One Good Turn

19

Richard Mott didn’t wake. He lay untroubled in Martin Canning’s living room in Merchiston. It was a large neo-Gothic Victorian mansion, with something of the manse about it. The front lawn was dominated by a single enormous monkey puzzle tree, planted when the house was still quite new. The house was masked from the road by ranks of mature trees and shrubbery. Nowadays the intricate cabling of the monkey puzzle tree’s roots extended far beyond the front lawn, curling around gas and sewer pipes in the street and poking silently into other people’s gardens.

The smashed-up Rolex on Richard Mott’s wrist showed he had died at quarter to six (a flat line, appropriately), watched over by only the little red demon eye on the television set-the “fantas-tic” one that for a second he had hoped to barter for his life-and with nothing for company but the faint noises of the suburban world, growing louder as the morning wore on. The milk van had rattled its way along the street. It was the kind of affluent suburb that still had milk vans delivering glass bottles on the doorstep. The post had slipped through the letter box in a subdued way. In Lon-don, the day never began for Richard Mott until the post arrived. He always felt that days when there was no post (although there was always post) never really began at all. Today there was post, nearly all of it for him, redirected “c/o Martin Canning”-a check from his agent, a postcard from a friend in Greece, two fan letters balanced by two hate letters. Despite the arrival of the post, however, this day was never going to begin for Richard Mott.

It was the maid who found him. The maid was Czech, from Prague, a physics graduate. Her name was Sophia, and she was spending the summer “working her arse off”for a pittance. They weren’t “maids,” they were cleaners, “maid” was a stupid old-fashioned name. They were employed by a firm called Favors, and they arrived mop-handed in a pink van under the supervision of a gang leader who was called the “Housekeeper”-a woman who came originally from the Isle of Lewis and who was mean to all the maids. With agency fees and hidden bonuses, it cost three times as much to hire Favors as it did to have a cleaner come in a couple of days a week. So, generally speaking, the houses they went to belonged to people who were too rich or too stupid (or both) to think of a cheaper alternative. They had little pink busi-ness cards on which the strapline read, WE HAVE DONE YOU A FAVOR! Sophia had learned the word “strapline” (and the word “arse” and many other things) from her Scottish boyfriend, who was a marketing graduate.When the maids finished they were supposed to leave one of the little pink cards, after they had written on them, “Your maids today were Maria and Sharon.” Or who-ever. Half the maids were foreign, most of them Eastern Euro-pean. “Economic immigration,” they called it, but really it was just slave labor.

They were given a checklist of tasks by the Housekeeper. This checklist had been agreed on beforehand with the owner of the house and always said obvious things such as “Clean bathroom sink,” “Vacuum stairs,” “Change beds.” It never said “Clean up cat sick,” “Change spunky sheets,” “Take hair out of bathroom plug hole,” which would have been more like the truth. Some people were pigs, they left their nice houses in a disgusting state. “Spunky,” obviously, was a word Sophia had learned from her Scottish boyfriend. He was a good source of the vernacular even though he was very shallow, but a great fuck (his words), which was what you wanted in a foreign boyfriend. Otherwise, why bother?

The Housekeeper usually drove them in the pink van and dropped them off and then did God knows what, nothing too strenuous, probably. Sophia imagined her sitting somewhere in a comfortable chair, eating chocolate biscuits, and watching Good Morning.

They had three houses to clean in Merchiston, all close to one another, so it was probably word of mouth-because whatever else they were, the Favors maids were good at cleaning. The house with the monkey puzzle tree (very nice, Sophia fantasized about living there) was somewhere they went every week. The owner was hardly ever there, when they came in the front door, he disappeared out the back door, like a cat. He was a writer, the Housekeeper said, so don’t ever disturb any papers, any writing. It was the cleanest, tidiest house they went to, nothing ever out of place, beds made, towels folded, all the food in the fridge inside neat plastic containers from Lakeland. You could have sat in the kitchen and drunk coffee and read the newspaper and then left without doing any cleaning, and the Housekeeper would never have known. But Sophia wouldn’t do that. She wasn’t lazy. In this house she polished and swept and vacuumed even more because the writer deserved it for being so clean himself. And now also because the writer had a visitor who was a pig, who smoked and drank and left his clothes on the floor and, if he caught sight of her, said filthy, suggestive things.

He had offered money to one of the other maids, a sad Ro-manian girl, and she had gone upstairs with him (“to have it off”), and then he had given her only half the money and a signed pho-tograph of himself. “Wanker,” all the maids agreed, Sophia had taught them the word, courtesy of her Scottish boyfriend. It was a very useful word, they said. But the girl was stupid to have gone with him. She cried for days afterward, spilling tears onto nice polished surfaces and using up clean towels. She was a virgin, she said, but she needed the money. Everyone needed money. Lots of the girls were here illegally, some had their passports confiscated, some disappeared after a while. Sex traffic. It would happen to the Romanian girl, you could see it in her eyes. There were rumors about bad things that had happened to some of the girls that worked for Favors, but there were always rumors and there were always bad things happening to girls. That was life.

Sophia liked to think that the writer wasn’t too rich or stupid to hire a regular cleaner but that he maybe liked the impersonal nature of Favors’ service. Sophia imagined that writers were peo-ple who didn’t like to get too close to other people in case it stopped them from writing.

Today they were short-staffed because there was “flu going round,” and the Housekeeper said, “Start on your own,” so Sophia rapped on the door of the writer’s house. She had a key, but they were supposed to knock first. She rapped again loudly, the writer had a good brass door knocker in the shape of a lion’s head, and there was something satisfying about using it, like being the po-lice. When there was no answer, she let herself in with the key and announced, “Favors here,” in a loud singsong voice just in case the writer was in bed having it off with someone. Very unlikely, no sign of a sex life with a woman or a man anywhere in the writer’s house. Not even any porn. A few photographs in frames, she rec-ognized Notre Dame in Paris, Dutch houses along a canal- tourist photographs like postcards, no people in the photographs.

He had a set of Russian dolls, matryoshka, the expensive kind. The tourist shops in Prague were full of Russian dolls these days. The writer’s dolls were lined up on the windowsill, she dusted them every week, sometimes she put them inside one another, playing with them as she had with her own set when she was a child. She used to think they were eating one another. Her ma-tryoshka had been cheap, crudely painted in primary colors, but the dolls that belonged to the writer were beautiful, painted by a real artist with scenes from Pushkin, so many artists in Russia with no jobs now, painting boxes and dolls and eggs, anything for tourists. The writer had a fifteen-doll set! How she would have loved that when she was a girl. Now, of course, she had put away childish things. She wondered if the writer was gay. A lot of gay men in Edinburgh.

There was a shelf of his books in his study, a lot of them in for-eign languages, even in Czech! She had glanced through them, they were about a girl named Nina Riley who was a private de-tective. Put the gun down, Lord Hunterston! I know what happened out on the grouse shoot. Davy’s death was no accident. Shite, as her Scottish boyfriend would have said. They referred to the writer as “Mr. Canning,” but that was not the name on his books, on the books he was “Alex Blake.”

All nice as it was every time. Scented roses from the garden in a bowl on a table in the hall. He always left ten pounds extra, tucked under the bowl, a generous man. Must be very rich. No ten-pound note today, not like him. The dining room unused, as usual. She opened the door to the living room. The curtains were closed, which they never were. It felt gloomy, as if there were a fog in the room. Even in the half-light she could tell that something bad had happened. She picked her way across the carpet, and glass crunched underfoot as if a bomb had gone off. She opened the curtains and sunlight poured in, illuminating the mess-the mirror above the fireplace, all the ornaments, even the pretty glass shades in the antique light fitting, all smashed to splinters and shards. A coffee table turned over, a table lamp lying on the floor, its yellow silk shade bent and broken. Everything upside down, as if elephants had passed through the room. Really clumsy elephants. The writer’s matryoshka dolls were scattered everywhere, little skittles knocked flying. She picked one up without thinking and put it in the pocket of her jacket, feeling the smooth, round, satisfying shape of it.

Sophia had a funny feeling in her stomach, like when something very exciting was going to happen, something that had never happened before. Like the time she watched a huge block of flats being demolished. Boom! And a great cloud of thick gray dust, like a volcano erupting, like the Twin Towers coming down, only it was before the Twin Towers.

Then she cried out, “Oh, God, oh my God,” in her own lan-guage. She made the sign of the cross even though she wasn’t religious and said, “Oh my God,”again. They seemed to be the only words she could remember. The sight of the man on the floor had temporarily eradicated the entire database of Sophia’s vocabulary, English and Czech.

She was a scientist, really, not a cleaner, she reminded herself, she should be able to observe dispassionately, objectively. She forced herself to move closer. The man, it must be the writer, was lying on the floor as if he had toppled over backward while at prayer. It looked like an uncomfortable position, but he probably didn’t care too much anymore. His head all caved in, an eye popped out. Brain everywhere like Scottish porridge. Blood. A lot of blood, soaked into the red carpet so she hadn’t seen it at first. Blood on the red-painted walls, blood on the red velvet sofas. It was like a room that had been waiting for a murder, waiting to ab-sorb it into its walls like a sponge.

She was getting used to looking at him now.Words were coming back as well-English words-she realized she could shout “Help!” or “Murder!” but now that she’d got over the shock, that seemed a little bit stupid, so she walked quietly back through the house and out the front door and into the street, where she found the House-keeper still unloading plastic buckets and mops from the back of the pink van and informed her that the writer’s house wasn’t going to be cleaned anytime today.