One Good Turn (8 page)

Richard Mott would probably have finished his show now. Afterward, Martin supposed, Richard would be at a bar somewhere drinking and socializing—networking. It was a one-off thing that the BBC was recording, a “showcase” for several comics. Richard’s usual show was at ten. “Comedy always happens at night,” he explained to Martin, which statement Martin thought was quite amusing, and he pointed this out to Richard. “Yeah,” Richard said in that strange laconic London way he had. He was a gagman, not a naturally funny person. In the two weeks of their acquaintance, he hadn’t made Martin laugh once, at least not intentionally. Perhaps he saved it all for the ten o’clock show. His glory days had been in the eighties, when it was easy to pretend to be political. After Thatcher was booted out, Richard Mott’s star began to descend, although he had never gone far enough away to make a comeback, keeping his profile up with appearances on “alternative” quiz shows, providing a reliable filler on chat shows, and even doing a bit of (bad) acting.

On the whole, Martin thought that he would rather be reading old, germ-laden magazines in a hospital, waiting for news of a stranger, than socializing at a Festival bar somewhere with Richard Mott.

Richard was a friend of a friend of an acquaintance. He had phoned out of the blue a couple of months ago and said he was “doing a gig at the Fringe” and was there any chance he could rent a room off Martin? Martin quietly cursed the acquaintance and the friend and the friend for giving out his phone number. He had always found it difficult to say no. There had been a time, several years ago, when he had been desperately trying to finish a book but was continually interrupted by people turning up at his door, a succession of day-trippers from Porlock (as he thought of them), and he had taken to keeping a coat and an empty briefcase in the hall so that whenever the doorbell rang, he could slip on the coat, pick up the briefcase, and say, “Oh, sorry, just going out.”

This was during the period in his life when he had just moved to Edinburgh from the Lakes and was making an attempt to get to know people, to start afresh with an active social life, no longer “Mr. Canning,” the old fart, but
Martin Canning, how d’you do? Me, oh I’m a writer. Crime novels. It’s called
Highland Fling
. On the best-seller lists, actually.Where do I get my ideas from? Oh, I don’t know, always had a lively imagination, felt the urge to be creative.You know how it is
. Of course, all that happened was that, instead of an active social life, he became saddled with all kinds of unwanted people that he then had to spend the next several months (and in some cases years) trying to get rid of. Nearly all of these unwanted people seemed to have nothing better to do in their own lives than to drop in on Martin at all times of the day and night. One in particular—a man named Bryan Legat—haunted him for years.

Bryan was a fortyish loser with an unpublished manuscript and a bitter resentment against every agent in Britain, all of whom had been incapable of recognizing his genius. Martin had seen some of the letters that Bryan had written in reply to his own many letters of rejection.
“You stupid, stupid, stupid, arrogant English bitch”
and
“I know where you live, you ignorant prick”
kind of letters that scared Martin with their madness. Bryan had shown him his manuscript, “the magnum opus” entitled
The Last Bus Driver
. “Well,” Martin murmured politely when he returned it to Bryan, “it’s certainly
different
. And you can write, there’s no doubt about that.”And he wasn’t lying, Bryan
could
write, he could take a pen with turquoise ink in it and make big, loopy joined-up handwriting with verbs scattered randomly throughout sentences—sentences that in every comma and exclamation point screamed
crazy
. But Bryan knew where Martin lived and so he wasn’t about to antagonize him.

When the doorbell rang this particular day, Martin threw his overcoat on, picked up the briefcase, and yanked open the door to find Bryan hovering hopefully on the doorstep. “Bryan!” Martin said with a jauntiness he didn’t feel. “What a surprise. Sorry, but I’m just going out, unfortunately.”

“Where are you going?”

“I have a train to catch.”

“I’ll come with you to the station,” Bryan offered cheerfully.

“No need to do that.”

“No trouble, Martin.”

They had ended up going to Newcastle together on an eleven-thirty King’s Cross GNER. In Newcastle, Martin had chosen an office block at random in the town center and said, “Well, this is me,” and plunged into a lift. He ended up on the eighth floor in the offices of a time-share company, where it was a relief to discuss the purchase of a luxury property in Florida, “adjacent to the golf course and leisure facilities.” He took the unsigned papers away with him “to look over” and threw them in the nearest bin on the way out. Needless to say, Bryan was waiting for him down in the foyer. “Good meeting?” he inquired genially when he caught sight of Martin. They returned together on the four-thirty train to Edinburgh, and somehow or other Bryan ended up in a taxi at Waverley with him. Martin couldn’t think of anything to say to him short of
“Fuck off out of my life forever, you crazy madman,”
and anyway by the time he’d paid off the taxi, Bryan was already halfway up the path, saying, “Shall I put the kettle on? I wanted to have a word with you about my novel. I’ve been thinking about putting it all into the present tense.”

The following year Bryan Legat fell to his death off Salisbury Crags. It was unclear whether he had jumped or fallen (or, indeed, been pushed). Martin had felt relief and guilt in equal measures when he heard of Bryan’s demise. Something should have been done to help a person who was clearly so deluded, but all Martin had been able to say to him was, “The way you use the vernacular is quite startling.”

So, when put on the spot, he had found it hard to refuse Richard Mott. When Richard said, “How much shall we say?” Martin said, “Oh, no—don’t be silly. I couldn’t take money off you.” As a gift, Richard had brought with him a DVD of his last tour, and in the few days since then, he had bought one bottle of wine, most of which he drank himself, and as a contribution to the housework, he had loaded the dishwasher once, attempting to make a comic performance out of the mundane task. Martin had to reposition all the crockery in the machine when Richard left the kitchen. He had also bought an expensive steak that he fried for himself, splattering the whole cooker with grease. The rest of the time he seemed to eat out.

Two days ago, on his opening night (which Martin had managed to avoid), Richard had invited Martin for “a curry” with “some people” here from London for his show. Martin had suggested the Kalpna in St. Patrick Square because he was a vegetarian
(“Nothing with a face, actually”)
, but somehow or other they had ended up at a rabidly carnivorous place that some other “people” in London had recommended to Richard. When it came to the bill, Martin found himself insisting on picking the whole thing up. “Thanks, Martin, thanks a lot,” one of the London people said, “although I could have put it on expenses, you know.”

“How do you feel about smoking in the house?” Richard had asked ten minutes after he arrived, and Martin had been caught between wanting to be a warm, welcoming host and wanting to say that he loathed everything to do with cigarettes. “Well . . .” he began, and Richard said, “Just in my room, of course. I wouldn’t make you breathe my filthy, carcinogenic smoke,” but every morning when Martin came downstairs there was a little pile of butts in the living room in whatever saucer or plate (and once a tureen) he had foraged from the Wedgwood service Martin had bought when he moved into the house.

Richard came in very late and then didn’t surface until midday, which was something to be thankful for. Once he was up he spent his time on the phone, he had a new videophone that Martin admired politely (
“Yeah, she’s a sexy mother, isn’t she?”
Richard agreed), even though he thought it was odd and rather dumpy and reminded him of a
Star Trek
communicator. Richard had downloaded the theme song from
Robin Hood
, the old fifties television program, as his ringtone, and the sound of it, rendered tinnily tiny and stupid, was slowly driving Martin crazy. As an antidote Martin himself had recently downloaded
Birdsong
and had been pleasantly surprised by how authentic the birds sounded.

Looking round, he found a clock behind him on the wall that said it was half-past one. It felt much later, the day had lost its shape, distorted under the weight of unexpected reality.

M
artin had read a spiteful review of Richard Mott’s show in the
Scotsman
that said, among other things,
“Richard Mott’s humor creaks with banality these days. He hashes up the same old tired material he was using ten years ago.The world has moved on, but Richard Mott hasn’t.”
Martin felt embarrassed just reading it. He couldn’t mention to Richard that he’d seen it because that would mean they would both have to face the awfulness of it all. Martin had acquired enough bad reviews himself to know the abysmal feelings they generated.

“I never read my reviews,” Richard volunteered morosely after his opening night. Martin didn’t believe him. Everyone read their own reviews. It was some years since Richard had “done the Festival,” and whatever feelings he had once had about Edinburgh (he had been gloriously successful here at the beginning of his career) had now turned mostly to antipathy. “You see, it’s a great city,” he said to one of the “some people from London” during their flesh-feeding frenzy in the phobia-inducing, crowded Indian restaurant. “Fantastic to look at and all that, but it has no
libido
. And obviously you have to blame Knox for that.” Martin hated the way Richard said “Knox” with such offhand familiarity. He felt like saying, “Knox might have been a dour, tight-arsed, puritanical bastard, but he was
our
dour, tight-arsed, puritanical bastard, not yours.”

“Exactly!” another one of them said. He was wearing narrow spectacles with thick black rims and smoked even more than Richard. Martin, a spectacle wearer since the age of eight, wore rimless lightweight glasses in an attempt to disguise the fact that he had defective eyesight, rather than making a feature of it. “No libido—very good, Richard.” The man with the black-framed spectacles jabbed the air with his cigarette to emphasize his agreement. “That’s Edinburgh
exactly
.” Martin wanted to defend his home city but couldn’t quite work out how. It was true, Edinburgh didn’t have a libido, but why would you want to live in a city that did?

“Barcelona!” another of Richard’s friends shouted across the table (they were loud and not a little drunk), and the man with the old-fashioned but trendy spectacles barked back, “Rio de Janeiro!” And so the shouting of cities went on (“Marseille! New York!”) until they got to “Amsterdam!” and a row broke out over whether Amsterdam possessed its own libido or was “merely a locus for the exploitative commercial transactions of other people’s libidos.”

“Sex and capitalism,” Richard intervened languidly, “what’s the difference?” Martin waited for a punch line, but apparently there wasn’t one. Personally he thought there was a lot of difference between the two, but then he remembered undressing in front of Irina in that awful hotel room, with its view of the Neva and the cockroaches scuttling along the skirting boards. “Well-upholstered. Built for comfort, not for speed,” he’d joked, cringing with embarrassment.

“Da?”
She laughed accommodatingly, apparently not understanding a word. The very remembrance of it made him double up as if he’d been hit by an invisible fist.

“Girls,” one of them said suddenly. “We should go and find some girls after this.”This idea was greeted with frightening enthusiasm.

“Pole dancing.” Richard sniggered like an adolescent boy.

“Oh, sorry, Martin,” another of them said. “Sorry to be so rampantly hetero.”

“Do you think I’m gay?” Martin asked, surprised. They all turned to look at him as if he’d said something interesting for the first time.

“There’s nothing wrong with that, Martin,” Richard said. “Everyone’s gay.”

Martin would have argued with this ridiculous statement, but he had just discovered that he was chewing on a piece of chicken from his “vegetable
biryani
.” He removed it from his mouth as discreetly as he could and put it on the side of his plate. The last gristly remnant of some poor abused bird that had been pumped full of hormones and antibiotics and water in a foreign country. He could have wept for it.

“It’s okay, Martin,” Richard Mott said, slapping him on the back. “You’re with friends.”

W
ithout asking him whether he wanted to go or not, Richard informed him that he had left a ticket for Martin for the radio showcase at the box office, but when Martin got to the venue, the indifferent girl behind the counter said to another indifferent girl, “Are there any comps in Richard Mott’s name?” The other girl made a face and glanced around while the first girl returned to glaring at her computer screen.

Martin found himself staring at a poster for Richard’s show. It was a close-up shot of Richard making a quirky face. A strapline running under it said, COMIC VIAGRA FOR THE MIND. Martin thought that sounded off-putting rather than inviting.

When nothing more was forthcoming from either of the girls, Martin pointed out a rickety wooden dovecote on the wall at the back with names Sellotaped beneath each individual pigeonhole. The one that said “Richard Mott” contained a white envelope. The second indifferent girl read the name written on the envelope. “Martin Canning?” she asked suspiciously and then gave it to him without waiting for confirmation. He checked the tickets and found a scribbled note on one of them.
“Your car’s parked in front of Macbet on Leith Walk. Cheers, R.”

“Can I go straight in?” he asked, and the first girl, without removing her eyes from her computer screen, said, “No, you have to join the queue.”