One Good Turn

4

Bright lights suddenly illuminated a white square, making the surrounding darkness seem even blacker. Six people walked into the square from all directions, they walked fast, crisscrossing one another in a way that made him think of soldiers performing a complex drill display on the parade ground. One of them stopped and began to swing his arms and rotate his shoulders as if getting ready for strenuous physical exercise. All six of them began to speak nonsense. “Unique New York, unique New York, unique New York,” a man said, and a woman answered, “Rubber baby buggy bumpers, rubber baby buggy bumpers,” while doing some kind of tai chi. The man who had been swinging his arms now addressed empty air, speaking rapidly without pausing for breath. “Thou-sleepst-worse-than-if-a-mouse-should-be-forced-to-take-up-her-lodging-in-a-cat’s-ear-a-little-infant-that-breeds-his-teeth-should-lie-with-thee-would-cry-out-as-if-thou-were-the-unquiet-bedfellow.” A woman stopped in the middle of her mad walking and declared, “Floppy fluffy puppies, floppy fluffy puppies, floppy fluffy puppies.” It was like watching the inmates of an old-fashioned asylum.

A man walked out of the darkness and into the square of light, clapped his hands, and said, “Okay, everyone, if you’ve finished your warm-up, can we get on with the dress, please?”

Jackson wondered if this was a good time to make his presence known. The actors-the “company”-had spent the morning doing the technical run-through. This afternoon they were having the dress rehearsal, and Jackson had been hoping that he could take Julia to lunch before then, but the actors were already attired alike in brown-and-gray shifts that looked like potato sacks. His heart sank at the sight of them. Theater, for Jackson, although of course he would never say this to any of them, was a good pantomime, preferably attended in the company of an enthusiastic child.

The actors had arrived yesterday, they had been rehearsing in London for three weeks, and he was finally introduced to them for the first time last night in a pub. They had all gone into raptures- one of them, a woman older than Jackson, had jumped up and down in a parody of a small child, and another (already he had forgotten their names) dropped dramatically to her knees with her hands raised up in prayer to him and said, “Our savior.” Jackson had squirmed inwardly, he didn’t really know how to deal with thespian types, they made him feel staid and grown-up. Julia was standing in the background (for once) and acknowledged his discomfort by winking at him in a way that might have been salacious, but he couldn’t really tell because he had recently (finally) admitted to himself that he needed spectacles. The beginning of the end, downhill from now on.

The actors were a small ad hoc group based in London, and Jackson had stepped in when at the eleventh hour they lost their funding to bring their play to the Edinburgh Fringe. Not out of any love of theater but because Julia had wheedled and cajoled in her usual over-the-top fashion, which was unnecessary-all she had needed to do was ask. It was the first real acting job she’d had in a while, and he had begun to wonder to himself (never to her, God forbid) why she called herself an actress when she hardly ever acted. When she thought she was about to lose this part at the last moment because of the lack of money, she had been plunged into a profound gloom that was so uncharacteristic of her that Jackson felt impelled to cheer her up.

The play, Looking for the Equator in Greenland, was Czech (or maybe Slovakian, Jackson hadn’t really been listening), an existentialist, abstract, impenetrable thing that was about neither the equator nor Greenland (nor indeed about looking for anything). Julia had brought the script over to France and asked him to read it, watching him while he did so, saying, “What do you think?” every ten minutes or so as if he knew anything at all about theater. Which he didn’t. “Seems… fine,” he said helplessly.

“So you think I should take the job?”

“God, yes,” he said a little too promptly. In retrospect, he realized there was no question of her not taking the job and wondered if she’d known from the beginning that funding was going to be a nightmare and had wanted him to feel involved with the play in some way. She wasn’t a manipulative person, quite the opposite, but sometimes she had a way of looking ahead that surprised him. “And if we’re successful you’ll get your money back,” she said cheerfully when he offered. “And you never know-you might make a profit.” In your dreams, Jackson thought, but he didn’t say that.

“Our angel,”Tobias, the director, had called him last night, embracing him in a queeny hug. Tobias was more camp than a Scout jamboree. Jackson had nothing against gays, he just wished that sometimes they wouldn’t be quite so gay, especially when being introduced to him in what had turned out, unfortunately, to be a good old-fashioned macho Scottish pub. Their “savior,” their “angel”-so much religious language from people who weren’t in any way religious. Jackson knew himself to be neither a savior nor an angel. He was just a guy. A guy who had more money than they did.

Julia spotted him and waved him over. She looked flushed and her left eyelid was twitching, usually a sign she was wound too tightly. Her lipstick had almost worn off and her body was camouflaged by the sackcloth-and-ashes costume so that she didn’t really look like Julia at all. Jackson guessed that the morning hadn’t gone well. Nonetheless she gave him a big, smiley hug (say what you like about Julia, she was a real trouper), and he wrapped his arms round her and heard her breathing, wet and shallow. The “venue” where they had their makeshift theater was below ground level in the underbelly of a centuries-old building that was a warren of damp stone passages scuttling off in all directions, and he wondered if Julia could survive down here without dying of consumption.

“No lunch, then?” he said.

She shook her head. “We haven’t even finished teching properly. We’re going to have to work through lunch. How was your morning?”

“I took a walk,” Jackson said, “went to a museum and the Camera Obscura. Had a look at the grave of Greyfriar’s Bobby-”

“Oh.” Julia made a tragic face. The mention of a dog, any dog, always provoked an emotional reflex in Julia. The idea of a dead dog upped the ante on the emotion considerably. The idea of a dead faithful dog was almost more than she could handle.

“Yeah, I paid him your respects,” Jackson said. “And I saw the new Parliament Building as well.”

“What was it like?”

“I don’t know. New. Odd.”

He could see she wasn’t really listening. “Shall I stay?” he asked. She looked panicked and said quickly, “I don’t want you to see the show until press night. It’s still a bit rough around the edges.” Julia was always upbeat about any piece of work, so he understood that “a bit rough around the edges” translated as “bloody awful.”This fact went unacknowledged between them. He could see wrinkles round her eyes that he didn’t remember being there two years ago. She stood on tiptoes to be kissed and said, “You have my permission to scarper. Go and have a good time.”

Jackson kissed her chastely on the forehead. Last night, after the pub, he’d been expecting to have heroic sex with Julia the moment they got through the door of the rented flat in Marchmont that the promoters had found for her. New locations always tended to make her peppy where sex was concerned, but instead she said, “I’m going to die, sweetie, if I don’t go to sleep this very second.” It wasn’t like Julia not to want sex, Julia always wanted sex.

He guessed it was a student flat in term time, Sellotape marks on the wall and a toilet that Jackson used two bottles of bleach on before it even began to look clean. Julia didn’t clean toilets, Julia didn’t really do housework, or not so you would notice. “Life’s too short,” she said. There were days when Jackson thought life was too long. He had offered to pay for something nicer, something more expensive, even a hotel for the run if Julia wanted, but she had been uncomfortable with the idea. “Everyone else living a life of penury while I’m in the lap of luxury? I don’t think that’s right, sweetie, do you? Group solidarity and all that.”

When he woke this morning it was to find Julia’s side of the bed as cold and smooth as if she’d never nested restlessly next to him all night. He could tell the air of the Marchmont flat was undisturbed by her presence, she wasn’t bathing or breathing or reading, none of which she did silently. His heart had given a little contraction of sorrow at her absence. He tried to remember the last time Julia had woken up before him. He didn’t think there ever had been a time. Jackson didn’t like change, he liked to think things could stay the same forever. Change was insidious, creeping up on you as if it were playing a game of statues. From day to day he and Julia seemed to remain the same, but if he thought about them two years ago they were like different people. Then, they had been clinging to each other, grateful, self-indulgent survivors of wreckage and disaster. Now they were just jetsam bobbing on the aftermath. Or was it flotsam? He was never sure of the difference.

“Oh, wait, I’ve got something for you,” Julia said, raking around in her bag and finally producing a timetable for Lothian Buses.

“A bus timetable?” he said when she handed it to him.

“Yes, a bus timetable. So you can catch a bus. And, here, take my Day Saver ticket.”

Jackson wasn’t in the habit of taking buses. Buses, in Jackson’s opinion, were for the old and the young and the dispossessed.

“I know what a bus timetable is,” he said rather churlishly, even to his own ears. “Thanks,” he added, “but I’ll probably go and look at the Castle.”

“And with one bound he was free,” Jackson heard her say as he walked away.

As Jackson made his way out of the labyrinth, he half-expected to find stalactites and stalagmites (“Stalactites from the ceiling, stalagmites from the ground, the voice of his old geography teacher muttered unexpectedly in his brain). The whole place was carved out of the rock, the walls mildewed, the lighting dim, an underground cavern that gave Jackson the creeps. He thought about his father going down the pit every night.

It felt like an incredibly sick building, Jackson suspected he had inhaled bacilli from the plague. And if there was a fire, he couldn’t imagine anyone getting out alive. Up the road from here there had been a dramatic fire a couple of years ago, and Jackson thought it was probably a good thing-plague followed by cleansing fire. He had asked a lethargic girl at the box office if they had a fire certificate and, if so, could he see it, and she had stared at him as if he’d just grown an extra head in front of her eyes.

Jackson liked things done properly. There was a file in his house in France neatly labeled WHAT TO DO WHEN I DIE, and inside it there was all the information that anyone would need in order to tidy up his affairs once he was gone-the name and address of his accountant and his solicitor, a power of attorney for the same solicitor (in case he went gaga before he died), his will, an insurance policy, his bank details, he was pretty sure he’d covered all the bases, everything squared away because at heart he was still army. Jackson was forty-seven and in good health, but he had seen a lot of people die when they weren’t planning to and had no reason to think it wouldn’t happen to him. There were some things you could control and some things you couldn’t. The paperwork, as they said, you could control.

Jackson was exarmy, ex-police, and now ex-private detective. Ex-everything, except Julia. He had sold his private-investigation business and took a precipitous and unexpected retirement from the world of work after inheriting money from a client, an old woman named Binky Rain. It was a serious amount of money- two million-more than enough to put some away for his daughter and buy a house in France in the foothills of the Pyrenees, complete with a trout stream, an orchard, and a meadow that came all kitted out with two donkeys. His daughter, Marlee, was ten now and was getting to an age where she preferred the donkeys to him. This French life had been his dream, now it was his reality. He had been surprised by the difference between the two.

Julia said two million wasn’t that much, really. Two million was “barely” a flat in London or New York. “A Learjet will set you back twenty-five million,” she said airily, “and you won’t get much change out of five million for a good yacht these days.” Julia never had any money, yet she always behaved as if she had (“That’s the trick, sweetie”). She had never, as far as he knew, even seen a five-million-pound yacht, let alone stepped on board one. Jackson, on the other hand, had money and behaved as if he hadn’t. He was wearing the same battered leather jacket on his back as before, the same trusty Magnum Stealths on his feet. His hair was still badly cut, and he was still a pessimist. “Everyone else living a life of penury while I’m in the lap of luxury? I don’t think that’s right, sweetie, do you?” No, he didn’t.

“Gosh, you could spend two million in a day, if you put your mind to it,” Julia had said. She was right, of course. Inheriting his two million had been like winning the lottery (“Trailer-trash money,” Julia called it). Real money was old money, the kind of money that you could never get through no matter how hard you tried. It was passed down from generation to generation and hoarded. It came from enclosing your peasants’ fields, from getting in on the ground floor of the Industrial Revolution, and from buying slaves to cut down your sugarcane. The people with real money ran everything.

“And those are the people we don’t like,” Julia said. “The enemy of the socialist future.Which is just around the corner, isn’t it, sweetie? And always will be, forever and forever, amen. God forbid we should ever achieve some kind of prelapsarian utopia on earth because then you would have to live your life instead of just complaining about it.”

Jackson looked at her doubtfully. He didn’t think he’d ever heard the word “prelapsarian” before, but he wasn’t about to ask her what it meant. It wasn’t so long since he could read her like a book. Now, sometimes, he didn’t understand her at all.

“Get over it, Jackson,” Julia said. “The serfs are free and roaming the land, buying shares in high-risk Asian markets.”

The funny thing was, sometimes she sounded just like his wife. His wife was also an argumentative person. (“I only argue with people I like,” Julia said. “It means I feel secure with you.” Generally speaking, Jackson only argued with people he didn’t like.) His ex-wife, he reminded himself. Yet another “ex”in his life. They were divorced, she was remarried and pregnant with another man’s child, and yet he still thought of her-technically rather than emotionally-as his wife. Maybe that was the Catholic in him.

And Julia was wrong. The serfs were all watching reality television, the new opium of the people. He watched it himself sometimes, he had satellite broadband in France, and couldn’t believe the ignorance and insanity of people’s lives. Sometimes when Jackson turned on the television, he got the feeling that he was living in a terrible version of the future, one he didn’t remember signing up for.

He fought his way past a long queue knotted up in the doorway. They were queuing for some comedy thing. He found himself looking at a poster, a photograph of a man making a dementedly comic face. RICHARD MOTT-COMIC VIAGRA FOR THE MIND, it said. It took a lot to make Jackson laugh. In my day, he thought, comedy was funny. “In my day”-that was what old people said, their days already behind them.

Back out in what passed for daylight, he was greeted by ancient, tall tenements staring blankly at each other from either side of the street, making it feel more like a tunnel, making it feel as if night had fallen. If there had been no people around, you might have mistaken it for a film set of a Dickens novel. You might have mistaken it for the past itself.

Julia said it was a good venue to be in, although they had been disappointed when they had failed “to get into the Traverse.” “But really this is good,” Julia insisted. “Central, lots of people.” She was right about there being a lot of people, the place was crowded, “hoaching,” his father would have said. Jackson’s father was a miner, from Fife originally, and might not have had much time for this expensive, thriving capital city. Too chichi. “Chichi” was something Julia said. Jackson’s vocabulary seemed to be full of other people’s words these days, French people’s mainly as that was now his “place of domicile,” which was a different thing from “home.”

Other than being conceived on holiday in Ayrshire (according to his father, anyway), Jackson had never been to Scotland before, he had never given it much thought, but now it struck him as odd (and psychologically revealing) that he had never visited the land of his father. When he stepped off the train in Waverley Station yesterday, he had been expecting the 50 percent of his genes that were Scottish to recognize their heritage. He thought perhaps he would discover an emotional link with a past he’d never known, walk down a street and the faces would feel familiar, turn a corner or climb a stair and there would be an epiphany of sorts, but in fact Edinburgh felt more foreign to him than Paris did.

As he pushed his way past the crowd, he tried to orient himself toward the Castle. The ancient bird part of his brain that was usually so good at directions seemed to have gone on holiday since his arrival in Edinburgh, probably because he had been reduced to being a pedestrian (“reduced” being the apposite word here, because, let’s face it, pedestrians are inferior creatures). To understand the topography of Edinburgh his brain needed to be connected directly to the compass of a steering wheel. Jackson was a man for whom having a car was an extension of his thinking. In moving to France, he had abandoned his old love, the BMW, and now had a hundred fifty thousand Euros’ worth of brand-new Mercedes tucked away in his barn back home.

At the moment, of course, all he had was a Day Saver ticket in his pocket. He didn’t understand how people managed without cars. “They walk,” Julia said. Julia didn’t walk much, she took the tube or rode her bike. Jackson couldn’t think of anything more dangerous than riding a bike in London. (“Have you always worried this much,” Julia asked him, “or is it just since you met me?”) Julia had a reckless streak a mile wide, Jackson wondered if it was because she didn’t think she could die or because she didn’t care if she died. Apart from one remaining sister, all of Julia’s family members were dead, a fact which seemed to make her treat existence with an odd nonchalance. (“We all have to die sometime.” Yes, but not yet.)

“Let’s face it, Jackson, you feel unmanned without a car,” Julia said to him on the train journey up from London. “Unmanned” was such a Julia word-archaic and theatrical.

“No, I don’t,” Jackson said. “I feel as if I can’t get anywhere.”

“You’re getting somewhere now,” she pointed out as they passed through Morpeth Station. “Here we go, up to Scotland,” Jackson had said at the beginning of the journey, and now, hours later, in a typically Julia-esque nonsequitur, she turned to him and said, “And you don’t say ‘up’from London. You say ‘down’because it’s the capital.”

“I know that,” Jackson said. “I’m not a hick. I just think it’s stupid-Edinburgh’s a capital city as well, and the whole of the north of England is blatantly geographically up.”

“Golly,” Julia said mildly, “I didn’t know you felt so strongly about it.”

Julia was wrong, it wasn’t not having a car that had unmanned him. It was the money. Real men had to earn a hard crust. They had to labor at the coal face, both real and metaphorical. They didn’t spend their days filling up their iPods with sad country songs and feeding apples to French donkeys.

He exited Julia’s venue just in time to witness a silver Peugeot get shunted by a Honda Civic (a car for losers if ever there was one). The guy who got out of the Honda was spitting mad, quite unnecessarily so, as his bumper didn’t even look dented. He caught the accent-English, like himself. Strangers in a strange land. Honda Man was wearing driving gloves. Jackson had never understood driving gloves. The Peugeot guy wasn’t big, but he was wiry and tough-looking, the type who appeared as if he could take care of himself but whose body language was all about conciliation, which made Jackson think he was used to being in hairy situations-army or police. He felt a little tug of empathy with the Peugeot driver.

Honda Man, on the other hand, was a nutter up for a rammy, and when he suddenly produced a baseball bat Jackson realized he must have had it with him when he got out of the car. Premeditated GBH, the ex-policeman in him was thinking. They had different terms for it up here, they probably had different terms for everything up here. There was a dog in the back of the Honda, he could hear the big bass rumble of its bark, could see its snouty face attacking the car window as if it could push its way out and finish off the Peugeot guy. It was true what they said about people resembling their dogs. Julia still lamented the loss of her childhood pet, Rascal, an enthusiastic terrier. That was Julia, an enthusiastic terrier.

At the sight of the baseball bat, Jackson was suddenly all instinct. He started weaving his way through the crowd quickly, on the balls of his feet, all ready for whatever, but before he got close enough to the scene to do anything, someone in the queue had thrown what looked like a briefcase and knocked the Honda driver for six. Jackson held back and watched. He didn’t want to get involved if there was no need. Honda Man picked himself up and took off, and within minutes a police car was on the scene. The sound of the approaching siren made Jackson’s heart beat faster. You didn’t hear police sirens in rural France. Two policewomen, both young, one prettier than the other, climbed out of the car, authoritative in their yellow fluorescent jackets and bulky belts.

The guy who had thrown the briefcase was sitting on the curb, looking as if he were going to pass out. Jackson said, “Are you okay?”to him. “Try putting your head between your legs.”An acrobatic, rather sexually charged-sounding suggestion, but the guy tried to do as he was told.

“Can I help you?” Jackson said, crouching down next to him. “What’s your name?”

The guy shook his head as if he didn’t know. He was as white as milk.

“My name’s Jackson Brodie,” Jackson said. “I used to be a policeman.” He experienced a sudden, unexpected shiver. That was it, that was his whole life summed up in two sentences: My name’s Jackson Brodie. I used to be a policeman. “Can I help you?”

“I’ll be all right,” the guy said with an effort. “Sorry. Martin Canning,” he added.

“No need to apologize to me,” Jackson said. “I’m not the guy you floored.”That was a mistake.The guy looked horrified.

“I didn’t attack him. I was trying to help him,” he said, pointing at the Peugeot driver, who was still in the middle of the street and now being tended to by paramedics.

“I know, I know,” Jackson said. “I saw it. Look, I’ll give you my mobile number. Give me a call if you need your story backed up, if the police or the Honda Man driver gives you any trouble. But I’m sure they won’t. Don’t worry.” Jackson wrote down his number on the back of a Fringe-show flyer that he had stuffed in his pocket and handed it over. He stood up, registering a creak in his knees as he did so. He wanted away from here. He didn’t like being at crime scenes and seeing them being run by policewomen only a few years older than his daughter, it made him feel ancient. Surplus to requirements. He felt an unexpected pang of desire for his warrant card.

Jackson had made a mental note of the Honda’s license plate, but he walked away without giving a statement to the policewomen. Someone else would have caught the registration. There were enough people around to be witnesses, Jackson said to himself, but the truth was he didn’t want to get caught up in all that bureaucratic rigmarole. If he wasn’t in charge, then he didn’t want to be part of it. He was just an innocent bystander, after all.