When Will There Be Good News?

by Kate Atkinson

  Reggie, on the other hand, heard every train. They gave her an odd feeling in the pit of her stomach when she heard them approaching, something fearful and primitive (atavistic!), and she wondered if her Stone Age brain thought the train was a woolly mammoth or a saber-toothed tiger or whatever other creatures sent her ancestors running to the back of the cave, because Dr. Hunter said that “after all,” we still had the DNA of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers and as far as she could see, we hadn’t evolved biologically and emotionally and we were all still Stone Age people with “a thin veneer of culture and sophistication on top. Strip that off and we’re back to basics, Reggie — love, hate, food, survival. Although not necessarily in that order.” It was certainly a theory that helped to explain Billy.

  Tonight Banjo was lethargic and showed no interest in going out, lying instead in front of the heat of the gas fire. Reggie was grateful, it was a horrible night, gusts of wind repeatedly lifting and dropping the brass knocker on Ms. MacDonald’s front door, so that it sounded as if an unseen visitor were desperate to get in. Cathy come home to Wuthering Heights. Mum’s ghost looking for Reggie. Back soon. Je reviens. Or just nobody and nothing.

  Fast falls the eventide; the darkness deepens.

  Rapture Ready

  Everyone was fastidiously ignoring the drunk guy who was lying completely immobile on the floor, and Jackson felt a twinge of guilt. He had once arrested someone for being drunk and disorderly, and it turned out the man was suffering from a bleed in the brain as a result of a concussion and had nearly died right there in the holding cell. Bearing this in mind, he knelt down to inspect the prostrate form on the carriage floor.

  His position gave him a close-up view of the feet of the woman in red, clad in a pair of ferocious spiked heels, shoes that were half fetish, half weapon. A banshee of a woman had once attacked him with the heel of her shoe when he’d been trying to wrangle a hen night that had got out of hand, giving a whole new meaning to the words killer heels. The mother of the bride, he seemed to remember, had been the owner of the shoe. He was trying to recall what Cambridge pub that had been in at the same time as he was checking the drunk guy’s vital signs (who said men couldn’t multitask?), when the train suffered another jolt, and then a rapid series of jolts, each one worse than the one before. The train started to speed up, which really didn’t seem like a good thing in the circumstances. There was the smell of burning — rubber and something unpleasantly chemical — accompanied by a high-pitched shrieking noise like metal grating on metal. Jackson could actually feel the train swaying as if it were trying to keep its balance.

  Christ, here we go, he thought. Not bound for London, not bound for glory, this train was bound for hell.

  People screamed, the woman in red included. Jackson tried to reach out and reassure her (or at least get her to stop screaming), but the carriage started to tip to one side and she slipped out of his sight.

  Jackson hoped there were angels in the cab with the driver, he hoped the driver could hardly breathe for the number of wing feathers in the air and that he had Gabriel himself as his wingman. It went without saying that Jackson didn’t believe in angels, but in extremis he was always willing to give credence to anything. Indeed, he hoped that well-known hobo, the Angel of the North, had caught a ride at Gateshead and was even now directing his rusty flock in how to ride the rails.

  The song “Jesus Take the Wheel” came into his head and he thought he might not go quite that far, but he wouldn’t mind if the Virgin Mary took her foot off the dead man’s handle and slowed them up a bit.

  The carriage suddenly righted itself and Jackson had just begun to think that they might be okay when it just as suddenly canted over again, only this time it flipped ninety degrees onto its side. “The train terminates at Waverley,” the old woman had said, but she was wrong after all. It terminated here.

  You can’t fight a train crash. People and luggage were thrown around indiscriminately in a grotesque jumble, lit only by the sparks from metal on metal and the occasional unpleasant light intermittently shed by something electrical that was shorting overhead. Instinctively, Jackson tried to protect the drunk guy by throwing himself on top of him. If he’d had time for a considered decision, this wasn’t the person he would have chosen to save (babies, children, women, animals, in that order, was his preferred roster). It made no difference anyway, because he was discovering that a derailing train didn’t give you much choice about where you went and what you did. And trying to hang on to something was futile when everything was in cataclysmic, chaotic free fall. The noise was terrifying, unlike anything he’d experienced before (even war), and there seemed to be no end to it, as the train, or at any rate the carriage they were in, kept on traveling on its side. He supposed time had expanded as it did in all accidents, but how long could it carry on for? What if it went on forever? What if this was hell? Was he dead? Did everything hurt this much when you were dead?

  Finally it came to a stop. They were in pitch darkness, and for a second, as if time were suspended, there was absolutely no sound. For an eerie moment Jackson wondered if everyone else was dead. Then people started to cry out, groaning and screaming. Perhaps this was hell? Darkness, the smell of burning, children crying for their mothers, mothers crying for their children, general lamenting and weeping. In Jackson’s book you didn’t get much closer to hell than that.

  Someone close by whimpered like a dog in pain. A woman, it sounded like the woman in red, kept saying the word no over and over again. A mobile phone rang, the ringtone incongruously the theme from The High Chaparral. A man’s voice murmured, “Help me, please someone help me.” Jackson, the sheepdog, always had a Pavlovian response to a plea for help, but he couldn’t work out which direction the words had come from — there was no up or down, no backwards or forwards anymore. He could feel something warm and wet that he thought might be blood, but he had no idea if it was his own or someone else’s. He was surrounded by dark shapes and objects that might have been bags or bodies, it was impossible to tell. He could feel broken glass everywhere around him, and when he gingerly made a move, he heard a soft cry of pain. “Sorry,” Jackson murmured.

  He tried to work out the orientation of the carriage. He was pretty sure they hadn’t rolled completely over, so there should be windows where the roof had been. The smell of burning was growing stronger all the time, there was no emergency lighting but there was a dull glow in the distance that didn’t augur well, and there was the foul smell of an electrical fire. The train needed evacuating in double-quick time.

  He decided to maneuvre over to where he thought the roof was (a trail of sorry’s), thinking it might be easier to get some purchase there if he was going to climb up toward the window.

  “Help me,” the voice said again and Jackson realized it was coming from beneath him, from someone he was actually crawling over. Jesus. Climb over seats, climb over people, forget anything your mother ever taught you about manners, but it didn’t work like that, not in reality. (In the other time dimension that he was occupying, where life was continuing as normal and he wasn’t expecting to die at any moment, he wanted to sit down and write a note to posterity, to Marlee, that said, You’ll want to stop and help other people. Don’t!)

  Jackson shifted his weight as much as he could. “All right, mate,” he said, one injured soldier to another, “we’ll get you out of here.” Leave no man behind. He explored warily, got his arms around the guy’s chest as if he were saving him from drowning, pulling him to shore. Heaving and dragging him over to where he thought the roof was. If he’d been thinking logically he might have considered the risk of spinal injury from hauling someone like a sack of coals, but there was no logic in this mayhem. One at a time, he thought. I’ll get them out one at a time.

  And then suddenly, with no warning, the two of them were falling through nothingness. Jackson clung on to the man as they performed their odd waltz into the abyss, Butch and Sundance going over the cliff. A bit of Jackson’s brain w
as going What the fuck? while another bit was wondering where they were going to land. There was another more paranoid part of his brain that was worrying that they were never going to land at all. Why this is hell, nor am I out of it. (And he slagged off Julia for quoting at inappropriate times.)

  Then it was over. They landed with a sickening thud, parachutists without a parachute, and rolled down a steep incline before coming finally to a stop. He banged his head hard when they landed and felt sick with the pain of it. He lay on his back for a second, trying to breathe, sometimes breathing was all you could manage. Sometimes breathing was enough. He remembered lying on the road after his showdown with the sheep this afternoon (really only this afternoon?), looking at the pale sky. There were days that really surprised you with the way they turned out.

  The rain falling on his face revived him a little, and he managed to struggle to a sitting position. He was shivering with cold, with the onset of shock. There were lights somewhere, and he realized that they weren’t in the middle of nowhere after all. There were houses, strung out along the track, and now there were voices as the first people arrived at the scene, civilians, not professionals; he could hear their confusion as they encountered a whole new definition for nightmare.

  Jackson understood what had happened now. He had been trying to find the roof of the carriage but there had been no roof to find — it had peeled back like the top of a sardine can, and Jackson and his accidental new companion had plunged straight out of the train and down an embankment and now they were lying in a kind of gully. The man he had fallen with (“Help me”) lay without moving, facedown in the mud a few feet away. Jackson dragged himself over to him. He didn’t have the strength to roll him over; he seemed to have hurt his arm when he fell, and the best he could do was to turn the man’s head to the side to stop him from suffocating in the mud. He thought of his grandfather’s brother going over the top at the Somme, drowning in the mud at Paschendale.

  A light appeared at the top of the embankment, a torch, providing enough faint light for Jackson to see his companion’s face. For some reason he had presumed it was either the young drunk guy or the tired suit and he was surprised to see that it was one of the squaddies. He looked pretty much dead. Survive a war where death stalks you at every moment and then find yourself picked off on the East Coast main line.

  Jackson had thought the torch signaled rescue, but the light disappeared as quickly as it had appeared and Jackson shouted “Hey,” his voice coming out as a reedy croak. He started trying to clamber up the embankment. He had to get more people out of the train. People who were still alive, preferably. He got about halfway up and had to stop, as weak as a kitten. There was something wrong, he’d been injured in some way but he wasn’t sure how. It dawned on him suddenly, unexpectedly, that it was bad. Combat injury. He needed medevacing out of the field. He slipped back down the embankment.

  He could feel the lifeblood ebbing away. On a couple of previous occasions when Jackson had found himself facing the possibility of death, he had clung on to life because he considered himself too young to die. Now it struck him that that wasn’t really the case anymore, he felt plenty old enough to die.

  I cut mine arm, and with my proper blood, assure my soul to be great Lucifer’s. He was going to quote himself to death if he wasn’t careful. Jesus, his arm really was bleeding, pumping the stuff out like there was no tomorrow. There wasn’t going to be a tomorrow, was there? He had finally run out of road. You’re a long way from home now, Jackson, he thought.

  He closed his eyes, if he could sleep for a minute, he might be able to make it back up to the top. A nagging little voice in his head was trying to remind him that if he went to sleep now, it would be the big one, the last one. He debated this idea briefly and decided he didn’t mind if he never woke up again. He was surprised, he had expected to fight at the end but it was actually a relief to close his eyes. He was so tired. His thoughts ran briefly to the woman walking in the dale. He had feared for her safety, when it was himself he should have been worried for.

  So this was how the world ended. This ae nighte, this ae nighte, every nighte and alle, fire and fleet and candle-lighte, and Christ receive thy saule. Or the devil. He supposed he would find out soon enough. He struggled to eradicate the enigmatic walking woman from his mind and put in its place a picture of Marlee’s face (Missing you! Love you!). He wanted her face to be the last thing he saw before he went into the black tunnel.

  The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

  She should have got the flowers, she should have gone to Waitrose, but here she was, parked outside Alison Needler’s house in Livingston. The curtains were drawn, the porch light off. No sign of life within or without now, everything calmed down again. When she heard Alison’s hysterical voice on the phone, Louise had expected the worst — he was back. But he wasn’t, it turned out to be a false alarm, not David Needler come back to finish off his family but some innocent bystander in a baseball cap walking his dog. Not that innocent actually, as the dog in question was a Japanese Tosa, according to one of the Livingston uniforms who had turned up in response to Alison Needler slamming her hand on her panic button.

  The innocent bystander was arrested and taken down to the station to be charged under the Dangerous Dogs Act, and the dog was carted off by a cautious vet. The squad car was already there when Louise turned up, so all in all they had provided quite a circus outside Alison Needler’s so-called safe house. Why not just put a big flashing neon sign on the roof saying, “If you’re looking for Alison Needler, David, she’s right here.”

  It wasn’t the first false alarm, and Alison’s nerves were tuned as tight as piano wires twenty-four hours a day. Her life was a train wreck. Louise would like to introduce Alison Needler to Joanna Hunter. Alison would see that it was possible to survive with grace, that there could be life after death. But, of course, the big difference was that Andrew Decker had been caught, whereas David Needler — dead or alive — was still out there somewhere. If they could find him, if they could put him away for the rest of his life, then perhaps Alison Needler could start to live again. (But what did life mean? In Andrew Decker’s case, thirty years, plenty of life left for him to live.)

  “I have to tell you that Andrew Decker has been released from prison.” Louise had never seen anyone go so pale so quickly and remain upright, but give Joanna Hunter her due, she’d held it together. Of course she must have known that he was coming up for release, that he’d already been out on conditional release, being prepared for his newfound freedom, because after thirty years inside, the world was going to come as a shock to him.

  “He’s living with his mother in Doncaster.”

  “She must be old. He was an only child, wasn’t he?” Joanna Hunter said. “How sad for her.”

  “He’s a Category A prisoner,” Louise said. “MAPPA will monitor his release. Keep an eye on him, make sure he is where he says he is.”

  “MAPPA?”

  “Multi Agency Public Protection Arrangements, bit of a mouthful, eh?”

  “You don’t need to apologize to me, the medical profession loves its acronyms too. I’m surprised you’re telling me,” Joanna Hunter said. “I would have thought after all this time . . .”

  “Well, that’s not all, I’m afraid.” Louise Monroe, always the purveyor of bad news, like some dark messenger angel. “The press have got hold of his release, I think they’re going to make a thing of it.”

  “ ‘Beastly Butcher Goes Free’— that kind of thing?”

  “Exactly that kind of thing, I’m afraid,” Louise said. “And, of course, it’s not just Decker they’ll be after. They’ll be wanting to know what happened to you.”

  “The survivor,” Joanna Hunter said. “‘Little Girl Lost.’ That’s what I was in the evening papers. By the morning I was ‘Little Girl Found.’ ”

  “Did you keep all that stuff, newspaper clippings, articles?”

  Joanna Hunter laughed drily. “I was six years o
ld. I didn’t get to keep anything.”

  Really it was the job of a family liaison officer, but the call happened to have gotten passed on to her and she realized that Joanna Hunter lived just around the corner from her, a handful of streets away in their unrelentingly middle-class ghetto, where there were no council houses, no pubs, no nightlife of any kind, not much life in the day either, given the huge proportion of retired and elderly. The streets were dead after eight o’clock at night, and there was fat equity as far as the eye could see. Welcome to the dream. Louise felt vaguely as if she’d joined the other side without ever having been on a side to begin with. “Rejoice in good fortune,” Patrick said, more fortune cookie than Zen.

  “Just to give you a heads-up,” the guy on the phone from MAPPA had said. “A recently released prisoner knew Decker was getting out and sold his story to the tabloids for twenty pieces of silver. It’ll be a storm in a teacup, but she should know in case they find her. They’ll come looking, they’re better at finding people than we are.”

  Louise had been vaguely aware of the Mason case, not in detail, not the way Karen seemed to be, but as one of a catalogue — guys who attacked women and children. They were different from guys who attacked women on their own, different too from the ex-partners who jumped off cliffs and balconies with their kids, who ran exhaust pipes into their cars with the kids in the back, who suffocated them in their beds, who ran after them to the furthest corners of the house with knives and hammers and clotheslines, all on the basis that if they couldn’t have their kids, then nobody was going to have them, and particularly not their kids’ mothers.