When Will There Be Good News?

by Kate Atkinson

  The suit next to him coughed, an unhealthy, phlegmy noise, and Jackson wondered if he should offer up his jacket to him as well. Strangers on a train. If there was an emergency, would they help one another? (Never overestimate people.) Or would it be every woman for herself? That was the way to survive in a plane or a train, you had to ignore everyone and everything, get out at any cost, gnaw off a limb — someone else’s if necessary — climb over seats, climb over people, forget anything your mother ever taught you about manners, because the people who got to the exit were the people who, literally, lived to tell the tale.

  The aftermath of a bad train crash was like a battlefield. Jackson knew, he’d attended one at the beginning of his career in the civilian police and it had been worse than anything he’d seen in the army. There’d been a small child trapped in the wreckage. They could hear it calling for its mother, but they couldn’t even begin to get to it beneath the tons of train.

  After a while the crying stopped, but it continued in Jackson’s dreams for months afterwards. The child — a boy — was eventually rescued, but strangely, that didn’t mollify the horror of recalling his sobs (“Mummy, Mummy”). Of course, this was not long after Jackson himself had become a parent to Marlee, a condition that had left him torn and raw and completely at odds with his prenatal preoccupations, which had mainly revolved around choosing a pram — with the kind of masculine attention to specs that he would normally have afforded a car (lockable front swivel wheels? adjustable handle height? multiposition seat?). The mechanics of fatherhood turned out to be infinitely more primitive. He fingered the plastic bag in his pocket. A different pregnancy, a different child. His. He remembered the surge of emotion he had felt earlier in the day when he had touched Nathan’s small head. Love. Love wasn’t sweet and light, it was visceral and overpowering. Love wasn’t patient, love wasn’t kind. Love was ferocious, love knew how to play dirty.

  He hadn’t seen Julia in her later stages. Short and sexy, in pregnancy she would be ripely voluptuous, he imagined, although she told him that she had piles and varicose veins and was “almost spherical.” They had maintained a low-grade kind of communication with each other; he phoned her and she told him to sod off, but sometimes they spoke as though nothing had ever come between them. Yet still she maintained the baby wasn’t his.

  He had visited her in the hospital afterwards. Walking into the six-berth maternity ward, he had taken a blow to the heart when he caught sight of her with the baby cradled in her arms. She was propped up on pillows with her wild hair loose about her shoulders, looking for all the world like a madonna — this vision spoiled only by the interloper, Mr. Arty-Farty photographer, lying next to her on the bed, gazing adoringly at the baby.

  “Well, look at this — the unholy family,” Jackson said (because he couldn’t help himself — the story of his life where shooting off his mouth to his women was concerned).

  “Go away, Jackson,” Julia said placidly. “You know this isn’t a good idea.” Mr. Arty-Farty, a little more proactive, said, “Get out of here or I’ll deck you.”

  “Fat chance of that, you big pansy,” Jackson said (because he couldn’t help himself). The guy was pampered and unfit. Jackson liked to think that he could have taken him out with one punch.

  “The better part of valor is discretion, Jackson,” Julia said, a warning note creeping into her voice. Trust Julia to be quoting at a time like this. She put her little finger in the baby’s mouth and smiled down at him. A world apart. Jackson had never seen her so happy and he might have turned on his heel and left, out of deference to Julia’s newfound redemption, but Mr. Arty-Farty (his name was actually Jonathan Carr) said, “There’s nothing for you here, Brodie,” as if he owned this nativity scene, and Jackson felt himself go so beyond reason that he would have beaten the guy up right there on the floor of the ward, with nursing mothers and newborn babies for an audience, if Julia’s baby (his baby) hadn’t started crying and shamed him into retreat. Jackson had the grace to be mortified by this memory.

  And now the two of them, soft southerners to the core, were living in his homeland, his heartland, while every day he walked a step further away. And Julia living a country life as a country wife beggared belief. He could believe in a billion angels dancing on a pinhead more readily than he could believe in Julia cooking on an Aga. Yes, okay, the Dales weren’t part of his heritage of dirt and industrial decay, but they were within the boundaries of God’s own county, which was also Jackson’s own county, flowing in the stream of his blood, laid down in the limestone of his bones even though neither of his parents was born here. Was it in his son’s DNA, carried now in Jackson’s pocket? The blueprint of his child. A chain of molecules, a chain of evidence. There would be traces of his sister in that single hair. Niamh, killed so long ago now that she existed more as a story than a person, a tale to be told, My sister was murdered when she was eighteen.

  He took his BlackBerry out and put it on the table in front of him. He was half expecting a text message. Arrived safely. As none came, he texted, Miss you, Jx. That passed a minute or two. He left the phone out so that he could see if he received a reply.

  The old woman opposite sighed and closed her eyes as if the book she was reading had quite worn her out. The woman in red — neither lady nor librarian but a good old-fashioned tart (rather like Julia) — could have been the same age as his strolling woman. Where was she now? Still walking up hill and down dale? The suit took out a battered-looking packet of cheese and onion crisps from his briefcase and in a rather reluctant act of camaraderie silently offered them around.

  The women refused but Jackson took a handful. He was starving, and his chances of getting to the buffet car were minimal, given the crush in the carriages. If ever thou gavest meat or drink, the fire sall never make thee shrink. If meat or drink thou ne’er gav’st nane, the fire will burn thee to the bare bane. That damned dirge. Had the suit bought his way into heaven with a packet of cheese and onion crisps? Jackson should have insisted that the old woman take his North Face jacket; otherwise he might find himself shivering his way through the fires of hell.

  The crisps tasted unnatural and made him thirsty. There was a throbbing behind his eyes. He wanted to be home.

  It was black outside the carriage window, not even a pinprick of light from a house, and rain lashed incessantly on the glass. It was deeply inhospitable out there. Where were they? He guessed somewhere in the no-man’s-land between York and Doncaster. Closer to his birthplace. His birthright gone, sold off with the family silver in the eighties by That Woman.

  Had they even stopped at York yet? If they had, he hadn’t noticed. He had a feeling he might have dozed off for a while.

  He found himself thinking about Louise. They hadn’t really kept in touch, just the occasional text from her when he suspected she was drunk. There’d never been anything between them, at least nothing that was ever spoken. Their relationship in Edinburgh two years ago could have been described as a professional one if you were playing fast and loose with the dictionary. They had never kissed, never touched, although Jackson was pretty sure she had thought about it. He certainly had. A lot.

  Then, a couple of months ago, she announced that she was getting married, an event that seemed so unlikely (if not absurd) that he suspected she was joking. He had thought at one point that he might feature in her future, and the next thing he knew he had been drop-kicked into her past. They were two people who had missed each other, sailed right past in the night and into different harbors. The one that got away. He was sorry. He wished her well. Sort of.

  How ironic that both Julia and Louise, the two women he’d felt closest to in his recent past, had both unexpectedly got married, and neither of them to him.

  They passed through a station at speed, and Jackson struggled and failed to read the name.

  “Where was that?” he asked the woman in red.

  “I didn’t see, sorry.” She took out a mirror from her handbag and reapplied her lipst
ick, stretching her mouth and then baring her teeth to check for any smears. Jackson’s suited neighbor tensed briefly and paused in his incessant typing, staring sightlessly at the laptop screen, not daring to look at the woman, but not quite able to keep his eyes away from her either. Some animal instinct briefly flared and flickered inside his suit, but then it must have burned itself out, because he slumped a little and returned to the tap-tap-tapping on his keyboard.

  The woman in red ran her tongue over her lips and smiled at Jackson. He wondered if she was going to give him a tangible sign, nod in the direction of the toilets, expecting him to inch his way after her, squeezing past the blank-eyed squaddies to take her, thrusting urgently against the soap-and-grime-smeared little sink, with his hastily dropped trousers in an undignified pool around his ankles. For I am wanton and lascivious and cannot live without a wife. A memory of Julia, playing Helen in Doctor Faustus in a stripped-down production above a smoky London pub. Jackson wondered what, if anything, would drive him to be tempted to barter his soul to the devil, or indeed anyone. To save a life, he supposed. His child. (His children.) Would he follow the woman in red if she gave him the sign? Good question. He had never been what you would call promiscuous (and he had never once been unfaithful, making him almost a saint), but he was a man and he had taken it where he found it. O, Man, thy name is Folly.

  When he glanced at her reflection in the dark glass of the window, she was innocently reading her trashy rag again. Perhaps she hadn’t been giving him the come-on after all, perhaps his imagination was charged by the fetid atmosphere of the carriage. He was relieved he’d been spared the test.

  Julia had done it in train toilets with complete strangers, and once on a plane, although admittedly that had been with him, not a stranger (at the time, anyway, different now). Julia gobbled up life because she knew what the alternative was, her catalogue of dead sisters a constant reminder of life’s fragility. He was glad she’d had a son, she might worry less for him than she would for a daughter.

  And now, Amelia, the only sister she had left, had cancer, her breasts at this very moment being “lopped off,” according to Julia. They had spoken, briefly, on the phone, Jackson wanting to be sure that Julia wasn’t at home before heading north to see his child. Their child.

  “Poor, poor Milly,” Julia said, more choked up than usual. Grief always brought on her asthma.

  Once, on holiday with Julia in sunnier times, he couldn’t remember where now, Jackson saw a painting by some Italian Renaissance guy he’d never heard of, showing the martyred St. Agatha holding her severed yet perfect breasts up high, on a plate, as if she were a waitress serving up a pair of blancmanges. No hint of the torture that had preceded this amputation — the sexual assaults, the stretching on the rack, the starvation, the rolling of her body over burning coals. St. Agatha was a saint whom Jackson was acquainted with only too well. After his mother was diagnosed with the breast cancer that would kill her, she had wasted a lot of her time praying to St. Agatha, the patron saint of the disease.

  He was shaken out of his thoughts by the old woman suddenly asking him if they had passed the Angel of the North and would she be able to see it in the dark. Jackson wasn’t sure what to say to her — how to break the news that she was traveling the wrong way, that this train was bound for London, and she had endured several hours in cramped, unpleasant conditions and was now going to have to turn round and do it all over again. The next stop would probably be Doncaster, maybe Grantham, birthplace of That Woman, the very person who had single-handedly dismantled Britain. (“Oh, for God’s sake, Jackson, give it a rest,” he heard his ex-wife’s voice say in his head.)

  “We’re not going that way,” he said gently to the old woman.

  “Of course we are,” she said. “Where do you think we’re going?”

  He slept. When he woke up, the suit was still tap-tapping on his laptop. Jackson checked for text messages but there were none. A station flashed by and the old woman gave him a smug look. “Dunbar,” she announced like an old soothsayer.

  “Dunbar?” Jackson said.

  “The train terminates at Waverley.”

  She was obviously a little senile, Jackson thought. Unless . . .

  The woman in red leaned over the table, displaying her own ample and healthy breasts for his connoisseurship, and said to him, “Do you have the time?”

  “The time?” Jackson echoed. (The time for what? A quickie in the train toilet?) She tapped her wrist, in an exaggerated dumb show. “The time, do you know what time it is?”

  The time. (Idiot.) He looked at his Breitling and was surprised to see it was nearly eight. They should be in London by now. Unless . . . “Ten to eight,” he said to the woman in red. “Where is this train going to?”

  “Edinburgh,” she said, just as a young guy who had been weaving his way unsteadily through the carriage stumbled and pitched towards Jackson, clutching onto his can of lager as if it were going to stop him from falling. Jackson jumped up, not so much to save the guy as to save himself from being showered with lager. “Steady there, sir,” he said, instinctively finding his voice of authority, while using his body weight to prop the guy up. He remembered the sheep from this afternoon. The drunk guy was more pliable. He stared blearily at Jackson, confused by the “sir,” unsure whether he was under attack or not — probably no one, but the police had previously addressed him in such a polite manner. He started to say something, slurred and incoherent, when the carriage jolted suddenly and he staggered and fell headlong, slipping through Jackson’s fumbled attempt to catch him.

  There was a certain amount of alarm registered by the carriage’s occupants at this unexpected stutter in the train’s progress, but it was soon replaced with relief. “What was that?” Jackson heard someone say and another voice laughed, “Wrong kind of leaves on the line probably.” It was all very British. The suit seemed the most twitchy. “Everything’s going to be fine,” Jackson said and immediately thought, Don’t tempt fate.

  Julia believed in the Fates (let’s face it, Julia believed in everything and anything). She believed they had “their eye on you,” and if they didn’t, then they were certainly looking for you, so it was best not to draw attention to yourself. They had been in the car once, stuck in traffic and running late to catch a ferry, and Jackson said, “It’s fine, I’m sure we’re going to make it,” and Julia had ducked down dramatically in the passenger seat as if she were being shot at and hissed, “Shush, they’ll hear us.”

  “Who will hear us?” Jackson puzzled.

  “The Fates.” Jackson had actually glanced in his rearview mirror as if they might be traveling in the car behind. “Don’t tempt them,” Julia said. And once on a plane that had been bucking with turbulence, he had held her hand and said, “It won’t last long,” and had been subjected to the same histrionic performance, as if the Fates were riding on the wing of the 747. “Don’t put your head above the parapet,” Julia said. Jackson had innocently inquired whether the Fates were the same thing as the Furies, and Julia said darkly, “Don’t even go there.”

  Looking back, he was astonished at how much traveling he had done with Julia — they were always on planes and trains and boats. He’d been hardly anywhere since their breakup, just a few hops across the Channel to his house in the Midi. He had sold the house now, the money should arrive in his account today. He had liked France but it wasn’t as if it were home.

  Jackson was currently less concerned with the Fates and more concerned by the direction they were traveling. They were going to Edinburgh? He hadn’t caught the train to King’s Cross, he had caught the train from King’s Cross. The strolling woman had been right. He was going the wrong way.

  Satis House

  When Reggie arrived at the bleak bungalow in Musselburgh, Ms. MacDonald opened the door and said, “Reggie!” as if she were astonished to see her, although their Wednesday routine was invariable. From once being a woman who took pride in the fact that nothing could surprise her,
Ms. MacDonald had turned into one who was amazed at the simplest things (“Look at that bird!” “Is that a plane overhead?”). Her left eye was bloodshot, as if a red star had exploded in her brain. It made you wonder if it wasn’t better just to dive down into the blue and check out early.

  No sign of the advent of Christmas in Ms. MacDonald’s house, Reggie noticed. She wondered if it was against her religion.

  “The meal is on the table,” Ms. MacDonald said. Every Wednesday they ate tea together and then Ms. MacDonald drove across to the other side of Musselburgh (God help anyone else on the road) to her “Healing and Prayer” meeting (which, let’s face it, wasn’t doing much good) while Reggie did homework and kept an eye on Banjo, Ms. MacDonald’s little old dog. When Ms. MacDonald returned, all prayered-up and full of the spirit, she checked Reggie’s homework over tea and biscuits — “a plain digestive” for Ms. MacDonald and a Tunnock’s Caramel Wafer bought specially for Reggie.

  Reggie didn’t know what kind of a cook Ms. MacDonald was before her brain started to be nibbled at by her crabby tumor, but she was certainly a terrible one now. “Tea” was usually a stodgy macaroni and cheese or a gluey fish pie, after which Ms. MacDonald would heave herself up from the table with an effort and say, “Dessert?” as if she were about to offer chocolate cheesecake or crème brûlée when in fact it was always the same low-fat strawberry yogurt, which Ms. MacDonald watched Reggie eat with a kind of vicarious thrill that was unsettling. Ms. MacDonald didn’t eat much anymore, now that she herself was being eaten.

  Ms. MacDonald was in her fifties, but she had never been young. When she was a teacher at the school, she looked as if she ironed herself every morning and had never betrayed a trace of irrational behavior (quite the opposite), but now not only had she embraced a crazy religion but she dressed as if she were one step away from being a bag lady, and her house was two steps beyond squalid. She was, she said, preparing for the end of the world. Reggie didn’t really see how a person could prepare for an event like that, and anyway, unless the end of the world happened very soon, it seemed unlikely that Ms. MacDonald would be around to see it.