One Good Turn Page 6

  He accidentally kicked Paul Bradley’s overnight bag with his foot and felt something hard and unyielding where he had expected the softness of clothes. He wondered what a man like that—admirably competent even when injured—carried with him. Where had he come from? Where was he going? Paul Bradley didn’t seem like someone who had come up for the Festival, he seemed like someone with more purpose than that.

  Martin looked for his watch on his wrist and remembered that he hadn’t been able to find it this morning. He suspected that Richard Mott had “borrowed” it. He borrowed things all the time, as if being in someone’s house gave you rights to all of their possessions as well. Martin’s books, shirts, and iPod (“You listen to some real shit, Martin”) had all been appropriated at one time or another by his houseguest. He had even found the spare keys to Martin’s car and seemed to think he could drive it whenever he wanted.

  The watch was a Rolex “Yacht-Master” that Martin had bought for himself to celebrate selling his first book to a publisher. It was an extravagance that had made him feel guilty, and he had felt compelled to give an equivalent amount to charity to salve his conscience. “Prosthetics Outreach,” supplying artificial limbs for the victims of land mines. The cost of his Rolex was equivalent to nearly a hundred arms and legs somewhere in the unimaginable netherworld of so-called civilization. Of course, if he hadn’t bought the Rolex he could have bought two hundred arms and legs, so his guilt was doubled rather than assuaged. The price of the watch was puny compared to the price of his house in Merchiston. For the cost of his house he could probably have fitted artificial limbs on every amputee in the world. He still wore the watch, even though it reminded him every day of the incident in Russia. That was his punishment, never to forget.

  Richard Mott would probably have finished his show now. Afterward, Martin supposed, Richard would be at a bar somewhere drinking and socializing—networking. It was a one-off thing that the BBC was recording, a “showcase” for several comics. Richard’s usual show was at ten. “Comedy always happens at night,” he explained to Martin, which statement Martin thought was quite amusing, and he pointed this out to Richard. “Yeah,” Richard said in that strange laconic London way he had. He was a gagman, not a naturally funny person. In the two weeks of their acquaintance, he hadn’t made Martin laugh once, at least not intentionally. Perhaps he saved it all for the ten o’clock show. His glory days had been in the eighties, when it was easy to pretend to be political. After Thatcher was booted out, Richard Mott’s star began to descend, although he had never gone far enough away to make a comeback, keeping his profile up with appearances on “alternative” quiz shows, providing a reliable filler on chat shows, and even doing a bit of (bad) acting.

  On the whole, Martin thought that he would rather be reading old, germ-laden magazines in a hospital, waiting for news of a stranger, than socializing at a Festival bar somewhere with Richard Mott.

  Richard was a friend of a friend of an acquaintance. He had phoned out of the blue a couple of months ago and said he was “doing a gig at the Fringe” and was there any chance he could rent a room off Martin? Martin quietly cursed the acquaintance and the friend and the friend for giving out his phone number. He had always found it difficult to say no. There had been a time, several years ago, when he had been desperately trying to finish a book but was continually interrupted by people turning up at his door, a succession of day-trippers from Porlock (as he thought of them), and he had taken to keeping a coat and an empty briefcase in the hall so that whenever the doorbell rang, he could slip on the coat, pick up the briefcase, and say, “Oh, sorry, just going out.”

  This was during the period in his life when he had just moved to Edinburgh from the Lakes and was making an attempt to get to know people, to start afresh with an active social life, no longer “Mr. Canning,” the old fart, but Martin Canning, how d’you do? Me, oh I’m a writer. Crime novels. It’s called Highland Fling. On the best-seller lists, actually.Where do I get my ideas from? Oh, I don’t know, always had a lively imagination, felt the urge to be creative.You know how it is. Of course, all that happened was that, instead of an active social life, he became saddled with all kinds of unwanted people that he then had to spend the next several months (and in some cases years) trying to get rid of. Nearly all of these unwanted people seemed to have nothing better to do in their own lives than to drop in on Martin at all times of the day and night. One in particular—a man named Bryan Legat—haunted him for years.

  Bryan was a fortyish loser with an unpublished manuscript and a bitter resentment against every agent in Britain, all of whom had been incapable of recognizing his genius. Martin had seen some of the letters that Bryan had written in reply to his own many letters of rejection. “You stupid, stupid, stupid, arrogant English bitch” and “I know where you live, you ignorant prick” kind of letters that scared Martin with their madness. Bryan had shown him his manuscript, “the magnum opus” entitled The Last Bus Driver. “Well,” Martin murmured politely when he returned it to Bryan, “it’s certainly different. And you can write, there’s no doubt about that.”And he wasn’t lying, Bryan could write, he could take a pen with turquoise ink in it and make big, loopy joined-up handwriting with verbs scattered randomly throughout sentences—sentences that in every comma and exclamation point screamed crazy. But Bryan knew where Martin lived and so he wasn’t about to antagonize him.

  When the doorbell rang this particular day, Martin threw his overcoat on, picked up the briefcase, and yanked open the door to find Bryan hovering hopefully on the doorstep. “Bryan!” Martin said with a jauntiness he didn’t feel. “What a surprise. Sorry, but I’m just going out, unfortunately.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I have a train to catch.”

  “I’ll come with you to the station,” Bryan offered cheerfully.

  “No need to do that.”

  “No trouble, Martin.”

  They had ended up going to Newcastle together on an eleven-thirty King’s Cross GNER. In Newcastle, Martin had chosen an office block at random in the town center and said, “Well, this is me,” and plunged into a lift. He ended up on the eighth floor in the offices of a time-share company, where it was a relief to discuss the purchase of a luxury property in Florida, “adjacent to the golf course and leisure facilities.” He took the unsigned papers away with him “to look over” and threw them in the nearest bin on the way out. Needless to say, Bryan was waiting for him down in the foyer. “Good meeting?” he inquired genially when he caught sight of Martin. They returned together on the four-thirty train to Edinburgh, and somehow or other Bryan ended up in a taxi at Waverley with him. Martin couldn’t think of anything to say to him short of “Fuck off out of my life forever, you crazy madman,” and anyway by the time he’d paid off the taxi, Bryan was already halfway up the path, saying, “Shall I put the kettle on? I wanted to have a word with you about my novel. I’ve been thinking about putting it all into the present tense.”

  The following year Bryan Legat fell to his death off Salisbury Crags. It was unclear whether he had jumped or fallen (or, indeed, been pushed). Martin had felt relief and guilt in equal measures when he heard of Bryan’s demise. Something should have been done to help a person who was clearly so deluded, but all Martin had been able to say to him was, “The way you use the vernacular is quite startling.”

  So, when put on the spot, he had found it hard to refuse Richard Mott. When Richard said, “How much shall we say?” Martin said, “Oh, no—don’t be silly. I couldn’t take money off you.” As a gift, Richard had brought with him a DVD of his last tour, and in the few days since then, he had bought one bottle of wine, most of which he drank himself, and as a contribution to the housework, he had loaded the dishwasher once, attempting to make a comic performance out of the mundane task. Martin had to reposition all the crockery in the machine when Richard left the kitchen. He had also bought an expensive steak that he fried for himself, splattering the whole cooker with grease. Th
e rest of the time he seemed to eat out.

  Two days ago, on his opening night (which Martin had managed to avoid), Richard had invited Martin for “a curry” with “some people” here from London for his show. Martin had suggested the Kalpna in St. Patrick Square because he was a vegetarian (“Nothing with a face, actually”), but somehow or other they had ended up at a rabidly carnivorous place that some other “people” in London had recommended to Richard. When it came to the bill, Martin found himself insisting on picking the whole thing up. “Thanks, Martin, thanks a lot,” one of the London people said, “although I could have put it on expenses, you know.”

  “How do you feel about smoking in the house?” Richard had asked ten minutes after he arrived, and Martin had been caught between wanting to be a warm, welcoming host and wanting to say that he loathed everything to do with cigarettes. “Well . . .” he began, and Richard said, “Just in my room, of course. I wouldn’t make you breathe my filthy, carcinogenic smoke,” but every morning when Martin came downstairs there was a little pile of butts in the living room in whatever saucer or plate (and once a tureen) he had foraged from the Wedgwood service Martin had bought when he moved into the house.

  Richard came in very late and then didn’t surface until midday, which was something to be thankful for. Once he was up he spent his time on the phone, he had a new videophone that Martin admired politely (“Yeah, she’s a sexy mother, isn’t she?” Richard agreed), even though he thought it was odd and rather dumpy and reminded him of a Star Trek communicator. Richard had downloaded the theme song from Robin Hood, the old fifties television program, as his ringtone, and the sound of it, rendered tinnily tiny and stupid, was slowly driving Martin crazy. As an antidote Martin himself had recently downloaded Birdsong and had been pleasantly surprised by how authentic the birds sounded.

  Looking round, he found a clock behind him on the wall that said it was half-past one. It felt much later, the day had lost its shape, distorted under the weight of unexpected reality.

  Martin had read a spiteful review of Richard Mott’s show in the Scotsman that said, among other things, “Richard Mott’s humor creaks with banality these days. He hashes up the same old tired material he was using ten years ago.The world has moved on, but Richard Mott hasn’t.” Martin felt embarrassed just reading it. He couldn’t mention to Richard that he’d seen it because that would mean they would both have to face the awfulness of it all. Martin had acquired enough bad reviews himself to know the abysmal feelings they generated.

  “I never read my reviews,” Richard volunteered morosely after his opening night. Martin didn’t believe him. Everyone read their own reviews. It was some years since Richard had “done the Festival,” and whatever feelings he had once had about Edinburgh (he had been gloriously successful here at the beginning of his career) had now turned mostly to antipathy. “You see, it’s a great city,” he said to one of the “some people from London” during their flesh-feeding frenzy in the phobia-inducing, crowded Indian restaurant. “Fantastic to look at and all that, but it has no libido. And obviously you have to blame Knox for that.” Martin hated the way Richard said “Knox” with such offhand familiarity. He felt like saying, “Knox might have been a dour, tight-arsed, puritanical bastard, but he was our dour, tight-arsed, puritanical bastard, not yours.”

  “Exactly!” another one of them said. He was wearing narrow spectacles with thick black rims and smoked even more than Richard. Martin, a spectacle wearer since the age of eight, wore rimless lightweight glasses in an attempt to disguise the fact that he had defective eyesight, rather than making a feature of it. “No libido—very good, Richard.” The man with the black-framed spectacles jabbed the air with his cigarette to emphasize his agreement. “That’s Edinburgh exactly.” Martin wanted to defend his home city but couldn’t quite work out how. It was true, Edinburgh didn’t have a libido, but why would you want to live in a city that did?

  “Barcelona!” another of Richard’s friends shouted across the table (they were loud and not a little drunk), and the man with the old-fashioned but trendy spectacles barked back, “Rio de Janeiro!” And so the shouting of cities went on (“Marseille! New York!”) until they got to “Amsterdam!” and a row broke out over whether Amsterdam possessed its own libido or was “merely a locus for the exploitative commercial transactions of other people’s libidos.”

  “Sex and capitalism,” Richard intervened languidly, “what’s the difference?” Martin waited for a punch line, but apparently there wasn’t one. Personally he thought there was a lot of difference between the two, but then he remembered undressing in front of Irina in that awful hotel room, with its view of the Neva and the cockroaches scuttling along the skirting boards. “Well-upholstered. Built for comfort, not for speed,” he’d joked, cringing with embarrassment.

  “Da?” She laughed accommodatingly, apparently not understanding a word. The very remembrance of it made him double up as if he’d been hit by an invisible fist.

  “Girls,” one of them said suddenly. “We should go and find some girls after this.”This idea was greeted with frightening enthusiasm.

  “Pole dancing.” Richard sniggered like an adolescent boy.

  “Oh, sorry, Martin,” another of them said. “Sorry to be so rampantly hetero.”

  “Do you think I’m gay?” Martin asked, surprised. They all turned to look at him as if he’d said something interesting for the first time.

  “There’s nothing wrong with that, Martin,” Richard said. “Everyone’s gay.”

  Martin would have argued with this ridiculous statement, but he had just discovered that he was chewing on a piece of chicken from his “vegetable biryani.” He removed it from his mouth as discreetly as he could and put it on the side of his plate. The last gristly remnant of some poor abused bird that had been pumped full of hormones and antibiotics and water in a foreign country. He could have wept for it.

  “It’s okay, Martin,” Richard Mott said, slapping him on the back. “You’re with friends.”

  Without asking him whether he wanted to go or not, Richard informed him that he had left a ticket for Martin for the radio showcase at the box office, but when Martin got to the venue, the indifferent girl behind the counter said to another indifferent girl, “Are there any comps in Richard Mott’s name?” The other girl made a face and glanced around while the first girl returned to glaring at her computer screen.

  Martin found himself staring at a poster for Richard’s show. It was a close-up shot of Richard making a quirky face. A strapline running under it said, COMIC VIAGRA FOR THE MIND. Martin thought that sounded off-putting rather than inviting.

  When nothing more was forthcoming from either of the girls, Martin pointed out a rickety wooden dovecote on the wall at the back with names Sellotaped beneath each individual pigeonhole. The one that said “Richard Mott” contained a white envelope. The second indifferent girl read the name written on the envelope. “Martin Canning?” she asked suspiciously and then gave it to him without waiting for confirmation. He checked the tickets and found a scribbled note on one of them. “Your car’s parked in front of Macbet on Leith Walk. Cheers, R.”

  “Can I go straight in?” he asked, and the first girl, without removing her eyes from her computer screen, said, “No, you have to join the queue.”

  “Thanks,” he said, unacknowledged and invisible. And then he had joined the queue. And then the man with the baseball bat stepped out of the Honda.

  7

  Jackson fought his way up the Royal Mile, through the crowds and the tartan crap, until he finally gained the Castle, soaring almost Catharlike on top of the volcanic rock. He paid the entrance fee and walked along the Esplanade, past the towering scaffolded stands built for the Edinburgh Tattoo. “The Tattoo has a hundred percent box office,” Julia had told him enviously, and tickets were “like gold dust,” and yet within minutes of arriving in Edinburgh she had been given comps for the Tattoo by a complete stranger (claiming to be a piper, although Ja
ckson saw no evidence of bagpipes). She tried to palm them off on Jackson, but he couldn’t think of anything worse than being trapped for two hours in the dark and the summer damp watching a camp spectacle that had nothing to do with the reality of being in the military. “Don’t think of it as military,” Julia said. “Think of it as theatrical. Massed pipes and drums,” she said, reading from a program the so-called piper had given her, “and an army motorcycle stunt team. Highland dancers? And, oh, look, Russian Cossack dancers. That sounds like fun, doesn’t it?”

  “No.”

  Jackson couldn’t imagine Julia’s play having any kind of box office, couldn’t believe anyone would actually pay good folding money to see Looking for the Equator in Greenland.

  The Castle was a brute of a building, all fairy-tale Scottish from below, but once you were within its glowering walls, it was dank and doom-laden. (This bit of Edinburgh his father might have liked.) The Castle seemed not so much a product of engineering as of organic growth, the dressed stone fused with the rough black basalt of the rock and its own bloody history. Jackson bought a guidebook but didn’t pick up an audio, he hated those things, the unruffled tones of some woman (always a woman) regurgitating predigested bits of information, dictating how you saw things. It reminded him of the voice on his GPS (“Jane”). He had tried other voices on the GPS but they hadn’t worked for him—the French was too sexy, the American too American, and even if he had understood the language he didn’t think he could have trusted an Italian voice telling him how to drive, so in the end he always came back to the quietly insistent tones of “Jane,” a woman who believed she was always right. It was rather like being in a car with his wife. His ex-wife.

  He had Julia’s camera with him, so he took a few snaps of the view from the ramparts. Julia never took photographs of views, she said pictures were meaningless unless they had people in them, so he asked one of a group of Japanese tourists to take a photo of him next to the One O’Clock Gun. The Japanese tourists seemed to think this was hilarious and insisted on posing with him before moving off like a school of fish after their guide.