One Good Turn

37

Jackson rolled over in the bed and spooned Julia’s hot body. She usually slept naked but was now wearing a pair of horrendous pa-jamas that were much too big for her and might at some point have belonged to her sister. Jackson knew the pajamas were sig-nificant, but he didn’t particularly want to think what that significance might be. He missed the feeling of skin on skin, the peachy roundness of Julia. He fitted himself into the familiar curves and cambers of her body, but instead of pushing back and settling into his shape, she shifted away from him, murmuring something incomprehensible. Julia talked a lot in her sleep, all of it gibberish, but nonetheless Jackson had taken to listening intently in case she divulged something secret and hidden that he would feel better (or, more likely, worse) for knowing.

He moved closer to her again and kissed her neck, but she remained steadfastly asleep. It was difficult to wake Julia up, short of shaking her. Once, he had made love to her while she slept, and she’d hardly even twitched when he came inside her, but he didn’t tell her about it afterward because he wasn’t sure how she would react. He couldn’t imagine her being particularly put out (this was Julia, after all). She would probably just have said, “Without me? How could you?” Technically it was rape, of course. He had arrested enough guys in his time for taking advantage of drunk or drugged girls. Plus, if he was honest, Julia was such a sound sleeper that there had been a touch of necrophilia about the whole thing. He’d put a necrophiliac away once, the guy worked in a mortuary and didn’t “see where the harm was” because “the objects of my affection have moved beyond earthly matters.”

Between Amelia’s pajamas and necrophilia, Jackson had pretty much managed to kill off any desire he might have woken up with. Julia was probably still annoyed with him, anyway. Jackson placed his ear to her back like a stethoscope and listened to her rattling breath. He had done the same for a three-year-old Marlee when she’d had bronchitis. Julia’s lungs would kill her in the end. There was something about her that suggested she would never make old bones, that long before she was drawing her pension she’d have emphysema and be lugging around an oxygen tank as tall as herself. She wriggled farther away from him.

Everything was subject to entropy, even sex, even love. A slow era-sure of passion. Not his love for his daughter, obviously, that was the one unbreakable bond. Or his sister. He had loved his sister with a true heart, but Niamh was too far “beyond earthly matters” now for him to feel the tug and urgency of love. The sadness was all that was left.

He propped himself up on an elbow and studied Julia’s face. He had a feeling that she wasn’t really asleep, that she might be acting.

“Don’t,” she said and rolled over, pressing her face into the pillow.

When he woke again, Julia was kneeling on the bed next to him, wearing only a towel and holding a tray on which he could see coffee, scrambled eggs, toast. “Breakfast!” she announced gaily. Jackson’s watch said seven o’clock.

“For a minute I thought you were Julia,” he said.

“Ha, funny. I couldn’t sleep.” Her damp hair was bundled into a demented ponytail on one side of her head, and she smelled soapy clean. She was naturally spotlighted by the sun, caught in a lozenge of light, and he could see the dark rings around her eyes, the shadow of something mortal on her brow. Maybe it was just disappointment. She settled cross-legged onto the bed and read out his horoscope to him. “‘Sagittarians are having a tough time at the moment.You feel as if you’re getting nowhere, but never fear-there is light at the end of the tunnel.’ Are you? Having a tough time?” she asked.

“No more than usual.”

He didn’t ask her what her stars said, that would have been to give a kind of credence to something he considered to be non-sense. He suspected Julia thought it was nonsense as well, and it was all part of some affectation.

“No, of course, this is yesterday’s paper,” Julia said. “We don’t know what’s in store for you today. Did you have a tough time yesterday? Oh, yes, you did, didn’t you? Fighting in the street, brawling, killing dogs-”

“I didn’t kill the dog.”

“Thrown in jail, convicted of an offense. They’ll never take you back in the police now, sweetie.”

“I don’t want to go back to the police.”

“Yes, you do.”

It was surprising what a burnt offering for breakfast could do to a man’s spirits. The eggs were rubbery and the toast was charred, but Jackson managed to get it all down. He had been expecting to breakfast on the cold leftovers of last night’s argument, so the eggs and Julia’s general air of benevolence were a pleasant surprise.

Julia sipped a cup of weak tea, and when he asked her why she wasn’t eating-Julia loved food the way a dog does-she said, “Funny tummy. First-night nerves. The press is going to be in, how ghastly is that? The idea of the show being reviewed is terri-fying, almost as terrifying as it not being reviewed. And you know it’s the Festival, so we won’t get a proper theater critic, they’re too busy on the Next Best Thing, we’ll get some nerd who usually subs the sports section. If only we had another preview.”

“How did it go last night?”

“Oh, you know”-she shrugged-“awful.”

Jackson’s heart went out to her.

“I’m sorry I was grumpy with you,” Julia said.

“I was grumpy too,” Jackson said magnanimously. He didn’t think he had been, really, but it didn’t hurt to be a little chivalrous, espe-cially as he presumed the logical outcome of Julia in a towel making him breakfast in bed was going to be sex, but when he made a play-ful grab at her, she jumped off the bed as neatly as a cat and said, “I have to get on, I’ve got so much to do.”At the door to the bedroom, she turned back and said, “I love you, you know.”At the beginning of a relationship, Jackson had noticed on more than one occasion in his own life, people looked happy when they said “I love you,” but at the end they said the same words and looked sad. Julia looked pos-itively tragic. But then that was Julia, always overacting.

Jackson’s phone rang and he considered not answering it. Good news always sleeps till noon, isn’t that what they said-or were those the lyrics to a Cowboy Junkies song? He answered it and had to riff on his memory for a while before the name meant something. Martin. Martin Canning, the guy who threw the briefcase at Terence Smith. An odd little guy.

“Hey, Martin,” Jackson said, adopting a false kind of cama-raderie because the guy sounded slightly unhinged. “How can I help you?”

“I wonder if you could do me a favor, Mr. Brodie?”

Jackson could no longer hear the word “favor” without thinking it had dark implications. “Sure, Martin. I haven’t got anything else to do today. And it’s Jackson, call me Jackson.”

“What are you going to do today?” Julia asked, fully dressed now and too distracted by her own day to be truly curious about his. She was applying her makeup in a little mirror propped up on the kitchen table. A light dusting of face powder had fallen on a pyra-mid of oranges balanced in a glass oven dish. Jackson didn’t remember buying any fruit.

“I’ve got a job,” he said.

“A job?”

“Yes, a job. Some guy wants babysitting today.”

“Babysitting?”

Jackson wondered if she would just keep echoing back to him what he said to her. Wasn’t this what the queen was supposed to do? It gave the impression of polite conversation, it gave the im-pression that you were genuinely interested in what the other person was saying without you having to actually engage with them on any meaningful level, or even listen to them. Testing the the-ory, he said to Julia, “And then I thought I might go and drown myself in the Forth,” but instead of parroting “the Forth?” Julia turned and gazed at him thoughtfully, seeing him rather than looking at him, and said, “Drowned?”

Jackson sensed the mistake immediately. Julia’s eldest sister, Sylvia, had drowned herself in the bath, a formidable act of will that Jackson almost admired. She was a nun, so Jackson supposed all those years of discipline had put the iron in her soul. His own sister hadn’t drowned, she had been raped and strangled and then dumped in a canal. Water, water, everywhere. They were linked, he and Julia, by these things. “Like some kind of karmic concate-nation,” she had ruminated once. He had to look up the word “concatenation,” it had sounded Catholic, but it wasn’t. From the Latin “catena,” a chain. The chain of evidence. Chain of fools. He wished now he’d had a classical education rather than an army ed-ucation. A good school, a degree, the world his own daughter was growing up in. The world Julia had grown up in, but then look how fucked up that had been. He wanted to tell Julia about the woman in the Forth, about his own near-drowning experience, but she had returned to herself, applying lipstick, peering at her lips in the mirror with professional detachment, smacking them together and making a face as if she were kissing her reflection.

Jackson wondered what it said about a relationship when you were unable to tell the “object of your affection” that you had been pulled out of the water like a half-drowned dog. “Lucky”- inevitably-had been the name of the dog that had scooted with joy off the pier at Whitby. The owner of the dog, the first man to drown that day, had a wife and eight-year-old daughter, and Jackson had wondered what had happened to the dog. Had they taken Lucky home with them?

“But you’ll be finished in time for the show?” Julia said.

“The show?”

As she was going out the door, Julia said, “Oh, while I remember, can you do me a favor? I dropped the memory card off at the chemist next to the flat. I thought if you didn’t have anything better to do you could pick the photographs up.”

“And what if I do have something better to do?”

“Do you?” Julia asked, curiosity rather than sarcasm in her voice.

“Hang on,” Jackson said, “back up-what photographs? What memory card?”

“The one from our camera.”

“But I lost the camera,” he said, “I told you I lost it at Cramond.”

“I know, and I told you that I phoned up the police lost prop-erty at Fettes and someone had handed it in.”

“What? You didn’t tell me that.”

“Yes, I did,”Julia said, “unless there was someone else lying next to me in bed pretending to be Jackson.”

When had Julia had time to drop things off at the chemist, to fill up the fruit bowl, to make phone calls, have lunch with Richard Mott? And yet she hadn’t had a second to give to him.

“Scott Marshall,” she continued blithely, “that nice boy who plays my lover, drove out to Fettes and picked it up for me.”

“They just handed it over to him?” Jackson said, astonished (“my lover,” the way she said it, so casual). “Without any proof?” He thought of the image of the dead girl trapped in the camera. Had someone looked at it, developed it?

“I described the first three photographs on the memory card over the phone,” Julia said, “and that seemed to satisfy them. And I told them that someone named Scott Marshall would be picking them up. He showed them his driver’s license. Crikey, Jackson, do we have to dissect every aspect of police procedure regarding lost prop-erty?”

“What are the first three photographs on the memory card?” Jackson asked.

“Are you testing me?”

“No, no, I’m intrigued. I have no idea what they are.”

“They’re of you,” Julia said, “they’re of you, Jackson.”

“But-”

“I have to dash, sorry, sweetie.”

No wonder identity fraud was such a fast-growing crime. The chemist was as lax as the police, Jackson had no receipt, no proof that the photographs were his, yet they were handed over promptly to him when he said that “Julia Land” had dropped them off this morning. The chemist (a man) smiled at him in a knowing way and said, “Yes, of course,” so Jackson presumed that Julia had used the full force of her orange-selling charms on him. If you were a man, you could be eighty with a Zimmer and Julia would flirt with you while she helped you across the road-because, and this was one of the reasons he loved her, she was the kind of person who walked old people across the roads, helped blind people in supermarkets, scooped up lost cats and injured birds.

She couldn’t help the flirting, it came automatically to her as if it were embedded in her personality. Julia flirted with dogs, for heaven’s sake. He had even seen her flirt with inanimate objects, cajoling a kettle into boiling faster, a car to start, a plant to flower.

“Oh, come on, sweetie, if you just try a little bit harder, you can do it.”

Perhaps he should look on it as a social service rather than as a threat, send her out to old people’s homes to give old guys the illusion of virility, make them feel good about themselves again. Vi-agra for the mind. There was something pathetic about old men. Guys who had fought in wars, witnessed empires topple, strode around boardrooms and factory floors like kings, won the bread, paid the dues, walked the walk, talked the talk, and now they couldn’t even piss without help. Whereas old women, no matter how frail, never seemed as pitiful. Of course there weren’t as many old men around as there were old women. Dry and brittle as old kindling maybe, but they were built to last.

He took the photos into Toast and settled into a booth. He felt an emotion similar to that of unwrapping a gift, the same anticipa-tion, the same surge of excitement, only on the dark side-the ob-verse, that was the fancy word for it, the word Julia would have used. The photograph would be welcome proof that he hadn’t hallucinated his experience in the Forth, unfortunately it would also be unwelcome proof that someone, somewhere, was dead.

A waitress brought over his coffee, and when she was safely back behind the counter he opened the packet of glossy six-by-fours. They were printed in the order they had been in on the memory card-the first three were indeed of Jackson, taken in the snow in France on Christmas Day, Julia trying out her new camera. He looked much the same in all three, striking awkward poses, managing a half-smile in the last one after much coaxing on Julia’s part. “Oh, come on, sweetie, if you just try a little bit harder, you can do it.” He hated having his photograph taken.

Then there were a couple more of France and then nothing until Venice because Julia had accidentally left the camera behind when she returned to London after New Year’s. She had packed in haste, typical Julia, and they had made love, a last-minute farewell thing, when she should already have been on the road to the air-port, let alone packing.

He dialed Louise’s mobile number. The phone rang for a long time.

Venice still looked beautiful, but now rather than simply being holiday photographs, the little Canalettos looked like poignant images of halcyon days, a record of their golden age together as a couple. Just before the cracks appeared. “A couple? Is that how you think of us?”

When Louise Monroe called him “Jackson” yesterday (“Let’s face it, Jackson, on paper you just don’t look good”), it felt like a switch had been thrown, just that little buzz of an electrical current kicking in. Bad dog, Jackson. He had thought better of himself than that.

She was, let’s face it, his type. Julia was so much not his type that she was off the radar. Louise. This was what happened when you went over to the dark side. When you became bad Jackson, you started to lust after other women. “Watch out for Pisceans,” Julia had said. Was Louise Monroe a Piscean? She would be a new path. Not necessarily a good path or a better one, just a new one.

After several rings a male voice (posh Edinburgh) answered, “The Monroe residence, can I help you?” Jackson was caught off guard, he hadn’t expected a man to answer, much less a pretentious-sounding wanker. He had expected better of Inspector Monroe. Before he could say anything, she came on the phone with a snappish, “Yes?”

“It’s Jackson, Jackson Brodie,” he said.

He had reached the last photograph of Venice. It was the view from their hotel window, over the lagoon, taken at the last moment by Julia (“Wait-we’ll forget this view”) before they boarded the Cipriani’s launch to St. Mark’s Square for the last time. She was right, he would have forgotten the view if there had been no record of it. But at the end of the day, no matter how beautiful, it was just a view. He could see what she meant about having people in pho-tographs, if she had been standing at the window with the lagoon behind her, it would have been a completely different photograph.

Then there was the photograph of him next to the One O’Clock Gun with the Japanese, then the photograph of the Na-tional War Memorial. There was only one more photograph after that. It was black, entirely black. Puzzled, Jackson rifled through the pictures again. Same result-nothing. No sign of the dead girl at all. Only the black photograph. He was reminded of the black square that Julia gazed into every night, the raging Arctic storm. He was wondering if the photograph of the dead girl had been erased, perhaps accidentally. He knew that you could never erase anything completely, it wasn’t deleting a file that destroyed it, it was writing new data over it. There were programs designed for retrieving images. It would be easy enough for a camera shop to do. Or police forensics.

“Did you want something,” Louise asked, “or did you just ring to annoy me?”

“You’re not really a morning person, are you?” he said. He suddenly realized what had happened. In his hurry to take the pho-tograph-dead body, rising tide, and so on-he had left the lens cap on. Oh shit. He banged his head on the table. The other pa-trons of Toast looked at him in alarm.

“Hello? Calling Jackson.”

“Nothing, I don’t want anything. You’re right, I was just ringing to annoy you.” He remembered something, something the crazy Russian girl said to him last night, and he asked Louise what she knew about “Real Homes for Real People.”

“Squirrels are eating my house,” Louise Monroe said unexpect-edly.

“Okay,” Jackson said slowly, unable to think of any kind of response to that statement. He wondered if they were particularly big squirrels.