One Good Turn Read online

  He checked his watch. Four o’clock—teatime on Planet Julia. He remembered a warm, lazy afternoon they had spent together last summer in the Orchard Tea Rooms at Grantchester, the two of them stretched out on deck chairs beneath the trees, replete with afternoon tea. They had been on a brief, rather uncomfortable visit to Julia’s sister, who still lived in Cambridge and who had declined to join them on their “jaunt.” Julia’s word. Julia’s vocabulary was “chock-full” of strangely archaic words—“spiffing,” “crumbs,” “jeepers”—that seemed to have originated in some prewar girls’ annual rather than in Julia’s own life. For Jackson, words were functional, they helped you get to places and explain things. For Julia, they were freighted with inexplicable emotion.

  “Afternoon tea” itself, of course, was one of Julia’s all-time favorite phrases (“Good enough words on their own, but together, perfect”). “Afternoon tea” usually trailed a few excessive adjectives in its wake—“scrumptious,” “yummy,” “heavenly.”

  “Warm bakery basket” was another of her favorites, as were (mysteriously) “Autumn equinox” and “lamp black.” Certain words, she said, made her toes “positively curl with happiness”— “rum,” “vulgar,” “blanchisserie,” “hazard,” “perfidious,” “treasure,” “divertimenti.” Certain scraps and lines of poetry—“Of his bones are coral made” and “They flee from me that sometime did me seek”— sent her into sentimental rapture. The “Hallelujah Chorus” made her sob, as did Lassie, Come Home (the whole film, title to closing credits). Jackson sighed, Jackson Brodie, the all-time winner of the Mr. and Mrs. game show.

  His phone buzzed like a trapped bee in his pocket. He peered at the screen—having an eye test would be something useful he could do while he was up here with nothing else to do. A text message from Julia read, “How r u? comp 4 r mott 2nite at our box! Luv Julia xxxxxxxxxxxx.” Jackson had no idea what the text meant, but he felt a surge of affection when he thought of Julia laboriously tapping in all those Xs.

  He was about to set off back when his eye was caught by something on the rocks, below the remains of a concrete lookout. For a second he thought it was a bundle of clothing that had been dropped there, hoped it was a bundle of clothing, but it didn’t take him more than a skipped heartbeat to know it was a body that had been cast up by the tide. Jetsam, or was it flotsam?

  A young woman, jeans and a vest top, bare feet, long hair. The policeman in him automatically thought, Hundred and twenty pounds, five foot six, although the height was a guess, as she was lying in a fetal position with her legs drawn up as if she’d gone to sleep on the rocks. If she’d been alive, he would have automatically thought, What a great body, but in death this judgment was translated into a lovely figure—aesthetic and asexual, as if he were contemplating the cold, marble limbs of a statue in the Louvre.

  Drowned? Fresh, not a “floater” who had gone down and come back up again as a nightmare of slippery, bloated flesh. He was glad she wasn’t naked. Naked would immediately have meant something different. Jackson scrambled down the grass and onto rocks that were slippery with seaweed and barnacles. Nothing on the body that he could see, no ligature marks around the neck, her skull looked intact. No needle tracks, no tattoos, no birthmarks, no scars, she was a blank canvas, just tiny gold crucifixes on her ears. Her green eyes—half-open—were filmy with death and as blank as the aforesaid statue.

  He could see some kind of card, like a business card, poking out from the cup of her bra. It was pale pink, an extra patch of wrinkled wet skin. He tweezed it out with his fingers. In black letters it said, favors—we do what you want us to do! and a phone number, a mobile. A prostitute? A lap dancer? Or maybe “Favors” was just a helpful charity that went around doing old ladies’ shopping. Yeah, that would be right, Jackson thought cynically.

  He touched her cheek, he wasn’t sure why, she was clearly dead, perhaps he wanted her to feel a friendly touch. He wanted her to know, between dying before her time and being sliced open by the pathologist’s scalpel, that someone had felt for her predicament. A wave washed over both the girl and Jackson’s boots. She was beached below the tidemark, and he was going to have to haul her to higher ground. Another wave.The rising waters were going to take her back out to sea if he didn’t do something fast. The rising waters? When he stood up and looked back toward the causeway, he realized that the rock pools were filling up with seawater and the sand and shingle were almost obliterated. “Tide turning,” the twitcher woman had said. Not going out as he had thought but coming in. Shit.

  Another wave came, lapping at Jackson’s boots. He was going to be trapped in this place if he didn’t get a move on. He took out his mobile and dialed 999, but there was only the squeaky electronic noise that indicated no signal. He remembered the camera in his pocket, at least he’d be able to give the police a record of her in situ before he moved her. He took a quick shot, not the usual holiday snap of a tourist, but then he had to abandon the idea of photographing anything because the water was rising so fast now that he had to wade into the water to grab hold of her. Just as he did, however, a wave bigger than all the ones that had gone before caught her, lifted her up, and rolled her away. Oh bugger, Jackson thought. He flung the camera down, threw off his jacket, and launched himself into the freezing gray water. The cold of the water was astonishing, the swell more powerful than it looked. Jackson didn’t think that any of his Celtic ancestors had been the seafaring sort. He was a good swimmer, but water wasn’t his element, he liked earth, the ground under his feet.

  He had put a swimming pool in the garden of his house in France. It was tiled with little azure mosaics, and in summer the sun on the water was so dazzling that you could barely look at it. When he lived in Cambridge he used to go for a run every morning, but since moving to France it had seemed a ridiculous thing to do. No one ran in rural France. They drank. If you didn’t drink you weren’t part of the social fabric. The French seemed able to down liters of alcohol without facing any consequence whereas Jackson felt the consequences almost every morning. So he swam in his turquoise-mosaic swimming pool, up and down, up and down, lap after lap, to swim off the alcohol, the boredom.

  His swimming pool bore no relation to the hostile environment of the Forth in August. “Sagittarius,” Julia said. “You’re a fire sign, water is your enemy.” Did she believe crap like that? “Watch out for Pisceans,” she told him. “Pisces” was the Latin for “fish.” At home in France his swimming pool was a piscine. Julia was an Aries, another fire sign, not ideal, she said. Fighting fire with fire. What would happen to them, would they just burn up? Become cold ashes?

  He managed to grab the dead woman beneath the shoulders, lifesaving style, but she was a deadweight, in all ways. A relentless succession of waves began to batter them both. Jackson took in a mouthful of brackish seawater that left him choking. He tried to tread water while he worked out the best way of getting them both out of the sea, but the waves kept coming. Jackson had saved people from drowning, once on duty, once off. And once, on a holiday weekend in Whitby with Josie and Marlee, he had watched as a man jumped into the sea off the pier after his dog— a bouncy little terrier that had been so excited it had simply raced off the edge and into the sea below, while all around people screamed in horror. The man got into difficulties immediately, and another two men dived in after him. They were brothers, both in their thirties, married with five children between them. Only the dog came out of the water alive. Jackson would have jumped in too, tried to rescue the lot of them, but the anchor of a hysterical four-year-old Marlee around his leg had prevented him. The inshore lifeboat was on its way by then, he told himself afterward, but to this day he hadn’t forgiven himself, and if he could have put the clock back he would have shaken Marlee off and jumped in. It wasn’t heroism, it was a kind of necessity. Maybe that was a Catholic thing too.

  He went under, still hanging on to the leaden girl. Somewhere in his head he could hear Marlee screaming, “Daddeee!” and the old woman at
the bus stop saying, “It’s very nice out at Cramond... you’ll like it,” and for a glorious second he was back in his swimming pool in France, the warm sun reflecting off the turquoise mosaics. He knew he was being pulled farther away from land all the time, knew that the dead woman was going to drag him under like some lovesick mermaid. Half-woman, half-fish, a Piscean. The words from Binyon’s poem came to him: “They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old.” He thought how ironic it would be if he drowned trying to save a corpse. He wondered if part of him believed he could still save her. That would be that pesky Catholicism then. He wondered if he was still trying to save the three men who drowned off the Whitby pier. If he wanted to save himself he was going to have to let her go. But he couldn’t.

  The Little Mermaid—Marlee had loved that when she was little. She would never be little again, she was poised, right on the cusp of her future. If he drowned he would never see her in that future. The briny deep. He didn’t know why those words came into his head, they must belong to someone else. Of his bones are coral made. No coral in the Forth. Julia, as brown as a nut, swimming in his pool in France, Julia punting him down the river in Cambridge, Julia the ferrywoman rowing him over the Styx. Marlee had a book called Greek Myths for Children that she had made him read to her. He had learned a lot from that book, his introduction to classicism.

  He sent up a prayer to whatever god was on duty that afternoon, sent another one up to Mary, Mother of God, a recessive instinct, the knee-jerk reaction of a lapsed Catholic staring death in the face. Was this how it was going to be? No last rites, no extreme unction? He always imagined he would come round at the end, fall back into the fold, embrace the mother of all churches and have his slate wiped clean, but it looked like that wasn’t going to happen now.

  He remembered seeing his sister’s body being pulled out of the canal—of course—that was why it wasn’t his element, why hadn’t he realized that before? Nothing to do with star signs. Stella Maris. Our Lady of Sorrows with a starry crown upon her head. Water, water everywhere. He was going down, down to Poseidon’s watery realm, the mermaid was taking him home with her.

  11

  Graham had been transferred from the A and E to the ICU. According to the staff in the ICU, there had been no change in his condition. Gloria wondered if he would stay like this forever, as passive as a stone effigy on a sarcophagus. Perhaps he would be moved into some long-term care facility, where he would use up valuable resources for several more decades, depriving more worthy people of kidneys and hips. If he were to die now there might be bits of him that could be recycled in a more socially useful person.

  It was quiet in the ICU, the pace of life slower and denser than in the outside world. You could feel how the hospital was a big humming machine, sucking air in and pushing it out, leaking an invisible life—chemicals, static, bugs—through its pores.

  Gloria regretted that she wasn’t a knitter, she could be producing a useful garment while waiting for Graham to die. The tricoteuse of the ICU. Beryl, Graham’s mother, had been a knitter, producing endless matinee sets when Emily and Ewan were babies—hats, jackets, mittens, bootees, leggings—threaded with fiddly ribbons and full of holes for tiny fingers to get caught in. Gloria had dressed her children up like dolls. Emily put the oddly named Xanthia into sensible stretchy white suits and little beanie hats. Gloria hardly ever saw her grandchild. When Emily announced she was pregnant, you would have thought she was the first woman on the planet to ever have a baby. To be honest, Gloria would have been more excited if her daughter had given birth to a puppy rather than the permanently angry Xanthia, who seemed to have inherited Emily’s worst traits.

  She regarded the steady rise and fall of Graham’s chest, the lack of expression on his face. He looked smaller. He was losing his power, shrinking, no longer a demigod. How are the mighty fallen. Graham made a little noise, a susurration as if he were speaking in a dream. His features remained unmoved, however. Gloria stroked his hand with the back of her fingers and felt a twinge of sorrow. Not for Graham the man so much as Graham the boy she had never known, a boy in long flannel shorts and gray shirt and school tie and cap, a boy who knew nothing about ambition and acquisition and call girls. “You stupid bugger, Graham,” she said, not entirely without affection.

  Where would he go if the machines were turned off ? Drift off into some inner space, a lonely astronaut, abandoned by his ship. It would be funny (well, not funny—astounding) if there was an afterlife. If there was a heaven. Gloria didn’t believe in heaven, although she did occasionally worry that it was a place that existed only if you did believe in it. She wondered if people would be so keen on the idea of the next life if it was, say, underground. Or full of people like Pam. And relentlessly, tediously boring, like an everlasting Baptist service but without the occasional excitement of a full immersion. For Graham, presumably, heaven would be a thirty-year-old Macallan, a Montecristo, and, apparently, Miss Whiplash.

  He thought he was invincible, but he’d been tagged by death. Graham thought he could buy his way out of anything, but the grim reaper wasn’t going to be paid off with Graham’s baksheesh. The Grim Reaper, Gloria corrected herself. If anyone deserved capital letters it was surely Death. Gloria would rather like to be the Grim Reaper. She wouldn’t necessarily be grim, she suspected she would be quite cheerful (“Come along now, don’t make such a fuss”).

  “They’ll never get me”—that’s what Graham said. Graham, who always behaved as if he were untouchable, some kind of maverick, an outlaw not subject to the normal rules, crowing with triumph when he fooled the Inland Revenue or Customs and Excise, bypassing health and safety and building regulations, pushing his way through planning, sweetening his path with bribes and backhanders, cruising along in the outside lane at a hundred miles an hour in that bloody great car of his with its blacked-out windows. Why would you need blacked-out windows unless you were up to something nefarious? Gloria didn’t like the drawn curtain, the closed door, everything should be on show in broad daylight. If you were doing something you were ashamed of, then you shouldn’t be doing it.

  Twice he’d managed to wriggle out of being prosecuted for speeding, once for reckless driving, once for being over the limit—thanks to a brother Mason in the courts, no doubt. A few months ago he had been stopped on the A9 going 120 miles per hour while talking on his mobile at the same time as eating a double cheeseburger. Not only that! When he was breathalyzed he was found to be over the limit, yet the case never even got as far as the court, being conveniently dropped on a technicality because Graham hadn’t been sent the correct papers. Gloria could imagine him only too well, one hand on the wheel, his phone tucked into the crook of his neck, the grease from the meat dripping down his chin, his breath rank with whiskey. At the time, Gloria had thought that the only thing lacking in this sordid scenario was a woman in the passenger seat fellating him. Now she thought that that had probably been going on as well. Gloria hated the term “blow job” but she rather liked the word “fellatio,” it sounded like an Italian musical term—contralto,alto,fellatio—although she found the act itself to be distasteful, in all senses of the word.

  When he had got off the latest charge, he celebrated with a noisy, bloated dinner at Prestonfield House with Gloria, Pam, Murdo, and Sheriff Alistair Crichton. It undoubtedly helped if your big golfing pal was a sheriff. Despite having lived in Scotland for four decades, Gloria found that the word “sheriff”did not immediately conjure up the Scottish judiciary. Instead she tended to see tin stars at high noon and Alan Wheatley as the evil Sheriff of Nottingham in the old children’s television program Robin Hood. She started to hum the theme tune.

  Gloria liked Robin Hood and its simple message—wrong punished, right rewarded, justice restored. Stealing from the rich, giving to the poor, they were basic Communist tenets. Instead of slipping off the bar stool and following Graham, she should have donned a duffle coat and sold the Socialist Worker on wet and windy street corners on Saturday m
ornings (and still have had sex with so many different men that she would never be able to remember their names, let alone their faces).

  They’ll never get me. But they would. She thought of the stag at bay on the living room wall, its lips curled back from its teeth in horror as the dogs closed in. No escape. Of course a deer was far too nice an animal for Graham to be compared with. He was more of a magpie—jabbering, yobbish birds who stole from other birds’ nests.

  “Needles and camels,” Gloria said to Graham. He had nothing to say on either topic, the only noise came from the machines that were keeping him alive. “What profiteth it a man if he gaineth the whole world but loseth his soul? Answer that one, Graham.”

  A Church of Scotland minister entered the ICU at that moment, dutifully visiting the lost lamb of his flock. Gloria had put “Church of Scotland” on Graham’s admission form just to annoy him if he lived. Now she rather regretted not putting “Jain Buddhist” or “Druid,” as it might have led to an interesting and informative discussion with whatever hierophant represented their religion in the Royal Infirmary. As it was, the Church of Scotland minister, apart from being surprised at finding Gloria quoting scripture (“No one does anymore”), proved harmless company, chatting to her about global warming and the problem of slugs. “If only they could be persuaded to eat just the weeds,” he said, wringing his hands.

  “From your mouth to God’s ear,” Gloria said.