Free One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson Page B

phobia-inducing, crowded Indian restaurant. “Fantastic to look at and all that, but it has no libido . And obviously you have to blame Knox for that.” Martin hated the way Richard said “Knox” with such offhand familiarity. He felt like saying, “Knox might have been a dour, tight-arsed, puritanical bastard, but he was our dour, tight-arsed, puritanical bastard, not yours.”
    “Exactly!” another one of them said. He was wearing narrow spectacles with thick black rims and smoked even more than Richard. Martin, a spectacle wearer since the age of eight, wore rimless lightweight glasses in an attempt to disguise the fact that he had defective eyesight, rather than making a feature of it. “No libido—very good, Richard.” The man with the black-framed spectacles jabbed the air with his cigarette to emphasize his agreement. “That’s Edinburgh exactly .” Martin wanted to defend his home city but couldn’t quite work out how. It was true, Edinburgh didn’t have a libido, but why would you want to live in a city that did?
    “Barcelona!” another of Richard’s friends shouted across the table (they were loud and not a little drunk), and the man with the old-fashioned but trendy spectacles barked back, “Rio de Janeiro!” And so the shouting of cities went on (“Marseille! New York!”) until they got to “Amsterdam!” and a row broke out over whether Amsterdam possessed its own libido or was “merely a locus for the exploitative commercial transactions of other people’s libidos.”
    “Sex and capitalism,” Richard intervened languidly, “what’s the difference?” Martin waited for a punch line, but apparently there wasn’t one. Personally he thought there was a lot of difference between the two, but then he remembered undressing in front of Irina in that awful hotel room, with its view of the Neva and the cockroaches scuttling along the skirting boards. “Well-upholstered. Built for comfort, not for speed,” he’d joked, cringing with embarrassment.
    “Da?” She laughed accommodatingly, apparently not understanding a word. The very remembrance of it made him double up as if he’d been hit by an invisible fist.
    “Girls,” one of them said suddenly. “We should go and find some girls after this.”This idea was greeted with frightening enthusiasm.
    “Pole dancing.” Richard sniggered like an adolescent boy.
    “Oh, sorry, Martin,” another of them said. “Sorry to be so rampantly hetero.”
    “Do you think I’m gay?” Martin asked, surprised. They all turned to look at him as if he’d said something interesting for the first time.
    “There’s nothing wrong with that, Martin,” Richard said. “Everyone’s gay.”
    Martin would have argued with this ridiculous statement, but he had just discovered that he was chewing on a piece of chicken from his “vegetable biryani .” He removed it from his mouth as discreetly as he could and put it on the side of his plate. The last gristly remnant of some poor abused bird that had been pumped full of hormones and antibiotics and water in a foreign country. He could have wept for it.
    “It’s okay, Martin,” Richard Mott said, slapping him on the back. “You’re with friends.”
    W ithout asking him whether he wanted to go or not, Richard informed him that he had left a ticket for Martin for the radio showcase at the box office, but when Martin got to the venue, the indifferent girl behind the counter said to another indifferent girl, “Are there any comps in Richard Mott’s name?” The other girl made a face and glanced around while the first girl returned to glaring at her computer screen.
    Martin found himself staring at a poster for Richard’s show. It was a close-up shot of Richard making a quirky face. A strapline running under it said, COMIC VIAGRA FOR THE MIND. Martin thought that sounded off-putting rather than inviting.
    When nothing more was forthcoming from either of the girls, Martin pointed out a rickety wooden