One Good Turn (47 page)

She could hear more sirens, one an ambulance. Louise could taste blood from where she had been biting her lip. She didn’t say
“Remember the favor you owe me, Jim.”
She didn’t say
“How’s your lovely daughter doing at university? Bet she’s glad she didn’t get a drug rap.”
She didn’t need to, he knew it was payback time, as you sow so shall you reap. He nodded his head toward the back of the house without saying anything. “Thanks,” she mouthed at him and disappeared. She wondered how many disciplinary, possibly criminal, acts she’d committed within the last five minutes. She didn’t bother to count.

Archie had sounded odd on the phone—strained and slightly desperate—and she thought he must have been arrested or killed someone. But it was worse than that.

47

T
hen he and Irina were walking into his cockroach hotel, past the rather frightening men who hung around at the entrance. A cross between doormen and security staff, they were always dressed in black leather jackets, always smoking cigarettes. They opened doors (sometimes) and called taxis, but they seemed more like gangsters. One of them said something to Irina, and she waved him away with a dismissive gesture.

And then somehow they were in his room, and without knowing how, he was standing in front of her in his underpants saying, “Well-upholstered. Built for comfort, not for speed.”

Then time jumped forward again, and she was astride him on the narrow bed, wearing only a bra and shoes, making short yipping noises that might have suggested sexual frenzy if her face hadn’t remained a blank. Martin contributed hardly anything to the encounter, it had taken him by surprise in its unexpectedness and its haste. He climaxed quickly and quietly in a way that ashamed him. “Sorry,” he said, and she shrugged and leaned over him, her beautiful hair sweeping his chest, a teasing gesture that seemed entirely perfunctory. He saw the dark roots where the bleach had grown out.

She climbed off him. The fog of alcohol in his brain cleared a little, and in its place a nauseous, dull depression fell on him as he watched her lighting a cigarette. A woman in a foreign country, a woman you hardly knew, did not strip down to her bra and shoes and ride you like a horse for free. She might not be a prostitute as such, but she expected money.

She picked up her clothes and put them on, the cigarette dan-gling from her mouth. She caught him looking at her and smiled. “Okay?”she said. “You have good time? You want to give me little gift for good time?”

He got up and hopped around, trying to get his trousers back on. The evening had taken him to depths of indignity he had previously steered clear of, even in his imagination. He searched through his pockets for money. He had cleared out most of his cash in the Grand Hotel and could find only a twenty-ruble note and small coins. Irina looked in disgust at the money as he tried to explain to her that he could go down to the reception desk and draw money on his Visa. She frowned and said, “
Nyet
, no Wisa.”

“No, no,” he said, “I’m not offering you Visa. I will
change
. I will get dollars for you from downstairs.” She shook her head vig-orously. Then she pointed at his Rolex and asked, “Is good?” She was wrapping the scarf around her head again, buttoning up her coat.

“Yes,” he said, “it’s genuine, but—”

“You give to me.” She was beginning to sound shrill and un-compromising. It was four in the morning (he had no idea how that had happened, when he last noticed the time it was eleven o’clock). There was a retired couple from Gravesend in the room next door. What would they think if they were woken up by a Russian woman demanding payment for sex? What if she started to scream and throw things around? It was ridiculous, the watch was worth more than ten thousand pounds, hardly a fair exchange. “No, I’ll get money,” he insisted. “And then the hotel will call a taxi for you.” He imagined one of the menacing men in black leather putting her in a taxi, looking at Martin, knowing he’d just paid for sex with her.

She said something in Russian and made a move toward him, trying to grab his wrist. “No,” he said, dancing out of the way. She made another lunge and he stepped away again, but this time she tripped and lost her balance and although she put out her hands to save herself, she couldn’t stop her head hitting a glancing blow off the corner of the cheap veneer desk unit that occupied almost the whole of one wall in the small room. She gave a little cry, a wounded bird, and then was quiet.

She should have got up. She should have got up, clutching her forehead. There would be a cut or a bruise and it would be sore. He would probably take the Rolex off his wrist and give it to her to make up for the pain, to stop her from making a fuss. But she didn’t get up. He crouched down and touched her on the shoul-der and said, “Irina?” tentatively. “Did you hurt yourself, are you okay?” She was lying facedown on the nasty carpet and didn’t respond. Her scarf had slipped off and strands of blond hair had es-caped from the neat chignon that she had pinned her hair into. The back of her neck was pale and vulnerable.

He tried to roll her over, not sure if that was the right thing to do to someone who had knocked herself out. She was heavy, much heavier than he’d expected, and awkwardly resistant, as if she were determined to give him no help in his maneuvers. He managed to turn her, and she flopped onto her back. Her eyes were wide-open, staring at nothing. The shock made his heart stop for a second. He sprang away from her, falling over the end of the bed, banging his shin, hurting his foot. Something rose in his chest, a sob, a howl, he wasn’t sure how it was going to emerge and was surprised it was nothing more than a stupid little squawk.

There was no obvious reason for it. A red mark on her temple, that was all. One of those chances in a million, he supposed—a fracture to one of her cervical vertebrae or an intracranial bleed. He read up on head injuries for months afterward.

The littlest thing. If she hadn’t been wearing heels, if the carpet hadn’t been fraying, if he had had the sense to realize that no way in the world would a girl like that be interested in him for himself. For a second he saw this scene through the eyes of others—the hotel management, the men in black leather, the police, the British consul, the couple from Gravesend, the dying grocer. There was no way that any of them would interpret it in a way that favored him.

Panic kicked in. Panic throbbing in his chest, spinning through his brain like a cyclone, a wave of adrenaline that passed through his body and washed away every thought except one—
Get rid of her
. He glanced around the room to see what of herself she had left behind. The only thing he could see was her handbag. He ri-fled through it to make sure there was nothing to incriminate him, that she hadn’t written his name and hotel address down. Nothing, just a cheap purse, some keys, a tissue, and lipstick. A photograph in a plastic wallet. The photograph was of a baby, its sex indeterminate. Martin refused to think about the significance of a photograph of a baby.

He yanked the window open. He was on the seventh floor, but the windows opened all the way—no health and safety in the cockroach hotel. He dragged her over to the window, and then, holding her round the waist in a clumsy embrace like a poor dancer, he hauled her across the sill. He hated her for the way she was like an unwieldy puppet, a sandbag mannequin for bayonet practice. He hated her for the way she hung half-in, half-out of the room as if she didn’t care about anything anymore. The street was deathly silent. If she fell from the seventh floor, if she was found on the pavement, no one would know whether she had jumped or been pushed, or simply fallen in drunken confusion. Her blood must be almost 100 percent alcohol, the amount she had drunk. No one would be able to point up to his window and say,
“There, Martin Canning, British tourist, that was whose window she came out of.”
There was an enormous builders’ dumpster down below, nearly full of rubble. He didn’t want her to fall into that because then it might seem as if someone were trying to dispose of her body rather than her having simply fallen.

He put the strap of her bag around her neck and then pushed her arm through it, like a child’s satchel, then he grabbed her round the knees and heaved and shoved until she slipped away.

If he had aimed for the construction dumpster he would have missed it, but because he wanted her to hit the pavement she went straight into the skip, twisting round in the air before crashing faceup onto the wood and stone and broken plaster inside it with a kind of crunching noise. A stray dog swerved from its path in alarm, but apart from that the street remained unmoved. He closed the window.

He sat on the floor in the corner of the room and hugged his knees. He stayed in that position for a long time, too drained to do anything else. He watched dawn entering the room and thought about Irina’s sightless eyes, never seeing the light come. A cockroach ran across his foot. He heard the first tram taking to the street. He waited for the builders, imagined them climbing up the scaffold, looking down and seeing the woman lying like a discarded doll. He wondered if he would hear their cries of discovery from his room.

He heard a massive engine, gears grinding, and crawled over to the window. The dumpster was swinging in midair, like a child’s toy from this distance. Somehow he had hoped that in the inter-vening hours she might have disappeared, but she was still there, broken and limp. The dumpster was swung onto the back of the enormous pickup lorry and settled with a great metallic clunk that echoed through the cold air. The lorry drove away, Martin followed its progress along the road, watching it move slowly, turning onto a bridge over the Neva. At the end of the bridge it turned and disappeared from sight.

He had thrown a human being away like rubbish.

A
t the airport, going through passport control, he waited for one of the terrifying officials to put a hand on his chest and feel his racing heart, to stare him in the eyes and see his guilt. But he was waved through with a sullen gesture. He had thought retribution would be swift, but it turned out that justice was going to be measured out slowly, rolling him flat until he simply didn’t exist.

In a small duty-free shop, he bought a fridge magnet for his mother, a little varnished wooden
matryoshka
. On the flight home the grocer sat with the couple from Gravesend, squeezed into a seat that was too small for him, and told them that he had ticked off another item from his to-do-before-I-die list. The in-flight meal was served, a sorry concoction of congealed pasta. Martin wondered if Irina’s stall remained boarded up or if someone had already taken it over. The grocer took ill as they came in to land. An ambulance collected him on the tarmac. Martin didn’t even look.

T
here was a woman he recognized from the book signing earlier in the day. He had no idea why she was here. She was clutching a copy of
The Monkey Puzzle Tree
and screaming. He thought about making a joke, saying to her, “It’s not that bad, is it?” but he didn’t. There was a blond girl who shouted something in Russian at the crazy Honda driver. The Honda driver was going to kill the blond Russian girl, and then Jackson stepped in to save her, to sacrifice himself. The Honda driver was engorged with rage. There was something wrong with the minds of people like that, people who threw dogs through windows and stuck guns to their wives’ heads. Bad brain chemistry. If Nina Riley had been here, she would have said,
“Lay down your weapon, you dastardly scoundrel.”
But she wasn’t here. It was just Martin.

Time slowed down. The Honda driver raised the bat in the familiar arc of annihilation. The Russian girl turned to face him. Her features changed. Her blue-doll eyes stared at him unblinking, her little rosebud lips said, “Shoot him, Marty.” So he did.

48

A
pregnancy-testing kit.

Jackson had run (literally) back to the flat, dropped his blood-stained clothes on the bathroom floor, jumped in the shower, and washed awayTerence Smith from his life. For a mad second he had contemplated running all the way from the Hatter house to Julia’s venue, but he could see that it might look a little
too
dramatic to arrive covered in blood. Save it for
Macbeth
.

He had been multitasking (as they said), pulling on clothes, phoning for a taxi, regarding his harrowed face in the steamy mirror, when he happened to glance down and see it.

He plucked the pregnancy test out of the wastebasket and stared at it as if it were an object from the moon. It was the last thing he was expecting to find, and yet why not? It had never happened in the two years they were together, but here it was. Blue. It was blue. Everyone knew what that meant. It explained everything, her mood swings, her loss of appetite (for sex and food), her odd diffidence. Julia was pregnant! What an extraordinary idea—Julia was having a baby. His baby.
We’re having a baby
. A baby for Julia. There were a lot of different ways of saying it, but it all came down to the same thing, there was a microscopic new life inside Julia, a small creature nestling inside a burrow inside the woman he loved. He wondered if it was a boy. Wouldn’t that be something, to have a son, to be the father his own father never was. He still had the little peanut baby doll in his pocket, he shrugged his jacket on and felt for it, like a talisman, a rosary bead, turning it over and over in his hand.

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.