Kate Atkinson - One Good Turn

“I’m sorry I was grumpy with you,” Julia said.

“I was grumpy too,” Jackson said magnanimously. He didn’t think he had been, really, but it didn’t hurt to be a little chivalrous, espe-cially as he presumed the logical outcome of Julia in a towel making him breakfast in bed was going to be sex, but when he made a play-ful grab at her, she jumped off the bed as neatly as a cat and said, “I have to get on, I’ve got so much to do.”At the door to the bedroom, she turned back and said, “I love you, you know.”At the beginning of a relationship, Jackson had noticed on more than one occasion in his own life, people looked happy when they said “I love you,” but at the end they said the same words and looked sad. Julia looked pos-itively tragic. But then that was Julia, always overacting.

Jackson’s phone rang and he considered not answering it. Good news always sleeps till noon, isn’t that what they said-or were those the lyrics to a Cowboy Junkies song? He answered it and had to riff on his memory for a while before the name meant something. Martin. Martin Canning, the guy who threw the briefcase at Terence Smith. An odd little guy.

“Hey, Martin,” Jackson said, adopting a false kind of cama-raderie because the guy sounded slightly unhinged. “How can I help you?”

“I wonder if you could do me a favor, Mr. Brodie?”

Jackson could no longer hear the word “favor” without thinking it had dark implications. “Sure, Martin. I haven’t got anything else to do today. And it’s Jackson, call me Jackson.”

“ What are you going to do today?” Julia asked, fully dressed now and too distracted by her own day to be truly curious about his. She was applying her makeup in a little mirror propped up on the kitchen table. A light dusting of face powder had fallen on a pyra-mid of oranges balanced in a glass oven dish. Jackson didn’t remember buying any fruit.

“I’ve got a job,” he said.

“A job?”

“Yes, a job. Some guy wants babysitting today.”

“Babysitting?”

Jackson wondered if she would just keep echoing back to him what he said to her. Wasn’t this what the queen was supposed to do? It gave the impression of polite conversation, it gave the im-pression that you were genuinely interested in what the other person was saying without you having to actually engage with them on any meaningful level, or even listen to them. Testing the the-ory, he said to Julia, “And then I thought I might go and drown myself in the Forth,” but instead of parroting “the Forth?” Julia turned and gazed at him thoughtfully, seeing him rather than looking at him, and said, “Drowned?”

Jackson sensed the mistake immediately. Julia’s eldest sister, Sylvia, had drowned herself in the bath, a formidable act of will that Jackson almost admired. She was a nun, so Jackson supposed all those years of discipline had put the iron in her soul. His own sister hadn’t drowned, she had been raped and strangled and then dumped in a canal. Water, water, everywhere. They were linked, he and Julia, by these things. “Like some kind of karmic concate-nation,” she had ruminated once. He had to look up the word “concatenation,” it had sounded Catholic, but it wasn’t. From the Latin “catena,” a chain. The chain of evidence. Chain of fools. He wished now he’d had a classical education rather than an army ed-ucation. A good school, a degree, the world his own daughter was growing up in. The world Julia had grown up in, but then look how fucked up that had been. He wanted to tell Julia about the woman in the Forth, about his own near-drowning experience, but she had returned to herself, applying lipstick, peering at her lips in the mirror with professional detachment, smacking them together and making a face as if she were kissing her reflection.

Jackson wondered what it said about a relationship when you were unable to tell the “object of your affection” that you had been pulled out of the water like a half-drowned dog. “Lucky”- inevitably-had been the name of the dog that had scooted with joy off the pier at Whitby. The owner of the dog, the first man to drown that day, had a wife and eight-year-old daughter, and Jackson had wondered what had happened to the dog. Had they taken Lucky home with them?

“But you’ll be finished in time for the show?” Julia said.

“The show?”

As she was going out the door, Julia said, “Oh, while I remember, can you do me a favor? I dropped the memory card off at the chemist next to the flat. I thought if you didn’t have anything better to do you could pick the photographs up.”

“And what if I do have something better to do?”

“Do you?” Julia asked, curiosity rather than sarcasm in her voice.

“Hang on,” Jackson said, “back up-what photographs? What memory card?”

“The one from our camera.”

“But I lost the camera,” he said, “I told you I lost it at Cramond.”

“I know, and I told you that I phoned up the police lost prop-erty at Fettes and someone had handed it in.”

“What? You didn’t tell me that.”

“Yes, I did,”Julia said, “unless there was someone else lying next to me in bed pretending to be Jackson.”

When had Julia had time to drop things off at the chemist, to fill up the fruit bowl, to make phone calls, have lunch with Richard Mott? And yet she hadn’t had a second to give to him .

“Scott Marshall,” she continued blithely, “that nice boy who plays my lover, drove out to Fettes and picked it up for me.”

“They just handed it over to him?” Jackson said, astonished ( “my lover,” the way she said it, so casual). “Without any proof?” He thought of the image of the dead girl trapped in the camera. Had someone looked at it, developed it?

“I described the first three photographs on the memory card over the phone,” Julia said, “and that seemed to satisfy them. And I told them that someone named Scott Marshall would be picking them up. He showed them his driver’s license. Crikey, Jackson, do we have to dissect every aspect of police procedure regarding lost prop-erty?”

“What are the first three photographs on the memory card?” Jackson asked.

“Are you testing me?”

“No, no, I’m intrigued. I have no idea what they are.”

“They’re of you,” Julia said, “they’re of you, Jackson.”

“But-”

“I have to dash, sorry, sweetie.”

No wonder identity fraud was such a fast-growing crime. The chemist was as lax as the police, Jackson had no receipt, no proof that the photographs were his, yet they were handed over promptly to him when he said that “Julia Land” had dropped them off this morning. The chemist (a man) smiled at him in a knowing way and said, “Yes, of course,” so Jackson presumed that Julia had used the full force of her orange-selling charms on him. If you were a man, you could be eighty with a Zimmer and Julia would flirt with you while she helped you across the road-because, and this was one of the reasons he loved her, she was the kind of person who walked old people across the roads, helped blind people in supermarkets, scooped up lost cats and injured birds.

She couldn’t help the flirting, it came automatically to her as if it were embedded in her personality. Julia flirted with dogs , for heaven’s sake. He had even seen her flirt with inanimate objects, cajoling a kettle into boiling faster, a car to start, a plant to flower.

“Oh, come on, sweetie, if you just try a little bit harder, you can do it.”

Perhaps he should look on it as a social service rather than as a threat, send her out to old people’s homes to give old guys the illusion of virility, make them feel good about themselves again. Vi-agra for the mind . There was something pathetic about old men. Guys who had fought in wars, witnessed empires topple, strode around boardrooms and factory floors like kings, won the bread, paid the dues, walked the walk, talked the talk, and now they couldn’t even piss without help. Whereas old women, no matter how frail, never seemed as pitiful. Of course there weren’t as many old men around as there were old women. Dry and brittle as old kindling maybe, but they were built to last.