Kate Atkinson - One Good Turn

Gloria had a nice little laptop of her own, hooked up to a broadband connection in the kitchen-which was where she spent most of her time, after all, so why not? Graham never used her computer, he did all his dirty business in the office. She could imagine him going on pornography sites, watching one of those webcams where a woman in a room somewhere (anywhere) in the world performed for him.

The only messages Gloria tended to get-apart from the odd missive from her children-were invitations to enlarge her penis or special offers from Boots.com. She would have liked to have checked Graham’s e-mail, but it was password protected. Gloria had been worrying away at it long before the events of yesterday, but she hadn’t yet come up with the open sesame-she had tried that too, along with every other word and combination of words she could think of. “Kinloch,” “Hartford,” “Braecroft,” “Hopetoun,” “Villiers,” and “Waverley.” Nothing. They were the names of the six basic models of Hatter Homes-the “Kinloch” was the cheapest, the “Waverley” the most expensive. The “Hart-ford” and the “Braecroft” were semidetached. Nowadays Graham built a lot more detached houses than he used to. People like de-tached no matter how small, the “Kinloch” was so tiny it reminded Gloria of a Monopoly house.

Next month Gloria would be sixty. She had heard someone on the radio say that “sixty was the new forty.” She had never heard anything so stupid in her life. Sixty was sixty, there was no point in pretending otherwise. Who was going to provide for her in her old age? Whether Graham was dead or alive wasn’t going to make any difference to the police and the courts, they were going to de-stroy Hatter Homes. Quite rightly, in Gloria’s opinion, but it would have been nice if she could have salvaged a little pension for herself before they did. She imagined that somewhere there was a big black book that contained all of Graham’s secrets, all of his money. The Magus’s book. As with capitalism, it was too late to ask him about it now.

She gave up on the password and checked her online bank account. They had a joint account that was mainly for day-to-day bills and housekeeping. Gloria was entirely dependent on Graham for money, a shocking realization that had taken several decades to sink in. One minute you’re sitting on a bar stool drinking a gin-and-orange, worrying about whether or not you look pretty, the next minute you’re a year away from a bus pass, staring bankruptcy and public humiliation in the face. And sixty was the same old sixty as it ever was.

The housekeeping account was drip-fed automatically from a Hatter Homes account, whenever money was debited from it, more was credited, whatever went out one day was topped up overnight. It was almost like magic. No one seemed to have noticed the five hundred a day that Gloria had been siphoning off. Her nest egg. It was entirely legal, it was a joint account, her name was on it. Five hundred a day, every day except Sunday, Gloria’s day of rest, monitored by her Baptist conscience. The new money-laundering regulations made it difficult to move large sums of money around, but five hundred a day seemed to keep her below the radar of both the Hatter Homes accountants and the bank. Sooner or later, she supposed, an alarm bell would ring, a flag would go up, but by then the accounts would all probably be frozen, and if there was any justice in the world, Gloria would be gone with her black plastic bag of swag. Seventy-two thousand pounds wasn’t a lot to start a new life on, but it was better than nothing, better than what most people in the world had.

Gloria emptied Graham’s belongings out of the bag and laid them on the maple wood draining board of the laundry room. His shoes, polished to a licorice-like shine, the jacket and trousers of his suit, the Austin Reed shirt, his expensive silk socks that someone, a nurse presumably, had rolled into a ball, the cotton vest and boxer shorts from Marks and Spencer-his underwear seemed particularly depressing to Gloria-and, last, his blandly corporate tie, curled limply at the bottom of the plastic bag like a dispirited snake.

It was strange to see his clothes laid out like that, flat and two-dimensional, as if Graham had suddenly become invisible while wearing them. Now they had all been swapped for a cotton gown that showed his Roquefort legs and his not-so-firm buttocks. The cotton gown would in turn soon be swapped for a shroud. With any luck.

Gloria had a sudden image of her brother’s mutilated body when it had been shown to his family in the hospital mortuary, wrapped up in white sheets, like a mummy or a present. Gloria wondered which of her parents had thought it was a good idea to let their fourteen-year-old daughter view the dead body of her brother, nicely wrapped or not.

Jonathan had a place at college to do an HND and was working in the mill only for the summer between school and college. There had been several mills in Gloria’s hometown when she was a child, now there were none. Some had been demolished, but most had been converted into flats or hotels, one into an art gallery and another into a museum where ex-mill workers demonstrated to the public the jobs they used to do in a past that was now officially history.

The week before her brother died, he had taken Gloria inside the mill. He was proud of where he was working, doing a “man’s job.” It wasn’t dark and satanic, as she had imagined from singing “Jerusalem” in school assemblies, rather it was full of light and as big as a cathedral, a hymn to industry. Tiny strands and puffs of wool floated in the air like feathers. And the noise! The “clattering, shattering, shuttling noise”-she had written a poem later for her grammar school magazine “in the style of Gerard Manley Hopkins,” thinking it might heal some part of the grief, but the poem was poor (“wool-dappled white air”) and came from the head, not the heart.

There had been talk of prosecution after Jonathan’s death-all kinds of health and safety laws had been flouted at the mill-but it never progressed beyond talk, and Gloria’s parents lacked the passion to pursue it. Her sister (so recently dead) was twenty at the time and upstaged their brother by turning up in a pair of jeans and a black polo-neck sweater for his Baptist funeral. Gloria had fully admired her sister’s gesture.

The only other time Gloria had been inside a real cathedral of industry was long ago, on a school visit to Rowntree’s factory in York, when her class had marveled every step of the way, from the Smarties being tumbled around in what looked like copper ce-ment mixers to the packing room where women were tying ribbons around boxes of chocolates with (yes) pictures of kittens on them. At the end of the tour they had been given bags of mis-shapes of all kinds, and Gloria had returned home triumphantly bearing dozens of two-fingered KitKats that had, like Jonathan, been mangled by the machinery.

She took the phone from Graham’s jacket pocket. What had Maggie Louden said last night? “Is it done yet, is it over? Have you got rid of Gloria? Have you got rid of the old bag?” Was that what she was-an old bag? Maggie Louden was well over forty, she’d be an old bag herself soon enough.

The phone had run out of battery power (rather like its owner). Graham’s suit could do with going to the dry cleaners, but really, why bother? If he died, all of his suits were going to the Oxfam shop on Morningside Road, apart from the one he would wear for his funeral. This one might do, a bit of a brush and a press, no point in getting something cleaned when it was going into the ground to rot.

She plugged Graham’s phone into the charger in the kitchen and carefully typed out a text to Maggie Louden. She tapped out “Am in thurso speak to you tomorrow g” -she was pretty sure Graham wouldn’t bother with any punctuation or grammar, but then she changed it to “Sorry darling am in thurso speak to you tomorrow g” and then redrafted it a third time to “Sorry darling am in thurso not much of a signal here don’t bother phoning speak to you tomorrow g.”