Kate Atkinson - One Good Turn

Another wave came, lapping at Jackson’s boots. He was going to be trapped in this place if he didn’t get a move on. He took out his mobile and dialed 999, but there was only the squeaky electronic noise that indicated no signal. He remembered the camera in his pocket, at least he’d be able to give the police a record of her in situ before he moved her. He took a quick shot, not the usual holiday snap of a tourist, but then he had to abandon the idea of photographing anything because the water was rising so fast now that he had to wade into the water to grab hold of her. Just as he did, however, a wave bigger than all the ones that had gone before caught her, lifted her up, and rolled her away. Oh bugger , Jackson thought. He flung the camera down, threw off his jacket, and launched himself into the freezing gray water. The cold of the water was astonishing, the swell more powerful than it looked. Jackson didn’t think that any of his Celtic ancestors had been the seafaring sort. He was a good swimmer, but water wasn’t his element, he liked earth, the ground under his feet.

He had put a swimming pool in the garden of his house in France. It was tiled with little azure mosaics, and in summer the sun on the water was so dazzling that you could barely look at it. When he lived in Cambridge he used to go for a run every morning, but since moving to France it had seemed a ridiculous thing to do. No one ran in rural France. They drank. If you didn’t drink you weren’t part of the social fabric. The French seemed able to down liters of alcohol without facing any consequence whereas Jackson felt the consequences almost every morning. So he swam in his turquoise-mosaic swimming pool, up and down, up and down, lap after lap, to swim off the alcohol, the boredom.

His swimming pool bore no relation to the hostile environment of the Forth in August. “Sagittarius,” Julia said. “You’re a fire sign, water is your enemy.” Did she believe crap like that? “Watch out for Pisceans,” she told him. “Pisces” was the Latin for “fish.” At home in France his swimming pool was a piscine. Julia was an Aries, another fire sign, not ideal, she said. Fighting fire with fire. What would happen to them, would they just burn up? Become cold ashes?

He managed to grab the dead woman beneath the shoulders, lifesaving style, but she was a deadweight, in all ways. A relentless succession of waves began to batter them both. Jackson took in a mouthful of brackish seawater that left him choking. He tried to tread water while he worked out the best way of getting them both out of the sea, but the waves kept coming. Jackson had saved people from drowning, once on duty, once off. And once, on a holiday weekend in Whitby with Josie and Marlee, he had watched as a man jumped into the sea off the pier after his dog- a bouncy little terrier that had been so excited it had simply raced off the edge and into the sea below, while all around people screamed in horror. The man got into difficulties immediately, and another two men dived in after him. They were brothers, both in their thirties, married with five children between them. Only the dog came out of the water alive. Jackson would have jumped in too, tried to rescue the lot of them, but the anchor of a hysterical four-year-old Marlee around his leg had prevented him. The inshore lifeboat was on its way by then, he told himself afterward, but to this day he hadn’t forgiven himself, and if he could have put the clock back he would have shaken Marlee off and jumped in. It wasn’t heroism, it was a kind of necessity. Maybe that was a Catholic thing too.

He went under, still hanging on to the leaden girl. Somewhere in his head he could hear Marlee screaming, “Daddeee!” and the old woman at the bus stop saying, “It’s very nice out at Cramond… you’ll like it,” and for a glorious second he was back in his swimming pool in France, the warm sun reflecting off the turquoise mosaics. He knew he was being pulled farther away from land all the time, knew that the dead woman was going to drag him under like some lovesick mermaid. Half-woman, half-fish, a Piscean. The words from Binyon’s poem came to him: “They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old.” He thought how ironic it would be if he drowned trying to save a corpse. He wondered if part of him believed he could still save her. That would be that pesky Catholicism then. He wondered if he was still trying to save the three men who drowned off the Whitby pier. If he wanted to save himself he was going to have to let her go. But he couldn’t.

The Little Mermaid -Marlee had loved that when she was little. She would never be little again, she was poised, right on the cusp of her future. If he drowned he would never see her in that future. The briny deep . He didn’t know why those words came into his head, they must belong to someone else. Of his bones are coral made . No coral in the Forth. Julia, as brown as a nut, swimming in his pool in France, Julia punting him down the river in Cambridge, Julia the ferrywoman rowing him over the Styx. Marlee had a book called Greek Myths for Children that she had made him read to her. He had learned a lot from that book, his introduction to classicism.

He sent up a prayer to whatever god was on duty that afternoon, sent another one up to Mary, Mother of God, a recessive instinct, the knee-jerk reaction of a lapsed Catholic staring death in the face. Was this how it was going to be? No last rites, no extreme unction? He always imagined he would come round at the end, fall back into the fold, embrace the mother of all churches and have his slate wiped clean, but it looked like that wasn’t going to happen now.

He remembered seeing his sister’s body being pulled out of the canal-of course- that was why it wasn’t his element, why hadn’t he realized that before? Nothing to do with star signs. Stella Maris . Our Lady of Sorrows with a starry crown upon her head. Water, water everywhere. He was going down, down to Poseidon’s watery realm, the mermaid was taking him home with her.

Graham had been transferred from the A and E to the ICU. According to the staff in the ICU, there had been no change in his condition. Gloria wondered if he would stay like this forever, as passive as a stone effigy on a sarcophagus. Perhaps he would be moved into some long-term care facility, where he would use up valuable resources for several more decades, depriving more worthy people of kidneys and hips. If he were to die now there might be bits of him that could be recycled in a more socially useful person.

It was quiet in the ICU, the pace of life slower and denser than in the outside world. You could feel how the hospital was a big humming machine, sucking air in and pushing it out, leaking an invisible life-chemicals, static, bugs-through its pores.

Gloria regretted that she wasn’t a knitter, she could be producing a useful garment while waiting for Graham to die. The tricoteuse of the ICU. Beryl, Graham’s mother, had been a knitter, producing endless matinee sets when Emily and Ewan were babies-hats, jackets, mittens, bootees, leggings-threaded with fiddly ribbons and full of holes for tiny fingers to get caught in. Gloria had dressed her children up like dolls. Emily put the oddly named Xanthia into sensible stretchy white suits and little beanie hats. Gloria hardly ever saw her grandchild. When Emily announced she was pregnant, you would have thought she was the first woman on the planet to ever have a baby. To be honest, Gloria would have been more excited if her daughter had given birth to a puppy rather than the permanently angry Xanthia, who seemed to have inherited Emily’s worst traits.

She regarded the steady rise and fall of Graham’s chest, the lack of expression on his face. He looked smaller. He was losing his power, shrinking, no longer a demigod. How are the mighty fallen. Graham made a little noise, a susurration as if he were speaking in a dream. His features remained unmoved, however. Gloria stroked his hand with the back of her fingers and felt a twinge of sorrow. Not for Graham the man so much as Graham the boy she had never known, a boy in long flannel shorts and gray shirt and school tie and cap, a boy who knew nothing about ambition and acquisition and call girls. “You stupid bugger, Graham,” she said, not entirely without affection.