One Good Turn

10

Jackson climbed aboard the 41 bus on the Mound and thought, okay, if she wanted him to take a bus, he would take a bus. The 41 covered a long route that ended up at Cramond. He knew “Cramond” as a hymn tune, not a place. Or was it “Crimond”? So many things he didn’t know. The Lord is my shepherd. Was he? It seemed unlikely somehow.

An old woman waiting at the bus stop with him said, “Oh, it’s very nice out at Cramond, you can go to Cramond Island from there. You’ll like it.” He believed her, years of experience had taught Jackson that old women tended to tell the truth.

He sat on the top deck, at the front, and felt for a moment like a child again-some boyhood memory of sitting up there next to his big sister as a treat. Those were the days when the top deck was for smokers. And a time when life was painfully simple. He often thought about his dead sister, but she was usually an image in isolation (the idea of his sister). He rarely had a sharply focused picture of something that had actually occurred, and this sudden, unexpected memory of sitting next to Niamh on the bus-the smell of her violet cologne, the rustle of her petticoat, the feel of his arm resting next to hers-tied a tight knot in his heart.

The old woman was right, it was nice out at Cramond. It was a satellite of Edinburgh but it seemed like a village. He walked past expensive houses, past a nice old church, down to the harbor, where swans were swimming idly. The smell of coffee and fried food wafting from the kitchen of the Cramond Inn mixed with the salty scents of the estuary. He had been expecting to catch some kind of ferry out to the island, but now he could see that it was easily reachable along a short causeway of rocks. He didn’t need a tide table to tell that the sea was shrinking away from the rocky spine of this causeway. The air was still damp from this morning’s rain, but the sun had put in an unexpected and welcome appearance, making the newly washed sand and shingle glitter. A host of different types of waders and gulls was busy beachcombing among the rocks. Exercise and fresh air would be just the ticket, as Julia would have said. He needed to blow away the stale thoughts that had accumulated in his brain, find the old Jackson that he seemed to have lost sight of. He set out along the causeway.

He passed a couple on their way back, retired middle-class types in Peter Storm jackets, binoculars slung around their necks, yomping briskly back to shore, their breezy “Good afternoons” ringing in Jackson’s ears. “Tide turning!” the female half of the pair added cheerfully. Jackson nodded agreement.

Bird-watchers, he supposed. What were they called? Twitchers. God knows why. He’d never really seen the attraction of watching birds, they were nice enough things in themselves, but watching them was a bit like trainspotting. Jackson had never felt that autistic (mainly) male urge to collect and collate.

The sun disappeared almost as soon as he reached the island, rendering the atmosphere of the place oddly oppressive. Occasionally he stumbled across the relics of wartime fortifications, ugly pieces of concrete that gave the place a bleak, besieged air. Seagulls swooped and screeched threateningly overhead, defending their territory. It was much smaller than he had expected, it took him hardly any time to walk round the whole island. He encountered no one else, something he was rather glad of. He didn’t like to think what kind of weirdos might be lurking around in a place like this. Obviously he didn’t include himself in the weirdo category. Despite not seeing anyone, he had an odd feeling- not one he was willing to give any daylight credence to-of being watched. A little frisson of paranoia, nothing more. He wasn’t about to start getting fanciful, but when a swollen purple cloud appeared from the direction of the sea and made an inexorable progress up the Forth, it seemed like a welcome sign that it was time to go back.

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.