Kate Atkinson - One Good Turn

Jim was a good sort, he was so grateful he would have cut off a limb and presented it to her in a glass case if she’d asked. Lily must be honest beyond the call of duty because she told her father about it, Louise couldn’t imagine herself owning up at that age. Any age, come to that. Louise wouldn’t have said anything to Jim about the bust, didn’t think it was nice to tell tales. The way she looked at it, if Jim ever found himself in a similar situation with Archie, Archie would have a get-out-of-jail-free card and at least one member of the Lothian and Borders Police on his side. Two if you count his mother, of course.

She emptied half a packet of Tic Tacs into her mouth, and she was as ready as she ever would be.

Richard Mott didn’t wake. He lay untroubled in Martin Canning’s living room in Merchiston. It was a large neo-Gothic Victorian mansion, with something of the manse about it. The front lawn was dominated by a single enormous monkey puzzle tree, planted when the house was still quite new. The house was masked from the road by ranks of mature trees and shrubbery. Nowadays the intricate cabling of the monkey puzzle tree’s roots extended far beyond the front lawn, curling around gas and sewer pipes in the street and poking silently into other people’s gardens.

The smashed-up Rolex on Richard Mott’s wrist showed he had died at quarter to six (a flat line, appropriately), watched over by only the little red demon eye on the television set-the “fantas-tic” one that for a second he had hoped to barter for his life-and with nothing for company but the faint noises of the suburban world, growing louder as the morning wore on. The milk van had rattled its way along the street. It was the kind of affluent suburb that still had milk vans delivering glass bottles on the doorstep. The post had slipped through the letter box in a subdued way. In Lon-don, the day never began for Richard Mott until the post arrived. He always felt that days when there was no post (although there was always post) never really began at all. Today there was post, nearly all of it for him, redirected “c/o Martin Canning”-a check from his agent, a postcard from a friend in Greece, two fan letters balanced by two hate letters. Despite the arrival of the post, however, this day was never going to begin for Richard Mott.

It was the maid who found him. The maid was Czech, from Prague, a physics graduate. Her name was Sophia, and she was spending the summer “working her arse off”for a pittance. They weren’t “maids,” they were cleaners, “maid” was a stupid old-fashioned name. They were employed by a firm called Favors, and they arrived mop-handed in a pink van under the supervision of a gang leader who was called the “Housekeeper”-a woman who came originally from the Isle of Lewis and who was mean to all the maids. With agency fees and hidden bonuses, it cost three times as much to hire Favors as it did to have a cleaner come in a couple of days a week. So, generally speaking, the houses they went to belonged to people who were too rich or too stupid (or both) to think of a cheaper alternative. They had little pink busi-ness cards on which the strapline read, WE HAVE DONE YOU A FAVOR! Sophia had learned the word “strapline” (and the word “arse” and many other things) from her Scottish boyfriend, who was a marketing graduate.When the maids finished they were supposed to leave one of the little pink cards, after they had written on them, “Your maids today were Maria and Sharon.” Or who-ever. Half the maids were foreign, most of them Eastern Euro-pean. “Economic immigration,” they called it, but really it was just slave labor.

They were given a checklist of tasks by the Housekeeper. This checklist had been agreed on beforehand with the owner of the house and always said obvious things such as “Clean bathroom sink,” “Vacuum stairs,” “Change beds.” It never said “Clean up cat sick,” “Change spunky sheets,” “Take hair out of bathroom plug hole,” which would have been more like the truth. Some people were pigs, they left their nice houses in a disgusting state. “Spunky,” obviously, was a word Sophia had learned from her Scottish boyfriend. He was a good source of the vernacular even though he was very shallow, but a great fuck (his words), which was what you wanted in a foreign boyfriend. Otherwise, why bother?

The Housekeeper usually drove them in the pink van and dropped them off and then did God knows what, nothing too strenuous, probably. Sophia imagined her sitting somewhere in a comfortable chair, eating chocolate biscuits, and watching Good Morning .

They had three houses to clean in Merchiston, all close to one another, so it was probably word of mouth-because whatever else they were, the Favors maids were good at cleaning. The house with the monkey puzzle tree (very nice, Sophia fantasized about living there) was somewhere they went every week. The owner was hardly ever there, when they came in the front door, he disappeared out the back door, like a cat. He was a writer, the Housekeeper said, so don’t ever disturb any papers, any writing. It was the cleanest, tidiest house they went to, nothing ever out of place, beds made, towels folded, all the food in the fridge inside neat plastic containers from Lakeland. You could have sat in the kitchen and drunk coffee and read the newspaper and then left without doing any cleaning, and the Housekeeper would never have known. But Sophia wouldn’t do that. She wasn’t lazy. In this house she polished and swept and vacuumed even more because the writer deserved it for being so clean himself. And now also because the writer had a visitor who was a pig, who smoked and drank and left his clothes on the floor and, if he caught sight of her, said filthy, suggestive things.

He had offered money to one of the other maids, a sad Ro-manian girl, and she had gone upstairs with him (“to have it off”), and then he had given her only half the money and a signed pho-tograph of himself. “Wanker,” all the maids agreed, Sophia had taught them the word, courtesy of her Scottish boyfriend. It was a very useful word, they said. But the girl was stupid to have gone with him. She cried for days afterward, spilling tears onto nice polished surfaces and using up clean towels. She was a virgin, she said, but she needed the money. Everyone needed money. Lots of the girls were here illegally, some had their passports confiscated, some disappeared after a while. Sex traffic. It would happen to the Romanian girl, you could see it in her eyes. There were rumors about bad things that had happened to some of the girls that worked for Favors, but there were always rumors and there were always bad things happening to girls. That was life.

Sophia liked to think that the writer wasn’t too rich or stupid to hire a regular cleaner but that he maybe liked the impersonal nature of Favors’ service. Sophia imagined that writers were peo-ple who didn’t like to get too close to other people in case it stopped them from writing.

Today they were short-staffed because there was “flu going round,” and the Housekeeper said, “Start on your own,” so Sophia rapped on the door of the writer’s house. She had a key, but they were supposed to knock first. She rapped again loudly, the writer had a good brass door knocker in the shape of a lion’s head, and there was something satisfying about using it, like being the po-lice. When there was no answer, she let herself in with the key and announced, “Favors here,” in a loud singsong voice just in case the writer was in bed having it off with someone. Very unlikely, no sign of a sex life with a woman or a man anywhere in the writer’s house. Not even any porn. A few photographs in frames, she rec-ognized Notre Dame in Paris, Dutch houses along a canal- tourist photographs like postcards, no people in the photographs.