One Good Turn

listened with bland interest, her head cocked to one side, her lips stretched in encouragement.

“All right, then,” she said, sounding defeated. “Write about a visit to or a stay in the hospital for your ‘homework.’ ” Martin wondered when they were going to start writing fiction, but the pedagogue in him responded to the word “homework,” and he set about the task conscientiously.

The WI women wrote sentimental pieces about visiting old people and children in the hospital. “Charming,” Dorothy said. The gruff man described in gory detail an operation to remove his appendix. “Vibrant,”Dorothy said. The miserable girl wrote about being in the hospital in Barrow-in-Furness after trying to cut her wrists. “Shame she didn’t manage it,” muttered one of the farmers’ wives sitting next to Martin.

tin himself had been in the hospital only once in his life, when he was fourteen-he found that each year of his teens had brought some fresh hell. He had passed a funfair on his way back from town. His father was stationed in Germany at the time, and Martin and his brother, Christopher, were spending the summer holidays there on leave from the rigors of their boarding school. The fact that it was a German funfair made it an even more terrifying place for Martin. He didn’t know where Christopher was that afternoon, probably playing cricket with other boys from the base. Martin had seen the funfair at night when the lights and smells and shouting were a dystopian vision that Bosch would have enjoyed painting. In the daylight it seemed less threatening, and his father’s voice appeared in his head, as it was wont to do (unfortunately), shouting, 20;Face the thing you’re afraid of, boy!” So he paid the entrance fee and proceeded to skirt gingerly around the various attractions because it wasn’t really the atmosphere of a funfair that scared him, it was the rides. Even playground swings used to make him sick when he was younger.

He searched in his pocket for change and bought a Kartoffelpuffer from a food stall. His grasp on the language was slippery, but he felt pretty safe with Kartoffel. The fritter was greasy and tasted oddly sugary and sat in his stomach like lead, so it really was a bad time for his father’s voice to make a reappearance in his head, just at the moment that Martin wandered past a huge swing, like a ship. He didn’t know the name for it in German, but in English, he knew, it was a pirate boat.

The pirate boat was rising and falling in a huge, impossible parabola in the sky, the cries of the occupants following the trajectory in a swoop of terror. The very idea of it, let alone the palpable reality in front of him, struck an absolute kind of horror in Martin’s breast, and on that principle, he tossed the remains of his Kartoffelpuffer into a waste bin, paid the fare, and climbed aboard.

It was his father who came to the civilian Krankenhaus to take him home. He had been taken to the hospital after he was found on the floor of the pirate boat, limp and semiconscious. It wasn’t a mental thing, it was nothing to do with courage, it turned out that he was particularly sensitive to g-forces. The doctor who discharged him laughed and said, in perfect English, “If you want my advice, you’ll not apply to be a fighter pilot.”

His father had walked right past his hospital bed without recognizing him. Martin tried to wave to him, but he failed to see his son’s hand flapping weakly on the covers. Eventually someone at the nurses’station directed him to his son’s bed. His father was in uniform and looked out of place in the hospital ward. He loomed over Martin and said, “You’re a fucking fairy, Martin. Pull yourself together.”

“There are some things that have nothing to do with character weakness, there are some things that a person is constitutionally incapable of dealing with,” Martin concluded. “And, of course, that was another country, another life.”

“Very good,” Dorothy said.

“It was a bit thin,” the gruff man said.

“My life has been a bit thin so far,” Martin said.

For the last class of the session, Dorothy brought in bottles of wine, packets of Ritz crackers, and a block of red cheddar. They appropriated paper cups and plates from the kitchen of the village hall. Dorothy raised her cup and said, “Well, we survived,” which seemed an odd kind of toast to Martin. “Let’s hope,” she continued, “that we all meet again for the spring session.” Whether it was the imminence of Christmas or the balloons and shiny foil decorations hanging in the village hall, or indeed simply the novel notion of survival, Martin didn’t know, but a certain celebratory air washed over them. Even the gruff man and the suicidal girl entered into the jubilee spirit. More bottles of wine emerged from people’s backpacks and A4-size bags. They had been unsure if there was going to be an end-of-term “do” but had come prepared.

Martin supposed that all of these elements, but particularly the wine, contributed to the surprising fact of his waking up the next morning in Dorothy’s bed in Kendal.

Her pale face was pouchy, and she pulled the covers over her and said, “Don’t look at me. I’m a fright first thing.” It was true- she did look a bit of a fright, but, of course, Martin would never have said so. He wanted to ask her how old she was, but he supposed that would be even worse.

Later, over an expensive dinner in a hotel overlooking Lake Windermere, which Martin reckoned they both deserved for having survived more than just the course, she toasted him with a nice steely Chablis and said, “You know, Martin, you’re the only one in the class who can put one word in front of another and not make me want to fucking puke, excuse my split infinitive. You should be a writer.”

Martin expected the Honda driver to pick himself up off the ground and search the crowd to find the culprit who had thrown a missile at him. Martin tried to make himself an anonymous figure in the queue, tried to pretend he didn’t exist. He closed his eyes, he had done that at school when he was bullied, clinging to an ancient, desperate magic-they wouldn’t hit him if he couldn’t see them. He imagined the Honda driver walking toward him, the baseball bat raised high, the arc of annihilation waiting to happen.

To his amazement, when he opened his eyes, the Honda driver was climbing back into his car. As he drove away, a few people in the crowd gave him a slow hand-clap. Martin wasn’t sure if they were expressing disapproval of the Honda driver’s behavior or disappointment at his failure to follow through. Whichever, they were a hard crowd to please.

Martin knelt on the ground and said, “Are you okay?” to the Peugeot driver, but then he was politely but firmly set aside by the two policewomen who arrived and took control of everything.

3

Gloria hadn’t really seen what had happened. By the time the rumor of it had rippled down the spine of the queue, she suspected it had become a Chinese whisper. Someone had been murdered. “Queue jumping, probably,” she said matter-of-factly to a twittery Pam standing next to her. Gloria was stoical in queues, irritated by people who complained and shuffled as if their impatience were in some way a mark of their individuality. Queuing was like life: you just shut up and got on with it. It seemed a shame she had been born just too late for the Second World War, she possessed exactly the kind of long-suffering spirit that wartime relied on. Stoicism was, in Gloria’s opinion, a very underrated virtue in the modern world.

She could understand why someone might want to kill a queue jumper. If it had been up to her she would have summarily executed a great many people by now-people who dropped litter in the street, for example, they would certainly think twice about the discarded sweet wrapper if it resulted in being strung up from the nearest lamppost. Gloria used to be opposed to capital punishment, she remembered, during her too-brief time at university, demonstrating against an execution in some faraway country that she couldn’t have placed on the map, but now her feelings tended to run in quite the opposite direction.

Gloria liked rules, rules were Good Things. Gloria liked rules that said you couldn’t speed or park on double- yellow lines, rules that told you not to drop litter or deface buildings. She was sick and tired of hearing people complain about speed cameras and parking wardens as if there were some reason that they should be exempt from them. When she was younger she used to fantasize about sex and love, about keeping chickens and bees, being taller, running through fields with a black-and-white border collie. Now she daydreamed about being the keeper at the gates, of standing with the ultimate ledger and ticking off the names of the dead as they appeared before her, giving them the nod through or the thumbs-down. All those people who parked in bus bays and ran the red light on pedestrian crossings were going to be very sorry when Gloria peered at them over the top of her spectacles and asked them to account for themselves.

Pam wasn’t what Gloria would have called a friend, just someone she had known for so long that she had