One Good Turn

“Tied up?”

“The girl with him attempted to resuscitate him, she seems quite the inventive sort.”

“Tied up?”

Gloria discovered the inventive call girl in question, the clown-aliased “Jojo,” still hanging around in the A and E waiting room. Her real name was “Tatiana,” apparently.

“I’m Gloria,” Gloria said.

“Hello, Gloria,”Tatiana said, her overripe Ls making the greeting seem slightly sinister, like that of a James Bond villainess.

“His wife,” Gloria added, for clarification.

“I know. Graham talks about you.”

Gloria wondered at what point in the transaction between Graham and a call girl that her name would crop up. Before, after-during?

“Not during,”Tatiana said. “He can’t speak during.” She raised expressive eyebrows in response to Gloria’s unspoken query. “Gag,” she said finally.

“Gag?” Gloria murmured over a coffee and a Danish in the hospital’s cafe. It was the first time she had been in the new infirmary and felt slightly disoriented by the fact that it was just like a shopping mall.

“Stops the screaming,” Tatiana said matter-of-factly, unrolling the pinwheel of a pain au raisin before delicately chewing on it in a way that reminded Gloria of the squirrels in her garden. Gloria frowned, trying to imagine how you could be tied down on an Apex bed. Impossible, surely? (No bedposts.)

“What does he say,” she asked, “when he can speak?”

Tatiana shrugged. “This and that.”

Gloria said, “Where are you from?” and Tatiana said, “Tollcross,” and Gloria said, “No, I mean originally,” and the girl looked at her with her catty green eyes and said, “From Russia, I am Russian,” and for a moment Gloria had a glimpse of endless forests of thin birch trees and the insides of smoky foreign coffeehouses, although she supposed the girl was more likely to have lived in a concrete highrise in some horrendously bleak suburb.

She was dressed in jeans and a vest top, not working clothes, surely. “No,” she said, “here is costume,” indicating the contents of the large bag she had with her. Gloria caught a glimpse of buckles and leather and some kind of corset that, for a surreal moment, brought to Gloria’s mind an image of her mother’s flesh-pink surgical Camp corset. “He likes to be submissive,” Tatiana yawned. “Powerful men, they’re all the same. Graham and his friends. Idyots.”

His friends? “Oh, lord.” She thought of Pam’s husband, Murdo. She thought of Pam tootling around town in her brand-new Audi A8, going to her bridge club, her health club, Plaisir du Chocolat for afternoon tea. While Murdo was doing-what? Gloria shuddered to think.

She sighed. Was this what Graham really wanted, not Windsmoor and Country Casuals, not tedious brass buttons, but a woman young enough to be his own daughter, trussing him up like a turkey? It was strange how something you weren’t expecting could, nonetheless, turn out to be no surprise at all.

Gloria noticed that Tatiana was wearing a tiny gold crucifix in each ear. Was she religious? Were Russians religious now that they weren’t Communists? You couldn’t ask, people never did. Not in Britain. On holiday in Mauritius, the driver taking them from the airport to the hotel asked Gloria, “Do you pray?” just like that, five minutes after picking them up and loading their suitcases in the boot. “Sometimes,” she replied, which wasn’t really true, but she sensed he would be disappointed to learn she was godless.

Gloria had never understood why you would want to wear an instrument of torture and death as an ornament. You may as well wear a noose or a guillotine. At least Tatiana’s earrings were plain, no twin dying bodies of Christ writhing on them. Did the crucifixes ever put the clients off? Jews, Muslims, atheists, vampires- how did they feel?

Her father, Tatiana volunteered suddenly, had been a “great clown.” (So perhaps it did explain her nom de guerre in some way.) In the West, she said, they thought clowns were “slapstick fools,” but in Russia they were “existential artists.” She drooped with a sudden Slavic melancholy and offered Gloria a piece of gum, which Gloria declined.

“So not funny, then?” Gloria said, taking five hundred pounds from an ATM in the hospital corridor. Gloria had been removing five hundred pounds a day from an ATM for the last six months. She kept the money in a black plastic garbage bag in her wardrobe. Seventy-two thousand so far in twenty-pound notes. It took up a surprisingly small amount of room. Gloria wondered how much space a million would occupy. Gloria liked cash, it was tangible, it didn’t pretend to be something else. Graham also liked cash. Graham liked cash a little too much, vast amounts of it swilled around in the Hatter Homes’ accounts and came out as clean as new white linen. Graham had eschewed the old-fashioned way- launderettes and sunbed shops-that his friend Murdo still adhered to. Pam seemed blissfully unaware that the Jean Muir and Ballantyne cashmere that clothed her back were bought with funny money. Ignorance was not innocence.

Gloria divided the money from the ATM between herself and Tatiana. They had, after all, both earned Graham’s money in their own ways. In the seventies, women had marched for “Wages for Housework.” Wages for sex seemed to make more sense. Housework had to be done whether you liked it or not, but sex was optional.

“Oh, no, I don’t have sex with them,” Tatiana said. She laughed as if this were the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard. “I’m not an idyot, Gloria.”

“But you charge money?”

“Sure. It’s business. Everything is business.” Tatiana rubbed her thumb and forefinger together in the universal language of money.

“So, what do they pay you for… exactly?”

“Slapped around. Tied up. Beaten. Given orders, made to do things.”

“What kind of things?”

“You know.”

“No, I can’t even begin to imagine.”

“Lick my boots, crawl on floor, eat like dog.”

“Nothing useful, then, like hoovering?”

Who knew-all these years Gloria could have been spanking Graham and making him eat like a dog? And be paid for it!

“In Russia I worked in bank,” Tatiana said darkly, as if a bank were the most dangerous place in the world to work. “In Russia I was hungry.” She had very mobile features, Gloria noticed, and she wondered if it had anything to do with her clowning father.

In exchange for the cash, from somewhere inside the confines of her bra, Tatiana produced a little pink card and wrote on the back of it a mobile number and “Ask for Jojo.” She handed the card to Gloria. On the front, it was engraved in black lettering with FA-VORS-WE DO WHAT YOU WANT US TO DO! The exclamation point gave the impression that Favors would provide entertainers and balloons for a child’s party. Again with the clowns, Gloria thought. She had seen that logo somewhere, surely. Wasn’t “Favors” a cleaning agency? Gloria had noticed their pink vans around her neighborhood, and Pam had used them when her own cleaner had a bladder prolapse last year. Gloria had always done her own cleaning, she liked cleaning. It filled in the hours in a useful way.

“Yeah, sure.” Tatiana shrugged. “They’ll do cleaning if that’s what you want.” “Cleaning” seemed to take on a whole new meaning in Tatiana’s lugubrious accent, as if it were, paradoxically, a filthy (if not slightly macabre) activity.

The card was still warm from nestling next to Tatiana’s breasts, and Gloria was reminded of collecting eggs from beneath the chickens her mother kept in the back garden, long after war and necessity were done with. Tatiana tucked the money inside her bra. Gloria also frequently carried valuables within the armor of her underwear in the belief that even the boldest mugger was unlikely to brave the rampart of her postmenopausal 42EE Triumph “Doreen.”

They walked together to the entrance of the shopping mall / hospital, and on the way Gloria bought a pint of milk, a book of stamps, and a magazine from a shop. She wouldn’t have been surprised to find a car wash out the back somewhere.