One Good Turn

by Kate Atkinson

  “Well, no rest for the wicked,” the minister said eventually, standing up and holding one of her hands in both of his for an intense moment. “Always a difficult time when a loved one is in the hospital,” he said, glancing vaguely at Graham. Even supine and comatose Graham failed to look like a loved one. “I hope it all goes well for you,” the minister murmured.

  “So do I,” Gloria said.

  12

  Louise was running. Louise hated running, but it was marginally preferable to going to the gym. The gym involved regular commitment, and outwith her job, she was crap at regular commitment. Go ask Archie. So, all in all, it was easier to grit her teeth and throw on her sweats, then jog sedately around the estate to warm up before heading off over the fields and, if she was feeling virtuous, or guilty (the other side of the coin), then up the hill and back again. The one good thing about running was that it gave you the space to think. That was the downside as well, of course. Dualism, the Edinburgh disease, Jekyll and Hyde, dark and light, hill and valley, New Town, Old Town. Catholics and Protestants. A game of two halves. An eternal Manichaean dichotomy. It was her day off and she could have had a swim, read a book, caught up with laundry, but no, she had chosen to run up a bloody big hill. Confessions of a justified sinner. “Antisyzygy and the Scottish Psyche.” She had done Hogg for her undergraduate dissertation, but then, who hadn’t?

  She had drunk what she thought of as a moderate three glasses of wine last night, but it was taking its toll on her. Her mouth felt like an old boot, and the Peking duck that had accompanied the wine still lived on like a game old bird. A rare and belated girls’ night out at the Jasmine, to celebrate Louise’s promotion two weeks ago. Afterward they had gone to “see something at the Festival,” a vague, unplanned mission that hadn’t taken into account the fact that anything good was going to be sold out by the time they arrived. They had ended up in a dive near the police mortuary, appropriately, and had gone to see some dreadful has-been comic. Three glasses of wine and Louise found herself heckling. They had made their rowdy way back through the Old Town, belting out “(You Make Me Feel Like) a Natural Woman” like the worst of hen parties. Louise liked to think it was Carole King’s own version rather than anything more unbridled, but she might have been kidding herself. They were lucky they weren’t lifted by the police. Shameful.

  But there you go, she was paying for it now, because no good member of the narrow church that was Scotland got away without punishment. Scot-free.

  By the time she was halfway up the hill, her breathing had started to become labored. She was thirty-eight and worried that she wasn’t as fit as she would like to be, as fit as she should be. She had a pain exactly where her appendix would be if she still had one, she imagined an empty space where it had nestled like a fat worm. It had come out last year (“whipped out” seemed to be the cliché that hospital staff adhered to). Both her mother and her grandmother had to have appendectomies, and she wondered if that meant Archie would lose his too.

  Archie talked vaguely about traveling in his gap year, although, at fourteen, both concepts—traveling and gap year—were still too far away to seem more than part of a nebulous, improbable future to him. She wondered if she could persuade him into having elective surgery on unnecessary organs before he set off (if he set off— she couldn’t imagine him having the energy, he was so lazy) so that he wouldn’t find himself halfway up a mountain in New Zealand with peritonitis. A hundred or so years ago and Louise would be dead now. Or teeth—teeth must have killed a lot of people, abscesses that led to blood poisoning. A scratch, a cold.

  The littlest thing. Her own mother died of liver failure, her flesh the color of ancient vellum, her organs pickled. Served her right. When Louise went to look at her in the Co-op undertakers last week, she had to resist the urge to take a needle with her, the old sailor’s trick for death at sea, and push it through the yellow flesh (like rancid cheese) of her nose. Just to make sure she was really dead.

  Her funeral was four days ago, at Mortonhall Crematorium, a service as torpid as her life. Though her name was Aileen, the minister drafted in continually referred to her as “Eileen,” but neither Louise nor the ramshackle bunch of people who regarded themselves as her mother’s friends had bothered to correct him. Louise liked the way “Eileen” made her mother seem like someone else altogether, a stranger and not her mother.

  When she was doing her cool-down stretches on the front path, she noticed the thing on the doorstep where the milk would have been if they delivered milk in this area. A nondescript brown canister. She felt a sudden irrational fear. A bomb? Some weird practical joke? Would she open it and find feces or worms or something poisonous? It took her a couple of seconds of panic before she realized it was an urn, and that inside the urn was what was left of her mother. For some reason she had expected something tasteful and classical—an amphora made from alabaster, with a lid and a finial, not something made from a kind of plastic material that looked for all the world like a tea caddy. She remembered her mother’s cousin saying he would collect the ashes from the crematorium for her. If it had been left up to her, she wouldn’t have bothered.

  Now she was left with the problem of what to do with the remains. Could she just put them in the bin? She had the feeling that that might be illegal.

  She turned her key in the lock but had to give the front door a hefty shove to get it open. It had been a wet summer and all the wood in the house had swelled, although the door had fitted badly to begin with. The house was only three years old but had all kinds of small annoying things wrong with it—snagging that had never got done no matter how many times she had complained— cracked plaster, sockets that were attached to the wall rather than the baseboard, a kitchen sink that wasn’t earthed. Thank you, Graham Hatter. The house was the “Kinloch” and was the smallest detached you could buy, but it was a house, a proper house, the two-eyes-and-a-mouth kind that she used to draw when she was a child, houses that contained an ideal family. She had drawn that too—mother, father, two children, and a dog. All she’d had in reality was the mother, a pretty piss-poor one at that. Poor Louise. When she thought of her days as a child, she usually put herself in the third person. She was sure a psychiatrist would have a field day with this fact, but no psychiatrist was ever going to get anywhere near her head.

  Modern houses were shit, but the estate (“Glencrest”) was safe, inasmuch as anything ever was, most of the neighbors in her little enclave knew one another, if only by sight. There were no pubs anywhere near, there was a Neighborhood Watch, there were young women with pushchairs who went to Mother and Baby Groups, there were guys who washed their cars on the weekend. It was as near as you got to normal.

  She took the urn inside with her and placed it on the kitchen draining board. She unscrewed the lid and poured some of the contents into a saucer and examined them, poking them around with a knife like a forensic technician. It was gritty, more like clinker than ash, and Louise half-expected to see a bit of tooth, a recognizable bone. Toxic waste. Perhaps if she added water to the saucer, her mother would be resurrected, the clay reformed from the dust. Her mothwing lungs might reinflate and she would rise like a genie from the urn and sit opposite Louise at the too-small kitchen table in the too-small kitchen and tell Louise how sorry she was for all the bad things she’d done. And Louise would say, “Too fucking late, get back in your urn.”

  The cat, old and arthritic, jumped awkwardly onto the draining board and sniffed hopefully at the contents of the saucer. Jellybean’s health was failing, he had a tumor growing inside him, the vet said “the time was coming very soon” when Louise was going to have to make a “decision.”

  Jellybean was once a tiny, hurtling ball of fur as light as a shuttlecock, now he was a sack of bones. He was older than Archie, Louise had known the cat longer than she’d known anyone else, except for her mother, and she didn’t count. She had found him when he was a kitten, abandoned in an empty house. She’d never had a pet, didn’t lik
e cats, still didn’t like cats, but she loved Jellybean. It was the same with kids, she didn’t like babies, didn’t like children, but she loved Archie. She couldn’t say it to anyone (especially not Archie) because they would think she was mad, but she thought she might love Jellybean as much as she loved Archie. Possibly more. They were her pair of Achilles’ heels. They said love made you strong, but in Louise’s opinion it made you weak. It corkscrewed into your heart and you couldn’t get it out again, not without ripping your heart to pieces. She kissed the top of Jellybean’s wobbly head and felt a sob catch in her chest. Jeez, Louise, pull yourself together, for fuck’s sake.

  The front door crashed open and was slammed shut again. Archie’s passage through the house was marked by the noise of things thrown and dropped and walked into. He was like the ball in a pinball machine. He exploded into the kitchen, nearly falling over his own feet. After he was born, the midwife said, “Boys wreck your house, girls wreck your head.” Archie seemed intent on doing both.

  He looked hot and bothered. She remembered that feeling, suddenly having to don a school uniform in what still felt like the middle of summer. English schools went back in September, but Scottish schools had always thought it a good idea to make kids go back in the dog days of heat. It would be a Presbyterian thing. No doubt John Knox looked out his window one fine August morning and saw a kid bowling along the street with a hoop, or whatever kids did in the sixteenth century, and he thought, That child should be suffering in a hot, airless classroom in a uniform that makes him ridiculous.

  Yeah, that would be Knox, Louise thought. Hey, Knox, leave that kid alone.

  What had happened to her little boy? Had he been eaten by this monster? Not long ago Archie had been a handsome child—silky blond hair, round, kissable arms. Looking at him now, in his badly fitting body that seemed to have been put together from the salvage of other people’s limbs, she found it hard to believe that women would ever find him attractive, that he would have sex with them, that he would fumble and wrestle and convulse, that he would do it with virgins and married women, with college students and girls who worked in shops. Her heart ached for him in his new ugliness, made even more poignant somehow by the fact that he seemed unaware of it.

  “What’s that?” Archie asked, glancing at the saucer of ash. No “Hello, Mum,” no “How was your day?”

  “My mother, what’s left of her.”

  He grunted incomprehension.

  “She was cremated last week,” Louise reminded him. A public burning. She hadn’t allowed Archie to go to the crematorium, she’d kept him away from his grandmother when she was alive, so she wasn’t going to waste his time on her when she was dead. Louise took the morning off work, said she had a hospital appointment. It was amazing the lies you could tell that were believed without question. If anyone had looked back through her employment records, they would have seen that they showed her mother was already dead, everyone she knew believed that her mother died long ago. “She’s dead to me,” she would have said, if challenged over her veracity.

  Archie lifted up the saucer and scrutinized the contents. “Cool,” he said. “Can I have it?”

  It wasn’t his fault (she had to remind herself on a daily basis) that some unkind biological imperative had turned him into a hormone factory on overtime, producing torrents of the stuff on double shift. He should be out playing football, pool in a church youth club, on parade with the army cadets, anything that would channel the glut of chemicals in his body, but no, he spent his time lying around in the smelly lair of his bedroom, hooked up to his iPod, his PlayStation, his computer, the TV, like some kind of half-human, half-robot hybrid that needed electricity to maintain life. Bionic boy.

  At least he wasn’t on drugs (not yet, anyway). She was pretty sure she’d be able to tell. Some porn in the form of magazines— she doubted there was anything he could hide from her, she was ruthless, she was an expert at that kind of thing, she was a mother. A few fairly tame porn mags—that was all par for the course for a fourteen-year-old, wasn’t it? Better to be realistic than draconian. No online porn as far as she knew, unless he’d got himself a credit card, although it would hardly be difficult and he was good with computers, although not as good as his friend Hamish Sanders. Hamish was scarily good for a fourteen-year-old. Boys were definitely hardwired for that sort of stuff. Hamish set up Louise’s broadband, and he was a hacker, she was pretty sure of it. She didn’t like Hamish, he was a natural-born liar and full of shit. Louise was a natural-born liar too, but her lies had always tended to be utilitarian rather than malicious. That was her excuse, anyway.

  The first time Archie brought him back to the house, Hamish said, “Hello, Ms. Monroe. Is it all right if I call you ‘Louise’?” and she’d been so surprised she hadn’t said, “No, it’s not, you little wanker.” Hamish was a new friend, he had been expelled from his posh school and wheedled into Gillespie’s by his parents. Louise was still trying to find out what he had been expelled for. “Stuff,” Archie said.

  “Ooh, your mum’s such a cop, Archie,” she had overheard Hamish saying. “She’s so powerful. I love it.”

  She wasn’t sure how much Archie himself knew about hacking. She wouldn’t mind so much if they were trying to get into the Pentagon or bring down a multinational, but they were probably just crashing some poor schmuck’s e-mail in Singapore or D�orf.

  The shoplifting was probably a one-off. All kids shoplifted. Louise had shoplifted, Woolworth’s was begging you to slip their merchandise into your pocket—sweets, pencils, key rings, lip-stick—and Louise wouldn’t have had any of that stuff if she hadn’t taken it. When she was older she got a Saturday job at Woolworth’s and always turned a blind eye to the thieving kids. But her own son, that was something different. Do as I say, not what I did.

  Still, look on the bright side—he had friends (would-be Gothic slackers like himself, but friends were friends), and he wasn’t dead. That was always the bottom line with kids. Dead was the un-thinkable. Never think it in case you make it come true, like some kind of bad voodoo.

  “How was school?” The daily litany since he was five. “What did you do?” No satisfactory answer had ever been forthcoming. “We drew a tree, we had custard for lunch, a boy fell and hurt himself.” No information about the curriculum. Louise used to wonder if they ever taught them anything. Now she didn’t even get these little daily tidbits.

  Archie mumbled something.

  “What?”

  “Stuff,” he said, looking at the floor. She couldn’t remember the last time he had made eye contact with her.

  “You did ‘stuff ’ at school?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “Mm.” He gave the impression he was thinking but he looked vague, disassociated. Had he taken something? “What the Nazis did for us,” he said finally.

  “I think you might have got that slightly wrong.”

  She would have liked a good argument with him, a rumbustious set-to, but he couldn’t do that, if she started in on him he just went quiet, waited it out patiently until she’d finished and then said, “Can I go now?”

  The phone rang. She knew without answering it that it would be work. It was her day off, but they were short-staffed, everyone down with a bug, she’d been expecting all day to be called in. She watched Archie while she was talking on the phone. He was having a staring competition with the cat, not much of a competition probably, as Jellybean had cataracts and had started bumping into walls and furniture in much the same way that Archie did. Archie didn’t seem to have any fond feelings for animals, but she’d never seen him be actively cruel to one. He wasn’t a potential psychopath, she reminded herself, just a fourteen-year-old boy. Her baby. She put the phone down. “I have to go,” she said. “There’s been an incident out at Cramond.”

  “I know what ‘incident’ means,” he said. “It means somebody’s dead.”

  Louise wished he didn’t look quite so excite
d by the idea. “Probably,” she agreed.

  13

  Martin was beginning to feel sick. He had eaten too many mints and nothing else, still living off the modest piece of toast he’d breakfasted on this morning, in another lifetime.

  He went outside for some air and read the bus timetables. He sat on a low wall until it started to rain and then came back inside and found the hospital chapel. It was pleasantly nondescript, a relief from the continual to-ing and fro-ing that seemed to form the bedrock of hospital life. All this time he had Paul Bradley’s holdall with him. It was black, made from a cheap imitation leather that seemed unaccountably masculine. The bag had a collapsed look about it, like a mouth with no teeth, and its strange gravity suggested it contained a brick or a Bible. He placed it on the seat next to him.

  Martin had grown more and more curious about the stranger he was waiting so stoically for, and the longer he waited the more the intrigue scratched away at him. He had begun to think there was a short story in there somewhere, a novel even, a serious one, not a Nina Riley. A piece plotted around the mysterious stranger who comes into town. No, that sounded like A Fistful of Dollars. A man whose day is changed, who goes from being anonymous and unrecognized to being the center of an unlooked-for drama. It would be existential yet gripping (the two rarely went hand in hand, in Martin’s experience). Where had Paul Bradley been going before his destiny was changed? The littlest thing. A man stepping off the pavement in front of your car. A girl saying, “You want coffee?” The littlest thing could change your life forever.

  Martin wondered if it was really his meanderings that had brought him to the chapel. Wasn’t it because he knew it would be the least busy place in the hospital? Hadn’t temptation lured him like something vaguely obscene so that he could look in the holdall? Wasn’t knowledge the reward of temptation? Eve, Adam’s disobedient wife, knew that. So did Bluebeard’s disobedient wife, nameless like Martin’s own imaginary spouse.