When Will There Be Good News?

by Kate Atkinson

  She didn’t. Instead, she opened a bottle of Bordeaux that was sitting on the kitchen counter and carried it through to the living room, where she poured it into one of Patrick and Samantha’s crystal goblets, put her feet up on the sofa, and caught a rerun of an old CSI on Living TV. She could feel the day beginning to seep out of her bones. It was like being single again. It felt good.

  In CSI, Stokes was in the process of being buried alive. Louise retrieved the remains of the ice cream from the freezer and dug into the tub. She didn’t even like ice cream, but at least it didn’t count as it was going into her pudding stomach (thank you, Dr. Hunter). Red wine and Cherry Garcia, a reckless combination if ever there was one. Louise could feel the hangover starting already.

  Grissom was holding up his badge and shouting, “Las Vegas Crime Lab!,” at someone. All that had been on her desk were copies of insurance policies, no accounts, nothing to do with Neil Hunter’s business at all. She liked the way Grissom walked, like a bear with a nappy on. “Let’s look at the facts,” Louise said to him. “Neil Hunter has insurance policies, not just on his businesses but on his wife as well, worth a cool half million.” (Not bad, all Patrick had got was a chip of glittering carbon to pay for another wife.) Half a million would go a long way to cushioning Neil Hunter’s problems. They already suspected him of destroying a property for money, what if he was capable of disposing of his wife for the same reason? But he’d need a body to trade for the policy, wouldn’t he? And a body was what there most certainly wasn’t. Because Joanna Hunter was with a sick aunt, she reminded herself. Nothing suspicious at all except for Neil Hunter’s jangled nerves and a willfully imaginative girl.

  The last time she saw Joanna Hunter, Reggie said, she was wearing a black suit and a white T-shirt and black pumps, the uniform, in varying degrees of chic, of the professional woman the world over. Louise’s own outfit. Sisters under the suit. Joanna Hunter was still wearing her suit, Reggie said. Why wouldn’t she have changed? How much of a medical emergency could an old aunt be having that you wouldn’t throw on something casual to drive in? She came home from work, she saw Reggie off on the doorstep, then she went upstairs and got as far as taking off her shoes and tights — and then what?

  The suspect that Grissom was talking to suddenly blew himself up.

  CSI was a two-parter and ended on a cliff-hanger, Stokes still buried alive and running out of air. Louise poured herself another glass of wine that was the color of old blood.

  She was woken a couple of hours later when the theatergoers returned. They spilled noisily into the living room and Louise closed her eyes again and feigned sleep.

  “She’s asleep,” Patrick said, without lowering his voice.

  Louise heard the crystal glass chink against the empty bottle of Bordeaux as he picked them both up from the carpet. She wondered if he would kiss her, or cover her with a blanket, or perhaps wake her up and encourage her up to bed, but all she heard was the door closing and Bridget’s heavy tread on the stair.

  Of course, the right response was “I love you too,” and it was only by the merest whisker that she had escaped saying it to Jackson.

  Grave Danger

  And then nothing. Time that was lost forever in some terrible dark chasm of the brain that Joanna never wanted to descend into again. She presumed that the missing time had been more than filled by tens, if not hundreds, of people with jobs to do — people asking her to describe events, showing her photographs, making drawings. Question after question, gently and relentlessly probing an open wound.

  The first thing she remembered afterwards was waking up one morning, alone in a strange bed, in a strange room, and being convinced that everyone else in the world was dead. The light coming through the curtains was unusual, bright and alien, and it was only when Martina entered the bedroom and pulled the curtains open and said, “Hello, darling, look, it’s snowed. Isn’t it lovely?” that Joanna understood that everyone was alive except for the people she cared about the most. And it was winter. The bleak midwinter.

  “Why don’t you come downstairs and have some breakfast with me?” Martina said, smiling encouragingly at her. “Some oatmeal? Or some eggs? You like eggs, darling.” And so Joanna climbed obediently out of bed and allowed the rest of her life to begin.

  Martina was brought up in Surrey, but her mother was Swedish, from a small town near the Finnish border, and Martina carried a northern gloom in her blood. She fought it as best she could, but whereas Joanna’s mother’s downturned smile had signaled happiness, Martina’s cheerful upturned one often meant the opposite. Martina the poet. (Bitch-cunt-whore-poet.) Martina with her straight fair hair and broad features, her burden of penitence. Martina who longed for a child of her own and who was persuaded into two terminations by the great Howard Mason. “My Scandinavian muse,” he called her, but not in a way that was kind.

  Nothing left of Martina now. Her one Faber volume of poems, Blood Sacrifice, long forgotten. (The ghosts at the table, their pale faces lighting our feast / We will not be put out, they say. No, not ever.) It was only a long time afterwards that Joanna realized that the poems were about her lost family. For years, she had owned a dog-eared copy, but it disappeared at some point, the way things do. Written on water. Martina had lain down with two bottles, one of sleeping tablets and one of brandy. My bottle of salvation. That was Sir Walter Ralegh, wasn’t it? “The Passionate Pilgrim.” Give me my scallop-shell of quiet, my something something something. Martina had given her poetry, but poetry had failed them all in the end. Sing, sing, what shall I sing? The cat’s run off with the pudding string.

  They had caught the man during the month that followed the murders. He was young, not yet twenty, and his name was Andrew Decker and he was an apprentice draftsman. Martina called him “the bad man,” and when Joanna had one of her sudden hysterical fits, she would hold her and murmur into her hair, “The bad man is locked away forever, darling.” Not forever, it turned out, just thirty years.

  Decker came to trial the following spring and pleaded guilty. “At least she’ll be spared the trial,” her father said to Martina. Joanna was always “she” to her father, not said in a malicious way, he just seemed to find the naming of her difficult. She had been his least favorite of the three of them, and now she was the only one and she still wasn’t the favorite.

  Decker was given a life sentence and ordered to serve the whole of it. He was considered fit to plead, as if there were nothing insane about slaughtering three complete strangers for no apparent reason. Nothing the least deranged about felling a mother and her two children in cold blood. When asked in court why he had done it, he shrugged and said he didn’t know “what had come over him.” Joanna’s father had been there to bear witness to this brief and unsatisfying conclusion.

  Looking back now, Joanna could see that she had not been spared a trial but cheated of her day in court. Even now she imagined herself standing in the witness box, in her best red-velvet dress, the one with the white lace Peter Pan collar that was a hand-me-down from Jessica, and pointing dramatically at Andrew Decker and saying, in her high, innocent child’s voice, “That’s him! That’s the man!”

  And now he was out. Out and free. “I have to tell you that Andrew Decker was released last week,” Louise Monroe said.

  Andrew Decker was fifty years old and he was free. Joseph would have been thirty-one, Jessica would have been thirty-eight, their mother sixty-four. When I’m sixty-four. Never. Nevermore, nevermore.

  Sometimes she felt like a spy, a sleeper who had been left in a foreign country and forgotten about. Had forgotten about herself. She had a pain in her chest, an ache, sharp and sore. Her heart was thudding. Knock, knock, knocking. Rapping, rapping at my chamber door —

  The baby woke with a squawk and she held him tightly to her chest and shushed him, cradling the back of his head with her hand. There were no limits to what you would do to protect your child. But what if you couldn’t protect him, no matter how much you tried?
>
  He was free. Something ticked over, a click in time, like a secret signal, a cue, implanted in her mind long ago. The bad men were all out, roaming the streets. Darkness now forevermore.

  Run, Joanna, run.

  IV

  And Tomorrow

  Jackson Risen

  When he woke up, there was an unpalatable-looking breakfast sitting on his bed-table. He had dreamt about Louise, at least it seemed like a dream. Had she been here? Someone had been here, a visitor, but he didn’t know who it was. It wasn’t the girl, the girl was there every time he opened his eyes, sitting at the side of his bed, watching him.

  In the dream he had opened his heart and let Louise in. The dream had unsettled him. Tessa hadn’t existed in the dream world, as if she had never entered his life. The train crash had caused a rift in his world, an earthquake crack that seemed to have put an impossible distance between him and the life he shared with Tessa. New wife, new life. He had proposed to her the day after Louise texted him to tell him she was getting married, it had never struck him at the time that the two things might have been related. But then he’d never been much good at figuring out the anatomy of his behavior. (Women, on the other hand, seemed to find him transparent.)

  He wondered if Tessa was trying to get in touch? Was she worried? She wasn’t a worrier. Jackson was.

  Of course Tessa hadn’t got on the train at Northallerton. She was in America, in Washington, at some kind of conference. “Back on Monday,” she had said as she was getting ready to leave. “I’ll be there to pick you up,” he said. He could see the two of them early on Wednesday morning — or whenever it had been, he had no relationship with time anymore — standing in the cupboard she called a kitchen in their little Covent Garden flat (her flat, which he had moved into). She was drinking tea, he was drinking coffee. He’d recently bought an espresso machine, a big, shiny red monster that looked as if it should be powering a small factory during the industrial revolution. Coffee was the one thing Tessa wasn’t good at. “I live in Covent Garden, for heaven’s sake,” she laughed. “I can’t throw a stone without hitting someone trying to sell me a cup of coffee.”

  The coffee machine took up half of the kitchen. “Sorry,” Jackson said after he’d installed it. “I didn’t realize it was so big.” Although what he really meant was that he hadn’t realized the kitchen was so small. They had been talking about moving somewhere larger, somewhere less urban, and had been looking in the Chilterns. Hard though it was for Jackson to believe it of himself, he was nonetheless planning on becoming a Home Counties commuter. That was what the love of a good woman did for you, it turned you inside out and into another self you barely recognized, as if all along you’d been reversible and just never knew it. The Chilterns were lovely, even the iron in Jackson’s hard northern soul softened a little at the sight of so much rolling green ease. “E. M. Forster country,” Tessa said. She was incredibly well-read, the proof of an expensive, wide-ranging education (“St. Paul’s Girls’ School, then Keble College”). Jackson wondered if it was too late now for him to start reading novels.

  A policewoman, not fuzzy at all. “Do you have a phone number for your wife?” She smiled sympathetically at him. “Can you remember?”

  “No,” he said. The answer in his head was longer and involved not calling Tessa and worrying her, not making her come back early from the States when there was no need because he wasn’t dead any longer, but the best he could manage was the no.

  That didn’t mean he didn’t want her here. He tried to conjure up her face, but the best he could manage was a vague Tessa-shaped blur. He tried to fix on the last time he saw her, in the kitchen, where she had drained her cup, rinsed it, and put it on the draining board (she was very tidy, she never left things undone). Her hair had been pinned up, no makeup, no jewelry except for a watch (“traveling mode”), and she was wearing black trousers and a beige sweater. The sweater felt incredibly soft when he held her in his arms. He could recall the sweater better than he could recall Tessa.

  Then she kissed him and said, “I should get to the airport. You’d better miss me.” He’d wanted to give her a lift to Heathrow but she’d said, “Don’t be silly, I’ll jump on the Tube to Paddington and catch the Heathrow Express.” He didn’t like her taking the Tube, he didn’t like anyone taking the Tube anymore. Fires and accidents and suicide bombers and police marksmen and nutters who could send you falling under a train with just a quick prod in the back — the Underground was a fertile place for disaster. He didn’t used to think like that, he had a couple of wars and a lifetime of appalling events beneath his belt, but somewhere along the lonesome highway he’d passed the tipping point — more years behind him than in front of him — and had suddenly begun to fear the random horror of the world. The train crash was the ultimate confirmation.

  “I’m sure it’ll come to you soon,” the policewoman said. “It’s probably best for your recovery if you don’t worry.”

  “I used to be a policeman,” Jackson said. Every time he hit the dead end of the existential labyrinth, he seemed to find it necessary to assert this. His identity might have been called into question, but of this one fact he was sure.

  It seemed unlikely that news of the train crash would reach Tessa in Washington, something pretty big had to happen in Europe before it percolated through the American consciousness. At worst, she would have tried to text him and wondered why he hadn’t replied, but she wouldn’t immediately jump to the conclusion that he had got himself into trouble, unlike his first wife, Josie. His first wife, how strange that sounded, especially as when she was married to him she used to think it was amusing to introduce herself that way: Hello, I’m Jackson’s first wife.

  Of course, Tessa had had no idea that he was on that train, had no idea that he was out of London, because he’d never mentioned it to her, never said, “Actually, once you’re on your way to the airport, I’m going north to see my son.” And the reason he hadn’t said that was because he’d never told her about Nathan. So quite a lot of sins of omission going on, and in such a new marriage, when there should have been no secrets. And, of course, even if she had known he was on the King’s Cross train, it wouldn’t have mattered, because he wasn’t. “You’re going the wrong way.” His head hurt. Too much thinking makes Jackson a dull boy.

  They had hardly been apart since they met. She went to work every day, of course, but they often met up at the British Museum during her lunch hour. Sometimes after they had eaten, they wandered around the building, Tessa talking to him about some of the exhibits. She was a curator, “Assyrian mainly,” she said when they first met. “Well, it’s all Greek to me,” Jackson joked weakly. The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold. Even her guided tours of the Assyrian bit didn’t enlighten him much. He was sure there was a better word than bit. Department, was that the word? “The Assyrian Department” — that didn’t sound right, it sounded like a bureaucratic niche in the underworld.

  Despite some carefully worded explanations from Tessa, he still wasn’t entirely sure that he understood the where/what/when of Assyria. He thought it might have something to do with Babylon. By the waters of Babylon we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. Not a Boney M song but Psalm 137. We remembered Zion, we remembered our songs, for we could not sing here. The song of the exile. Wasn’t everyone an exile? In their hearts? Was he being mawkish? Probably.

  New information was hard to retain, because of the amount of useless old information littering his brain. It was strange that the one thing he seemed to remember from school was poetry, probably the subject he had paid least attention to at the time. Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack.

  He kept a photograph of her in his wallet, alongside one of Marlee, but the wallet was still missing. He could home in on a feature, the long-lashed brown eyes, the nice straightness of her nose, a neat ear, but nothing fitted together into a proper portrait. She was Picasso rather than Vermeer. He should have studied Tessa mor
e, taken more photographs, but she was chronically camera shy; as soon as she spotted a lens, she would mask her face with her hand and, laughing, say, “No, don’t! I look terrible.” She never looked terrible, even first thing in the morning when she had just woken up she seemed flawless. It was difficult to believe that out of all the men on the planet she had chosen him. (“Very difficult,” Josie agreed.)

  The objective, more world-weary part of Jackson knew that he was foxed by love, that he was still in the heady spring days of the relationship, when everything in the garden was rosy and blooming. My love is like a bloodred rose. No, not blood. Red. Red, red rose. “Your salad days,” Julia said. “Green in judgment.” “And what does this paragon amongst women see in you exactly?” Josie asked. “Apart from the money, of course.”

  “How old is she?” Julia asked, a histrionic look of horror on her face.

  “Thirty-four,” Jackson said reasonably.

  “That’s cradle-snatching, Jackson,” Josie said.

  “Bollocks,” Jackson said.

  “You know that being in love is a form of madness, don’t you?” Amelia said. (“Then it must be a folie à deux,” Tessa laughed when he told her.) Amelia had (dreadful to recall) once been in love with Jackson. He must phone Julia, find out how Amelia’s operation had gone. Was she dead? Julia would be inconsolable. There was a phone by the side of his bed, but he needed a credit card to operate it and the credit card was in his wallet. If he had Andrew Decker’s wallet, did Andrew Decker have his? Andrew Decker’s wallet was almost bare, the old driving license, a ten-pound note. Traveling light. Was he in the hospital somewhere?

  The photograph in his wallet was the only one he had of Tessa, taken on Jackson’s camera by one of their impromptu witnesses after their hasty wedding, and even on that auspicious occasion she had tried to turn away from the camera. Now he didn’t even have that. No wallet, no BlackBerry, no money, no clothes. Born naked, reborn naked.