Kate Atkinson - One Good Turn

“Why didn’t you plead ‘not guilty’?” Julia asked. “You’re an idiot, Jackson.” She no longer sounded sleepy, quite the opposite in fact.

“Thanks for the sympathy.”

“And so, what now?” she asked.

“Dunno. Guess I’ll try to go straight from now on.”

“It’s not funny.”

“Unless you like the idea of being a gangster’s moll.”

“It’s not funny.”

Jackson could hear a door opening and closing and then voices in the background. A man asked a question that Jackson couldn’t catch, and Julia turned her mouth away from the phone and said, “Yes, please.”

“Are you in a shop?”

“No, I’m in rehearsal. I have to go, I’ll see you later.” And she was gone. She couldn’t be in rehearsal, her venue was so far under-ground that no phone signal could penetrate the rock. Jackson sighed. Hard times in Babylon.

Louise had to spend twenty minutes waking Archie up, if she didn’t put the effort in he would still be in his bed when she came home from work. He had been in the shower for almost half an hour, she wouldn’t be surprised if he’d fallen asleep again in there, he certainly never seemed any cleaner when he came out. She didn’t like to think what other things he might be doing in there with his man/boy body. It was hard to remember that he had once been brand-new, as pink and unsullied as Jellybean’s paw-pads when he was a kitten. Now he sprouted hair and stubble, erupted in spots, his voice was on a roller coaster, swooping and plummeting at random. He was undergoing some kind of unnatural transformation, as if he were changing from a boy into an animal, more werewolf than boy.

It was almost impossible to believe now that Archie had come out of her own body, she couldn’t see how he had ever fitted in there. Eve was made from Adam’s body, but in reality men came from inside women-no wonder it did their heads in. Man that is born of woman and is but of few days and is full of trouble. Sometimes you wondered why anyone bothered crawling out of the cradle when what lay ahead was so darn difficult. She shouldn’t think like that, depressive mothers produced depressive children (she had read a clinical study), she had thought that she could be the one to break the cycle, but she hadn’t done a very good job.

She drank coffee and glared at the urn that was still sitting on the draining board. Woman is born of woman. Perhaps she could just scatter the contents in the garden like fertilizer. There was hardly any topsoil out there-thank you, Graham Hatter-so for the first time in her life her mother could perform a useful func-tion. She realized she had bit her lip until it had bled. She liked the taste of her own blood, salty and ferric. She was sure she had read somewhere that there was salt in the blood because all life began in the sea, but she found it hard to believe. It seemed po-etic rather than scientific. She thought of an embryonic Archie, more fish than fowl, curled in his watery environment, tumbling like a sea horse inside her.

She sighed. She couldn’t deal with her mother yet. “I’ll think about it tomorrow,” she murmured. The ghost of Scarlett passed through her, and she acknowledged her with a little salute. Good to see you, Ms. O’Hara .

It could have been the first murder case on which she was se-nior officer in charge, and instead it was turning out to be a mirage. The divers had gone in at first light and found nothing. She’d sent Sandy Mathieson out there to cover for her. Somehow she had known the divers wouldn’t come up with anything. She would probably get hauled over the coals for wasting money and resources. She would like the dead woman to turn up, not because she wanted a woman dead but because she would like to prove that she wasn’t a figment of Jackson Brodie’s imagination. She wanted to justify Jackson. The justified sinner. Was he a sinner? Wasn’t everyone?

Yesterday, Jessica Drummond had checked his credentials with the Cambridge police. Yes, he used to be a detective inspector with them, but he had left a few years ago to set up as a private investigator. “A gumshoe, a private dick ,” Jessica snorted (she really did snort). “ Boy’s Own fantasy stuff.”

Eager beaver , Louise had heard Jessica called. She was trying so hard to become one of the boys that she looked as if she might have started shaving. Compared to her, Louise felt like a great big puffy pink marshmallow of womanhood.

Worse, Jessica went on, Brodie had inherited money from a client and buggered off to retire in France.

“How much money?” Louise asked.

“Two million.”

“You’re joking.”

“No.Two million pounds from a very old lady. You can’t help but wonder how much coercion that involved. Confused old lady changes her will in favor of some sweet talker. I think there’s something wrong with our Mr. Brodie.” She tapped her forehead. “You know, an elaborate hoaxer, misses being a policeman, having a real job, sets about making himself the center of attention. A fantasist.”

“That all sounds a bit soap opera,” Louise said. “And I didn’t see any evidence of sweet-talking.” Quite the opposite, if anything. He had two million in the bank and he was traveling on buses? He didn’t look like the kind of guy who took a bus. “Not everyone has someone who’ll notice they’ve gone.” Was he talking about himself? He had looked right at her when he said it. Did he think she didn’t have anyone who would miss her? Archie would miss her. Jellybean would miss her. Jellybean would miss her more than Archie. Archie would hole up in his bedroom, playing Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction , watching Punk’d and Cribs and Pimp My Ride and ordering pizza on her credit card.

But then what, when the money ran out? He was a boy who could barely open a tin of beans. If she died before her time, then Archie would be an orphan. The idea of Archie as an orphan was a kick to her heart, the next worst thing to his own death (don’t think that). But then everyone became an orphan eventually, didn’t they? She was an orphan herself now, of course, although the difference between her mother being alive and her mother being dead seemed minimal.

For Archie’s sake rather than her own, Louise hoped that she would die a natural death in her own bed when she was a con-tented old woman and Archie was completely grown-up and independent and was ready to let her go. He would have a wife and children and a profession. He’d probably turn out to be a right-wing investment banker and say things to his kids like, “When I was your age, I was a bit of a rebel too.” She would be dead but everyone would be okay about that, including Louise, and her genes would carry on in her child and then in his child, and in this way the world was stitched together.

Louise could imagine being old, but she couldn’t imagine being contented.

“Not many girls drown themselves, though, women aren’t noted for drowning.” She supposed Jackson Brodie was right. Not many women drowned, period. Louise made a mental list of women who had drowned-Maggie Tulliver, Virginia Woolf, Natalie Wood, Rebecca de Winter. True, they weren’t all real, and techni-cally speaking, Rebecca didn’t drown, did she? She was murdered, and she had cancer. The Rasputin of romantic literature-bad women need killing several times over, apparently. You could keep a good woman down but not a bad one. Louise had gone straight into the police after she graduated from St. Andrews with a first in English. Never a backward glance to academia, they had wanted her to do an MPhil, but what was the point, really? In the police you could be out there, on the street, doing something, making a difference, breaking down doors and finding small helpless children at the mercy of their drunken mothers. And you would have the power to take those small helpless children away from their drunken mothers and save them, give them to foster parents, put them in an orphanage, anything rather than leaving them at home to be a witness to their own ravaged childhood. Jackson Brodie didn’t seem like a hoaxer, but then that was the thing about hoax-ers and con men, wasn’t it, they were plausible. Perhaps he had fallen in the water and panicked, hallucinated, made something out of nothing. Invented a corpse out of malice or delusion or plain old insanity. He’d wrong-footed her at first by being so professional- his description of the body and the circumstances in which it was found was what she would expect from one of her team-but who was to say he wasn’t a pathological liar? He had taken photographs but there was no sign of a camera, he had found a card but it had disappeared, he had tried to pull a dead woman from the water but there was no body. It was all very shaky.