Kate Atkinson - One Good Turn

Martin went to the bathroom and locked the door. He tried to urinate quietly. He washed his hands and dried them on the thin towel that was damp from Paul Bradley’s ablutions. Paul Bradley’s toothbrush stood at ease in a glass next to the taps. It was old, the bristles worn and splayed, proof of a life that preceded their strange encounter. Martin always found something poignant in the sight of a singular toothbrush. He had never walked into his own bathroom and seen two toothbrushes standing companionably together.

The holdall was on the floor, its mouth gaping wide. Martin could see the black box inside. Surely, Paul Bradley wouldn’t have left it lying there if it contained something private or illegal? Adam’s wife whispered in one ear, Bluebeard’s wife in the other, urging him, Just one look . And Pandora, of course, not to forget Pandora, standing behind him, saying, Open the box, Martin.What harm can there be? He had a vague memory of watching Take Your Pick on television when he was a child, the audience shouting at the contestant, Open the box! The sensible ones took the money, the gamblers opened the box. Martin opened the box.

Inside was a charcoal-colored sponge material that had molded itself to the contents-a golfing trophy, a figure that was eight inches or so high, in a chrome finish that caught the light in the bathroom like a mirror. Dressed in plus fours and diamond-patterned sweater with a tammy on the head, he was caught at the height of his swing, the little pitted ball waiting forever at his feet. The plinth he stood on was engraved with the name R. J. HUDSON-1938, but there was no indication of what tournament it had been awarded for. It looked cheap, a generic kind of thing that ended its life in a charity shop following a house clearance after an old man died. The kind of old man who had lived alone with one toothbrush.

The trophy didn’t look valuable enough to merit a padded box, and the box itself was all wrong, the size of it indicating a void. Nina Riley would have discovered the false bottom immediately. It took Martin a few moments longer. He placed the golfing trophy on the sink, next to the glass containing Paul Bradley’s lone toothbrush, and wrestled with the charcoal sponge. It felt clammy to the touch, like the ancient green oasis that his mother used to stab with flower stems in her less-than-halfhearted attempts at artistic arrangements. Pandora, Eve, Bluebeard’s anonymous wife, and the entire ghostly audience of Take Your Pick were at his back, urging him on. Finally, he managed to remove the sponge.

A gun.

He hadn’t been expecting that somehow, yet when he saw it, there seemed a perfect logic about it.

The fact of the gun was overwhelming, eliminating any thought about the reason for it. It took his breath away, literally, and he had to hold on to the sink for a few seconds before he recovered.

Not any old gun. A Welrod. Of course, that figured, an ex-SBS man would have a Welrod. His father had owned an old one, illegally. He kept it in a shoe box on top of the wardrobe, the same place that Martin’s mother kept her “party shoes”-uncharacteristically frivolous footwear in gold or silver leather. Although Martin was born more than a decade after the war ended, he and Christopher were, nonetheless, brought up on tales of their father’s best years- parachuting behind enemy lines, hand-to-hand combat, daring escapes-like one of their boys’ comics come to life. Were those tales of Harry’s all true? From this distance in time it seemed less likely. After the war, life was, necessarily, a disappointment for Harry. Martin himself knew, from a young age, that any chances he might have had in life to be a hero had already been used up by his father.

Martin wasn’t a stranger to handling guns, his father’s casualness around them had extended to teaching his sons to shoot. Christopher was a rotten shot, but Martin, to his father’s perpetual astonishment, wasn’t too bad. He might not be able to bowl a cricket ball, but he could line up a sight and hit a bull’s-eye. He had never shot at a living thing (to his father’s disgust), limiting himself to inanimate targets in junior competition.

Harry liked to take them out into the woods with shotguns, he was particularly fond of rabbit hunting. Martin had an unfortunate flashback to an image of his father stripping the pelt off a rabbit as easily as peeling a banana. The memory of the glistening candy-pink carcass hidden beneath the fur was still enough to make Martin nauseous, even now.

Once, when Martin and Christopher were children, they came home from school and found their father holding a gun-the Welrod, in fact-to their mother’s head. “What do you say, boys,” his father said, pressing the barrel harder against his wife’s temple, “shall I shoot her?” He was drunk, of course. Martin couldn’t remember what he had said or done, he was only eight at the time and he seemed to have blocked out the rest of the “incident.” He hoped he had stood up for his mother, although God knows there were enough times when she didn’t stand up for him. He always expected that, in the end, his father would blow his own brains out and was surprised by the tameness of his exit.

There was no way he could look at a gun these days and think it was a good thing. He touched it, noticed the slight tremor in his hand. He stroked the metallic smoothness, he’d expected it to be cold but it was almost the temperature of his hand. The Welrod, beloved of special forces everywhere, developed in Britain during the war.The only truly silenced gun. Nine-millimeter, single shot. Not a great range, best close-up. There was only one thing really that you would use a Welrod for, and that was shooting a single target at close range as covertly as possible. In other words, it was an assassin’s gun.

He took a deep breath. He was going to walk out of the bathroom, out of the hotel room, quietly, it was obviously very important not to wake Paul Bradley. He was going to tiptoe down the stairs, past reception, and out of the building, then he would jump in the first taxi he found and ask to be taken to the nearest police station.

He opened the bathroom door. Paul Bradley was sleeping soundly, snoring gently, his arms flung out innocently, like a child’s. Martin began to cross the room toward the door, but his legs started to melt. When he looked down, the carpet was swimming in front of his eyes. A spasm of dizziness seemed to pass through his brain. He was suddenly extraordinarily tired, he had never been this tired in his life, he hadn’t known it was possible to be this tired. He had to lie down and sleep for a little while, right here on this unpleasant tartan carpet.

Gloria made sure all the doors and windows were locked, set the burglar alarm, and then went down to the basement to check the security cameras.

All quiet on the garden front, except for a vixen trotting briskly across the lawn. Gloria put out food for the foxes most nights, she’d started by just giving them leftovers, but now she often bought them food specially, packets of pork sausages, a little piece of stewing steak. For the hedgehog (there may have been more than one, but how could you tell?) she put out cat food and bread and milk. The fox ate that as well, of course. Sometimes rabbits romped on the lawn (the fox ate them too), and Gloria had seen countless neighborhood cats, as well as the small, shy rodents that only came out at night. The fox particularly liked the small, shy rodents. Sometimes, down in the basement, it was like watching a nature program on television.

The night-vision cameras showed everything in strange greens and grays so that it seemed like a different garden altogether, a shadowy place seen through ghostly eyes. Something moved in the chaos of leaves that formed the big rhododendron bushes along the drive. Something glinting, diamonds set in jet. Eyes. Gloria tried to think what animal could be that tall. A bear? A horse? Both unlikely. She blinked and it was gone. A creature of the night.