One Good Turn Page 5

  It was the first day of the new term, their school lunch hour, and Archie hadn’t worked out whether their school uniform made them look more or less of a threat. It was the uniform of a “good school,” his mother had lied about where she lived, using a friend’s address to get him into the catchment area for Gillespie’s. And then she said lying was wrong! She lied all the time. All it meant for Archie was that he had two long bus rides every day.

  It was the middle of the Festival, the middle of the summer almost, and there were all these wanker foreigners and visitors wandering around town, having a good time, still on holiday, and here they were back at school. “It’s enough to make a boy turn to crime, eh, Archie?” Hamish said. He had a funny way of talking. Archie had worried at first that it was effeminate, but now he realized it was probably just posh. Hamish had been expelled from Fettes and had joined Archie’s class only last year. He was weird, but Archie put that down to his being rich.

  This place was a find, a little shop in the Grassmarket that sold snowboarding gear. Really nice. Tastee. There was only one assistant, a stuck-up bitch, all makeup and attitude. He’d like to “do it” to her, that would show her. He hadn’t managed to “do it” with any girl yet, but he thought about it 90 percent of his waking life and 100 percent of his dreaming life.

  He phoned Hamish’s number and then rang off, and Hamish went into his whole drama-queen thing—“What do you mean, Mum? Which hospital? But Dad was fine this morning,” and so on— while Archie stuffed a Quiksilver T-shirt into his bag. Maybe Hamish was too obvious, maybe the stuck-up bitch was more on the ball than she looked, whatever, all of a sudden the pair of them were legging out the door, running like fucking athletes. Archie thought he was going to have a heart attack. He came to a halt and bent over double, fighting for breath. Hamish skidded to a halt and bumped into him from behind. Hamish was pissing himself with laughter. “The dozy cow didn’t even leave the shop,” he said, and then, looking around, “What’s going on here?”

  “Dunno, something.”

  “A fight,” Hamish said, sticking his arm up in the air in triumph. “Yes!”

  Archie saw the baseball bat come out, saw the guy cowering on the road. He turned to Hamish and said, “Cool.”

  6

  One of the policewomen said, “Are you going to ride with him in the ambulance?” She seemed to think he was a friend of the injured man, and as the injured man was at that moment friendless, Martin dutifully climbed aboard the ambulance. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

  It was only when they eventually arrived at the new Royal Infirmary on the outskirts of town that he realized he no longer had his bag. He remembered it clattering and skidding on the wet cobblestones, but he didn’t know what happened to it after that. It wasn’t a disaster, everything was backed up safely on disk—the tiny lilac flake of a Sony Memory Stick in his wallet—and that disk was itself replicated, the backup copy in a drawer in the “office.” He imagined whoever found his laptop turning it on, going into “My Documents,” and reading his work, thinking what a lot of crap it was, reading passages out loud to friends and them all pissing themselves with laughter—because he imagined the kind of person who found his laptop being the kind of person who would “piss himself ”with laughter rather than simply laugh. And they certainly wouldn’t giggle. A less bourgeois, less pathetic person than Martin (“You’re such an old woman,” his father had said to him on more than one occasion), a person who would think Martin’s life and work were worthy of derision. “ ‘Something’s up, Bertie,’ Nina whispered as she balanced on Bertie’s shoulders to get a good view of Lord Carstairs in the palm-filled conservatory of Dunwrath Castle.” Bertie was Nina Riley’s seventeen-year-old sidekick whom she had rescued from a life of poaching.

  There was correspondence in Martin’s files as well (“Thank you so much for your letter. I’m so glad you like the Nina Riley books. Best wishes,Alex Blake”). Perhaps the strangers pissing themselves with laughter would find his address and return the laptop to him. Or perhaps they would come to his house and steal everything else he had. Or perhaps a car would run over the laptop, crush its mysterious motherboard, warp its plasma screen.

  The Peugeot driver was conscious and quite lucid now. He had a fierce-looking lump on his temple, as if an egg were buried beneath the skin. “My Good Samaritan,” he said to the female paramedic, nodding in Martin’s direction. “Saved my life.”

  “Really?” the paramedic said, unsure whether to believe such hyperbole. The Peugeot driver was wrapped in a large white cotton cellular blanket like a baby. He struggled to remove his arm from the swaddling and extended it toward Martin. “Paul Bradley,” he said, and Martin shook his hand and said, “Martin Canning.” He was careful not to squeeze the Peugeot driver’s hand too hard in case it would cause him more pain but then worried that his handshake might seem wimpish. Martin’s father, Harry, was firm on the matter of manly introductions (“You’re not a fucking limp-wristed Mary-Ellen—shake hands like a man”). He needn’t have worried. Paul Bradley’s surprisingly small, smooth hand gripped with the vicelike efficiency of an automaton’s.

  Martin hadn’t touched another human being for months, except accidentally, taking change from a cashier in the supermarket, holding Richard Mott over the toilet bowl one night while he vomited up an evening’s worth of alcohol. He had helped an old woman onto a bus a week ago and had been surprised by how he’d been moved by the touch of her weightless, papery hand.

  “You look like you should be lying here, not me,” Paul Bradley said. “You’re white as a sheet.”

  “Am I?” He did feel distinctly weak.

  “It was a nasty incident by the sound of it,” the paramedic said. “Incident”—that was what one of the policewomen had called the road rage. “We’ll need to take a statement about the incident, sir.” A nice neutral word, almost like “innocent.” Perhaps he could use it for what had happened to him. “Oh, yes, well, when I was in Russia there was this unfortunate incident...”

  When they entered the A and E, a receptionist asked Martin for the Peugeot driver’s details, and Martin realized he had already forgotten the man’s name. The Peugeot driver had been wheeled off into the hinterland of the ward, and the receptionist gave Martin a teacher’s look and said, “Well, could you find out? And get an address and a next of kin as well.”

  Martin went looking for the Peugeot driver and found him in a curtained cubicle, where a nurse was taking his blood pressure. “Sorry,” Martin whispered, “just need his details.” The Peugeot driver tried to sit up and was pushed gently down by the nurse.

  “Take my wallet out of my jacket, mate,” the Peugeot driver said from his prone position. A black leather jacket was hanging on a metal-framed chair in the corner, and Martin reached gingerly into the inside pocket and retrieved a wallet. It felt oddly intimate to be searching through someone else’s pockets, like a reluctant thief. The jacket was an expensive, buttery leather— lambskin, Martin guessed—and he had to stifle a desire to slip it on and feel what it would be like to be someone else. He waved the wallet at the nurse to show that he had it, that he was innocent of all trickery, and she gave him a nice smile. “Shall I look after your bag?” he asked the Peugeot driver. The bag, a holdall, had traveled with them in the ambulance, and the Peugeot driver said, “Cheers,”which Martin took to be acquiescence. The holdall looked almost empty but was surprisingly heavy.

  The receptionist rifled efficiently through the Peugeot driver’s wallet. Paul Bradley was thirty-seven years old, and he lived in north London. He had a driver’s license, a wad of twenty-pound notes, and a rental agreement with Avis for the Peugeot. Nothing else, no credit card, no photographs, no scraps of paper with phone numbers scrawled on them, no receipts or ticket stubs. No sign of a next of kin. Martin offered himself for the role and the receptionist said, “You didn’t even know his name,” but nonetheless wrote down “Martin Canning” on the form.

  “Churc
h of Scotland?” she asked, and Martin said, “He’s English. Better put Church of England.” He wondered if there was a Church of Wales. He’d never heard of one.

  The hospital was more like a station or an airport than a hospital, people stopping off on their way somewhere rather than being there for a reason. There was a café and a shop that was like a small supermarket. There was no indication that there might be sick people anywhere.

  He took a seat in a waiting room. He supposed he would have to see it through now. He read the whole of a Period Homes magazine and a copy of Hello! that dated to three years ago. He remembered reading somewhere how hepatitis C could live outside the body for a long time. You could pick it up just by touching something—a door handle, a cup, a magazine. The magazines were older than the hospital. Someone must have boxed them up and brought them from the old Royal in Lauriston Place. Martin remembered being in the A and E there, his mother had scalded her hand while on a rare visit to him. That was the only thing she remembered about the visit, not the drive out to Hopetoun House, where they had a lovely walk of the grounds followed by afternoon tea, not lunch at the Balmoral Hotel, nor the visit to Holyrood Palace—only the way she had managed to pour water from the kettle onto her hand. “Your kettle,” she said, as if Martin were directly responsible for the boiling point of water.

  The waiting room had been like something from the Third World, filthy, with old chairs that smelled of urine. She had been taken into a cubicle with pale green curtains that were stained with dried blood. Now the old hospital was being converted into flats, among other things. Martin thought it was odd that people would want to live where other people had died and been in pain or simply been bored to tears sitting in Outpatients waiting for an appointment. Martin himself lived in a Victorian house in the Merchiston area, and before it was a house there had, presumably, been a field there. Living somewhere that had once been a field seemed preferable to living somewhere that had once been an operating theater or a morgue. People didn’t care, there was a hunger for housing in Edinburgh that was almost primitive. A report in the paper last week recorded a garage selling for a hundred thousand pounds. Martin wondered if people were going to live in it.

  He had bought his own house three years ago. When he moved to Edinburgh—after signing his first publishing deal—he lived in a small rented flat off the Ferry Road while he saved for something better. He had been as obsessive and crazed as every other house hunter in the city, poring over the property listings, pouncing off the starting blocks like a sprinter for the viewings on Thursday evenings and Sunday afternoons.

  He fell in love with the Merchiston house as soon as he walked in the door one misty October day. The rooms seemed as if they were full of secrets and shadows, and the fading afternoon light had shone dully through the stained glass. Opulent, he had thought. He had a vision of how it must have been once, heard it echoing with the laughter of old-fashioned children, the boys wearing striped school caps, the girls in smocked dresses and white ankle socks. The children were conspirators, thinking up merry japes in front of the nursery fire. Everywhere the house was busy with life: a maid who washed and scrubbed willingly—no class resentment—and who sometimes aided and abetted the children in their japes. There was a gardener, and a cook who prepared old-fashioned meals (kippers, blancmanges, cottage pies). And overseeing everything a loving pair of parents, gracious and good-tempered, except when the japes got out of hand, at which time they became stern and solemn arbiters. Father commuted every day and did something mysterious “at the office” while Mother threw bridge parties and wrote letters. On darker days Father was mistaken for a criminal or a spy and the family was forced into temporary hardship and poverty (Mother pulled it all off magnificently), before everything was explained and restored.

  “I want it,” he said to the woman from the solicitor’s office who was showing him around.

  “You and ten other people who’ve put in notes of interest,” she said.

  She didn’t understand that when he said, “I want it,” it wasn’t a simple statement about house buying, about surveying and bidding and paying, it was a cry from the heart for a home. After an itinerant army childhood, a boarding-school adolescence, and a staff cottage on the grounds of the Lake District school, he craved his own hearth. At university he had once done one of those word-association tests for a fellow student’s psychology module, and when he was presented with the word “home,” Martin had drawn a complete blank, a verbal space where an emotion should have been.

  When Harry, his father, retired from the army, their mother had tried to persuade him to return to her native Edinburgh but failed miserably in her mission, and instead they had gone to live in Eastbourne. It turned out (no surprise really) that Harry was temperamentally unsuited to retirement, temperamentally unsuited to living in one place in a solid three-bedroom terrace with a nice white-wood trim, on a quiet street five minutes from the English Channel. The sea held no attraction for him, he took a brisk walk along the beach every morning, but its purpose was exercise rather than pleasure. It was a relief to everyone, especially his wife, when, three years after he retired, he dropped dead of a heart attack in the middle of an argument with a neighbor who had parked his car in front of their house. “He never accepted that it was a public highway,” their mother explained to Martin and his brother, Christopher, at the funeral, as if that was somehow the cause of his death.

  Their mother lacked the will to leave Eastbourne, she had never been someone with any sap, but both Martin and Christopher gravitated back to Scotland (like eel or salmon) and lived about as far as they could get from her.

  Christopher was a quantity surveyor, living beyond his income in the Borders with his neurotic, bitchy wife, Sheena, and their two surprisingly pleasant teenage children. The geographical distance between Martin and his brother was small, yet they hardly ever saw each other. Christopher was uneasy company, there was something stilted and artificial about the way he navigated his route in the world, as if he’d observed other people and thought by copying them he would be more acceptable, more authentic. Martin had long ago given up hope of being like other people.

  Neither Martin nor Christopher referred to the Eastbourne house as “home,” their mother didn’t have enough personality to infuse a house with the sense of home. They always said to each other, “When are you next going down to the house?” as if the house had more character than their mother, yet it had hardly any identity at all, repainted in the same inoffensive shade of biscuit every couple of years, after which it never took long for the walls to acquire their customary stain of nicotine yellow. His mother was a heavy smoker, it was perhaps her defining trait. Martin believed that hell would be to endure forever a wet Sunday in his mother’s house—always four o’clock in the afternoon in January, with the smell of a shin beef stew cooking in the unventilated kitchen. Tobacco fumes, weak tea, the jaw-clenching sweetness of a fondant fancy. A rerun of Midsomer Murders on the video.

  Their mother was tremulously old now, yet showed no sign of dying. Christopher, teetering on the edge of his income, complained that she was going to end up outliving him at this rate and he would never inherit the half of the Eastbourne house that his bank account needed so badly.

  Martin had visited his mother not long after he had first made an appearance on the bestseller lists, and he showed her the week’s top-fifty in the Bookseller, explaining, “Alex Blake—that’s me, nom de plume.” He laughed, and she sighed, “Oh, Martin,” as if he’d done something particularly irksome. When he bought his house in Merchiston, he may not have been sure what it was that made a house a home, but he knew what didn’t.

  Christopher had visited Martin’s house only once, just after he bought it—a difficult visit made more difficult by Sheena, a woman who ran with hyenas.

  “What the fuck do you need such a big house for, Martin?” Christopher asked. “There’s only you.”

  “I might get married, have children,” Martin
said defensively, and Sheena yelped, “You?”

  There was a small room at the top of the house, overlooking the garden, that Martin earmarked as a study. He felt it was the kind of room where he would be able to write something with strength and character, not the trite and formulaic Nina Riley but a text in which every page was a creative dialectic between passion and reason, a thing of life-changing artistry. Disappointingly, not only did this not happen but all the life he had sensed in the house disappeared after he purchased it. Now, when Martin walked through the front door, it often felt as if no one had ever lived there, including himself. There was no sign of any merry japes. “Merry” was a word Martin particularly liked. He had always thought that if he had children he would give them names like Sonny and Merry. The name maketh the man. There was something to be said for all those religiously influenced names—Patience, Grace, Chastity, Faith. Better to be named for a virtue than to be landed with a forgettable “Martin.” Jackson Brodie, that was a fine name. He had been unruffled by events (“I used to be a policeman”) whereas Martin had felt sick with the excitement of it all. Not the good sort of excitement, not the merry jape sort, but the incident sort.

  At university he had briefly gone out with a girl named Storm (because he had had girlfriends, despite what most people thought). It had been an experience—an experience rather than a relationship—that led him to believe that people lived up to their names. “Martin” was pretty dull as names went, but “Alex Blake” had a certain dash to it. His publishers hadn’t considered Martin’s own name to be “punchy”enough. The pseudonym “Alex Blake” was chosen after much deliberation, most of which excluded Martin. “A strong, no-nonsense sort of name,” his editor said, “to compensate.” For what, she didn’t say.