When Will There Be Good News?

by Kate Atkinson

  Tonight it was oven-baked spaghetti. Ms. MacDonald had a recipe that made real spaghetti from a packet taste exactly like tinned, which was quite an achievement.

  Over the spaghetti, Ms. MacDonald was blathering on about the “Rapture” and whether it would be before or after the “Tribulation,” or “the Trib,” as she called it with cozy familiarity, as if persecution, suffering, and the end of days were going to be on the same level of inconvenience as a traffic jam.

  Religion had introduced Ms. MacDonald, rather late in the day, to a social life, and her church (aka weird religious cult) was keen on potluck suppers and uninspiring barbecues. Reggie had been to an agonizing few and eaten cautiously of the burnt offerings.

  Ms. MacDonald belonged to the Church of the Coming Rapture and was herself, she announced smugly, “rapture ready.” She was a pretribulationist (“pretribber”), which meant she would be whizzed up to heaven business class, while everyone else, including Reggie, had to suffer a great deal of scourging and affliction (“seventy weeks, actually, Reggie.”). So a lot like everyday life, then. There were also posttribulationists, who had to wait until after the scourging but got to bypass heaven and enter the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, “which is the whole point,” Ms. MacDonald said. There were also midtribulationists, who, as their name implied, went up in the middle of the whole confusing process. Ms. MacDonald was saved and Reggie wasn’t, that was the bottom line. “Yes, I’m afraid you’re going to hell, Reggie,” Ms. MacDonald said, smiling benignly at her. Still, there was one consolation: Ms. MacDonald wouldn’t be there, nagging her about her Virgil translation.

  Whenever some horrible tragedy happened, from the big stuff, like planes crashing and bombs exploding, to the smaller stuff, like a boy falling off his bike and drowning in the river or a crib death in the house at the end of the street, it would always be put down to “God’s work” by Ms. MacDonald. “Going about His mysterious business,” she would say and nod sagely as people ran from disasters on the television news, as if God were running a secretive office dealing in human misery. Only Banjo seemed able to ruffle her feelings. “I hope he goes first,” Ms. MacDonald said. It was going to be a race between Ms. MacDonald and her gnarled old misfit of a terrier. It was surprising how much soppy, maternal love Ms. MacDonald lavished on Banjo, but then, Hitler was very fond of his dog. (“Blondi,” Dr. Hunter said. “She was called Blondi.”)

  Ms. MacDonald’s dog was on his last legs, literally — sometimes his back legs collapsed under him and he sat in the middle of the floor looking completely bewildered by his sudden immobility. Ms. MacDonald had begun to worry that he might die on his own while she was off doing her Wednesday-evening healing and praying, so now Reggie stayed with him in case he popped his paws. There were worse ways to spend an evening. Ms. MacDonald had a TV that worked, although not the Hunters’ extensive cable package, sadly, and Reggie got the run of the bookcases and a hot meal for her pains, plus the entire congregation (of eight) always said a prayer for her, which wasn’t a gift horse she was about to look in the mouth. She might not believe in all that stuff, but it was nice to know that someone was thinking about her welfare, even if it was Ms. MacDonald’s flock of loony tunes, who all felt sorry for Reggie on account of her orphan status, which was totally fine by Reggie — the more people who felt sorry for her, the better, in her opinion. Not Dr. Hunter, though. She didn’t want Dr. Hunter to think of her as anything but heroically, cheerfully competent.

  When the yogurt was ceremoniously finished, Ms. MacDonald exclaimed, “Goodness, look at the time!” Nowadays she was continually amazed by the time — “It can’t be six o’clock!” or “Eight o’clock? It feels more like ten,” and “It’s not really that time, is it?” Reggie could just see her when all that scourging and affliction started, turning to Reggie in astonishment, saying, “That’s never the end of the world!”

  Was there a kind of lottery (Reggie imagined a raffle) where God picked out your chosen method of going — “Heart attack for him, cancer for her, let’s see, have we had a terrible car crash yet this month?” Not that Reggie believed in God, but it was interesting sometimes to imagine. Did God get out of bed one morning and draw back the curtains (Reggie’s imaginary God led a very domesticated life) and think, “A drowning in a hotel swimming pool today, I fancy. We haven’t had that one in a while.”

  The Church of the Coming Rapture was a made-up kind of religion. Really it consisted of a bunch of people who believed unbelievable things. They didn’t even have a building but held their services in their members’ front rooms on a rotational basis. Reggie had never attended one of these services, but she imagined it was much like one of their potluck suppers, with everyone earnestly debating dispensationalist and futurist views while they passed round a plate of fig rolls. The only difference would be that Banjo wouldn’t be in attendance, slavering and groaning at the sight of the fig rolls. “I was never blessed with children of my own,” Ms. MacDonald told Reggie once, “but I have my wee dog. And I have you, of course, Reggie,” she added.

  “But not for long, Ms. Mac,” Reggie said. No, of course she didn’t say that. But it was true.

  The awful thing was that Ms. MacDonald was the nearest thing that Reggie had to a family. Reggie Chase, orphan of the parish, poor Jenny Wren, Little Reggie, the infant phenomenon.

  Reggie did the washing-up and cleaned the worst bits of the kitchen. The sink was disgusting, decaying food in the trap, old tea bags, a filthy cloth. No one seemed to have told Ms. MacDonald that cleanliness was next to godliness. Reggie poured full-strength bleach into the tea-stained mugs and left them to soak. Ms. MacDonald had mugs that said things like “It’s All About Jesus” and “God Is Watching You,” which Reggie thought was unlikely, you would think he would have something better to do. Mum had a Charles-and-Diana wedding mug that had survived longer than the marriage itself. Mum had worshipped Princess Di and frequently lamented her passing. “Gone,” she would say, shaking her head in disbelief. “Just like that. All that exercise for nothing.” Diana-worship was the nearest thing Mum had to a religion. If Reggie had to choose a religion, she would go for Diana too, the real one — Artemis, pale moon goddess of the chase and chastity. Another powerful virgin. Or flashing-eyed Athene, wise and heroic, a warrior virgin.

  You would have thought that with her background in the classics, Ms. MacDonald would have chosen from a more interesting pantheon — Zeus throwing bolts of lightning like javelins, or Phoebus Apollo driving his fiery horses across the heavens. Or, given her mushrooming tumor, Hygeia, goddess of health, and Asklepios, god of healing.

  Reggie separated the rubbish into the red, blue, and brown bins. Ms. MacDonald didn’t recycle anything, she was possibly the least green person on the planet. There was no point in preserving the earth, Ms. MacDonald explained in a kindly tone, because the Last Judgment couldn’t occur until every last thing on the planet had been destroyed, every tree, every flower, every river. Every last eagle and owl and panda, the sheep in the fields, the leaves on the trees, the rising of the sun, and the running of the deer. Everything. And Ms. MacDonald was looking forward to that. (“It’s a funny old world,” Mum would have said.)

  Reggie was definitely going to start up her own religion, one where things were cared for, not destroyed, one where the dead were reborn — and not in a symbolic way either — without everything else having to die. Then her mother would be back on the sofa watching Desperate Housewives and working her way through a packet of tortilla chips. No Gary sitting there pawing her, though, just Mum and Reggie. Together forever.

  It had been just Mum and her for so long — well, Billy too, but Billy wasn’t the kind of person who sat around and ate and chatted and watched TV (just what he did do was hard to say) — and then the Man-Who-Came-Before-Gary came along, who turned out to be “a total arse,” according to Mum (not to mention married), and then the “real deal” came along in the form of Gary, and Mum started saying “my boyfriend this” and “my
boyfriend that,” and suddenly she was having sex and all her friends wanted to come round and talk about it. Her mother preening and giggling, “Three times in one night!” and her friends shrieking with excitement and spilling their wine.

  Unlike the Man-Who-Came-Before-Him, Gary wasn’t evil, he was just a big lump who, until he met Mum (after he met Mum as well, actually), spent his time sitting around all day in his greasy denims at the back of the bike shop with a load of Gary clones talking about the Harley-Davidson Sportster 883L he was going to buy when he won the lottery. He courted Mum with cheap hothouse roses from the Shell Shop and boxes of Celebrations, and when Reggie protested at this clichéd attitude to romance, her mother said, “You won’t hear me complaining, Reggie,” fingering the thin silver chain of the heart-shaped locket he had bought her for her birthday.

  Gary was going to take her to Spain for two weeks (“Lloret de Mar — how nice does that sound, Reggie?”). Reggie’s mother hadn’t been on a “proper grown-up” holiday since she went to Fuerteventura in 1989, so he could have taken her to Butlin’s in Skegness and she would have been impressed. Mum had taken Reggie and Billy to Scarborough for a week once, but it was rather spoiled when Billy disappeared from their B and B one night and was brought back by a policeman the next morning after being found wandering along the prom smashed out of his mind on lager. He was twelve at the time.

  Reggie received a postcard a week into the fortnight so her mother must have written it not long after she’d arrived. It was a photograph of the hotel, a white concrete building that looked as if it had been constructed out of badly stacked blocks, the rooms all at odd angles to one another. At the rectangular heart of it was the swimming pool, turquoise and empty, bordered by neatly arranged white plastic recliners. There were no people at all in the photograph, so it was probably taken very early in the morning, everything as yet unsullied by wet towels and sunblock and half-eaten plates of chips.

  On the back, Mum had written, “Dear Reggie, Hotel very nice and clean, food plentiful, our waiter is called Manuel, like in that John Cleese thingy! Drinking a lot of sangria. Naughty, naughty! Already made friends with a couple called Carl and Sue from Warrington who are a good laugh. Missing you loads. Back soon, love, Mum xxx.” Gary had added his name at the bottom in the big round hand of someone still not convinced by the concept of cursive writing. Sangria came from the same Latin root as blood. Bloodred wine. There was a poem they had done in school about a Scottish king drinking bloodred wine, but Reggie couldn’t remember more than that. She wondered if eventually she would forget everything she’d learned. That was death, she supposed. Reggie wondered if her life would get back on track before she died. It seemed unlikely, every day it felt as if she were being left further behind.

  Reggie was working on her own translation for Ms. MacDonald of Book Six of the Iliad, one of her Greek set texts. She thought she might sneak a peek at the relevant Loeb to check what she had so far (“Nestor then called to the Argives, shouting aloud, ‘Brave friends and Greeks, servants of Ares, let no one now stay behind.’”). She wasn’t supposed to refer to the Loebs, of course; that was cheating, according to Ms. MacDonald. “Helping,” Reggie would have said.

  Volume One of the Iliad had definitely been there last week, but when she came to look for it now, there was no sign of it. She noticed other gap-tooths in the bookshelf — the second volume of the Iliad too, as well as both volumes of the Odyssey and the first of the Aeneid (one of her Latin set texts). Ms. MacDonald had probably hidden them. She carried on laboriously, “ ‘Let us kill men. Afterwards at your leisure you shall strip the bodies of the dead.’ ” There were an awful lot of the dead in Homer.

  After her mother died, Reggie always kept the postcard from Spain close, in her bag or at her bedside. She had studied every detail of it as if it might contain a secret, a hidden clue. Her mother had died right there in the empty space of turquoise water, and, although Reggie had seen her in the undertaker’s after she was shipped home, a tiny part of her believed that her mother was still inhabiting that bright postcard world, and if she scrutinized the picture long enough, she might catch a glimpse of her.

  Mum had woken up before any other guests were about — she was always an early riser — and, leaving Gary snoring off the previous night’s sangria, she had put on her unsuitable swimming costume beneath her pink terry cloth dressing gown and made her way down to the pool. The pink terry cloth dressing gown had been dropped where she stood poised at the edge of the deep end. Mum was never one for neatly folding clothes. Reggie imagined her raising her arms above her head — she was a good swimmer and a surprisingly graceful diver — and then plunging into the cool blue of oblivion, her hair streaming after her like a mermaid. Vale, Mater.

  Afterwards, at the inquest in Spain that neither Billy nor Reggie attended, the police reported that they had found her cheap silver Valentine’s locket at the bottom of the pool (“Bit of a dodgy clasp,” Gary admitted guiltily to Reggie) and speculated that it had come off while she was swimming and that she had dived down to retrieve it. No one could know for sure, no one was there to witness what happened. If only it had been the morning that the postcard photographer was taking his shots of the hotel. Perched high in his eyrie, possibly on the roof of the hotel, he would have watched Mum slicing down through the blue water, contemplated putting her into a photograph — probably decided against it given the orange Lycra and the pale plumpness of Mum’s northern skin — and then alerted someone (“Hola!”) when she didn’t come back up again. But that wasn’t how it happened. By the time someone noticed that her beautiful long hair was trapped in a drain down in the turquoise depths, it was too late.

  It was a waiter who spotted her, setting up tables for breakfast. Reggie wondered if it was the Manuel of the postcard. He had dived in, in his waiter’s uniform, tried and failed to pull the English mermaid free. Then he had climbed out of the pool and run to the kitchen, where he grabbed the nearest knife, dashed back to the pool, dived into the water again, and sawed through Mum’s hair to finally liberate her from her underwater prison. He attempted to revive her — at the inquest he was commended for his attempts to save the poor unfortunate tourist — but of course to no avail. She was gone. No one was to blame, it had been a tragic accident. Et cetera.

  “Which it was, after all, Reg,” Gary said. He had attended the inquest and came to see Reggie on his return from Spain, appearing unannounced on the doorstep, a six-pack of Carlsbergs in his hand, “to toast a wonderful woman.” He had slept through everything. By the time he was woken, bleary and hungover, by “Carl and Sue from Warrington” hammering on his door, it was all over. He was, he said to Reggie, “all choked up” about what had happened.

  “Yeah,” Reggie said. “Me too.”

  The Spanish police returned the heart-shaped locket to Gary, who kept it “as a souvenir.” No mention was made at the inquest of what had happened to the thick lock of Mum’s hair left down in the pool. Or indeed of the knife that had cut through it. Did it go in the dishwasher, was it back chopping vegetables for a paella by the time the day was out? Reggie would have liked to have Mum’s hair as a “souvenir.” She would have slept with it beneath her pillow. She would have held on to it the way the baby held on to Dr. Hunter’s hair, like he held on to his green blanket. It would have been Reggie’s talisman.

  “Aye, it just goes to show,” Gary said, turning philosophical after the third Carlsberg. “You never know what’s waiting around the corner.” Reggie sat out this visit of condolence, the nearest thing her mother would have to a wake. She had been to a wake, with Mum, a proper Irish one held by their neighbors the Caldwells a couple of years ago when old man Caldwell had died. It had been a cheerful affair with a lot of singing, some of it very bad, and endless bottles of Bushmills produced by the many and various mourners, so that Mum had to be carried home by a big Caldwell boy who told everyone next day how Mum had tried to get him to climb into bed with her before she threw up all over
him. Still, as Mum said later, it had been a good send-off for the old man.

  Gary left after the fourth Carlsberg, and Reggie didn’t see him again until a few weeks later, when she ran into him in the supermarket, where he was browsing the tinned soup aisle in the company of a woman with too much henna in her hair. Reggie waited to see if he would recognize her, but he didn’t even notice her, his brain already stretched to breaking point from making the choice between Heinz’s Big Soup Beef Broth and Batchelor’s Cream of Tomato. It was the same supermarket Mum used to work in, and it seemed disrespectful to be in it with another woman. Almost like infidelity.

  The postcard had arrived in the letter box at virtually the exact moment (taking into account the time difference between Britain and Spain) that Mum was leaving the planet. Reggie thought about Laika the poor space dog rocketing into the sky and looking down on Earth with eyes as dead as stars. Reggie had thought she might still be up there, but no, Dr. Hunter said, she fell back to earth after a few months and burned up in the atmosphere. Lassie, come home.

  Usually, round about this time of the evening, Banjo would sit by the back door and start to whine, and Reggie would say to him, “Come on then, poor wee scone, time for your constitutional,” and Banjo would waddle unsteadily along the street to his favorite gatepost, where he would awkwardly lift an arthritic leg. He could just about make it to the gatepost but usually had to be carried back. Reggie was always surprised when she lifted him up in her arms at how little he weighed compared with the baby.

  Ms. MacDonald lived in a housing estate that almost backed onto the East Coast main line. The whole house shook every time an express train hurtled past. Ms. MacDonald was so used to trains that she didn’t even hear the regular earthquakes they caused, at least not if the trains were running to timetable. Occasionally, over tea, Ms. MacDonald would suddenly cock an ear, in much the same way that Banjo used to before he lost his hearing, and say something like, “That can’t be the six-twenty Aberdeen to King’s Cross, can it?”