One Good Turn

37

Jackson rolled over in the bed and spooned Julia’s hot body. She usually slept naked but was now wearing a pair of horrendous pa-jamas that were much too big for her and might at some point have belonged to her sister. Jackson knew the pajamas were sig-nificant, but he didn’t particularly want to think what that significance might be. He missed the feeling of skin on skin, the peachy roundness of Julia. He fitted himself into the familiar curves and cambers of her body, but instead of pushing back and settling into his shape, she shifted away from him, murmuring something incomprehensible. Julia talked a lot in her sleep, all of it gibberish, but nonetheless Jackson had taken to listening intently in case she divulged something secret and hidden that he would feel better (or, more likely, worse) for knowing.

He moved closer to her again and kissed her neck, but she remained steadfastly asleep. It was difficult to wake Julia up, short of shaking her. Once, he had made love to her while she slept, and she’d hardly even twitched when he came inside her, but he didn’t tell her about it afterward because he wasn’t sure how she would react. He couldn’t imagine her being particularly put out (this was Julia, after all). She would probably just have said, “Without me? How could you?” Technically it was rape, of course. He had arrested enough guys in his time for taking advantage of drunk or drugged girls. Plus, if he was honest, Julia was such a sound sleeper that there had been a touch of necrophilia about the whole thing. He’d put a necrophiliac away once, the guy worked in a mortuary and didn’t “see where the harm was” because “the objects of my affection have moved beyond earthly matters.”

Between Amelia’s pajamas and necrophilia, Jackson had pretty much managed to kill off any desire he might have woken up with. Julia was probably still annoyed with him, anyway. Jackson placed his ear to her back like a stethoscope and listened to her rattling breath. He had done the same for a three-year-old Marlee when she’d had bronchitis. Julia’s lungs would kill her in the end. There was something about her that suggested she would never make old bones, that long before she was drawing her pension she’d have emphysema and be lugging around an oxygen tank as tall as herself. She wriggled farther away from him.

Everything was subject to entropy, even sex, even love. A slow era-sure of passion. Not his love for his daughter, obviously, that was the one unbreakable bond. Or his sister. He had loved his sister with a true heart, but Niamh was too far “beyond earthly matters” now for him to feel the tug and urgency of love. The sadness was all that was left.

He propped himself up on an elbow and studied Julia’s face. He had a feeling that she wasn’t really asleep, that she might be acting.

“Don’t,” she said and rolled over, pressing her face into the pillow.

When he woke again, Julia was kneeling on the bed next to him, wearing only a towel and holding a tray on which he could see coffee, scrambled eggs, toast. “Breakfast!” she announced gaily. Jackson’s watch said seven o’clock.

“For a minute I thought you were Julia,” he said.

“Ha, funny. I couldn’t sleep.” Her damp hair was bundled into a demented ponytail on one side of her head, and she smelled soapy clean. She was naturally spotlighted by the sun, caught in a lozenge of light, and he could see the dark rings around her eyes, the shadow of something mortal on her brow. Maybe it was just disappointment. She settled cross-legged onto the bed and read out his horoscope to him. “‘Sagittarians are having a tough time at the moment.You feel as if you’re getting nowhere, but never fear-there is light at the end of the tunnel.’ Are you? Having a tough time?” she asked.

“No more than usual.”

He didn’t ask her what her stars said, that would have been to give a kind of credence to something he considered to be non-sense. He suspected Julia thought it was nonsense as well, and it was all part of some affectation.

“No, of course, this is yesterday’s paper,” Julia said. “We don’t know what’s in store for you today. Did you have a tough time yesterday? Oh, yes, you did, didn’t you? Fighting in the street, brawling, killing dogs-”

“I didn’t kill the dog.”

“Thrown in jail, convicted of an offense. They’ll never take you back in the police now, sweetie.”

“I don’t want to go back to the police.”

“Yes, you do.”

It was surprising what a burnt offering for breakfast could do to a man’s spirits. The eggs were rubbery and the toast was charred, but Jackson managed to get it all down. He had been expecting to breakfast on the cold leftovers of last night’s argument, so the eggs and Julia’s general air of benevolence were a pleasant surprise.

Julia sipped a cup of weak tea, and when he asked her why she wasn’t eating-Julia loved food the way a dog does-she said, “Funny tummy. First-night nerves. The press is going to be in, how ghastly is that? The idea of the show being reviewed is terri-fying, almost as terrifying as it not being reviewed. And you know it’s the Festival, so we won’t get a proper theater critic, they’re too busy on the Next Best Thing, we’ll get some nerd who usually subs the sports section. If only we had another preview.”

“How did it go last night?”

“Oh, you know”-she shrugged-“awful.”

Jackson’s heart went out to her.

“I’m sorry I was grumpy with you,” Julia said.

“I was grumpy too,” Jackson said magnanimously. He didn’t think he had been, really, but it didn’t hurt to be a little chivalrous, espe-cially as he presumed the logical outcome of Julia in a towel making him breakfast in bed was going to be sex, but when he made a play-ful grab at her, she jumped off the bed as neatly as a cat and said, “I have to get on, I’ve got so much to do.”At the door to the bedroom, she turned back and said, “I love you, you know.”At the beginning of a relationship, Jackson had noticed on more than one occasion in his own life, people looked happy when they said “I love you,” but at the end they said the same words and looked sad. Julia looked pos-itively tragic. But then that was Julia, always overacting.

Jackson’s phone rang and he considered not answering it. Good news always sleeps till noon, isn’t that what they said-or were those the lyrics to a Cowboy Junkies song? He answered it and had to riff on his memory for a while before the name meant something. Martin. Martin Canning, the guy who threw the briefcase at Terence Smith. An odd little guy.

“Hey, Martin,” Jackson said, adopting a false kind of cama-raderie because the guy sounded slightly unhinged. “How can I help you?”

“I wonder if you could do me a favor, Mr. Brodie?”

Jackson could no longer hear the word “favor” without thinking it had dark implications. “Sure, Martin. I haven’t got anything else to do today. And it’s Jackson, call me Jackson.”

“What are you going to do today?” Julia asked, fully dressed now and too distracted by her own day to be truly curious about his. She was applying her makeup in a little mirror propped up on the kitchen table. A light dusting of face powder had fallen on a pyra-mid of oranges balanced in a glass oven dish. Jackson didn’t remember buying any fruit.

“I’ve got a job,” he said.

“A job?”

“Yes, a job. Some guy wants babysitting today.”

“Babysitting?”

Jackson wondered if she would just keep echoing back to him what he said to her. Wasn’t this what the queen was supposed to do? It gave the impression of polite conversation, it gave the im-pression that you were genuinely interested in what the other person was saying without you having to actually engage with them on any meaningful level, or even listen to them. Testing the the-ory, he said to Julia, “And then I thought I might go and drown myself in the Forth,” but instead of parroting “the Forth?” Julia turned and gazed at him thoughtfully, seeing him rather than looking at him, and said, “Drowned?”