One Good Turn

never took long for the walls to acquire their customary stain of nicotine yellow. His mother was a heavy smoker, it was perhaps her defining trait. Martin believed that hell would be to endure forever a wet Sunday in his mother’s house-always four o’clock in the afternoon in January, with the smell of a shin beef stew cooking in the unventilated kitchen. Tobacco fumes, weak tea, the jaw-clenching sweetness of a fondant fancy. A rerun of Midsomer Murders on the video.

Their mother was tremulously old now, yet showed no sign of dying. Christopher, teetering on the edge of his income, complained that she was going to end up outliving him at this rate and he would never inherit the half of the Eastbourne house that his bank account needed so badly.

Martin had visited his mother not long after he had first made an appearance on the bestseller lists, and he showed her the week’s top-fifty in the Bookseller, explaining, “Alex Blake-that’s me, nom de plume.” He laughed, and she sighed, “Oh, Martin,” as if he’d done something particularly irksome. When he bought his house in Merchiston, he may not have been sure what it was that made a house a home, but he knew what didn’t.

Christopher had visited Martin’s house only once, just after he bought it-a difficult visit made more difficult by Sheena, a woman who ran with hyenas.

“What the fuck do you need such a big house for, Martin?” Christopher asked. “There’s only you.”

“I might get married, have children,” Martin said defensively, and Sheena yelped, “You?”

There was a small room at the top of the house, overlooking the garden, that Martin earmarked as a study. He felt it was the kind of room where he would be able to write something with strength and character, not the trite and formulaic Nina Riley but a text in which every page was a creative dialectic between passion and reason, a thing of life-changing artistry. Disappointingly, not only did this not happen but all the life he had sensed in the house disappeared after he purchased it. Now, when Martin walked through the front door, it often felt as if no one had ever lived there, including himself. There was no sign of any merry japes. “Merry” was a word Martin particularly liked. He had always thought that if he had children he would give them names like Sonny and Merry. The name maketh the man. There was something to be said for all those religiously influenced names-Patience, Grace, Chastity, Faith. Better to be named for a virtue than to be landed with a forgettable “Martin.” Jackson Brodie, that was a fine name. He had been unruffled by events (“I used to be a policeman”) whereas Martin had felt sick with the excitement of it all. Not the good sort of excitement, not the merry jape sort, but the incident sort.

At university he had briefly gone out with a girl named Storm (because he had had girlfriends, despite what most people thought). It had been an experience-an experience rather than a relationship-that led him to believe that people lived up to their names. “Martin” was pretty dull as names went, but “Alex Blake” had a certain dash to it. His publishers hadn’t considered Martin’s own name to be “punchy”enough. The pseudonym “Alex Blake” was chosen after much deliberation, most of which excluded Martin. “A strong, no-nonsense sort of name,” his editor said, “to compensate.” For what, she didn’t say.

He accidentally kicked Paul Bradley’s overnight bag with his foot and felt something hard and unyielding where he had expected the softness of clothes. He wondered what a man like that-admirably competent even when injured-carried with him. Where had he come from? Where was he going? Paul Bradley didn’t seem like someone who had come up for the Festival, he seemed like someone with more purpose than that.

Martin looked for his watch on his wrist and remembered that he hadn’t been able to find it this morning. He suspected that Richard Mott had “borrowed” it. He borrowed things all the time, as if being in someone’s house gave you rights to all of their possessions as well. Martin’s books, shirts, and iPod (“You listen to some real shit, Martin”) had all been appropriated at one time or another by his houseguest. He had even found the spare keys to Martin’s car and seemed to think he could drive it whenever he wanted.

The watch was a Rolex “Yacht-Master” that Martin had bought for himself to celebrate selling his first book to a publisher. It was an extravagance that had made him feel guilty, and he had felt compelled to give an equivalent amount to charity to salve his conscience. “Prosthetics Outreach,” supplying artificial limbs for the victims of land mines. The cost of his Rolex was equivalent to nearly a hundred arms and legs somewhere in the unimaginable netherworld of so-called civilization. Of course, if he hadn’t bought the Rolex he could have bought two hundred arms and legs, so his guilt was doubled rather than assuaged. The price of the watch was puny compared to the price of his house in Merchiston. For the cost of his house he could probably have fitted artificial limbs on every amputee in the world. He still wore the watch, even though it reminded him every day of the incident in Russia. That was his punishment, never to forget.

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.