One Good Turn (5 page)

The play,
Looking for the Equator in Greenland
, was Czech (or maybe Slovakian, Jackson hadn’t really been listening), an existentialist, abstract, impenetrable thing that was about neither the equator nor Greenland (nor indeed about looking for anything). Julia had brought the script over to France and asked him to read it, watching him while he did so, saying, “What do you think?” every ten minutes or so as if he knew anything at all about theater. Which he didn’t. “Seems . . . fine,” he said helplessly.

“So you think I should take the job?”

“God, yes,” he said a little too promptly. In retrospect, he realized there was no question of her
not
taking the job and wondered if she’d known from the beginning that funding was going to be a nightmare and had wanted him to feel involved with the play in some way. She wasn’t a manipulative person, quite the opposite, but sometimes she had a way of looking ahead that surprised him. “And if we’re successful you’ll get your money back,” she said cheerfully when he offered. “And you never know—you might make a profit.”
In your dreams
, Jackson thought, but he didn’t say that.

“Our angel,”Tobias, the director, had called him last night, embracing him in a queeny hug. Tobias was more camp than a Scout jamboree. Jackson had nothing against gays, he just wished that sometimes they wouldn’t be quite so
gay
, especially when being introduced to him in what had turned out, unfortunately, to be a good old-fashioned macho Scottish pub. Their “savior,” their “angel”—so much religious language from people who weren’t in any way religious. Jackson knew himself to be neither a savior nor an angel. He was just a guy. A guy who had more money than they did.

J
ulia spotted him and waved him over. She looked flushed and her left eyelid was twitching, usually a sign she was wound too tightly. Her lipstick had almost worn off and her body was camouflaged by the sackcloth-and-ashes costume so that she didn’t really look like Julia at all. Jackson guessed that the morning hadn’t gone well. Nonetheless she gave him a big, smiley hug (say what you like about Julia, she was a real trouper), and he wrapped his arms round her and heard her breathing, wet and shallow. The “venue” where they had their makeshift theater was below ground level in the underbelly of a centuries-old building that was a warren of damp stone passages scuttling off in all directions, and he wondered if Julia could survive down here without dying of consumption.

“No lunch, then?” he said.

She shook her head. “We haven’t even finished teching properly. We’re going to have to work through lunch. How was your morning?”

“I took a walk,” Jackson said, “went to a museum and the Camera Obscura. Had a look at the grave of Greyfriar’s Bobby—”

“Oh.” Julia made a tragic face. The mention of a dog, any dog, always provoked an emotional reflex in Julia. The idea of a dead dog upped the ante on the emotion considerably. The idea of a dead
faithful
dog was almost more than she could handle.

“Yeah, I paid him your respects,” Jackson said. “And I saw the new Parliament Building as well.”

“What was it like?”

“I don’t know. New. Odd.”

He could see she wasn’t really listening. “Shall I stay?” he asked. She looked panicked and said quickly, “I don’t want you to see the show until press night. It’s still a bit rough around the edges.” Julia was always upbeat about any piece of work, so he understood that “a bit rough around the edges” translated as “bloody awful.”This fact went unacknowledged between them. He could see wrinkles round her eyes that he didn’t remember being there two years ago. She stood on tiptoes to be kissed and said, “You have my permission to scarper. Go and have a good time.”

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.

A
s 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.

And Julia was wrong. The serfs were all watching reality television, the new opium of the people. He watched it himself sometimes, he had satellite broadband in France, and couldn’t believe the ignorance and insanity of people’s lives. Sometimes when Jackson turned on the television, he got the feeling that he was living in a terrible version of the future, one he didn’t remember signing up for.

He fought his way past a long queue knotted up in the doorway. They were queuing for some comedy thing. He found himself looking at a poster, a photograph of a man making a dementedly comic face. RICHARD MOTT—COMIC VIAGRA FOR THE MIND, it said. It took a lot to make Jackson laugh.
In my day
, he thought,
comedy was funny
. “In my day”—that was what old people said, their days already behind them.

Back out in what passed for daylight, he was greeted by ancient, tall tenements staring blankly at each other from either side of the street, making it feel more like a tunnel, making it feel as if night had fallen. If there had been no people around, you might have mistaken it for a film set of a Dickens novel. You might have mistaken it for the past itself.

Julia said it was a good venue to be in, although they had been disappointed when they had failed “to get into the Traverse.” “But really this is good,” Julia insisted. “Central, lots of people.” She was right about there being a lot of people, the place was crowded, “hoaching,” his father would have said. Jackson’s father was a miner, from Fife originally, and might not have had much time for this expensive, thriving capital city. Too chichi. “Chichi” was something Julia said. Jackson’s vocabulary seemed to be full of other people’s words these days, French people’s mainly as that was now his “place of domicile,” which was a different thing from “home.”

Other than being conceived on holiday in Ayrshire (according to his father, anyway), Jackson had never been to Scotland before, he had never given it much thought, but now it struck him as odd (and psychologically revealing) that he had never visited the land of his father. When he stepped off the train in Waverley Station yesterday, he had been expecting the 50 percent of his genes that were Scottish to recognize their heritage. He thought perhaps he would discover an emotional link with a past he’d never known, walk down a street and the faces would feel familiar, turn a corner or climb a stair and there would be an epiphany of sorts, but in fact Edinburgh felt more foreign to him than Paris did.

As he pushed his way past the crowd, he tried to orient himself toward the Castle. The ancient bird part of his brain that was usually so good at directions seemed to have gone on holiday since his arrival in Edinburgh, probably because he had been reduced to being a pedestrian (“reduced” being the apposite word here, because, let’s face it, pedestrians are inferior creatures). To understand the topography of Edinburgh his brain needed to be connected directly to the compass of a steering wheel. Jackson was a man for whom having a car was an extension of his thinking. In moving to France, he had abandoned his old love, the BMW, and now had a hundred fifty thousand Euros’ worth of brand-new Mercedes tucked away in his barn back home.