Kate Atkinson - One Good Turn

Jackson kissed her chastely on the forehead. Last night, after the pub, he’d been expecting to have heroic sex with Julia the moment they got through the door of the rented flat in Marchmont that the promoters had found for her. New locations always tended to make her peppy where sex was concerned, but instead she said, “I’m going to die , sweetie, if I don’t go to sleep this very second .” It wasn’t like Julia not to want sex, Julia always wanted sex.

He guessed it was a student flat in term time, Sellotape marks on the wall and a toilet that Jackson used two bottles of bleach on before it even began to look clean. Julia didn’t clean toilets, Julia didn’t really do housework, or not so you would notice. “Life’s too short,” she said. There were days when Jackson thought life was too long. He had offered to pay for something nicer, something more expensive, even a hotel for the run if Julia wanted, but she had been uncomfortable with the idea. “Everyone else living a life of penury while I’m in the lap of luxury? I don’t think that’s right, sweetie, do you? Group solidarity and all that.”

When he woke this morning it was to find Julia’s side of the bed as cold and smooth as if she’d never nested restlessly next to him all night. He could tell the air of the Marchmont flat was undisturbed by her presence, she wasn’t bathing or breathing or reading, none of which she did silently. His heart had given a little contraction of sorrow at her absence. He tried to remember the last time Julia had woken up before him. He didn’t think there ever had been a time. Jackson didn’t like change, he liked to think things could stay the same forever. Change was insidious, creeping up on you as if it were playing a game of statues. From day to day he and Julia seemed to remain the same, but if he thought about them two years ago they were like different people. Then, they had been clinging to each other, grateful, self-indulgent survivors of wreckage and disaster. Now they were just jetsam bobbing on the aftermath. Or was it flotsam? He was never sure of the difference.

“Oh, wait, I’ve got something for you,” Julia said, raking around in her bag and finally producing a timetable for Lothian Buses.

“A bus timetable?” he said when she handed it to him.

“Yes, a bus timetable. So you can catch a bus. And, here, take my Day Saver ticket.”

Jackson wasn’t in the habit of taking buses. Buses, in Jackson’s opinion, were for the old and the young and the dispossessed.

“I know what a bus timetable is,” he said rather churlishly, even to his own ears. “Thanks,” he added, “but I’ll probably go and look at the Castle.”

“And with one bound he was free,” Jackson heard her say as he walked away.

As Jackson made his way out of the labyrinth, he half-expected to find stalactites and stalagmites ( “Stalactites from the ceiling, stalagmites from the ground , the voice of his old geography teacher muttered unexpectedly in his brain). The whole place was carved out of the rock, the walls mildewed, the lighting dim, an underground cavern that gave Jackson the creeps. He thought about his father going down the pit every night.

It felt like an incredibly sick building, Jackson suspected he had inhaled bacilli from the plague. And if there was a fire, he couldn’t imagine anyone getting out alive. Up the road from here there had been a dramatic fire a couple of years ago, and Jackson thought it was probably a good thing-plague followed by cleansing fire. He had asked a lethargic girl at the box office if they had a fire certificate and, if so, could he see it, and she had stared at him as if he’d just grown an extra head in front of her eyes.

Jackson liked things done properly. There was a file in his house in France neatly labeled WHAT TO DO WHEN I DIE, and inside it there was all the information that anyone would need in order to tidy up his affairs once he was gone-the name and address of his accountant and his solicitor, a power of attorney for the same solicitor (in case he went gaga before he died), his will, an insurance policy, his bank details, he was pretty sure he’d covered all the bases, everything squared away because at heart he was still army. Jackson was forty-seven and in good health, but he had seen a lot of people die when they weren’t planning to and had no reason to think it wouldn’t happen to him. There were some things you could control and some things you couldn’t. The paperwork, as they said, you could control.

Jackson was exarmy, ex-police, and now ex-private detective. Ex-everything, except Julia. He had sold his private-investigation business and took a precipitous and unexpected retirement from the world of work after inheriting money from a client, an old woman named Binky Rain. It was a serious amount of money- two million-more than enough to put some away for his daughter and buy a house in France in the foothills of the Pyrenees, complete with a trout stream, an orchard, and a meadow that came all kitted out with two donkeys. His daughter, Marlee, was ten now and was getting to an age where she preferred the donkeys to him. This French life had been his dream, now it was his reality. He had been surprised by the difference between the two.

Julia said two million wasn’t that much, really. Two million was “barely” a flat in London or New York. “A Learjet will set you back twenty-five million,” she said airily, “and you won’t get much change out of five million for a good yacht these days.” Julia never had any money, yet she always behaved as if she had (“That’s the trick, sweetie”) . She had never, as far as he knew, even seen a five-million-pound yacht, let alone stepped on board one. Jackson, on the other hand, had money and behaved as if he hadn’t. He was wearing the same battered leather jacket on his back as before, the same trusty Magnum Stealths on his feet. His hair was still badly cut, and he was still a pessimist. “Everyone else living a life of penury while I’m in the lap of luxury? I don’t think that’s right, sweetie, do you?” No, he didn’t.

“Gosh, you could spend two million in a day, if you put your mind to it,” Julia had said. She was right, of course. Inheriting his two million had been like winning the lottery (“Trailer-trash money,” Julia called it). Real money was old money, the kind of money that you could never get through no matter how hard you tried. It was passed down from generation to generation and hoarded . It came from enclosing your peasants’ fields, from getting in on the ground floor of the Industrial Revolution, and from buying slaves to cut down your sugarcane. The people with real money ran everything.

“And those are the people we don’t like,” Julia said. “The enemy of the socialist future.Which is just around the corner, isn’t it, sweetie? And always will be, forever and forever, amen. God forbid we should ever achieve some kind of prelapsarian utopia on earth because then you would have to live your life instead of just complaining about it.”

Jackson looked at her doubtfully. He didn’t think he’d ever heard the word “prelapsarian” before, but he wasn’t about to ask her what it meant. It wasn’t so long since he could read her like a book. Now, sometimes, he didn’t understand her at all.

“Get over it, Jackson,” Julia said. “The serfs are free and roaming the land, buying shares in high-risk Asian markets.”

The funny thing was, sometimes she sounded just like his wife. His wife was also an argumentative person. (“I only argue with people I like,” Julia said. “It means I feel secure with you.” Generally speaking, Jackson only argued with people he didn’t like.) His ex -wife, he reminded himself. Yet another “ex”in his life. They were divorced, she was remarried and pregnant with another man’s child, and yet he still thought of her-technically rather than emotionally-as his wife. Maybe that was the Catholic in him.