One Good Turn

WEDNESDAY
16

Richard Mott woke with a start. He felt as if an alarm bell had gone off in his head. He had no idea what time it was. Martin hadn’t had the decency to provide a clock for his guest room. It was light outside, but that didn’t mean anything, it hardly seemed to get dark at all up here. “Jockland”-that’s what he’d begun to call it. Edinburgh, the Athens of the North, that was a fucking joke. He felt as if a slug had crawled into his mouth while he slept and taken over for his tongue. He could feel a trail of snail drool on his chin.

He hadn’t got to bed until four, and dawn was already struggling to make an appearance by then. Tweet, tweet, fucking tweet all the way home. Had he got a taxi or had he walked? He had been drinking in the Traverse Bar long after midnight, and he had a vivid, bizarre memory of being in a lap-dancing club on the Lothian Road-“Shania,” if he wasn’t mistaken, sticking her crotch in his face. A real skank. The showcase had gone okay, those kind of middle-of-the-day BBC things always attracted an older, well-behaved audience, the kind that still believed the BBC was synonymous with quality. But the ten o’clock show…wankers, the lot of them. Bastard wankers.

The sun poked its dispassionate finger through the curtains, and he noticed Martin’s Rolex on his wrist. Half-past five. Martin didn’t need a watch like this, he wasn’t a Rolex man. What chance was there that Martin might give it to him? Or maybe he could “accidentally” take it home with him.

The alarm in his head went off again, and he realized it was actually the doorbell. Why the fuck didn’t Martin get it? Again, longer this time. Jesus. He staggered out of bed and down the stairs. The front door was on the latch rather than fastened with the usual endless series of bolts and locks and chains that Martin barricaded himself in with. The guy was such an old woman about some things. Most things. Richard Mott pulled open the door and was hit by the daylight, knew how vampires felt. There was a guy standing there, just a guy, not a postman or a milkman or anyone else who might have claimed the right to be waking him at this hour.

“What? It’s half-past five in the morning. It’s still yesterday, for fuck’s sake.”

“Not for you,” the man on the doorstep said, pushing him roughly inside. “For you it’s tomorrow.”

“What the-?” Richard Mott said as the man shoved him into the living room.

The guy was huge, his nose swollen and ugly, as if he’d been in a fight. He was very nasal, English, a bit of something flat, Nottingham, Lancaster, perhaps. Richard Mott imagined himself giving a description afterward to the police, imagined himself saying, “I know accents, I’m in the business.”He had tried his hand at acting in the early nineties, there’d been a bit part on The Bill where he’d played a guy (a comic so he wouldn’t have to “stretch” him-self) with a crazy female stalker who wanted to kill him, and one of the Sun Hill detectives counseled his character that to be a survivor you had to think like a survivor, you had to picture yourself in the future, after the attack. This advice came back to him now, but then he remembered that his character had actually been killed by the crazy stalker.

The insane stranger was wearing driving gloves, and Richard thought this probably wasn’t a good sign. The gloves had holes from which the guy’s knuckles protruded, little atolls of white flesh, and Richard thought there was a joke in there somewhere, perhaps you could reference those classic yob knuckle-tattoos “love” and “hate,” but try as he could he couldn’t render this thought into anything remotely coherent, let alone funny. From nowhere the guy produced a baseball bat.

What followed ought to be in slow motion, no sound, a music track instead-Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” or perhaps something poignant and classical-the cello-Martin would know. Richard Mott’s legs buckled suddenly and he fell to his knees. He’d never experienced that before, you heard talk about it but you didn’t think it happened.

“That’s good,” the man said, “get down on the floor where you belong.”

“What do you want?” His mouth was so dry he could hardly speak. “Take anything, everything. Take everything in the house.” Richard Mott flipped desperately through a mental inventory of everything in Martin’s house. There was a good stereo, a fantastic wide-screen TV over in the corner behind him. He tried to gesture with a nerveless arm in the direction of the television, spotted Martin’s Rolex on his wrist, tried to bring it to the man’s attention.

“I don’t want anything,” the man said (quite calmly, his calmness was the worst thing).

Richard’s phone rang, breaking the strange, intense intimacy between them. They both stared at it, sitting on the coffee table, a bizarre intrusion from outside. Richard Mott tried to calculate whether or not he could reach for it, flip it open, shout down the line to whoever was phoning him at this hour, “Help me, I’m with a crazy guy,” prove he wasn’t joking, give the address (like someone in a movie, a sudden remembered image of Jodie Foster in Panic Room), but he knew it was no good, before he could even touch the phone, the crazy guy would have brought his baseball bat down on his arm. He couldn’t even bear thinking about the kind of pain the crazy guy could inflict. He started whimpering, he could hear himself, like a dog. Jodie Foster was made of sterner stuff, she wouldn’t whimper.

The phone stopped ringing and the crazy guy pocketed it, laughing, taking up the Robin Hood theme song where the phone had left off. “Bunch of faggots if you ask me,” he said to Richard. “Don’t you think?” Richard felt a warm trickle of urine working its way down his thigh. “I didn’t like what you did today.”

“The show?” Richard said in disbelief. “You’re here because you didn’t like the show?”

“Is that what you call it?”

“I don’t understand. I’ve never met you before. Have I?” He had gone through his life indifferent to whether or not he offended people, it struck him now that maybe he should have taken more care.

“Stay down on your knees and face me.”

“Do you want me to suck your cock?” Richard offered desper-ately, trying to make himself sound eager despite his cotton-mouth, despite the warm stain on his boxers. He wondered what he would do to save himself from being hurt by this man. Proba-bly anything.

“You filthy bastard,” the man said. (Okay, he’d read that one wrong.) “I don’t want you to do anything, Martin. Just shut the fuck up, why don’t you?”

Richard Mott opened his mouth to say that he wasn’t Martin, that Martin was asleep upstairs in his room and he would very happily show him the way so he could hurt Martin instead of himself, but all he managed was to croak, “I’m a comedian,” and the man threw back his head and laughed, his mouth open so wide that Richard Mott could see the fillings in his back teeth. He felt a sob break in his throat.

“Oh you fucking are, there’s no doubt about that,” the guy said, and then quickly, quicker than in Richard Mott’s imagination, he brought the bat down, and Richard Mott’s world exploded into pieces of light-little filaments, like in old-fashioned lightbulbs- and he realized he had told his last joke. He could have sworn he heard applause, and then all the little filaments burned out one by one until there was only darkness, and Richard Mott floated into it.

His last thoughts were about his obituary. Who would write it? Would it be good?