Текст книги "When Will There Be Good News?"

Автор книги: Kate Atkinson

Соавторы: Kate Atkinson,Kate Atkinson
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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

The dog tried to follow but Dr Hunter shut the door in her face without saying anything to her, which was so not Dr Hunter, and an exiled Sadie sat down outside the door and waited patiently. Ifa dog could frown she would have frowned.

After the woman left, Dr Hunter had a funny, tight look on her face as ifshe was trying to pretend that everything was normal when it wasn't.

Now there was a new card on the noticeboard. It was embossed with 'Lothian and Borders Police', a phone number and a name, 'Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe'.

Reggie fed the baby a yoghurt, not regular yoghurt but a special organic baby yoghurt, no additives, no sugar, nothing artificial. She finished it off for him when he lost interest in it.

Outside, it was cold and damp but in the kitchen it felt cosy and safe. There were no Christmas decorations up yet, just the Advent calendar they had bought on the baby's birthday, but Reggie could imagine the scent of pine and clemen tines and log fires and all the other good smells that she was sure Dr Hunter would fill the house with any day now. It would be Reggie's first Christmas with Dr Hunter and the baby and she wondered if there was any way she could go about suggesting that she should spend Christmas Day itself with them rather than on her own or with the Hussains. Nothing against the Hussains or anything but they weren't herfamily. And Dr Hunter and the baby were.

Sadie waited patiently at the side of the high-chair. Every time the baby dropped any food she licked it off the floor. Sometimes she managed to catch it in mid-air. She had a lot of dignity for a dog hustling for scraps. ('She's starting to get old,' Dr Hunter said sadly.)

Reggie gave the baby a finger of wholemeal toast to chew on while she washed his bowls, by hand because she didn't trust the dishwasher with them. The baby's dishes were real china in an oldfashioned pattern. His toys were tasteful wooden ones -nothing garish or noisy -and his clothes were all expensive and new, not handed down or bought in second-hand shops. A lot of them were French. Today he was wearing the cutest-ever navy blue and white striped all-in-one ('his matelot outfit' Dr Hunter called it) that reminded Reggie of a Victorian bathing suit. He had a Noah's Ark rug in his room and a nightlight in the shape of a big red and whitespotted fairy toadstool. His sheets were embroidered with sailboats and there was a framed sampler above his bed with his date of birth and his name 'Gabriel Joseph Hunter' in pale blue chain stitch.

The baby wasn't afraid of anything except unexpected loud noises (Reggie wasn't too keen on those either) and he could clap his hands ifyou said, 'Clap your hands,' and ifyou said, 'Where's your red ball?' he would crawl to his toy box and find it. He had just yesterday taken his first wobbly but unaided step. (,One small step for mankind, one giant leap for a baby,' Dr Hunter said.) He could say the word 'dog' and the word 'ball' and 'banky', which was his word for his most precious possession -the little square cut from a blanket that had been bought for him before he was born by Mr Hunter's sister, a pale green ('moss', Dr Hunter said) blanket to suit either sex. Dr Hunter told Reggie that 'actually' she had known what sex the baby was but she hadn't told anyone she knew, not even Mr Hunter, because she 'wanted to keep the baby all to herself for as long as possible'. Now the green blanket ofwhich the baby was obsessionally fond had been cut down to make it more manageable. 'His Winnicottian transitional object,' Dr Hunter said mysteriously. 'Or perhaps it's his talisman.'

It had been his first birthday a week ago and, to celebrate, the three of them (not Mr Hunter, he was 'all tied up' and anyway 'it's not as if he knows it's his birthday, Jo ') had driven to a hotel near Peebles for afternoon tea and the waitress had made a big fuss of the baby because he was so gorgeous and so well-behaved. He had a small dish of pink ice-cream. 'His first ever! Imagine!' Dr Hunter said. 'Imagine eating ice-cream for the very first time, Reggie.' The baby's eyes almost popped out of his head with surprise when he tasted the pink ice-cream.

'Aw, bless,' Reggie said.

Reggie and Dr Hunter ate a whole plate of cakes between them. 'I think I have a fat person inside me trying to get out,' Reggie said and Dr Hunter laughed and then nearly choked on a miniature coffee eclair, which would probably have been OK because Reggie had asked Dr Hunter to teach her the Heimlich manoeuvre for exactly this kind of occurrence.

'I'm very happy,' Dr Hunter said when she'd recovered and Reggie said, 'Me too.' And the nice thing was that they really were because it was surprising how often people said they were happy when they weren't. Like Mum with the Man-Who-Came-Before-Gary.

That was on the first day ofAdvent and Dr Hunter said that was a nice day to have a birthday on even though she wasn't religious. They bought the Advent calendar in Peebles. Peebles was full of all the kinds of shops that old people liked. Reggie liked them too, she supposed it was something to do with her old soul.

The Advent calendar had chocolates behind every door and Dr Hunter said, 'Let's put it up in the kitchen and you can open a door every day and have the chocolate.' Which is what Reggie did, what she was doing now, holding the melting Santa-shaped chocolate in her cheek to extend its life while she dipped the baby's Bunnikins dishes in the sink, squirting Ecover washing-up liquid into the hot water. Dr Hunter didn't use any products that weren't ecological washing powder, floor soap, everything. 'You don't want harmful chemicals around a baby,' she said to Reggie. The baby was precious, he was as valuable as the most valuable object. 'Well, I had to go to a lot of trouble to get him,' Dr Hunter laughed. 'It wasn't easy.'

Dr Hunter had to be careful because she had asthma (Physician heal thyself, she said) which she got 'from my mother'. She was always getting colds as well, which she said was because a doctor's surgery was 'the unhealthiest place on earth to work -full of sick people'. Sometimes, if Reggie was standing close to Dr Hunter, she could hear a wheezing in her chest. The breath of life, Dr Hunter said to Reggie. The baby didn't seem to have inherited any of Dr Hunter's problems with her lungs. ('Dickens had asthma,' Ms MacDonald said. 'I know,' Reggie said. 'I've read round the subject.')

There was no obvious evidence of Mr Hunter's sticky patch. The Hunters had a lovely house, two cars, a fridge full of expensive food and the baby wanted for nothing.

Some mornings when Reggie arrived Mr Hunter behaved like a runner in a relay race, handing the baby over to Reggie so quickly that the baby's little mouth and eyes went completely round with astonishment at the speed of the changeover. Then Reggie and Sadie listened to the mesmerizing sound of the huge Range Rover roaring away from the house in a crunch and spit of gravel as if Mr Hunter was a getaway driver. 'He's like a bear in the morning sometimes,' Dr Hunter laughed. Living with a bear didn't seem to bother her. Water off a duck's back.

Mr Hunter and Sadie didn't have much ofa relationship. The most Mr Hunter said to her was, 'Out of the way, Sadie,' or 'Get off the couch, Sadie.' She was 'part of the package', he said to Reggie. 'You don't get Jo without Sadie.'

'Love me, love my dog,' Dr Hunter said. 'A woman's best friend.' Timmy, Snowy, Jumble, Lassie, Greyfriars Bobby. Everyone's best friend. Except for poor Laika, the spacedog, who was no one's friend.

On other mornings, Mr Hunter stayed at home and made endless phone calls. Sometimes he went outside so that he could smoke while talking. He wasn't supposed to smoke, in or out of the house, but the phone calls seemed to drive him to it. 'Don't tell,' he winked at Reggie as if Dr Hunter wouldn't smell the smoke on his clothes or notice the cigarette butts nestling amongst the gravel.

Reggie couldn't help but overhear Mr Hunter because he always spoke very loudly to the unseen people at the other end of the phone. He was 'exploring new avenues' he told them. He had 'very interesting prospects on the horizon' and'opportunities opening up'. He sounded brash but really he was pleading. 'Jesus, Mark, I'm fucking bleeding out here.'

Mr Hunter was handsome, in a rough, slightly battered kind of way, which actually made him more good-looking than ifhe'd been conventionally attractive. Dr Hunter had met him when she was a senior registrar 'at the old Royal Infirmary', although he wasn't from Edinburgh. He was from Glasgow, 'a Weegie', Dr Hunter laughed, which was generally intended as an insult by people from Edinburgh but maybe Dr Hunter didn't know that, being English. He had courted her for a long time before she 'caved in' and married him. Mr Hunter was 'something in the leisure industry' but exactly what was unclear to Reggie.

Dr Hunter and Mr Hunter seemed to get along pretty well, although Reggie didn't really have anything to compare their relationship to except for Mum and Gary (uninspiring) and Mum and the Man-Who-Came-Before-Gary (horrible). Dr Hunter laughed at Mr Hunter's shortcomings and never seemed to get annoyed with him about anything. 'Jo's too easygoing for her own good,' Mr Hunter said. Mr Hunter, for his part, would bang into the house with a bunch ofnice flowers or a bottle ofwine and say, 'Hiya, doll,' to Dr Hunter like a comedy Glaswegian and give her a big kiss and wink at Reggie and say, 'Behind every great woman there's some shite guy, Reggie, don't forget that.'

Most of the time Mr Hunter behaved as if he couldn't see Reggie at all, but then sometimes he would take her by surprise and be really nice to her and tell her to sit down at the kitchen table while he made her a coffee and tried to make rather awkward conversation ('So what's your story, Reggie?') although usually before she could start telling him her (not inconsiderable) 'story' his phone would ring and he would leap up and pace around the room while he talked ('Hey, Phil, howy'are doing? 1 was wondering if we could get together, I've got a proposition I'd like to run by you.').

Mr Hunter called the baby 'the bairn' and tossed him in the air a lot, which made the baby shriek with excitement. Mr Hunter said he couldn't wait until 'the bairn' could talk and run around and go to football matches with him and Dr Hunter said, 'Time enough for all that. Make the most of every second, they're gone before you know it.' If the baby hurt himself Mr Hunter picked him up and said, 'Come on, wee man, you're fine, it was nothing,' in an encouraging but not very sympathetic way whereas Dr Hunter hugged him and kissed him and said, 'Poor wee scone,' which was a phrase she had got from Reggie (who had in turn got it from Mum). When she said Scottish words and phrases Dr Hunter said them in a (pretty good) Scottish accent so it was almost like she was bilingual.

The baby liked Mr Hunter well enough but he worshipped Dr Hunter. When she held him in her arms his eyes never left her face, as ifhe was absorbing every detail for a test he might have to sit later.

'I'm a goddess to him now,' Dr Hunter laughed, 'but one day I'll be the annoying old woman who wants to be taken to the supermarket.'

'Och, no, Dr H.,' Reggie said. 'I think you're always going to be a deity for him.'

'Shouldn't you have stayed on at school, Reggie?' Dr Hunter asked, a little frown worrying her pretty features. Reggie imagined this was how she was with her patients ('You really have to lose some weight, Mrs MacTavish.').

'Yes, 1 should,' Reggie said.

'Come on, sunshine,' Reggie said to the baby, lifting him out of his high-chair and planting him on the floor. She had to keep an eye on him all the time because one moment he'd be sitting contentedly trying to work out how to eat his fat little foot and the next he'd be commando-crawling towards the nearest hazard. All he wanted to do was put things in his mouth and you could be sure if there was an object small enough to choke on then the baby would make a beeline for it and Reggie had to be constantly on the lookout for buttons and coins and grapes -ofwhich he was particularly fond. All his grapes had to be cut in half which was a real chore but Dr Hunter had told her about a patient whose baby had died when a grape got stuck in his windpipe and no one had been able to help him, Dr Hunter said, as ifthat was worse than the dying itself. That was when Reggie got Dr Hunter to teach her not just the Heimlich manoeuvre but mouth-to-mouth, how to stop arterial bleeding and what to do for a burn. And electrocution and accidental poisoning. (And drowning, of course.) 'You could go on a first-aid course,' Dr Hunter said, 'but they do such an awful lot ofunnecessary bandaging. We can do some strapping of wrists and arms, a basic head bandage, but you don't need anything more complicated than that. Really, you just need to know how to save a life.' She brought home a CPR dummy from the surgery so that Reggie could practise resuscitation. 'We call him Eliot,' Dr Hunter said, 'but no one can remember why.'

When Reggie thought about the baby who had choked on a grape she imagined him stoppered up like the old-fashioned lemonade bottle with a marble in its neck that she had seen in the museum. Reggie liked museums. Clean, well-lighted places.

Mr Hunter was very easygoing about the baby. He said babies were 'virtually indestructible' and that Dr Hunter worried too much, 'but then you can't expect anything else given her history'. Reggie didn't know anything about Dr Hunter's history (imagined herself saying, 'What's your story, Dr H.?' but it didn't sound right). All Reggie really knew was that William Morris sat on the bookshelf in Dr Hunter's living room while her own father was officially declared junk and lived in the old curiosity shop on the top floor. Reggie herself thought babies were extremely destructible and after the grape story she became particularly paranoid about the baby not being able to breathe. But what else could she expect, given her history? (,The breath,' Dr Hunter said, 'the breath is everything.')

Sometimes Reggie lay in bed at night and held the breath in her lungs until she thought they would burst so that she could feel what it was like, imagining her mother anchored underwater by her hair like some new, mysterious strain of seaweed.

'How long does it take to die from drowning?' she asked Dr Hunter.

'Well, there are quite a few variables,' Dr Hunter said, 'water temperature and so on, but roughly speaking, five to ten minutes. Not long.'

Long enough.

Reggie placed the baby's dishes in the draining rack. The sink was at the window and overlooked a field at the foot of Blackford Hill. Sometimes there were horses in the field, sometimes not. Reggie had no idea where the horses went when they weren't there. Now it was winter they wore dull green blankets like Barbour jackets.

Sometimes when Dr Hunter came home early enough, before the winter dark descended, they would take the dog and the baby into the field and the baby would crawl around on the rough grass and Reggie would pursue Sadie round the field because she loved it when you pretended to chase her and Dr Hunter would laugh and say to the baby, 'Come on, run, run like the wind!' and the baby would just look at her because of course he had no idea what running was. If the horses were in the field they remained aloof as if they ran, which they must surely do, in secret.

The horses were big nervy creatures and Reggie didn't like the way their lips curled back over their huge yellow teeth, she imagined them mistaking the baby's excited fist for an apple and biting it off his arm.

'Horses worry me as well,' Dr Hunter said. 'They always seem so sad, don't you think? Although not as sad as dogs.' Reggie thought dogs were pretty happy creatures but of course Dr Hunter saw the potential for sadness everywhere. 'How sad,' Dr Hunter said when the leaves came off the trees. 'How sad,' she said when a song came on the radio (Beth Nielsen Chapman). 'How sad,' when Sadie whined quietly at the sight of her getting ready to leave the house. Even when it had been the baby's birthday and they had all been so happy eating cake and pink ice-cream, afterwards as they drove home Dr Hunter said, 'His first birthday, how sad, he'll never be a baby again.'

For his birthday, Reggie had given the baby a teddy-bear and a bib embroidered in blue with ducks and the words 'Baby's First Birthday'. First things were nice, last things not so much so.

Often, after one of her moments ofsadness, Dr Hunter would give her head a little shake as if she was trying to get rid of something from it and smile and say, 'And yet we are not downhearted, are we, Reggie?' and Reggie would say, 'No, indeed we are not, Dr H.'

'Call me Jo,' Dr Hunter said to Reggie. 'Fiddle dee dee, fiddle dee dee, the fly has married the bumblebee,' she said to the baby.

Reggie had never told Dr Hunter about her mother, about her being dead, the weight of the sadness ofit might have been too much for Dr Hunter to bear, even without the unnecessary and tragic manner of Mum's going. And every time she looked at Reggie, Dr Hunter would have had the sad expression on her face and that too would have been unbearable. Instead, Reggie made up her mother. She was called Jackie and worked on the checkout at a supermarket in a shopping centre that Dr Hunter never went to. When she was young she had been a champion highland dancer (although you would never have guessed that). Her best friends were called Mary, Trish and Jean. She was always planning the next diet, she had long hair (lovely hair, sadly Reggie had not inherited it) that she said she was going to have to start wearing up because she was getting too old to wear it down. She was thirty-six this year, the same age as Dr Hunter. She was sixteen when she got engaged to Reggie's father, seventeen when she had Billy and a widow at twenty. Reggie supposed it was just as well she had packed everything in early on.

She took a terrible photograph, made worse by the goofy faces she always pulled the moment a camera was pointed in her direction. One of her favourite sayings was, 'It's a funny old world,' said affectionately, as ifthe world was a mischievous child. She liked reading Danielle Steel and her favourite flower was a daffodil and she made a really good shepherd's pie. Actually all of these things were true. It was just the being alive bit that was made up.

While Reggie was wiping down the draining board her eye was caught by something moving at the far end of the field. The sun had hardly popped its head up today and it was hard to distinguish anything more than smudged shapes at that distance. Not a horse, this was not a day for horses, they were living their mysterious lives somewhere else. Whoever or whatever it was seemed to scuttle along the hedge, a blur of something black. Reggie glanced at the dog to see if her canine senses were alerting her to anything but Sadie was sitting stoically on the floor next to the baby while he tried to stuff her tail in his mouth.

'I don't think so, mister,' Reggie said to the baby, gently releasing a fistful offur and lifting him in her arms. She carried the baby over to the window but there was nothing to be seen out there now. The baby clutched a hank of her hair, he was a terrible hair grabber. 'Atavistic instinct, I expect,' Dr Hunter said. 'From the days when I would have been swinging through trees and he would have been clutching on to my fur for dear life.' The idea of Dr Hunter, always so neatly groomed in the little black suit she wore for work, as a primitive tree-dweller was comical. Reggie had to look up 'atavistic'. She still hadn't found an opportunity to use it. She was working her way through the 'a's so it fitted in well with the drive to improve her vocabulary.

Lately, Reggie had got into the habit ofstaying longer and longer at the Hunters' house while Mr Hunter seemed to be out of the house more and more. 'He's setting something up, a new venture,' Dr Hunter said brightly. Dr Hunter seemed glad that Reggie was there so much. She would suddenly look out of the window and say, 'Heavens, Reggie, it's dark, you must be getting home,' but then she would say, 'I hate this horrid weather so. Shall we have another cup oftea?' Or 'Stay and have some supper, Reggie, and then I'll give you a lift home.' Reggie hoped that one day soon Dr Hunter might say, 'Why go home, Reggie? Why not move in here?' and then they would be a proper family -Dr Hunter, Reggie and the baby and the dog. ('Neil' didn't really figure in Reggie's daydream of family life.)

On one of these evenings, apropos of nothing ('apropos' was another new word), when Dr Hunter and Reggie were giving the baby a bath, Dr Hunter turned to Reggie and said, 'You know there are no rules,' and Reggie said, 'Really?' because she could think of a lot of rules, like cutting grapes in half and wearing a cap when you went swimming, not to mention separating all the rubbish for the recycling bins. Unlike Ms MacDonald, recycling was something that Dr Hunter was very keen on. She said, 'No, not those kinds ofthings, I mean the way we live our lives. There isn't a template, a pattern that we're supposed to follow. There's no one watching us to see ifwe're doing it properly, there is no properly, we just make it up as we go along.'

Reggie wasn't entirely sure that she knew what Dr Hunter was talking about. The baby was distracting her, squawking and splashing like a mad sea-creature.

'What you have to remember, Reggie, is that the only important thing is love. Do you undt:rstand?'

That sounded OK to Reggie, a bit Richard Curtis, but OK.

'Loud and clear, Dr H.,' she said, taking a towel from the radiator where it had been warming. Dr Hunter lifted the baby out of the water, he was slipperier than a fish, and Reggie wrapped him in the towel.

'Knowing that when light is gone, Love remains for shining,' Dr Hunter said. 'Isn't that lovely? Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote it for her dog.'

'Flush,' Reggie said. 'Virginia Woolf wrote a book about him. I've read around the subj ect.'

'When everything else has gone, love still remains,' Dr Hunter said.

'Totally,' Reggie said. But what good did it do you? None at all.

Ad Augusta per Angusta THIS WOULD BE THE SCENIC ROUTE THEN. HE WAS TAKING THE LONG way round. Jackson tipped a metaphorical hat in the direction of the Dixie Chicks.

For reasons best known to itself the GPS stopped working five miles after leaving the village. At some point they had obviously taken a wrong turning because Jackson found himself on a one-track road that wound its leisurely way up through a deserted dale. There was no signal on his phone and the radio had given out nothing but crackle and hiss for some time now. The CD player contained one disc accidentally left over from the previous rental and Jackson wondered in what circumstances he would feel so desperate for the sound of another voice that he would listen to Enya's.

He should have brought his iPod, he could have been listening to songs of heartache and redemption and redneck righteousness. And it had obviously been a really bad idea to leave that OS map behind, although he wasn't convinced that the roads around here actually conformed to any map. If it hadn't been for a signpost a mile back reassuring him that they were heading for the right destination he would have turned round by now. (Although should he put so much faith in signs?)

Bleak in its beauty, the landscape was beginning to bring out the mournful streak in Jackson that he was usually better off keeping at bay. Hello, darkness, myoId friend. Life was easier if you were an unimaginative pragmatist, a happy idiot. 'Well, you've got the idiot part right,' he heard his ex-wife Josie's voice say in his head.

The road stretched tightly over the contours of the land and, apart from the occasional dip, they were climbing the whole time. Although Jackson would have referred to himself in the singular ifhe had been (God forbid) on foot, when he was in a car he became a plural pronoun. They, we, us. The car and me, a bio-mechanical fusion of man and vehicle. Pilgrims on God's highway.

They were alone. Not another car in sight. No tractors or Land Rovers, no other drifters on the high plains, no fellow travellers at all. No farmhouses or sheep-barns either, only grass and barren limestone and a dead December sky. He was on the road to nowhere.

There were still a lot of hardy sheep wandering around though, aloof to the dangers posed by a bloody great Discovery bearing down on them. They must surely lamb late up here on these wuthering heights. Jackson wondered if they were already carrying next year's lambs. He had never considered the gestation period of a sheep before, it was surprising what a lonely road drove you to. His daughter had recently announced her conversion to the vegetarian cause. In a word association test his automatic response to the word 'lamb' would be 'mint sauce', Marlee's would be 'innocent'. The slaughter of. She was being brought up as an atheist, but she spoke the language of martyrs. Perhaps Catholicism was genetic, in the blood.

'Becoming a vegetarian seems to be a rite of passage for teenage girls these days,' Josie said, during his last visit to Cambridge at the end of the summer. 'All her friends have given up meat.' No more father-daughter bonding over a burger then.

'I know, I know, meat is murder,' he said, as they sat down at a table in a cafe of Marlee's choice called something like Seeds or Roots. ('Weeds,' he called it, to her annoyance.) He had had a hankering for a beef and mustard sandwich but settled for a chewy brown roll with an anaemic-looking filling that he guessed to be egg but which turned out -horror of horrors -to be 'scrambled tofu'.

'Yum,' he said and Marlee said, 'Don't be so cynical, Daddy. It suits you too much.'

When had his daughter started speaking like a woman? A year ago she had skipped along like a three-year-old on the path by the river to Grantchester (where, if his memory served him rightly, she had eaten a ham salad in the Orchard Tea Room, no guilt at all about ingesting Babe). Now, apparently, that girl had run on ahead out of sight. Turn your back for a minute and they were gone.

When you had children you measured your years in theirs. Not 'I'm forty-nine' but 'I have a twelve-year-old child'. Josie had another child now, another girl, two years old, the same age as Nathan. Two children united by the common thread of DNA they shared with their half-sister, Marlee. Just because Nathan didn't look like him didn't mean he wasn't his son. After all, Marlee didn't look like him either. Julia claimed that Nathan wasn't his child but when had anyone ever believed anything that his ex-girlfriend said? Julia was born to lie. Plus she was an actress, of course. So when she looked him earnestly in the eye and said, 'Really, Jackson, the baby isn't yours, I'm telling the truth, why would I lie?' his instinct was to say, 'Why change the habit of a lifetime now?' Instead of arguing (I generally only argue with people I like, she had once said to him), she had given him a pitying look.

He wanted a son. He wanted a son so he could teach him all the things he knew, as well as how to learn all the things he didn't know. He couldn't teach his daughter anything, she knew more than he did already. And he wanted a son because he was a man. Simple as that. He suddenly recalled the surge of emotion he had felt when he touched Nathan's head. That was the kind ofthing that made a strong man weak for life.

And anyway, he had said to Josie, since when was twelve a teenager? ' "Teen" is the clue -thirteen, fourteen, etcetera. She's only twelve.'

'Double figures count; Josie said casually. 'They start earlier these days.' 'Start what?' Jackson had passed through his teens without ever being aware of them. He had been a boy at twelve and then he had joined the army at sixteen and become a man. Between the two he had walked in the valley of the shadow of death, with no comfort to hand.

He hoped his daughter would have a sunny passage through those years. He had a crumpled postcard from her in the pocket of his jacket from when she had been on a school trip to Bruges in her half-term. The postcard showed a picturesque view of a canal and some old red-brick houses. Jackson had never felt the need to go to Belgium. He had transferred the card from his old leather jacket to the North Face jacket -his disguise -although from no clear motive, only that a message from his daughter, banal and dutiful though it was (,Dear Dad, Bruges is very interesting, it has a lot of nice buildings. It is raining. Have eaten a lot of chips and chocolate. Missing you! Love you! Marlee XXX'), seemed like something you shouldn't just throwaway. Did she really miss him? He suspected her life was too full to notice his absence.

A ragged-looking sheep, long-in-the-tooth mutton, stood foursquare in the road ahead, like a gunslinger waiting for high noon. Jackson slowed to a stop and waited it out for a while. The sheep didn't move. He hooted his horn but it didn't even twitch an ear, just continued chewing grass laconically like an old tobacco hand. He wondered if it was deaf. He got out of the car and looked at it threateningly.

'Are you gonna pull those pistols or whistle "Dixie"?' he said to it. It looked at him with a flicker of interest and then went back to its incessant chewing.

He tried to shift it bodily. It resisted, leaning its stupid weight against his. Shouldn't it be frightened of him? He would be frightened of him if he was a sheep.

Next he tried moving its hindquarters, to get some grip and torque, but it was impossible, it might as well have been cemented into the road. A headlock also got him nowhere. He was glad there was no one around to witness this absurd wrestling match. He wondered about the ethics ofpunching it. He backed off a few steps to rethink his tactics. Finally he tried pushing its front legs from beneath it but he ended up losing his own balance and found himself sprawled on his back on the road. Across the pale winter sky an even paler cloud floated overhead, as white and soft as a little lamb. From his prone position, Jackson watched its progress from one side of the dale to the other. When the cold had not only seeped into his bones but had begun to freeze the marrow inside them, Jackson sighed and, getting to his feet, he saluted his opponent.