One Good Turn

The entrance was a huge air lock at the front of the building where people hung around, using their mobiles, waiting for taxis and lifts, or getting a break from whatever birth or death or routine mundanity had brought them here. A couple of patients in dressing gowns and slippers stared glumly through the rain-spotted glass at the outside world. On the other side of the glass, the smokers stared back inside, equally glum.

It felt cold outside after the hothouse atmosphere of the hospital. Tatiana shivered, and Gloria offered her own three-quarter-length green Dannimac. It made Gloria look like the clone of every other middle-aged woman, but on Tatiana the coat gained a strange un-Dannimac-like glamour. She snapped gum and smoked a cigarette while she made a call on her mobile, speaking very quickly in Russian. Gloria felt a little tug of admiration. Tatiana was so much more interesting than her own daughter.

“This was a surprise for you,” Tatiana said when she finished the call.

“Well, yes,” Gloria agreed, “you could say that. I always imagined him going on the golf course. Not that he’s actually gone yet, of course.”

Tatiana patted her on the shoulder and said, “Don’t worry, Gloria. He will soon.”

“You think?”

Tatiana gazed off into the distance like a soothsayer and said, “Trust me.” Then she gave another little shiver that seemed to have nothing to do with the weather and said, “Now I have to go.” She slipped off Gloria’s Dannimac in an elegant, if rather theatrical, way that made Gloria wonder if she had trained as a ballet dancer, but Tatiana shook her head and, handing back the coat, said, “Trapeze.”

The last Gloria saw of Tatiana, she was getting into a car with blacked-out windows that had pulled up stealthily at the curb. For a minute Gloria thought it was Graham’s car, but then she remembered where he was.

9

The nurse with the nice smile sought Martin out in the waiting room. She sat down next to him, and for a moment Martin thought that she was going to tell him that Paul Bradley had died. Would he have to arrange the funeral now that he was somehow responsible for him?

“He’s going to be a little while yet,” she said. “We’re just waiting on the doctor coming back, then he’ll probably be discharged.”

“Discharged?” Martin was astonished, he remembered Paul Bradley in the ambulance, blood from his head staining the baby-blanket shroud he was wrapped in. He still thought of him as someone who was wrestling with oblivion.

“The head wound’s only superficial, there’s no fracture. There’s no reason he can’t go home as long as you can be there to keep an eye on him for the rest of the night. We ask that when people have been unconscious, no matter how briefly.”

She was still smiling at him, so he said, “Right. Okay. No problem. Thank you-?”

“Sarah.”

“Sarah. Thank you, Sarah.” She seemed very young and small, the epitome of neatness, her blond hair smoothed into the kind of tight bun that ballerinas wore.

“He said you were a hero,” she said.

“He was wrong.”

Sarah smiled, but he wasn’t sure at what. She cocked her head to one side, a sparrow of a girl. “You look familiar,” she said.

“Do I?” He knew he had a forgettable face. He was a forgettable person, a perpetual disappointment to people when he met them in the flesh.

“Oh, you’re so short!” one woman declared during question time after a reading last year. “Isn’t he?” she said, turning to the rest of the audience for validation, which was quick in forthcoming, everyone nodding and smiling at him as if he had just turned from man to boy in front of their eyes. He was five foot eight, hardly a midget.

Did he write like a short man? How did short men write? He had never had a photograph on his jackets, and he suspected it was because his publishers didn’t think it would help sell the books. “Oh, no,” Melanie said, “it’s to make you more mysterious.” For his most recent book, they had changed their minds, sending up a celebrated photographer to try to capture something “more atmospheric.” (“Sex him up” was the actual phrase, used on an e-mail that had been mistakenly forwarded to Martin. Or at least he hoped it was a mistake.) The photographer, a woman, had suggested Blackford Pond to him with the aim of taking moody black-and-white shots beneath winter trees. “Think of something really sad,” she instructed him while mothers with small children in tow, there to feed the ducks and swans, regarded them with open curiosity. Martin couldn’t do sad-to-order, sadness was a random visual spring tapped by accident-RSPCA adverts showing dead kittens, old documentary shots of piles of spectacles and suitcases, Haydn’s Second Cello Concerto. The maudlin, the terrible, and the sublime all producing the same watery reaction in him.

“Something in your own life,” the celebrity photographer cajoled. “How did it feel when you left the priesthood, for example? That must have been difficult.” And Martin, uncharacteristically rebellious, said, “I’m not doing this.”

“Too difficult for you?” the photographer said, nodding and making a tortuously sympathetic face. In the end the photograph made him look like a polite suburban serial killer, and the book was published, as usual, without a photograph on the jacket.

“You need more presence, Martin,” Melanie said. “It’s my job to tell you these things,” she added. He frowned and said, “Is it?” The opposite of presence was absence. A forgettable man with a forgettable name. An absence rather than a presence in the world.

“No, really,” Sarah insisted, “I’m sure I’ve seen you somewhere. What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a writer.” He immediately regretted saying it. For one thing it always sounded as if he were showing off (and yet there was nothing about being a writer per se that was cause for hubris). And it was a dead-end conversation that always followed the same inevitable path: “Really? You’re a writer? What do you write?”“Novels.”“What kind of novels?”“Crime novels.”“Really? Where do you get your ideas from?” The last one seemed to Martin to be a huge neuroscientific and existential question quite beyond his competency to answer, yet he was asked it all the time. “Oh, you know,” he said vaguely these days, “here and there.” (“You think too much, Martin,” his Chinese acupuncturist, Ming Chen, said, “but not in a good way.”)

“Really?” Sarah said, her untainted features struggling to imagine what it meant to be a “writer.” For some reason people thought it was a glamorous profession, but Martin couldn’t find anything glamorous about sitting in a room on your own, day after day, trying not to go mad.

“Soft-boiled crime,” Martin said, “you know, nothing too nasty or gory. Sort of Miss Marple meets Dr. Finlay,” he added, conscious of how apologetic he sounded. He wondered if she’d heard of either. Probably not. “The central character is named Nina Riley,” he felt compelled to continue. “She inherited a detective agency from her uncle.” How stupid it sounded. Stupid and crass.

The policewomen from earlier appeared in the waiting room. When they saw Martin, the first one exclaimed, “There you are! We need to take a statement from you. We’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

“I’ve been here all the time,” Martin said.

“I bet you can’t tell what he does for a living,” Sarah said to the policewomen. Both women stared at him gravely for a moment before the second one said, “Don’t know. Give up.”

“He’s a writer,” Sarah declared triumphantly.

“Never,” the first one said.

The second policewoman shook her head in amazement and said, “I’ve always wondered about writers. Where do you get your ideas from?”

Martin went for a walk around the hospital, taking Paul Bradley’s bag with him. It was beginning to feel like his own. He went to the shop and looked at the newspapers. He went to the cafe and had a cup of a tea, working his way through the loose change in his pocket. He wondered if it was possible to live in the hospital without anyone noticing you were there. The place had everything you needed, really-food, warmth,