Kate Atkinson - One Good Turn

One day, undoubtedly, his daughter, Marlee, would be drunk. Statistically she would smoke cigarettes in her adolescence. Take drugs at least once, have a near miss in a car. Suffer a broken heart (or several), give birth twice, get divorced once, have an illness, need an operation, grow old. If she grew old she would have osteoporosis and arthritis, shuffle along with a walking stick or a shopping cart, need a hip replaced, watch her friends die one by one, move to a nursing home. Die herself.

“Mr. Brodie?”

“Yes.”

By the end of the afternoon a lot of hardware had buzzed around the area, the RAF, the RNLI, a police launch, a Port Authority pilot vessel, plus a lot of manpower-all to no avail. They found zilch, not even the camera he’d left behind when he went into the water, although they had recovered his jacket (thank you), which at least proved he had been on the island because even that seemed to be in question.

“Well, at least you didn’t imagine that,” Louise Monroe said. She smiled, she had a crooked smile that took the edge off any congeniality.

“I didn’t imagine any of it,” Jackson said.

Consider the first person on the scene as a suspect. That was what she was doing. It was what he would do. “What was the purpose of your visit to Cramond, sir?” What could he say-loafing? That he was at a permanently loose end? He thought about saying, “I understand I’m one of you,” but he wasn’t, not anymore, he wasn’t part of the coterie anymore. The club. And part of him-a perverse part, undoubtedly-was curious to know what it was like on the other side. It had been a long time since he’d visited that other side, Jackson’s criminal career started and ended when he was fifteen and was caught breaking into the local shop with a friend to nick cigarettes. The police caught them and hauled them off to the station and frightened the life out of them.

“There was a card,” he said suddenly to Louise Monroe. “I’d forgotten. It was a business card. Pink, black lettering, it said-” What did it say? He could see the card, he could see the word, but he couldn’t read it, as if he were trying to decipher something in a foreign language or a dream. Feathers? Fantasia? And a phone number. His good memory for numbers, just about all he had a good memory for nowadays, seemed to have deserted him. “The name began with an ‘F,’ ” he said. He couldn’t remember what he’d done with the card, you would have thought he would have put it in his jacket pocket, but there was no sign of it.

“We didn’t find a pink card when we were on the island,” Louise Monroe said.

“Well, you weren’t looking for one, were you?” Jackson said. “It wasn’t exactly big.”

“You photographed a dead body?” the butch DC said suddenly, giving him a “you crazy psycho” look.

He thought of the pictures inside the camera, the little jewellike compositions of Venice with Julia in all her loveliness, nestling next to pictures of an unknown corpse. “Of course I did,” he said.

The butch DC was named Jessica-something, he missed her surname when she introduced herself. “Jessica” was a girly name for a girl who wasn’t girly. “Sure this wasn’t a bit of a prank, Mr. Brodie?” Jessica-something said. He ignored her, the name was on the tip of his tongue, feathers, fantasia, fandango-“Favors!” he said suddenly, that was it, that was what had been written on the missing card.

As he was leaving, he heard Louise Monroe requesting the assistance of police divers. He wondered how pissed she was going to be at him if she found nothing. A lot, probably. A uniformed constable gave him a lift back into town, to Julia’s venue, where he discovered the actors taking a break from the dress rehearsal.

Julia, now wan rather than flushed, came outside with him, where she smoked a cigarette with a frightening kind of purpose, her inhalations punctuated by rasping breaths. “Tobias is a pillock,” she said angrily. She was nervy and talkative, where earlier she had been quiet and subdued. “And you know Molly?”

“Mm,” Jackson said. Of course he didn’t.

“The neurotic one,” Julia said (not very helpfully, they were all neurotic as far as Jackson could make out). “Doesn’t know her lines. She’s still on the book.”

“Really?” Jackson said, trying to strike a note of mild outrage at the idea of someone being “on the book.” He wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but he could take an educated guess.

“It was all over the place today, thank God we’ve got previews tomorrow. Did you get my text about the ticket for Richard Mott?”

So that was what her text had said. The name “Richard Mott” was vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t put a face to it. “How come you had a free ticket?” he asked.

“I had a drink with him at lunchtime. He gave me one.”

“Just you?”

“Yes. Just me.” He clearly remembered her having no time for lunch. “We’re going to have to work through lunch.” Jackson frowned.

“Don’t worry,” Julia said, “Richard Mott’s not my type.”

“I’m not worried.”

“You’re always worried, Jackson. It’s your default setting. You could meet up with me afterward. We’re going to be hours yet.” Julia sighed and stubbed her cigarette out and as an afterthought said, “How was your afternoon?”

Jackson considered all the things he could say (I nearly drowned today, I found a corpse, I sparked a huge, futile air-sea search, oh, and the police think I’m a paranoid delusional nutter) and chose, “I went to Cramond.”

“That’s nice, did you take photos?”

“I lost the camera.”

“No! Our camera? Oh, Jackson, that’s awful.” He felt an unexpected swell of emotion when she said “our camera” rather than “my camera.”

He supposed from Julia’s point of view that it was awful, but compared with everything else that had happened to him this afternoon, he found it hard to get worked up about it. “Yeah,” he said. “Sorry.”

He accompanied her back down to her inner circle of hell and watched her walk onstage and take her place in an angst-strewn scene where she had to spend ten minutes staring at a black square that, at that moment (it was a multifunctional piece of scenery), was representing a window opening onto a raging Arctic storm- a fact that Jackson knew only because he had spent some time in London doing lines with Julia. He reckoned he could have understudied for her if necessary (now that would be a nightmare). There was something noble and tragic in the mute pose she adopted. With her sackcloth and disordered hair, she looked like the survivor of something terrible and unspeakable. He wondered if, when she was doing scenes like that, she was thinking about her own past.

He turned abruptly on his heel and potholed his way out of the building. The sound of a police siren somewhere in the distance made his heart leap with the old familiar thrill. When the helicopter and launches had arrived at Cramond, he had badly wanted to take control, it had been hard watching Louise Monroe being the one with all the power. Twice in one day he had observed women younger than himself wielding more authority. Nothing to do with them being women (his only precious child was a girl, after all), more to do with Jackson not being a man. A real man. Real men didn’t accept money off dead old ladies and live in France. He missed his warrant card, he missed his child, he missed his iPod, which he had accidentally left behind. He missed the sad-voiced women who let him share their pain. Lucinda, Trisha, Eliza, Kathryn, Gillian, Emmylou. Most of all he missed Julia, yet she was the one thing he had with him.