One Good Turn (14 page)

Where would he go if the machines were turned off ? Drift off into some inner space, a lonely astronaut, abandoned by his ship. It would be funny (well, not funny—astounding) if there was an afterlife. If there was a heaven. Gloria didn’t believe in heaven, although she did occasionally worry that it was a place that existed only if you
did
believe in it. She wondered if people would be so keen on the idea of the next life if it was, say, underground. Or full of people like Pam. And relentlessly, tediously boring, like an everlasting Baptist service but without the occasional excitement of a full immersion. For Graham, presumably, heaven would be a thirty-year-old Macallan, a Montecristo, and, apparently, Miss Whiplash.

He thought he was invincible, but he’d been tagged by death. Graham thought he could buy his way out of anything, but the grim reaper wasn’t going to be paid off with Graham’s baksheesh. The Grim Reaper, Gloria corrected herself. If anyone deserved capital letters it was surely Death. Gloria would rather like to be the Grim Reaper. She wouldn’t necessarily be grim, she suspected she would be quite cheerful
(“Come along now, don’t make such a fuss”)
.

“They’ll never get me”
—that’s what Graham said. Graham, who always behaved as if he were untouchable, some kind of maverick, an outlaw not subject to the normal rules, crowing with triumph when he fooled the Inland Revenue or Customs and Excise, bypassing health and safety and building regulations, pushing his way through planning, sweetening his path with bribes and backhanders, cruising along in the outside lane at a hundred miles an hour in that bloody great car of his with its blacked-out windows. Why would you need blacked-out windows unless you were up to something nefarious? Gloria didn’t like the drawn curtain, the closed door, everything should be on show in broad daylight. If you were doing something you were ashamed of, then you shouldn’t be doing it.

Twice he’d managed to wriggle out of being prosecuted for speeding, once for reckless driving, once for being over the limit—thanks to a brother Mason in the courts, no doubt. A few months ago he had been stopped on the A9 going 120 miles per hour while talking on his mobile at the same time as eating a double cheeseburger. Not only that! When he was breathalyzed he was found to be over the limit, yet the case never even got as far as the court, being conveniently dropped on a technicality because Graham hadn’t been sent the correct papers. Gloria could imagine him only too well, one hand on the wheel, his phone tucked into the crook of his neck, the grease from the meat dripping down his chin, his breath rank with whiskey. At the time, Gloria had thought that the only thing lacking in this sordid scenario was a woman in the passenger seat fellating him. Now she thought that that had probably been going on as well. Gloria hated the term “blow job” but she rather liked the word “fellatio,” it sounded like an Italian musical term—
contralto,alto,fellatio
—although she found the act itself to be distasteful, in all senses of the word.

When he had got off the latest charge, he celebrated with a noisy, bloated dinner at Prestonfield House with Gloria, Pam, Murdo, and Sheriff Alistair Crichton. It undoubtedly helped if your big golfing pal was a sheriff. Despite having lived in Scotland for four decades, Gloria found that the word “sheriff”did not immediately conjure up the Scottish judiciary. Instead she tended to see tin stars at high noon and Alan Wheatley as the evil Sheriff of Nottingham in the old children’s television program
Robin Hood
. She started to hum the theme tune.

Gloria liked Robin Hood and its simple message—wrong punished, right rewarded, justice restored. Stealing from the rich, giving to the poor, they were basic Communist tenets. Instead of slipping off the bar stool and following Graham, she should have donned a duffle coat and sold the
Socialist Worker
on wet and windy street corners on Saturday mornings (and still have had sex with so many different men that she would never be able to remember their names, let alone their faces).

They’ll never get me
. But they would. She thought of the stag at bay on the living room wall, its lips curled back from its teeth in horror as the dogs closed in. No escape. Of course a deer was far too nice an animal for Graham to be compared with. He was more of a magpie—jabbering, yobbish birds who stole from other birds’ nests.

“Needles and camels,” Gloria said to Graham. He had nothing to say on either topic, the only noise came from the machines that were keeping him alive. “What profiteth it a man if he gaineth the whole world but loseth his soul? Answer that one, Graham.”

A Church of Scotland minister entered the ICU at that moment, dutifully visiting the lost lamb of his flock. Gloria had put “Church of Scotland” on Graham’s admission form just to annoy him if he lived. Now she rather regretted not putting “Jain Buddhist” or “Druid,” as it might have led to an interesting and informative discussion with whatever hierophant represented their religion in the Royal Infirmary. As it was, the Church of Scotland minister, apart from being surprised at finding Gloria quoting scripture (“No one does anymore”), proved harmless company, chatting to her about global warming and the problem of slugs. “If only they could be persuaded to eat just the
weeds
,” he said, wringing his hands.

“From your mouth to God’s ear,” Gloria said.

“Well, no rest for the wicked,” the minister said eventually, standing up and holding one of her hands in both of his for an intense moment. “Always a difficult time when a loved one is in the hospital,” he said, glancing vaguely at Graham. Even supine and comatose Graham failed to look like a loved one. “I hope it all goes well for you,” the minister murmured.

“So do I,” Gloria said.

12

L
ouise was running. Louise hated running, but it was marginally preferable to going to the gym. The gym involved regular commitment, and outwith her job, she was crap at regular commitment. Go ask Archie. So, all in all, it was easier to grit her teeth and throw on her sweats, then jog sedately around the estate to warm up before heading off over the fields and, if she was feeling virtuous, or guilty (the other side of the coin), then up the hill and back again. The one good thing about running was that it gave you the space to think. That was the downside as well, of course. Dualism, the Edinburgh disease, Jekyll and Hyde, dark and light, hill and valley, New Town, Old Town. Catholics and Protestants. A game of two halves. An eternal Manichaean dichotomy. It was her day off and she could have had a swim, read a book, caught up with laundry, but no, she had chosen to run up a bloody big hill. Confessions of a justified sinner. “Antisyzygy and the Scottish Psyche.” She had done Hogg for her undergraduate dissertation, but then, who hadn’t?

She had drunk what she thought of as a moderate three glasses of wine last night, but it was taking its toll on her. Her mouth felt like an old boot, and the Peking duck that had accompanied the wine still lived on like a game old bird. A rare and belated girls’ night out at the Jasmine, to celebrate Louise’s promotion two weeks ago. Afterward they had gone to “see something at the Festival,” a vague, unplanned mission that hadn’t taken into account the fact that anything good was going to be sold out by the time they arrived. They had ended up in a dive near the police mortuary, appropriately, and had gone to see some dreadful has-been comic. Three glasses of wine and Louise found herself heckling. They had made their rowdy way back through the Old Town, belting out “(You Make Me Feel Like) a Natural Woman” like the worst of hen parties. Louise liked to think it was Carole King’s own version rather than anything more unbridled, but she might have been kidding herself. They were lucky they weren’t lifted by the police. Shameful.

But there you go, she was paying for it now, because no good member of the narrow church that was Scotland got away without punishment. Scot-free.

By the time she was halfway up the hill, her breathing had started to become labored. She was thirty-eight and worried that she wasn’t as fit as she would like to be, as fit as she should be. She had a pain exactly where her appendix would be if she still had one, she imagined an empty space where it had nestled like a fat worm. It had come out last year (“whipped out” seemed to be the cliché that hospital staff adhered to). Both her mother and her grandmother had to have appendectomies, and she wondered if that meant Archie would lose his too.

Archie talked vaguely about traveling in his gap year, although, at fourteen, both concepts—traveling and gap year—were still too far away to seem more than part of a nebulous, improbable future to him. She wondered if she could persuade him into having elective surgery on unnecessary organs before he set off (
if
he set off— she couldn’t imagine him having the energy, he was so lazy) so that he wouldn’t find himself halfway up a mountain in New Zealand with peritonitis. A hundred or so years ago and Louise would be dead now. Or teeth—teeth must have killed a lot of people, abscesses that led to blood poisoning. A scratch, a cold.

The littlest thing. Her own mother died of liver failure, her flesh the color of ancient vellum, her organs pickled. Served her right. When Louise went to look at her in the Co-op undertakers last week, she had to resist the urge to take a needle with her, the old sailor’s trick for death at sea, and push it through the yellow flesh (like rancid cheese) of her nose. Just to make sure she was really dead.

Her funeral was four days ago, at Mortonhall Crematorium, a service as torpid as her life. Though her name was Aileen, the minister drafted in continually referred to her as “Eileen,” but neither Louise nor the ramshackle bunch of people who regarded themselves as her mother’s friends had bothered to correct him. Louise liked the way “Eileen” made her mother seem like someone else altogether, a stranger and not her mother.

When she was doing her cool-down stretches on the front path, she noticed the thing on the doorstep where the milk would have been if they delivered milk in this area. A nondescript brown canister. She felt a sudden irrational fear. A bomb? Some weird practical joke? Would she open it and find feces or worms or something poisonous? It took her a couple of seconds of panic before she realized it was an urn, and that inside the urn was what was left of her mother. For some reason she had expected something tasteful and classical—an amphora made from alabaster, with a lid and a finial, not something made from a kind of plastic material that looked for all the world like a tea caddy. She remembered her mother’s cousin saying he would collect the ashes from the crematorium for her. If it had been left up to her, she wouldn’t have bothered.

Now she was left with the problem of what to do with the remains. Could she just put them in the bin? She had the feeling that that might be illegal.

She turned her key in the lock but had to give the front door a hefty shove to get it open. It had been a wet summer and all the wood in the house had swelled, although the door had fitted badly to begin with. The house was only three years old but had all kinds of small annoying things wrong with it—snagging that had never got done no matter how many times she had complained— cracked plaster, sockets that were attached to the wall rather than the baseboard, a kitchen sink that wasn’t earthed. Thank you, Graham Hatter. The house was the “Kinloch” and was the smallest detached you could buy, but it was a house, a proper house, the two-eyes-and-a-mouth kind that she used to draw when she was a child, houses that contained an ideal family. She had drawn that too—mother, father, two children, and a dog. All she’d had in reality was the mother, a pretty piss-poor one at that. Poor Louise. When she thought of her days as a child, she usually put herself in the third person. She was sure a psychiatrist would have a field day with this fact, but no psychiatrist was ever going to get anywhere near her head.

Modern houses were shit, but the estate (“Glencrest”) was safe, inasmuch as anything ever was, most of the neighbors in her little enclave knew one another, if only by sight. There were no pubs anywhere near, there was a Neighborhood Watch, there were young women with pushchairs who went to Mother and Baby Groups, there were guys who washed their cars on the weekend. It was as near as you got to normal.

She took the urn inside with her and placed it on the kitchen draining board. She unscrewed the lid and poured some of the contents into a saucer and examined them, poking them around with a knife like a forensic technician. It was gritty, more like clinker than ash, and Louise half-expected to see a bit of tooth, a recognizable bone. Toxic waste. Perhaps if she added water to the saucer, her mother would be resurrected, the clay reformed from the dust. Her mothwing lungs might reinflate and she would rise like a genie from the urn and sit opposite Louise at the too-small kitchen table in the too-small kitchen and tell Louise how sorry she was for all the bad things she’d done. And Louise would say, “Too fucking late, get back in your urn.”

The cat, old and arthritic, jumped awkwardly onto the draining board and sniffed hopefully at the contents of the saucer. Jellybean’s health was failing, he had a tumor growing inside him, the vet said “the time was coming very soon” when Louise was going to have to make a “decision.”

Jellybean was once a tiny, hurtling ball of fur as light as a shuttlecock, now he was a sack of bones. He was older than Archie, Louise had known the cat longer than she’d known anyone else, except for her mother, and she didn’t count. She had found him when he was a kitten, abandoned in an empty house. She’d never had a pet, didn’t like cats, still didn’t like cats, but she loved Jellybean. It was the same with kids, she didn’t like babies, didn’t like children, but she loved Archie. She couldn’t say it to anyone (especially not Archie) because they would think she was mad, but she thought she might love Jellybean as much as she loved Archie. Possibly more. They were her pair of Achilles’ heels. They said love made you strong, but in Louise’s opinion it made you weak. It corkscrewed into your heart and you couldn’t get it out again, not without ripping your heart to pieces. She kissed the top of Jellybean’s wobbly head and felt a sob catch in her chest.
Jeez, Louise, pull yourself together, for fuck’s sake
.