he’d had Norman Bakewell haranguing him in the most obscene language about the jacket of his next paperback. Angela came in with an expression of satisfying superiority, and ashine of dislike for him in her eyes. The curve to her lips discouraged friendliness, at a time when, not long out of his girlfriend’s bed, it was vital for him to show it, even if only to diminish the guilt which harried him since she had found out.
    He stood. ‘Hello, darling!’
    Scales at the gym told him his weight had gone down in the last weeks. Hers had, as well, so that both looked raddled and mean. She had put herself on the machine, and laughed at the notion of selling the idea of an adulterous affair to Weight Droppers Anonymous. If a couple wanted to economise, only one need do it.
    ‘What’s funny, love?’
    She sat facing – looking, she assumed, right through him. ‘You.’
    ‘How come?’
    ‘You said you’d packed her in.’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘There’s more than one? I’m not surprised. London’s full of ’em waiting to fall on their backs and open their legs for a walking cock like you.’
    ‘Oh, don’t let’s go into all that again.’ Again? She hadn’t stopped since that fateful day nor, he supposed, would she ever. Did she want a divorce?
    She didn’t. ‘I’ll let you know when I do.’
    Nor did he. It would disturb his life too much.
    ‘I know,’ she said. ‘You want everything.’
    He wondered whether silence wouldn’t be better, but his mouth took control again. ‘Who doesn’t? You can have a divorce, if you like.’
    ‘When I feel like one I won’t ask you.’ She didn’t want to swim around in the slime of the alligator playground for the rest of her life. But she was in it, couldn’t help herself. He’d pushed her under and she was drowning. ‘I don’t need permission how to run my life from a scumbag like you.’
    Back into the maelstrom, and who needs it? A divorce might bethe only way, but would mean defeat, and more trouble than he wanted to face. Men were often too busy having affairs, Norman once said, to have time for a divorce.
    ‘I want you to give her up,’ and then she would leave him.
    ‘I’ve told you. I have.’ He’d never be able to, apart from not wanting to surrender on principle. Women who were easy to get were hard to let go of.
    ‘You haven’t.’
    ‘You’ve got to believe me.’ She had