Текст книги "When Will There Be Good News?"

Автор книги: Kate Atkinson

Соавторы: Kate Atkinson,Kate Atkinson
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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

The women refused but Jackson took a handful. He was starving and his chances of getting to the buffet car were minimal given the crush in the carriages. Lfever thou gavest meat or drink, the fire shall never make thee shrink. If meat or drink thou ne'er gavst nane, the fire will burn thee to the bare bane. That damned dirge. Had the suit bought his way into heaven with a packet of cheese and onion crisps? Jackson should have insisted that the old woman took his North Face jacket otherwise he might find himself shivering his way through the fires ofhell.

The crisps tasted unnatural and made him thirsty. There was a throbbing behind his eyes. He wanted to be home.

It was black outside the carriage window, not even a pinprick of light from a house, and rain lashed incessantly on the glass. It was deeply inhospitable out there. Where were they? He guessed somewhere in the no-man's-land between York and Doncaster. Closer to his birthplace. His birthright gone, sold off with the family silver in the eighties by That Woman.

Had they even stopped at York yet? If they had he hadn't noticed. He had a feeling he might have dozed off for a while.

He found himself thinking about Louise. They hadn't really kept in touch,just the occasional text from her when he suspected she was drunk. There'd never been anything between them, at least nothing that was ever spoken. Their relationship in Edinburgh two years ago could have been described as a professional one if you were playing fast and loose with the dictionary. They had never kissed, never touched, although Jackson was pretty sure she had thought about it. He certainly had. A lot.

Then a couple of months ago she announced that she was getting married, an event that seemed so unlikely (if not absurd) that he suspected she was joking. He had thought at one point that he might feature in her future and the next thing he knew he had been dropkicked into her past. They were two people who had missed each other, sailed right past in the night and into different harbours. The one that got away. He was sorry. He wished her well. Sort of.

How ironic that both Julia and Louise, the two women he'd felt closest to in his recent past, had both unexpectedly got married, and neither of them to him.

They passed through a station at speed and Jackson struggled and failed to read the name. 'Where was that?' he asked the woman in red.

'I didn't see, sorry.' She took out a mirror from her handbag and reapplied her lipstick, stretching her mouth and then baring her teeth to check for any smears. Jackson's suited neighbour tensed briefly and paused in his incessant typing, staring sightlessly at the laptop screen, not daring to look at the woman, but not quite able to keep his eyes away from her either. Some animal instinct briefly flared and flickered inside his suit but then it must have burned itself out because he slumped a little and returned to the tap-tap-tapping on his keyboard.

The woman in red ran her tongue over her lips and smiled at Jackson. He wondered if she was going to give him a tangible sign, nod in the direction of the toilets, expecting him to inch his way after her, squeezing past the blank-eyed squaddies to take her, thrusting urgently against the soap-and-grime-smeared little sink, with his hastily dropped trousers in an undignified pool around his ankles. For I am wanton and lascivious and cannot live without a wife. A memory of Julia, playing Helen in Doctor Faustus in a stripped-down production above a smoky London pub. Jackson wondered what, if anything, would drive him to be tempted to barter his soul to the devil, or indeed anyone. To save a life, he supposed. His child. (His children.) Would he follow the woman in red if she gave him the sign? Good question. He had never been what you would call promiscuous (and he had never once been unfaithful, making him almost a saint) but he was a man and he had taken it where he found it. Oh, Man, thy name is Folly.

When he glanced at her reflection in the dark glass of the window she was innocently reading her trashy rag again. Perhaps she hadn't been giving him the come-on after all, perhaps his imagination was charged by the foetid atmosphere of the carriage. He was relieved he'd been spared the test.

Julia had done it in train toilets with complete strangers, and once on a plane, although admittedly that had been with himself, not a stranger (at the time anyway, different now). Julia gobbled up life because she knew what the alternative was, her catalogue of dead sisters a constant reminder of life's fragility. He was glad she'd had a son, she might worry less for him than she would for a daughter.

And now, Amelia, the only sister she had left, had cancer, her breasts at this very moment being 'lopped off' according to Julia. They had spoken, briefly, on the phone, Jackson wanting to be sure that Julia wasn't at home before heading north to see his child. Their child.

'Poor, poor Milly,' Julia said, more choked up than usual. Grief always brought on her asthma.

Once, on holiday with Julia in sunnier times, he couldn't remember where now, Jackson remembered seeing a painting by some Italian Renaissance guy he'd never heard of, showing the martyred St Agatha holding her severed yet perfect breasts up high, on a plate, as if she were a waitress serving up a pair of blancmanges. No hint of the torture that had preceded this amputation -the sexual assaults, the stretching on the rack, the starvation, the rolling of her body over burning coals. St Agatha was a saint whom Jackson was acquainted with only too well -after his mother was diagnosed with the breast cancer that would kill her she had wasted a lot of her time praying to St Agatha, the patron saint of the disease.

He was shaken out of his thoughts by the old woman suddenly asking him if they had passed the Angel of the North and would she be able to see it in the dark? Jackson wasn't sure what to say to her -how to break the news that she was travelling the wrong way, that this train was bound for London, and she had endured several hours in cramped, unpleasant conditions and was now going to have to turn round and do it all over again. The next stop would probably be Doncaster, maybe Grantham, birthplace of That Woman, the very person who had single-handedly dismantled Britain. ('Oh, for God's sake,Jackson, give it a rest,' he heard his ex-wife's voice in his head.)

'We're not going that way,' he said gently to the old woman.

'Of course we are,' she said. 'Where do you think we're going?'

He slept. When he woke up the suit was still tap-tapping on his laptop. Jackson checked for text messages but there were none. A station flashed by and the old woman gave him a smug look. 'Dunbar,' she announced, like an old soothsayer.

'Dunbar?' Jackson said.

'The train terminates at Waverley.'

She was obviously a little senile,Jackson thought. Unless ...

The woman in red leaned over the table, displaying her own ample and healthy breasts for his connoisseurship, and said to him, 'Do you have the time?'

'The time?' Jackson echoed. (The time for what? A quickie in the train toilet?) She tapped her wrist, in an exaggerated dumbshow. 'The time, do you know what time it is?'

The time. (Idiot.) He looked at his Breitling and was surprised to see it was nearly eight. They should be in London by now. Unless ... 'Ten to eight,' he said to the woman in red. 'Where is this train going to?'

'Edinburgh,' she said, just as a young guy who had been weaving his way unsteadily through the carriage stumbled and pitched towards Jackson, clutching on to his can of lager as if it was going to stop him from falling. Jackson jumped up, not so much to save the guy as to save himself from being showered with lager. 'Steady there, sir,' he said, instinctively finding his voice ofauthority, while using his body weight to prop the guy up. He remembered the sheep from this afternoon. The drunk guy was more pliable. He stared blearily at Jackson, confused by the 'sir', unsure whether he was under attack or not, probably no one but the police had previously addressed him in such a polite manner. He started to say something, slurred and incoherent, when the carriage jolted suddenly and he staggered and fell headlong, slipping through Jackson's fumbled attempt to catch him.

There was a certain amount of alarm registered by the carriage's occupants at this unexpected stutter in the train's progress but it was soon replaced with relief. 'What was that?' Jackson heard someone say and another voice laughed, 'Wrong kind of leaves on the line probably.' It was all very British. The suit seemed the most twitchy. 'Everything's going to be fine: Jackson said and immediately thought, Don't tempt fate.

Julia believed in the Fates (let's face it,Julia believed in everything and anything). She believed they had 'their eye on you' and if they didn't then they were certainly looking for you, so it was best not to draw attention to yourself. They had been in the car once, stuck in traffic and running late to catch a ferry, and Jackson said, 'It's fine, I'm sure we're going to make it: and Julia had ducked down dramatically in the passenger seat as if she was being shot at and hissed, 'Shush, they'll hear us.'

'Who will hear us?' Jackson puzzled.

'The Fates.' Jackson had actually glanced in his rear-view mirror as ifthey might be travelling in the car behind. 'Don't tempt them:Julia said. And once on a plane that had been bucking with turbulence he had held her hand and said, 'It won't last long: and been subjected to the same histrionic performance as if the Fates were riding on the wing of the 747. 'Don't put your head above the parapet: Julia said. Jackson had innocently enquired whether the Fates were the same thing as the Furies and Julia said darkly, 'Don't even go there.'

Looking back it was astonishing how much travelling he had done withJulia, they were always on planes and trains and boats. He'd been hardly anywhere since their break-up, just a few hops across the Channel to his house in the Midi. He had sold the house now, the money should arrive in his account today. He had liked France but it wasn't as if it was home.

Jackson was currently less concerned with the Fates and more concerned by the direction they were travelling in. They were going to Edinburgh? He hadn't caught the train to King's Cross, he had caught the train from King's Cross. The strolling woman had been right. He was going the wrong way.

Satis House WHEN REGGIE ARRIVED AT THE BLEAK BUNGALOW IN MUSSELBURGH Ms MacDonald opened the door and said, 'Reggie!' as if she was astonished to see her, although their Wednesday routine was invariable. From being a woman who took pride in the fact that nothing could surprise her, Ms MacDonald had turned into one who was amazed at the simplest things (,Look at that bird!' 'Is that a plane overhead?'). Her left eye was bloodshot as if a red star had exploded in her brain. It made you wonder if it wasn't better just to dive down into the blue and check out early.

No sign of the advent of Christmas in Ms MacDonald's house, Reggie noticed. She wondered if it was against her religion.

'The meal is on the table,' Ms MacDonald said. Every Wednesday they ate tea together and then Ms MacDonald drove across to the other side ofMusselburgh (God help anyone else on the road) to her 'Healing and Prayer' meeting (which, let's face it, wasn't doing much good) while Reggie did homework and kept an eye on Banjo, Ms MacDonald's little old dog. When Ms MacDonald returned, all prayered up and full of the spirit, she went over Reggie's homework over tea and biscuits -'a plain digestive' for Ms MacDonald and a Tunnock's Caramel Wafer bought specially for Reggie.

Reggie didn't know what kind of a cook Ms MacDonald was before her brain started to be nibbled at by her crabby tumour but she was certainly a terrible one now. 'Tea' was usually a stodgy macaroni cheese or a gluey fish pie, after which Ms MacDonald would heave herself up from the table with an effort and say, 'Dessert?' as if she was about to offer chocolate cheesecake or creme bnllee when in fact it was always the same low-fat strawberry yoghurt, which Ms MacDonald watched Reggie eat with a kind of vicarious thrill that was unsettling. Ms MacDonald didn't eat much any more now that she herself was being eaten.

Ms MacDonald was in her fifties but she had never been young. When she was a teacher at the school she looked as ifshe ironed herself every morning and had never betrayed a trace of irrational behaviour (quite the opposite) but now not only had she embraced a crazy religion but she dressed as if she was one step away from being a bag lady and her house was two steps beyond squalid. She was, she said, preparing for the end of the world. Reggie didn't really see how a person could prepare for an event like that and anyway, unless the end of the world happened very soon it seemed unlikely that Ms MacDonald would be around to see it.

Tonight it was oven-baked spaghetti. Ms MacDonald had a recipe that made real spaghetti from a packet taste exactly like tinned, which was quite an achievement.

Over the spaghetti, Ms MacDonald was blethering on about the 'Rapture' and whether it would be before or after the 'Tribulation', or 'the Trib' as she called it with cosy familiarity, as if persecution, suffering and the end of days were going to be on the same level of inconvenience as a traffic jam.

Religion had introduced Ms MacDonald, rather late in the day, to a social life, and her church (aka 'weird religious cult') was keen on pot-luck suppers and uninspiring barbecues. Reggie had been to an agonizing few and eaten cautiously of the burned offerings.

Ms MacDonald belonged to the Church of the Coming Rapture and was herself, she announced smugly, 'rapture-ready'. She was a pretribulationist ('pretribber'), which meant she would be whizzed up to heaven, business-class, while everyone else, including Reggie, had to suffer a great deal of scourging and affliction (,Seventy weeks, actually, Reggie.'). So a lot like everyday life then. There were also post-tribulationists who had to wait until after the scourging but got to bypass heaven and enter the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, 'which is the whole point', Ms MacDonald said. There were also midtribulationists who, as their name implied, went up in the middle of the whole confusing process. Ms MacDonald was saved and Reggie wasn't, that was the bottom line. 'Yes, I'm afraid you're going to hell, Reggie,' Ms MacDonald said, smiling benignly at her. Still, there was one consolation, Ms MacDonald wouldn't be there, nagging her about her Virgil translation.

Whenever some horrible tragedy happened, from the big stuff like planes crashing and bombs exploding, to the smaller stuff like a boy falling offhis bike and drowning in the river or a cot death in the house at the end of the street, they would all be put down to 'God's work' by Ms MacDonald. 'Going about His mysterious business,' she would nod sagely as people ran from disasters on the television news, as if God was running a secretive office dealing in human misery. Only Banjo seemed able to ruille her feelings. 'I hope he goes first,' Ms MacDonald said. It was going to be a race between Ms MacDonald and her gnarled old misfit of a terrier. It was surprising how much soppy, maternal love Ms MacDonald lavished on Banjo, but then Hitler was very fond of his dog. (,Biondi,' Dr Hunter said. 'She was called Biondi.')

Ms MacDonald's dog was on his last legs -literally, sometimes his back legs collapsed under him and he sat in the middle of the floor looking completely bewildered by his sudden immobility. Ms MacDonald had begun to worry that he might die on his own while she was off doing her Wednesday evening healing and praying, so now Reggie stayed with him in case he popped his paws. There were worse ways to spend an evening. Ms MacDonald had a TV that worked, although not the Hunters' extensive cable package sadly, and Reggie got the run of the bookcases and a hot meal for her pains, plus the entire congregation (of eight) always said a prayer for her which wasn't a gift horse she was about to look in the mouth. She might not believe in all that stuff but it was nice to know that someone was thinking about her welfare even if it was Ms MacDonald's flock of loony-tunes who all felt sorry for Reggie on account of her orphan status, which was totally fine by Reggie, the more people who felt sorry for her the better, in her opinion. Not Dr Hunter, though. She didn't want Dr Hunter to think of her as anything but heroically, cheeifully competent.

When the yoghurt was ceremoniously finished Ms MacDonald exclaimed, 'Goodness, look at the time!' Nowadays she was continually amazed by the time -'It can't be six o'clock!' or 'Eight o'clock? It feels more like ten,' and 'It's not really that time is it?'

Reggie could just see her when all that scourging and ailliction started, turning to Reggie in astonishment saying, 'That's never the end of the world!'

Was there a kind of lottery (Reggie imagined a tombola) where God picked out your chosen method of going -'Heart attack for him, cancer for her, let's see, have we had a terrible car crash yet this month?' Not that Reggie believed in God, but it was interesting sometimes to imagine. Did God get out of bed one morning and draw back the curtains (Reggie's imaginary God led a very domesticated life) and think, 'A drowning in a hotel swimming pool today, I fancy. We haven't had that one in a while.'

The Church of the Coming Rapture was a made-up kind of religion, really it consisted of a bunch of people who believed unbelievable things. They didn't even have a building but held their services in their members' front rooms on a rotational basis. Reggie had never attended one of these services but she imagined it was much like one of their pot-luck suppers with everyone earnestly debating dispensationalist and futurist views while they passed round a plate of fig rolls. The only difference would be that Banjo wouldn't be in attendance, slavering and groaning at the sight of the fig rolls. 'I was never blessed with children of my own,' Ms MacDonald told Reggie once, 'but I have my wee dog. And I have you, ofcourse, Reggie,' she added. 'But not for long, Ms Mac,' Reggie said. No, of course, she didn't say that. But it was true. The awful thing was that Ms MacDonald was the nearest thing that Reggie had to a family. Reggie Chase, orphan of the parish, pOor Jenny Wren, Little Reggie, the infant phenomenon.

*

Reggie did the washing-up and cleaned the worst bits of the kitchen. The sink was disgusting, decaying food in the trap, old teabags, a filthy cloth.

Noone seemed to have told Ms MacDonald that cleanliness was next to godliness. Reggie poured neat bleach into the tea-stained mugs and left them to soak. Ms MacDonald had mugs that said things like 'It's All About Jesus' and 'God Is Watching You' which Reggie thought was unlikely, you would think he would have something better to do. Mum had a Charles and Diana wedding mug that had survived longer than the marriage itself. Mum had worshipped Princess Di and frequently lamented her passing. 'Gone,' she said, shaking her head in disbelief. 'Just like that. All that exercise for nothing.' Diana-worship was the nearest thing Mum had to a religion. If Reggie had to choose a religion she would go for Diana too, the real one -Artemis, pale moon goddess of the chase and chastity. Another powerful virgin. Or flashing-eyed Athene, wise and heroic, a warrior virgin.

You would have thought that with her background in the Classics, Ms MacDonald would have chosen from a more interesting pantheon -Zeus throwing bolts oflightning like javelins or Phoebus Apollo driving his fiery horses across the heavens. Or, given her mushrooming tumour, Hygeia, goddess of health, and Asklepios, god of healing.

Reggie separated the rubbish into the red, blue and brown bins. Ms MacDonald didn't recycle anything, she was possibly the least green person on the planet. There was no point in preserving the earth, Ms MacDonald explained in a kindly tone, because the Last Judgement couldn't occur until every last thing on the planet had been destroyed, every tree, every flower, every river. Every last eagle and owl and panda, the sheep in the fields, the leaves on the trees, the rising of the sun and the running of the deer. Everything. And Ms MacDonald was looking forward to that. ('It's a funny old world,' Mum would have said.)

Reggie was definitely going to start up her own religion, one where things were cared for, not destroyed, one where the dead were reborn -and not in a symbolic way either -without everything else having to die. Then her mother would be back on the sofa, watching Desperate Housewives and working her way through a packet of tortilla chips. No Gary sitting there pawing her though, just Mum and Reggie. Together for ever.

It had been just Mum and her for so long, well Billy too, but Billy wasn't the kind of person who sat around and ate and chatted and watched TV Gust what he did do was hard to say) and then the ManWho-Came-Before-Gary came along who turned out to be 'a total arse', according to Mum (not to mention married) and then the 'real deal' came along in the form of Gary and Mum started saying 'my boyfriend this' and 'my boyfriend that' and suddenly she was having sex and all her friends wanted to come round and talk about it. Her mother preening and giggling, 'Three times in one nightl' and her friends shrieking with excitement and spilling their wine.

Unlike the Man-Who-Came-Before-Him, Gary wasn't evil, he was just a big lump who, until he met Mum (after he met Mum as well actually), spent his time sitting around all day in his greasy denims at the back of the bike shop with a load of Gary clones talking about the Harley-Davidson 883L Sportster he was going to buy when he won the lottery. He courted Mum with cheap hothouse roses from the Shell Shop and boxes of Celebrations and when Reggie protested at this cliched attitude to romance her mother said 'You won't hear me complaining, Reggie,' fingering the thin silve; chain of the heart-shaped locket he had bought her for her birthday.

Gary was going to take her to Spain for two weeks ('Lloret de Mar -how nice does that sound, Reggie?'). Reggie's mother hadn't been on a 'proper grown-up' holiday since she went to Fuerteventura in 1989 so he could have taken her to Budin's in Skegness and she would have been impressed. Mum had taken Reggie and Billy to S~arborough for a week once but it was rather spoiled when Billy dIsappeared from their Band B one night and was brought back by a policeman the next morning after being found wandering along t~e Prom smashed out of his mind on lager. He was twelve at the tIme.