One Good Turn

Gloria regretted that she wasn’t a knitter, she could be producing a useful garment while waiting for Graham to die. The tricoteuse of the ICU. Beryl, Graham’s mother, had been a knitter, producing endless matinee sets when Emily and Ewan were babies-hats, jackets, mittens, bootees, leggings-threaded with fiddly ribbons and full of holes for tiny fingers to get caught in. Gloria had dressed her children up like dolls. Emily put the oddly named Xanthia into sensible stretchy white suits and little beanie hats. Gloria hardly ever saw her grandchild. When Emily announced she was pregnant, you would have thought she was the first woman on the planet to ever have a baby. To be honest, Gloria would have been more excited if her daughter had given birth to a puppy rather than the permanently angry Xanthia, who seemed to have inherited Emily’s worst traits.

She regarded the steady rise and fall of Graham’s chest, the lack of expression on his face. He looked smaller. He was losing his power, shrinking, no longer a demigod. How are the mighty fallen. Graham made a little noise, a susurration as if he were speaking in a dream. His features remained unmoved, however. Gloria stroked his hand with the back of her fingers and felt a twinge of sorrow. Not for Graham the man so much as Graham the boy she had never known, a boy in long flannel shorts and gray shirt and school tie and cap, a boy who knew nothing about ambition and acquisition and call girls. “You stupid bugger, Graham,” she said, not entirely without affection.

Where would he go if the machines were turned off? Drift off into some inner space, a lonely astronaut, abandoned by his ship. It would be funny (well, not funny-astounding) if there was an afterlife. If there was a heaven. Gloria didn’t believe in heaven, although she did occasionally worry that it was a place that existed only if you did believe in it. She wondered if people would be so keen on the idea of the next life if it was, say, underground. Or full of people like Pam. And relentlessly, tediously boring, like an everlasting Baptist service but without the occasional excitement of a full immersion. For Graham, presumably, heaven would be a thirty-year-old Macallan, a Montecristo, and, apparently, Miss Whiplash.

He thought he was invincible, but he’d been tagged by death. Graham thought he could buy his way out of anything, but the grim reaper wasn’t going to be paid off with Graham’s baksheesh. The Grim Reaper, Gloria corrected herself. If anyone deserved capital letters it was surely Death. Gloria would rather like to be the Grim Reaper. She wouldn’t necessarily be grim, she suspected she would be quite cheerful (“Come along now, don’t make such a fuss”).

“They’ll never get me”-that’s what Graham said. Graham, who always behaved as if he were untouchable, some kind of maverick, an outlaw not subject to the normal rules, crowing with triumph when he fooled the Inland Revenue or Customs and Excise, bypassing health and safety and building regulations, pushing his way through planning, sweetening his path with bribes and backhanders, cruising along in the outside lane at a hundred miles an hour in that bloody great car of his with its blacked-out windows. Why would you need blacked-out windows unless you were up to something nefarious? Gloria didn’t like the drawn curtain, the closed door, everything should be on show in broad daylight. If you were doing something you were ashamed of, then you shouldn’t be doing it.

Twice he’d managed to wriggle out of being prosecuted for speeding, once for reckless driving, once for being over the limit-thanks to a brother Mason in the courts, no doubt. A few months ago he had been stopped on the A9 going 120 miles per hour while talking on his mobile at the same time as eating a double cheeseburger. Not only that! When he was breathalyzed he was found to be over the limit, yet the case never even got as far as the court, being conveniently dropped on a technicality because Graham hadn’t been sent the correct papers. Gloria could imagine him only too well, one hand on the wheel, his phone tucked into the crook of his neck, the grease from the meat dripping down his chin, his breath rank with whiskey. At the time, Gloria had thought that the only thing lacking in this sordid scenario was a woman in the passenger seat fellating him. Now she thought that that had probably been going on as well. Gloria hated the term “blow job” but she rather liked the word “fellatio,” it sounded like an Italian musical term-contralto,alto,fellatio-although she found the act itself to be distasteful, in all senses of the word.

When he had got off the latest charge, he celebrated with a noisy, bloated dinner at Prestonfield House with Gloria, Pam, Murdo, and Sheriff Alistair Crichton. It undoubtedly helped if your big golfing pal was a sheriff. Despite having lived in Scotland for four decades, Gloria found that the word “sheriff”did not immediately conjure up the Scottish judiciary. Instead she tended to see tin stars at high noon and Alan Wheatley as the evil Sheriff of Nottingham in the old children’s television program Robin Hood. She started to hum the theme tune.

Gloria liked Robin Hood and its simple message-wrong punished, right rewarded, justice restored. Stealing from the rich, giving to the poor, they were basic Communist tenets. Instead of slipping off the bar stool and following Graham, she should have donned a duffle coat and sold the Socialist Worker on wet and windy street corners on Saturday mornings (and still have had sex with so many different men that she would never be able to remember their names, let alone their faces).

They’ll never get me. But they would. She thought of the stag at bay on the living room wall, its lips curled back from its teeth in horror as the dogs closed in. No escape. Of course a deer was far too nice an animal for Graham to be compared with. He was more of a magpie-jabbering, yobbish birds who stole from other birds’ nests.

“Needles and camels,” Gloria said to Graham. He had nothing to say on either topic, the only noise came from the machines that were keeping him alive. “What profiteth it a man if he gaineth the whole world but loseth his soul? Answer that one, Graham.”

A Church of Scotland minister entered the ICU at that moment, dutifully visiting the lost lamb of his flock. Gloria had put “Church of Scotland” on Graham’s admission form just to annoy him if he lived. Now she rather regretted not putting “Jain Buddhist” or “Druid,” as it might have led to an interesting and informative discussion with whatever hierophant represented their religion in the Royal Infirmary. As it was, the Church of Scotland minister, apart from being surprised at finding Gloria quoting scripture (“No one does anymore”), proved harmless company, chatting to her about global warming and the problem of slugs. “If only they could be persuaded to eat just the weeds,” he said, wringing his hands.

“From your mouth to God’s ear,” Gloria said.

“Well, no rest for the wicked,” the minister said eventually, standing up and holding one of her hands in both of his for an intense moment. “Always a difficult time when a loved one is in the hospital,” he said, glancing vaguely at Graham. Even supine and comatose Graham failed to look like a loved one. “I hope it all goes well for you,” the minister murmured.

“So do I,” Gloria said.

12

Louise was running. Louise hated running, but it was marginally preferable to going to the gym. The gym involved regular commitment, and outwith her job, she was crap at regular commitment. Go ask Archie. So, all in all, it was easier to grit her teeth and throw on her sweats, then jog sedately around the estate to warm up before heading off over the fields and, if she was feeling virtuous, or guilty (the other side of the coin), then up the hill and back again. The one good thing about running was that it gave you the space to think. That was the downside as well, of course. Dualism, the Edinburgh disease, Jekyll and Hyde, dark and light, hill and valley, New Town, Old Town. Catholics and Protestants. A game of two halves. An eternal Manichaean dichotomy. It was her day off and she could have had a swim, read a book, caught up with laundry, but no, she had chosen to run up a bloody big hill. Confessions of a justified sinner. “Antisyzygy and the Scottish Psyche.” She had done Hogg for her undergraduate dissertation, but then, who hadn’t?

She had drunk what she thought of as a moderate three glasses of wine last night, but it was taking its toll on her. Her mouth felt like an old boot, and the Peking duck that had accompanied the wine still lived on like a game old bird. A rare and belated girls’ night out at the Jasmine, to celebrate Louise’s promotion two weeks ago. Afterward they had gone to “see something at the Festival,” a vague, unplanned mission that hadn’t taken into account the fact that anything good was going to be sold out by the time they arrived. They had ended up in a dive near the police mortuary, appropriately, and had gone to see some dreadful has-been comic. Three glasses of wine and Louise found herself heckling. They had made their rowdy way back through the Old Town, belting out “(You Make Me Feel Like) a Natural Woman” like the worst of hen parties. Louise liked to think it was Carole King’s