Kate Atkinson - One Good Turn

A baby would heal Julia. The lost Olivia would somehow be re-born in Julia’s own baby. A baby would make everything right for Julia, and for the two of them. A couple. If they were going to be parents, then one way or another she was going to have to come to terms with that word. A baby would heal Jackson too, close up some of his wounds. What had Louise said? “Sperm meets egg and bam. It can happen to the best of us.” And it had happened to Julia.

Not a new path, but a new world to walk in.

Louise could hear classical music playing in the living room. The house lights were off and instead a scented candle was burning in the hearth. He had put Classic FM on the radio. Her heart broke for the way he had tried to deal with everything. She could see the back of Archie’s head above the sofa. Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts, shut not up thy merciful ears to our prayers . She must have made a noise because he turned his head slightly and said, “Mum?” She could hear the tearful tremor in his voice.

“Archie?” She approached the sofa slowly. She bit down hard on her lip to try to stop the howl that was trying to escape from some deep, deep place inside. Archie looked up at her and said quietly, “I’m sorry, Mum.” His eyes were rimmed with red, he looked ghastly. In his arms he was cradling Jellybean as if he were a newborn baby, but he was deflated and shrunk, the life all gone from him. He was wrapped in an old sweater of Louise’s. “I thought he’d like to smell you,” Archie said. Another turn of the corkscrew. Her heart in shreds. “It’s okay to cry, Mum,” he said, and the pain finally forced its way out-a terrible wail of lamen-tation, a high-pitched keening that sounded as if it belonged to someone else.

She hadn’t been present at her cat’s birth, and now she had missed his death. “But you had everything in between,” Archie said. It was disturbing how like an adult he sounded. “Here,” he said, carefully passing his sad, swaddled bundle over to her. “I’ll make a cup of tea.”

She unwrapped the cat and kissed him on the head, the ears, the paws. Even this shall pass .

When Archie came back with the tea it was sweet, he must have heard it somewhere on television, hot, sweet tea in times of crisis. She had never taken sugar in tea in her life, but there was something unexpectedly comforting about it.

“He had a good life,” Archie said. He wasn’t old enough for it to be a cliché to him.

“I know.” Love was the hardest thing. Don’t let anyone ever tell you different.

“We have to leave, Gloria,”Tatiana said.

The machines continued to hiss and pump, Graham continued to float in space. Gloria bent down and kissed Graham on the forehead. A benediction or a curse, or both, because everything could be encompassed in the synthesis that was reality. Black and white, good and bad. His flesh already felt like clay.

What were the true crimes? Capitalism, religion, sex? Mur-der-usually, but not necessarily. Theft-ditto. But cruelty and indifference were also crimes. As were bad manners and callousness. Worst of all was indifference.

Not long after Gloria married Graham, they went to his par-ents’-Beryl and Jock’s-for Sunday lunch. A skinny roast duck, as Gloria remembered, counterbalanced by a hefty plum cobbler. It never ceased to amaze Gloria that she could barely remember what happened last Friday but could recall in detail meals that she had eaten forty and more years ago.

For some reason their car was in the garage that day (Graham had brought a Triumph Herald to the marriage), so Graham’s father had given them a lift to the modest “Hatter Home” (the old “Pencaitland” model, long abandoned) that had been a wedding gift from Jock and Beryl. It had been known as a “starter home.” No one sold “finisher homes,” did they?

On the way, they made a detour via “the yard” on some busi-ness or other that father and son had to attend to, long forgotten now. At the time Hatter Homes was just a builders’ yard with a ramshackle office in one corner. Gloria got out of the car, she’d never been to the yard or the office before and supposed she should take an interest now that she herself was a Hatter. She should never have given up her maiden name of Lewis, of course. Now might be a good time to revert it, now that she was an out-law widow. People changed their identities all the time, her own grandfather had changed his name to Lewis after he arrived in Leeds from Poland with nothing more than a cardboard suitcase and a surname that no one could pronounce.

The two Hatter men went into the office, and Gloria wandered around the yard with its mysterious pallets and sacks. She couldn’t imagine how you even began to build a house, she wondered what would have happened to the human race if it had all been up to her at the point when man first struck flint on flint and made a tool. She would never have managed anything as sophisticated as a shelf, everything would now be kept in hammocks and bags, probably. She was a gatherer, Graham was a screwdriver-wielding hunter. He would go out and build things, and she would stay inside and rear things. This was only a month after their wedding, when the sparkle was still on their union and Gloria was deliri-ously busy with buying matching tea plates and squeegee mops.

At that moment Gloria heard a little mewling noise that proved, when investigated, to be-joy of joys-a nest of kittens, still blind and molelike, curled up with their mother in a corner of the yard behind a pile of old wood.

Hatters, senior and junior, emerged from the office, her new father-in-law hailing her with “You found those damn kittens then, Gloria?” Gloria, who was already planning the sheepskin-lined basket she would provide for at least two, possibly all, of the kittens, a Hatter home within a Hatter Home, said, “Oh, they’re so gorgeous , Mr. Hatter.” Gloria’s toes wriggled with the cuteness of the kittens. She still couldn’t manage the familiarity of “Jock” and in fact never did for the three years she was his daughter-in-law, before he had a massive heart attack, dropping dead on-site into the mud in the breeze-block shell of one of his houses while his men gathered around and stared down at his lifeless body in as-tonishment. The titan had left the building. The Olympian, mean-while, was in the unfinished kitchen, wondering if he could get away with putting in a smaller window.

“Graham,” Jock Hatter said, “get the bloody things, will you?”

“Sure,” Graham said, scooping up all five soft, warm kitten bodies and in one easy movement plunging them into a water butt that stood next to the office. Gloria was so surprised that for a terrible second she merely watched, mute and motionless, as if she were under a spell. Then she screamed and made to run to Graham to res-cue the kittens, but “Jock” held her back. He was a small man but astonishingly strong, and no matter how much she twisted and turned to get away from him, she couldn’t escape his grip. “Has to be done, lass,” he said softly when she finally gave up. “It’s just the way of the world.” Graham removed the five limp little bodies from the water butt and threw them into an old oil drum that was used for waste.

“Fucking cats,” he said when she became hysterical with him later in the galley kitchen of their starter home. “You need to stop being so fucking soft, Gloria. They’re just fucking animals.”

“ M urdered.” The word had sounded strange falling from Ta-tiana’s lips, it rolled around like thunder, it cracked the sky. Glo-ria wondered if the cracked sky was going to break into pieces and fall at her feet. Her stomach felt hot and liquid, and her heart was beating faster than was healthy in a woman on the verge of a bus pass. Tatiana’s friend had been murdered. Lena. A good person.