One Good Turn

6

One of the policewomen said, “Are you going to ride with him in the ambulance?” She seemed to think he was a friend of the injured man, and as the injured man was at that moment friendless, Martin dutifully climbed aboard the ambulance. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

It was only when they eventually arrived at the new Royal Infirmary on the outskirts of town that he realized he no longer had his bag. He remembered it clattering and skidding on the wet cobblestones, but he didn’t know what happened to it after that. It wasn’t a disaster, everything was backed up safely on disk-the tiny lilac flake of a Sony Memory Stick in his wallet-and that disk was itself replicated, the backup copy in a drawer in the “office.” He imagined whoever found his laptop turning it on, going into “My Documents,” and reading his work, thinking what a lot of crap it was, reading passages out loud to friends and them all pissing themselves with laughter-because he imagined the kind of person who found his laptop being the kind of person who would “piss himself ”with laughter rather than simply laugh. And they certainly wouldn’t giggle. A less bourgeois, less pathetic person than Martin (“You’re such an old woman,” his father had said to him on more than one occasion), a person who would think Martin’s life and work were worthy of derision. “ ‘Something’s up, Bertie,’ Nina whispered as she balanced on Bertie’s shoulders to get a good view of Lord Carstairs in the palm-filled conservatory of Dunwrath Castle.” Bertie was Nina Riley’s seventeen-year-old sidekick whom she had rescued from a life of poaching.

There was correspondence in Martin’s files as well (“Thank you so much for your letter. I’m so glad you like the Nina Riley books. Best wishes,Alex Blake”). Perhaps the strangers pissing themselves with laughter would find his address and return the laptop to him. Or perhaps they would come to his house and steal everything else he had. Or perhaps a car would run over the laptop, crush its mysterious motherboard, warp its plasma screen.

The Peugeot driver was conscious and quite lucid now. He had a fierce-looking lump on his temple, as if an egg were buried beneath the skin. “My Good Samaritan,” he said to the female paramedic, nodding in Martin’s direction. “Saved my life.”

“Really?” the paramedic said, unsure whether to believe such hyperbole. The Peugeot driver was wrapped in a large white cotton cellular blanket like a baby. He struggled to remove his arm from the swaddling and extended it toward Martin. “Paul Bradley,” he said, and Martin shook his hand and said, “Martin Canning.” He was careful not to squeeze the Peugeot driver’s hand too hard in case it would cause him more pain but then worried that his handshake might seem wimpish. Martin’s father, Harry, was firm on the matter of manly introductions (“You’re not a fucking limp-wristed Mary-Ellen-shake hands like a man”). He needn’t have worried. Paul Bradley’s surprisingly small, smooth hand gripped with the vicelike efficiency of an automaton’s.

Martin hadn’t touched another human being for months, except accidentally, taking change from a cashier in the supermarket, holding Richard Mott over the toilet bowl one night while he vomited up an evening’s worth of alcohol. He had helped an old woman onto a bus a week ago and had been surprised by how he’d been moved by the touch of her weightless, papery hand.

“You look like you should be lying here, not me,” Paul Bradley said. “You’re white as a sheet.”

“Am I?” He did feel distinctly weak.

“It was a nasty incident by the sound of it,” the paramedic said. “Incident”-that was what one of the policewomen had called the road rage. “We’ll need to take a statement about the incident, sir.” A nice neutral word, almost like “innocent.” Perhaps he could use it for what had happened to him. “Oh, yes, well, when I was in Russia there was this unfortunate incident…”

When they entered the A and E, a receptionist asked Martin for the Peugeot driver’s details, and Martin realized he had already forgotten the man’s name. The Peugeot driver had been wheeled off into the hinterland of the ward, and the receptionist gave Martin a teacher’s look and said, “Well, could you find out? And get an address and a next of kin as well.”

Martin went looking for the Peugeot driver and found him in a curtained cubicle, where a nurse was taking his blood pressure. “Sorry,” Martin whispered, “just need his details.” The Peugeot driver tried to sit up and was pushed gently down by the nurse.

“Take my wallet out of my jacket, mate,” the Peugeot driver said from his prone position. A black leather jacket was hanging on a metal-framed chair in the corner, and Martin reached gingerly into the inside pocket and retrieved a wallet. It felt oddly intimate to be searching through someone else’s pockets, like a reluctant thief. The jacket was an expensive, buttery leather- lambskin, Martin guessed-and he had to stifle a desire to slip it on and feel what it would be like to be someone else. He waved the wallet at the nurse to show that he had it, that he was innocent of all trickery, and she gave him a nice smile. “Shall I look after your bag?” he asked the Peugeot driver. The bag, a holdall, had traveled with them in the ambulance, and the Peugeot driver said, “Cheers,”which Martin took to be acquiescence. The holdall looked almost empty but was surprisingly heavy.

The receptionist rifled efficiently through the Peugeot driver’s wallet. Paul Bradley was thirty-seven years old, and he lived in north London. He had a driver’s license, a wad of twenty-pound notes, and a rental agreement with Avis for the Peugeot. Nothing else, no credit card, no photographs, no scraps of paper with phone numbers scrawled on them, no receipts or ticket stubs. No sign of a next of kin. Martin offered himself for the role and the receptionist said, “You didn’t even know his name,” but nonetheless wrote down “Martin Canning” on the form.

“Church of Scotland?” she asked, and Martin said, “He’s English. Better put Church of England.” He wondered if there was a Church of Wales. He’d never heard of one.

The hospital was more like a station or an airport than a hospital, people stopping off on their way somewhere rather than being there for a reason. There was a café and a shop that was like a small supermarket. There was no indication that there might be sick people anywhere.

He took a seat in a waiting room. He supposed he would have to see it through now. He read the whole of a Period Homes magazine and a copy of Hello! that dated to three years ago. He remembered reading somewhere how hepatitis C could live outside the body for a long time. You could pick it up just by touching something-a door handle, a cup, a magazine. The magazines were older than the hospital. Someone must have boxed them up and brought them from the old Royal in Lauriston Place. Martin remembered being in the A and E there, his mother had scalded her hand while on a rare visit to him. That was the only thing she remembered about the visit, not the drive out to Hopetoun House, where they had a lovely walk of the grounds followed by afternoon tea, not lunch at the Balmoral Hotel, nor the visit to Holyrood Palace-only the way she had managed to pour water from the kettle onto her hand. “Your kettle,” she said, as if Martin were directly responsible for the boiling point of water.

The waiting room had been like something from the Third World, filthy, with old chairs that smelled of urine. She had been taken into a cubicle with pale green curtains that were stained with dried blood. Now the old hospital was being converted into flats, among other things. Martin thought it was odd that people would want to live where other people had died and been in pain or simply been bored to tears sitting in Outpatients waiting for an appointment. Martin himself lived in a Victorian house in the Merchiston area, and before it was a house there had, presumably, been a field there. Living somewhere that had once been a field seemed preferable to living somewhere that had once been an operating theater or a morgue. People didn’t care, there was a hunger for housing in Edinburgh that was almost primitive. A report in the paper last week recorded a garage selling for a hundred thousand pounds. Martin wondered if people were going to live in it.

He had bought his own house three years ago. When he moved to Edinburgh-after signing his first publishing deal-he lived in a small rented flat off the Ferry Road while he saved for something better. He had been as obsessive and crazed as every other house hunter in the city, poring over the property listings, pouncing off the starting blocks like a sprinter for the viewings on Thursday evenings and Sunday afternoons.

He fell in love with the Merchiston house as soon as he walked in the door one misty October day. The rooms seemed as if they were full of secrets and shadows, and the fading afternoon light had shone dully through the stained glass. Opulent, he had thought. He had a vision of how it must have been once, heard it echoing with the laughter of old-fashioned children, the boys wearing striped school caps, the girls in smocked dresses and white ankle socks. The children were conspirators, thinking up merry japes in front of the nursery fire. Everywhere the house was busy with life: a maid who washed and scrubbed willingly-no class resentment-and who sometimes aided and abetted the children in their japes. There was a gardener, and a cook who prepared old-fashioned meals (kippers, blancmanges, cottage pies). And overseeing everything a loving pair of parents, gracious and good-tempered, except when the japes got out of hand, at which time they became stern and solemn arbiters. Father commuted every day and did something mysterious “at the office” while Mother threw bridge parties and wrote letters. On darker days Father was mistaken for a criminal or a spy and the family was forced into temporary hardship and poverty (Mother pulled it all off magnificently), before everything was explained and restored.

“I want it,” he said to the woman from the solicitor’s office who was showing him around.

“You and ten other people who’ve put in notes of interest,” she said.

She didn’t understand that when he said, “I want it,” it wasn’t a simple statement about house buying, about surveying and bidding and paying, it was a cry from the heart for a home. After an itinerant army childhood, a boarding-school adolescence, and a staff cottage on the grounds of the Lake District school, he craved his own hearth. At university he had once done one of those word-association tests for a fellow student’s psychology module, and when he was presented with the word “home,” Martin had drawn a complete blank, a verbal space where an emotion should have been.

When Harry, his father, retired from the army, their mother had tried to persuade him to return to her native Edinburgh but failed miserably in her mission, and instead they had gone to live in Eastbourne. It turned out (no surprise really) that Harry was temperamentally unsuited to retirement, temperamentally unsuited to living in one place in a solid three-bedroom terrace with a nice white-wood trim, on a quiet street five minutes from the English Channel. The sea held no attraction for him, he took a brisk walk along the beach every morning, but its purpose was exercise rather than pleasure. It was a relief to everyone, especially his wife, when, three years after he retired, he dropped dead of a heart attack in the middle of an argument with a neighbor who had parked his car in front of their house. “He never accepted that it was a public highway,” their mother explained to Martin and his brother, Christopher, at the funeral, as if that was somehow the cause of his death.

Their mother lacked the will to leave Eastbourne, she had never been someone with any sap, but both Martin and Christopher gravitated back to Scotland (like eel or salmon) and lived about as far as they could get from her.

Christopher was a quantity surveyor, living beyond his income in the Borders with his neurotic, bitchy wife, Sheena, and their two surprisingly pleasant teenage children. The geographical distance between Martin and his brother was small, yet they hardly ever saw each other. Christopher was uneasy company, there was something stilted and artificial about the way he navigated his route in the world, as if he’d observed other people and thought by copying them he would be more acceptable, more authentic. Martin had long ago given up hope of being like other people.

Neither Martin nor Christopher referred to the Eastbourne house as “home,” their mother didn’t have enough personality to infuse a house with the sense of home. They always said to each other, “When are you next going down to the house?” as if the house had more character than their mother, yet it had hardly any identity at all, repainted in the same inoffensive shade of biscuit every couple of years, after which it never took long for the walls to acquire their customary stain of nicotine yellow. His mother was a heavy smoker, it was perhaps her defining trait. Martin believed that hell would be to endure forever a wet Sunday in his mother’s house-always four o’clock in the afternoon in January, with the smell of a shin beef stew cooking in the unventilated kitchen. Tobacco fumes, weak tea, the jaw-clenching sweetness of a fondant fancy. A rerun of Midsomer Murders on the video.

Their mother was tremulously old now, yet showed no sign of dying. Christopher, teetering on the edge of his income, complained that she was going to end up outliving him at this rate and he would never inherit the half of the Eastbourne house that his bank account needed so badly.

Martin had visited his mother not long after he had first made an appearance on the bestseller lists, and he showed her the week’s top-fifty in the Bookseller, explaining, “Alex Blake-that’s me, nom de plume.” He laughed, and she sighed, “Oh, Martin,” as if he’d done something particularly irksome. When he bought his house in Merchiston, he may not have been sure what it was that made a house a home, but he knew what didn’t.

Christopher had visited Martin’s house only once, just after he bought it-a difficult visit made more difficult by Sheena, a woman who ran with hyenas.

“What the fuck do you need such a big house for, Martin?” Christopher asked. “There’s only you.”

“I might get married, have children,” Martin said defensively, and Sheena yelped, “You?”

There was a small room at the top of the house, overlooking the garden, that Martin earmarked as a study. He felt it was the kind of room where he would be able to write something with strength and character, not the trite and formulaic Nina Riley but a text in which every page was a creative dialectic between passion and reason, a thing of life-changing artistry. Disappointingly, not only did this not happen but all the life he had sensed in the house disappeared after he purchased it. Now, when Martin walked through the front door, it often felt as if no one had ever lived there, including himself. There was no sign of any merry japes. “Merry” was a word Martin particularly liked. He had always thought that if he had children he would give them names like Sonny and Merry. The name maketh the man. There was something to be said for all those religiously influenced names-Patience, Grace, Chastity, Faith. Better to be named for a virtue than to be landed with a forgettable “Martin.” Jackson Brodie, that was a fine name. He had been unruffled by events (“I used to be a policeman”) whereas Martin had felt sick with the excitement of it all. Not the good sort of excitement, not the merry jape sort, but the incident sort.

At university he had briefly gone out with a girl named Storm (because he had had girlfriends, despite what most people thought). It had been an experience-an experience rather than a relationship-that led him to believe that people lived up to their names. “Martin” was pretty dull as names went, but “Alex Blake” had a certain dash to it. His publishers hadn’t considered Martin’s own name to be “punchy”enough. The pseudonym “Alex Blake” was chosen after much deliberation, most of which excluded Martin. “A strong, no-nonsense sort of name,” his editor said, “to compensate.” For what, she didn’t say.

He accidentally kicked Paul Bradley’s overnight bag with his foot and felt something hard and unyielding where he had expected the softness of clothes. He wondered what a man like that-admirably competent even when injured-carried with him. Where had he come from? Where was he going? Paul Bradley didn’t seem like someone who had come up for the Festival, he seemed like someone with more purpose than that.

Martin looked for his watch on his wrist and remembered that he hadn’t been able to find it this morning. He suspected that Richard Mott had “borrowed” it. He borrowed things all the time, as if being in someone’s house gave you rights to all of their possessions as well. Martin’s books, shirts, and iPod (“You listen to some real shit, Martin”) had all been appropriated at one time or another by his houseguest. He had even found the spare keys to Martin’s car and seemed to think he could drive it whenever he wanted.

The watch was a Rolex “Yacht-Master” that Martin had bought for himself to celebrate selling his first book to a publisher. It was an extravagance that had made him feel guilty, and he had felt compelled to give an equivalent amount to charity to salve his conscience. “Prosthetics Outreach,” supplying artificial limbs for the victims of land mines. The cost of his Rolex was equivalent to nearly a hundred arms and legs somewhere in the unimaginable netherworld of so-called civilization. Of course, if he hadn’t bought the Rolex he could have bought two hundred arms and legs, so his guilt was doubled rather than assuaged. The price of the watch was puny compared to the price of his house in Merchiston. For the cost of his house he could probably have fitted artificial limbs on every amputee in the world. He still wore the watch, even though it reminded him every day of the incident in Russia. That was his punishment, never to forget.

Richard Mott would probably have finished his show now. Afterward, Martin supposed, Richard would be at a bar somewhere drinking and socializing-networking. It was a one-off thing that the BBC was recording, a “showcase” for several comics. Richard’s usual show was at ten. “Comedy always happens at night,” he explained to Martin, which statement Martin thought was quite amusing, and he pointed this out to Richard. “Yeah,” Richard said in that strange laconic London way he had. He was a gagman, not a naturally funny person. In the two weeks of their acquaintance, he hadn’t made Martin laugh once, at least not intentionally. Perhaps he saved it all for the ten o’clock show. His glory days had been in the eighties, when it was easy to pretend to be political. After Thatcher was booted out, Richard Mott’s star began to descend, although he had never gone far enough away to make a comeback, keeping his profile up with appearances on “alternative” quiz shows, providing a reliable filler on chat shows, and even doing a bit of (bad) acting.

On the whole, Martin thought that he would rather be reading old, germ-laden magazines in a hospital, waiting for news of a stranger, than socializing at a Festival bar somewhere with Richard Mott.

Richard was a friend of a friend of an acquaintance. He had phoned out of the blue a couple of months ago and said he was “doing a gig at the Fringe” and was there any chance he could rent a room off Martin? Martin quietly cursed the acquaintance and the friend and the friend for giving out his phone number. He had always found it difficult to say no. There had been a time, several years ago, when he had been desperately trying to finish a book but was continually interrupted by people turning up at his door, a succession of day-trippers from Porlock (as he thought of them), and he had taken to keeping a coat and an empty briefcase in the hall so that whenever the doorbell rang, he could slip on the coat, pick up the briefcase, and say, “Oh, sorry, just going out.”

This was during the period in his life when he had just moved to Edinburgh from the Lakes and was making an attempt to get to know people, to start afresh with an active social life, no longer “Mr. Canning,” the old fart, but Martin Canning, how d’you do? Me, oh I’m a writer. Crime novels. It’s called Highland Fling. On the best-seller lists, actually.Where do I get my ideas from? Oh, I don’t know, always had a lively imagination, felt the urge to be creative.You know how it is. Of course, all that happened was that, instead of an active social life, he became saddled with all kinds of unwanted people that he then had to spend the next several months (and in some cases years) trying to get rid of. Nearly all of these unwanted people seemed to have nothing better to do in their own lives than to drop in on Martin at all times of the day and night. One in particular-a man named Bryan Legat-haunted him for years.

Bryan was a fortyish loser with an unpublished manuscript and a bitter resentment against every agent in Britain, all of whom had been incapable of recognizing his genius. Martin had seen some of the letters that Bryan had written in reply to his own many letters of rejection. “You stupid, stupid, stupid, arrogant English bitch” and “I know where you live, you ignorant prick” kind of letters that scared Martin with their madness. Bryan had shown him his manuscript, “the magnum opus” entitled The Last Bus Driver. “Well,” Martin murmured politely when he returned it to Bryan, “it’s certainly different. And you can write, there’s no doubt about that.”And he wasn’t lying, Bryan could write, he could take a pen with turquoise ink in it and make big, loopy joined-up handwriting with verbs scattered randomly throughout sentences-sentences that in every comma and exclamation point screamed crazy. But Bryan knew where Martin lived and so he wasn’t about to antagonize him.

When the doorbell rang this particular day, Martin threw his overcoat on, picked up the briefcase, and yanked open the door to find Bryan hovering hopefully on the doorstep. “Bryan!” Martin said with a jauntiness he didn’t feel. “What a surprise. Sorry, but I’m just going out, unfortunately.”

“Where are you going?”

“I have a train to catch.”

“I’ll come with you to the station,” Bryan offered cheerfully.

“No need to do that.”

“No trouble, Martin.”

They had ended up going to Newcastle together on an eleven-thirty King’s Cross GNER. In Newcastle, Martin had chosen an office block at random in the town center and said, “Well, this is me,” and plunged into a lift. He ended up on the eighth floor in the offices of a time-share company, where it was a relief to discuss the purchase of a luxury property in Florida, “adjacent to the golf course and leisure facilities.” He took the unsigned papers away with him “to look over” and threw them in the nearest bin on the way out. Needless to say, Bryan was waiting for him down in the foyer. “Good meeting?” he inquired genially when he caught sight of Martin. They returned together on the four-thirty train to Edinburgh, and somehow or other Bryan ended up in a taxi at Waverley with him. Martin couldn’t think of anything to say to him short of “Fuck off out of my life forever, you crazy madman,” and anyway by the time he’d paid off the taxi, Bryan was already halfway up the path, saying, “Shall I put the kettle on? I wanted to have a word with you about my novel. I’ve been thinking about putting it all into the present tense.”

The following year Bryan Legat fell to his death off Salisbury Crags. It was unclear whether he had jumped or fallen (or, indeed, been pushed). Martin had felt relief and guilt in equal measures when he heard of Bryan’s demise. Something should have been done to help a person who was clearly so deluded, but all Martin had been able to say to him was, “The way you use the vernacular is quite startling.”

So, when put on the spot, he had found it hard to refuse Richard Mott. When Richard said, “How much shall we say?” Martin said, “Oh, no-don’t be silly. I couldn’t take money off you.” As a gift, Richard had brought with him a DVD of his last tour, and in the few days since then, he had bought one bottle of wine, most of which he drank himself, and as a contribution to the housework, he had loaded the dishwasher once, attempting to make a comic performance out of the mundane task. Martin had to reposition all the crockery in the machine when Richard left the kitchen. He had also bought an expensive steak that he fried for himself, splattering the whole cooker with grease. The rest of the time he seemed to eat out.

Two days ago, on his opening night (which Martin had managed to avoid), Richard had invited Martin for “a curry” with “some people” here from London for his show. Martin had suggested the Kalpna in St. Patrick Square because he was a vegetarian (“Nothing with a face, actually”), but somehow or other they had ended up at a rabidly carnivorous place that some other “people” in London had recommended to Richard. When it came to the bill, Martin found himself insisting on picking the whole thing up. “Thanks, Martin, thanks a lot,” one of the London people said, “although I could have put it on expenses, you know.”

“How do you feel about smoking in the house?” Richard had asked ten minutes after he arrived, and Martin had been caught between wanting to be a warm, welcoming host and wanting to say that he loathed everything to do with cigarettes. “Well…” he began, and Richard said, “Just in my room, of course. I wouldn’t make you breathe my filthy, carcinogenic smoke,” but every morning when Martin came downstairs there was a little pile of butts in the living room in whatever saucer or plate (and once a tureen) he had foraged from the Wedgwood service Martin had bought when he moved into the house.

Richard came in very late and then didn’t surface until midday, which was something to be thankful for. Once he was up he spent his time on the phone, he had a new videophone that Martin admired politely (“Yeah, she’s a sexy mother, isn’t she?” Richard agreed), even though he thought it was odd and rather dumpy and reminded him of a Star Trek communicator. Richard had downloaded the theme song from Robin Hood, the old fifties television program, as his ringtone, and the sound of it, rendered tinnily tiny and stupid, was slowly driving Martin crazy. As an antidote Martin himself had recently downloaded Birdsong and had been pleasantly surprised by how authentic the birds sounded.

Looking round, he found a clock behind him on the wall that said it was half-past one. It felt much later, the day had lost its shape, distorted under the weight of unexpected reality.

Martin had read a spiteful review of Richard Mott’s show in the Scotsman that said, among other things, “Richard Mott’s humor creaks with banality these days. He hashes up the same old tired material he was using ten years ago.The world has moved on, but Richard Mott hasn’t.” Martin felt embarrassed just reading it. He couldn’t mention to Richard that he’d seen it because that would mean they would both have to face the awfulness of it all. Martin had acquired enough bad reviews himself to know the abysmal feelings they generated.

“I never read my reviews,” Richard volunteered morosely after his opening night. Martin didn’t believe him. Everyone read their own reviews. It was some years since Richard had “done the Festival,” and whatever feelings he had once had about Edinburgh (he had been gloriously successful here at the beginning of his career) had now turned mostly to antipathy. “You see, it’s a great city,” he said to one of the “some people from London” during their flesh-feeding frenzy in the phobia-inducing, crowded Indian restaurant. “Fantastic to look at and all that, but it has no libido. And obviously you have to blame Knox for that.” Martin hated the way Richard said “Knox” with such offhand familiarity. He felt like saying, “Knox might have been a dour, tight-arsed, puritanical bastard, but he was our dour, tight-arsed, puritanical bastard, not yours.”

“Exactly!” another one of them said. He was wearing narrow spectacles with thick black rims and smoked even more than Richard. Martin, a spectacle wearer since the age of eight, wore rimless lightweight glasses in an attempt to disguise the fact that he had defective eyesight, rather than making a feature of it. “No libido-very good, Richard.” The man with the black-framed spectacles jabbed the air with his cigarette to emphasize his agreement. “That’s Edinburgh exactly.” Martin wanted to defend his home city but couldn’t quite work out how. It was true, Edinburgh didn’t have a libido, but why would you want to live in a city that did?

“Barcelona!” another of Richard’s friends shouted across the table (they were loud and not a little drunk), and the man with the old-fashioned but trendy spectacles barked back, “Rio de Janeiro!” And so the shouting of cities went on (“Marseille! New York!”) until they got to “Amsterdam!” and a row broke out over whether Amsterdam possessed its own libido or was “merely a locus for the exploitative commercial transactions of other people’s libidos.”

“Sex and capitalism,” Richard intervened languidly, “what’s the difference?” Martin waited for a punch line, but apparently there wasn’t one. Personally he thought there was a lot of difference between the two, but then he remembered undressing in front of Irina in that awful hotel room, with its view of the Neva and the cockroaches scuttling along the skirting boards. “Well-upholstered. Built for comfort, not for speed,” he’d joked, cringing with embarrassment.

“Da?” She laughed accommodatingly, apparently not understanding a word. The very remembrance of it made him double up as if he’d been hit by an invisible fist.

“Girls,” one of them said suddenly. “We should go and find some girls after this.”This idea was greeted with frightening enthusiasm.

“Pole dancing.” Richard sniggered like an adolescent boy.

“Oh, sorry, Martin,” another of them said. “Sorry to be so rampantly hetero.”

“Do you think I’m gay?” Martin asked, surprised. They all turned to look at him as if he’d said something interesting for the first time.

“There’s nothing wrong with that, Martin,” Richard said. “Everyone’s gay.”

Martin would have argued with this ridiculous statement, but he had just discovered that he was chewing on a piece of chicken from his “vegetable biryani.” He removed it from his mouth as discreetly as he could and put it on the side of his plate. The last gristly remnant of some poor abused bird that had been pumped full of hormones and antibiotics and water in a foreign country. He could have wept for it.

“It’s okay, Martin,” Richard Mott said, slapping him on the back. “You’re with friends.”

Without asking him whether he wanted to go or not, Richard informed him that he had left a ticket for Martin for the radio showcase at the box office, but when Martin got to the venue, the indifferent girl behind the counter said to another indifferent girl, “Are there any comps in Richard Mott’s name?” The other girl made a face and glanced around while the first girl returned to glaring at her computer screen.

Martin found himself staring at a poster for Richard’s show. It was a close-up shot of Richard making a quirky face. A strapline running under it said, COMIC VIAGRA FOR THE MIND. Martin thought that sounded off-putting rather than inviting.

When nothing more was forthcoming from either of the girls, Martin pointed out a rickety wooden dovecote on the wall at the back with names Sellotaped beneath each individual pigeonhole. The one that said “Richard Mott” contained a white envelope. The second indifferent girl read the name written on the envelope. “Martin Canning?” she asked suspiciously and then gave it to him without waiting for confirmation. He checked the tickets and found a scribbled note on one of them. “Your car’s parked in front of Macbet on Leith Walk. Cheers, R.”

“Can I go straight in?” he asked, and the first girl, without removing her eyes from her computer screen, said, “No, you have to join the queue.”

“Thanks,” he said, unacknowledged and invisible. And then he had joined the queue. And then the man with the baseball bat stepped out of the Honda.