“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?”
Jackson sensed the mistake immediately. Julia’s eldest sister, Sylvia, had drowned herself in the bath, a formidable act of will that Jackson almost admired. She was a nun, so Jackson supposed all those years of discipline had put the iron in her soul. His own sister hadn’t drowned, she had been raped and strangled and then dumped in a canal. Water, water, everywhere. They were linked, he and Julia, by these things. “Like some kind of karmic concate-nation,” she had ruminated once. He had to look up the word “concatenation,” it had sounded Catholic, but it wasn’t. From the Latin “catena,” a chain. The chain of evidence. Chain of fools. He wished now he’d had a classical education rather than an army ed-ucation. A good school, a degree, the world his own daughter was growing up in. The world Julia had grown up in, but then look how fucked up that had been. He wanted to tell Julia about the woman in the Forth, about his own near-drowning experience, but she had returned to herself, applying lipstick, peering at her lips in the mirror with professional detachment, smacking them together and making a face as if she were kissing her reflection.
Jackson wondered what it said about a relationship when you were unable to tell the “object of your affection” that you had been pulled out of the water like a half-drowned dog. “Lucky”- inevitably-had been the name of the dog that had scooted with joy off the pier at Whitby. The owner of the dog, the first man to drown that day, had a wife and eight-year-old daughter, and Jackson had wondered what had happened to the dog. Had they taken Lucky home with them?
“But you’ll be finished in time for the show?” Julia said.
“The show?”
As she was going out the door, Julia said, “Oh, while I remember, can you do me a favor? I dropped the memory card off at the chemist next to the flat. I thought if you didn’t have anything better to do you could pick the photographs up.”
“And what if I do have something better to do?”
“Do you?” Julia asked, curiosity rather than sarcasm in her voice.
“Hang on,” Jackson said, “back up-what photographs? What memory card?”
“The one from our camera.”
“But I lost the camera,” he said, “I told you I lost it at Cramond.”
“I know, and I told you that I phoned up the police lost prop-erty at Fettes and someone had handed it in.”
“What? You didn’t tell me that.”
“Yes, I did,”Julia said, “unless there was someone else lying next to me in bed pretending to be Jackson.”
When had Julia had time to drop things off at the chemist, to fill up the fruit bowl, to make phone calls, have lunch with Richard Mott? And yet she hadn’t had a second to give to him.
“Scott Marshall,” she continued blithely, “that nice boy who plays my lover, drove out to Fettes and picked it up for me.”
“They just handed it over to him?” Jackson said, astonished (“my lover,” the way she said it, so casual). “Without any proof?” He thought of the image of the dead girl trapped in the camera. Had someone looked at it, developed it?
“I described the first three photographs on the memory card over the phone,” Julia said, “and that seemed to satisfy them. And I told them that someone named Scott Marshall would be picking them up. He showed them his driver’s license. Crikey, Jackson, do we have to dissect every aspect of police procedure regarding lost prop-erty?”