Текст книги "When Will There Be Good News?"

Автор книги: Kate Atkinson

Соавторы: Kate Atkinson,Kate Atkinson
сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

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 for evermore.

Run,joanna, run.

Chapter IV

And Tomorrow.

Jackson Risen.

WHEN HE WOKE UP THERE WAS AN UNPALATABLE-LOOKING BREAKfast sitting on his bed-table. He had dreamed 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 behaviour. (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 any more -standing in the cupboard she called a kitchen in their little Covent Garden flat (her flat, that 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 CSt 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 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 make-up, no jewellery except for a watch Ctravelling 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 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 any more. 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 use 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 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 himselfinto 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 Jold. 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 oj 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, Jar 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 that 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 more, 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 blood-red rose. No, not blood. Red. Red, red rose. 'Your salad days,' Julia said. 'Green in judgement.' '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 aJolie adeux,' 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 licence, a ten-pound note. Travelling light. Was he in the hospital somewhere?

The photograph in his wallet was the only one he had ofTessa, 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.

'We hardly know each other,' she said when he proposed.

'Well, that's what marriage is for,' Jackson said, although his experience of marriage tended to indicate the opposite -the longer he and Josie were married the less they seemed to understand each other.

Tessa didn't change her name to his, she had never 'seen herself' as Mrs Brodie, she said. Josie hadn't changed her name either when she married him. The last 'Mrs Brodie' that Jackson knew was his mother. Jackson's sister, an old-fashioned girl in every sense, used to tell him that she couldn't wait to be married and ditch her maiden name and 'become Mrs Somebody Else'. That's what she was -a maiden, a virgin, 'saving herself for Mr Right'. There were always boys after her but she still hadn't found anyone steady when she was raped and murdered. She had a bottom drawer, a little chest in her room that was neatly layered with tea towels and embroidered traycloths and a stainless-steel cutlery set that she was adding to, one item a month. All for the life to come that never came. All these things seemed so far away now, not just Niamh herself but all the girls who saved embroidered tray-cloths and stainless-steel cutlery sets. Where were they now?

Most people carried a couple ofphoto albums with them through their lives but he had never come across a single photograph in Tessa's Covent Garden flat. Her parents were dead, killed in a car crash, but there was no sign they had ever existed. There was nothing from her childhood, no souvenirs of the past at all. 'I live in the past in my job,' she said. 'I like to keep my life in the present. And Ruskin says that every increased possession loads us with weariness, and he's right.'

There was something Spartan in Tessa's make-up that was appealing, especially after Julia, a woman who inclined to the rococo, a subject on which she had once given him an entertaining lecture that had somehow involved sex (typical Julia). Julia was much more educated than she allowed you to believe. Tessa would have been bemused by Julia if she had known her. As it was, she was indifferent, 'your ex', no interest, no jealousy (but what if she had known about the baby?). There was something refreshingly neutral about Tessa. He would never have thought he would find 'neutral' an attractive adjective for a woman. Just goes to show.

They had known each other for four months, they had been married for two. He had been engaged to Josie for over two years before they married so he had no personal evidence that a long courtship was the foundation of a long marriage. ('Oh, I think we were married long enough,' Josie said.) Nonetheless, the sudden impulsive marriage to Tessa had been completely out of character for him. 'No, it wasn't,' Josie said, 'you've always been the most uxorious of men.' 'No, it wasn't,' Julia said, 'you were desperate to marry me, and think how disastrous that would have been.' For I am wanton and lascivious and cannot live without a wife. He was neither wanton nor lascivious (or he liked to think he wasn't), but being married had always seemed an ideal state to him. The Garden of Eden, the paradise lost.

'You're not actually very good at being married,' Josie said. 'You just think you are.' 'You're a lone wolf, Jackson,' Julia said. 'You just can't admit it.' Josie and Julia lived uncomfortably in his brain, conflated into the voice of his conscience, the twin recording angels of his behaviour. 'Marry in haste,' Josie's voice said. 'Repent at leisure,' Julia's concluded.

'What day is it?' he asked the policewoman.

'Friday.'

Tessa flew back into Heathrow first thing on Monday. He would be home by then, if not before. He would be there to meet her off the plane, as promised. It was good for a man to have a goal, it was good for a man to know where he was going. Jackson was going home.

They had met at a party. Jackson never went to parties. It was the slimmest of chances, a confluence of the planets, a ripple in time.

He had bumped into his old commanding officer in the military police, in Regent Street of all places -again, not an endroit where Jackson was usually to be found. The Fates had clocked him crossing Regent Street, but for once in a good way.

His old boss was a rather roguish guy called Bernie, whomJackson hadn't seen for over twenty years. They had never had much in common apart from the job, but they had got on well and Jackson was surprised by his own pleasure at this unexpected encounter so when Bernie said, 'Look, I've got a few folk coming round next week to the flat for a drink, as casual as it gets, why not join us?' he had been tempted before eventually demurring, at which point he had found himself at the end of a charm offensive from Bernie which finally proved irresistible -or rather, it had become easier to say 'yes' than to keep on saying 'no'. In retrospect, he realized it wasn't so much pleasure at seeing Bernie as it was at unexpectedly getting a reminder of a life that was now lost, two old soldiers reminiscing about the past.

He had been surprised by two things. The first was Bernie's flat in Battersea which was plushly decorated and full of things -furniture, ornaments, paintings -that even Jackson could recognize as 'good'. Bernie had mentioned something about being 'in security' (what else?) when they met but Jackson had never suspected that security could be so well remunerated. Jackson didn't mention his own good fortune.

The second surprise was the guests Bernie had assembled. 'A few folk round for a drink' had transformed into what Jackson overheard a guest refer to as 'one ofBernie's famous soirees'. Jackson was pretty sure he'd never been to a 'soiree' before.

The flat was peopled by well-dressed London types -men in hip spectacles and women in ugly and extraordinarily uncomfortablelooking shoes. Jackson was innately suspicious ofwell-dressed men real men (i. E. men from the north) didn't have the time or the inclination to shop for designer clothes and he believed that no woman should wear a pair ofshoes that she couldn't, ifnecessary, run away in. (Although a couple of years ago he had observed a girl simply throwing her shoes away in order to run, but she had been Russian and crazy, albeit worryingly attractive. He still thought about her.) None of the women at Bernie's 'soiree' looked as if they would be prepared to toss away their Manolos and Jimmy Choos to make a quick getaway. Yes, he knew the names of designer shoemakers, and no, that wasn't the kind of stuff real men from the north should know, but he had been stuck in Toulouse airport with Marlee last summer and had been tutored relentlessly by her from the pages of Heat and OK!.

*

Bernie greeted him effusively at the door of the flat and led him into the already slightly overheated crowd. How Bernie knew these people was puzzling. None of them seemed like the natural social circle of a fifty-year-old ex-RMP guy.

'Cocktail?' Bernie offered and Jackson said, 'It's against my religion, got any beer?' and Bernie laughed and, punching him on the arm, said, 'Same oldJackson.' Jackson didn't think he was the same old Jackson, he had shed several skins since last seeing Bernie (and acquired a few new ones), but he didn't say so.

Jackson was no good at parties. He couldn't do small talk. Hi, my name's Jackson Brodie, I used to be a policeman. Maybe it was something to do with the lives he had led, first a soldier and then a policeman -neither profession exactly fostered idle chat. At first sight the people at Bernie's party (sorry, soiree) seemed strangely vacuous, as if they'd been hired for the night to play at being festive. Jackson found himself skulking around the fringes of the gathering like a latecomer to the waterhole, wondering how long he had to continue to endure the evening before he could make his gruff excuses and leave.

At which point,Tessa pitched up at his elbow and murmured into his ear, 'Isn't this ghastly?' Jackson was pleased to note that not only was she wearing a simple linen dress, made all the more attractive in contrast to the odd garb sported by some of the other women, but also low-heeled sandals that she could easily have run away in. She didn't choose to run, but stayed close to his side. 'You seem like a safe harbour,' she said.

After five minutes of conversation made awkward by the volume of noise in the room he had said boldly to her, 'Fancy getting out of here?' and she said, 'I can't think ofanything I'd like better,' and they'd gone to a pub over the river in Chelsea, not really Jackson's kind of place but nonetheless a thousand times better than Bernie's. They had talked until closing time over a civilized bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon before he walked her all the long way home to her flat ('smaller than a postage stamp') in Covent Garden. On the final stretch he took her hand ('Shy boys get nothing' -the words of his long-dead Lothario of a brother came unexpectedly into his head) and when they reached her door he had planted a firm but decorous kiss on her cheek and was rewarded by her saying, 'Shall we do this again? How about tomorrow?'

He couldn't have designed a better woman. She was cheerful, optimistic and sweet. She was funny, even comical sometimes, and much smarter than he was but unlike the previous women in his life didn't find it necessary to remind him of this fact at every turn. She was graceful Ca lot ofballet when I was young') and athletic ('tennis, ditto'), and liked animals and children but not to the point of being over-sentimental. She had a job she loved but that she was never overwhelmed by. She was fifteen years younger than he was ('Lucky dog,' Bernie said later when he 'caught up' with Jackson) and hadn't yet lost the glow of youthful enthusiasm, seemed, in fact, as if she might never lose it. She had long, light-brown hair, cut in a heavyfringed style that made her look like an actress or a model from the sixties Gackson's preferred look in a woman). She was someone who didn't need looking after but who nonetheless was properly grateful when he did look after her. She could drive and cook and even sew, knew how to do simple DIY, was surprisingly frugal but also knew how to be generous (witness the Breitling watch -her wedding present to him) and was the mistress of at least two sexual positions that Jackson had never tried before (hadn't even known existed, actually, but he kept that to himself). She was, in short, how God intended women to be.

How come she knew a guy like Bernie? 'Friend of a friend of a friend,' she said vaguely. 'I don't usually go to parties. I end up standing in a corner like a standard lamp. I'm not much good at small talk. I was taught by nuns until I was eleven -you learn silence early on.' Jackson's sister, Niamh, had been a convent girl. When she was thirteen she announced she wanted to become a nun. Their mother, despite being a devout Irish Catholic, was terrified. She had been looking forward to a future where a married Niamh popped in and out of her house, trailing babies in her wake. To everyone's relief, Niamh's enthusiasm for becoming a bride of Christ proved to be short-lived. Jackson was only six at the time but even then he knew that nuns spent their lives imprisoned away from their families and he couldn't bear the idea that Niamh, so full of life, could be shut away from him for ever.

And then, of course, she was.

He could feel his headaches breeding, stacking themselves one upon the other.

When he woke a second time the girl was sitting there again, blinking at him like a baby owl. She was speaking nonsense. 'Dr Foster went to Gloucester, all in a shower of rain.'

Out in the larger ward, Jackson could hear children's voices singing Christmas carols, quite badly. He noticed for the first time some half-hearted gaudy decorations hanging in his room. He had forgotten all about Christmas. He wondered if the girl was something to do with the carol concert. She looked about the same age as Marlee and was gazing at him intently as if she was expecting him to do something extraordinary.

'They said you were a soldier,' she said.

'A long time ago.'

'The nurse said. That's how they knew your blood group.'

'Yeah.' His voice was still croaky. He was a weak version of himself, a flawed clone, everything working but nothing quite right. 'My dad was a soldier.'

He struggled into a sitting position and she helped him with the pillows. 'Yeah? What regiment?' he asked, unexpectedly entering into his conversational comfort zone.

'Royal Scots,' the girl said.

'Were you here yesterday?' he said. 'The day before today,' he clarified. He was pleased to see that he was getting the hang of time again. Yesterday, today, tomorrow, that was how it went, one day after the next. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Julia had done Macbeth at Birmingham Rep, a crazed, blood-boltered Lady Macbeth. 'Acting with her hair again,' Amelia snorted in the seat next to him. Jackson thought she was good, better than he'd expected anyway.

'No,' she said. 'I've only just found you.'

He wondered if she was one of those volunteers, like prison visitors, who come and see people who don't have anyone else.

(Because apparently he didn't.) Perhaps the army had sent her, like a care package.

'You would have bled to death,' she said. She seemed very interested in his blood. His veins ran with the blood of strangers, he wondered if that had any implications for him. Had he lost his immunity to measles? Had he acquired a predisposition to something else? (Something that ran in the blood.) Was he carrying the DNA of strangers? There were a lot of unanswered questions surrounding his transfusion. Was this girl one of his donors? Too young surely.

'Exsanguinated,' she said, pronouncing it carefully.

'Right.'

'Exsanguinated,' she said again. 'Sangria comes from the same root, the Latin for blood. Blood-red wine. Wine-dark sea.'

'Do I know you?' Jackson said. It suddenly struck him that she might be a fellow survivor of the train crash. She had a nasty bruise on her forehead.

'Not really,' she said. Not a very helpful answer. 'Are you going to eat that toast?' she asked, eyeing up the unappetizing food still in front of him.

'Knock yourself out,' Jackson said, pushing the bed-tray towards her. 'Have we met?' he pursued.

'In a way,' she said, her mouth full of toast.

His headache, blissfully absent when he woke, was beginning to throb again. 'You don't remember me, do you?' she said. 'Sorry, no. There's a lot ofthings I don't remember at the moment.

Are you going to tell me or do I have to guess? I really don't think I have the energy to guess.'

'You wouldn't be able to. It would take you for ever.' She looked pleased with herself at this idea. She took a little dramatic pause from eating toast and said, 'I saved your life.'

I saved your life. What did that mean? He didn't understand. 'How?'

'CPR, artery compression. At the train crash. At the side of the track.' 'You saved my life,' he repeated. 'Yes.'

At last he understood. 'You're the person that saved my life.'

'Yes.' She giggled at his slowness. He found himself grinning, in fact he couldn't stop grinning. He felt oddly grateful that his life had been saved by a giggling child and not some burly paramedic.

'They did their bit, as well,' she said. 'But it was me that kept you alive in the beginning.'

She had breathed life into him, literally. His breath was hers. Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath if We; and man became a living being. More rotelearning from some murky place in his spiritual past.

What on earth could he say to her? It took a while but Jackson got there eventually.

'Thank you,' he said. He was still grinning.

'How about the cornflakes?You gonna eat them?'

'So, technically speaking, you belong to me.'

'I'm sorry?' Her name was Reggie. A man's name.

'You're in my thrall.' She seemed delighted by the word 'thrall'.

'You can only be released by reciprocation.' 'Reciprocation?' 'Ifyou save my life.' She smiled at him and her small features were illuminated. 'Plus, I'm responsible for you now until you do.' 'Do what?' 'Save my life. It's a Native American belief. I read about it in a book.' 'Books aren't all they're cracked up to be,' Jackson said. 'How old are you?' 'Older than I look. Believe me.'

What did she mean he belonged to her? Perhaps he had mortgaged his soul after all, not to the devil but to this funny little Scottish girl.

Dr Foster put her head round the door of the ward and, frowning at the girl, said, 'Don't tire him out with talking. Five more minutes,' she added, holding up her hand in an emphatic gesture as if they needed to count her fingers to know what five was.

'Do you understand?' she said pointedly to Reggie.

'Totally,' the girl said. To Jackson, she said, 'I have to go anyway, I have a dog waiting outside for me. I'll be back.'

Jackson realized he was feeling much better. He had been saved. He had been saved for the future. His own.

When you had a future a couple of nurses could gang up on you and remove your catheter without any anaesthetic, or even any warning, and then force you out of bed, and make you hobble in your flimsy, open-backed hospital gown to the bathroom, where they encouraged you to 'try and pee' on your own. Jackson had never previously appreciated that such a basic bodily function could be both so painful and so gratifYing at the same time. I piss therefore I am.

He would look at everything differently from now on. The reborn bit had finally kicked in. He was a new Jackson. Alleluia.

Dr Foster mnt to Gloucester '''ALL IN A SHOWER OF RAIN. HE STEPPED IN A PUDDLE RIGHT UP TO his middle and never went that way again." I bet people quote that to her all the time.'

'Who?'

'Dr Foster.'

'I bet they don't,' Jackson Brodie said.

She had finally found him and now she was keeping a faithful vigil by his bedside, Greyfriars Reggie.

Like Chief Inspector Monroe before her, Dr Foster didn't really seem to believe Reggie when she said that she had saved Jackson Brodie's life. 'Really?' Dr Foster said sarcastically. 'I thought we did that in the hospital.' She had seemed harassed by Reggie's questions about Jackson Brodie's condition. 'Who are you?' Dr Foster asked bluntly. 'Are you a relative? I can only talk about his medical condition to close relatives.'

Good question. Who was she? She was the Famous Reggie, she was Regina Chase, Girl Detective, she was Virgo Regina, the stormtossed queen of the plucky abandoned orphans. 'I'm his daughter, Marlee,' Reggie said.

Dr Foster frowned at her. Dr Foster frowned every time she spoke, and quite often when she didn't speak. She should think about the wrinkles she was going to have in a few years' time. Mum was always worried about wrinkles. For a while she had gone to bed at night with her jaw strapped up in crepe bandages so that she looked like an accident victim.

'You're the first thing he remembered,' Dr Foster said.

'That's nice.'

'Don't stay for long, he needs to rest.'

You would think they would ask for ID, for proofofwho you said you were. You could be anybody. You could be Billy. Just as well she was only Reggie.

He was on his own in a little room off a bigger ward. When she was looking for him she was worried that when she found him she wouldn't recognize him, but she did. He looked more gaunt but less dead. An uneaten breakfast lay on a table across the bed. It seemed an awful waste offood to someone who had breakfasted on a Tunnock's Caramel Wafer two mornings in a row. This morning, groggy with sleep, it took Reggie some time to understand that she had slept again on Ms MacDonald's uncomfortable sofa and that the noise that had woken her was the racket of the heavy recovery machinery gearing up for work on the track. She wondered if she would ever wake up again to her own alarm in her own bed. In her own good time.