Kate Atkinson - One Good Turn

“I’m sorry,” she said, suddenly contrite, pressing herself against him. He felt her body slacken, as if her strings had just been cut, and he rested his chin on the top of her head. She was taller than usual because of the boots. They both kept their arms by their sides, just leaning against each other like two unbalanced people trying to hold each other up. He smelled her perfume, something spicy like cinnamon that she hadn’t worn before. He noticed for the first time that her earrings were tiny porcelain pansies. He did-n’t think he’d seen them before, either. Her hair was mad as usual, you really could imagine birds nesting in it, he wouldn’t have been surprised if one evening a flock of rooks returned to roost there. (“Wouldn’t that be wonderful?” Julia said.) A chopstick that, in a victory of creativity over physics, seemed to be holding the whole edifice in place nearly poked Jackson’s eye out.

There was a poster on the wall behind them for Looking for the Equator in Greenland . It showed Julia reaching out to the audience in a manner that Julia said was supposed to be beseeching but to Jackson looked whimsical. The faces of the other cast members were stacked in a kind of pyramid around her, in a way that was, unfortunately, reminiscent of Queen in the video for “Bohemian Rhapsody.” It was pasted next to one for Richard Mott’s COMIC VIAGRA FOR THE MIND. Someone had taken a felt-tip pen and scrawled “Canceled” across his face.

She stepped away from him and said, “The preview should be finished about nine, although we ran over this afternoon. We’ll probably go for something to eat, then for a drink. Come and join us, help us lick our wounds.” He wished she was in a good play, one the critics would rave about, one that ended up transferring to the West End.

He had a sudden, horrible thought. “Your sister’s not coming up for your first night, is she?”

“Amelia?”

It was odd the way she said that, as if there were a choice of sis-ters, as if Olivia and Sylvia were still alive. Maybe they were still alive for Julia.

“Yes, Amelia.”

“No. I told her to come later, when the play’s run in a bit. She won’t like it anyway, it’s not her kind of thing. She likes Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov. I thought she could come up and stay for a few days. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

“Hold me back.”

“Don’t be like that, Jackson. Amelia’s all I’ve got.”

Jackson refrained from saying the obvious “You’ve got me” in case it provoked more arguments.

“Oh, I nearly forgot,” Julia said, suddenly animated (when had her moods started changing so quickly?). She reached into her big carpetbag, pulling out an assortment of God knows what before finding what she was looking for. “Free tickets!” she said with an enforced gaiety. When Jackson made no attempt to take them, she pushed them into his hand.

“Who did you have lunch with to get those?” he asked. Why couldn’t he keep his mouth shut? He’d meant it to come out as a joke (not a good one, admittedly), but it ended up sounding offensive. Julia just laughed, though, and said, “Oh, sweetie, I had to fuck two clowns and an elephant to get those tickets. The circus , Jackson, they’re tickets for the circus, they were handing them out for free, drumming up trade, the circus wallah chappie gave them to me. It’ll be good sport. Go. Relive the childhood you never had.”

“ Alime daiquiri and a Glenfiddich, please,” Jackson said to the barman. It was a nice old-fashioned pub, no music or game ma-chines, lots of polished wood and stained glass. He wasn’t a whiskey drinker by nature, yet he seemed to have drunk a lot of the stuff since arriving. It must have been in his Scottish blood all this time, calling to him.

“And yet you’ve never visited Scotland before?” Louise Mon-roe said. “That’s odd, don’t you think? Do you think you’re avoiding something? Psychologically speaking.” No small talk then, Jackson thought, none of that getting-to-know-you stuff, pussy-footing around each other’s past. “I was in France on holiday.”“Oh? What part?” or “You like country music? What a coincidence, so do I.” Cutting straight to the chase instead- “Are you psychologically damaged? Are you in avoidance about something?”

“I don’t know,” Jackson said. “Are you? Avoiding something?”

“Question with a question,” she said as if he’d just failed a test. “The psychopathology of it is interesting, though, isn’t it?” “That’s a big word,” Jackson said. “Pretty and smart, huh?” “You may behave like an idiot, but you’re not stupid.” Jackson wondered if that was supposed to be a compliment. “Anyway, cheers,” she said, taking a healthy swig of her lime daiquiri.

“Confusion to kings and tyrants,” Jackson responded, raising his glass. He was under the impression that a daiquiri was the kind of drink you were supposed to sip. He avoided cocktails in case they arrived encumbered with parasols and sickly sweet cherries on sticks, but the daiquiri looked clean and inviting.

“Try it,” she said, holding the glass out to him, and he felt shocked by the sudden intimacy of the offer. He had been brought up in a parsimonious household where they tended to steal food off one an-other’s plates, not offer it up willingly. He could still see his brother, Francis, winking at him while he filched a sausage off his sister-and getting a box on the ear from Niamh for his efforts. Julia, on the other hand, would share with a dog, she was forever pushing forks and spoons into his mouth, “Try this, eat this,” licking her lips, sucking her fingers, he’d never met anyone before for whom the line between food and sex was so thin. The things she could do with a strawberry were enough to make a grown man blush. He had a sudden image of her in the Nell Gwyn costume, volunteering her breasts to the photographer, oranges are the only fruit. He had seen that on television, Julia had read the book, that was the difference between them. She had a little gap between her front teeth that gave her the slightest of lisps. It was funny-he’d always been aware of that, yet he’d never really thought about it before.

“No, you’re all right,” he said to Louise Monroe, lifting his glass to prove that he was happy with his own choice of alcohol, and she said, “I wasn’t offering to share DNA with you.”

“I didn’t think you were.”

The pub was on a street off the Royal Mile, close to the offices of Favors.

“I see you found the soot-blackened, whiskey-soaked, blood-sodden metaphysical core of the wen that was Edinburgh,” she said when she met him in the cobbled close.

“Right,” he said. She could be quite wordy once she got going. Like Julia. He had finally managed to get a call through to her, and all she could say was, “You should have phoned me before you came here. Oh, no, wait a minute, you’re not a policeman, are you? You shouldn’t have been here in the first place .”

“I couldn’t get ahold of you, you didn’t give me your mobile number.”

“Well, I’m here now, and what exactly am I looking for? I see a very dodgy-looking sauna and a doomed production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle .”

“Shit,”Jackson said, staring at the entrance. There was no longer any sign saying FAVORS-IMPORT AND EXPORT, no sign saying anything at all. No buzzer, no camera. The door was still there, Jackson was relieved to see, so he hadn’t entered some parallel uni-verse, and when Louise Monroe gave it a push, it opened with the theatrical kind of creak that a sound-effects man would have been proud of. They made their way up the stairs, if they had been Americans they would have had their guns out by now, Jackson thought, but as it was, being Scottish and half-Scottish, they had nothing to defend themselves with but their wits.