Текст книги "When Will There Be Good News?"

Автор книги: Kate Atkinson

Соавторы: Kate Atkinson,Kate Atkinson
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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

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It was pretty at the waterfall. The limestone and the moss. The trees were black and skeletal and the water, brown and peaty, looked as if it was in spate, but maybe it always looked like that. They called the waterfall a 'force' around here, which was a good word for it. An unstoppable force. Water always found a way, it beat everything in the end. Paper, scissors, rock, water. May the force be with you. He checked his expensive watch again. He wished he still smoked. He wouldn't mind a drink. If you didn't smoke and you didn't drink then standing by a waterfall for ten minutes with nothing to do was something that could really get to you because all you were left with were your thoughts.

He searched in his pocket for the plastic bag he'd brought with him. Carefully, he dropped the hair into it and closed it with a plastic clip and pushed it into the pocket of his jacket. He had been clutching the thin black filament in his hand ever since he plucked it from the boy's head. Job done.

Ten minutes up. He walked quickly back to the mud-caked Discovery. If he didn't hit any problems he'd be in Northallerton in an hour and back on the train to London. He jettisoned the OS map, left it on a bench, an unlooked-for gift for someone who thought walking was the way to go. Then Jackson Brodie climbed back in his vehicle and started the engine. There was only one place he wanted to be. Home. He was out of here. neurotic would that make you? Especially in a time before firelighters.

They had done an unseen translation together of some of Pliny's letters. 'Pliny the Younger,' Ms MacDonald always emphasized as if it was of crucial importance that you got your Plinys right, when in fact there was probably hardly anyone left on earth who gave a monkey's about which was the elder and which was the younger. Who gave a monkey's about them, period.

Still, it was good to think that Billy was willing to do things for her even if they were nearly always illegal things. She had accepted the ID card because it was a handy kind of thing to have when no one believed you were sixteen but she had never taken up the offer of the bus passYou never knew, it might be the first step on a slippery slope that would eventually lead to something much bigger. Billy had started with pinching sweets from Mr Hussain's shop, and look at him now, pretty much a career criminal.

'Have you had much experience with children, Reggie?' Dr Hunter had asked at her so-called interview.

'Och, loads. Really. Loads and loads,' Reggie replied, smiling and nodding encouragingly at Dr Hunter, who didn't seem very good at the whole interviewing thing. 'Loads, sweartogod.'

Reggie wouldn't have employed herself. Sixteen and no experience of children, even though she had great character references from Mr Hussain and Ms MacDonald and a letter from Mum's friend Trish saying how good she was with children, based on the fact that in exchange for her tea she had spent a whole year of Monday evenings with Grant, Trish's eldest muppet of a son, trying to coax him through his Maths Standard Grade exam (a hopeless case if ever there was one).

Reggie had never actually had a close encounter with a one-yearold child before, or indeed any small children, but what was there to know? They were small, they were helpless, they were confused and Reggie could easily identify with all of that. And it wasn't that long since she had been a child herself although she had an 'old soul', a fortune teller had told her. Body of a child, mind of an old woman.

Old before her time. Not that she believed in fortune tellers. The one who told her about her old soul lived in a new brick house with a view of the Pentlands and was called Sandra. Reggie had encountered her on a hen night for one of Mum's friends who was about to embark on another disastrous marriage and Reggie had tagged along as usual, like a mascot. That was what happened when you had no friends of your own, your social life consisted of outings to fortune tellers, bingo halls, Daniel O'Donnell concerts ('Pass the Revels along to Reggie'). No wonder she had an old soul. Even now that Mum was gone, her friends still phoned her up and said, 'We're going over to Glasgow for a shopping trip, Reggie, want to come with us?' or 'Fancy seeing Blood Brothers at the Playhouse?' No and no. Our revels now are ended. Ha.

There had been nothing unearthly about fortune-telling Sandra. A plump legal secretary in her fifties, she wore a rose-pink cardigan with a shawl collar pinned by a coral cameo brooch. In her bathroom all the toiletries were Crabtree and Evelyn's Gardenia, lined up a precise inch from the edge of the shelves as if they were still on display in the shop.

'Your life is about to change,' Sandra said to Mum. She wasn't wrong. Even now, Reggie thought that she could sometimes catch the sickly sweet smell of gardenias.

Dr Hunter was English but had trained to be a doctor in Edinburgh and had never gone back south of the border. She was a GP in a practice in Liberton and had a morning surgery at half past eight so Mr Hunter did 'the early shift' with the baby. Reggie took over from him at ten 0'clock and stayed until Dr Hunter came home at two (although it was usually nearer to three, 'Part-time but it feels like full-time,' Dr Hunter sighed) and then Reggie stayed on until five o'clock, which was the time of the day that she liked best because then she got to be with Dr Hunter herself.

The Hunters had a 40-inch HD television on which she watched Balamory DVDs with the baby, although he always fell asleep as soon as the theme tune began, snuggled into Reggie on the sofa, like a little monkey. She was surprised Dr Hunter let the baby watch television but Dr Hunter said, 'Oh, heavens, why not? Now and again, what's the harm?' Reggie thought that there was nothing nicer than having a baby fall asleep on you, except perhaps a puppy or a kitten. She'd had a puppy once but her brother threw it out of the window. 'I don't think he meant to,' Mum said but it wasn't exactly the kind of thing you did accidentally and Mum knew that. And Reggie knew that Mum knew that. Mum used to say, 'Billy may be trouble, but he's our trouble. Blood's thicker than water.' It was a lot stickier too. The day the puppy went flying through the window was the second worst day of Reggie's life so far. Hearing about Mum was the worst. Obviously.

Dr and Mr Hunter lived on the really nice side ofEdinburgh, with a view of Blackford Hill, quite a distance in every way from the third-floor shoebox in Gorgie where Reggie lived on her own now that Mum was gone. Two bus journeys away in fact, but Reggie didn't mind. She always sat on the top deck and looked into other people's houses and wondered what it was like to live in them. There was the added bonus now of spotting the first Christmas trees in windows. (Dr Hunter always said that simple pleasures were the best and she was right.) She could get quite a lot ofschool work done as well. She wasn't at school any more but she was still following the curriculum. English Literature, Ancient Greek, Ancient History, Latin. Anything that was dead really. Sometimes she imagined Mum speaking Latin (Salve, Regina), which was unlikely, to say the least.

Of course, not having a computer meant that Reggie had to spend a lot of time in the public library and in internet cafes but that was OK because a person didn't have to listen to someone saying, 'Regina rhymes with vagina,' to them in an internet cafe, unlike the horrible posh school she went to. Until it breathed its last gasp, Ms MacDonald used to have an ancient dinosaur of a Hewlett-Packard that she let Reggie use. It had been bought at the beginning of time Windows 98 and AOL dial-up -and meant that getting on the internet was a grim exercise in patience.

Reggie herself had briefly been in possession of a MacBook which Billy had turned up with last Christmas. No way had he actually gone into a shop and bought it, the concept of retail was foreign to Billy. She had made him spend Christmas with her ('our first Christmas without Mum'). She cooked a turkey and everything, even flamed the pudding with brandy, but Billy only made it to the Queen's speech before he had 'to go and do something' and Reggie said, 'What? What could you possibly need to do on Christmas Day?' and he shrugged and said, 'This and that.' Reggie spent the rest of the day with Mr Hussain and his family, who were having a surprisingly Victorian Christmas. A month later Billy came to the flat when Reggie wasn't there and took the MacBook away because he obviously didn't understand the concept of gifts either.

And, let's face it, libraries and internet cafes were better than Reggie's empty flat. 'Ah, a clean, well-lighted place,' Ms MacDonald said. Which was a Hemingway story that Ms MacDonald had made Reggie read ('A seminal text,' she buzzed) even though Hemingway wasn't on the A Level syllabus so wouldn't she, Reggie protested, be better off reading something that was? 'Mzzz MacDonald,' she always insisted, so that she sounded like an angry wasp (which was a pretty good definition of her character).

Ms MacDonald was very keen on 'reading round the subject' ('Do you want an education or not?'). In fact most of the time she seemed keener on the reading-round bit than she did on the subject itself. Ms MacDonald's idea of reading round the subject was more a case of catching a plane and seeing how far you could get away from it. Life was too short, Reggie would have protested, except that probably wasn't a good argument to use with a dying woman. Reggie had chosen Great Expectations and Mrs Dalloway as prescribed texts and felt she had quite enough to do with reading round the subject of Dickens and Virginia Woolf (i. E. their entire 'oeuvre' as Ms MacDonald insisted on calling it), including letters, diaries and biographies, without being distracted on to the side road of Hemingway's stories. But resistance was futile.

Ms MacDonald had lent Reggie nearly all of Dickens's novels and the rest she had bought in charity shops. Reggie liked Dickens, his books were full of plucky abandoned orphans struggling to make their way in the world. Reggie knew that journey only too well. She was doing Tivelfth N(!!. Ht too. Reggie andViola, orphans of the storm.

Ms MacDonald used to be a Classics teacher, used to be Reggie's Classics teacher, in fact, at the horrible posh school she once went to, and was now attempting to guide Reggie through her A Levels. Ms MacDonald's qualification for tutoring Reggie in English Literature was based on the fact that Ms MacDonald claimed to have read every book that had ever been written. Reggie didn't dispute the claim, the evidence was all over Ms MacDonald's criminally untidy house. She could have started up a branch library (or a spectacular house fire) with the amount of books she had piled around the place. She was also in possession of every single Loeb Classic that had ever been published, red for Latin, green for Greek, hundreds of them crammed into her bookcase. Odes and epodes, eclogues and epigrams. Everything.

Reggie wondered what would happen to all the lovely Loebs when Ms MacDonald died. She supposed it wasn't very polite to put in a request for them.

The tutoring wasn't exactly free because in exchange Reggie was always running messages for Ms MacDonald, picking up her prescriptions and buying tights from British Home Stores, hand cream from Boots, 'and those little pork pies they have in Marks and Spencer'. She was very specific about which shops you bought things in. Reggie thought that a person at death's door shouldn't really be too fussy about where her pork pies came from. With a little effort, Ms MacDonald could probably have got these things herself as she was still using her car, a blue Saxo that she drove in the wayan excitable and short-sighted chimpanzee might have done, accelerating when she should be braking, braking when she should be accelerating, going slow in a fast lane, fast in the slow lane, more like someone on an amusement arcade simulator than a real road.

Reggie didn't go to the horrible posh school any more because it made her feel like a mouse in a house of cats. Extras, vacations, and diet unparalleled. She had won a scholarship when she was twelve but it wasn't the kind of school where a person arrived halfway through from another planet with nothing but their brains to recommend them. A person who never seemed to be wearing the right bits of uniform, who never had the proper sports kit (who was rubbish at sports anyway, right kit or not), who never understood the secret language and hierarchies of the school. Not to mention a person who had an older brother who sometimes hung around the school gates ogling all the girls with their good haircuts and nice families.

Reggie knew that Billy was dealing to some of the boys (nice families, good haircuts, etcetera), boys who, although destined to follow the genetic code spiralled into their veins and become lawyers in the Edinburgh courts, were, nonetheless, scoring recreational drugs off Reggie Chase's runty brother. He was their contemporary in years but in every other way he was different.

You could have bought two really good cars a year for the price of the fees, her scholarship only covered a quarter of that, the army paid the rest. 'Delayed guilt,' Mum said. Unfortunately there was nobody to cover all the extras, those bits of uniform she was always missing, the books, the school trips, the good haircuts. Reggie's father was a soldier in the Royal Scots but Reggie never got to know him.

Her mother was six months pregnant with Reggie when he was killed during the GulfWar, shot by 'friendly fire'. Most people were out of the womb before they first encountered irony, Reggie said to Ms MacDonald.

'Consigned to history,' Ms MacDonald said.

'Well, we all are, Ms Mac.'

Both Mum and Reggie always had jobs on the go. As well as working in the supermarket Mum did ironing for a couple of Band Bs and Reggie worked in Mr Hussain's shop on Sunday mornings. Even before she left school Reggie had always worked, paper rounds and Saturday jobs and the like. She squirrelled away money in her building society, budgeting down to the last penny for the rent and bills, her Pay-As-You-Go mobile and her Topshop card. 'Your attempts at domestic economy are creditable,' Ms MacDonald said. 'A woman should know how to manage money.'

Mum was from Blairgowrie and when she left school her first job had . Been in a chicken factory, keeping an eye on a continually movl. Ng line of goose-pimpled carcases as they were dipped in scaldmg water. This had set a standard for Mum, ever afterwards, whatever she did, she said, 'It's not as bad as the chicken factory.' Reggie reckoned the chicken factory must have been pretty bad because Mum had had some rubbish jobs in her time. Mum loved meat -bacon sandwiches, mince and tatties, sausage and chips -but Reggie never once saw her eat chicken, even when the Man-WhoCame-Before-Gary used to bring in a KFC bucket and the Man-Who-Came-Before-Gary could get Mum to do just about anything. But not eat chicken.

Despite the educational aspects -ten top-grade GCSEs -it was really quite a relief when Reggie forged a letter from Mum saying that they were moving to Australia and Reggie wouldn't be coming back to the horrible posh school after the summer vacation.

Mum had been so proud when Reggie got her scholarship place ('A genius for a child! Me!') but once she was gone there didn't seem much point and it was bad enough leaving for school in the morning with no one to say goodbye to her but coming home to an empty house with no one to say hello was even worse. You would never have thought that two little words could be so important. Ave atque vale.

Ms MacDonald didn't go to the horrible posh school any more either because she had a tumour growing like a mushroom in her brain.

Not to be selfish or anything but Reggie hoped that Ms MacDonald would manage to guide her through her A Levels before the tumour finished eating her brain. Our nada who art in nada, Ms MacDonald said. She was really quite bitter. You might expect a person who was dying to be a little bit resentful but Ms MacDonald had always been like that, illness hadn't made her a nicer person, even now she had religion she was hardly full of Christian charity. She could be kind in the particulars but not in the general. Mum had been kind to everybody, it was her saving grace, even when she was being stupid -with the Man-Who-Came-Before-Gary, or indeed Gary himself -she never lost sight of being kind. However, Ms MacDonald had her saving graces too -she was good to Reggie and she loved her little dog and those two things went a long way in Reggie's book.

Reggie thought Ms MacDonald was lucky that she'd had lots of time to adjust to the fact that she was dying. Reggie didn't like the idea that you could be walking along as blithe as could be and the next moment you simply didn't exist. Walk out of a room, step into a taxi. Dive into the cool blue water of a pool and never come back up again. Nada y pues nada.

'Did you interview a lot of girls for this job?' Reggie asked Dr Hunter and she said, 'Loads and loads,' and Reggie said, 'You're a terrible liar, Dr H.,' and Dr Hunter blushed and laughed and said, 'It's true. I know. I can't even play Cheat. I had a good feeling about you though,' she added and Reggie said, 'Well, you should always trust your feelings, Dr H.' Which wasn't something that Reggie actually believed because her mother had been following her feelings when she went off on holiday with Gary and look what happened there.

And Billy's feelings rarely led him to a good place. He might be a runt but he was a vicious runt.

'Call me Jo,' Dr Hunter said.

Dr Hunter said that she hadn't wanted to go back to work and that ifit was up to her she would never leave the house.

Reggie wondered why it wasn't up to her. Well, 'Neil's' business had 'hit a sticky patch', Dr Hunter explained. (He'd been 'let down' and 'some things had fallen through'.) Whenever she talked about Mr Hunter's business Dr Hunter screwed up her eyes as if she was trying to make out the details of something a long way off.

When she was at the surgery Dr Hunter phoned home all the time to make sure the baby was OK. Dr Hunter liked to talk to him and she had long one-sided conversations while, at his end, the baby tried to eat the phone. Reggie could hear Dr Hunter saying, 'Hello, sweet pea, are you having a lovely day?' and 'Mummy will be home soon, be good for Reggie.' Or a lot of the time she recited scraps of poems and nursery rhymes, she seemed to know hundreds and she Was always suddenly coming out with 'Diddle, diddle, dumpling, my son John' or 'Georgie Porgie pudding and pie'. She knew a lot of stuff that was very English and quite foreign to Reggie, who had been brought up on 'Katie Bairdie had a coo', and 'A fine wee lassie, a bonnie wee lassie was bonny wee Jeannie McCall'.

Ifthe baby was asleep when she phoned, Dr Hunter asked Reggie to put the dog on instead. ('I forgot to mention something,' Dr Hunter said at the end of their 'interview' and Reggie thought, uh-oh, the baby's got two heads, the house is on the edge of a cliff, her husband's a crazy psycho, but Dr Hunter said, 'We have a dog. Do you like dogs?'

'Totally. Love 'em. Really. Sweartogod.')

Although the dog couldn't speak it seemed to understand the concept of phone conversations (,Hello, puppy, how's my gorgeous girl?') better than the baby did and it listened alertly to Dr Hunter's voice while Reggie held the receiver to its ear.

Reggie had been alarmed when she first saw Sadie -a huge German shepherd who looked as if she should be guarding a building site. 'Neil was worried about how the dog would react when the baby came along,' Dr Hunter said. 'But I would trust her with my life, with the baby's life. I've known Sadie longer than I've known anyone except for Neil. I had a dog when I was a child but it died and then my father wouldn't let me get another one. He's dead now too, so it just goes to show.'

Reggie wasn't sure what it went to show. 'Sorry,' Reggie said. 'For your loss.' Like they said in police dramas on TV She'd meant for the dead dog but Dr Hunter took it to mean her father. 'Don't be,' she said. 'He outlived himself a long time ago. Call me Jo.' Dr Hunter had quite a thing about dogs. 'Laika,' she would say, 'the first dog in space. She died of heat and stress after a few hours. She was rescued from an animal centre, she must have thought she was going to a home, to a family, and instead they sent her to the loneliest death in the world. How sad.'

Dr Hunter's father continued a half-life in his books -he had been a writer -and Dr Hunter said he had once been very fashionable (,Famous in his day,' she laughed) but his books hadn't 'stood the test of time'. 'This is all that's left of him now,' she said, leafing through a musty book titled The Shopkeeper. 'Nothing of my mother left at all,' Dr Hunter said. 'Sometimes I think how nice it would be to have a brush o. R a co~b: an object that she touched every day, that was part of her hfe. But It s all gone. Don't take anything for granted, Reggie.'

'No fear of that, Dr H.'

'Look away and it's gone.'

'I know, believe me.'

Dr Hunter had relegated a pile of her father's novels to an unstable heap in the corner of the little windowless boxroom on the top floor. It was a big cupboard really, 'not a room at all', Dr Hunter said, although actually it was bigger than Reggie's bedroom in Gorgie. Dr Hunter called it 'the junk repository' and it was full of all kinds of t~ings that no one knew what to do with -a single ski, a hockey stIck, an old duvet, a broken computer printer, a portable television that didn't work (Reggie had tried) and a large number ofornaments that had been Christmas or wedding presents. 'Quelle horreurf' Dr Hunter laughed when she occasionally poked her head in there. 'Some of this stuff is truly hideous,' she said to Reggie. Hideous or not, she couldn't throw them away because they were gifts and 'gifts had to be honoured'.

'Except for Trojan horses,' Reggie said.

'But, on the other hand, don't look a gift horse in the mouth,' Dr Hunter said.

'Perhaps sometimes you should,' Reggie said.

'Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,' Dr Hunter said.

'Totally.'

N. Ot honoured for ever, Reggie noticed, because every time a plastIC charity bag slipped through the letterbox Dr Hunter filled it with items from the junk repository and put it -rather guiltily -out on the doorstep. 'No matter how much I get rid of there's never any less,' she sighed.

'Law of physics,' Reggie said.

. The rest of the house was very tidy and decorated with tasteful thmgs -rugs and lamps and ornaments. A different class of ornament from. Mum's collections of thimbles and miniature teapots that de t h* . '

Spl e t elr SIze, took up valuable space in the Gorgie flat.

The Hunters' house was Victorian and although it had every modern comfort it still had all its original fireplaces and doors and cornices, which Dr Hunter said was a miracle. The front door had coloured glass panels, starbursts ofred, snowflakes ofblue and rosettes of yellow that cast prisms of colour when the sun shone through. There was even a full set of servants' bells and a back staircase that had allowed the servants to scurry around unseen. 'Those were the days,' Mr Hunter said and laughed because he said if he had been alive when the house was built he would have been making fires and blacking boots, 'And you, too, probably, Reggie,' while 'Joanna' would have been 'swanning around upstairs like Lady Muck' because her family came from money.

'It's all gone,' Dr Hunter said when Reggie looked at her enquiringly.

'Unfortunately,' Mr Hunter said.

'Bad investments, nursing-home bills, squandered on trifles,' Dr Hunter said, as if the getting and spending of money was meaningless. 'My grandfather was rich but profligate, apparently,' she said.

'And we are poor but honest,' Mr Hunter said.

'Apparently,' Dr Hunter said.

Actually, Dr Hunter admitted one day, there had been some money left and she had used it to buy this 'very, very expensive house'. 'An investment,' Mr Hunter said. 'A home,' Dr Hunter said.

The kitchen was Reggie's favourite room. You could have fitted the whole of Reggie's Gorgie flat into it and still had room for swinging a few elephants if you were so inclined. Surprisingly, Mr Hunter liked cooking and was always making a mess in the kitchen. 'My creative side,' he said. 'Women cook food because people need to eat,' Dr Hunter said. 'Men cook to show off.'

There was even a pantry, a small, cold room with a flagged floor and stone shelves and a wooden door that had a pattern of cut-out hearts on the panels. Dr Hunter kept cheese and eggs and bacon in there, as well as all her tinned and dried goods. 'I should make jam,' she said guiltily in the summer. 'A pantry like this begs for homemade jam.'Now that it was nearly Christmas she said, 'I feel bad that 1 haven't made mincemeat. Or a Christmas cake. Or a pudding. The pantry is begging for a pudding, wrapped in a cloth and full ofsilver sixpences and charms.' Reggie wondered if Dr Hunter was thinking about her own Christmases when she was a child but Dr Hunter said, 'Heavens, no.'

Reggie didn't think that the pantry was begging for anything, except possibly a bit ofa tidy. Mr Hunter was always rooting through there, looking for ingredients and spoiling Dr Hunter's neat ranks of tins and jars.

Dr Hunter ('Call me Jo'), who didn't believe in religion, who didn't believe in 'any kind oftranscendence except that of the human spirit', believed most firmly in order and taste. 'Morris says that you should have nothing in your house that you don't know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful,' she said to Reggie when they were filling a pretty little vase (,Worcester') with flowers from the garden. Reggie thought she meant someone called Maurice, probably a gay friend, until she noticed a biography ofWilliam Morris on the bookshelf and thought, duh, stupid, because of course she knew who he was. Twice a week a cleaner called Liz came in and moaned about how much work she had to do but Reggie thought she had it pretty easy because the Hunters had everything under control, they weren't housework Nazis or anything but they knew the difference between comfort and chaos, unlike Ms MacDonald whose entire house was a 'repository ofjunk' -bits of old crap everywhere, receipts and pens, clocks without keys, keys without locks, clothes piled on top of chests, pillars ofold newspapers, half a bicycle in the hallway that just appeared there one day, not to mention the forest's worth of books. Ms MacDonald used the imminence of the Rapture and the Second Coming as an excuse ('What's the point?') but really she was just a slovenly person. Ms MacDonald had 'got' religion (goodness knows where from) shortly after her tumour was diagnosed. The two things were not unrelated. Reggie thought that if she was being eaten alive by cancer she might start believing in God because it would be nice to think that someone out there cared, although Ms MacDonald's God didn't really seem the caring sort, in fact quite the opposite, indifferent to human suffering and intent on reckless destruction.

Dr Hunter had a big noticeboard in the kitchen, full of all kinds of things that gave you an insight into her life, like an athletics certificate that showed she had once been a county sprint champion, another to show that she reached Grade 8 in her piano exams and a photograph (,when I was a student') of her holding aloft a trophy, surrounded by people clapping. 'I was an all-rounder,' Dr Hunter laughed and Reggie said, 'You still are, Dr H.'

There were photographs on the noticeboard that charted Dr Hunter's life, some of Sadie over the years, and lots of the baby, of course, as well as one ofDr and Mr Hunter together, laughing in the glare of foreign sunshine. The rest of the noticeboard was a medley ofshopping lists and recipes (Sheila's Chocolate Brownies) and messages that Dr Hunter had left to herself -Remember to tell Reggie that Joe Jingles is cancelled on Monday or Practice meeting changed to Fri PM. All the appointment cards were pinned there too, for the dentist, the hairdresser, the optician. Dr Hunter wore spectacles for driving, they made her look even smarter than she was. Reggie was supposed to wear spectacles but on her they had the opposite effect, making her look like a complete numpty, so she tended only to wear them when there was no one else around. The baby and Dr Hunter didn't count, Reggie could be herself with them, right down to the spectacles.

There were a couple ofbusiness cards on the noticeboard as well, stuck up by Mr Hunter on returning from 'working lunches', but really it was Dr Hunter's noticeboard.

A woman had come to see Dr Hunter yesterday afternoon. She rang the doorbell two minutes after Dr Hunter came home and Reggie had wondered if she had been parked nearby, waiting for Dr Hunter to arrive.

Reggie, the baby balanced on her hip, led her into the kitchen and went to tell Dr Hunter, who had gone upstairs to get changed out of the black suit she always wore for work. When Reggie came back downstairs the woman was examining the noticeboard in a way that Reggie thought was too presumptuous for a stranger. The woman looked a bit like Dr Hunter, same dark hair that skimmed her shoulders, same slim build, a bit taller. She was wearing a black suit too. She wasn't the Avon lady, that was for sure. Reggie wondered if she would ever have a life where she got to wear a black suit.

Dr Hunter came into the kitchen and the woman took a card from her bag and, showing it to Dr Hunter, said, 'Can I have a word?' and Dr Hunter said to Reggie, 'Can you look after the baby for a few minutes, Reggie?' even though the baby was doing his suicidal starfish thing, his little plump arms held out to Dr Hunter like he was asking to be rescued from a sinking ship, but Dr Hunter just smiled at him and led the woman away into the living room and shut the door. Dr Hunter never ignored the baby, Dr Hunter never took anyone into the living room -people always sat at the big table in the comfY kitchen. For a minute Reggie worried that the woman had something to do with Billy. She would be revealed as the sister of Bad-Boy Billy and would be cast out. Reggie had never mentioned to Dr Hunter that she had a brother. She hadn't lied, she had simply left him out of the story of her life, which was what he did to her, after all.