Kate Atkinson - One Good Turn

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 excited by the idea. “Probably,” she agreed.

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.