One Good Turn

Without anything better to do than lie in an empty bed and think about what he didn’t have, he went and picked up his ticket for Richard Mott.

Jackson remembered Richard Mott from the eighties, he hadn’t found him funny then and he didn’t find him funny now. Neither did most of the audience, apparently-Jackson was shocked by how vicious some of the jeering and catcalling was. He dropped off a couple of times, but the circumstances were hardly conducive to sleep. When Richard Mott finished to grudging applause, Jackson thought, There goes another hour of my life. He was too old now, too aware of the finite nature of what was left to squander precious time on crap comedy.

He slipped away as quickly as possible and made his way down to the subterranean depths of Julia’s venue, only to find it dark and empty. One day he would find a Minotaur in there. Julia had said they would be hours, but there was no sign of anyone. He turned his phone back on and found a text from Julia, saying, “All done, see you back at the flat.”

He discovered a fire exit and made the mistake of leaving the building through it so that when he hit the street, he had no idea where he was. He had read in National Geographic (he had recently taken out a subscription, thereby incontrovertibly confirming his middle-aged status) that it had been proved by geneticists that women navigated by landmarks, men by spatial indicators. It was dark, and lacking any spatial indicators, he tried looking for landmarks, searching for the shape of the Royal Mile, for the skyline of spires and crowstepped gables culminating in the pomp and circumstance of the Castle. He looked for the massy bulk of the museum on Chambers Street. He looked for the spans of the landlocked bridges, but all he found was the mouth of a dark alley, a narrow close that led to an endless flight of stone steps. He could see lights at the top, and a street still humming with Festival-goers, and he set off without thinking much beyond This looks like a shortcut. A “snicket,” that’s what he would have called it when he was a boy. Different language, different times.

Jackson was forever warning Marlee (and Julia, come to that, but she never listened) about the foolishness of going down dark alleys. “Daddy, I’m not even allowed out in the dark,” Marlee said reasonably. Of course, if you were a girl, if you were a woman, you didn’t need to go down a dark alley in order to be attacked. You could be sitting on a train, stepping off a bus, feeding a photo-copier, and still be plucked from your life too soon by some crazy guy. Not even crazy, that was the thing, most of them weren’t crazy, they were just guys, period. Jackson would have been happier if the women in his life never left the house. But he knew even that wasn’t enough to keep them safe. “You’re like a sheepdog,” Julia told him, “every last lamb has to be accounted for.”

Jackson himself wasn’t afraid of dark alleys, he thought he prob-ably posed more of a threat himself in a dark alley than anyone he was likely to encounter, but obviously he hadn’t reckoned on Honda Man. The Incredible Hulk on steroids in all his pumped-up glory, barreling out of nowhere and staggering into Jackson with all the grace of a rugby prop. Jesus Christ, Jackson thought as he hit the ground, this was some kind of town. The Minotaur was out of the labyrinth.

He got to his feet instinctively, never stay down, down means kicked, down means dead, but before Jackson could even get a ra-tional thought up and running-Why? would have been a good one to start with-Honda Man had slammed him with a punch like a battering ram. Jackson heard the air leaving his own body with a kind of ouf! sound before he slumped to the ground. His diaphragm turned to stone, he immediately lost interest in rational thought, his only concern had become the mechanics of his breathing-why it had stopped, how to start it again. He managed to get on all fours, like a dog, and was rewarded by Honda Man stamping on one of his hands, a bitchy kind of move, in Jackson’s opinion, but it hurt so much he wanted to cry.

“You’re going to forget about what you saw,” Honda Man said.

“Forget what? What did I see?” Jackson gasped. Full marks for trying to have a conversation, Jackson, he thought. On all fours and still talking-give this man a medal. He blew out air and sucked it in again.

“Don’t try to be fucking clever, you know what you saw.”

“Do I?” In reply, Honda Man gave him a casual kick in the ribs that made him recoil in agony. The guy was right, he should stop trying to be clever.

“I’m told that you’ve been causing a fuss, Mr. Brodie.” (The guy knew his name?) Jackson thought about saying that he hadn’t been doing any such thing, that, indeed, he had actively refrained from saying anything about the road rage to the police and had no interest at all in being a witness, but all that he managed to say was “Uh,” because one of Honda Man’s heavy-duty boots gave him another hefty nudge in the ribs. He had to get up off the ground. You had to keep getting to your feet. All the Rocky films seemed to pass before his eyes in one go. Stallone shouting his wife’s name at the end like he was dying. “Adrian!” The Rockies I-V contained important moral lessons that men could learn to live by, but what did they teach you about fighting impossible enemies? Keep going, against the odds. When there was nothing else to do, all that was left was seeing it through to the end.

Honda Man was squatting like a sumo and taunting Jackson by making gestures with his hands as if he were helping him reverse into a parking space, the universal machismo mime for Bring it on.

The guy was twice his size, more like an unstoppable force of nature than a human being. Jackson knew there was no way he could fight him and win, no way he could fight him and live. He suddenly remembered the baseball bat. Where was it? Up his sleeve? No, that would be ridiculous, a magician’s trick. They circled round like street-fighting gladiators, keeping their weight low. Honda Man obviously had no sense of humor, because if he had, he would have been laughing at Jackson for behaving as if he had a chance against him. Where was the baseball bat?

The other thing Jackson always tried to impress on Marlee- and Julia-was what you had to do if you were attacked because you’d been foolish enough to ignore his advice in the first place and go down the dark alley.

“You’re at a disadvantage,” he tutored them. “Height, weight, strength, they’re all against you, so you have to fight dirty. Thumbs in the eyes, fingers up the nostrils, knee to the groin. And shout, don’t forget to shout. Lots of noise. If worst comes to worst, bite wherever you can-nose, lips-and hold on. But then shout again. Keep shouting.”

He was going to have to forget fighting like a man and fight like a girl. Navigating like the fairer sex hadn’t worked for him, but nonetheless he went for Honda Man’s eyes with his thumbs-and missed, it was like jumping for a basketball hoop. He made it to the nose somehow and bit down and held on. Not the most disgusting thing he’d ever done, but close. Honda Man screamed- an unearthly storybook-giant kind of sound.

Jackson let go. Honda Man’s face was covered in blood, the same blood that Jackson could taste in his own mouth, coppery and foul. He took his own advice and shouted. He wanted the po-lice to come, he wanted concerned citizens and innocent by-standers to come, he wanted anyone to come who could stop the madman mountain. Unfortunately, the shout attracted the dog, and Jackson remembered that it wasn’t the baseball bat he needed to worry about-it was the dog. The dog that was making a bee-line for him, its teeth bared like a hound from hell.

He knew how to kill a dog, in theory anyway-you got hold of its front legs and just pulled it apart, basically-but a theoreti-cal dog was different from a real dog, an enraged real dog, packed with muscle and teeth, whose only ambition was to tear your throat out.

Honda Man stopped screaming long enough to give the dog its orders. He pointed at Jackson and yelled, “Get him! Kill him!”

Jackson watched in mute, paralyzed horror as the dog leaped in the air toward him.

WEDNESDAY 16

Richard Mott woke with a start. He felt as if an alarm bell had gone off in his head. He had no idea what time