One Good Turn

7

Jackson fought his way up the Royal Mile, through the crowds and the tartan crap, until he finally gained the Castle, soaring almost Catharlike on top of the volcanic rock. He paid the entrance fee and walked along the Esplanade, past the towering scaffolded stands built for the Edinburgh Tattoo. “The Tattoo has a hundred percent box office,” Julia had told him enviously, and tickets were “like gold dust,” and yet within minutes of arriving in Edinburgh she had been given comps for the Tattoo by a complete stranger (claiming to be a piper, although Jackson saw no evidence of bagpipes). She tried to palm them off on Jackson, but he couldn’t think of anything worse than being trapped for two hours in the dark and the summer damp watching a camp spectacle that had nothing to do with the reality of being in the military. “Don’t think of it as military,” Julia said. “Think of it as theatrical. Massed pipes and drums,” she said, reading from a program the so-called piper had given her, “and an army motorcycle stunt team. Highland dancers? And, oh, look, Russian Cossack dancers. That sounds like fun, doesn’t it?”

“No.”

Jackson couldn’t imagine Julia’s play having any kind of box office, couldn’t believe anyone would actually pay good folding money to see Looking for the Equator in Greenland.

The Castle was a brute of a building, all fairy-tale Scottish from below, but once you were within its glowering walls, it was dank and doom-laden. (This bit of Edinburgh his father might have liked.) The Castle seemed not so much a product of engineering as of organic growth, the dressed stone fused with the rough black basalt of the rock and its own bloody history. Jackson bought a guidebook but didn’t pick up an audio, he hated those things, the unruffled tones of some woman (always a woman) regurgitating predigested bits of information, dictating how you saw things. It reminded him of the voice on his GPS (“Jane”). He had tried other voices on the GPS but they hadn’t worked for him-the French was too sexy, the American too American, and even if he had understood the language he didn’t think he could have trusted an Italian voice telling him how to drive, so in the end he always came back to the quietly insistent tones of “Jane,” a woman who believed she was always right. It was rather like being in a car with his wife. His ex-wife.

He had Julia’s camera with him, so he took a few snaps of the view from the ramparts. Julia never took photographs of views, she said pictures were meaningless unless they had people in them, so he asked one of a group of Japanese tourists to take a photo of him next to the One O’Clock Gun. The Japanese tourists seemed to think this was hilarious and insisted on posing with him before moving off like a school of fish after their guide.

Julia always grinned at the camera as if it were the happiest day of her life. Some people had it and some didn’t, Jackson himself tended to look surly in photographs. Perhaps it wasn’t just in photographs. Julia had once told him that he had a “somewhat threatening demeanor,” a perception of himself that he found alarming. He had tried to take on a more benign aura for his photograph with the Japanese. For a moment Jackson envied them. He imagined it must be nice to belong to a group, most people thought of him as a loner, but he suspected he had been at his most comfortable when he had been institutionalized, in the army and then the police. The individual was overrated in Jackson’s opinion.

He found a table outside the café and had a cup of tea and a cake, a lemon poppy seed thing. The poppy seeds made the cake look as if it were speckled with insect eggs, and he left most of it. Julia believed no outing was worth its while unless it ended up with tea and cake. He knew everything Julia believed. He could have gone on one of those “Mr. and Mrs.” quizzes and answered everything about her likes and dislikes. He wondered if she would be able to do the same for him. He honestly didn’t know.

A rustle of excitement preceded the firing of the One O’Clock Gun. The story went that the citizens of Edinburgh had been too cheap to pay for twelve cannon shots for midday and so had settled for a gun at one o’clock. Jackson wondered if that was true. Was the Scots’ reputation for stinginess really justified? Half-Scottish himself (although he didn’t feel it), he liked to think he had been generous with money even when he didn’t have any. Now that he had it, he tried to distribute his wealth far and wide-diamond earrings for Julia, a herd of cows for a village somewhere in Africa. Nowadays you could shop for charity on the Internet as easily as trawling the cybershelves of Tesco.com, adding goats and chickens to your “shopping basket” as if they were bags of sugar, tins of beans.

Jackson knew that ever since he’d inherited the money he’d been looking for ways to get it off his conscience-it was the Puritan in him, the little voice that said if you didn’t suffer for something then it wasn’t worth having. That was what he admired in Julia-she was a total and complete hedonist. And it wasn’t that Julia hadn’t suffered in her life, because she had, more than Jackson. They both had a sister who had been murdered, they both had been motherless children, Jackson’s elder brother and Julia’s eldest sister had both killed themselves. Bad luck on bad luck. The kind of stuff you tended not to talk about because it wasn’t usually a good idea to reveal so much disrepair to other people. That was the good thing about Julia, her family background was even more fucked up than his. They were a pair of freakishly bereaved people.

Jackson and Julia had stood side by side in a police mortuary, gazing at the fragile bird-bones of Julia’s long-lost sister, Olivia. Such things cast a long shadow on the soul, and Jackson feared that it was their understanding of loss that made them true companions of the heart. He suspected that it might not be a healthy thing-yet wasn’t the shared twist of grief in them stronger than, say, a mutual love of skiing or Thai food or all the other things couples based their lives on?

“A couple?” Julia had said ruminatively, when he mentioned something to this effect. “Is that how you think of us?”

“Don’t you?” he said, suddenly alarmed, and she laughed and said, “Of course I do,” tossing her head so that the curls piled upon it bounced around like springs. He knew that gesture well, it nearly always accompanied dissimulation on Julia’s part.

“You don’t think of us as a couple?”

“I think of us as you and me,” Julia said. “Two people, not an entity.”

One of the things Jackson liked about Julia was her independence, one of the things he didn’t like about Julia was her independence. She had her own life in London, Jackson visited her there and she came to stay in his house in the Pyrenees, where they built log fires in the huge stone hearths and drank a lot of wine and had a lot of sex and talked about getting a Pyrenean mountain dog (or Julia did). Sometimes they went to Paris together, they liked Paris a lot, but she always went back to London. “I’m like a holiday romance for you,” Jackson complained, and Julia said, “But that’s rather wonderful, isn’t it?”

For her birthday in April, Jackson took Julia to Venice, to the Cipriani, although both of them discovered that an entire week of either was a little too much. Julia said it was like finding the best cake in the world and then eating nothing else, so that you “sickened on the very thing you craved the most.” Jackson wondered if she was quoting from a play, she often did, and he hardly ever got the reference. “I don’t have a sweet tooth to begin with,” he said rather grumpily.

“Just as well that life isn’t really like a box of chocolates, then, isn’t it?”she said. He got that reference. He’d hated that film. They were on the water bus at the time, making their way up the Grand Canal, and Jackson snapped her as they passed Santa Maria della Salute. Wherever you went, it was like being on a stage set. It suited Julia perfectly.

On her birthday, Jackson took Julia for an evening gondola “excursion”-along with just about every other tourist in Venice. “He’s not going to sing, is he?” Julia whispered as they settled themselves onto the red velvet seat. “I hope not,” Jackson said. “I think you pay extra for singing.”The gondolier, in his striped vest and straw boater, seemed like a dreadful tourist cliché. Jackson was reminded of the punts on the river in Cambridge. Cambridge was where he had lived in the “before” time, it was where Julia grew up, it was where his own daughter was growing up now. Before, Jackson never really thought of Cambridge as home, home was (strangely) the army, or the dark place where he himself had grown up, a place where it was always raining in his memory, and possibly in reality too. Now, with the curse of hindsight, he could see that perhaps Cambridge had been a real home-a place of safety with a wife and a house and a child. Another kind of institution. Before and after-that was how he classified his life. Before and after the money.

The gondolier didn’t sing, and it turned out to be not such a cliché after all. Venice was even more gorgeous at night, the lamps glittering on the black water like soft jewels, and something unsuspected and beautiful to marvel at around every turn in the narrow canal-Jackson felt the poetry in his soul rising until Julia hissed in his ear, “You’re not going to propose, are you?” The thought hadn’t been in his head at all, but once she said that-in exactly the same tone as she had voiced her anxieties about the singing gondolier-he felt irritated with her. Why shouldn’t he propose to her, was it such a dreadful thing? He knew that these weren’t the circumstances in which you should kick off an argument (Venice, birthday, gondola, etc.), but he couldn’t stop himself. “So you wouldn’t marry me if I asked you?” he said defensively.

“Is that a proposal, Jackson?”

“No. I’m just saying, if I asked you, would you say no?”

“Yes, of course I would.”They’d hit some kind of traffic jam on the canal, squeezing past a large gondola containing a cargo of Americans. “Be reasonable, Jackson. Neither of us is the marrying kind.”

“I am,” Jackson said, “and you’ve never been married, so how can you know?”

“That’s a specious argument,” Julia said, turning her face away from him and making a show of looking up at the windows of some palazzo or other. The gondola rocked on the water as the gondolier finally maneuvered it past the Americans.

“So how do you see our relationship?” he persisted. He knew he shouldn’t. “Do we just see each other now and then, whenever you feel like it, fuck each other’s brains out, and after a few years you grow bored and it all peters out? Is that how you see it? I mean, goodness, Julia,” he said sarcastically, “this is the longest you’ve ever been with anyone. What was the record before-a week?”

“Crikey, you’ve really been giving this some thought, haven’t you, Jackson?”

“Of course I’ve been giving it some thought. Jesus, haven’t you?”

“Not in such lurid detail, apparently,” Julia said mildly. “Do you honestly think, sweetie, that being married would stop us from getting bored with each other?”

“No, but that’s not the point.”

“Yes it is. Stop it, Jackson, don’t be so curmudgeonly, you’re going to spoil a lovely evening.”

But the evening was clearly spoiled already.

He wasn’t sure that he did actually want to marry Julia, but he found her absolute negativity on the subject disturbing. He knew the topic couldn’t be introduced again, not without a huge row, a fact that festered in a way that he found surprising.

The One O’Clock Gun boomed over the town, and the tourists dutifully flinched and laughed. It seemed to have more to do with theater than timekeeping, a show for the Japanese and Yanks. And nothing to do with real gunfire. Real gunfire cracked and popped mysteriously in the distance or exploded so loudly near you that it blew your eardrums out.

He had a look in the building at the heart of the Castle that housed the Scottish National War Memorial. He was surprised by how beautiful it was inside-Arts and Crafts style, he knew that from Julia. She had a thing about William Morris, she said she had the right kind of hair for the period. Sometimes he found himself wondering if she cultivated eccentricity just for the sake of it. The names of the dead, so many dead, were written in big red books. He knew he had three great-uncles (three brothers, God help their mother) in those books somewhere, but he didn’t look for them. Scotsmen all over the globe building the British Empire and then dying for it. His own father hadn’t fought in the Second World War because mining was a protected occupation. “As if it were a soft option,” his father scoffed, “working a double shift in the bowels of the earth.” When he’d left school at sixteen, Jackson had gone to sign on at the pit, but his father said that he hadn’t worked all his life “in this filthy hellhole” just so that his son would have to as well. So Jackson joined the army, a Yorkshire regiment because Yorkshire was his home, not this place of gray stone and blasting wind. Francis, his brother, had worked as a welder at the pit, and his father had made no effort to stop him. But Francis was dead by the time Jackson was sixteen, and Jackson had become the only one of three children left to his father, and he supposed that had made him more precious in some way, not that the old bastard had ever shown it.

Jackson was left relatively unmoved by the ranks of the dead (death was so commonplace), by the plaques for the fallen, for the women, for the merchant seamen. Not even the verse from the Binyon poem-“At the going down of the sun and in the morning / We will remember them”-on the Women’s Services Memorial was able to touch him as it usually did, it was something else entirely that set off the emotion-a small relief carved into the stone at knee-height, depicting a cage of canaries and a little gathering of mice. THE TUNNELLERS’ FRIENDS, the inscription read. He blinked back the tears, coughed, and did some manly throat clearing to cover his emotion. Julia would have been on her knees next to it, stroking the stone as if it were an animal. Kissing it, probably. He could bring her to see it once her show opened. She would like that.

Outside, he stood across the courtyard and took a photograph of the building that housed the memorial, but he knew already that when it was developed it would just look like a building.

The camera had been his present to Julia last Christmas, a nice chunky Canon digital that had appealed to him as a piece of equipment. Their photos from Venice were still on the memory card, and while he drank his tea in the Castle’s café, he scrolled through the little colored pictures that looked like miniature paintings. There had been a perfect blue spring sky for the whole week so that through the viewer the photographs looked like tiny Canaletto backdrops with Julia or Jackson inserted into them. There were only two pictures of them together, one on the Rialto, taken by a helpful German tourist, and a second one taken with the camera’s timer-Jackson and Julia sitting up on their king-size bed in the Cipriani, toasting each other with champagne. It was taken just before they left for the gondola ride.

Julia was very photogenic, every time turning on the full beam of her lipsticky smile. She had a great smile. Jackson sighed, paid the bill for his tea and cake, put a big tip on the table, and left the Castle.

Crowds flowed down the Royal Mile like the lava that had once molded landscape out of fire, moving around obstacles in the way-the statue of David Hume, a mime artist, a piper, several student theater groups, people handing out flyers (lots of them), another piper, a man eating fire, a man juggling fire, a woman dressed as Mary Queen of Scots, a man dressed as Sherlock Holmes. Another piper. It certainly was a city en fête. It was strange to think that-far away in a country about which people knew nothing-there was a war going on. But then there was always a war going on somewhere. War was the human condition. War had fed, clothed, and paid Jackson in its time, so perhaps he shouldn’t be the one to complain. (Although someone should.)

He walked down to Holyrood Palace, bought a poke of chips, and walked back up the Royal Mile. Another day where nothing has happened, he thought. That was a good thing, he reminded himself. What was the Chinese curse? May you live in interesting times. Still, a little bit more interesting wouldn’t be such a dreadful thing to ask for. He remembered Honda Man and Peugeot Guy, it had been an interesting day for them. He felt a pang of guilt for not acting like a concerned citizen and reporting the Honda’s registration. He could still reel it off, he’d always had a good memory for numbers even though he had no feel for maths-one of the brain’s many baffling anomalies.

He must have looked as if he belonged because someone, Swedish or Norwegian, asked him for directions, and Jackson said, “Sorry, I’m a stranger here.” That wasn’t what you said, was it? “Stranger.” “Visitor” was the correct word. “Stranger” implied an outsider, a threat. “A tourist,” he added for clarification. “I’m a tourist too.”