When Will There Be Good News?

by Kate Atkinson

  Dr. Hunter would have led her into the kitchen, where she would have switched on the coffee machine and made Reggie sit down at the nice big wooden table, and when, but only when (“Strict house rules, Reggie”), they had mugs of coffee and a plate of chocolate biscuits in front of them, Dr. Hunter, face bright with anticipation, would have said, “Right, Reggie, come on, then, tell me all about it,” and Reggie would have taken a deep breath and said, “You know the train crash last night? I was there.”

  And now because of some aunt, an aunt who lived in H-a-w-e-s, Reggie had no one to tell. Although, of course, Dr. Hunter would have been at work by the time Reggie arrived and there would only have been Mr. Hunter (“What’s your story, Reggie?”), who was an unsatisfactory audience at the best of times.

  Reggie went downstairs to Ms. MacDonald’s kitchen, flicked on the kettle, and spooned instant coffee into an “I Believe in Angels” mug. While she waited for the kettle to boil, she bundled her disgusting clothes from last night into the washing machine, after which she found half a stale sliced white loaf in the bread bin, made a Jenga tower of toast and jam from it, and turned on the television in time to catch the seven-o’clock headlines on GMTV.

  “Fifteen people dead, four critical, many severely injured,” the news reader said with her best serious face on. She handed over to a reporter who was “live at the scene.” The man, who was in a trench coat and was clutching a microphone, was trying to look as if he wasn’t freezing cold, as if he hadn’t raced through the night like a ghoul to get to Scotland, high on adrenaline at the idea of a disaster. “As dawn begins to break here, you can see that behind me there is a scene of utter devastation,” he intoned solemnly. Across the bottom of the screen it said “Musselburgh Train Crash.”

  In the arc-lit background, people in fluorescent yellow jackets moved around in the wreckage. “The first of the heavy-lifting gear is beginning to arrive,” the reporter said, “as the investigation into the causes of this tragic accident begin.” The noises of engines revving and machinery clanking were the same sounds that Reggie could hear from Ms. MacDonald’s living room. If she had stood on tiptoe at the bedroom window, she probably could have seen the reporter.

  After Mum died, a journalist had come round to the flat. She had been a lot more dowdy and a lot less perky than any of the reporters that you saw on TV. She had brought a photographer with her, “Dave,” the woman said, indicating a man lurking in the stairwell as if waiting for a cue to come up onstage. He gave Reggie a sheepish little wave. Even he, battle-hardened veteran of a hundred local tragedies of one kind or another, could understand why a girl who had just lost her mother might not want to be photographed at eight in the morning with her eyes red-raw from weeping. “Fuck off,” Reggie said and shut the front door in the reporter’s face. Mum would have been horrified at her language. She was pretty horrified herself.

  The reporter wrote the piece anyway. “Local woman in holiday swimming-pool tragedy. Daughter too upset to comment.”

  Banjo, lying on the sofa next to her like a deflated cushion, whimpered in his sleep, his paws moving as if he were chasing dream rabbits. He hadn’t wanted to wake up last night, hadn’t shown any interest in anything, so Reggie had put him on the sofa, covered him up with a blanket, and — because she could hardly leave him all alone — had herself slept in Ms. MacDonald’s inhospitable guest room between brushed nylon sheets, beneath a thin, slightly damp eiderdown.

  At home, Reggie now slept in Mum’s double bed, pillowed and downy, made up with the pink broderie-anglaise sheets Mum had liked best, and exorcized of all trace of Gary’s sweaty, hairy biker’s body. Before Spain, Reggie had lain in bed on the other side of the wall, three pillows over her head, trying not to hear the (barely) muffled laughs and creaks coming from Mum’s room. It had been incredibly embarrassing. No mother should subject her teenage daughter to that.

  It was nice when she was lying in Mum’s bed in the dark to have the comfort of a street lamp outside, like a big orange night-light. It was only the bed that Reggie had taken over the occupation of, on account of her own bedroom being a windowless storeroom. The rest of the room was still Mum’s, her clothes in the wardrobe, her cosmetics on the dressing table, her slippers beneath the bed, waiting patiently for her feet. Miracle by Danielle Steel was still on the bedside table, the corner of page 251 turned down where Mum had left off to go to Spain. Reggie couldn’t move it from its final resting place. Mum hadn’t taken any books with her on holiday. “I don’t suppose I’ll have time for reading,” she giggled.

  Mary, Trish, and Jean had given up trying to persuade Reggie to give Mum’s stuff to charity — they had offered to box everything up and “get rid of it” — but Reggie went into charity shops herself and imagined herself raking through the secondhand paperbacks and bits of old-lady china and finding one of Mum’s skirts or a pair of her shoes. Even worse — a complete stranger pawing Mum’s stuff. “We go and leave nothing behind,” Dr. Hunter said, but that wasn’t true. Mum had left a lot.

  Banjo suddenly made an odd grunting noise that Reggie had never heard before. The phone number for the vet, written in black felt tip, was taped to the wall beside the phone. Reggie hoped she wouldn’t be the one who would have to call it. She stroked the dog’s head absentmindedly while she finished her toast. She was still ravenous, as if she’d skipped several meals. It felt like a whole lifetime since she had sat at the dining-room table with Ms. MacDonald, eating her “speciality” spaghetti. Reggie’s stomach did a funny flip at the thought of Ms. MacDonald. She was never going to sit at that table again, never eat spaghetti, never eat anything at all. She had had her last supper.

  The man live at the scene was still speaking. “Reports vary as to what actually happened here last night and the police have so far neither confirmed nor denied that at the time of the accident, there was a vehicle on the track a few hundred yards from here.” A picture flashed on the screen of a bridge over the railway line. A car had obviously driven off the road and knocked down the wall of the bridge and fallen onto the track below.

  The reporter didn’t add that the vehicle was a blue Citroën Saxo or that it contained Ms. MacDonald, very dead at the scene. These facts hadn’t been made public yet. Only Reggie knew because the police had come to Ms. MacDonald’s house last night, after Reggie had got back from the train crash, and asked her lots of questions about “the occupant of the house” — where was she, and what time was Reggie expecting her back? There were two uniformed policemen, one florid and middle-aged (“Sergeant Bob Wiseman”), the other Asian, small and handsome and young and apparently nameless.

  For some reason they had their wires crossed and thought Reggie was Ms. MacDonald’s daughter. (“Has your mother left you alone in the house?”) The handsome young Asian PC made her a cup of tea and handed it to her nervously, as if he weren’t sure what she would do with it. She was starving then as well and had thought about the Tunnock’s Caramel Wafer that she should have been eating with Ms. MacDonald at that moment. She supposed it wasn’t appropriate to suggest biscuits when the older policeman had just said to her, “I’m really sorry but I’m afraid we think your mother may be dead.”

  For a moment Reggie was confused, Mum had been dead for over a year, so it seemed a little late to be telling her about it now. Her brain was fudge. She had come in from the train crash, soaked to the skin and covered in mud and filth and blood. The man’s blood. She had stripped and endured an eternity beneath Ms. MacDonald’s lukewarm shower before putting on her lavender fleece dressing gown, which smelled slightly unpleasant and had stains where Ms. MacDonald’s nighttime Horlicks had dribbled down the front. There had still been sirens wailing outside and the sound of helicopters put-puttering in the sky.

  They had taken the man away in a helicopter. Reggie had watched it lift off from a field on the other side of the track. “You did well,” the paramedic said to her. “You gave him a chance.”

  She’s not my mother,” Reggie sai
d to the older policeman.

  “Where is your mother, then?” he asked, looking concerned.

  “I’m sixteen,” Reggie said. “I’m not a child, I just look young for my age. I can’t help it.” Both policemen studied her doubtfully, even the handsome Asian one, who looked like a sixth-former.

  “I can show you my ID, if you want. And my mother’s dead already,” Reggie said. “Everybody’s dead.”

  “Not everybody,” the Asian guy said, as if he were correcting misinformation rather than being kind. Reggie frowned at him. She wished she wasn’t wearing Ms. MacDonald’s grotty dressing gown. She didn’t want him to think she dressed like that out of choice.

  “We’re not releasing these details to the press yet,” the middle-aged policeman said. He looked familiar; Reggie had a feeling he had once come to the flat looking for Billy.

  “Right,” Reggie said, trying to concentrate on what he was saying. She was so tired, down to the bone.

  “We’re not quite sure what happened,” he said. “We think Mrs. MacDonald must have driven off the road and fallen down onto the track somehow. You don’t know if she had been feeling at all depressed lately?”

  “Mzzz MacDonald,” Reggie corrected him on Ms. MacDonald’s behalf. “You think she killed herself?” Reggie was prepared to give this idea consideration — Ms. MacDonald was dying, after all, and might have decided to go quickly rather than slowly — until she remembered Banjo. She would never leave the dog on his own. If Ms. MacDonald were going to commit suicide by driving off a bridge and landing in front of an express train, she would have taken Banjo with her, sitting up in the front of the Saxo like a mascot.

  “Nah,” Reggie said, “Ms. MacDonald was just a rubbish driver.” She didn’t add that Ms. MacDonald was rapture ready, that she embraced the end of all things and was expecting to live eternally in a place that when she described it sounded a bit like Scarborough.

  Reggie imagined Ms. MacDonald nodding serenely at the 125 express train that was charging towards her, saying, “That’ll be God’s will, then.” Or was she astonished, did she consult her watch to check if the train was on time, did she say, “Not already, surely?” One second there, the next gone. It was a funny old world.

  Of course, alternatively, she might have been out of her mind with panic when she realized she was stuck with the instrument of her death bearing down on her at over a hundred miles an hour, too confused in the moment to do anything as sensible as get out of the car and run for her life. But Reggie would rather not think about that scenario.

  “Plus she had a brain tumor,” she added, trying not to catch the eye of the Asian policeman in case she embarrassed herself by blushing. “I mean it might just have, I dunno, exploded.”

  “We need someone to identify her,” Sergeant Wiseman said. “Do you think you can do it?”

  “Now?”

  “Tomorrow will do.”

  And now it was tomorrow.

  “We will bring you more news as we have it,” the news reader said, staring seriously at the camera. The program cut to his co-presenter, whose smile was only slightly tempered by the proximity of disaster. “Now,” she said, “we’re delighted to welcome to the studio the newest resident of Albert Square, already making waves in EastEnders with her —.” Reggie switched the television off.

  She noticed how still the air in the house was, as if someone had breathed out and not breathed in again. Reggie looked closely at Banjo. His eyes were rheumy slits, and his tongue was lolling out of the side of his mouth. No movement in his ancient little lungs. Dead. Here one second, gone the next. The breath was the thing. It was everything. Breathing was the difference between alive and dead. She had breathed life into a man, should she try and do the same with a dog? But no, really, if he were a person, he would have “Do Not Resuscitate” written on a piece of paper inside the tiny barrel that hung from his collar. Some people left early (a lot of people closely related to Reggie), but some people (and dogs) went when they were supposed to.

  A great bubble of something like laughter but that she knew was grief rose up in Reggie’s chest. She’d had the same reaction when she was told about Mum’s death — in a phone call from Sue (minus Carl) from Warrington because Gary was “too choked” to talk. “Sorry, love,” Sue said, in a voice husky from fags. She sounded like she meant it, sounded like she cared more about Mum after a couple of days’ acquaintance than Mum’s sister, Linda, did after a whole childhood together.

  Reggie wished she had a sister, someone else who had known and loved Mum so that she wasn’t all alone keeping her memory alive. There were Mary, Trish, and Jean, but in the last year they had moved on, making Mum into a sad memory, no longer a real person. Billy was no good, Billy only cared about Billy. When Reggie died, that would be the end of Mum. And when Reggie died, that would be the end of Reggie, of course. Reggie wanted a dozen kids so that when she was gone they could all get together and talk about her (“Do you remember when . . . ?”), and not one of them would feel they’d been left alone in the world.

  Reggie had asked Dr. Hunter if she wanted more children, a brother or a sister for the baby, and she’d made a funny face and said, “Another baby?” as if that were an outlandish idea. And Reggie could see her point. This baby was everything, he was emperor of the world, he was the world.

  Reggie visited Mum’s grave every week and talked to her, and then on the way home from this pilgrimage, she stopped in at the Catholic church and lit a candle for her. Reggie didn’t believe in any of that hocus-pocus, but she believed in keeping the dead alive. There would be more candles to light now.

  She knew it was wrong, but Reggie felt more affected by the dog’s death than she did by his owner’s. Reggie stroked Banjo’s ears and closed his dim eyes. The dead guy, the soldier, last night had his eyes half open, but Reggie hadn’t closed them. There’d been no time for such niceties. The Asian policeman was wrong, everybody was dead. It was like being cursed. It was like being in some horror movie. Carrie. All those people on the train, perhaps they should be on her conscience as well. “Troubled teen or angel of death?” she said to the dead dog. “You have to wonder.” Was the man dead too? Perhaps instead of saving him she had killed him, simply by being near him. Not the breath of life but the kiss of death.

  He was the second man she’d come across after half sliding, half falling down the muddy embankment. The first one was the soldier. Reggie shone her torch on him and moved on. She expected there would be plenty of time later to think about how he looked dead. The torch beam was thin and wavery. Thigh high, not eye high. Mum had once worked as an usher at the Dominion but was sacked after two weeks for eating ice creams without paying for them.

  The second man had a pulse, pretty weak, but a pulse was a pulse. His arm was a mess, he was bleeding from an artery, and, in the absence of anything else, Reggie took off her jacket, rolled up a sleeve, and used it as a pad to press on the bleeding arm the way that Dr. Hunter had shown her. Reggie tried calling out for help, but everyone was down in a dip where no one could see or hear them. The first sirens had begun to wail in the distance.

  She checked the pulse in the man’s neck again and this time couldn’t find one. Her fingers were slippery with his blood. Perhaps she was mistaken? She felt herself beginning to panic. She thought about Eliot, the CPR dummy that Dr. Hunter had brought home. Eliot wasn’t anything like the man whose life was suddenly and unexpectedly in her hands. She couldn’t work out how to breathe into his mouth — let alone do the heart compressions — without taking the pressure off his bleeding artery. It was like a nightmare game of Twister. She thought of the Spanish waiter trying to breathe life into her mother’s lungs. Had he felt this same sense of desperation? What if he had kept on going a little longer, what if her mother hadn’t been dead but in a watery suspension, waiting to be restored to life? The thought galvanized Reggie and she transferred her knee onto the improvised pressure pad and then stretched over the man’s body like a large awk
ward spider. She could manage it if she really tried.

  “Just hang on,” she said to the man. “Please. For my sake if not for yours.” She breathed in as deeply as she could and put her mouth over his. He tasted of cheese and onion crisps.

  Reggie took the bus home from Ms. MacDonald’s house. Before leaving she had wrapped Banjo’s body in an old cardigan of Ms. MacDonald’s and dug a hole for him in one of the flower beds. A little parcel of bones. It had been like the Somme in Ms. MacDonald’s back garden, and it had been a horrible task dropping the small body into the unfriendly, muddy hole. Nada y pues nada, as Hemingway and Ms. MacDonald would have said. First things were good, last things not so much so. As Reggie would have said.

  It had rained when they buried Mum as well, dropped her into her own muddy hole. There were quite a few mourners at the graveside — Billy, Gary, Sue and Carl from Warrington, which was nice of them, considering they hardly knew Mum — a couple of Gary’s biker mates, some neighbors, Mary, Trish, and Jean, of course, quite a lot of coworkers from the supermarket, the manager himself in black tie and black suit, even though the month before he’d threatened Mum with her cards for “persistently poor timekeeping.” Even the Man-Who-Came-Before-Gary turned up, lurking in the cemetery’s hinterland. Billy made an obscene gesture at him, which caused the vicar to stumble over his intonement.

  “Not a bad turnout,” Carl said as if he were some kind of professional funeral inspector.

  “Poor Jackie,” Sue said.

  In the church beforehand they had sung “Abide with Me,” a hymn chosen by Reggie on the grounds that Mum always cried when she heard it because they had sung it at her own mother’s funeral. Reggie had arranged the service with the help of Mary, Trish, and Jean. Mum wasn’t a churchgoer, so it was hard to know what she would have liked. “Aye, hatched, matched, and dispatched within a church, like most of us,” Trish said as if she were saying something wise. “There must be something, when you think about it,” Jean said. Reggie didn’t see why there had to be anything. “We’re all alone,” Dr. Hunter once said to her. “All alone and cast adrift in the vast infinity of space” (was she thinking about Laika?), and Reggie said, “But we have one another, Dr. H.,” and Dr. Hunter said, “Yes we do, Reggie. We have one another.”